As You Know, Bob

Will The Circle Be Unbroken?

2012-01-16T15:49:00.011-05:00

I can remember being 15, 16 years old, and my mother being distinctly unimpressed with my taste in music - her reaction to my first Frank Zappa records ("We're Only In It for the Money", "Hot Rats", "Weasels Ripped My Flesh", etc.) standing out in memory.

I have MLK Day off, so I'm here at home this morning at my leisure, having a cuppa coffee and listening to Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire (a recent library-sale find, the London Sinfonietta on London)...

...and my 15-year-old wakes up and comes down stairs.

And as the circle turns, now it's my daughter's turn to be distinctly unimpressed with my choice of music.

I feel so ...used

2012-01-12T17:45:00.008-05:00

(Or: Wow, I'm Dumb.)

My new 2012 Civic takes 21st century motor oil.
OK, it IS the 21st century, I can adjust my thinking to this.

Nowhere in the owner's manual does it talk about a change interval.
But the car gives you a dashboard meter that tells you "Percentage of oil life left".

OK, "Everything's up to date in Kansas City" -
maybe there's some modern trick at work here.
Maybe they measure the viscosity, and the car calculates the oil life remaining.
Maybe they optically sense the opacity of the oil and calculate how dirty it is.
Maybe there's some modern µ-proc trick I'm not even thinking of.
Who knows where they get this "percentage life" number from?
We're living in the 21st century.

OK, I decide to TRUST the dashboard meter. Extrapolating,
it's telling me that the break-in oil is good for 10,000 miles.
Wow. It's great, living in the future.

So, the car rolls over 7000 miles, and soon after,
the dashboard meter decrements and says I've got 20%-of-oil-life left.

But I absolutely can't stand it, and go get an oil change.
Afterward, the kid tells me that he reset the meter for me:
which implies that it's simply odometer-driven.
The "Oil Life" meter may not actually be "measuring" ANYTHING.
Maybe it's just a reminder of your mileage since the last oil change.

*~~So maybe there's NO high-tech real-time measurement of the state of the oil, no, nothing at all.~~* [Whoops - see UPDATE, below]

Wow, am I an idiot. [This remains a distinct possibility, however.]

On the other hand: the car specifies snythetic 0w-20 oil:
which IS better than dead-dinosaur oil,
and which does have nominally twice the lifespan.
(And: which costs fully twice as much.)

So:
Even if they tell you there's no break-in required, and even if it's
not actually overdue for an oil change - the interval still FEELS over-long.

UPDATE: Hey, I was right the first time. Looking into the question, it seems that the car's CPU really DOES monitor some combination of oil temp, engine revs, time, mileage, etc. - - and really DOES calculate "oil life remaining". What it can't do is know that you've changed the oil - thus the need for the manual reset.

2012 Civics

2011-11-08T19:21:00.002-05:00

I had half a thought to swing into a dealership to try to pick the brains of a Honda service shop, but got distracted by a new shipment of Civics at Mohawk.

They had a dozen or more, including:

- LX (AT) at $19,425; to which they had added undercoating or something, to make it $19,804
- EX-L (AT) at $22,725 - with a dealer add-on bringing it to $23,104
- EX-L NAV at $24,225 (!)
and a version that I might actually consider, the
- Civic Hybrid at $26,020 (rated at 44/44/44mpg)

Still no sign of the chimeral HF edition.

So
Hybrid:DX is $26020:$16575
:: 56.98% more than the base model.
That's fully $9445 more - - plus 8% tax = a $10,200.60 price difference.

That's hard to justify just on the basis of gas savings. Even at tomorrow's $10/gallon, that's a thousand gallons of gas; at today's prices, that's not far from a decade of driving.

(I was actually going to ask them about replacement Smart Keys, and about synthetic oil changes, but didn't ever make it inside....)

The internet has again failed me

2011-11-06T18:46:00.003-05:00

Turns out, there IS no clear source for the line:

Put your hands in air
and wave them around
like you just don't care

This was already a commonplace back in my college radio days in the '70s - Grandmaster Flash came close to saying it, I'm pretty sure Cameo said it - but who was FIRST to say it? Google won't tell me. (Apparently it's in at least 100 songs....)

A thought for the day

2011-11-06T16:07:00.012-05:00

I was cooking breakfast this morning while listening to one of the Columbia/Legacy blues collections (the Son House 1965 session, as it happens...)

and I had the thought:

"Maybe I'd rather live in the alternate universe, the one where the first Monkees single had been called "Last Train to Clarksdale".

(To spell out the joke:)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Route_61 :

"The junction of Highway 61 and Highway 49 in Clarksdale is designated as the famous crossroads where, according to legend, Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for mastery of the blues."

And then I wiki'd it and learned that the pop song nearly HAD been called "Last Train to Clarksdale":

"Though the Clarksville in the song's title appears to refer to the city of Clarksville, Tennessee — and by implication to nearby Fort Campbell, Kentucky, which is home to the 101st Airborne Division — co-writer Bobby Hart states that this is a coincidence. "There's a little town in northern Arizona I used to go through in the summers on the way to Oak Creek Canyon called Clarkdale," said Hart.
"We were throwing out some names and then when we got to Clarkdale we stopped for a minute and thought that sounded pretty good. We thought maybe Clarksville would even be a little better. We didn't know at that time that there is an Army base near the town of Clarksville, Tennessee, which would have fit the bill fine."

On second thought, maybe that would actually be a pretty terrible alternate universe, one where Clarksdale, Mississippi was best known from a crappy pop song.

So - on further reflection - I decided I want to live in the alternate universe where the Monkees sang about a trip to the space station up in geosynchronous orbit:
"Last Train to Clarkesville"

Our Story Thus Far V

2011-10-23T02:58:00.006-04:00

V. Gas mileage.

The EPA SAYS their numbers are for the median driver: some will do better, some will do worse.
I can and already have gotten 40mpg out of this car. It's only rated 28city/36 highway/ 31 overall.
("Lightfoot Bob", they call me....)

The EPA says the automatic-transmission version actually gets slightly better mileage, which I find hard to believe. But the AT would be about $14.27 more per monthly payment; not enough to offset the theoretically lower gas bill, not until gas goes to $10/gallon or so. (Or unless I keep it another twenty years, which is now demographically unlikely. (I've already outlived my mother....))

The recent visit to Utica was definitely over 40-mpg, for 200+ miles. I need to keep "Leadfoot Maggie" away from the car if I hope to turn in a >40mpg tankful, though.

Oh, and the thing with "How can you live without A/C?"
It was 84F over Labor Day weekend, and we did fine with it. It won't be that warm again until April or May.
Hypothetical A/C would be nothing but useless dead weight - and probably close to $200 in car payments - until then.
For what I'm not spending on A/C, I could rent an air-conditioned car for the worst week of the summer.

Our Story Thus Far IV

2011-10-09T23:57:00.002-04:00

IV. The Radio

Being the stripped version, the car arrives with speakers - but no radio. I laughed when the salesman offered to sell me an $800 dealer-installed radio. I checked with the dealer's parts department: I could buy the factory radio over-the-counter myself for $430 + tax, install it in myself, and save over $330. They'd have to order the thing, but that should take only a few days. Or I could install my own after-market radio and save something over $600.

But, for a while there, it looked like I might have outwitted myself: neither Crutchfield nor Scoche, (nor the other brand whose name escapes me) has an installation kit available just yet for the brand-new Civic. (Oops.) I even called Crutchfield; they said they'd have a kit by the summer of 2012, nine months from now. Three local installers said they didn't have those parts. Best Buy said they'd certainly be able to do something - I even made an appointment with them - but when I went in, they wanted me to buy my own harness connector kits first. (Best Buy graciously gave me the Scoche parts numbers, which helped me figure out what I needed.)

My pal Aaron ran down an on-line forum where a guy posted pictures of his radio installation: by looking at those, I was able to confirm that the parts numbers that Best Buy provided me were correct. (The wiring harness is available because it's the very same as the one in a 2008 Accord - which makes it a perfect example of how these options move down-market after a few years.) I ordered the wiring harness and the antenna connector on-line; went to Walmart and bought a Sony head-end with radio/cd/ usb connector.

- Sony receiver: $79 + tax = $85.32.
(Which is sort of astonishingly cheap: 4ch x 50W, AM/FM/CD/ USB/aux)
- Wiring harness: $16 delivered
- Ant. connector: $22 delivered
- A bit of heatshrink and solder
...for a total of just about $125 - say, about $675 less than letting the dealer do it, a saving of fully $11/month on the car payment. That's a total saving of more than two car payments, 1/27 of the entire cost of the car.

I spent a very pleasant hour one recent Saturday afternoon (Oct. 8) soldering up the new wiring harness. So it took me 38 days to assemble the elements for this job, mostly because I couldn't believe that parts for such a common car weren't yet for sale SOMEWHERE, o I kept looking in ever-more-improbable places. (It also took me a few minutes to locate the right toolbox, the one with the soldering gear....)

Now I have a car stereo that's at least electrically connected - I'll mechanically finish the installation when those parts are available in the spring. (Probably another $25-40.) Right now, it's rattling around loose in the dash, propped up on some scrap wood. The Youngest Member and I took a lovely Sunday drive up to Curtis Lumber to shop their 'exotic wood' department, and came home with a $1 scrap of cherry to mask the opening in the dash.

The stock speakers aren't bad at all. The 21st century receiver has a basket full of annoyances - multiple menus, unlabeled controls, arbitrary and unmute-able beeps, etc. But despite that, it's a joy having a CD player / iPod player in the car. My family minivan has had a CD player since 2002; but my commuter cars haven't, not until now, in the year 2011.

Our Story Thus Far III

2011-09-01T00:51:00.003-04:00

III. Buying the Car

Was relatively painless. It had taken me a month or so of shopping to get serious, a while longer to email Honda to ask for their help in finding a stripper, and then a couple weeks for it to come in.

For the first time in my life, I didn't even bother to drive the thing beforehand, figuring that the ninth-generation Civic could offer me no surprises, certainly no surprises that would be a dealbreaker. As the Death Car shows, I'm reasonably accepting in what I can accommodate myself to driving. So, why even bother with the test-drive ritual?

The salesman was somewhat bemused by my car and by my deal: he noted that the CUSTOMER is allowed to call Honda and request a specific configuration of car, but the dealership is supposed to take what they're allocated.

They DID try to sell me a dealer-installed radio: $730, plus sales tax, plus financing. That was nearly 5% of the price of the car. I passed on that chance.

(ProTip: you can spot the DX at a hundred paces because the cheap version comes only in silver, and it has cheap black-plastic doorhandles; every other Civic on the road has door handles that match the paint job. And we quickly learned that a "four-door compact sedan in silver gray" is just about the most anonymous car on the road. It's like every tenth car matches this description.)

The deal itself was only a nominal 2% off sticker - but the sticker price was just about 15% below the MSRP of the standard LX version that they wanted me to buy, so I'm happy enough. Honda offered 0.9% / 60-month financing: a total cost of ~$410 for the loan, spread over five years. That's only about 27¢/day for the loan. Even my Credit Union was at 2.75%, fully a thousand bucks more. My payment is only $303.51. I see 4-year-old used Civics being sold for more than I paid. (Just for the record, I should look up the sticker prices of the top-end Civic, and of the hybrid Civic. Later: The top Civic (EX-L with Sat. Nav.) is a remarkable $24,225; the Hybrid is $24,050, and comes only with a CVT, and gets 44/44/44 mpg. Oh, and there's a 4dr Si for $24,675.)

Now I'm trying to think of something interesting to do with the money I saved. (Something more interesting than buying fuel oil for the winter, anyway....)

Our Story Thus Far II

2011-08-27T02:55:00.004-04:00

Part II. The email to Honda

In a flight of optimism, back in early July I had filled out Honda's "on-line quote generator", and asked the five local Honda dealers for a price on a stripped Civic. I learned that using the online quote requestor does nothing except to give their sales weasels your contact information and an excuse to annoy you.

Four of them ignored my request and tried to up-sell me on the standard-issue Civic. The stripper is $16750; the standard LX is $18,625 - but you'd have to special-order even that, as they all come through as $19,425 AT versions. That's fully $2675 more - $2889 with tax.

As in: "Pretty soon, you're talking real money."

Keeler Motors actually quoted me a price on the car I wanted. $16,275 on a $16,575 5-sp 4-door DX.

So I went in to talk to them - and they said that they could ORDER me one for fall delivery, call it three months: but only IF I gave them a $500 deposit. (And I would want to do this, why, exactly?)

So I went home somewhat dissatisfied; and, after a few days, I emailed Honda's VP of North American Sales and asked if HE could find me a Civic DX.
I was stunned when he replied almost immediately, asking for details. He basically told me "we're putting our best men on it. Our best men."

And somewhat to my surprise, twelve days later, he came up with a car: I got a somewhat bemused call from Keeler, that they had a car arrive with MY name on it. Built in Indiana, and re-directed from a Honda dealer in New Hampshire. By bypassing the local dealers, I got the car I wanted.

Our Story Thus Far (Adventures with the New Car)

2011-07-30T01:29:00.001-04:00

0. The End of The Death Car (see previous post). We came back from Cape Cod in time to give away the old Civic and turn in the plates.

I. Shopping for the new Civic
So, back in the spring of 2011 - recognizing that my 1991 Civic was becoming untenable - I started tuning in to the new-car market, and noticed that the 2012 Civic was already for sale, spotting it up at Mohawk Honda as early as April. By the time I was seriously shopping in the summertime, their initial allotment of 30-40 Civics was already gone.

I looked at the Smart Car, drove the new Fiat 500, drove a Mazda 3 (and Mazda PAID me $25 to do so...); considered the Fit, the Verso, a few others - including a 2006 $9000 Scion B - but determined that what I really wanted was the stripped Honda Civic.

Only to find that nobody would sell one to me. Rensselaer Honda explicitly told me that "We CANNOT sell a car in this market without air conditioning." Which makes me wonder: exactly how far north do you have to go before A/C isn't considered mandatory? Yes, we get a bit of hot and muggy weather here, but It hits 90F here on all of eight afternoons a year. Eight days, and that calls for A/C? Americans are wimps.

I don't much like or need A/C - and, at least until my Miata finally dies - this car is meant to be primarily a winter beater. In theory, at least, a winter beater should NEVER need A/C.

And the step from the stripped DX to the standard-equipment LX is at least $2000.
Honda asks $800 for an automatic transmission, too.
So the step up to go from from a stripped 5-speed DX to the standard-issue LX with A/C and an automatic transmission is fully $3000. (Maggie's first Civic was only $3400.) And as my father pointed out: "The parts you don't buy will never fail."

On its 20th birthday, the Death Car's registration expired -
and so rather than renew it - and buy new plates - instead, I took it off the road.
Which left us without a spare car. Which isn't a real problem, except my Miata is now solely a fair-weather driver, and the family minivan is the least reliable car I've ever owned. It was time to buy a replacement for the Death Car.

The End of an Era

2011-07-23T11:22:00.012-04:00

New York State is switching license plates (again).

I've already blogged at length about my adventures with my current Death Car.*

Its registration expired yesterday (on its 20th birthday) - so, rather than go to the trouble of
- getting it inspected (...almost certainly not a trivial undertaking...),
- renewing the registration for the next two years,
and
- paying for and attaching new license plates
(which would involve the non-trivial question "Will the old plates come off?")

instead I gave it to my mechanic, turned in the plates, and canceled the insurance.

Gone. Twenty years of service.

It was the 2nd-best car we ever owned, but I was getting scared to drive it, and even more scared to carry my family around in it.

(Reference point for "What scares Bob in a car?": over the decades, I've driven at least four cars without brakes. (At least five, if you count the time I ripped the handbrake out of the floor in Maggie's first Civic.) But the Death Car scares me.)

For two? grand or so (a gas tank (no longer easily available), some exhaust work, the BUMPER), I could have kept it going in its current 'reserve' status for another year or two, but really, enough is enough: twenty years was not a bad run. It's been hard to calculate the mileage lately because the fill pipe had rusted free of the gas tank and so it leaked very badly (pints? quarts?) when you filled it - but it was still getting in the 35mpg ballpark right up to the end.

I guess the lesson here is that "Once MAJOR PARTS start falling off, a car's days are numbered." (The rear bumper rusted off 18 months ago...)

January 2010:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/asyouknow_bob/4415154886/

* This iteration of my "Death Car" (which is an Anne Beattie reference, you really should read Chilly Scenes of Winter) was the last (1991, fourth-generation) Honda Civic Wagon, purchased new in July of 1991 when my wife got shy of our previous Death Car, our high-mileage '87 Civic.

meme

2010-09-09T21:08:00.001-04:00

visited 31 states (62%)
Create your own visited map of The United States

The Dream Is Alive, And It Is Full Of Eels

2010-09-07T22:59:00.004-04:00

For 11 weeks in the summer of 2004, there was a high-speed ferry from Rochester to Toronto.

It was a big, fast ship: on-board casino, duty-free shopping, 2:15 crossing times.
OF COURSE it went bust (...gas prices, for one thing...).

The City of Rochester took it over, and ran it a few times in the summer of 2005.

I missed it, I missed it both seasons. I had penciled it in for "Hmmm, I must try that some year."

Ever since it went bust, people have been kicking around the idea of reviving it.
This year, the Port of Toronto solicited proposals:

http://www.citytv.com/toronto/citynews/life/money/article/22191--can-fast-hovercraft-service-between-u-s-and-toronto-stay-afloat

This particular business plan looks dubious; still, I would like to do this before I die.

