The Whirled Traveler

I’ve spent a majority of my time on the road now for a decade. After thirty years of living pretty much entirely within the state of Minnesota, I suddenly found myself, in 1994, traveling cross-country for a living, seeing a rich variety of places, often several diverse locales in a single day. It’s travel, and it’s not travel. I love to see new places, but doing it as a job can take a bit of the sheen off of it. My present company flies all around the world, and this is a constant subject among my roommates: is the benefit of seeing the world on someone else’s dime compensation enough for having to see it in such a cursory and disruptive way? After a while, one becomes numbed to the nuanced differences from one place to another. But I used to love these little details.

Most of my career flying has been in the Midwest, and now I’m seeing some further reaches (for me) of the Lower 48. The last couple months have given me some quality time in Ontario, California, San Antonio, Atlanta, Des Moines, Knoxville, Detroit. These places go into my logbook, added to New York and Denver and Miami and Chicago and a zillion other towns of varying sizes in the Midwest. Each visit gives one a chance to cement one’s favorite discoveries from past visits--it’s cool to have a favorite restaurant in a place 1,500 miles from home--and to further extend one’s knowledge of an area. There’s precious little glamour left in being an airline pilot after the implosion of the entire industry post-9/11, but eating dinner five states away from where you had breakfast still offers a shred of interest.

It’s tough not to try and pigeonhole your experiences, to pass a kind of organizational summary judgment about each area, as a means of making sense of places relative to one’s home turf. One begins with a pastiche of innuendo and silly USA Today summaries and movie cliches and works inward from there.

This week I've been in Texas. Land of oil wells and cattle drives and cowboys and slimy politicians. (OK, I made that up.) (But it’s true.) (OK, I made that up too.) If you were abducted and woke up with your corneas missing and your face in a bucket of ice water, even then--with no corneas!--you would never mistake Texas for, say, Wisconsin. Big as several other states combined, it seems like a country unto itself, linked to the rest of the US only by lottery tickets and long-forgotten fragments of grammar. Lots of people speak with a drawl (“He talks like a schoolmarm thru his nose,” they might say of me; “Goddamn Yankee”) and country music is a constant background in grocery stores and elevators and hotel lobbies. Everyone drives a truck. A big one.

Everything in Texas is big. Space is not at a premium, so things are spread out. And Texans love their steaks. Halleluja (I’m doing Atkins, and happy to be here) but a fella never goes hungry in Texas. I remember a few years back in Dallas going out to lunch and ordering a baked potato as a side, and it came in, literally, at two pounds. I’m a pretty big eater, and I didn’t finish my lunch that day. I began to have friendly thoughts.

Like a hair dryer dropped into the bath water (or maybe pulled out of the bath water), California makes a natural contrast. This place is like another freakin’ planet compared to Texas. The state was once referred to by Charlton Heston (or some other luminary with scab-encrusted phalangeal articulations) as “an artificial limb which should be lopped off to save the body.” (Yeah, that’s a ripoff of a Saul Bellow quote. But I’m sure that’s not where I heard it.) Anyway, it was, of course, an endorsement to me. And I was not surprised to find that I loved everything about the place (well, you can keep the avocado and sprouts, but everything else...). San Diego is God’s Own Climate, and L.A. has something of New York’s electric vitality, but with an oily, Vegas spin. San Francisco is like a love child of L.A. and Seattle. I remember the first time I went to L.A. I was struck by how the architecture was so focused on bringing the outside in. This was in stark contrast to my (then) home state of Minnesota, where the architecture was intended to keep the outdoors out, a prophylactic against the hellish climate for 11 months of the year.

It’s cool to see how other people live, and to contemplate the perks and pitfalls of life in another place. I’ve been able to accurately refine my sense of where I would (New York City) and would not (Detroit) like to live. My in-laws, bless their hearts, have basically never left the state of Wisconsin for 70 years and are terrified at the prospect; to them my job would be like being stretched on the rack.

I say: “Hey, nice rack!"

Y'All Can Comment Now

Texas does THAT to you, too.

Sorry, I had a setting screwed up preventing all the teeming masses who have visited my blog to post their comments.

Now, thanks to Derek, I've rectified the problem and you can all finally have your say.

I'm sure the backlog will clear eventually. Be patient; allow those in line in front of you to take their turn. Perhaps I can put in some kind of callback protocol, where your phone will be called when we're able to accept your comments.

Texas Does This to a Fella

Intelligent Design, or “I.D.” (which is similar to E.D., but harder to swallow... *groan*) is back in the news , with the latest battle lines centered around a court case in Pennsylvania.

Come on, people! All these Republicans are trying to do is help, right? They just don’t want kids to go thru life under a cloud of ignorance!

Despite the explanatory power of Darwin’s work; despite the iron-clad, absolute certainty that evolution occurs; despite the infinite regress of unanswerable difficulty created by the deus ex machina of “a creator” thrown into the discussion; despite the untestability of, and lack of predictive power in, I.D.; a lot of people seem to find the current status quo wanting. They may not understand anything about evolution--beyond that it obviates, or at least emasculates, their favored mythological explanation about the origin of life--but they’re willing to fight to see some restraints (like six feet of good topsoil) put on it.

