Above and Beyond: Earth from orbit

This is what our home looks like from above.

It's claustrophobic, isn't it, floating so close to all that choking water vapor? It's a start though. If you can get that far out of the well, you can get nice clean colonies in space. One day.

Lead in his pencil

Dalton Ghetti is an artist who carves pencil lead into miniature sculptures. [link dead, alas]

Lovely stuff.

The Dead Weather, Halloween 2009

Breathtaking video of their Shoreditch 2009 performance. No idea how this got onto the interwebs or whether there's more, but for all Jack White and Dead Weather fans, this performance of Treat Me Like Your Mother is a real big deal.

We choose to go to the moon and do the other thing...

Driving home this evening I was listening to Radio One's Zane Lowe, who had discovered the new king of hip hop, the savior of rap. Sorry, I've forgotten who that was, but I'm sure I'll be reminded in short order. The first track he played was, in the words of Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, "needlessly messianic" but fairly catchy, and was introduced by a long sample of one of the most inspiring speeches of the 20th Century, the "We choose to go to the moon" speech.

Which Zane Lowe, with an awed shiver in his voice, described as "Nixon's moon speech".

Not quite, but it does throw out a number of ideas for an alternative history. The speech in question is from 1962, and is JFK's...which I thought everyone knew but you can't take things for granted these days.

(You can watch the awe-inspiring full speech here.)

Remarkable stuff. I can't imagine a modern president - Obama included - who could speak of progress and science and exploration as a great endeavor we should undertake because we have a calling. I'd be surprised if a modern president could pull off a halting speech inspiring the rebuilding of a crumbling bridge. Speeches about how we have to take our clothes off in front of strangers in order to avoid being massacred by beardies living in caves, we got 'em.

I miss the 20th Century.

Back to Washington

Today my boss's boss's boss, on a conference call, said, "We're asleep at the switch and the competition are eating our lunch."

Wise words.

Air and Space Museum

Flying back from Washington proved to be quite fun too. Mostly due to the easy vodka. It had never occurred to me ask the stewardesses (or whatever they're called now) "I'd like two vodkas and orange please". I assumed you'd have to buy things one by one, like in a real bar. So a million kudos to the drunk in front of me on the trip out from SNA to DFW last Friday afternoon who taught me otherwise (by example).

We'd spent the previous day at the Air and Space Museum, so we went to the Steven F Udvar-Hazy Center on the way back to Dulles. This is where the Smithsonian stashes all the aircraft that are too large to go into the Hair and Face Museum on the National Mall.

It's huge. I've seen a Concord(e) of course (yawn) and an SR-71 Blackbird (more yawns) too, and a great deal of the others, but Udvar-Hazy holds the ace of all times - a space shuttle.

My god was it big and impressive. It was more like an ocean liner than a plane and dwarfed the other space craft there and in the Mall without even trying. This is a Gemini Capsule; this is an Apollo Capsule; hello up there (cranes neck), you must be a Space fucking Shuttle.

It sort of embodies American superiority. "Hi Russia! Hi China! What did you do on your holidays? Well that's nice. I did THIS!" [Whips out a Space Shuttle.]

Then I was back to the airport to endure the usual. Shoes off! Laptops out! Who knows why they go through this crap. It's not to make us more safe - the idea that the security theater at the airports makes us safer is simply risible. I guess it's better to be seen to do something than to do nothing, even if 'something' is expensive, intrusive and disruptive and achieves bugger all. It is, after all, something.

No one should believe the latest 'terror scare'. Flock-sprayed printer cartridges with some sort of printed circuit glued on the outside? It's even more amateurish than the last three or four underwear and shoe scares. It's amateurish enough that I don't even believe the government orchestrated it, as I think even the American government could mock something up that was a little more believable. But you have to admit, it was convenient for it to happen just a couple of days before the elections. Vote For Fear!

Meanwhile, FedEx doesn't actually fly planes from Yemen. And isn't it weird that the Brits said the printer cartridges tested harmless, until the Yanks demanded that they weren't? None of this story hangs together. All we have here is a demand to be afraid, be very afraid, with nothing to back that up. And of course, the fact that a cargo plane (of dubious factuality) contained a bomb (of lead azide, I read somewhere, which would take a second device to actually burn) means that passengers on non-cargo planes will now be required to have a pornoscan (if the airport is so equipped) or a 'thorough' (read 'ball-squeezing') pat down if no scanners are available.