Around the Lake Again in Twenty Ten

2010-09-05T00:11:00.003-04:00

A couple of times when we were in college, M & I went camping around Lake Ontario. This year, it was finally time to take my daughters on a similar expedition.

Before we left, I looked into the Glenn Gould Tour of Toronto and found that his neighborhood diner up on St.Clair was now gone.

So Priceline gets us a pretty good hotel right in the middle of Toronto:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=bond+place+hotel+toronto&aq=0&aqi=g8g-m1&aql=&oq=Bond+Place+H&gs_rfai=CAcTvWxKDTN-PDae-zgSht9GLBQAAAKoEBU_QZ0kg

Monday afternoon we leave Niagara Falls, arrive in T about nightfall, find the hotel just steps from the Eaton Centre: but where is their parking?

Drive around the block: hey look, it's Massey Hall; oh look, that looks like a decent place to eat across the street. We go check in, get told where to park, stash the car, check out the neighborhood.

Time to eat: OK, let's try this "Fran's" we spotted just down the block.
We wound up eating there for dinner, breakfast the next day, and The Eldest and I wound up there a third time.

Come home and find that the place is actually a descendant of Gould's neighborhood diner: the original branch uptown is gone, but they opened on Victoria St. in 2004.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran's_Restaurant

http://www.fransrestaurant.com/

"Sometime between two and three every morning Gould would go to Fran's, a 24-hour diner a block away from his Toronto apartment, sit in the same booth and order the same meal of scrambled eggs."

Kinda funny how even though I didn't go up to GG's old neighborhood, I still *accidentally* managed to eat at his hangout anyway.

Small world.

Everybody Needs a Hobby

2010-08-18T23:49:00.003-04:00

I bought a German rangefinder from about 1956, with a lovely little 48mm f/2, and a classic Synchro-Compur shutter. See:

http://www.camerapedia.org/wiki/Argus_V-100

It's actually something called an Iloca 'Rapid' from 1956, built in Hamburg and rebadged as the top-of-the-line Argus.

Rangefinder is in wonderful shape, photocell is dead, the shutter speeds sound 'off', but hey.

And I find myself seriously contemplating opening up the shutter to clean it. The front elements just unscrew; that in itself is some fraction of the way in...

Oh, and look - conveniently enough, the internets provide complete instructions:

http://www.rolandandcaroline.co.uk/synchro-compur.html

I have a reasonable set of tools (check); my corner CVS stocks lighter fluid (check)...

...somebody needs to talk me out of this....

The Internets Have Failed Me

2010-08-17T00:01:00.003-04:00

(or, Things Not Learned While Looking Up Other Things)

OK, a couple weeks ago, there were lots of stories on Steve McCurry and The Last Roll of Kodachrome.

I posed the question: "OK, Who's going to get The Last Roll of Tri-X?"

(My answer: Salgado)

So I got to poking around the early days of 35mm. Oskar Barnack, Leica, 1925, yadda yadda.

To compete in this new segment of the photographic market, Kodak bought the Nagel Werkes in Dec. 1931, and brought the first Kodak (Nagel) Retina 35mm camera AND its associated 135 Daylight Loading Cartridge to market in 1934.

(Obscure Fun Fact: Kodak also briefly sold "235" Leica cartridges and "435" Contax cartridges. ("335" was for some stereo camera.))

Now, Doc Augie Nagel HELD the German patent on the 135 cartridge. And so I'm wondering if Kodak bought his company just to get access to the patent, or did he design it out while on the Kodak payroll?

The internet will not answer this.

It's one of those topics where the Internets turn up ONLY the close-to-useless Wiki text, but copied on a hundred different sites.

I can find the patent for the APS cartridge, but not for the 135 cartridge.

I may need a research library with real paper books.

Globalization

2010-08-08T15:27:00.001-04:00

When I was about 5, my family took me on a family vacation that included a factory tour of Hershey's.

I seem to have been deeply imprinted by the experience of meeting a 1000-gallon open vat of liquid chocolate.

In the mid-80s, I took my new bride to Hershey - only to discover that THEY NO LONGER GAVE FACTORY TOURS. (Instead, they tried to send you on an amusement park ride that described the process. Not the same. No.)

With a little research (this was pre-internet...), I discovered that Hershey of Canada still offered factory tours, so the next year we went up to Smiths Falls Ontario, and took the tour.

This year, I was going to take my kids to Ontario, and figured I'd check out Hershey.

"The factory that produced Hershey Kisses and other confections for 45 years closed its doors in December 2008, when the chocolate giant relocated its manufacturing operation to Mexico.

"The move put 400 townspeople out of work and took with it the town's main tourist attraction, which drew about 425,000 visitors per year."

This is my Sad Face :(

Annals of DIY II

2010-08-01T16:55:00.004-04:00

I spent a very pleasant morning running three more tanks of b&w film.

In their wisdom, Kodak has discontinued the one-liter size of XTOL developer... so, if you want to use the stuff, you now have to buy the FIVE-liter package.

Five liters of stock developer is a LOT of soup. XTOL can be cut 1:3, so that's potentially up to 80 rolls of film. A preposterous amount of soup.

Now, I had A FOURTEEN YEAR BACKLOG of b&W film waiting for processing - I've done something like 32 rolls this month - and so far, I've used up a total of three of the five liters. (I'm still a few rolls from being caught up, but I think everything that's left is at least from this year.)

A liter will developer as few as 2 rolls of 120 film (full strength), or as many as 16 rolls of 35mm (diluted).

The stock solution supposedly keeps reliably for two months, maybe six.

So (ignoring my backlog still on hand) I now have to go out and shoot somewhere between (minimally) [four rolls in the Rollei], and (maximally...)[32 rolls of 35mm], in order to efficiently use the developer Kodak sold me. In the next month or so.

Sometime soon I run out of acetic acid, and will have to get myself to a Real City to buy more, as there's none for sale locally, and it's prohibitively expensive to ship. (It comes under HazMat rules.)

Annals of DIY

2010-07-17T21:33:00.012-04:00

All physical labor is now a realm that's entirely owned by The Three Stooges.

Over my lifetime, I've changed the oil on a car somewhere around 100 times.
(Keep in mind that, in the bad old days, the standard change interval was 3,000 miles.)

I finally changed the oil on our Mazda MPV, and managed to do basically EVERYTHING wrong.

OK, I'm now old enough to not much enjoy crawling under cars, so, for the past eight years I've been paying people to change the oil on my wife's minivan. It's irked me, but

1) There's a shroud that needs to be removed to reach the oil filter (and then replaced)
2) The drain is far enough back that it needs car ramps to reach comfortably - and my ramps are too steep to drive the MPV up
3) It's a 5-quart system, which is a lot more mess to dispose of
than my usual 3-qt-cars.
And (needless to say)
4) I hate that car with every fiber of my being, and don't WANT to work on it.

Tracking down the MPV's current gas leak, I had occasion to look under the engine room, and discovered that, at some point, the chimps at Jiffy Lube have snapped off the part of the shroud that covers the oil filter.

Which is actually a GOOD thing.

OK, the "underneath" portion of an oil change for the MPV used to consist of ten or twelve steps, depending upon what you count as a discrete therblig:
a) Remove THREE bolts, remove shroud
b) remove drain bolt
c) remove filter
d) replace drain bolt
e) replace filter
f) replace shroud, run home THREE shroud bolts.

With the shroud now pre-broken for me, the task now reduces to the same four steps (b-e) as any other oil change. So I went out and got myself a set of MPV-compliant car ramps and changed the oil. (And now I'm the owner of TWO cheap sets of car ramps...)

My oil-change kit is small enough to fit in a hand box in the trunk of the Miata.
The drain bolt on the MPV is 15mm, not the 17mm that I keep in the car (...er, space being at a premium in the Miata trunk, I don't keep a full socket set there...) - so I had to go inside and rustle around my tool chest until I came up with a 15mm socket. ("Spread out, spread out!")

OK, climb back under and remove the crankcase drain plug - and there was enough oil in the crankcase (and shooting out through a smaller hole...) to send the stream several inches further than I usually see, so it missed the drain pan entirely, and splashed on the driveway.
("Hey, FELLAS!")

Five quarts is a lot more than 3 quarts - so the drain pan I've been using for at least 20 years of Miata changes FOLDED under the weight, splashing a cup of hot used motor oil on my shoes, on the driveway, etc. ("Nyuck nyuck nyuck")

(Note to self: buy a bigger, stronger, more rigid drain pan.)
And then the drain pan was full enough to overflow its pouring spout, spilling more used oil down the outside of the Used Oil jugs.... ("Hrrr-RUFF!")

Oh, and I dropped the drain bolt into the drain pan. Which I've done before, of course; but this time I managed to pour the bolt INTO the 'used oil' jug, and had to decant the oil back and forth until I could fish the thing out.
("Woooo wooooo wooooo wooooo wooooo wooooo....")

If I had been deep enough under the car to require the use of my garage creeper, I would have done my version of the "Curley-spinning-on-the-floor" dance move.

Jiffy Lube is now something like $36?, $26? with coupons? Something like that. Even NAPA is $27, with sales tax.

DIY cost me something like $13, so I saved at least ten bucks, maybe twenty.
I'll put that toward replacing my oil-splashed shoes....

Addendum: On the walk-around, I spotted a bubble on the front-right tire, something that I would NOT have caught had I simply gone to Jiffy Lube. So, it's entirely possible that a DIY oil change saved our lives.

Tomorrow's Thrilling Installment: On to BJ's to buy new tires.

Update: I TRIED to put a pair of tires on it - but the shop REFUSED to let it in when it's dripping gas. So the new tires have to wait until the gas leak is fixed, probably Thursday.

Acceleration

2010-07-03T19:19:00.005-04:00

That big new bio of Monk:

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

was published October 6, 2009. ($30.00 list, Amazon currently shows it for $19.80)

I had it out from the library, played with it a bit, but didn't read much of it.

Today (July 3, 2010) I found it REMAINDERED at my neighborhood Borders.
Not only is it not yet a year old, it's not even 9 months old.

Apparently the lifecycle is still accelerating, for books as well as for everything else.

The point is: I cannot get to and read a new book in nine months. So, why would I EVER pay new-hardcover prices?

Edited to add: Oh, right: it was remaindered for $5.99, but I made them apply the current "33% off" coupon, so, for you, a special price - $4.01.

Forward, into the past

2010-07-03T02:10:00.003-04:00

Around 1978, I bought a pack of 100 negative preservers for 120 film ($12 at State Photo...), to go with my new 6x7 back for my Crown Graphic. I carried it around from apartment to apartment for years. Actually, though, I used most of them here in the 21st century; in fact, mostly since I re-started using film mailers around 2004.

I finally finished the hundred-pack earlier this year - so, on average, that's a whisker over (3 rolls of 120 film) per year.

The hundred-pack took about 31-32 years.

I just finished the 25-pack that I bought to replace it. (It's July....)

Clearly, as digital takes over, I'm doing more and more medium-format photography.

Similarly, I'm just finishing a bottle of glacial acetic, and a bottle of PhotoFlo 200. The latter has a label: "State Photo, $2.07".

State Photo closed in 1986, 24 years ago.

Note to self: order/buy some more negative preservers. Oh, and some acetic acid.

The larger story: back in the '80s, we bought a house, and I installed a home darkroom in the corner of the basement. Then we started having kids, and I discovered that grandparents want to see color prints of their grandchildren. So I largely switched away from B&W and color slides, and shot mostly C-41 for most of the '90s.

I had a developing tank with two rolls of 120 Plus-X that I loaded around 1995 (give or take a year...) - and then went off to chase my kids.

Now that my eldest is out of high school, I JUST got back to that tank, roughly fifteen years later. (Not surprisingly, it has lots of base fog....)

Word of the Day

2010-06-26T14:26:00.014-04:00

Or, "I love the interwar period"

In my ongoing quest for the most primitive camera that I can easily use here in the 21st century, I picked up a prewar Voigtländer Bessa, a 6x9 folder (with a 110mm/4.5 uncoated triplet). It fits in a jacket pocket, and takes huge 2 1/4" x 3 1/4" negatives on still-easily-obtainable 120 film.

(There's some chance that this one was assembled post-war, but it's certainly a 1937 model. This particular sample is 'way on the low end of the Bessa option range - mostly, they came with better lenses and with better shutters. But so far, I'm surprised at how well this one seems to work (...stay tuned for film at eleven...) - the bellows seem to be intact, the shutter basically works, the lens is clean, the aperture blades are clean and dry, the focus is smooth, etc.).

Anyway, it's guess-focus, so it has a Depth-of-Field table on the back, helpfully labeled

" Voigtländer Tiefenschärfentabelle "

(literally, "deep sharp table" / so, "depth of sharpness table") - labeled in meters, of course.

I'm not sure if it's the two words together, the two umlauts in quick succession, or the 21-letter compound noun, but somehow "Tiefenschärfentabelle" just tickles me.

My father always used to claim "This is why the Germans lost the war: they couldn't understand each other."

"Was bedeuten der Tiefenschärfentabelle sagen?"
"Was?"
"Was sagt' der Tiefenschärfentabelle?"
"Was?"

...und so weider....

I need a new hobby

2010-05-13T23:46:00.004-04:00

So I was in GoodWill, and they had a Dual 1228...
...and I plugged it in, and the strobe said that it made speed - hey, look, it spins accurately at both 33 AND 45....

And I looked up from it with a look of pained resignation on my face, because I knew that it would have to come home with me.

At some point, I'll have to stop.

In my own small way, I collect cameras, and I collect Dual turntables (...oh, and I guess maybe I also collect acoustic-suspension loudspeakers...) - but then, I can store a dozen or more cameras in the volume occupied by one turntable.

So yeah, collecting turntables is becoming a problem . . . but at least I'm not one of THESE guys:

The Maytag Collector's Club

Which brings us to Bob's Law of the Internet:

In whatever direction you care to look, you can always find somebody further Out There than you are.

Hilariously self-referential

2010-04-19T22:05:00.003-04:00

The Economist (Feb. 27th - March 5th, 2010) has a cover story:

The Data Deluge and How to Handle It:
A FOURTEEN PAGE Special Report.

How did I not know this?

2010-04-07T22:52:00.005-04:00

OK, with the death of Kodak processing, I've been dusting off my medium-format gear.
(Kodak mailers were cheap. Local processing is now relatively expensive. So I'm being nudged back to DIY black&white. If I'm to be relegated to doing home darkroom, I suppose it might as well be stuff that I can contact-print....)

So I've been playing with my old Zeiss Ikonta. Which brings to mind Eric Newby's pictures from "The Last Grain Race", taken on his late-'30s Zeiss Super Ikonta.

During my Lost Decade (...those years lost to parenting...), Newby published a coffee-table book of JUST his photos from aboard the Moshulu: Learning the Ropes, 1999. (But, since I missed it when it was new, it's now scarce and expensive. Grrr.)
Somehow I never really noticed that this was a different book from his "A Traveler's Life", also a Newby coffee-table book. So there's that.

But it's Thing Two that's really remarkable:

The Moshulu is not only still afloat, but it's
a floating restaurant in Philadelphia. (!)

Now, I read The Last Grain Race nearly 30 years ago. For most of those thirty years, I've been IN Philadelphia about every other year. I've SEEN the shipping at Penn's Landing. And yet, this factoid never entered my consciousness.

It makes me wonder what OTHER obvious bits of knowledge have so far evaded me.

Things Found While Looking Up Other Things

2010-04-03T00:32:00.011-04:00

I was at the post office today and learned that the USPS has issued a set of "Abstract Expressionist" stamps. A set which includes one of Motherwell's "Elegies to the Spanish Republic".

And an hour later, my brain made the association and started autoplaying the Clash's "Spanish Bombs".

And looking up the cover photographer (Pennie Smith) of their iconic "London Calling" album led me to finding out that...

...those wild-and-crazy guys over at the Royal Mail have issued a set of 10 "Classic Album Covers" postage stamps.

I don't know which is the most improbable - each one is less likely than all the others... (Let it Bleed? David Bowie?? Joy Division???)

(But note that there's still no "Never Mind the Bollocks..." stamp.)

And easily obtainable at eBay.

Oh, Internets, I Iove you so

2010-03-26T13:36:00.001-04:00

Teach Yourself Na'vi

(This pretty much had to exist, didn't it?)

Note to self

2010-03-22T00:39:00.006-04:00

(Attention Conservation Notice: I could try to dress this up as some sort of commentary on modern capitalism, but it's just me comparison shopping. This is boring EVEN FOR ME, so feel free to skip this entry.)

I've been buying some interesting point'n'shoot cameras (...for certain low values of "interesting"...) - and they each need batteries. Sometimes I'm lucky, and it runs on ubiquitous (and cheap) AAs - but sometimes it takes something preposterous like the now-rare "223", or a PAIR of 123s.

So I buy a $3- or $5 camera... and then I need to find a $10 battery to see if it works.

A 123 lithium cell is:
- $14 for two at my corner drugstore;
- $12 /2 at Home Despot;
- $10 /2 at Walmart;
- $9 for one ($14/2) at Walgreens.
(All these prices are plus my local 8% sales tax.)

All of those options are pretty ridiculous to fire up a camera that was $3 in a thrift-shop, or a $5 camera from eBay .

Going on line, I bought eight of these 123s for $18.95 delivered. Say, $2.38 each. Let the record show that that that is less than half the price at Walmart, about a third of the price of my local drugstore. And if you're willing to try weird-ass Asian brands (and wait for delivery from Hong Kong or someplace), you can get these for less than two bucks a piece in small quantities.

Now, this little hobby of picking up amusing cameras at thrift shops becomes a lot more viable when it takes only an additional buck or three to power it up. Seven dollar 123s or $14 2CR5s are just untenable.

