Beat the Drum Slowly and Play the Fife Lowly

This has truly been an annus horribilis, It's little wonder that so many people have chosen 2016 as their year to depart this mortal coil. Here are the people whom I considered to be significant. Very obviously, your list will differ.

Heroes

• Stephanie Rader
• Edgar Mitchell
• Mitchell Higginbotham
• Fred Cherry
• Samuel Willenberg
• Delmer Berg
• Joe Medicine Crow
• Elizabeth Strohfus
• Gilbert Horn Sr.
• Erich Rudorffer
• Kaname Harada
• Jane Fawcett
• Elie Wiesel
• Dave Bald Eagle
• Shelby Westbrook
• Jeremiah Joseph O'Keefe
• John Glenn
• Larry Colburn

Musicians

• David Bowie
• Paul Bley
• Glenn Frey
• Keith Emerson
• Greg Lake
• Paul Kanter
• Frank Sinatra, Jr.
• Merle Haggard
• Jimmie Van Zant
• Prince
• Maurice White
• Scotty Moore
• Ralph Stanley
• Rob Wasserman
• Pete Fountain
• Stanley "Buckwheat Zydeco" Dural
• Sharon Jones
• Leonard Cohen
• Leon Russell

Sportsmen & Sportswomen

• Joe Garagiola
• Muhammad Ali
• Gordie Howe
• Pat Summitt
• Buddy Ryan
• Carl Haas
• Shugoro Nakazato
• Arnold Palmer
• Dave Mirra

Authors

• Umberto Eco
• Harper Lee
• Alvin Toffler
• Edward Albee
• Richard Adams

Actors

• Alan Rickman
• Dan Haggerty
• Abe Vigoda
• George Kennedy
• Frank Kelly
• Garry Shandling
• Burt Kwouk
• Bud Spencer
• Jerry Doyle
• Alan Young
• David Huddleston
• Kenny Baker
• Jack Riley
• Paul Comi
• Patty Duke
• Gene Wilder
• Robert Vaughn
• Andrew Sachs
• Florence Henderson
• Ron Glass
• Bernard Fox
• Alan Thicke
• Carrie Fisher
• Debbie Reynolds
• William Christopher

Statesmen, Stateswomen, & Politicians

• Dale Bumpers
• Antonin Scalia
• Jo Cox
• James R. Bennett
• Walter Scheel
• Phyllis Schafly
• Shimon Peres
• Janet Reno
• Fidel Castro
• King Bhumibol Adulyadej
• Boutros Boutros-Ghali

Scientists & Engineers

• Ed Yourdan
• Marvin Minsky
• Wesley A. Clark
• Ray Tomlinson
• Katharine Blodgett Gebbie
• James Cronin
• Joe Sutter
• Andrew Grove
• Eileen Younghusband
• Edward Lofgren
• Deborah S. Jin
• Charles H. Henry
• Erwin Hahn
• Jack Garman
• Denton Cooley
• Henry Heimlich
• Vera Rubin

Journalists

• Craig Windham
• Tom Mintier
• John McLaughlin
• Gwen Ifill
• Craig Sager
• Morley Safer
• Joe Garagiola
• Bud Collins

Others

• Bob Elliot — Comedian
• Jack Elrod — Cartoonist
• Henry Worsley — Adventurer
• Tom Hayden — Peace & Civil Rights Activist
• George Martin — Record Producer & Composer
• Daniel Barrigan — Priest & Social Advocate
• Raymond Selby — Friend & Character since 7th Grade
• Michael Cimino — Screenwriter & Director
• Garry Marshall — Television & Movie Producer
• Darren Seals — Social Activist
• Nancy Reagan — First Lady & Actress
• Greta Zimmer Friedman — A moment, frozen in time.
• Zsa Zsa Gabor — Celebrity
• Joseph Harmatz — Partisan Fighter & Revenge Plotter
• George Barris — Photographer
• Tyrus Wong — Artist

Early Exploits in User Experience

Years ago, I made a control panel for a laser system. The lab director, Dr. Ken ~~~~, had a habit of randomly changing settings on your perfectly calibrated equipment. To prevent this, the panel had a toggle switch that was labeled “TUNING” and switched between “MANUAL” and “AUTOMATIC”. There were three very fancy knobs that even had little Vernier dials:

They were labeled something like “OFFSET”, “DEAD BAND”, and “GAIN”, if I recall correctly. There was also an LED that could change from yellow to red.

Of course, the switch and knobs weren’t connected to anything and the light was connected to a little circuit that had a photocell. If someone stood in front of the panel for a couple of minutes, his or her shadow would cause a capacitor to drain until a transistor would reverse the polarity on the LED and it would change colors. Since there was no label about whether red or yellow was good, Ken would wander by on occasion and tweak the knobs until it changed to the other color.

The whole thing had been built as an April Fools’ prank and was quite satisfactory. Access to the real settings required you to unscrew and remove the aforementioned panel, whereupon you could change the actual controls, which were mounted on the electronics chassis itself. Since this was usually accompanied by considerable swearing and yelling across the football-field sized basement laboratory, it was never done except late at night, so Ken never caught on.

Because we were funded by the Department of Energy, which would send bureaucrats from Washington to ensure that we were spending the money properly, all of our gear was abundantly outfitted with dials and blinking lights, which twitched and flashed in dramatic fashion. This reassured the bean counters, who had absolutely no idea of what they meant. This was all the way back in 1979 and almost certainly represented my first explorations into the difference between user interface and user experience.

How Do You Say, "Sucks to be you!" in Spanish?

Ah, futbol. A game of inches. Chilean team Universidad de Concepcion beat O'Higgins, which is somehow another Chilean team. In stoppage time at the end of the game, down 2-1, O'Higgins' keeper clears the ball down the field, hoping for one shot at the tying score.

It did not work out as planned.

Precisely One Comment

My only comment regarding the election results is this: it is my profound hope that the President-Elect fulfills everyone of the innumerable campaign promises that he made, to the letter.

Aaarrrrggghhhh!

Vertikles critiqued this blog the other day and said that it looked like it had been created twenty years ago by an eccentric crank. I wasted no time in quickly whipping off a reply castigating him for his lack of taste and his indiscerning eye for the stylish. Having quickly dispatched of the unwarranted commentary, I returned to contemplating my next post. In the back of my mind, I was still stewing about his e-mail. He kept calling it a 19 point font. Hah! That shows what he knows. All of the text is actually sixteen pixels high. Still, he did come back to that point three times and in all of the years that I've known Vertikles (a number that makes nineteen look very small), he is nearly always correct about these details.

So, to appease my indignation, I quickly searched the text for '19px' and son of a gun, there was one spot in the code where body text was set to nineteen pixels. To understand how this could occur, you must realize that Blogger templates are a mashup of HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Google voodoo. Furthermore, I was using a Blogger template that I had extensively modified (the attribution is in the source code, but I made so many changes that I didn't think it fair to either party to have the author's name on the page) and which had been written by someone with what must be delicately called poor code hygiene. Somewhere along the line, a 16 had been changed to a 19. So I changed it back.

And by Crom, now the page looked terrible.

