Category Archives: General

Administrative, General, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society, War Commentary

On Not Being A Dove

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A long but fascinating essay from the late John Updike. I found this passage quite interesting:

The protest, from my perspective, was in large part a snobbish dismissal of [the president] by the Eastern establishment; Cambridge professors and Manhattan lawyers and their guitar-strumming children thought they could run the country and the world better than this lugubrious bohunk from Texas. These privileged members of a privileged nation believed that their pleasant position could be maintained without anything visibly ugly happening in the world. They were full of aesthetic disdain for their own defenders, the business-suited hirelings drearily pondering geopolitics and its bloody necessities down in Washington. The protesters were spitting on the cops who were trying to keep their property—the USA and its many amenities—intact. A common report in this riotous era was of slum-dwellers throwing rocks and bottles at the firemen come to put out fires; the peace marchers, the upper-middle-class housewives pushing baby carriages along in candlelit processions, seemed to me to be behaving identically, without the excuse of being slum-dwellers.

Emphasis mine.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. They weren’t anti-war — they were just on the other side.

General, Humor

The Rogue Cotter Pin

Adventures in garage-door repair, with James Lileks:

I pushed it back into place, ran the door down, and discovered something: the end of a cotter pin that’s been there for nine years had managed to turn itself around 90 degrees so it plucked the edge of the sensor bracket as it travelled up. For a moment I felt like a prison warden discovering a six-mile tunnel dug with spoons and thimbles – you have to admire the effort, the ingenuity, the sheer determination. The pin was trying to escape. Day after day, year after year, it had been trying to pull itself out – but like escapees who run into a brick foundation from an old building razed decades before (why didn’t you tell us, Pops? I didn’t know! There was never anything there, not even when I came here in ’21!) it hadn’t counted on the sensor bracket giving the game away.

How could it have?

Business, General, History

Depressing Aerial Photography

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At least to me.

Here’s a before and after of the demolition of the old AC Spark Plug plant this year on Dort Highway in Flint. The view is toward the southeast.

I didn’t work there. I worked in the oil filter plant farther east on Davison Road, that isn’t in this picture. But I lived just a few blocks from there for the first decade or so of my life. That road that bisects the plant is Averill, and I lived two blocks north and two blocks east of the intersection of Davison Road and Averill.. If you follow Davison Road a few miles east, you end up in Michael Moore’s home town of the same name. The engineering building, where my uncle worked, can be seen in the top picture, on the corner of Averill and Davison (and the Red Rooster, one of the best restaurants in town, that I only ate at once, was across Averill). My father worked in the HQ building on Dort Highway (which was also called Dixie Highway — it came down from Bay City and Saginaw, and continued south to Detroit, and thence all the way to Florida), in personnel.

Anyway, it’s all history now. It’s hard to imagine the town without that facility — it was there all my life until now.

Administrative, General, Popular Culture

SoCal Adventures

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OK, not adventures exactly.

I know that posting has been light. I’ve been doing hard-core actual work out here, with little time to post. But I have to relate the following story.

It’s amazing how you (or, well…me) can live somewhere for decades, and never notice a place in the neighborhood. OK, not exactly in the neighborhood, but not more than three miles from it. For the last many years we lived in Redondo, Patricia and I were always looking for good breakfast places in the South Bay. While looking for one on my own before work in Torrance, I noticed yesterday morning, for the first time ever, that there was actually a Norm’s Restaurant on the west side of Hawthorne, just north of 190th.

So I went in to check it out.

The waiter had an expensive “tricked-out name tag” that said (well, strongly implied) that his name was Ismael. I had to resist two impulses.

The first was to say, “So, can I call you Ismael?” Hardy har har.

I resisted because either a) he wouldn’t have gotten the literary reference, so he would either say “Sure, it’s my name, why not?” (leaving me feeling as foolish as I should) or b) he would get it, and say, “Yes. Please do so. I’ve never heard that one before. Well, not more than 83,436 times. Doing so will leave my sides bleeding and my spleen on open display at the continuing hilarity.” Which would also go over like the proverbial depleted-uranium blimp. Many would have done so, either because they didn’t anticipate these two almost certain responses, or because making lame jokes and being the life of the Norm’s party was more important to them than these consequences.