"The mail bomb threat prompted DHS to roll out additional security measures at passenger airports. An "unpredictable mix" of security layers for passengers were implemented, TSA announced, including explosives detectors, bomb sniffing dogs and additional pat downs."

Because you know, vague and unlikely threats to cargo always mean each individual human being on a passenger flight needs to submit to search. Under those circumstances, you should give up your constitutional rights against unlawful search or seizure. It makes COMPLETE SENSE.

They say the bomb could have been activated by wi-fi. Seems unlikely, there's not a lot of wi-fi in the sky. Pressure, altitude, timer, garage door opener, car door fob, GPS motion sensor...much more likely. Except there's no evidence the "bomb" had any of those on board. Anyway, it was a fake bomb. .

I've read a shitload of message board posts about this in the last few days. Many say that the Fourth Amendment is kind of not needed and could be done away with. That having pictures of your naked body examined by strangers is reasonable, and you should just get over it. It's not really a strip search since you don't strip (someone actually said this). Anyone who doesn't want to go through that, and isn't overjoyed by the alternative, a squeeze-frisk, must have something to hide.

Yeah, I do have a different alternative. There are people from that demographic trying to kill Americans. To reduce that, personally, I'd go for not killing people's families with drones, and not occupying other people's countries. I think that would be significantly cheaper and as a bonus would stop teh brown people developing red masks of blood vengeance as they survey the scattered limbs of their families, blood of their daughters soaking into the dry dust of their devastated houses. Call me a big silly if you like, but I sometimes wonder if blowing the fuck out of a family with a missile doesn't make the surviving family members wonder exactly how much they love the US.

Maybe I just have my head in the clouds.

Halloween in Baltimore

With a trip to Washington DC under my belt, it was time to head for Baltimore, home of Edgar Allan Poe, for a trip around the crypts and a some short story readings.

On the way there, we visited the American Visionary Art Museum. Definitely worth a visit, if you're there. It mainly focuses on work by people who don't really see things the same way as other people. Some of them are religiously inspired, and some are just...different. I forget the PC term.

The temporary exhibit was on the theme, "What Makes Us Smile?" What mostly made *us* laugh were the Whoopee Cushions that went off whenever someone sat on a particular bench. Adults mostly did it by accident, being able to read the name on the cushions but failing to do so and getting embarrassed, and kids mostly did it deliberately because they love fart jokes. Apart from that, most people wandered around doing things like looking at pictures of Alfred E. Neumann or reading jokes by Jon Stewart with a scholarly air of absorption. My friend Kali was laughing at the jokes, and when I pointed out to her that no-one else was, because a MUSEUM IS SERIOUS BUSINESS GODDAMMIT it only made her laugh more.

Then we ate too much (a recurring theme on my trips with Kali Durga) and went to Westminster Hall and Burying Ground for the Annual Halloween Tour. Westminster Hall is a suitably twisted burying place for Poe. The original graveyard was in operation from 1786 (and contains a number of veterans of both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812). When a church was needed, in order to avoid disturbing the remains, the church was designed to be built on stilts. The graves are still there, complete with headstones, underneath it. Not only that, but there are above-ground crypts both underneath it and around it. (The church was completed in 1852.)

Poe is not underneath the church - he died too late for that, in 1849. His original grave was unmarked, but as interest in his stories grew, his remains were disinterred and moved to a more prominent spot, and given a large marker.

The Halloween tour included the inevitable Toccata and Fugue in D Minor on the organ (pictured above - those are the decorative fake pipes, the real pipes occupying much more space behind them), trips around the crypts (none of which were lying broken open with bones strewn around, disappointingly. I'd even have lived without seeing gnaw marks if there had been a bit of strewing), cider and popcorn, and a recitation of The Telltale Heart by a dead ringer for Tom Baker, The Doctor, both in looks and performance. Excellent portrayal of nutcasery by a fine local actor whose name I did not catch.