I knew that all of the sizes were right, but the smaller text swam in white on the black background. Vertikles had also railed against my use of Raleway as the body font, but I rather liked it. Except that in the small size, it was all but unreadable. The nuances that make it interesting blurred together into a gummy mass. To make bad matters worse, the little things that annoyed me that I hadn't gotten around to fixing, like the spacing on the cast and inventory lists in the movie reviews, were even more obvious with the smaller font size.

Aaaaarrrggghhh!

So, some twenty hours of my life later, it's much nicer, at least in my opinion (and Vertikles would be wise to keep his thoughts to himself for a few weeks). I've rolled back to an earlier color scheme, made some tweaks to links when you hover over them, fixed the Crom-damned list spacing, and even changed the text font. Vertikles will still be displeased, but I don't care. I can't stand text fonts where you can't tell a lowercase 'L' from an uppercase 'I' or the number '1'. I also like editorial typefaces to have a bit of character (sorry), with a few distinctive characters. I had almost gone to something really trendy, but my predilection for pompous verbosity meant that the resulting deluge of sesquipedalian prose would be even more unreadable unless I chose carefully. In the end, looking through the Google fonts, as well as those that I have a web license for, I chose Museo Sans, which is quirky enough for my taste, while still being readable in a paragraph of text.

In the next day or so, I'll get around to another Amazon posting. The little gnomes who make the suggestions have been working overtime there and I have bumper crop of artificial stupidity to spring upon you. Until then, Tschüß.

Hey, Look at That!

The 2016 Wildlife Photography Comedy Awards have been given out. Check out the gallery to see all of the animals that didn't make the cover of National Geographic.

You Need a Large Dose

Jef Mallett's Frazz is the best thing in comics. Yesterday's was dead-on.

So what are are you waiting for? Crank it loud!

I Saw Beautiful Things Today

I served as a Poll Watcher today. This is a small and insignificant part of American politics, where each party can send observers to voting locations to watch that the election laws are being scrupulously followed to neither deny anyone their rightful vote nor to permit anyone to vote illegally. I spent roughly half the day in each of two locations, both of which had two precincts voting. One was on the edge of a prestigious private university and the other was in the most ethnically diverse region of the city.

And I saw beautiful things today.

I stood in the dark of a November morning and looked up at mighty Orion standing in the crystal clear sky.

I saw two college women waiting twenty minutes before the polls opened, so that one could attest to the other's residency in the precinct.

I saw a couple who had come from Somalia as refugees and who had been naturalized in July proudly wave their ballots over their heads as they walked across the room while everyone in the polling place, including the officials, stood and applauded.

I saw text messages from a friend monitoring another precinct telling me about a ninety-year-old woman and a 107 year-old man casting their votes.

I saw college students take their first step toward running this country by voting for the first time.

I saw couples of every gender combination hug and kiss after voting together.

I saw election officials white and black, liberal and conservative, do everything within the law to make it possible for people to register.

I saw people who couldn't produce the proper documentation come back, after having gone home to dig for what was needed.

I saw a middle-aged Hmong man smiling as though he would explode with joy after casting the first ballot of his life.

I saw people of all colors, national origins, and religions standing patiently together as they waited in line.

I saw two gay men proudly say that they now had the same last name as the poll worker looked them up on the roll of voters.

I saw two observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) watching American democracy, so that they can make recommendations and comments.

I saw two dozen people put aside their lives to calmly and patiently scan, sort, examine, and explain more than a thousand times all of the details needed to register and check in voters and to give them their ballots.

And when I walked across the street to an Arabic grocery to stretch my legs and grab a bottle of mango juice and some baklavas, the owner called me brother as we chatted about the beautiful weather.

Today, I saw the things that make me proud to be an American.

A Super Cool Good Guy

The Washington Post reports that a Cubs fan wasn't able to get a World Series ticket for game six, in Cleveland. While looking for a scalper, she saw Bill Murray and decided to get close to him, probably hoping for a selfie.

Suddenly, he turned around and handed her a ticket. Next to him. Five rows behind home plate.

The woman wasn't a supermodel. She wasn't famous. She didn't even ask him for the ticket. He just did a random act of kindness. And that's super cool.

As are the bunny ears she's giving him in this picture.

White Comanche

Cast

• Joseph Cotten
• William Shatner
• Rosanna Yanni
• Perla Cristal
• Mariano Vidal Molina
• Luis Prendes
• Barta Barri
• Víctor Israel

Inventory

• A deer being butchered
• Two attempted lynchings
• A bar fight
• An inept bounty hunter
• A wagon load of haybales, to be used as instant foxholes
• A cute little boy
• A bandage on the outside of a coat sleeve

Summary

Again, we have a Paella Western. It's a bit surprising that there aren't more of them, since the Spanish film industry was at least as productive as the Italians, you have an endless supply of actors to play Mexican roles, the terrain is favorable, and the Spanish army seemed to be for rent at very reasonable rates when you had a scene that required a number of military extras running around.

We begin with Johnny Moon, one of two characters played by Shatner, being ambushed by a band of men bent on hanging him. Fortunately for him, they prove to be incompetent at that, as well as at shooting. This is good, because Moon is on his way to a Comanche village to meet Notah, the warrior chief and his twin brother

Moon is kept waiting by his brother, who is out leading an attack on a wagon. Moon's come to kill Notah, whose raiding is what inspiring the locals to attempt to stretch Moon's neck. After the two share a little fraternal love, they are about to duel when a Comanche woman leaps in front and grabs Notah's arm. After Notah says that a woman saved him, Moon mentions that if Notah cut back on the peyote, he'd be faster, thus making this a mushroom paella. Moons tells Notah that he'll spend four days in Rio Hondo and Notah agrees to meet him to settle things once and for all.

On the way to Rio Hondo, Moon stops the lynching of one land baron's minion by the minions of another. This provides an opportunity to see Moon's speed with the gun and to provide some appropriate enemies. When he gets to town, the baron, named Grimes, whose minion he saved offers to hire him. Moon says he'll tell him in four days. Later that night, the other baron, named Garcia, shows up, conveniently setting up a lovely bar fight between his brother, who was one of lynchers, and Moon.

After dealing with the brother dramatically, but non-lethally, Moon discovers that his own brother raped the sole female passenger on the stage coach when she attempts to perforate Moon with a Navy .44. The Sheriff clears Moon by saying that he traced the tracks of the riders and that none of them could have been Moon's. When the woman, Kelly, confronts Moon in his room, we learn that the brothers are half-breeds born to a white father and Comanche mother. Turned away by both whites and Indians, Notah starts using peyote which gives him visions of a new Comanche empire with him as the emperor. Since this is the sixties, following a delusional druggie seems like a good idea, so he is able to build a cult.

The next day, we learn that Kelly has a curious habit of bathing in the middle of the desert. After conveniently dropping in on her during this excercise, Moon explains that he and Notah are going to finish things. Kelly returns the favor by pointing out Garcia's brother is about to ambush Moon. This time Moon removes the need for me to keep specifying whose brother I'm talking about by drilling him through the forehead. For inexplicable reasons, Garcia is not pleased by this turn of events and makes unpleasant comments about Moon, Kelly, and the Sheriff.