I also considered asking him if he had a sister named “Isfemael.” But I had only just given him my order. He hadn’t gone into the kitchen yet. One never knows what happens in the kitchen. The possibilities are endless, and disgusting.

As it turned out, they had great corned-beef hash with eggs.

General, Technology and Society

Hornet Down?

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I’m hearing that an FA-18 crashed into a neighborhood in San Diego, near Miramar (the former location of the Navy’s “Top Gun” school), with an ejected pilot. If so, that’s very unusual. Pilots usually do what they can to make sure that the plane doesn’t hurt anyone on the ground before ejecting (if they eject).

[Update a few minutes later]

For those without access to radio/television, here’s a live thread tracking it over at Free Republic. It doesn’t sound good–several houses are reported to be burning. Let’s hope that no one was home.

General, Science And Society

News I Can Use

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Sort of.

I had my eyes checked last week (for the first time in three or four years) and discovered that I’m color blind. Sort of. It’s minor enough that it’s never been an issue from a functional standpoint, apparently, and this is the first time that I’ve ever had this problem diagnosed. I went on line to check out some of the tests to confirm it, and I do show up as red-green color blind, but only mildly. That is, I can sometimes make out the things that normal sighted are supposed to see, but some of them just barely very dim, and I can see some (but not all) of the numbers that true red-green color blind people aren’t supposed to at all. On the ones that have one number for normal, and a different one for color-blind, I see the color-blind one more clearly, but I can actually see both. And I’ve never had any trouble distinguishing red from green traffic lights (which would be the biggest problem, I would think, though fully color-blind people know from position). When I look at the pictures that show what the world looks like to normal and deficient eyes, I can very clearly see the vivid red dress as red, whereas it should be more of a greenish color if I were fully color blind. I wonder what this page looks like to someone with no red receptors? Are both pictures the same? And it makes me wonder what the red dress would look like to someone with normal vision (something I’ve never wondered before, because I’ve always thought I had normal vision).

So, the question is, have I always had this borderline condition, and it’s only become apparent now, or was I much better in my youth (I never failed a test as a kid) and have deteriorated a lot with mileage? I’m guessing that maybe I was always borderline, but far enough over the border toward normal earlier that I always passed the test, not realizing that I could have been seeing the numbers more clearly had my color sight been better, and perhaps with age, I’ve drifted into a region where I don’t fully pass any more, but am still a long way from being unable to distinguish red from green.

Anyway, the opthalmologist recommended a follow-up visit to a neuro-opthalmologist, just to make sure that there wasn’t something else going on (just as a precaution, because it’s unlikely that it’s caused by anything serious).

General, Political Commentary

Thanks

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I suppose, since I have a shiny new blog, that I should say something for the occasion.  Both first, and trivially, I’m thankful that we live in a country that has competing blog software providers, and particularly that they are free of charge (though, in the case of MT, I’ve gotten a lot less than I paid for over the past several months).

I’m thankful that, at least so far, an Obama administration hasn’t lived up to his campaign promises.  I wonder if he had told the voters that he would a) support Joe Lieberman, b) put in a set of centrist economic advisors, c) go soft on his promise to “raise taxes on the rich,” d) keep George Bush’s Defense Secretary for at least another year, etc., whether he would have had a chance of winning the Democrat nomination.  But I guess that what running left for the nomination, and to the center for the election, is all about.

I’m also grateful that, while I missed out on the economic boom of the last few years, paradoxically, as the ecoonomy has gone in the toilet this fall, I’m actually doing very well financially since last summer, with good prospects for continuing to do so.  And I have my health, which as time goes on, become ever more precious.

I’m also grateful to my readers, devoted and otherwise, who keep coming back to read my blather. I hope that you all have much for which to be grateful as well, and have a happy holiday, and more to come.

My LA friend (from Florida) Bill Whittle has some further Thanksgiving thoughts, and gratitude, for a friend who died recently.