Milk Run

As we milled around the National Mall during the Million Moderate March, the fancy took me for a hot dog, and for some reason I believed I'd be able to get one in the Hirshhorn Museum. This turned out to be an incorrect assumption but since rallying with moderates (and Zombies) was getting tiring we took to the subterranean gallery of the museum and looked at the Color Forms exhibits.

One of them, Milk Run, was in a special room and came with instructions, which I didn't bother to read, and so was soon walking down a completely dark corridor and round two sharp bends that cut off any light at all from outside. (I ran into the wall on the second bend.) After that, I staggered forward for a while towards a pale glow, hand trailing the wall and feeling for every footstep in case there was a step up or down in front of me. I'd been doing that when someone behind me hissed, "Hey, you people are *in* the exhibit. Come back here." And someone else giggled, "It's like watching zombies stagger around."

I made it back, with considerable help, to the bench from which you are actually supposed to observe the pink glow. As our eyes gradually dark-adapted over twenty minutes or so, the slight sensation of light turned into a deep red rectangle that seemed to hang in mid-air, white highlights to one side of it and a feeling of a frame hanging in a different plane so that it did not enclose the work, but rather set it off as an accent.

It was an impressive piece of art. Pictures don't do it justice, since you're not in the dark, but here is one, FWIW. But much more impressive was watching the next wave of non-dark-adapted zombies arrive, and then the next and the next. Each time there was a 'thunk' as at least one of every party walked into the wall in the corridor, and then the strange stagger, similar across all but always different, as the new arrival, completely in the dark, tried to orient themselves using the faint glow. At the back, with our adapted eyes, we could now see them very clearly, silhouetted against the artwork. Some staggered and tried to get out through the light source of the piece. Some felt along the wall. Some had read the instructions and had some idea there was a bench at the back and just needed encouragement. One couple kissed and I briefly entertained the idea we were in for a very naughty shadow play, but they got bored and staggered out after a while. A few hopeless sad cases used their cell phone lights, which of course risked burning our retinas so we shouted at them.

STB said, "You can do this in art. If this was a science experiment you'd never get the IRB to okay doing this to people."

Good fun.

And I managed to get a hot dog from a vendor outside afterwards.

Rally to Restore Sanity

I spent Friday flying during a terror alert. For some reason or other, it was the easiest and most pleasant pair of flights I've had in years. Limo to the airport (I splashed out), two hours waiting for a flight while I watched OMG TERROR WE'RE DOOMED ARREST ALL THE BROWN PEOPLE reports on the airport monitors, then whisked on to planes where I was able to consume $56 of vodka due to the ease with which credit card transactions now go down on flights. No food - food seems to be verboten on flights these days. I asked for some at some point and was offered a cookie or potato chips for some large number of dollars. These aren't actually food in my book, so I just drank the equivalent in vodka instead.

I was on my way to the Million Moderate March in Washington. I got into Dulles at midnight thirty (as advertised) and snored until about 9 am. We got up and headed slowly for the Springfield Metro station and realized, all of a sudden, that this thing was big and we were in for a special day.

The crowds at the Metro were out of the door. It literally took 40 minutes to buy a ticket. And this is way out in Springfield. Getting out of the Metro again at L'Enfant was like trying to evacuate a facility. It took more than thirty minutes to get from the platform to the bottom of the (non functional as usual) escalators and start making phone calls. Most of which got dropped due the sheer number of cellular callers in the area. Despite all this, we did manage to meet up with our third person, and walked into The National Mall.

Which was like walking into a free festival. There were hundreds of thousands of people there. Professional estimates seem to center around 215,000. That's the size of one to two days of the really big festivals in the West. Think New Year's Eve in Times Square or Trafalgar Square. Packed with no room to move. We couldn't actually see the stage, or even the Jumbotrons, from where we were further down The Mall. Apparently they'd set up for 60K rather than 215K, so we were well out the viewing area. But it didn't really matter that we couldn't see the official stuff. The rally goers were such fun, with their costumes and clever signs, that the thrill of the day was being with other like-minded people, not watching Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Ozzy and Yusuf Islam and the O'Jays dueled (trieled?) Peace Train and Crazy Train and Love Train. Colbert argued to Keep Fear Alive. Jon Stewart argued (mildly and sensibly) for moderation. Good times (and funnel cakes with sugar and whipped cream) were had by all.