The Sheriff, smelling a range war, tries to recruit Moon, who blows him off. The next morning, both bands are in town, with Grimes' men in his saloon and Garcia's men riding into town. The sheriff tries to stop Garcia by talking to him, but Garcia simply shoots him and rides on by, so that the two sides can start blasting at each other from across the street. Moon saves the day by raising a dust storm. As the two sides thin each other out, he cleans up until only Garcia is standing. The Sheriff gets the drop on him, completely eliminating both bands and providing a convenient subsidy for the local gravediggers' union. As is the way with these things, Moon and the Sheriff bond over a slug of whiskey. Later, when he returns to his room, Kirk gets the girl. I mean, Moon gets the girl.

Meanwhile, Notah leads his band to slaughter a mining camp and then informs them that they will be going to Rio Hondo to slaughter the white folks. When someone points out that Rio Hondo is about Notah and his brother, Notah replies, in essence, that my problems are your problems. When the conscientious objector sneaks off in the night to warn the town, he is confronted by Notah's woman who, despite being pregnant, manages to out-ride him and ambush him. The two kill each other, but not before the Comanche warns Moon of the oncoming assault.

All of the townspeople leave town for the cemetery, conveniently leaving a free-fire zone for the upcoming events. Moon takes the two dead Comanche and sets them on a traditional pyre. Seeing this, the other Comanches stop to burn the bodies and free the spirits. Notah is nonplussed by this turn of events, but his band say that they will conduct the ceremony and wait for Notah to return. Or not.

The two settle things in the old way, which requires both men to ride shirtless, like Vladimir Putin, past each other, taking a shot on each pass. One wonders how long this has been the old way and precisely whose old way it is. Perhaps there was some sort of guidebook for how half-breed twin brothers settled disputes.

Joseph Cotton was a distinguished actor who had a long career, including his own television show, which appears to have been a courtroom anthology series. He appeared on both The Love Boat and Fantasy Island (twice!), thus marking him as a B-grade celebrity up until about 1980. His most famous role is as the lead character, Holly Martins, of The Third Man. It makes you wonder why he would do a movie like this, particularly since he was in the middle of the busiest stretch of his career.

Ironically, this came out right in the middle of Star Trek's run. It doesn't seem to have had any effect upon Shatner's career. It's rarely mentioned when discussing him, though.

Dialogue

"Miss Kelly, leave the sheriff out of what's between me and myself."

Story

The bits and pieces that aren't clichés wouldn't fill a half-hour. It's not completely terrible, since they didn't mess up anything and the parts are more or less in the right order, but no one will ever watch it twice.

Music

The opening theme is a jazzy big band piece that has nothing to do with a western, but which is catchy, nonetheless. The rest of the music is perfectly fine, if completely unmemorable.

Acting

Cotton does an excellent job as the Sheriff. The women do a decent job as the women in a western. Shatner is actually excellent as Johnny Moon. His Notah as a surfer messiah leaves a lot to be desired. It's like watching the episode Mirror, Mirror. He's trying too hard to distinguish between the two men.

Watching this made me wonder why Shatner didn't do more westerns. He rides a horse beautifully, he has the good looks and his speech mannerisms don't seem out of place for a loner cowboy. The fact that he's about the size of the typical stuntman couldn't hurt and I'm sure that with some practice, he could have learned how to throw a punch and fake taking one, so that all of the fights didn't need to be shot from odd angles.

[Update] Another Bad Guy

And it's an airline employee. Is anyone surprised when an airline employee turns out to be racist, sexist, homophobic, or amazingly ill-informed on matters of religion or culture?

This time, it was a flight attendant (the story doesn't say what sex the attendant was) who, when a passenger went comatose, told a doctor offering to help, "“Oh no, sweetie, put [your] hand down. We are looking for actual physicians or nurses or some type of medical personnel, we don’t have time to talk to you.”

The doctor's problem? She was black and female and we all know that unless you are a white male, you can't be an actual physician or nurse‽^†

The airline in question was Delta, but it hardly matters anymore. All of the American airlines are dreadful, as are most of the European. I met a multi-million miler while waiting for a delayed flight once who told me that he consistently got better service on African airlines, where at least the crews were pleasant and the atmosphere congenial.

The radius for driving rather than flying increases every year. I'm up to twelve to fourteen hours, depending upon how long I'll be at the destination. Most of my colleagues are up in the six to eight hours, although some have reached ten.

If this country had a decent high-speed rail system, there wouldn't be a domestic airline flying.

Update

The Washington Post has a follow-up article. It helpfully includes a photograph of the doctor in question. In the future, all flight attendants will be required to carry a copy of this photograph, so that in case of an emergency, they can see what a doctor looks like. I was going to add "in 2016", but the first black doctor in the United States, James McCune Smith, earned his degree in 1837, graduating at the top of his class. The first woman doctor in the United States, Elizabeth Blackwell, earned her degree in 1849, although the medical establishment was so appalled that she was forced to practice in Europe for several years. Perhaps that could be Delta's new motto: "The Airline Most Recommended by Antebellum Doctors".

^†The character at the end of the sentence is the beloved interrobang. It expresses those cases where excitement and puzzlement mix. In this case, why would the flight attendant not assume that the woman was at least a nurse? Has she never seen a person of color as a medical professional before? Where does this flight attendant live? Mars? I live in a state that has a black minority of only 2.1% and I have had both black doctors and nurses. Routinely. This flight attendant is a racist idiot! See how handy an interrobang is? It summed up a whole paragraph in one character. In fact, it summed up a whole character in one character.

Product Marketing 101

I do a little graphic design work for fun, which of course means that I get boatloads of spam from companies selling stock photography, fonts, and various odds and ends. I've managed to eliminate most of the really awful stuff, so most of what I get is high quality, if generally not of much use. For example, the last week consisted of a rather remarkable run on coffee mug mockups. These are Photoshop files that let you take your graphics and project them onto a mug, as viewed from any of a number of locations, including full or empty, on the desk or in the hand, or even in an attractive gift box. It's how you market designs without the expense of having to actually make the mugs. Last week, for some reason, I got about ten of these, including various sizes, materials, shapes, and other characteristics. As I said, they're all very well done, but I'm not really interested in selling mugs this week.

There are also vast numbers of templates for dance clubs, bars, sporting events, etc. You basically fill in the appropriate names and dates and print off a few hundred to get hung on bulletin boards around college campuses and bus stops. The quality of these range from mediocre to unspeakable, but they probably accomplish the desired result and at almost no cost. I've got these packing off to my spam filter.

In between lies the stock photography. About a decade ago, there was a stock photography model who ended up in every computer ad for every company on Earth. She became known as "everywhere girl" and was eventually located in real life, where it turned out that she was a college student who made a couple of hundred dollars one day having about a thousand photos taken of her using various computers, carrying them across campus, sitting in classrooms, etc. Ironically, she was completely unaware that she had become an internet sensation.