The downside is that I have a new cute little Canon waterproof WP-1 that arrived Friday - but I have to wait a few days now for batteries to come in the mail. Because I simply could not bring myself to spend $10 on batteries for it.

Deader'n' Vaudeville

2010-03-20T16:19:00.006-04:00

It's really too bad that film photography is dead, because I'm really enjoying the bargains to be had in used (film) cameras.

A couple of years ago, I was in a local GoodWill, and they were just putting out a Vivitar 90mm/2.5 macro lens. Beautiful lens, very well regarded when it came out in 1978. I picked it up, looked at it - but I didn't have a Pentax "K"-mount camera, so ten bucks seemed like too much.

I left the store and was a mile away when it finally occurred to me that I COULD BUY A PENTAX CAMERA BODY. There must be literally a million K1000s around. So I turned around, went back and bought the macro lens. And as I was buying it, they were just putting out the K1000 that it had come in with. A K1000 and its SMC 50/2 for all of twenty bucks; plus 10 bucks for the Vivitar macro lens: $30 plus sales tax.

I've hacked around with it a bit - the K1000 is a crude but useful tool. The 90/2.5 lives up to its reputation.

Recently I saw this same lens go by on eBay: Vivitar 90mm/f2.5 Macro - where it sold for $400 plus $13.50 shipping.

In a related story, last fall I picked up a late Alpa SLR, one mass-produced by Chinon once Alpa could no longer afford to hand-make their cameras in Switzerland. I played with it a bit, but, once my curiosity was satisfied, I turned around and sold it on eBay. (I wasn't planning to invest in a bag full of M42 lenses just to use the thing.) What I learned, though, is that it really was beautifully made, which gave me some respect for Chinon's capabilities.

Last week I spotted a Chinon CP9-AF SLR on GoodWill.com. It was in a kit consisting of the AF SLR, its standard 28-70 AF zoom, a 70-210 AF zoom, a dedicated flash, a neveready case, the instruction book, a polarizing filter, etc. I was about to pass it by when I remembered that Chinons were K-mount bodies. So I bid, and got the whole kit for $31 plus shipping.

It's pretty much awesome. It has a built-in intervalometer. And, with non-AF K-mount lenses, it works in "Auto" mode as an aperture-preferred autoexposure camera. So I can use my two existing K-mount lenses with it, for a pretty powerful kit. It's got speed, it's got close-focusing, it's got a wide range of focal lengths - all it lacks is something wider than 28mm or longer than 210mm. I'm trying to think of a project that requires my K-mount macro lens and my new intervalometer-equipped camera: maybe a time-lapse sequence of seed germination?

Now, at some level, this seventy bucks or so would probably have been better spent toward a DSLR. But then again, this kit is quite a bit of fun, and by the time I'm done playing with it, the price of a DSLR will come down in price by that much, so I won't really be out much of anything at all.

Yes, I know film photography is dead - my kids certainly don't hesitate to remind me - but I'm having a ball collecting film cameras.

WHAT did you just call her?

2010-03-20T00:14:00.003-04:00

NYPoliticsfilter: The county supervisor of Suffolk County - who, btw, is a Democrat - is going to challenge the hapless Rick Lazio for the Republican nom for governor. Levy held a press confernece out on the Plaza here in Albany to make the announcement.

So I went over to watch Steve Levy go rogue and abandon the Democratic party.

The high point of his press conference was hearing Richard Nixon's son-in-law call Levy's wife a cow.

(Scroll down.)

State GOP chairman Edward Cox:
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

"Steve has no sacred cows...except Colleen, of course." The line brought a few confused looks, but didn't make the news.

Reanimator

2010-03-17T22:23:00.004-04:00

I still use and collect film cameras.

My spare F3 finally came back to me, March 10, 2010.

(Four years ago, I loaned it to a friend's son so that he could use it for a photography course in college. (Nov. 15, 2005)
Last fall when I WORE OUT my first-line F3, I finally asked my pal to return the loaner. (Oct. 9, 2009.)

My "dead" first-line F3 had developed unreliably short long exposures - anything longer than 1/60 was now iffy, rendering slides inaccurately dark.

I have enough cameras that I have absolutely no need to use a wonky camera. But I'm committed enough to the F3 - I have a drawer full of its goofy accessories - that I really should have a first-line F3, and my F3/T lacks good flash capabilities.
Therefore, I called in my loaner.

So my first-line F3 is retired awaiting a CLA, and it became the parts hulk that I used to revive the loaner.

First off, swap the chrome replacement shutter-button-collar on the loaner camera for the stock black shutter collar from the hulk.

First hurdle: the AA batteries in the motor drive had leaked. Throw them out, clean up the battery holder with vinegar and Q-tips, install new set of batteries.... and then decide that the battery holder in my parts hulk was cleaner, and swap it out.

Power it up, and discover that the meter head (what is that? a DP-3?) is dead.

Take two seconds to swap it out with the HP head from the parts hulk.

Take it out for a test drive, everything's nominal. Switch the drive to "Continuous", let loose a burst - and the motor drive DIES. Just dies.
(Oops. That's a new one, too: I have now worn out an F3 AND killed an MD-4. Wow.)

Grimace, shrug, and swap out the MD-4 motor drive from the parts hulk.

While I'm at it, the door on the hulk looks nicer - swap that out, too.

Voila: I now have a nominal F3 created largely from the accessories and parts from my dead F3.

The loaner is happily restored to working order, and my F3 parts hulk now has
- a wonky shutter,
- a dead metering head,
- a dead motor drive,
- a dirty battery holder,
- a brassed film door,
- a replacement shutter collar (in unpainted aluminum, rather than black).
The hulk is in pretty sad shape now.

But wow, is it fun to tinker with an "F" series Nikon. Just tinkering with the thing fulfills most of my photojournalist fantasies.

The hulk was about $300 in late 2004, and was my first-line camera up through our 2009 vacation.
The spare (loaner) wasn't much over $200, in early 2005.
Then - because I had always lusted after one -
I picked up an F3/T, which was also about $300, later in 2005. (Which sounds like a lot, until you realize that the D3 is five thousand bucks or so. I can buy a LOT of film for the $4000 difference....)

When I found myself with THREE F3s, I happily loaned one out in November 2005. (That went out the door in a rush, as it was needed by my pal's son for a college course.)

When the hulk died last September, I finally called in the loaner. (When the loaner didn't come back right away, I was desperate for a fully-working F3, so I spent all of $140 last November to replace the loaner with a non-HP F3 - which temporarily became my new first-line camera. Now, with the return of the loaner, I seem to be back to THREE working F3s.)

Which, admittedly, is probably in excess of requirements.

(...And then, while I was looking at Nikon SLRs on eBay, I also picked up TWO N90s for under $80 for the pair. THESE might just be my first-line cameras now. My eyes might need AF by now. The N90s are not quite pro grade, but they're awesome cameras, and they give me AF and matrix metering.)

Anyway - now that I have a parts hulk, I'm considering harvesting the flash contacts off of it to replace the corroded contacts on my F3/T. And, if I'm successful, its death will have revived TWO other F3s.

UPDATE: And a look at the F3 repair manual shows that harvesting the flash connector requires some very finicky soldering. That might be too much effort for too little reward. (I keep the F3/T loaded for outdoor photography. Come to think of it, I rarely use a flash on any of the F3s....)

Set theory

2010-03-17T22:00:00.002-04:00

I figured that SOMEWHERE on the planet, there must be a Hotel Hilbert.

(And you could go up to the reception desk, and INSIST that they find you a room. . . "FULL? How can the Hotel Hilbert be FULL?")

A Google search for "Hotel Hilbert" turns up a "Hotel Brigadier Sh De Hilbert Mario", in Santa Fe, Argentina - - but the sign on the door there says "Hotel Brigadier". Not good enough.

But there IS a Pension Hilbert in Greiz, Germany.

Oddly, it claims to hold fewer than 50 guests.

Now I know where to stay on vacation.

One of the eternal questions

2009-04-13T01:42:00.004-04:00

I went to college at a place that bills itself as "A Technological University", so lots of my friends from those days are engineers and the like: people with a higher-than-average propensity to build stuff. E.g., I know guys who etch their own circuit boards. I know a guy who was taught how to build a Dobsonian telescope by John Dobson.

One of the questions we've kicked around, is "What's a reasonable household toolkit?"

Yes, every home needs a pair of Vise-Grips - but does every household really need a welding rig? How about a generator? (I can recall helping a friend at school fix his car at the curb; and then his roommate came out to help, carrying TWO toolboxes. He dropped the first: "Wrenches." Then dropped the second toolbox: "Other stuff." Uh, thanks.)

Esquire magazine (of all places) addresses the question this month: "31 Things Every Man Should Own". THEIR list ranges from the obvious to the silly:

Cast-Iron Skillet
Valid Passport
Multipurpose Tool
Waiter's Corkscrew/Bottle Opener/Knife
Ax
WD-40
Cordless Drill
Weekend Shoulder Bag
Giant Wool Blanket Never Removed from the Trunk of the Car
Chain Saw
Work Gloves
Carpenter's Level
Boots for the Shop
Boots for Everywhere Else
Jack
Claw Hammer
Lantern
Chef's Knife
Flying Disc
U.S. Road Atlas
Air Pump
Jumper Cables
Charcoal Grill
Card Holder
Pocket Knife
Grease
Lucky Charm
$1,000 Hidden in Your House
LED Flashlight
Money Clip
Joy of Cooking

Well, I suppose it's a start on a list. I'm trying to think if anybody I know owns "a lucky charm". Or if anybody I know here in the snow belt DOESN'T own a pair of boots. Or why a "flying disc" is such a high-priority item (in the Top 31?) Or why they spec a simple "shoulder bag" and not some sort of pre-packed "go kit". Admittedly, it's a general list of "things" and not just "tools", but either way, it seems woefully incomplete.

So, what did they miss?

". . . fifteen seconds, MacGyver!"

2009-02-08T17:29:00.006-05:00

I've already blogged about The Death Car: I have an old Civic Wagon that I keep on the road as my winter beater. I'm trying to stretch another season or two out of it.

The rear bumper is held on with plastic clips. But the sheet metal that these clips pop in to is rotting away, so the right side of the bumper is waving in the breeze - and now, the unsupported weight of the bumper is beginning to unzip the anchors along the top of it, popping them out from the right side to the left, as each clip in turn is forced to bear more weight.

So when I got to work on Friday and parked the car, I realized that the bumper is distinctly falling off the car. This is not good.

A quick inventory showed that I had a Swiss Army 'Classic' in my pocket, and a desk in my office that was chock-full of paperclips. It was the matter of a moment to take my pocket knife, punch a hole in the plastic bumper, and twist a paperclip through to hold the bumper on to the car until I could drive home and make a slightly more permanent repair.

It worked.

Saturday, I went out with a drill and put a few more holes in the bumper, and attached it to the car more firmly with several nylon cable-ties. Two minutes with a drill and a nickel's worth of ties and I'm good to go.

It's just rude to have major car-parts fall off your vehicle and inconvenience innocent bystanders...

Coda: I was telling this story around the watercooler at my office, and co-worker noted:

My brother who lives in Arizona tells me that a campesinio will pay a
coyote up to $5,000 to bring him into the United States, where he can find work and not have to drive a car like that.

the self-referential OCD experience

2009-01-26T22:30:00.002-05:00

One of my kids saw an episode of "Monk" at somebody's house, and expressed an interest in seeing more. (We don't have cable....)

One of the local libraries has it, but their run (five seasons, twenty?-some discs already) was (of course) all jumbled at random on the shelf. And it's only logical to start watching it from the beginning, right?

So in order to find and bring home the earliest disc they had, I found myself carefully arranging their run of "Monk" DVDs into chronological order...

There's a simple explanation, really

2009-01-23T22:02:00.002-05:00

Inaugural Day.

Two Supreme Court Justices.

Both of them, Republican appointees.

One of them is 88 years old, and tasked with administering a 74-word oath, and does it perfectly.

The other is 53 years old, and completely botches the administration of an oath only 35 words long.

So what's the obvious difference here?

The one who was hopelessly incompetent at the simplest aspect of his job was the Bush appointee.

Well, that cheers me up.

2008-12-21T22:54:00.003-05:00

Steven F. Weinberg won the 1979 Nobel Prize in physics for linking two of the fundamental forces (EM and the weak force), and thus bringing us that much closer to a grand unified theory of everything.

In her book The Canon, Natalie Angier reports that Weinberg "recently switched from particle physics to cosmology because the math in particle physics was getting beyond him."

I find this to be very, very heartening.

Reverse Weimar

2008-11-25T19:26:00.005-05:00

Price inflation now seems to be built into the economy: since WWII, there's been a relentless 2-4% upward trend. (And occasionally more: sometimes much more.)

Computers and electronics have been running against this trend, being insanely deflationary. (Just wait a year or two, and the device you lust after will be half its current price. Or more capable. Or both.)

What's new and unprecedented in my experience is the sudden collapse of energy prices. (Last spring, the price of fuel oil was still heading upward even after the heating season was over; gasoline peaked in July, and, in a few short months, has dropped by fully 50%.

We all grew up on the horror stories of runaway Weimar-style inflation - all the stories of people rushing to spend their pay before the afternoon round of price increases....

But here's the reverse, an effect I never anticipated seeing:

albanygasprices.com 11/25/08:

Lowest observed 197.9 Sunoco Rotterdam
Average Albany prices:
Today 2.145 So, down 1.6¢ from yesterday
Yesterday 2.161 down 13.6¢ from a week before
One Week Ago 2.281 down 69.1¢ from a month before
One Month Ago 2.836 down 93.3¢ from a year ago
(One Year Ago 3.078) (The peak price was in July)

That's down 69.1¢ in 31 days; that's a decline of >2.2¢/day
(Hell, I paid 419.9 on July 22 (so, down ~$2.22/gal in about 156 days)

So all this month - all this season - it's been worth it to wait as long as possible before buying gas.

Which means this price deflation hass had a perverse effect:
the price of gas is dropping so fast that it's encouraging me to use the bus.
Because the longer I can delay filling up, the cheaper the tank of gas will be.

Normally, a tank lasts me about two weeks of commuting.
I last filled the Miata on Nov 2nd, $23.00 at 249.9
I would have been due for another tankful about Nov 14th, when I filled the MPV at 217.9

But if I take the bus to work for a week, I can save a few bucks on a fill-up.

Today - 11 days after 11/14 - there are several local stations at 199.9 or below:
50 cents less than I last paid for the Miata, 18 cents less than I last paid in the MPV, 13.6 cents lower than just seven days ago.

So I'd be saving $5 from fill-up to fill-up, but saving $1.50 of that just by delaying the extra week. A day of commuting by bus is only $1.90. A full 5-day week is only $9.50. Just delaying the next gasoline purchase offsets 15-20% the cost of riding the bus. That's astounding.

A sign of the times

2008-11-20T21:34:00.002-05:00

Remarkably, there are still people who think that "Which party wins" makes no difference in people's lives.

I was crossing the Plaza at lunchtime, and saw an Office of General Services crew putting up the official State xmas tree. Because, you know, we now have a Democratic governor.

Which is a sign of the times: under the previous Republican administration, they used to use prisoners to put up the official tree.

Because, you know, nothing says "The true spirit of Christmas" like having the community's holiday decorating done by slave labor. It really warms the heart.

The Decline of The Red Menace

2008-11-03T00:28:00.004-05:00

The Miata now seems to be entering the territory of Oliver Wendell Holmes' "One-Horse Shay". No trouble to speak of for essentially forever, except that the day finally comes when entire vehicle just . . . disintegrates.

Year one: No problems
Year two: Convertible top fails, replaced under warranty
Year three: No problems
Year four: Valve cover gasket leaks. A $50 problem.
Year five: No problems
Year six: No problems
Year seven: Top fails again
Year eight: No problems
Year nine: No problems
Year ten: Center brakelight wire fails
(A zero $ problem: I just spliced in a few inches of used lampcord)
Year eleven: No problems
Year twelve: No problems
Year thirteen: No problems
Year fourteen: No problems
Year fifteen: No problems
Year sixteen: No problems
Year seventeen: No problems
Year eighteen: Cooling system fails (April '07.)
(First the radiator goes, then - when the pressure is increased - all the little fussy hoses at the top of the block fail, one after the other.)
Year nineteen: Transmission explodes (July '08. The Miata finally strands me. Then the alternator dies (Halloween '08))

Now that the transmission replacement is fully amortized (three-and- a-half months), the "Battery!" idiot light came on. I was able to drive to work and back on Friday apparently on just the battery. (Being careful to use no lights, no radio.)

So replacement was this weekend's project: an hour to get the old alternator out, forty-five minutes to go get it tested and trade it for a new one, then a half-hour to put the new one in. (The alternator apparently did not like being sprayed with coolant last season when all the little hoses let go in last year's cooling-system failure. The alternator did continue to work for another ~10,000 miles or so before failing, though.

Here's the trick: to physically get the alternator out of a Miata engine bay, the air intake pipe across the front of the block needs to be disconnected and moved out of the way.

And here's the moral of today's story:

Had I disposed of the Miata after SEVENTEEN YEARS of service (and 140,000 miles), it would have been essentially trouble-free. Now the elderly-car problems are starting, and I should start to think about replacing it. (It's long overdue for an exhaust system, for instance - that'll be next....)

Fun fact: the stock alternator was a Mitsubishi part, the new ($130) rebuild is a Bosch.
My 14mm box wrench was nowhere to be found, so a 9/16" served until I could buy a new one.