On a serious note: I'm all for moderation, in the sense of not screaming at opponents, or lying to support my cause, or spinning wildly to make my side look good. In that I supported the march and Jon Stewart and enjoyed the day. But I want to point out that I'm not for 'moderation' in the sense of compromise. Republicans have succeeded in bringing the Overton Window far enough over that to be a 'moderate' is to be a patsy.

Happy well-fed squirrel on the National Mall

I Voted

I voted.

Of course, when I boasted about it, everybody I saw said they'd voted too. The outcome of the election must be like Schroedinger's Cat - the fate only to be determined when we open the box.

I voted today because my absentee ballot hadn't arrived and I won't be home on Tuesday. The helpful lady at the County registrar's office said I should just come up and fill in a ballot. I did. I turned up, said, "Hi, I'm me," filled in my name and address on a form and got given my ballot, which I filled in, put in an envelope and signed the outside.

Nobody asked me to prove I'm me. No driver's license, no nothing. I get that any intimidation at the polls is a bad thing but...you know, when you get on an airplane to the next city you almost have to hand in all four of your grandparents' birth certificates and a DNA sample, but when I voted who I wanted in government today I didn't even have to flash my ID.

Now, good question - why won't I be home on Tuesday to vote? Well, because I'm going on Jon Stewart's Million Moderate March, that's why. Yes, I'm going to Washington DC to march on the government. In the name of not making waves.

I marched on Grosvenor Square in London a few times in the past, I have to say, and not in the interests of the status quo (although I always enjoyed Paper Plane). Someone asked me what I'd do on Saturday and I thought about it and said, "Well, I probably won't be throwing ball bearings under the police horses' hooves."

And I won't. I'll be going to the Smithsonian and seeing a couple of art galleries, and we have a Halloween night lined up. I'm not sure whether to be ashamed or proud of the changes I've made since I was a young adult. For what it's worth, I was listening to Zane Lowe's program on BBC Radio 1 about the Kings of Leon today, and one point emphatically made was that the father of the Followills was a Pentecostal Fire and Brimstone preacher...who used to be an acid-dropping hippy.

It's hard to get my head around a hippy who then became a traditionalist whose sons became rock and rollers (which I'll tentatively believe is hippy). I may have mislaid the hippy ideals that informed my childhood, but at least I'm not a revivalist preacher. (And Kings of Leon sounded quite nice on the program.)

20th Century Boy

Time for a critical reappraisal...oh, all right. I mean it's just time to listen to it again. T. Rex's 20th Century Boy, a great piece composed entirely of pop hooks and rock riffs like a stone porcupine. I heard it again recently when the PowerPop blog said, "Marc Bolan's critical reassessment pretty much began when this obscure T-Rex b-side started showing up on the tube. And with good reason - - it's an absolutely killer rock'n'roll track."

Which is all, y'know, true, except it's not an obscure b-side. It's an a-side that went to number 3 in the UK charts.

Anyway, here it is, featuring Brad Pitt and some equally gorgeous woman in a 1990 Levi's commercial. Shame Marky-babes wasn't around to profit from the attention.

Ari Up, RIP

Ari Up of the Slits is dead. I'm a bit late with that, so it's not news. She died on October 20th, 2010 at age 48, which is too young for anyone.

Let me tell you a bit about The Slits. First, I'll tell you a bit about me. Growing up, rock music seemed to be a progression (no prog pun intended). It started, as far as I could tell, with people playing washboards and tea-chest bass, and went on to Wipe Out and Louie Louie, and the Beatles went from I Wanna Hold Your Hand to Paul Buckmaster string arrangements. We went from You Really Got Me to Queen II, from three chords to carefully splicing tape of literally a thousand sounds into one track. Music went from Chris Montez' Let's Dance to Yes.

Yes. They were prog and had Mellotrons and suspended chords.

I actually bought Yes records. Listening to them - and listening to the other prog bands of the day back then, one thought predominated. It was, "How can anyone coming into music today surpass this? It's pretty fucking clever. No new band can ever have more Mellotrons or Moogs than this. No one can know more augmented or suspended chords. Where can we, and I mean this sincerely, where can we go after this?"