If you have a need for a one-off photo, there are many services that can sell you one, with the appropriate rights for reproduction (please don't just grab them off the web—that's a good way to get sued). If you are going to do a series of ads or if you are doing a presentation, you might want to get a number of related photos, either of the same style or the same people. These come about a dozen at a time with titles like, "Excited Interracial Business People", which is a group of young, mixed race and sex professionals demonstrating more enthusiasm in a business meeting than would normally be expected. There are also healthy numbers of "Attractive dark-haired woman with perfect skin and makeup". Sets such as these are available in every imaginable combination of ethnicity, hair and eye color, makeup or natural, and range from prudish to mildly titillating. Women outnumber men about ten to one in these sets, which is indicative of something.

Today, in the utterly non-titillating line, I received an offer for fourteen photos of a "Happy girl in a pink dress with balloons is standing on the background of the waterfront". Indeed, there is a blonde woman, whom I would consider to beyond the age of "girl", being in her late twenties, wearing a long pink dress and standing on large rocks that look like a breakwater jutting out into the ocean. She has long hair, is wearing what appears to be a tiara, although I suspect that it is a hairband of some kind, and she has a bundle of about a dozen balloons of the same color as her dress. The balloons are not inflated with helium, so in a couple of the pictures, she is holding them above her head. In all but one of the pictures, she has a rather vacuous smile, with the exception being one in which she is blowing a kiss. There is no conceivable erotic value and with the possible exception of anti-psychotic drugs, there is no possible product that you could imagine using these to sell. Although well-exposed, they have no artistic merit and it's really not possible to think of any potential use for them.

This is a perfect example of a product without an audience. I am almost tempted to buy the set to use in a presentation on building a product without doing customer research. I believe that it falls within 'fair use' to show you a tiny version of one of the photos, just to provide context.

Should you think of a use for this set, I'd love to hear it. Also, suggestions as to how she got out onto those rocks in that dress would also be appreciated.

Great Moments in Product Design

So, on Wednesday, Aphrodite and I were invited to the elementary school where our kids had gone to speak to the students about our careers as engineers. These were pre-kindergarten through fifth-grade students, fairly evenly divided.

Aphrodite, being who she is, gave an excellent talk on Test Engineering, with photos and videos. Me, being me, did a design exercise on how to build a bug catcher. The kids were good and had lots of good ideas (way too many, but that's typical of adult design exercises, too).

One boy, probably in kindergarten, proceeded to give me the single best design that I'll ever hear. He politely raised his hand and waited until he was called upon. When it was his turn to speak, he very precisely described how, if you wish to catch spiders, you need a bowl with steep sides about this high (using his fingers to indicate about an inch). You set this on the floor and then you place a dead hand in the middle and all the spiders will come and be trapped in the bowl.

A dead hand?

Yes. Spiders are really attracted to dead hands.

Several other students solemnly agreed that dead hands worked especially well for spiders, His teacher was frantically trying not to laugh out loud. I looked at him as he stood seriously looking back at me, waiting for feedback, and said, "I'll be sure to get the test engineers working on that, but I think that we may have trouble getting it past Product Compliance and the Branding departments."

He nodded knowingly and we continued the exercise.

I've Wondered About That, Myself

When in Doubt, Order a Pizza

Courtesy of the Washington Post, we have another Good Guy™

After Hurricane Matthew scraped the Florida coast, a Nebraska man worried about his 87-year-old grandmother. Her phone was out and the emergency services were overwhelmed, so there was no one to check on her. Until he had a stroke of genius.

He called her local Papa John's Pizza and had them deliver a pepperoni pizza. On the part of the order where special instructions go, (like, don't try to pet the dog) he asked that the delivery person call him when he dropped off the pizza. The delivery guy did so and grandma was found to be safe and sound, although living in the dark and without communications.

So, here's a Good Guy award for Palm Coast Papa John's Pizza and another for a thoughtful (and clear-thinking) grandson.

It's Going to Be One of Those Days

A gnat just flew into my coffee cup and drowned.

I'm sure that there are both an emoji and a German word for this, but I don't know either.

Back to the Amazon

When I began to revive this blog, I never expected that the most popular entries would be Amazon's butchery of my interests. Still, these are the most viewed, according to Google, so I'll keep doing them. In the near future, I'll throw in Netflix, which makes Amazon look positively brilliant. The latest couple of checks of Amazon recommendations have actually produced far too many bloopers for a single blog entry, so this will be spread out over the next week or so. Since it's the gift that keeps on giving, I can't help but hope that there may be even more goodies waiting.

We'll start out with some self-help books. I'm always trying to lose weight and get into better shape. Having met remote members of my family tree, I know that I resemble the Lithuanian side of my heritage, but I'm about to give it up on blaming genes and simply call it a result of incompetent Intelligent Design:

Just to be sure that I wasn't missing anything, I expanded the list. Nope, this time Amazon has completely wandered off the feedlot and is now meandering at random. I do recommend the Don Norman book as an excellent introduction into product design. It's a fun read.

Sticking with our polka dot theme, it might be interesting to see what young adults are reading these days. I can remember a summer of Herman Hesse when I was thirteen, so almost anything is possible. Having said that, Norwegian branding design was still unexpected.

I better expand this list, too. Just to see what's back there:

A J.K. Rowling short story collection—understandable and certainly more appropriate. One Hundred Years of Solitude and a supporting trivia book? I can dig it. A little sophisticated (says the kid who was reading Hesse at thirteen), but magical realism is a great literary style and after this, the quality of the reader's school essays is bound to improve (although her or his grades may not).

But what's that lurking on the very edge? Virginia Woolf? To the Lighthouse?

I confess to never having read Woolf. Mark it down as one of my many character faults. The problem is that I never felt the need for a primer on how to be an angst-ridden adolescent. I had to read the reviews and the Wikipedia summary to get an idea of what it might be about. At this point, I think that I'll spare any teenagers for whom I might feel the need to buy a book from both Woolf and Hesse. Gabriel García Márquez seems to be a much better choice, or maybe a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces. I'll pass on the Rowling, too. Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes would both be better reads.

Wow. Totally heavy. Let's close this with a couple of my favorite insights on the part of Amazon. First, what I can only presume is an ethical guide to cloning:

Then, when I went back a week later, I found that it had been replaced by an eighteenth century dialogue on the existence of God:

I can only imagine the conversation in the operating room.

"Sarah, do you think that this is a metastasized region or a separate tumor?"

"John, a very small part of this great system, during a very short time, is very imperfectly discovered to us; and do we thence pronounce decisively concerning the origin of the whole?"

"I see your point, but the question is whether we should excise the whole bowel or just this region."

"You alone, or almost alone, disturb this general harmony. You start abstruse doubts, cavils, and objections: You ask me, what is the cause of this cause? I know not; I care not; that concerns not me."

"You know, Sarah, you're right. This guy's a walking corpse anyway. Let's cut the whole thing out, sew him up, and we can still catch half-price appetizers down at TGIFridays."

"But for my part, whenever I find myself disposed to mirth and amusement, I shall certainly choose my entertainment of a less perplexing and abstruse nature. A comedy, a novel, or at most a history, seems a more natural recreation than such metaphysical subtleties and abstractions. Or, barring that, an order of fried green beans and a Long Island iced tea would go down right fine."