Sweet Zombie Jesus, That Was Horrible, II

2008-10-05T23:15:00.009-04:00

(Epigraph:)
(To paraphrase Chekhov) “If there’s an accordion on stage when the curtain rises, it must be fired by the third act.”

I did college radio for six or seven years or so: the avant garde holds no particular terrors for me. Being in college radio, we went through the whole thing of musical one-upmanship: “Hey, I can listen to weirder shit than you can.” A couple of my best pals introduced me to all sorts of Difficult Music in those days.

cf. Laurie Anderson’s Language is a Virus, which certainly bears on this:

“Good evening. Welcome to “Difficult Listening Hour”: the spot on your the dial for that relentless and impenetrable sound of. Difficult. Music. So sit bolt upright in that straight-backed chair; button that top button; and get set for some Difficult Music."

(one version of this is at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHg2jZelIYc)

This is actually pertinent - Laurie Anderson played The Egg here in Albany a week or two ago - and even SHE could not fill that 1200-seat hall.

This weekend was the grand opening of a new performance hall up at RPI. So I went, to check it out. What’s notable is that one of the highlights of the weekend was a concert of avant garde music - or rather, music that had once been avant garde, oh, fully a third of a century ago, back when I was doing college radio.

First, Cecil Taylor (...sans Unit...) came out and fought with a grand piano for half an hour or so. Much like this:

(His bio at Allmusic notes: “Suffice it to say that Cecil Taylor's music is not for everyone.“)

Then Pauline Oliveros came up the stairs to the stage from out of the audience, sat down, picked up her accordion, and let the bellows of her accordion breathe a bit, to force us to hear it. The performance was a lot like this one from last year:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rdnXFXrUhE

People were leaving in the midst of her first number.

What’s interesting is that this was a high-prestige gig at the opening weekend of RPI’s new EMPAC. Nice building, nice hall.

(It's kind of comical that a purpose-built hall in the 21st century STILL has videography only as an afterthought: FOR THE OPENING GIG, they had five cameras BLOCKING THE AISLES. Somebody please explain to me why they didn't build niches for cameras to live, out of the way of the paying customers.)

Anyway: on a college campus of 6,000 students, a free concert could not fill the new 1200-seat house. The hall was scarcely half full. And people started leaving after 15 minutes or so. Whatever the artistic merits of the musical avant garde, it’s hard to convincingly assert that this metropolitan area can actually support such a venue. (Half-full? The premiere weekend?? For a free gig???)

(Now, me, I'm pretty inured to what Laurie Anderson calls "Difficult Listening Music". But, hilariously, I dragged along my long-suffering teenaged daughter. She’s still in shock.)

The Death of Film, Chapter 31

2008-09-09T21:07:00.003-04:00

Yesterday (September 8, 2008), my local supermarket took away their Drop Box for film processing.

The C-41 machine was pulled out of my corner CVS a few months ago. (They still do prints from digital files, and they still accept film for processing.)

For a brief interval, there were FOUR drop boxes and TWO One-Hour processors within walking distance of my house. (Eckerd when they were down on the corner, CVS when it was in the local strip mall, Hannaford, and the local PhotoLab about a klick away. This would have been back around the year 2000? 2002? (When did my local lab close? 2006?))

Now, there's only the CVS drop-box.

"The Garden Spot of the Universe"

2008-07-14T20:54:00.005-04:00

My father would make that observation that every time he drove past the decaying factory town of Amsterdam (NY) - and not entirely ironically.

Because my mother was born-and-raised in Amsterdam. She had to drop out of high school to go to work in the carpet mill - and I seem to recall that she started at four dollars a week - as it was the depths of the Hoover Depression, and her father didn't make enough to keep them fed. (Now that I think of it, it's more likely that the mill wouldn't take him back on - not at seven dollars a week - not when they could hire teenaged girls at four dollars a week.)

When the war broke out, she went to work down the valley at GE's Schenectady Works, where she met my father. (And by then, she was then making more than her father, a laborer in the carpet mill.)

When my parents married in '45, they lived in Amsterdam for a couple of years; my eldest sister was born there. My mother's brother - who was, after her father died, her only living relative - raised his family in Amsterdam, and lived there until the day he died. (He's buried right behind Ft. Johnson.)

We visited my uncle probably about monthly for most of the '60s; I've been to several weddings up in Amsterdam, of my cousin and of my mother's friends' kids.

So I have a connection there; heck, it's not far to the alternate universe in which I grew up in Amsterdam. (My uncle was in school with Kirk Douglas, who wrote books about growing up poor in Amsterdam.)

Anyway, on Saturday, Alice and I were headed up the valley, and were stopped at the traffic light in the center of town (at the light at the intersection of Routes 5 and 30)... and the shift linkage let go.
Nice strangers jumped out to push the Miata into the fire station's parking lot; a half-hour later, it was towed to Dudka's Garage over on the west side of town.

It was a sunny and hot Saturday afternoon - not the worst conditions to be stranded. And I noted that I am not the first of my lineage to be walking around Amsterdam.

Eventually, my daughter and I walked over to the Amtrak station and took the last train of the day down to Schenectady, where Maggie and Mary rescued us.

The conductor thought this was hilarious - "It'll take me that long to write up the ticket!" - as it's all of a 15-minute train ride. (However, let's note that Amtrak was fully thirty minutes late for a 15-minute ride....)

Back at the lodge, we toasted our adventure...

(I got home to learn that the Miata doesn't have "linkages" - if the shifter is busted, it's inside the transmission case. This is going to hurt....)

More evidence

2008-07-11T20:10:00.006-04:00

The federal minimum wage goes up in a couple of weeks, because the Democrats won control of Congress in the 2006 elections.

This will be the 20th increase since the minimum wage was established in 1938. So, 70 years, 20 increases - the long-term average interval is about every three-and-a-half years.

The two longest intervals between increases?

The longest was the ten years between 1997 and 2007, when the Republicans controlled Congress (and then all three branches). Note that the price of gasoline (to take one example) about tripled while the minimum wage remained stagnant.

The second longest interval was the nine years from 1981 until 1990, when the Republicans controlled the presidency and then the Senate.

(And the third longest interval was from 1967 to 1974, most of which was when the Republicans controlled the White House.)

Republicans are bad for wage-earners. Why somebody who works for a living would ever help vote them into power remains a mystery to me.

Wages go up when Democrats are in power. Wages - and standards of living - go down when Republicans are in power.

"States visited" meme

2008-06-19T00:22:00.002-04:00

create your own visited states map

(Just over half the states of the union.)

{Well, too bad the 'img' doesn't fit this layout....}

John Henry Was A Steel-Drivin' Man

2008-06-09T21:02:00.005-04:00

All my adult life, I've been a Serious Amateur photographer. I've developed my own 4x5s, I've done hundreds of rolls of my own E-6.

Now - like millions of dads before me - I have other priorities staring me in the face, things - like orthodontia - that I need to spend money on, things that keep me from buying expensive cameras.

But I did started buying professional-grade film cameras - Nikon F3s - soon after the June 2004 Transit of Venus, when I realized

a) I needed (heck, deserved!) more and better gear

and

b) every pro photographer in the world was dumping their film gear on eBay as they made their transition over to digital photography.

So I picked up some cheap used F3s, and a couple of bags full of fancy Nikkor glass.
Let's say I paid $300 for an F3-with-motor-drive at the end of 2004.

Now, let's assume I'm shooting 80 rolls/yr since then (I don't have a complete count in one place, but this is the ballpark - I've used about 220 mailers (...at ~$2 each) in the three seasons since May 2005, plus a couple dozen rolls at Walmart, at my local pro lab, etc.)
Three full seasons (2005, 2006, 2007), and now just starting the high season of 2008.

That's about 250 rolls @ about $4/roll = about $1000 in film costs.

(Stores have been liquidating their film inventories: I bought a pallet of print film at 50¢/roll, about 80 rolls of Kodachrome at ~$1.75... and, over on eBay, two hundred mailers at about $2 each.

So - an average of $4/roll is certainly in the ballpark.)

In late 2004, the D2 was what? $4500? The early-2005 D200 was $1600?.
(In 2002, the D1 was $5400. In 2006, the D200 was still $1600.)
Today's D3 is $5000. The D300 is $2000.
It's now 2008, and - shooting as fast as I can since 2004 - I'm still ahead on film costs, and thus I'm still saving money on total imaging costs.

(There's also the slight detail that the incremental costs of digital imaging are not QUITE "Zero": the files need to be stored, the files need to be viewed, even if never output to hard copy. Batteries, computer upgrades, storage costs, printing costs.)

On the one hand: My used F3 - now with another 100 rolls on the odometer - is still not-broken-in-yet.
On the other hand: What fraction of owners who bought a high-end DSLR at the end of 2004 are still using it as their front-line camera? 75%? 50%? It's not 100%. I view a camera as a once-per-generation investment; DSLR seem to be modeled more on the computer, a 'upgrade-every-couple-of-years' paradigm.

(A related question: Let's look ahead to the year 2010 or the year 2015, a blink of an eye from now: Which will be more obsolete then? a digital SLR from the year 2004, or an F3?)

But now that my F3 is - by any standard - fully amortized, this solution still obtains: I can continue to shoot film at $5/week while I continue to wait for the inarguable DSLR to come to market.

Even here in 2008, it still appears as though I can continue to do this more-or-less indefinitely.

Coda: I just bought another batch of $2 mailers on eBay, enough for the next two years or so. So say $10/week in imaging costs for the next two years, that brings me into the year 2010. And presumably the $1500 F400 of 2010 will be more camera than the $4500 D2 of 2004 ever was.

Theoretically, I would love to make the jump to digital, but I just can't seem to make the numbers work. $400/year in film costs continues to be less than $1600 for a DSLR.

Origin Stories

2008-04-30T22:55:00.004-04:00

It's some sort of sign of old age that I've suddenly become interested in genealogy.

(In my defense, it's grown out of the recent upsurge of my interest in local history, which has grown out of parenthood.)

I've been dragging my kids around to Revolutionary War reenactments, and I went to the William Johnson seminar last fall in Johnstown.

About 15 years ago we buried my mother's brother in the Catholic cemetery directly behind Fort Johnson; as his cortege passed the Fort, I recall thinking, "Hmmm, sometime I should learn more about Wm. J." So I did.

And that led me to the American Revolution here in the Mohawk Valley. Which led me to the Herkimer House, and to the Battle of Oriskany. Which led me to this book:

(insert cover photo of "Forgotten Allies")

about the Oneida Indians in the Revolution: the Oneidas broke the Six Nations Confederacy to stand by their Patriot neighbors against the British - and against the Indians allied with the British, including their own Mohawk brethren.

Now, the Oneidas are still right there at the west end of the Valley; and they've been pressing their land claims to that part of the world - which (theoretically, at least)
would include my sister's house, a few miles east of the Oriskany battlefield.

So I got to thinking about MY house, here on Mohawk land, and started looking into the solidity of my own deed. And wondering about the days when the Dutch wrangled my lot from the original owners, and wondering about the first contact between the natives and the Europeans. So I read some books on the Dutch settlement of the neighborhood, and some books on the Iroquois.

Now, my aunts had always claimed that their mother's line entitled them to DAR-status.
And it turns out that not only were they correct - we do go back before 1783, and at least seven of my ancestors served on the Patriots' side. But, more interestingly, my grandmother's people go back to the original Dutch settlers, before the English.

One remarkable aspect of this part of the world - which I suppose is little different from any other part of the world - is that you read the names on the map, you read the histories of the earliest settlement - and those same names used to sit next to me in school. I lived across the street from the DeGrafs, we lived around the corner from the Fondas. I went to Bradt School, for goodness sake, where I was taught by Mrs. Viele. In high school I dated a girl who lived next door to the Mabee farm. And there were still Mabees living there at the time, just like there had been since the 1680s, when it marked the frontier of European expansion. And those Old Local Names that I went to school with? Now it turns out that I'm probably connected to half of them. Being Americans , and so many of us recent immigrants, we never talked much about this back then. (Everyone being blue collar - with no particular desire to put on airs - probably had something to do with it, too.)

All of which is neither unusual or nor especially interesting - but it was startlingly new to me.

Footnotes to the previous post

2008-03-30T16:08:00.008-04:00

In explaining Napalm Death to my children, I had to back up and explain John Peel, shortwave broadcasting, alternative music, etc. Peelie's autobiography is out, with the cover photo looking exactly like my college radio days:

(Maggie agrees: not only does Peel resemble our college-radio-pal John, but the woman in the back (presumably his wife Sheila) bears more than a passing resemblance to M.)

From the Wiki article on John Peel:

I've always imagined I'd die by driving into the back of a truck while trying to read the name on a cassette, and people would say, 'He would have wanted to go that way.' Well, I want them to know that I wouldn't.

Edited (8 April) to add: and someone on BookMooch was good enough to send me a copy. Of the hardcover first. Via Air Mail. From England. I guess I know what I'm reading next.

Sweet Zombie Jesus, that was horrible

2008-03-30T01:59:00.018-04:00

Back when I was doing college radio, there was always a race going on to see who could find the most extreme music, in any number of dimensions: the best, the 'rockingest', the most obscure, the loudest, the most literary, the most atonal, the coolest, the noisiest. Whatever the dimension, there was always an endless series of one-upmanship going on: "You call that 'X'??? Here, listen to THIS, I'll show you 'X'. " (Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" was of course the trump card in any number of these discussions.)

Even after I left college radio behind, I still kept up: every week I would listen to the BBC's John Peel to find out what was new. (Of course, now Peelie has left us, and I'm now officially clueless. But I did play the game for a very long time. And I still miss Peelie.)

Around 1987, John Peel's World Service show brought us Napalm Death, and the entire genre they spawned of "grindcore".

Loud, fast, difficult to listen to. Which meant it was perfect, for what it was. St. Anselm's Ontological Argument for the Existence of Grindcore: "Postulate the existence of a genre louder and faster than which no other music can be conceived. Such a genre must exist, and must be worshipped."

And after listening to 1987-vintage Napalm Death, it was hard to imagine how rock could get harder, louder, or faster. So for the last 20 years, Napalm Death has been my specimen example for the genus of "hard rock".

And twenty years later, Napalm Death finally played here. An all-new lineup, but, still, here they are. My long-suffering wife refused to go with me. My teenaged daughter adamently refused to accompany me. So I went all on my lonesome.

Northern Lights is just a club in a strip mall. (What's hilarious is that next door to Northern Lights is the Northway Church, the local advertise-on-television Mega-church: Saturday night, there's one set of worshippers, and Sunday morning a different set of worshippers fills the same parking lot. Because, ya know, we each worship in our own way.) I'd guess the crowd was about 300? Mostly young men, of course, but a very visible contingent of women. The dress code ran almost entirely to 'black'. I counted four mohawk hair-dos. And I was probably the only un-tattooed person in the place.

(It's probably a topic for a different post to discuss how charming it is that audiences self-select. I didn't know that there WERE 300 grindcore fans in the area - and yet, here they were, all conveniently assembled in one place.)

So I saw a couple of the warmup acts ('Straightline Stitch' and '36 Crazyfists', from Alaska), and the headliners ('Devil Driver'). Napalm Death was not quite as loud as Sonic Youth - still my reference standard for "LOUD" (and come to think of it, I don't know if my hearing has recovered from that, even yet....) - but it was not for lack of trying. I kept touching my earplugs to make sure that they were seated - and touching them would break the seal, and let me know that, yes, they had been seated - the noise was, yes, simply loud enough that I thought my earplugs must have failed.

During the stage patter, Barney Greenway, Napalm Death's current singer, talked about the band now being 27 years old, and referenced 1987's "Scum" - which I was holding in my hand, as I had brought it along in hope of an autograph. (I was chatting with one guy who pointed out that the album was older than HE was.) My moment of fame.

"Scum":

In your mind
Nothing but fear
You can't face life
Or believe death's near
A vision of life
On television screens
An existance created
From empty dreams
Hide behind T.V.
Hide behind life
You should be living
But you only survive
Life holds nothing
But pain and death
Don't look for love
There is none left

What's remarkable is how conservative the genre is: Napalm Death played stuff off their new album, AND material from 1987's premiere "Scum" - and it did NOT sound like there was 20-some years of progress between the two. And the headliners clearly owe their style to ND, but have not moved the goalposts very far past their progenitors.

Hearing "Scum" played live made me smile. They play Binghamton tonight, but I still can't talk my family* into going with me.

*Amended to add:

Well, the 11-year-old is game - she's always up for about any adventure, and agrees that Napalm Death is funny - but I don't think the club would let her in.

.

Fun Facts: Maxfield Parrish's "Daybreak"

2008-03-22T11:46:00.025-04:00

This young woman, in Parrish's "Morning"
(http://www.greatmodernpictures.com/mfp08lg.jpg)

was also the model for the reclining girl in 1922's "Daybreak"
(http://americanart.si.edu/eyelevel/images/parrish.jpg)

Her name was Kitty Owen.
And her grandfather was William Jennings Bryan.

Her mother - Bryan's daughter Ruth Bryan Owen - was a prominent feminist, and was later elected to Congress in 1928, and has a fascinating biography herself. Ruth Bryan Owen was the mother of four (two with the first husband, two with Maj. Owen), but if "Kitty" Owen is also known as "Helen Rudd Brown" (noted as "daughter of Ruth Bryan Owen"), then she ran for Congress herself, in 1958 and 1960 (and lost).

According to
http://politicalgraveyard.com/families/1185.html
Helen Rudd Brown - either the girl in "Daybreak", or, more likely, her half-sister - was still living in 2003.

