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books / friends / history / photo / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
18
Jan 17

Stuff in the air, and in my office

I found this book last weekend:

It was published in 1958 and seems to be aimed at giving a reasonable historical re-telling and description to teens. The chapters have great line art:

That’s a paratrooper, which was pretty much the moment I decided to take pictures to send to our friend Adam, who is a modern paratrooper, because I thought he’d appreciate the biplane:

But it was this one he really liked, and how could you not? Look at his left hand:

Just another day at the office, oh, and do remember your briefcase. Here’s an almost contemporaneous accounting of Captain Sergei Mienov:

He spent almost a year in the United States. On his way back to Russia he passed a few days in Paris. He was full of enthusiasm for what he had seen in the development of air technique. Although Russia was not yet officially recognized, Mienov had been courteously received. He had visited airplane factories, airdromes and training schools. He praised highly the quality of American parachutes and the instruction American pilots received in their use. He had made his first parachute jump here.

[…]

When Mienov submitted the report of his US observations to Air Chief Alksnis, he mentioned the wide interest which parachute jumping could arouse. He suggested that the interest of the Soviet population, and particularly the young, could be turned toward the development of air power by this type of propaganda. Alksnis passed the comment on to the Politburo. Stalin agreed that it was a good idea.

And so parachuting became wildly popular in the Soviet Union.

Until the purges. And then the Germans did it better and then the Americans did it more. And that’s the story of how one of the more crazy ideas a person could do as a spectator sport became one of the craziest things people would do in military service. How the book wound up where I found it remains a mystery.

Here’s Adam now, this is his jump into Ste. Mere-Eglise, Normandy, France, commemorating the 70th anniversary of D-Day:

He took a miniature American flag on the jump with him and sent it to me as a keepsake, which super cool. That’s in my office now.

So is this stuff:

We are about to surplus a bunch of old equipment. The university has a surplus process for its eight campuses and some things of a certain value must be processed in a certain way and that’s where I am. More specifically, that picture is opposite of where I am, in my office, which is now filled.

Because it made more sense to bring this stuff out of storage, start (and hopefully complete) the paperwork process and then wait on the nice fellows from the Surplus store to come over and pick it up. So I have huge bundles of television cabling, a half dozen old cameras, a switcher, various accesorries and a chest-high stack of old engineering components in my office. If anyone wants to come push buttons, now is the time.

As a bonus, many of the buttons sound different.

Monday / photo / running / video — Comments Off
16
Jan 17

Oh the things I could tell you

I could tell you about the shuttle drivers we had this weekend. (They were each great in their own ways. The first because she was enthusiastic and opinionated and talkative and honey this and darlin’ that. And the second because he was waiting just for us and took us directly to the car and then told us which way to go to avoid the new toll on the bridge.) I could tell you about the six-and-a-half miles I ran today in the fog. (It was slow and I’m still not a very good runner.) I could tell you about one book I just finished and another I started. (One was fiction, the rare piece of the genre I read and, thus, a real guilty pleasure. The other is a historical collection, and we’ll get into it at a later date.) I could talk about a lot of things, I suppose.

But I have a picture of The Yankee with a horse:

And we also met a donkey this weekend:

That was at the ranch, which I’ll tell you a bit about tomorrow. But, first, there is a video of the sky:

And, tomorrow, we’ll talk about a historic farm.

movies / running / site / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
11
Jan 17

Notions of time

I was going to write more, but the day got away from me. The days all get away from us from time to time, even as we know the days are always going some way or another. That’s the thing about us, we can seize the day, occasionally, if we are so inclined. But we can never grab the day and hold onto it. Not for very long anyway. I assume this has something to do with how our brains perceive time. We’re flowing through it, or it is flowing around us or some thing or another and the net you are holding isn’t woven with small enough mesh. Or some such.

But, hey! I did entirely rework a page on the site you’ll never see! And I found two or three things there that I need to fix. It is an administrative thing and you don’t care at all. I might not, either, but I started it long ago for reasons that probably didn’t make much sense then and probably mean less now. But I have it under control. For a time.