A Sound of Thunder

This would be a spectacularly bad month to announce that you've invented a time machine. I can imagine angry crowds with pitchforks and torches outside the laboratory. Take care not to step on any butterflies.

Just in case.

Profiles in Courage

This blog isn't intended to discuss politics as such. I have strong opinions on the topic, but I don't particularly want to use this platform to share them. There are plenty of other good news sites, blogs, and miscellaneous sources for news and views.

Having said that, this blog is called Broken Symmetry, and one example of broken symmetry is false equivalence: where two wrongs (or rights) are treated equally, despite their disproportionate natures. Another sad, but real, example of broken symmetry is the lack of courage displayed by individuals, corporations and other organizations, and governments on things that matter, while they trumpet their trivial stands against meaningless threats.

I suppose that this is the counterpoint to the "Good Guys" concept that I introduced recently.

So, this presidential campaign season has demonstrated many examples of courage and cowardice. In several cases, I will admit that I was well and truly wrong about an individual or institution. In others, I was unfortunately correct. I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge a few of these, given the rather amazing events of the past couple of days. Please note that I am making no attempt to be fair and/or balanced. I don't call a joystick a multifunction control lever and I don't call a pathetically limp excuse an act of courage. If you disagree with some or all of these, more power to you. I would advise that you can find reading more to your liking elsewhere on the Internet.

This week's award for Best Self-Inflicted Wound by a Corporate Legal Department goes to NBC, which had the Donald Trump sexual assault video tapes and sat on them, because they were afraid of being sued. Finally, a staff member leaked the tapes to The Washington Post, who immediately verified their reality and then published them. What's genuinely amazing is that even I know that a public figure has almost no legal protection from the publication of factual information. Any lawsuit by a candidate for President about a video made while he was the "star" of a reality television show would be laughed out of court. Obviously, the WaPo receives a Good Guy award for its publish and be damned attitude.

On a similar note, the New York Times publication of Donald Trump's state tax returns, showing that he has likely paid little or no income taxes for many years is noteworthy only compared to the pathetic television "news" networks. The Times, and many other newspapers, have long and bold histories of breaking these kinds of stories. This is a reason to keep paying for them: even in the era of instant Internet information, there is still a place for genuine journalism.

We have some individual Good Guys, as well:

• Mitt Romney—This is one that I feel strongly about. I underestimated the caliber of the man when he ran for President. I would like to apologize for that. I don't agree with his politics, but I give him full credit for integrity.
• George H.W. Bush—I have always believed George the First to be one of the most intelligent men to hold the office of the President of the United States. There were times when he did not live up to the standards of a good guy, such as when he became Reagan's running mate after calling him out for "Voodoo Economics", but he has redeemed himself repeatedly this campaign season
• Khizr and Ghazala Khan, Alicia Machado, Gonzalo P. Curiel, and Elizabeth Beck—All private citizens who displayed dignity and courage when attacked by publicly attacked by Trump. (Yes, Curiel is a judge and technically not a private citizen, but he had done nothing to deserve the attack, except his job.)
• The long list of journalists and columnists who have kept reporting on Trump, despite threats, insults, and general malice from the man.

The list of individual Bad Guys is too long for a blog entry, but there are some who deserve special mention. With luck, history will piss on all of them:

• John McCain—Is being reelected to the Senate when you are eighty years old really more important than your personal pride and integrity?
• Bob Dole—I listened on NPR as Dole was interviewed and said that despite the fact that Trump was not qualified to be President, Dole would support him anyway, because he (Dole) was a lifelong Republican and you don't turn your back on that. I literally yelled at the radio that Dole was a lifelong American, a war hero who sacrificed his arm for his country, and a genuine patriot and that those things seemed a hell of a lot more important than belonging to a club for old, rich, white men.
• Paul Ryan—Any hope that he had of rising above the title of "weasel" has been thrown away.
• Ted Cruz—Donald Trump insulted him and his family, yet he continues his endorsement. I can't speak for his hands, but he has marshmallows for cajones.
• The long list of television "news" people who have kept kowtowing to Trump, despite all evidence indicating that he is Nixon's and Agnew's political love child.

Literalature

Have you ever seen a title and said to yourself, "I wonder what that's all about?"

If you read this blog, I know you have.

The editors of the Wyoming Legacy Love Inspired Historical novel series apparently worried mightily about confusing their readers with fancy titles that include metaphors and allusions. As I was walking through Half Price Books, I came across the novel seen below, held in your author's massive mitt. The first thing that you'll notice is the title: The Wrangler's Inconvenient Wife. Come on, Darling, tell me how you really feel about me.

Oh, wait! There's the subtitle: She's the wife he never wanted.

Ouch.

I do like the cover photo, which has been nicely hit with a very light Photoshop painting plug-in. Of course, it's a little tough to tell if that's the wife or the reason that the wife is inconvenient. The horses seem equally fond of each other.

Being an inconvenient spouse in the back country was an unhealthy way of life. People tended to die of various infectious diseases back then and once buried, disinterring them wasn't generally considered a good idea.

Despite the almost overwhelming temptation to spend a dollar and actually read the thing, I resisted.

On the same trip, I saw that someone had taken the display copy of The Conan Compendium and had left a tossed-aside copy of Crime and Punishment on the pile. Sorry, Vertikles, but it's Robert E. Howard 1, Fyodor Dostoevsky 0.

VIPDUCK

Man, two long, serious postings. It's time for a break. Here's an example of random brilliance. That's when you're walking along and you see something totally cool that has no business being there.

Call Me Ishmael

Your humble author, when he is not producing these musings or crafting artifacts for the gods, is crafting artifacts for a large multi-national corporation. My artificing can best be described as legendary, in that it is best documented through lore and not through any discernible historical record. Nevertheless, a rather staggering number of companies have been willing to trade good coin for my efforts over the years, which demonstrates that having a good bard to sing one's praises is often the best ally a person can have. This, in turn, goes a long way toward explaining why I spend time honing my rhetoric in this forum.

Three of the aforementioned companies have been members of the fifty largest companies on Earth, while some of the others were more of a size where we not only knew the names of our colleagues' most significant others, but spawn and pets, as well. As the years have passed, I have learned that among the primary differences between one end of the corporate spectrum of sizes and the other is that in a small company there is a general honesty, whereas as the company grows ever larger, that honesty becomes overwhelmed by paranoia, arrogance, and ambition. These characteristics become more pronounced as you move closer to the seat of power. (For proof of this, please feel free to peruse the mythology of any culture. You'll note that gods and kings schemed against each other constantly, usually to the detriment of the mortals who dwelt below. The best things in life never change.)

I had this explained to me once by an organizational psychologist who had been brought in to train the mid-grade peons in how to deal with the perpetual in-fighting of the mighty. She pointed out that when forming groups, people tend to select those most like themselves. This is a phenomena that I had observed early in my academic career, when I was employed as a photographer of fraternity and sorority parties. After a very short period of observation, it became possible to identify which house a particular female had pledged merely by noting hair color and style, and the nature of her garb.