(This family gets more interesting the deeper one looks:
http://www.nndb.com/people/098/000052939/
http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/Cambridge/entries/061/Ruth-Bryan-Owen-Rohde.html
http://www.uic.edu/orgs/cwluherstory/jofreeman/polhistory/owen.htm

WJ Bryan's wife was a lawyer herself.
Not only was RB Owen the first woman Representative from the deep South, but FDR appointed her as America's first woman Ambassador. Ruth Bryan apparently dropped out of college in 1903 to marry and raise a family; was divorced in 1909, and only married Major Reginald Owen (a Brit, no less) in 1910 - so either the girl in the picture was about 11 years old, or she took her stepfather's name.)

Here's a photo of Eleanor Roosevelt and RB Owen:

http://history1900s.about.com/library/photos/blyfdr143.htm

Anyway, let's take a moment to reflect upon Parrish's masterpiece, "Daybreak":

This was considered to be fine art in 1922, and it was the most popular art print of the 20th century (the figure "one for every four American homes" is commonly cited) - but let's note that over eighty-five years later, in today's climate of panic, it counts as kiddie-pr0n: the naked girl is Parrish's daughter Jean, who was all of eleven years old. Parrish couldn't have sold this to the American public in the 21st century; he'd be lucky to talk his way out of jail just for having painted it.

Times change.

Datlow's Inferno

2008-02-21T01:10:00.007-05:00

I started reading science fiction as a kid, 'way back in the '60s, so I absorbed the Party Line of the day, the one that was promulgated back during the 'New Wave' Wars: that 'science fiction' was but a subset of the larger universe of 'speculative fiction'.

'Speculative Fiction' (known to its friends as 'SF') included 'science fiction', but also includes 'fantasy', and even some of the more supernatural flavors of 'horror'. Slipstream, magical realism: it can all be subsumed into the larger 'umbrella' genre of "SF".

So, while I'm basically a 'science fiction' sort of guy, ideologically I've come to feel an obligation to keep abreast with what's going on in all the other corners of the field.

And for much of this, I've come to rely upon Ellen Datlow: her roundup in the annual series The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror is - in many years - most of what I see in those sub-genres. I'm perfectly happy to let her find stuff and bring it to my attention. (And her original anthologies are worth tracking down, too.)

So when I heard that she had a new anthology of original horror, I took a peek. Now, let's announce up front that I am NOT by temperment a 'horror' reader, and the peek was from between my fingers; but even so, I can recognize a good story when I read one.

There's good stuff here. You can trust Ellen Datlow.

The girl, the gold watch, and everything

2008-02-17T22:31:00.006-05:00

Today marks my 25th anniversary in my job.

The question of "What should I be when I grow up?" seems to have answered itself.

I'm on my third* governor, my fifth Commisioner, and my seventh supervisor.
(*Well, strictly speaking, I was working over in a different agency (briefly) under my first governor. Three governors in this job, four in my civil service career.)

UPDATED TO ADD: And a month later, Eliot Spitzer imploded. So I can increment my governor-counter by "one".

'Liberated' from an LT'er named "HippieLunatic"

2008-01-29T22:28:00.000-05:00

You are a Hippie

You are a total hippie. While you may not wear birks or smell of incense, you have the soul of a hippie.
You don't trust authority, and you do as you please. You're willing to take a stand, even when what you believe isn't popular.

You like to experiment with ideas, lifestyles, and different subcultures.
You always gravitate toward what's radical and subversive. Normal, mainstream culture doesn't really resonate with you.

Are You a Hippie?

The Peter Steiner Effect

2008-01-09T22:52:00.001-05:00

In July of 1993, at the very dawn of the internet age - just three months after Mosaic was launched - The New Yorker published the famous Peter Steiner cartoon: "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog".

This was instantly recognized as a profound truth; but it took some years for the corollary to be noticed.

Yes, nobody on-line knows your real-life appearance - you may very well BE a dog, for all anyone on-line can know. People know you're a dog in real life only if they know you in real life. You are what you present yourself to be.

Which lead to an interesting corollary of the Steiner Observation:
"If you behave like a troll, you ARE a troll".

It's not a question of "Oh, but he's really not like that - in person he's really nice". No.

You are what you present yourself to be.

If you're a rude jerk in your on-line presentation , you ARE a rude jerk. Nobody can tell that you might ALSO be a nice doggie in real life. Internet anonymity lets you transcend the limitations of the flesh, and gives you the opportunity to present your True Self.

It can be quite revealing.

Postscript:
And, of course, Vonnegut pointed this out decades ago, in Mother Night:

"Be careful what you pretend to be
because you are what you pretend to be."

We Shall Not See Their Like Again

2008-01-08T21:23:00.000-05:00

Sunday, January 13, 2008 - New York Harbor
"Witness the making of maritime history as fireworks and fanfare mark the first and only meeting of Queen Mary 2, Queen Elizabeth 2 and the new Queen Victoria."

The QE2 is being retired in November, so this really is the only chance to see these three in the same place at the same time.

Now I have to find somebody to go to NYC with me.

It's turtles all the way down

2007-12-31T17:10:00.000-05:00

There really is no bottom to this 'history' stuff.

Everybody knows that Bristol fishermen had discovered the cod of the Grand Bank well before Columbus "discovered" the New World - they were drying their catch ashore here for hundreds of years before European settlement.

In 1609, Henry Hudson wasn't even the first European to sail up his eponymous river; but, starting then, the Dutch returned every summer to trade for furs. After a few years, they set up a permanent trading post (1614) on Albany's "Castle Island".

And why was it called "Castle Island"?

Because "Castle Island" was the home of the extensive ruins of the French fort of 15-fucking-40.

(Which doesn't seem to have been built by Monsieur Cartier, who was poking around the St. Lawrence around then, but I can't seem to find any name at all attached to this expedition.)

(And just why were the Albany natives so happy to see the Dutch show up, and just why were they so eager to trade with them? Because the French had helped the Hurons rout the Albany locals (up on Lake Champlain) the previous summer,
about three months before Hudson showed up in the fall. They wanted guns.)

For all the Big Deal that Albany makes of the year "1609", you might think that somebody would have at least mentioned "1540".

Pretty soon I'll find out that Leif Eriksson actually built an early canal around the Cohoes Falls.

The Quest for the Headwaters of the Tawasentha

2007-12-24T17:06:00.000-05:00

Cartier, Cabot, Hudson, Frobisher, Franklin - over the centuries, countless explorers have sought the fabled Northwest Passage.

Think of von Humboldt, spending months of hardship exploring the mysterious Orinoco, and finding the channel that connects it to the mighty Amazon.

The White Nile, the Blue Nile - some of the greatest explorers in the history of the world have competed for the prize of finding the Source of the Nile - Richard Burton, Henry Stanley, Dr. David Livingstone.

Hudson in the Halfmoon, Sir John Franklin with the Erebus and Terror - so it was with us in our MPV minivan as we sent out in search of the headwaters of the Normanskill, and the fabled secret passage to the Schoharie and the lost Mohawk castle at Icanderoga.

The Tawasentha is a minor river that flows from the heights above the Schoharie down to the Hudson, joining it just below the Dutch trading post of Beverwyck (today's Albany). Today, I live ten miles west of Albany, on the ridge about a half-mile above the stream - now called the Normanskill. But how far west could one canoe up the Normanskill?

'Google Maps' to the rescue!

A couple of miles to my west, you can trace the Normanskill crossing to the north side of US 20, and it meanders another ten miles or so up to Duanesburg - where it runs past my Aunt Dorothy's back yard - and wraps around the west side of the hilltop town of Duanesburg, recrossing Rt. 20. But then what?

A look at the maps shows that the surveyors of the Delaware and Hudson Railroad found this course nearly a century-and-a-half ago: the Normanskill runs through the lost town of "Del-an-son", and peters out on the flat heights a mile or two west of Delanson. But just yards to the west of the swamps that mark the source of the Tawasentha, a stream starts running west, which then precipitously drops into the Schoharie, directly across from the town of Esperance. From there, it's a smooth paddle down to the old Mohawk village of Icanderoga at Fort Hunter. All traces of the native village and colonial Fort were obliterated in the 1820s by the construction of the Erie Canal.

But a road trip showed that it's feasible: rather than come down the Mohawk - and negotiate the 80-foot Cohoes Falls, and the Mahican village at Peebles Island - it is possible to climb up out of the Schorarie Valley at Esperance and find the Normanskill well to the west of Delanson - scarcely three miles of rapids and portage, leading to 20-some miles of mostly gentle canoeing downstream. The uphill climb must be real work - the Divide here is benchmarked at 836 feet, and the Schoharie at Esperance only about three miles to the west is at about 550 feet - but the Normanskill seems made for canoeing.

Here's the divide:

http://www.topozone.com/map.asp?lat=42.7366&lon=-74.22652&symshow=n&datum=nad83&layer=DRG

(From here, the D&H RR veers off to the SW, heading for the Susquehanna; the stream for the Schoharie swings off to the NW; and the swamp to the east turns into the Normanskill, a stream that meanders down through Delanson, Duanesburg, through Longfellow's Vale of Tawasentha in Guilderland, on across the town of Bethlehem, finally entering the Hudson at today's Port of Albany.)

So the Mohawks had three routes to reach the Dutch trading post: down the Mohawk River and portaging around the Cohoes falls (which, btw, is a major shrine in the history of the Iroquois Confederacy); or down the Mohawk River to Schenctady, and then 15 miles by foot down the Mohawk Trail across the pine bush(that would become the King's Highway) to State Street in Beverwyck; or, down the Normanskill, arriving just to the south of Fort Orange.

PS: a close study of the topography shows that my ancestral home was at the top of another 'continental divide': a mile to my north was the drainage into Schenectady's Binnekill; a mile or so to my NE was the source of the Lishakill; two miles to my south, you're in the Normanskill catchment; 4? miles to the SE, you enter the drainage of the Patroon Creek, which passes on the north side of Albany.

(Athens Junction, the crossroads of the world.)

.

Today's Fun Facts

2007-12-05T19:05:00.000-05:00

Catching up with The New Yorker, here's a quote from "Future Reading" by Anthony Grafton, Nov. 5, 2007 p. 53:

A conservative reckoning of the number of books ever published is thirty-two million; Google believes that there could be as many as a hundred million. It is estimated that between three and ten per cent of all known books are currently in print, and twenty per cent - those produced between the beginning of print, in the fifteenth century, and 1923 - are out of copyright. The rest, perhaps seventy-five per cent of all books ever printed, are "orphans," possibly still covered by copyright protections but out of print and pretty much out of mind. Google, controversially, is scanning those books although it is not yet making them fully available; Microsoft, more cautiously, is scanning only what it knows it can legitimately disseminate.

A shout-out for all my posse

2007-11-28T19:09:00.000-05:00

PBS' NewsHour just did a story about the rustbelt / factory closings in Milwaukee / Bucyrus-Erie welders/ training inner-city HS kids in the manufacturing trades (heck: will there even BE American jobs for welders?).

A tough school - they talked to a security guard in the HS who demonstrated various gang signs... and then they talked to a kid who demonstrated the Engineer's "Gang Sign":

the right-hand rule.

This amuses me

2007-10-27T13:11:00.000-04:00

So the family iBook - the worst consumer product ever sold to an innocent public - won't take a charge anymore.

As I know all too well, we have a local Apple Store. So I was wild and crazy and paid full price for a new battery. The Apple Store did not have a charger in stock (!), but could get me one on Tuesday. (By Tuesday, I could get a half-price one through Amazon, so I did that instead.)

As long as I was down at the mall, I checked out Best Buy. Their low-end laptop is now a $400 Toshiba, one that now has DVD recording. (Last spring - the most recent occasion that the iBook had to go into the shop* - their low-end laptop was a $450 Compaq.)

Hmm, DVD recording. So I wandered over to the stand-alone DVD recorders to check them out. The Best Buy house brand was $50, marked down from $100. They had a return that they were selling for $30.

Thrty bucks for a DVD recorder. This amused me so much that I bought it, mostly with the money that I'm saving by not buying the charger at the Apple Store. I'm pretty sure that I've bought $30 DVDs already, so the idea of a $30 recorder is just hilarious.

* I think the April failure was catastrophic failure #6, possibly #7, but I've lost track without looking it up. Apple has now given me two replacement machines.

Things Found While Looking For Other Things

2007-10-26T01:06:00.000-04:00

It's reassuring to be reminded that - despite some evidence to the contrary - I'm not THE most eccentric person in the world:

There's a "Maytag Collector's Club"!

- and I'm not a member! See, I scarcely budge the needle on the Eccentric-O-Meter.

(Maytag Collectors. I am reminded of the Bob-and-Ray "opposing viewpoint" sketch, the guy complaining that it was unrealistic to expect an ordinary working man to "save the whales": as most apartments are too small for a decent whale collection.)

Things I was looking up:

I was at the library today for their weekly book sale... and upstairs in the meeting room, the conductor of our local Symphony was introducing this week's guest star, "celebrated erhu virtuoso" Betti Xiang.

(She played on Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Project).

So I stopped in and listened to some Chinese classical music on erhu for a while. I've certainly spent LESS interesting lunch hours.

She was born in Shanghai, started learning her instrument during the Cultural Revolution, did her stint in the People's Army, emigrated to Chicago ten years ago. Worked with Yo-Yo.

The path:

1) Hmm, Shanghai.
2) The Bund.
3) The extra-territorial concessions along the Chinese coast.

4) I was unclear on the German concession in China; what I knew was that up in the Northwest, the Germans had built a brewery (...you can't have a German community without some drinkable beer - and Tsingtao reached America just about the time that I reached drinking age...); AND, for some obscure reason, I was under the impression that the Germans were involved with Russia's Port Arthur, across the bay.
What was the story there?

5) And so I confirm in my head that Port Arthur and Tsingtao are actually different concessions.

6) But it turns out that Tsingtao is now

a) Qingdao, a city of over seven million people (...won't be long before it's bigger than NYC...)
and
b) the home of appliance manufacturer Haier.

7) Haier is now a major manufacturer, $12b/year. With a factory in America.

8) Haier was beat out by Whirlpool in their bid to buy out Maytag. (We're a Maytag family, and have been ever since my parents' Bendix front-loader gave up.)

9) Whirlpool bought Maytag a year ago, and has already closed Maytag HQ in Newton Iowa (I was there with my father in the summer of 1970, on our way to Collins Radio), and has also closed the Maytag factories. The Newton factory closed TODAY, in fact. (Sic transit gloria mundi.)

Which led to

10) Maytag Collectors!

I love the Internets.

.

Like a science fiction convention, but with less cosplay

2007-10-21T20:39:00.000-04:00

(Well, with slightly less cosplay....)

I spent the weekend at an academic conference - a local history seminar funded by several agencies of NYS government, so it had both the resources to bring in some really big names in the field, AND the mandate to open attendence up to the general public. Which meant that the entire audience was self-selected to be people fascinated by the topic. There actually was a bit of cosplay, which highlighted the fact that the crowd was largely made up of types familar from SF fandom.

The audience all wanted to be there and all had some personal expertise and interest in the subject - so the difference from, say, "lectures aimed at sullen undergraduates" was remarkable. The questions were generally informed and intelligent (and only occasionally did they veer off toward the questioner's own particular "King Charles' Head" hobby horse).

On the other hand, 'lectures' really are a remarkably time-inefficient method of transmitting information: please give me the equivalent stack of articles, and please give me 90% of my time back. But sometimes interesting things really do happen in the personal exchange of ideas that can happen only at a conference. It killed the entire weekend, but I can't say that it was a waste of time.

OK - I admit I need help

2007-10-19T20:54:00.000-04:00

They say that's the first step.

I swore that I would buy No More Cameras until I buy myself a digital SLR.

But I'm still waiting for a Nikon DSLR that's both

a) affordable
and

b) compatible with my pallet of AI-S lenses.

So I've stopped going to the local Camera show, I no longer surf eBay for cameras (...well, except for the Zeiss Contessa of my dreams...).

But Friday, I stopped at the local GoodWill.

They had a Vivitar Series One lens, the famous 90mm/f2.5 Macro.
Interesting lens, but - mercifully - it was in Pentax K-mount.

So i walked away, and I was already a mile a way when it dawned on me that I could pick up a K1000 body to go with it, for about nothing. And have a low-cost knocking-around macro/portrait lens. A camera I could leave in the car, or loan to one of my kids without fear.

So I went back for the lens - and by the time I went back, the GoodWill had put out a K1000 with a working meter. (With its default 50mm/2.)

I guess it was meant to be - but, seriously now: what do I do with yet another film camera?

(PS - the camera came with an exposed roll of K64-36 in it. Have I also purchased the obligation to see that this Found Film gets developed?)

(PPS - the K1000 lacks a self-timer. So one immediate benefit is that I got to rummage around in my gadget drawer and put to use an external self-timer that my father left me. That was oddly satisfying, to have that relatively obscure bit of kit on hand.)

Which Dead Russian Composer Are You?

2007-10-16T22:47:00.000-04:00

If I were a Dead Russian Composer, I would be Igor Stravinsky.

Known as a true son of the new 20th Century, my music started out melodic and folky but slowly got more dissonant and bizzare as I aged. I am a traveler and a neat freak, and very much hated those rotten eggs thrown at me after the premiere of "The Rite of Spring."

Who would you be? Dead Russian Composer Personality Test

No surprise here, I guess

2007-10-15T00:38:00.000-04:00

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm You're probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are one of the literati. Other people's grammatical mistakes make you insane.
Dedicated Reader
Book Snob
Literate Good Citizen
Non-Reader
Fad Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz

Yeah, I've read a lot - - though, given my famously Low tastes, I hope it's not accurate to characterize me as a "book snob". And, again, given my own imperfect mastery of spelling, I'm not especially offended by others' grammatical mistakes. But, yeah, I guess I'd have to say that "obsessive-compulsive bookworm" is probably a fair cop.