Also, I have added new images to the top and bottoms of the blog, here. As you might have noticed those are rotating images, built with a bit of code that offers the viewer a random image based on numerical sequence. Presently there are 81 headers and 81 footers. They all have varying heights and they are all 900 pixels wide. So I’m staying with this format for a long time, I suppose. I’ve been with this format for a good long while, as well.

I’ve been watching HBO-produced biopics. There was an Lyndon Johnson movie based on a play and then a two-parter on Winston Churchill that I’ve started. They are both interesting and probably have some accurate anecdotes, and they compress years of civics lessons into two-hour capsules. But try as I might, I see Anthony Mackie and Frank Langella rather than Rev. Martin Luther King and Sen. Richard Russell. Bryan Cranston fills out LBJ pretty well.

But I don’t know that you can really portray LBJ’s in a PG environment. The trailer was really good, I felt, so I watched it. The movie was worth seeing if you like political pieces or period pieces. There were a few really quite powerful moments. I think it captured the best parts of the worst parts of a hard, challenging time.

Stephen Root was J. Edgar Hoover. He is great in everything and there’s one little moment he has that nods at all of the things the cinematic audience we’ve learned about Hoover in recent years. Which makes me think of this in much the same way as we do comic book universes. Except, of course, this was real life. The most fake thing was the makeup they put on poor Josh Lyman to try to turn him into Hubert Humphrey. Should have spent more time on that.

I was half-listening to the Churchill story (turns out this is a BBC-HBO co-produced project) when I heard Lena Headey. Nothing takes you out of the 1940s like an accidental Game of Thrones reference. The problem is that these sorts of films always come off as cartoonish, either in a harsh way or in a soft focus, after school special sort of way:

I’ve been running indoors. Someone left the door open and Canada is cooling all of outdoors so we’ve been at the track. The track is a fine three-lane affair. Eight laps to a mile, only slightly better paces. It is made from special grade painful cement designed to hurt old joints, I think. But it looks like this outside:

So it is a trade off. Eighteen miles in the last couple of days. And now it’ll be a few more days before I set off again. Hopefully outside, where my stride is sometimes better.

The nicest part about being inside, after avoiding hypothermia, I mean, is that my running app can’t cope. For the first three miles or so it things I’m running at a world class pace. I am not running at a world class pace. Also, it thinks this is my course:

That is not my course. My app is just going through a modern art phase. It takes no time at all to imagine that is an aggressive effort.

basketball / Friday / IU / photo / video — Comments Off
6
Jan 17

She shoots …

No, this was not spooky at all this morning:

My office has the three coat hooks behind the door. I’m not sure why there are three. It is a small office — just me in here — and it surely won’t get three-coats-cold. But it has been plenty chilly the last few days. So gloves and a scarf came to work today, as did the heavy leather jacket. And so I used all the hooks. Didn’t want any of them to be left out, lest the mishape a coat, so I used them all and created an unholy beast.

But at least its a warm and inviting one.

Here’s something else a bit weird. In the microwave the cook sensor found something it didn’t like last night:

Oh, sure, we made scissors jokes and Big Lebowski jokes and then this morning I noticed the other corner of the clock display. Clearly the magnetron inside knows something is wrong. You wonder if the cathode or the anode has the bigger problem with cooking toes.

(I had to read a bit about magnetrons to make a joke, so it seemed like there should be some internal conflict there.)

This morning, Allie is securing the perimeter from birds:

The Yankee put a bird feeder right outside that window and it seems to be working for everyone. This is the morning routine now: push a hooman (me) off the bed, enjoy the heated blanket for an extra half hour after he gets up, set up camp guarding the library windows from the offensive birds.

Those birds are a morning problem. They don’t seem to be an issue later in the day.

She does a great job keeping the birds outside.

At work we got to tour the Cuban Center at Assembly Hall. There’s a giant green screen room and some high end broadcasting gear going in. They are building up facilities to run all of the video screens in the athletic facilities from there. The original scoreboards are on display outside of the newly renovated gym. Inside the actual court there are 28 cameras making the new FreeD technology. You’ve seen this, the cameras in certain venues where you can see a key play in the game from a revolving series of angles.

It takes two people to run, a pilot and a navigator, and right now there are 11 people in the world that know how to do this.