The behaviorist went on to note that the people who are successful in large organizations are paranoid, arrogant, and ambitious, as a rule. As they begin their climbs up their particular Olympus, they look for minions who are also paranoid, arrogant, and ambitious, because they understand the motivations of those individuals. Altruists and those who are open-minded regarding the intentions of others are scary people who behave in random and mysterious ways. And so power is concentrated on one end of the spectrum of collaboration, plunging exponentially to an asymptote only microscopically above zero for those who are actually willing to cooperate with their fellow man (or woman).

All of this is prelude to the events of the day, when there was the ritual known as a reorganization. Since the particular vessel on which I have shipped had grown fat and happy during the good times, the time had come for a reckoning. In addition to the random shuffling of deck chairs, a number of them were to be tossed overboard, in order to raise the freeboard. If this inspires thoughts of ship's officers walking along the promenade and examining each chair for its condition and suitability, I congratulate you on your naïvité and encourage you to quickly close this page and move on to some other activity, such as browsing the Garfield archives.

No, while determining the fate of the chairs on their merits may seem both logical and fair, it suffers from the unfortunate element of offering an opportunity for legal action by those left behind in the wake. Thus, with the courage that only Human Resources can muster, the decision whether or not any individual would stay or go was determined solely by seniority with the company. Thus, your narrator was spared while others, whom I freely admit could add more to the success of this particular organization, were cast off. My opinions on this process were not solicited in advance, nor would the proposed solution of a game of "Duck, Duck, Goose" have been accepted, despite being both less arbitrary and more fun.

What moves this from tragedy into farce (Damn, where is that chorus when they are needed?) is that the Captain of our ship, the Chairman of the Freeboard, so to speak (this will teach me to choose my metaphors with more care, if I wish to avoid mixing them), is possessed with an Ahab-like drive to pursue world-class engagement by his employees. This particular cetacean can be identified by the scores on particular questions in the biennial employee surveys.

Now, much to our Ahab's dismay, (Did you note how smoothly I moved from one unsustainable metaphor to another? You don't learn that in Freshman English in this day and age.) the employee engagement had not only been merely continental-class lately, but it had fallen considerably in the previous two surveys. This led to a letter from the Captain to the employees that came as close to the proverbial "the beatings will increase until morale improves" as any document that I have ever seen in real life.

The particular aspects of the survey whereby our Pequod had fouled its lines the worst were in communications and in dealing fairly with over- and under-achievers. I'd quote the figures here, but oddly, when we asked if we could have a copy of the results, which were being presented to us, we were told that there were instructions that they were not to be distributed. Identifying this as a potential example of the communications issue accomplished nothing more than to earn the enmity of the speaker.

Now, if I were a cynical man,
...
...
...

Excuse me, I had to go and get a glass of water after almost choking on that line.

If I were to express my cynicism openly, I might point out that the method used to select which chairs would become jetsam^[1] and which would remain on board the vessel might do wonders for eliminating those who want management to be more aggressive about separating out non-performers. On the other hand, the fact that the mechanism was never explained outright, but had to be inferred from muttered conversations in which the various parties tried to identify the distinguishing characteristics that led to the various outcomes may indicate that the communications line may still be wrapped around Ahab's leg in two years when the next harpoon is hurled.

Now, if you will excuse me, I shall retire to consume an appropriate elixir. Since Summer has finally departed these parts and the evening is cool and dry, I cannot in good conscience consume a Tonya Harding. Instead, to honor my metaphorical meandering, I shall have a whale of a rum and Coke.

Admit it. The two of you who actually have read^[2] Moby Dick were waiting for a Starbucks joke.

^[1] Jetsam is material intentionally thrown overboard. Flotsam is material from a shipwreck or other incident. There are legal differences between the two, which is why one refers to "flotsam and jetsam". I mention this only to point out to fair Aglaea why her father kicked her ass on the vocabulary test.

^[2] Three times, thank you very much. Including the chapters on whale anatomy. I happen to think that it is one of the great reading books of literature.

A Foolish Consistency

Somewhere in the multiverse, that is the name of this blog. It was my first alternative and I spent a lot of time deciding between the two. Perhaps I chose wrong. That phrase comes from an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, entitled Self-Reliance. The essay, which I highly recommend, is a diatribe against conformance. It was written by a man who felt that the common standards had become both a strait-jacket on imagination and independence, and a licence to behave in a boorish and self-centered manner.

The whole paragraph is never quoted. In fact, the entire sentence itself is almost never found intact. This is a shame, as it is a bit of writing that we could well use in this year, as people are urged to vote for party unity against their own interests and the interests of the common good. (And I say that of all parties, and not just those in the United States of America.) I cite it here, so that you can see what Emerson meant.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.— 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' —Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

I have a reputation at work for ignoring awards. Those that I have been given sit abandoned upon shelves in Human Resources and my supervisors' offices until they finally heed my response to their calls to claim them and dispose of them in some way or another. I don't attend ceremonies and I did not bother to collect my high school or college diplomas. I have no need for these things. I can understand that others value them and collect them like treasure, but that does not affect me one way or the other. I have no disdain for those for whom these awards have merit, but at the same time, I give them no credit. If I have no knowledge of the accomplishment, I have no knowledge of the value of the award, while on the other hand, if I know the accomplishment, the award adds nothing to my appreciation of the effort or the level of achievement. Emerson spoke of this, as well:

Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

I choose to interrupt the usual meaningless ramblings presented in this blog to cite Emerson and to urge you to read Self-Reliance because I can see that in near future some of my posts will need to refer to my beliefs, for the sake of understanding. These beliefs are incoherent and inconsistent. They make no sense to anyone but me, because I am the only one who has to live by them. I hold no others to the tenets of my belief system, just as I accept no binding from the beliefs of others.

My beliefs change through time. This does not make them unique; anyone who claims that their beliefs are fixed and unchanging is ignorant, arrogant, or foolish beyond imagination. They are also wrong, but stand too close to the painting to see the image. All they see is the brush strokes and pigment, and they fail to see how they change through the day as the light moves from window to window and as the fire flickers in the night.

I hold no belief in the divine, whether a universal God who created everything in the beginning, but who does not interfere in day-to-day matters, or in a personal God who answers prayers from individuals and who requires obsequence and adoration. To me, God is synonymous with "I don't know."

"In the beginning, there was God and God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was." This is the equivalent to me to the sentence, "I don't know what there was before there was a universe, nor do I know what caused the universe to appear, but it did." After that, I'd argue that there is much more empirical evidence for how we got to this point for those who aren't big believers in continuous divine intervention. When I say that I'd argue that point, I'm speaking metaphorically. I don't try to convert people and I don't tolerate those who try to convert me. Enough studies have been done to show that you can't argue someone out of a belief system and attempting to do so only makes her more determined to believe.

So what do I believe? Today at least, I believe in the elder gods, both good and evil, who battled throughout time, raising mountains and crushing them flat again. Only today, these gods no longer deal with furious thunder, howling winds, and raging seas. Instead, they have taken up new roles as gods of technology, who delight in tormenting those who do not properly serve them. I believe in titans who dwell in plumbing, causing the mysterious need to fine-tune the settings for the shower each morning and who cause the drain to clog fifteen minutes before a houseful of guests arrive. I believe in sprites who cause doorknobs to fall off when you are in a hurry to leave, who can kill a light bulb in the one fixture that you need to work, and who can divert a cloud burst a few hundred meters to where you left your windows rolled down.