(A shout-out to LJer "ecbatan" for the link.)

Stirrings from Rochester

2007-10-14T17:10:00.000-04:00

("It's alive!")

Oct. 10, 2007: Kodak has tweaked TMAX 400:

We’ve improved both the grain and sharpness of KODAK PROFESSIONAL T-MAX 400 Film / 400TMY. Now, in addition to being the world’s finest-grained 400-speed B&W film, T-MAX 400 is also the world’s sharpest.

(Is this an admission on Kodak's part that Fuji's Neopan 400 was actually sharper?)

Supposedly in stores in December.

.

Nobel Peace Prize

2007-10-12T19:03:00.000-04:00

Let's see, now... Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter... and now Al Gore.

That makes four people who have been elected to the American Presidency who have gone on to be honored with a Nobel Peace Prize.

Jefferson's Library

2007-09-05T22:37:00.001-04:00

About a decade ago, we realized that our books were more numerous than the library that Jefferson sold to replace the LC. Think of that: our late-90s collection - assembled by an ordinary couple in an ordinary suburban house - was numerically as big as the LC used to be, early in the 19th century. That's some sort of index of how rich our society is today.

Over on LibraryThing, they're loading in the catalog of TJ's library, the collection he sold to Congress to rebuild the LC after the British burned it.

"On Jan. 30, 1815, Congress approved the purchase of Thomas Jefferson's personal library of 6,487 books for $23,950."

So that's an average price of $3.69 in 1815.

(As it happens, that was a high point for American prices - prices had jumped by fully a third due to the War of 1812, and, except for the Civil War, prices would generally decline for the rest of the 19th century.)

according to

http://measuringworth.com/calculators/ppowerus/result.php

$23,950 in 1815 was worth $323,830.99 in 2006: $49.89 per book
(A further 3% inflation gives us $333,546 in 2007: $51.42 per book.)
So, say, roughly $50 per book, mostly leather-bound hardcovers.

So, Jefferson's collection was sold for more like "Folio Society" prices than like "bookstore" prices.

(Sidebar: Note that relentless inflation is mostly a post-WWII phenomenon - American prices were essentially the same in 1941 as they were in 1815:

According to this calculator:
$13,075.32 in the year 1900 has the same "purchase power" as $23,950 in the year 1815.
$15,645.41 in the year 1915 has the same "purchase power" as $23,950 in the year 1815.
$24,190.95 in the year 1918 has the same "purchase power" as $23,950 in the year 1815.
$23,660.87 in the year 1941 has the same "purchase power" as $23,950 in the year 1815.)

Borrowed from Bear

2007-08-31T20:07:00.000-04:00

This seems roughly correct.

It looks like my work here is done

2007-08-28T00:33:00.000-04:00

We had our end-of-summer cookout yesterday. (We have Other Plans for Labor Day Weekend (celebrating the proletarian contribution, no doubt...).) Anyway, I was grilling burgers on the Weber, and tried to pantomine my need for assistance.

The fifteen-year-old rolled her eyes, sighed, and said:

"I wish I were like other kids and had normal parents!

The Importance of Copy-Editing

2007-08-03T22:06:00.000-04:00

If concepts are not correct, works are not finished;
if works are not finished, art and morality do not flourish;
if morality and art do not flourish, justice is not exact;
if justice is not exact, the country does not know where to lean.

Therefore one must not tolerate words not being in order.
This is what matters.

-- Confucius

.

Gardner Dozois' List of Essential SF (pre-1980)

2007-07-25T21:16:00.000-04:00

Thanks to James Nichol on LiveJournal for pointing to this:

http://www.sfwa.org/reading/rec_dozois.htm

Dozois lists the essential novels and short story collections for someone interested in pre-1980 SF. Like any such list, it has its problems in detail (a couple - Okla Hannali, for one - aren't actually SF), but, overall it's not a bad list of the SF I grew up with. Here's GD's list of novels - books I've actually read are italicized.

Brian W. Aldiss :
The Long Afternoon of Earth
Starship
The Malacia Tapestry

Poul Anderson:
The Night Face
Tau Zero
The High Crusade
Brain Wave
Three Hearts and Three Lions

Isaac Asimov :
The Caves of Steel
The Naked Sun

Gregory Benford :
Timescape

Alfred Bester:
The Stars My Destination
The Demolished Man

Michael Bishop:
A Little Knowledge
Stolen Faces

James Blish :
A Case of Conscience
Cities in Flight

Leigh Brackett:
The Long Tomorrow

Ray Bradbury:
Something Wicked This Way Comes

John Brunner:
The Shockwave Rider
Stand on Zanzibar
Polymath
Squares of the City

Algis Budrys:
Rogue Moon
Who?

Arthur C. Clarke:
Childhood's End
The City and the Stars
A Fall of Moondust
The Deep Range
The Sands of Mars

Hal Clement:
Mission of Gravity
Cycle of Fire
Needle

D.G. Compton :
Synthajoy
The Unsleeping Eye

Jack Dann:
The Man Who Melted
Junction

Avram Davidson:
Masters of the Maze
The Phoenix and the Mirror
Rork!
Rogue Dragon
Clash of Star Kings
The Enemy of My Enemy

L. Sprague de Camp:
Lest Darkness Fall
The Glory That Was
Rogue Queen
The Hand of Zei
The Tower of Zanid

L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt:
The Complete Enchanter
Land of Unreason

Samuel R. Delany:
Nova
Babel-17
The Einstein Intersection
The Fall of the Towers
Triton

Lester del Rey:
Nerves

Philip K. Dick:
Ubik
The Man in the High Castle
Martian Time-Slip
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Time Out of Joint
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Gordon R. Dickson:
Soldier, Ask Not

Thomas M. Disch :
334
Camp Concentration

G.C. Edmondson:
Blue Face (a.k.a. Chapeyeca)
The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream

George Alec Effinger:
When Gravity Fails
What Entropy Means to Me

Philip Jose Farmer:
The Lovers
Night of Light
The Fabulous Riverboat

James Gunn :
The Listeners

Joe Haldeman:
The Forever War
Mindbridge
Worlds

Charles L. Harness:
The Rose

Harry Harrison:
Make Room! Make Room!
The Deathworld Trilogy
Bill, the Galactic Hero

Robert A. Heinlein:
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
Double Star
Starman Jones
Red Planet
Between Planets
Citizen of the Galaxy
Farmer in the Sky

Frank Herbert:
Under Pressure
(a.k.a. The Dragon in the Sea)
Dune
The Green Brain

Daniel Keyes:
Flowers for Algernon

Damon Knight:
The Man in the Tree
The Other Foot

C.M. Kornbluth:
The Syndic
Not This August

R.A. Lafferty:
The Reefs of Earth
The Devil Is Dead
Okla Hannali
The Fall of Rome
Past Master

Keith Laumer:
A Trace of Memory
A Plague of Demons

Ursula K. Le Guin:
The Left Hand of Darkness
The Dispossessed
Planet of Exile
City of Illusions
The Wizard of Earthsea
The Lathe of Heaven

Fritz Leiber:
The Big Time
Our Lady of Darkness
The Wanderer
Conjure Wife

George R.R. Martin:
The Dying of the Light
Fevre Dream

Walter M. Miller, Jr.:
A Canticle for Leibowitz

Ward Moore :
Bring the Jubilee

Ward Moore and Avram Davidson:
Joyleg

Larry Niven:
World of Ptavvs
A Gift From Earth
Ringworld

André Norton:
The Time Traders
The Beast Master
Galactic Derelict

Edgar Pangborn:
Davy
A Mirror for Observers
West of the Sun

Alexei Panshin:
Rite of Passage

H. Beam Piper:
Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen
Little Fuzzy
Fuzzy Sapiens

Frederik Pohl:
Gateway
Man Plus
A Plague of Pythons

Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth:
Wolfbane
Gladiator-at-Law
The Space Merchants

Keith Roberts:
Pavane
The Chalk Giants

Joanna Russ:
Picnic on Paradise
And Chaos Died
The Female Man
The Two of Them

Eric Frank Russell:
Wasp

Fred Saberhagen:
Berserker

Pamela Sargent:
Cloned Lives

James H. Schmitz:
Agent of Vega
The Witches of Karres

Robert Sheckley:
The Status Civilization

Robert Silverberg :
Dying Inside
Downward to the Earth
The Book of Skulls
Nightwings
Tower of Glass

Clifford D. Simak:
Way Station
City
Time and Again

Cordwainer Smith:
Norstrilia

Norman Spinrad:
Bug Jack Barron

Theodore Sturgeon:
More Than Human
Some of Your Blood
The Synthetic Man
(aka The Dreaming Jewels)
Venus Plus X

William Tenn:
Of Men and Monsters

James Tiptree, Jr.:
Up the Walls of the World

Wilson Tucker:
The Long Loud Silence

Jack Vance:
Emphyrio
The Star Kings
The Killing Machine
The Blue World
The Anome
Big Planet
The Dragon Masters
The Last Castle
The Dying Earth
The Eyes of the Overworld
The Languages of Pao
Trullion Alastor 2262

A.E. Van Vogt:
The War Against the Rull
The Weapon Shops of Isher
Slan
The Players of Null-A

John Varley:
Ophiuchi Hotline

Kate Wilhelm :
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
Margaret And I
Let the Fire Fall
The Clewiston Test
City of Cain

Jack Williamson:
The Humanoids

Gene Wolfe:
The Book of the New Sun
(several volumes)
The Fifth Head of Cerberus
Peace
The Devil in a Forest

Roger Zelazny:
Lord of Light
This Immortal
The Dream Master
Isle of the Dead
Doorways in the Sand

(that's 166 of 'em; about 31 unread (but those 31 titles include a trilogy and a quartet)

"There's more to life than books, you know..."

2007-07-25T01:17:00.000-04:00

I was participant in a conversation over on LibraryThing that touched on the question of, well, how many books is enough? How many books do you think you're ever going to get around to reading?

The conversation moved on before I could recall enough of the following anecdote to cite it (or even find it: but, yay Google) - but at the time I was vaguely reminded of a factoid that I eventually tracked down to Diana Trilling's obit in the New York Times, October 25, 1996 (this is snipped and re-arranged - and I should learn how to do 'block-quote'):

"I graduated from Radcliffe without having read a line of Homer or Dante or Chaucer, without knowing anything of Shakespeare," she said.

Diana Trilling's career as a critic began in 1941, at the age of 36, when she overheard a telephone conversation between her husband and Margaret Marshall, the literary editor of The Nation, who had called to ask if he could recommend someone to write the magazine's literary notes column. When her husband hung up, Mrs. Trilling looked at him and offered herself for the position.

She began writing in 1941 and never stopped.

At one point, as a critic for The Nation, Mrs. Trilling read a novel a day for six and a half years, delivering challenging reviews on some of the most important works of the modern era: Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited," Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men," Jean-Paul Sartre's "Age of Reason" and George Orwell's "1984." {end NYT quote}

Assuming that's literally true: six and a half years @ one per day = 2374 books. (two leap years makes it an even number....)

Now note that Trilling lived to be 95, so ten times that number of books is certainly possible.

How many people here have had periods when they've read a book a day?

Life List

2007-07-24T22:04:00.000-04:00

[Attention Conservation Notice: a long, boring post of interest only to me and some of my real-world friends]

CONCERT LIST
I went to RPI mostly to join the radio station and to be a rock'n'roll DJ. (Remember "free-form" radio?) One fringe benefit was meeting and interviewing and recording rock stars; that, AND getting comp’d into shows. Oh, and all the free records and payola and groupies, of course. (No coke, though, unless the Program Directors kept it all for themselves, AND kept Real Quiet about it.)

A hundred or so pop shows in 36 years:
a few score bands (here are about 70) come more-or-less readily to mind.
(There are other shows that I don’t actually recall 30 years later, but pals will still occassionally remind me that they were there with me.)

Bold = comp’d in; Bold ital = free show
* = a stand-out show, personally or musically memorable

Alphabetically:

76% Uncertain: Am.Legion Post, Albany.(And a couple even-lesser warmup acts...)
*America: SPAC; I was in HS, ok?
*Joan Armatrading: Proctors? and maybe at SPAC, too?
*B-52s: at JB Scotts
The Bangles: the second (bigger) JB’s, about 1986. I was too old by that point.
*The Bhundu Boys: Iron Horse, Northampton 1990 or 91, before most of them died
Blondie: Asbury Park (farthest traveled? With my college chum 'Thin' Lizzie)
Blotto: some Albany bar
Blue Öyster Cult : Columbia Day at SPAC (WRPI comps)Summer 74; again at ESP July 2006
Gordon Bok: Old Songs, Altamont
Billy Bragg Troy Music Hall
Jackson Browne: SPAC
Camper van Beethoven: QE2 (local club, not the Cunard liner)
Caravan: a late incarnation, at the Palace ca. 1974-5
Chieftains: Proctors. A very young Michael Flatley did step-dancing with them
Petula Clarke: State Fair 85? This literally came under the heading of “Yeah, I’d cross the street to see x”
*Lloyd Cole: Valentine’s Bar Nov 2000?
Elvis Costello & Clover: Siena College (not with the Attractions)
Iris DeMent: Schenectady's Central Park
Dead Kennedys: Danny says this was JB Scotts. Jello Biafra lectured at SUNY, years later
*Devo: Radio City Halloween of 79? With Russ and Danny and M.
*Diblo Dibala: Albany's Wash. Park with Alice and Mary, about July 2003
Fairport Convention WITH Sandy Denny (yay!) (but without RT, boo) Palace
Flo & Eddie: as warmup for Fleetwood Mac just before FM broke out big
The Foundations: My very first show. Jr. College of Albany gym, May of 1969?
*Gang of Four: QE2. Very late incarnation (new rhythm section). "My Date
with Sara Lee" (She lived in Woodstock, came up for the show, and I talked to her in the bar). G04 were great.
Good Rats: at the Hullaballoo? Maybe again as warmup for Van Morrison?
Ritchie Havens : town park July 25, 2002
Hoodoo Gurus: warmup for the Bangles, 1985 or 86
Bert Jansch: Siena College
Kanda Bongo Man: Sch’dy Cental Park
*Kitchens of Distinction: Hoboken (I was in NYC for work, had an evening to kill.)
Nils Lofgren: Palace. And again in the station, Studio A. SteveC interviewed him
Martha & the Muffins: Peppermint Lounge NYC with Danny
Ellen McIllwaine: McNeil Room. Worst show ever, largely thanks to UPAC Sound.
Van Morrison: Proctors
Maria Muldaur: warmup for America at SPAC?
The Nields: Sch’dy Cental Park
Phranc: Foxboro (warmup for the Smiths)
*Plasmatics: JB Scotts. What a great show.
Maddy Prior: Wash. Park, Albany ca.1998 (just a few songs, as I had the kids in tow)
Psychedelic Furs: (warmup for Talking Heads at the Palace 1980 )
Quicksilver MS: warmup at Live at Five, 7/07.(Let’s just say: disappointing)
Bonnie Raitt?: outdoors in the Berkshires - Tanglewood or Music Shed?
*Ramones: The Hullaballoo, Rensselaer. Hey ho, indeed.
*Steve Reich: and musicians. SUNYA PAC
Relativity: Old Songs, Altamont
*REM: The Skyway, Scotia Oct 1983 (I won comps. Beer w the bass player.)
The Roches: (Maggie and Terri and Scuzzy) ESP free show
Rollins Band (Henry, not Sonny): QE2
Todd Rundgren: Sch’dy Cental Park. Past his peak, but still.
Tom Rush: 8th Step Coffee House Lark Street
John Sebastian: at Tawasentha, my town park...
Michelle Shocked: Troy Music Hall late ‘80s. She was warmup for Billy Bragg
*Silly Wizard: Old Songs, Altamont. Their good-bye concert.
Siouxsie and the Banshees: at one of the early Lollapalooza tours, SPAC 1992?
*Patti Smith: Union College Chapel 1974?
*Smiths: Foxboro (farthest traveled?)
*Sonic Youth: QE2. Loudest show ever. Holy crap: I even had ear
protection, and they were STILL unbelievably loud.
Bill Spence & Fennig’s All-star String Band: Niskayuna HS (local folkies)
Star Spangled Washboard Band: McGovern Rally fall '72 (local heroes, pre-Blotto)
Starship: Live at Five, 2007. Not quite the same as Jefferson Airplane at SUNYA in 1969, but hey. With QMS.
Al Stewart: Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center. After his Big Hit.
Steve Stills: SPAC My excuse was that this was after CSNY broke up
Tibetan Monks: Troy Music Hall
The Tubes: Palace
U-2: JB Scotts. Before they became bigger than god.
UK: Madison Theater
Michael Urbaniak: (least distance traveled? from the Quad, over to the McNeill Room
Wolfe Tones etc: ESP convention center (Jimmy comp’d me in)
Yes: SPAC, high school

(That’s about 70 bands)

Spitzer inaugural, 2007: Judy Collins, James Taylor, Natalie (Attired) Merchant, etc.

Multi-band events:
- WRPI got tickets for some jazz festival in the rain in Vermont - and we spent most of it huddling for warmth, and the music is entirely blotted from my memory. Metheny?
- The rest of the Lollapalooza roster 1992 (nothing but Siouxsie sticks in my mind, I should look up and list the other forgettable bands...)
- Columbia Day at SPAC: BÖC + several other bands - Pavlov’s Dog!, Dave Sancious & Tone, etc.
- Fox Hollow Folk Festival (but today I can’t name a single act besides Robert
J. Lurtsema). Didn’t this have Jean Redpath? Wouldn't I remember that?