And no, the answer wasn't Ari Up, at least not at first. Just as I arrived at university in 1976, I started hearing about the Ramones, and shortly afterwards the Sex Pistols. These guys played three chord rock, very loud, very fast and would, one learned, be quite happy to wipe their asses on Rick Wakeman's glittery cape. I listened, and it was refreshing.

Instead of trying to beat the current dinosaurs at their own game, to be more clever, to be better musicians and have more gear, the Punk bands did what nature does, which is, when in doubt, go for neoteny. The fully-featured adult body of a metazoan is hard to improve or beat, so nature instead works on the embryonic form, where small tweaks lead to large changes in the adult. It's impossible to restructure and improve on Tales From The Topographic Oceans to come up with The Next Big Thing, but it's relatively easy to re-engineer Be-Bop-A-Lula or Johnny B. Goode - and come up with a great pop track that leads to riots among the youth and general happiness.

Which is what the Sex Pistols did. I saw them, and the Ramones, and the Clash and all the other Punk bands of the era as hacking off 20 years of twigs from Briar Rose's hedge, and leading us back to the main trunk, rock and roll. The light this pruning let in was dazzling. What I hadn't seen at first was the gender biases inherent in that assumption. To get back to Scotty Moore or Cliff Gallup from Steve Howe or Robert Fripp was an amazing leap that energized me no end.

But it was The Slits that showed me that even the females, even the birds, the chicks, could play rock music and mean it. In an era when Blondie had male instrumentalists, and the exemplary bassist was Jah Wobble (despite the example of Tina Weymouth), The Slits were the ones who put it out there that women could rock. And their take on it, the queasy, slippery dub where they excelled, which would never, ever need a Mellotron to progress.

And so I salute Ari Up. Thanks for the music and thanks for the wrench you gave the dopey, major-oriented music of 1979. I wouldn't be the person I am without you.

Half Price Drinks with Mick Farren

We drove up to what one SF-dweller of my acquaintance called the Seventh Circle of Hell yesterday - otherwise known as LA. The major reason for the excursion was the imminent emigration of my mate Mick Farren, who is heading back to Blighty. However, he promises he will keep up with his blog and his live performances from his new digs in Brighton.

Mick Farren

The Citadel, an Assyrian outlet on the I-5

We ambled up the I5 at such a leisurely rate (stopping at a CPK for a Thai Pizza or two, plus starters) that we only got to our first destination, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, a couple of hours before it closed for the day. I hadn't been for a few years, and it's expanded greatly, with some major new displays which I can only describe as 'of the kind that the MJT is famous for'. You really have to, like, go, to get the flavor of it. They now have a tea room, in which I had some very nice tea from a samovar, served by a young lady who appeared and disappeared mysteriously behind a curtain and in some respects resembled some of the exhibits. Outside the tea room we particularly admired the oil paintings of the heroic canines of the Soviet space program.

LA from the freeway

In the shop I bought a musical box operated by a punched roll, like a player piano, except that the rolls are blank and it's sold with a hand punch, so you can make your own music. I also got the first non-diabetes inducing set of rubber stamps I've seen in quite some time, the Pictorial Webster's set, with snails and shells and seahorses and swallows and stags and some things that don't only begin with S.

Historic Route 66 - in LA, it's festooned with poles like an R Crumb cartoon

On to the bar, then, to see Mick. He was already well-lubricated and quite a supporting cast had gathered, so we talked extensively to him and to a few new people. As a parting gift, he'd brought along a table-full of his own books which we could pick up and he'd sign, so now I have a collection of them. I should have thought to bring along my copy of Give The Anarchist a Cigarette, but it didn't occur to me he'd be signing. We all then had a nice piece of cake and shared a fond farewell. Most of my friends are electric. I rarely saw Mick in real life, so a few extra thousand miles won't make a significant difference...but still it's sad when someone leaves. Though not, of course, for them.