What happens when we die? Some would say God. I say that I don't know. But despite that, I believe in karma; both the variety that passes through eternity, chasing you through lifetimes; and the kind that opens up a parking spot right when you need it after that week when you left particularly good tips for all of the waiters and waitresses, including the one who brought the wrong plate, but who apologized and rushed the right order through the kitchen.

I believe that no person is really gone until the last person whose life he affected no longer remembers him. I believe that we are here to do good things. Spectacular things. To create art. To advance science. To help those around us. And to be kind to each other.

Because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

I do not believe that the unjust, the cruel, the foul, and the evil are punished, unless we rise up and punish them. I do not believe in retribution in the afterlife. We need to get those bastards here and now. At the same time, I do not believe that goodness will be rewarded after death. If someone does something good, reward them now. Or better yet, go out and do three good things of your own, instead. You'll leave the world a better place and that works toward the goal that the good people have.

I do not believe in bigotry of any kind. Hatred of a whole class of people is the worst intellectual laziness. If you're going to hate someone, hate them one at a time for a specific reason. The best and most common reason that I have found is because they are an asshole. That is a suitable reason to hate someone. Being an asshole is a choice and it's perfectly fine to hate someone because of a choice that they made. The color of a person's skin, her nationality, his sexual orientation, mental and/or physical handicaps, and economic status are not choices. They came as part of the original equipment and unless a lot of expense has been put into aftermarket components, a person is pretty much stuck with the model that he got at birth.

What about religion? It's clearly a choice. Is it alright to hate someone because of their religion?

For this, I'll point you back to Ralph Waldo Emerson. A person, regardless of which religion they espouse, who works to bring good to the world, who takes the parts of his religion that improves the human condition; the parts about loving one's neighbor, about caring for the stranger, about tending to the Earth; that is a good person who makes good choices and you have no right to hate him for his beliefs. On the other hand, the person who picks out the poisonous threads from the cloth of her religion and who uses them to spew bile at those who are different and who don't have the same religion, who uses her life to do evil to others and to the world; regardless of the name of the religion she professes, she is a blazing asshole and you have not merely the right, but the responsibility to do everything in your power to crush her and everything that she believes in.

And so maybe the two names are interchangeable: viewing the world as symmetric, with good and evil balancing each other, with tolerance and hatred as equals, with independent thought and mindless devotion both considered virtuous is a foolish consistency, and it is only by breaking that symmetry that we can be all that we are meant to be.

The First Rule of Relationships

More Amazon Goodness

So, I had an Amazon seller cancel an order on me without wasting time letting me know. Groovy. Now I can return the parts that I ordered to go with the cancelled equipment.

In exchange, Amazon continues to amaze with suggestions. The other day, it offered up Paradise Lost as a "Children's Book." Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get a screen shot of that, because it was particularly memorable. If I had to think of a way to turn a kid away from reading, I'd be hard pressed to think of a better choice.

Today's suggestions aren't as good, but there are a few worth noting. First of all, in the reference department, we have that fire safety manual:

Next is Amazon demonstrating that all electromagnetic waves should be treated equally, regardless of frequency:

If you happen to be a particularly funny photographer, you'll definitely want a copy:

I have nothing to add that can improve upon this:

When my kids were little, we occasionally had a bath bomb. I might pick these up for nostalgia's sake:

I suspect that Amazon is trying to tell me something about being particularly dim:

I've been trying to avoid current events lately, but these seem to be taking it a bit too far:

In order to be prepared if your Tesla runs out of power four inches from the outlet:

Once again, I can literally think of nothing that would add to the spectacular nature of this selection. There are at least three completely different forms of humor on display here:

While I suppose that asphyxiation could be used to kill wild game, how do you get a live trout into a vacuum freezer bag, let alone a deer?

If you ignore the title, the subtitles are a pretty good description of teenagers, given my experience at raising two of them:

Good Guys

Aphrodite and I often exchange news stories about "the good guys". These are the people, companies, teams, etc. that make the world more livable simply by doing a little bit more than is absolutely necessary. You've seen the stories: athletes who spend time at children's hospitals, police officers who pay for the baby formula that a mother was trying to shoplift, companies who do things that they don't have to do, simply because it's the right thing.

I'm going to include occasional good guy stories, when they're sufficiently interesting/amusing/amazing, because they are part of the symmetry of the multiverse. For every Donald J. Trump, there is a Jill Nobody, who goes out of her way to make the world a less hateful, less bitter, less awful place.

Today's good guys are Topps, the baseball card and bubble gum company.

Back in 1957, they held a contest where kids who sent in a special card, plus three gum labels, and predictions for the scores of two baseball games to be played on 19 July 1957, could win a new baseball glove, if they got the scores right. The material mentioned had to be received by 11 July to be eligible. The company didn't specify the year, though.

Enter Darwin Day, age 65, whose brother died of cancer. Mr. Day, recognizing the inconvenience that his brother's family was going through as they dealt with a lifetime of flotsam and jetsam, decided to clean up his own mess before departing this mortal coil. Eventually, he found three binders of baseball cards from 1956, 1957, and 1958. Included among the cards was one of the special contest cards. Since he and his brother had enjoyed collecting the cards so much and since his brother was a practical joker, Mr. Day decided in his brother's honor to enter the contest.

Not surprisingly, picking the correct scores of 59-year-old baseball games was easy and Mr. Day sent the required materials to Topps.

Tony Jacobs, Vice President of Topps in charge of confectionery (not a bad job, if you can get it), received the package and being a stand-up guy who runs a stand-up company, decided to honor the terms of the contest as written.

Mr. Day is now the proud owner of a brand-new baseball glove and Topps and Mr. Jacobs have the honor of joining the ranks of the good guys.

This story is courtesy of the New York Times.

Old Age and Treachery

A while back, I read a nice little article written by a B-52 radar navigator. His plane and three others were attending one of the big training exercises. They had been flying for about a week under extremely severe restrictions — ingress at 15,000' from the West, egress at 18,000' to the North, no jammers, etc. Needless to say, the other participants were picking them out of the sky left and right.

On the night before the last exercise, which was to be a simulated nuclear attack, the bomber squadron commander walked into the office of the guy who was running the exercise and said that the BUFFs weren't going to fly the next day. Since his people weren't getting anything out of the exercise except for morale bruises, he didn't see the point in racking up airframe hours. After a heated debate, the exercise manager agreed that the bombers could fly their own attack the next day — no restrictions.

The author and the other radar navigators spent the whole night working out the attack plan.

The next day the B-52s came into the target region from four directions at altitudes ranging from 250 to 500 feet at full throttle with every electronic countermeasure cranked to eleven. They criss-crossed over the target at less than 200 feet altitude in what's called a lay-down attack, where the bombs are intended to soft-land to allow the bomber a chance to depart before special relativity is experimentally proven once again. The total time over target was less than two minutes and none of the SAM sites even got a lock on them. One defender fired a (simulated) missile, but it was during the egress phase, was a wild shot with no chance to hit, and left the firing plane directly over ground zero at the moment when the bombs would have gone off. An F-18 was "shot down" when he obliviously flew directly behind one of the bombers.