And the “I’d sure as hell see that again” list:
(Here are ~38 shows, a further 16 bands)
- 5 Grateful Dead shows: *Utica 3/73 / Syracuse 9/73 / Boston summer 76? / Field House in the 70s/ Knick 3/91
- 4 Richard Thompson: McNeil Room '85 / Bottom Line '86? /in-store, StuyvesantPlaza
~'94?/ Troy Music Hall Oct '96
- 3 *Bruce Springsteen: Union College Chapel Oct '74 (Wow!)/ Lenox July '75 /
Palace Theater fall '75?
- 2 George Thorogood Palace (warmup for Bruce? or headlining?) / then at Cornell w M
- 2 Oregon: McNeil Room/ then at some club in Poughkeepsie (the Chance?)
- 2 *Be-Bop Deluxe Palace, for both the ‘Air Age’ and ‘Drastic Plastic’ tours
- 2 *Mekons Both QE2 (Hello to Mekons)
- 2 Talking Heads *Madison ’77 / Palace ’80. First show might have been comp’d.
- 2 10,000 Maniacs JB Scotts? Palace?
- 2 Suzanne Vega I helped roll the Ampex 351 over to the McNeil Rm to record her; and again shortly thereafter with M, but where? I think the ESP CC.
- 2 Laurie Anderson: Proctor’s May ’90, and an earlier show -- at the Palace?
- 2 Fleetwood Mac *Palace March 75? / SPAC a yr or so later because BoJo
gave me a ticket
- 2 NRBQ at some Albany bar / then as warmup for George Thorogood?
- 2 Dave Amram: Café Lena’s - the first show was so good that we went
back the 2nd night
- 2 Devilish Merry: Wobblie Joe’s Bar, Pittsburgh, successive years in the late 70s
- 2 PDQ Bach SPAC w Roxanne, Palace with Maggie

Seen twice, but more by accident than intentionally:
- 2 Renaissance I remember it as: Caravan was warmup; then Renaissance came back a month or two later with Fairport as warmup, and the Palace was empty. Hope they fired their booking manager.
- (Joan Armatrading?) I think twice, once at Proctor’s, once at SPAC
- (Chieftains?) I think I saw them twice, probably both at Proctor’s

Concerts that did NOT make a big impression:
(or just too light-weight to bother listing above...)

Did I see some incarnation of King Crimson? at the Madison? (or am I confusing this with UK?)
I have a faint (and possibly false) memory of seeing Steve Forbert someplace the year he premiered - at the pub in the student union? (or was he later at el Loco?)
Didn’t I see Utah Philips at Mothers Wine Emporium? Or is this another false memory?
Commander Cody played at RPI when I was there, right? outside? GM week,maybe?

A bunch of my college chums and I saw somebody at the Village Vanguard.
(Aaron suggests that this may have been McCoy Tyner; this was almost certainly on the Death Trip, when Peggy crashed the car in the snow - - which would explain why I don’t much recall this show ... mostly I was just being glad to be alive, and the VVanguard had a several-drink minimum.)
Nick F. Brignola (and one or more Mangione -- more likely Gap than Chuck -- but maybe both) played at my high school...does that count?
What was that local Latin/Cuban band that Rod and Aaron dragged me out to see in Nashville?

I’ve seen a whole bunch of local bands too tedious to recall... including half of the warmup bands for the above shows (Doug Sahm for the Grateful Dead; Lloyd Cole had a couple local guys do warmup...)
Some WRPI bands (Monolith, Banquo’s Ghost, Roger and Jimmy’s various projects, etc)
One stand-out:
The Matterbabies at Jimmy’s store,3rd St.Troy, early ’90s - Free, or nearly free: $3?
They were good enough that I bought their tape.

Some radio station appearances: Root Boy Slim, Rory Block(*sigh*), various hair bands

Some regional bands I saw around campus: Pearl Harbor & the Explosions, the Flashcubes, The Todd Hobin Band; Orleans played somewhere.

A bunch more free shows at Tawasentha, Schenectady's Central Park, Albany's Washington Park, out at the State Fair, downtown Albany, Larkfest, etc.

A few forgettable minor-league shows at local clubs where WRPI was on the guest list.
(What was that dreadful band Lou-the-Who & I interviewed at the Hullabaloo?)

I’ve been to forgettable pop shows at the Lenox Music Shed and at Tanglewood, but don’t recall exactly who - Bonnie Raitt seems to have been one of them? Judy
Collins?

And I can’t rightly include a few shows I heard from the outside:
most notably, Mahavishnu Orchestra across the street in the Armory when I was living in the Quad back in ought ’74 - - (this sounded like The End Of The World at fully 100 yds);
el Loco Mexican restaurant used to do live music (Odetta!) that we could basically watch/hear from our stoop across the street on Madison Avenue; arguably, this was a more intimate concert setting than, say, SPAC... but really, now, it's hard to claim....
Aaron & Anne’s apartment next to the jazz club, etc.

Concerts I missed:
this list is essentially an infinite set, but notable highlights include:
- The local ’60s shows I was too damn young to get to:
Steppenwolf, Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin at The Aerodrome in Schenectady;
(Roxanne claimed to have gone to all of these shows...)
Jimi Hendrix at the RPI Armory (Easter 1968?)
The Doors at the RPI Fieldhouse (December 1967?),
Jefferson Airplane at SUNYA (I was in the 9th? 10th? grade - - I think Mr. Mastro went)
The Knickerbockers played St. Rose in the ’60s....
Genesis with Peter Gabriel, at the Palace 1972? ’73?
well, WOODSTOCK.

- Walking past the venue, but couldn’t change plans in time to get to the
show later:

The Gang of Four in Philadelphia 1992 (...I was pushing a baby in a
stroller...)
The B-52s at Max’s Kansas City, with a bunch of college chums

- Too far/too broke/too many obligations/ just couldn’t make the effort/and I still regret missing:
Steeleye Span in the Berkshires early summer of 1974?
Various Roxy Music gigs in NYC, 1975-2001
Gang of Four in New York circa 1981; and again in 2006
New Order in New York circa 1982 (just too damn broke...);
John Cippolina played at some Albany bar just a couple of years before he died.
Linda Thompson was singing at Ronnie Scott’s (London ’85), but we were too tired....
The Smiths did a NYC tour about 1983, before I even knew who they were.
Deacon Blue and a half-dozen other minor bands we liked were playing up near Oxford the day we got off the plane in London in June ’90, but we were too jet-lagged to jump in a rental car....

Any number of shows at the Chateau (that vanished little ’80s club they knocked down to build the Knick Arena (not a fair trade)) – but I couldn’t be bothered to cross the street: The Sick F*cks is at the top of this list, but there must have been 20 or 50 noteworthy shows there.

Shows that everybody in the Capital District would later claim that they
were at: The Police at JB Scotts; [even more obscure: The Police at the Hullabaloo at couple months before that. There were supposed to have been a dozen people in the audience, and I've heard this story from everybody in Albany.]

Note that the listing of ‘bands seen’ doesn’t line up perfectly with the listing of 'shows seen’, as some shows get counted twice when the warmup band was also memorable.

Someplace I have a shoebox full of ticket stubs that would answer a few of these hazy memories.

I saw Jelly Biafra and Henry Rollins as lecturers, too.

A quarter or so of the shows listed were free; most expensive was probably the Smiths?

Smallest venue: Cafe Lena’s in Saratoga. (Why did I never bother to see Christine Lavin when she worked there?) I've been to a half-dozen shows there, and the only one I can recall is Dave Amram. Seats what, 40?
Smallest house (as proportion of capacity): Fairport/Ren. at the Palace. There couldn't have been 200 people there, in a 1500? seat theater.

Largest venue: SPAC Runner-up: Foxboro
Largest indoor show: the Dead at the Knick

Note that once the scale popular rock shows moved from the Aerodrome/ Field House -sized venues up to arenas, the only venue big enough here for big-name bands was SPAC, until the Knick opened in about 1990.

Although Steve Reich is listed above as pop, there’s a separate (shorter) Life List for classical gigs:

Philadelphia Orchestra ~1966, Boston Symphony ~ 1967, a half-dozen Albany SO ca. 1977 season; the Northern Sinfonia/Iona Brown ca. 1986; some major string Quartet (Borodin?) at Union with Aaron ca. 1978; Troy Music Hall for Ma/Stern/Laredo/Ax ca. 1988; U Mass Lowell for Antheil’s Ballet Mechanique (farthest traveled?) Nov.1999;
ADD: Dutoit/Phillie/Ma SPAC July 31, 2002

...And then, starting in ’99, the score or so of gigs I recorded as Don's assistant, using Aaron’s hi-tech 'Calrec' Ambisonic mike: Kronos Quartet, Emerson Quartet, Takacs, Gil Shaham, Lang Lang, Edgar Meyer, Boston Camerata, the *BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (Iggy rocks my world...), Kremerata Baltica, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, etc., etc.

The Emerson Quartet is now at 4 gigs on my Life List, which puts them ahead of Bruce -- plus two or three shows by their cellist, and yet another show by their violist. So David Finckel is probably my most-seen artist. And I’ve now seen Edgar Meyer twice, too: once solo, once in a quintet with the Emersons]

Danny, Aaron, anybody: anything I've missed?

I hate that car, Part XXIII

2007-07-04T14:06:00.000-04:00

The last tail light bulb I changed was on the Civic, a year or so ago.

I stopped at the store on my way to work, bought a replacement - I'm pretty sure it was 59¢ - reached into the hatch, and changed it in the parking lot, and was on my way. Five minutes, 59¢.

But the MPV uses "European-style" (#7443) bulbs: $2.99, sold only in 2-packs,
and not in a drug store: so, not 59¢, no, a dead tail light now costs me $5.98 and a trip to an auto-supply store. (As I told the guy at the counter: "I hate cars." He agreed.)

And then I had to find a Phillips-head and figure out how to take off the lens. (Today's MPV tip: it's held by two screws, and then by two pins, so the lens pulls off perpendicular to the side, it doesn't pull off to the back.) And now I have to store the second bulb against the day the right-side brake light fails. (I hung the blister-pack on a hook in the shed with the 'car' stuff, maybe I'll actually be able to find in next year.)

Ok, it's literally ten times as expensive, no surprise there.
But it's not just more expensive, it also that they've taken a "nothing" job (take five minutes to jump out and fix it on the way to work) into an actual "get out the toolbox and spend fifteen minutes on it" job.

On the other hand, the Youngest Member got to work the pedal for me, so it was a Teaching Moment, too.

"We are stardust..."

2007-06-27T19:46:00.000-04:00

This is one of my all-time favorite Fun Facts:

Harlow Shapely's quote has entered the larger culture - that "We are stardust, we are golden" as Joni Mitchell / CSN paraphrased it -- that every single heavy atom in us had to have been cooked up in the heart of an earlier generation of star.

Well, I've run across a factoid that's even neater. From Energies by Vaclav Smil, MIT Press 1999:

"High intensities of heterotrophic metabolism mean that living organisms surpass the Sun in power output per unit of mass.

Given the star's enormous mass (1.99 x 10 to the 33 g), its immense luminosity (3.9 x 10 to the 26 W) prorates to just about 200 nW/g of the stellar matter. In contrast, the daily metabolism of children (averaging about 3 mW/g of body weight) proceeds at a rate about 15,000 times higher, and respiring bacteria reach up to 100W/g, or 500 million times the Sun's rate. Stars astonish with their total energy fluxes, but ATP-driven energy conversions in heterotrophic organisms have unrivaled intensities of energy conversions per unit mass." (p.39)

In other words, not only are we made of stardust, but we burn brighter, too. I find that fact to be inexpressibly poignant.

Fandom

2007-06-26T19:44:00.000-04:00

I grew up in a blue-collar suburb. I knew other kids who read (not all of them the college-tracked kids...), but I didn't know anybody as deep into SF as I was.
And at Big Nerd College ("A Technological University"), lots of guys read the stuff... but nobody seemed to have time to do much about it.

I first heard of fandom because Asimov mentioned it all the time.
(My Asimov stories:
1. A summer in the late 70s, M & I are out for a drive, we wind up at the Rensselaerville Institute. And there he was, strolling across the grounds with a young woman on his arm.
2. Saw him again at one of the "New York is Book Country" fests in the '80s.
3. I sent him a postcard once; in his F&SF column, he had asked for info on a poem; using M's Granger's Index to Poetry, I was able to tell him.)

I saw Harlan speak at my college in the fall of 1974, and he positively excoriated fans and fandom. I never found fandom until well after college, and never really got involved until after I was a grown-up.

Back in the '80s, Latham-Albany-Schenectady-Troy fandom (Byron & Tina Connell, wombat, etc.) put on 4 cons: 1981, '82, '85, '86

My first look at the Con scene:
Fall of 1982, LastCon Too: Aaron and I got press credentials and looked in.
I interviewed Wilson Tucker, we went to see the masquerade.
Fulfilling several fandom cliches, I was gratuitously insulted by a teenager who was dressed in a Robin Hood get-up. I was 27.

Years later I discovered that one of my my college pals was involved in the revived local fandom, and with Albacon. I've been to seven of them to date, starting with the first:

1996 I was 41 yrs old. This one was on Wash Ave. Nancy Kress, Sheffield
1997 Oct 17-19 Ramada Sch'dy Melissa Scott (Paul Edward Zimmer dies)
1998 Oct 9-11 Ramada Friesner

2000 Oct 6-8 Ramada Glen Cook
2001 Oct 5-7 Ramada Larry Niven; Bonnie & Ted Atwood
2002 Oct 4-6 Ramada Mike Resnick
2003 Oct 11 Bujold I brought Alice (at 11) to Lake George
I'm pretty sure I missed 2005 (Terry Brooks),
I'm certain that I missed 2004 and 2006)

Out-of-town Cons:

Readercon 15 July 2003 I was 47 for my first out-of-town con
A day trip/one-day membership to meet Howard Waldrop, Rucker, etc.
Noreascon 4, Sept 2004 I was 48. My first WorldCon.
Terry Pratchett I brought Alice (12) along
Boskone 43, Feb 2006 Ken MacLeod. Mary was 9.
I brought all the girls. Mary's 1st con, M's 1st.
Readercon 18 July 2007: which will be my 12th con;
M & M's 2nd; Alice's fourth

Hand-crafted vs. factory-made

2007-06-24T17:02:00.000-04:00

Over at LibraryThing I've been involved in a long-running discussion of Why That Stuff You Read Sucks. I'm recycling a point I made over there:

By this point in the thread, I think we all understand that people read for different reasons. What I'm still not getting is why this is a problem.

Because it's also true that people write for different reasons:

1) Because they need to express themselves.
2) In hope of entertaining others.
3) In hope of making a living.

These are not necessarily mutually exclusive reasons.

But I can only speak for myself. I read, I write. I long ago decided not to ever try to make a living from my pen.

I also do a bit of carpentry. I do it entirely for my own purposes, I derive satisfaction from the activity, and the end products are useful. People who come by admire my bookshelves. People often see my bookcases, and then ask if they can commission me to build some for them.

But I work wood for myself, for my own purposes. A few extra bucks might be nice, but I have no need to make custom bookshelves for others. I especially don't want to try to make a living as a cabinet-maker. For one thing, taking such a step would place me too much at the mercy of the taste of others. The craftsmen who DO meet this market - and I've talked to a couple - I rather tend to admire. Are they prostituting their art? I doubt they see it that way.

I also have no need to resent Ikea for selling the ignorant masses cheap, wobbly, factory-built bookcases. I especially have no need to yell at the customers of Ikea for not appreciating fine custom carpentry. People buy what suits their own needs. MY need is for several hundred feet of built-in custom bookshelves; other people can be perfectly happy with a DIY Ikea "BILLY" unit.

"Ahhh! My hand!"

2007-06-21T01:21:00.000-04:00

Earlier today (well, yesterday, now), the eldest kid and I made a nerd road trip up to the new digital-tv transmitter shack up in the hills.

All afternoon, I had been brooding about standing at the foot of the broadcast tower while it was radiating a few megawatts of radio energy into space.

So, come sunset, I went down to the basement and dug out a couple of 48" fluorescent bulbs, and threw them and the family into the car. We drove over to the nearest high-voltage power line, and we watched the fireflies while we waited for full dark, and then we played light sabers in the gloaming.

ADDENDUM: Here's a guy who did an artistic installation of hundreds of fluorescent tubes under his local power line:

http://www.boxyit.com/r/index.htm

Better pictures here:

http://stopgeek.com/richard-boxs-light-field.html

.

.

"Radio, live transmission..."

2007-06-17T23:15:00.000-04:00

I have so much seniority that I'm now required to take off a day per month (...use/lose time). My eldest kid is done with school for the year; so, this being her First Day of Summer, we went for a Road Trip in the Miata, which ended up being an expedition up to the "new" digital TV transmitters.

(About two years ago the local broadcasters pooled their resources and put up One BIG Tower for their new digital tv signals.)

It's about a mile past the old tower farm (aka "Televisonland"), and then a further half-mile up a gravel road marked "TOWER #3 / PRIVATE ROAD".

There were two cars there; I got out to read the signage ("You are under video observation", for one) when an old engineer came out to see what we wanted. I gave him the Secret Lodge Sign, and he offered us the fifty-cent tour.

It's about the biggest transmitter shack you ever saw. They have TWO 1.2 megawatt diesel generators, and he claimed about a weeks' worth of fuel.