Eleven. That’s the legitimate number. And if you want to get into the technology, IU is the only place in the world to do it. Soon, major soccer leagues and Major League Baseball will have this technology in all of their stadiums. And it all started with a small Israeli company, recently purchased by Intel, and the Cuban Center here at IU.

Also, being Indiana, there’s basketball, of course:

By transitive properties The Yankee is now a five-time national champion.

books / Indiana / Thursday / video — Comments Off
5
Jan 17

Without a doubt, irrefutably: snow

Woke up to snow. Watched it, off and on, fall all day. Little flakes, big flakes, sticky flakes. Here’s some shots from the office:

Classes start back next Monday. People are starting to trickle back into the building, the ones that aren’t sick with something anyway. There’s a lot of that going around, which has been the case since before Thanksgiving. This is a new old building, one side of which you see at the beginning of the video, but it might be out to get us, in a biological sense.

But the snow! Isn’t it lovely! Tonight it will actually get cold. Tomorrow we’ll be between 0 and 5 degrees and wearing heavy jackets. But, today, the snow is full of that magic that wipes away doubt and impossibility and dirt and the decay of autumn. Tomorrow, or the next day, the snow will be its own doubt and dirt.

I canceled my XM subscription today. Two representatives tried very hard to upgrade me or reduce my bill or extend me this or offer me that. But I just don’t spend that much time in the car right now and the reception to their transponders is blocked on about 20 percent of my route. The quality has been in decline ever since the Sirius-XM merger, while the price has almost doubled.

I really only listened to the 40s station anyway.

We’re watching West Wing, about 15 years too late.

I feel like, after tonight’s episodes, that we might have already watched the best part of the show. But last night we were here:

Tonight we got here:

And I think I see what everyone likes about the Charlie character. He’s not a bad character, but I think this is about first impressions — and binge watching. When you met him he was that young kid, who thought he was there to be a messenger. And then you learned his backstory, which was heartbreaking and then he was frozen in amber. He’s a humble sort, but never in over his head. And so he became the precocious child of the show, even as a young adult.

It probably hurt him, then, that he’s in a room surrounded by talented, accomplished people and has a paternalistic lead. Now, it is supposed to be four years later. But, really, for us, it has been just a few months. He’s still that boy, still precocious, which isn’t fair to the character. He’s not a boy, we haven’t allowed for that evolution with time.

Some things about binge watching are antithetical to character evolution.

Would you rather we discussed books?

If you like sports, or baseball, or books about sports, or just good research and writing, I’d suggest Bottom of the 33rd. It is about the longest game in the history of organized baseball, a Triple-A struggle in Massachusetts in 1981.

It featured Easter, 40-degree temperatures, Wade Boggs, Cal Ripken Jr., Bruce Hurst and maybe the best hitter you’ve never heard of. The book covers two clubs, owners, communities, broadcasters, managers … it is difficult to imagine how did not get included, so complete is the research.

The writing is incredibly crisp. I don’t read a lot of sports books, but this was written by a New York Times columnist and it shows in his love of the craft.

I’m also about halfway through The Adventure of English. This is the companion book to a BBC series on the language, told as a biography, almost of a living person.

It’s a slog, but its a good read. You have to really want it, I think, really appreciate the power of language to find this book interesting. It’s poetic in places, and it is as dense as a technical manual in others. Halfway through, though, and Shakespeare just retired and the study of the language has moved to the Pilgrims, landing months late and at the wrong spot, and the meeting, either by “chance or through God’s providence,” with Squanto.

Tisquantum, you might recall, helped the pillaging Pilgrims survive that first harsh winter. He was perhaps the only English-speaking native for hundreds of miles around, and arguably the most fluent English speaker on the continent. How fortunate for them that he was in the next village from where they came ashore. Now, the book is moving into the American Colonial period. I just learned that of the 13 colonies only two were derived from native terms. Connecticut, for example, stems from Quinnehtukqut, which the Internet tells me means “beside the long tidal river.”

I think the best part of the book is that, while it is talking about the power of the language to evolve, it stops in 2011. So some of these words from the 2011 additions to the OED may be in there, but surely not all of them, surely not the word “posilutely.”