The author stated that they returned to base and had just begun the debriefing when the general in charge of the defense team literally kicked the door open and started screaming. The author went on to say that it was exactly like the scene from "The Dirty Dozen". The offended general was red-faced and ranting about how the bombers had cheated and about how their crews' mothers and fathers had never known each other's last names. All in all, a supremely satisfying moment, from the report.

Of interest is the fact that all of the fighter pilots were amazed by the abilities of the B-52s. The pilot who had been shot down had no idea that he was anywhere near the bomber, let alone in its tail cone. The pilot who had made the wild shot only noticed the plane because it was flying so low that the shadow was completely black against the ground.

As an aside, the sight of four B-52s coming in at full throttle from all different directions at 200 feet must have been pretty damn impressive, if not to say deafening. When we lived in Austin, there was an annual airshow at Bergstrom Air Force Base. Since it was an old SAC base, there were always a couple of B-52s, which were enormously popular for the amount of shade they produced. They would always make a low pass at about 500' and it was one of the highlights of the show to have your chest rumble.

What Makes Nascar the True American Sport

Okay, so your former boss has managed to screw you one last time, long after you've stopped working for him. Only Nascar gives you a microphone and lets you tell a national audience the following:

 "It's just disappointing that you've got somebody old like that's retiring -- should be retired the way he drives -- it's just ridiculous. I only hit him in Turn 1 when he cut across my nose, so I don't think there was any reason other than him just being bipolar and having anger issues. Google Tony Stewart. You'll see all kinds of things he's done. Look it up on YouTube and everything else. He's quite the guy."

By the way, just like at work, here's what your ex-boss left around the office:

Amazon's Algorithms Are Clear, Now

So, Amazon decided that my interests lay in Religion and Spirituality books, a topic of which the best that can be said is that my reading tends to the highly esoteric. If the recommended books had involved the various aboriginal religions, seventeenth-century religious schisms in Islam, or medieval Lithuanian paganism, I would have been impressed and might have perused the selection.

Instead, it consisted almost entirely of pop theology, Christian leadership, and "The Men Who Stare at Goats" (to quote the great Dave Barry: I am not making this up). Since I don't read these books (although I might read "The Men Who Stare at Goats", if I ever find the time), I couldn't begin to guess why Amazon decided to recommend them. Fortunately, I can click a link and find out:

Wow! Three Vonnegut novels, Huxley's classic, a novel of the Franklin Expedition of 1845, and Grant's Memoirs. If I saw these on your bookshelf, I'd come up with a very different list of suggestions. Something regarding the Elder Gods might be appropriate, or more likely, something from another shelf in the library. (I do actually own and have read all of these books, by the way.)

Amazon is also incorrect in that my hobby is not voyeurism. I live in a neighborhood filled with middle-aged bodies living middle-class lives. Frankly, my neighbors are neither attractive or interesting enough to justify peering through their windows, making this suggestion irrelevant:

Why Broken Symmetry?

Symmetry is one of the most fundamental concepts in science, philosophy, and art. In principle, it represents an ideal state of balance and potentiation, where possibilities remain open and equal. In reality, symmetry is elegant, but dull. I chose the name Broken Symmetry for my blog because it reflects a crossroads where my interests meet.

As a physicist, I know that symmetry is behind many of the most beautifully brilliant theories, but that nasty experimentalists have a habit of performing experiments that disclose cracks in these theories and that these violations of symmetry are the likely cause of the universe consisting of matter, rather than equal quantities of matter and antimatter, annihilating each other to nothing.

In chemistry, most organic molecules have chirality: that is to say, they are right-handed or left-handed. While most synthetic processes produce equal quantities of each, biological processes tend to be very specific, producing (and consuming) left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars. As we search for life on other worlds, one tool that will be used is looking at these compounds to see if they show a preference for one hand or the other. If they do, it will be strong evidence of biological function.

As an artist, I know that symmetry is graceful and pleasing to the senses, but that asymmetry causes tension that makes art exciting and inspiring.

Something as common as a face may seem symmetric, but virtually no one's is. Psychologically, more symmetric faces are generally viewed as more attractive, but as these photos show, even when viewing a random person, the natural face appears more interesting than do either of the two faces created by mirroring one half onto the other:

Even a face generally considered to be beautiful looks strange and uninviting when made symmetric:

So this blog is all about the interesting and exciting world that comes when things are not in balance. When good and evil aren't equivalent, when truth and lies don't cancel out, and when you discover that two left gloves aren't the same as a pair.

I believe in balance. I'm just opposed to it. This is the place where chaos begins.

New Look

Well, I like it better.

The background image is mine. If you like it, let me know and I'll send you a copy at whatever resolution that you want.

The Cure for the Dog Days of August

Years ago, on a particularly sultry summer evening, when thoughts of Tennessee Williams plays came to mind, the need to find an appropriate elixir that would simultaneously penetrate the steamy heat of the evening and the similarly sodden nature of my mood became apparent. A search of the cabinets disclosed that all reasonable options had long since been depleted, leaving only a bottle of cheap vodka, bought for the manufacture of pie crust (yes, a properly flaky pie crust is best prepared using vodka), and a bottle of Fresca, the presence of which was inexplicable, but fortuitous.

Both of these were immediately dispatched to the freezer, where they chilled until the vodka poured like maple syrup in November and the Fresca spontaneously turned to slush when the lid was opened and the pressure relieved. The two were titrated together in a large glass that had also spent time in the freezer until the taste of one pretty much counter-balanced the taste of the other. Since Fresca is not known for its subtlety, this resulted in a particularly potent beverage with all the nuance of a Donald Trump policy speech.

When consumed while watching heat lightning dance across the night sky, it had precisely the desired effect upon mind and body.

Later, when I described the concoction to the deeply insightful Tentakles, I lamented that it was in need of a name. He immediately and brilliantly responded by calling it a Tanya Harding, which perfectly captured the essence of the drink: trailer trash materials, dubious taste, a frigid nature, and the ability to knock the knees out from under you.

Depending upon the precise nature of the funk which is upon you, it is best enjoyed while listening to either Delta blues, Johnny Cash's American IV, V, and VI albums, or Zydeco. In the latter case, an appropriate dinner should be arranged and the experience shared. The other two are best enjoyed alone.

Sometimes in the Night

Charles Schultz understood.

More Amazon Fails

I'm not certain whether sunken WWII aircraft carriers qualify as Craft, Hobby, or Home, but any of the alternatives are a tad morbid:

At this point, I feel the need to mention that I don't build ship models and never have, either indoors or outdoors:

Vacuum sealing equipment seems to be putting the cart before the horse when it comes to hunting gear:

If you take your Tesla to Europe:

Wedding rings have been popping up for more than a month now and I'm not quite sure what to make of it. I've been married for more than thirty-two years.

I certainly can't add anything to this:

Unless this is a graduate text on using analytics for Gerrymandering, I can't imagine the connection:

It may come as surprise to you, but I can't remember the last time that an Amazon recommendation was of any use to me.