Each station has its own locked room, maybe 25 x 30'; so the whole complex must be 60' x 100'? Big. The tower is taller than the old analog towers, too. We did some handshaking, I dropped my father's credentials: it turns out that the guy (who never DID give me his name... odd, that) had done a summer at WPTR in '57, so he could name the Chief Engineer; which of course means that he was two steps from my father. Small world.

We stopped at the Tollgate for the traditional post-Pinnacle repast. I got to tell the young one the traditional tales of Guys I Know Who've Worked at Transmitter Shacks, the stories of Our People.

Now I have Ian Curtis in my head:

Radio, live transmission.
Radio, live transmission.

Listen to the silence, let it ring on.
Eyes, dark grey lenses frightened of the sun.
We would have a fine time living in the night,
Left to blind destruction,
Waiting for our sight.

And we would go on as though nothing was wrong.
And hide from these days we remained all alone.
Staying in the same place, just staying out the time.
Touching from a distance,
Further all the time.

(chorus: Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio. &c.)

Well I could call out when the going gets tough.
The things that we've learnt are no longer enough.
No language, just sound, that's all we need know, to synchronise
love to the beat of the show.

And we could dance.

(chorus:) Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio. (repeat.)

ADDENDUM: one of my radio pals found pictures of this:

http://www.necrat.com/albdtv.html

.

Beliefnet's 'Belief-o-matic' quiz

2007-06-15T22:36:00.000-04:00

at

http://www.beliefnet.com/story/76/story_7665_1.html

1. Secular Humanism (100%)
2. Unitarian Universalism (92%)
3. Nontheist (85%)
4. Liberal Quakers (76%)
5. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (69%)
6. Theravada Buddhism (65%)
7. Neo-Pagan (59%)
8. New Age (49%)
9. Taoism (48%)
10. Orthodox Quaker (46%)
11. Reform Judaism (46%)
12. Sikhism (46%)
13. Bahá'í Faith (38%)
14. Mahayana Buddhism (35%)
15. Scientology (35%)
16. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (34%)
17. New Thought (34%)
18. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (27%)
19. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (26%)
20. Seventh Day Adventist (25%)
21. Eastern Orthodox (22%)
22. Islam (22%)
23. Jainism (22%)
24. Orthodox Judaism (22%)
25. Roman Catholic (22%)
26. Hinduism (15%)
27. Jehovah's Witness (11%)

Today's 'Fun with Numbers': More on graduation rates

2007-06-05T21:28:00.000-04:00

So, the rule-of-thumb is that about 1/4 of American adults are college graduates; and something like 20% are high-school dropouts. But the post-war boom in education has really transformed the attainments of the citizenry. (Case in point: the Iowa- class BBs were designed to be operated by sailors who possessed a third-grade education. The 1980s refit raised that a bit.)

Which leads us to some interesting boring questions:

1) What year did a majority of American adults have a HS education?

from the Stat Abstract, the ready-to-hand 2004-5 edition:
1960: 41.1% HS 7.7% college grad or more
1970: 52.3% HS 10.7% (note that Linda was part of the elite: the most educated 10%)

linear interpolate: add per yr: 1.12% and +0.3%;
which gives us a rough'n'ready answer of: About 1968.

Which might be an interesting coincidence: "1968" being, after all, The Year It Changed.

Ok, I'm interested enough in the answer to actually look it up in the 1970 Stat Ab:
1965: 49.0%
1966 na
1967 51.6%
1968 52.6%

The more robust, closer to 'real' answer: probably about 1966.

From this, we learn that the day I started college, I became part of the better-schooled half of the populace? Wow.

Further: today's citizenry is twice as educated as 1961??
(2003: 84.6% of adults have a HS diploma, vs. 1960: 41.1%)

A question for another day is the depreciation of the HS diploma:
my mother-in-law's Boston Latin dipoma from about 1940 probably certified more actual 'education' than most college degrees do today.

A second interesting boring question emerges:
2) In what year did the percentage of college grads exceed the number of HS
dropouts? (bringing the nominal average up past "HS diploma" level. Yes, yes, there's data on Associates degrees, and post-grad education tips the balance, too.
I could go look up DoE data on "average years completed", too. But this stat I'm thinking of is slightly different from the simple 'average'.)

College grads dropouts
1990 21.3% 22.4%
1995 23.0% 18.3%

linearly interpolating, we get
1991 = ~21.64% ~21.58%

Which is slightly interesting: the landscape changed the very year I started having kids.

Bright college days

2007-06-05T21:08:00.000-04:00

This weekend is my college 30th-reunion weekend, so my alma m has been dunning me with emails.

They sent me one bursting with pride about the Class of 'Ought Seven, 1131 strong. A minute's digging leads to the factoid that there were 1371 admitted: a completion rate of 82.5% . (Actually, commencement must have included some laggards from previous class years.)

Turns out 1) that college completion rates are actually lower than I thought; and 2)yes, elite private schools take the kids who are much more likely to graduate.

Overall, only 36.4% of students graduate on time: one in three. (Which rather cheers me up about taking so long to finish.) "1300 SATS and "A" average" kids have 68.9% completion rates; not surprisingly, kids who aren't such obvious college material are drastically less likely to finish.

I went to a college whether they actually did that thing that they do at the service academies - - at frosh orientation, we were told: "Shake hands with the guy on your left; shake hands with the guy on your right; one of the three of you won't make it to graduation".

Turns out that that's true overall. Hadn't really thought about it when I was 17.

.

Here's a cheerful thought

2007-06-02T11:32:00.000-04:00

The guy in the news with XDR-TB is mostly being portrayed as an unthinking, selfish asshole.

But not only is his case a public health failure, it was yet another failure of Homeland Security.

He had been placed under a 'no-fly' order - and yet he got into the country anyway. Say it again: the 'no-fly' order did not protect us.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/health/02tick.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=us

Still, by the time Mr. Speaker made his way to the United States border, an alert had been attached to his passport that warned customs agents to detain him. But the guard waved him through — a matter that is now under investigation.

Now, suppose AQ decides to deliberately infect people with, say, Ebola, and put them on planes headed for the US....

The 31st Annual RF Memorial Cook-Out

2007-05-28T14:27:00.000-04:00

At the end of the Spring '77 semester, we were dropping like flies. Glenn gave up and retreated back home; I lacked enough credits to graduate on time; and Rod flamed out spectacularly, and was about to go home to Pittsburgh.

To cheer ourselves up, we were going to throw an end-of-semester cook-out for our entire circle, and stage it as a surprise going-away bash for Rod.

Well, surprise: Rod got an interview with Allegheny Steel and left.

We looked at each other, and at the pile of provisions, shrugged, and had the cook-out in his honor anyway, figuring, well, he didn't actually need to be there in any event. We remembered to call him up on the phone and tell him what a good time we were having.

Which began an annual tradition: an end-of-semester/Memorial Day Cook-Out.

This is number 31 in the series.

Forward, into the past

2007-05-27T16:54:00.001-04:00

Here I am, surfing the internet, conducting conversations with people I've never met in real life...
...and over on the couch, the Lady Margaret is using her Stereopticon to view various Uplifting and Ennobling Views of the Great War.

(She was thinking about buying some more stereo views on eBay, and thought she should review the ones she owned.)

OK, I guess... but it should require more deference to The Leader

2007-05-27T13:22:00.000-04:00

If you founded a religion...
Created by EvilAuthor on Memegen.net

The Transformational Sisterhood of Brothers

Your followers are friendly and welcoming people,

who work for a living just like everybody else,

who are free and fun loving,

and who are encouraged to achieve
greater spiritual enlightenment by questioning their own beliefs.

Your followers wear whatever they want.

Your followers are

increasingly common (over 50,000),

and they don't interfere with the beliefs of outsiders.

Take this quiz now - it's easy!

I HATE that car

2007-05-26T16:47:00.000-04:00

Maggie was loading crap into the hatch of the MPV when the left strut failed. The hatch is heavy.

The gas strut is bolted to the car, but has a ball-and-socket fitting bolting it to the hatch (to give it enough degrees-of-freedom); the ball sheered off from the strut.

I probably could have popped the ball out of the socket,but that still would have left the problem of reattaching the ball to the strut. (Time to learn welding?)

So: new strut $81.05, new socket bolt $8.50: total with tax, $96.71. A hundred bucks, simply so that we can continue to use the hatch conveniently. How stupid.

I guess this means my age is showing: a hundred bucks is a hundred bucks, but I guess it's trivial today: it's the price of two tanks of gas....

Mercifully, at least the dealer parts dept. was open on Saturday morning.

Update: BoingBoing reports Sony charges $82 for a single "special" screw:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/05/26/sony_charges_82_for_.html

That sounds about right, too

2007-05-24T21:57:00.000-04:00

You scored as Scientific Atheist, These guys rule.

I'm not one of them myself, although I play one online.
They know the rules of debate, the Laws of Thermodynamics,
and can explain evolution in fifty words or less.

More concerned with how things ARE than how they should be,
these are the people who will bring us into the future.

Scientific Atheist

100%

Apathetic Atheist

58%

Agnostic

42%

Militant Atheist

33%

Spiritual Atheist

33%

Angry Atheist

33%

Theist

17%

What kind of atheist are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

That's pretty much it

2007-05-24T21:40:00.000-04:00

If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.

- Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, September 19, 1777

It was 40 years ago today

2007-05-24T00:53:00.000-04:00

June 1st (UK) or 2nd (US), 1967

"The closest Western Civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the week the Sgt. Pepper album was released.. . . . At the time I happened to be driving across country on Interstate 80. In each city where I stopped for gas or food — Laramie, Ogallala, Moline, South Bend — the melodies wafted in from some far-off transistor radio or portable hi-fi. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard. For a brief while the irreparable fragmented consciousness of the West was unified, at least in the minds of the young."

- Langdon Winner (a Political Scientist (Berkeley '66, '67, '73) who, coincidentally, is now at RPI's Department of Science and Technology Studies (where I picked up a minor))

Keep the Aspidistra Flying

2007-05-23T23:09:00.000-04:00

Last week on NPR's Morning Edition, Nancy Pearl (America's Librarian) recommended a fantasy called "Kings of Infinite Space" :

http://www.tppl.org/books/nancypearl/0507.cfm
(Scroll down)

It's about a guy whose life is such a mess that he's forced to take a job as a tech writer for the state government - his circumstances are so dire that he's been reduced to driving a 14--year-old Dodge Colt.

Of course, I heard her review while driving to my tech writing job in state government, at the wheel of my 16-year-old Honda Civic.

Later that week, I ran across the book at the APL sale. So I bought it, and of course I'm reading it.

(Somewhat similarly, the American version of Hornby's "Fever Pitch" portrayed the protagonist as a loser who was deliberately avoiding a serious career that would render him worthy of the heroine: he was a lowly schoolteacher.)

So much for 'ordinary' careers as portrayed in the arts... this, in a country where only a quarter of adults have a college degree.

Today's "Not Dead Yet!" Film Post

2007-05-23T22:53:00.000-04:00

Perhaps for the first time this century, there's good news on the "Kodak Processing Mailer" front.

For several years now, Kodak has contracted out their mailer processing. (It seems to have finally come to rest at Dwayne's in Parsons, Kansas.) For a while, it was sent to an address in Maryland and then forwarded to Kansas, and then returned to the customer via some slow mail service. Last year, Kodachromes were taking two weeks or more for the round trip. For a couple of years there, each time you sent off a mailer, you would never know where it would come back from, or how long it would take - except you knew that it would several weeks.

This season, Dwayne's has resumed returning Kodachromes via first class mail.

With the return of spring, I'm shooting Kodachrome 64 again - and the last three batches I've sent to Kansas have come back to me in 6 days, 5 days (!) and 7 days, and have come via First Class Mail (just like the promise made on the mailer, the promise that had been ignored in recent years).

This is the first encouraging news about the survival of slide film that I've experienced lately.

.

You might think that I would know better by now.....

2007-05-23T22:39:00.001-04:00

I went out for lunch on Monday and, on a whim, got an oil change.

Aaron once used a mechanic - a Russian immigrant - whose reaction was "Jiffy Lu-be?!? Feh!!!" Now I remember why.

Ok, the '91 Civic has the oil filter on the back side of the block, pretty much inaccessible unless you get 'way under the car. I'm too big and too old to bother, so I've always paid to have somebody change the oil for me.

Similarly for the minivan - the filter is somewhat more accessible, but requires removing a shroud each time, AND crawling under the car.

The Miata, though, has the filter right on the side of the block, ready-to-hand from above.

So I need to get several oil changes per year, but I almost always do the Miata myself.

I was driving past JiffyLube on Monday, and they still had their "buy-one-get-another-free" deal.

Hmmm... my arithmetic brain immediately went to work on the problem.... let's see, Jiffy Lube is $35, NAPA is $25... doing it myself is about eight bucks, plus an hour of my time. Hmm, TWO oil changes for $35 is still a couple bucks high - and I really enjoy changing the oil on the Miata, as it's still about the most butch thing I do.

However, the Miata was Right Now, This Minute badly overdue for a change. I got it running a month ago, but it's rained so much that I hadn't yet gotten around to its vernal oil change.

While I could do it myself on Wednesday and save the out-of-pocket expense, is an hour of my time really worth the three bucks or so I would save?

I went to JiffyLube.

We did their little Kabuki ritual where they bow and show me the air filter, and I bow back and politely rebuff their advances; this time, they also tried to sell me on $15 of Special Old Car Oil, too. I made them give me the standard 10w-30.

And of course
a) they disturbed the wire from the Oil Pressure sender - which killed the OP meter reading;
b) they denied it was their fault. We played "Uh - it was like that when it came in." "No it wasn't" "Yes, it musta been. You can change out the sender pretty easily",(etc.) for a while, much like a Python routine; eventually,
c) they played with it for a minute, but had very little interest in getting it to work.

So after paying somebody to change my oil, there I was, under the hood anyway, tweaking the wire off the oil pressure sender.

Had I done it myself, I would have had the foresight to wear old clothes. As it was, there I was in a dress shirt and tie, up to the elbow in Miata. At least they let me wash up before I went back to work.

And I was SO hoping for "godless nihilist"

2007-05-23T17:06:00.000-04:00

What kind of extremist are you? Your Result: Rational Person You consider these questions obvious straw men, designed to distract people from a meaningful investigation of facts and a serious discussion of relevant political issues. How boring.
Left-Wing Extremist
Moderate Extremist
Right-Wing Extremist
What kind of extremist are you? See All Our Quizzes

Today's "Death of Film" News, #34

2007-05-14T19:57:00.000-04:00

Postage went up today - up 5% for a First Class letter - and it actually went DOWN for additional ounces - but non-machine-readable items - lumpy stuff like, say, film mailers - got completely p4wn3d.

A mailer -by weight - would actually have gone down to 58 cents (from 63 cents) - but the new "shape" rates make it a "large envelope", and 97 cents: up 54%.

It still pays to send multiple rolls together, but: jeez!

Film mailers now become even less competitive.... (I have about 50-60 still on hand.)

Ho, hum, more 'history in the making'

2007-05-14T19:13:00.000-04:00

One of the many fringe benfits of being a minor civil servant is being in the middle of State government.

Today at noon, there was a campaign rally at the Capitol, as Gov. Spitzer endorsed Sen. Clinton for president. Our other Senator (Shumer) - and every other Dem who could elbow their way in front of the cameras - were there, too.

It was about worth walking over on my lunch hour. It was a beautiful spring day, so I actually brought an F3 loaded with K64 with me to work.

Well, that went well.

2007-05-13T23:09:00.000-04:00

I've been accumulating books since I was a teenager.
(The clerk at Lescron once asked me - "So...do you read all these books you buy?")
Now that I'm finally getting my library accurately cataloged, now is a good time to unload some dupes.

M just put another first edition of Neuromancer up on eBay. I ran across this at Cranbury about 1989; I paid 60 cents for it.

Neuromancer, by William Gibson, first edition July 1984 Item number: 160114330525

Your item sold for US $163.10!

Thought for the Day

2007-05-13T16:10:00.000-04:00

Well, it's a trivial observation, but it's gratifying to see such substantive evidence for it:

'Science fiction' and 'religion' meet some of the same needs.

LibraryThing's unsuggester points this out: the "opposite" books for SF titles tend to be religious - and vice versa. That is, the people who read the one genre ignore the other. (This was brought home to me when I idly clicked on the "Unsuggester" for one of the John M. Ford books. People who own The Last Hot Time - the least likely book for them is The Five People You Meet In Heaven. Which seems about right, somehow.)

One could build on this and point out how 'SF fandom' is roughly analogous to 'being member of a congregation' in satisfying the need for membership in a community.

"We each worship in our own way."

Update: well, one might infer that there are two subspecies of human, the rational and the superstitious... but it's somewhat more parsimoneous to assume that the SF "sense of wonder" is a version of the more common "religious awe".

A Novel With One Foot in the Future

2007-05-09T23:40:00.000-04:00

Vinge's Rainbows End.

"It's like Neuromancer - but with the internet...".

An entertaining story . . . clearly, Vinge is familiar with Nicholson Baker's Double-fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper and the argument against the rush to digitize library content (and discard the pesky originals) . . . but I liked this story better twenty years ago, when cyberspace was still new. Whatever wonders Vinge shows of the near future of UI, his future still isn't as mindblowing as the first days of the real-world internet.

And I would have liked it better if only Vinge had bothered to tell us something about the fate of, you know, the most interesting character in the book.

Ho-hum.

(I apparently now seem to require the SFnal equivalent of pure heroin.)