Afterwards, STB and I followed the disembodied voice of his Android to the Viet Noodle Bar, where I had fish noodle soup and, from their extensive collection of books, a good read of several Oscar Wilde stories, which I will now rip off. I also got to listen to a bunch of conservatives at the end of the communal table struggling to understand sexual harassment, as defined by liberals. One of them had noticed that liberals were in favor of sexual freedom and was completely stumped by Anita Hill's testimony against Clarence Thomas. The person appeared to be grappling with the concept that, if Clarence Thomas was talking about sex to Anita Hill, that was a liberated and liberal and sort of left-wingy thing to be doing, wasn't it? So what was the problem?

Well, it works like this. If someone in a position of power over you makes sexual remarks in the workplace, the implication is that you will not do well at work unless you go along with that person- which in some cases means giving sexual favors to stay employed. This is a bad thing. Even if a person who is only a peer makes sexually charged remarks - or for instance puts up a nude calendar - that can lead to what the law calls a Hostile Work Environment. Outside the work place, yeah, liberals are pretty much in favor of sex. That people can get to fifty or so in California without knowing these basics is either a sad indictment of Liberals, who haven't explained it, or a sad indictment of Republicans, who are stupid. Or both, I guess.

But the noodles were nice.

On the way back down south we saw the closing fireworks of Disneyland, which start around 9:30 pm. We were laughing about something we'd heard, that some residents had clubbed together to complain to Disneyland about the noise (as if they hadn't known about the noise when they moved in!) and pulled off on Ball to get gas.

Gas Station Disney fireworks

Man those fireworks sounded like WWII. Loud as all get out. I think the residents may have a case. Pretty though.

And so to Orange County and bed.

Edit:



(Removed original Half Price Drinks as the link broke and substituted a 2009 version.)

Busking, 2010

People tell me the past was just like the present, but with less Hello Kitty and fewer Facebook status updates. I can buy that.

But I have to admit to a slight thrill as I watch these musicians, Atomic Tom, sing their song Take Me Out on the subway.

Yes, playing all their instruments on iPhones is different and new. Now you don't only not need to buy a guitar, you don't even need to make a diddly bow in a cow pasture to get into the act. Jack White may not approve of their solution, but it's a nice video of a bunch of kids making music out of the first thing that comes to hand.

(Caveat: possible iPhone product placement viral ad - who could tell?)

Scrapbooking

I went out to a scrapbooking supply sale today. No, I haven't lost my mind. A friend at work recommended the warehouse sale on the grounds that a bunch of stuff would be sold off below cost.

Now, I've never actually 'scrapbooked' as in made a scrapbook album according to the generally accepted rules. I've made an altered book, in which I've replaced references to, and pages of, forensic science with pictures and animations, texts and maps that relate to the Dead Weather's first album, Horehound, or to their first tour.

But making a good altered book depends on knowing what embellishments, tags and stamps are out there, so I went to this sale. I had a ball. The costs really were low, and there were grab-bags that promised "over $100 value - just $10", one of which I bought. As I was classifying it this evening, though, it occurred to me that 75% will be thrown out, leaving me with a bare positive margin. (Unless, of course, I can negotiate a s swap.) The backgrounds and alphabets and beads are beautiful, but there are the annoying other 'themes' I'll never use. "I do." "My mother's the best." "Under the Sea." "It's a Girl!"

I guess I'll put all those into the garage sale box. In the meantime this has taught me something. Not everyone is like me. In fact, most women in Orange County are thinking about kids, marriage and how great their parents and alma mater are.

My company, for reasons best known to it, in what is otherwise a belt-tightening time, chose to have the Senior Leadership Team, including me, assessed by a personality profile (so far so common) which they are then following up with a two-hour interview by a licensed psychotherapist in order to discuss the results. What am I going to say to this guy - paid for by my company, not me? Am I going to ask him for help and advice? I don't think so. He's a minion of my boss. I'm going to keep very quiet about health, stress, alcohol and all the other performance factors one might name. And hope he goes away.

And this is where the scrapbook sale came in useful. Now I know that the pages I habitually discard are the 'normal' ones, the ones I should emphasize. When Mr. oops I mean Dr. Psychotherapy gets on the line, I'm going to talk to him about marriage, how great my parents are, what a blessing infant boys (and girls) are and what I did at my High School Prom. (I didn't go to a High School Prom, but he may not know that.)

That was worth $35, wasn't it? And the backgrounds are actually useful.