Well, let’s look at some of our options (since we want to be scientific about this, don’t we? And that means we have to at least verbally dismiss something--that’s how science works, right?). But how will we decide among the thousands of competing theories? Do we go by sheer number of votes? Life came from wherever most people believe it came from? Or do we accept the philosophy of the loudest, most vehement faction (which distinction goes at the moment to the Middle-Eastern Islamic terrorist)? Perhaps we should just blindly trust the judgment of the President? (Yeah, that’s a good one!) OK, then, what?

In the spirit of helpfulness for which I am world-famous, I’ve compiled a short, exemplary list of some other cosmogenies so that kids can try to be better informed about where we came from, and wouldn’t have to hang blindly on any stupid, wild-ass guesses about something as vitally important as the origin of life some six billion (er, I’m sorry, six thousand) years ago.

Here’s an example from China (whose votes, it’s only scientific to note, would outnumber the Southern Baptists by about a buzillion--technical term, "buzillion"--to one):

“The first living thing was P'an Ku. He evolved inside a gigantic cosmic egg, which contained all the elements of the universe totally intermixed together. P'an Ku grew by about 10 feet each day. As he grew he separated the earth and the Sky within the egg. At the same time he gradually separated the many opposites in nature male and female, wet and dry, light and dark, Yin and Yang. These were all originally totally commingled in the egg. While he grew he also created the first humans. After 18,000 years the egg hatched and P'an Ku died from the effort of creation. From his eyes the sun and moon appeared, from his sweat, rain and dew, from his voice, thunder, and from his body all the natural features of the earth arose.”

Or how about this old Apache nugget:

“In the beginning nothing existed, no earth, no sky, no sun, no moon, only darkness was everywhere. Suddenly, from the darkness emerged a thin disc, one side yellow and the other side white, appearing suspended in midair. Within the disc sat a small bearded man, the Creator, the One Who Lives Above.”

Or here’s a nice Aboriginal homily:

“There was a time when everything was still. All the spirits of the earth were asleep, or almost all. The great Father of All Spirits was the only one awake. Gently he awoke the Sun Mother. As she opened her eyes, a warm ray of light spread out towards the sleeping earth. The Father of All Spirits said to the Sun Mother, ‘Mother, I have work for you. Go down to the Earth and awake the sleeping spirits. Give them forms.’ The Sun Mother glided down to Earth, which was bare at the time and began to walk in all directions and everywhere she walked plants grew. After returning to the field where she had begun her work the Mother rested, well pleased with herself. The Father of All Spirits came and saw her work, but instructed her to go into the caves and wake the spirits.”

Yeah, we could keep this up for days. Absurd, you say? None of them are objectively less probable than the explanation that “God” (love the co-opting capital G) “‘did it’ in seven days, after which He rested."

There are thousands of known religions, and unless we admit that religion cannot tell us anything concrete about our world then it follows inevitably that not more than one of them can be correct. Ergo, a majority--and probably a sizeable majority--of the world’s population are living a lie. Simple statistics.

But a person’s religion is almost without exception that of their family or community, which proximity, we might agree, has no bearing on the truth or falsehood of a proposition. Every religion claims to be the truth and the only truth and everybody else is going to a hellish place.

News Flash! It isn’t about truth. It's about power and control.

The Hits Just Keep On Comin'

I read yesterday in a San Antonio newspaper about private charter companies hired by the US Navy to fly terror suspects out of the arresting countries to places where torture is allowed. Governmental officials in the countries from whence these flights originated are furious, and who can blame them? Can we imagine what we would think if, say, jailed Chicago mobsters were kidnapped away from our justice system because Russia thought we were going to be too soft on them?

Yet again we find our government trying to work outside the frameworks of law and accepted practice and diplomacy, trying to conceal its nature as a regime that fights terror with torture and pre-emptive warfare, and that will engage in any practice or tactic which advances a secret set of priorities and goals. Secret, I say, because I simply don’t believe the American public endorses the behavior one sees again and again from this administration. I think W has had his agenda firmly in mind from the outset, and his version of political skill is to sugar coat and prettify things enough to get them paraded under the noses of the people whose votes would be withdrawn if they really grasped what he was up to. Just once--only once!--I’d like to read about something other than shit flowing downhill from this particular group of rich white guys.

After the election of 2004 I remember being aghast at Bush’s almost immediate statement that “I won political capital with this election, and I intend to spend it.” The electoral victory had been a scant 34 votes, and the popular vote had been very close in a divisive and contentious election. If Kerry had been elected by the same margin, conservatives would have fumed at any notion of a mandate, and I honestly believe Kerry would have made an I-didn’t-win-by-much-so-let’s-find-the-common-ground speech. But here was W plowing ahead with an agenda that was largely not spoken of.

Like these flights.

Discouraging as this is, one can’t really claim to be surprised given the administration’s track record from the first four years. But what is surprising, and the more depressing for it, is the failure of the supposed “liberal media” to follow up on these things with, say, the same zeal they approached Clinton’s Oval Office blow job. I found this article about these secret flights buried inside the local San Antonio paper, and it took me forever to find it again on the web today. Is this really so trivial a matter? Can our media really not distinguish between personal moral foibles (something reasonably of concern to, say, a person’s spouse) and a seemingly complete breakdown of governmental ethics and accountability? Do our expectations and demands of our news media, to say nothing of our elected representatives, really fail to extend beyond what is titillating and tabloid-worthy?

You Can't Go Back

I spent the weekend in my home town of Brainerd, in central Minnesota, to attend my nephew’s wedding. It’s always an exercise in nostalgia for me to go home (my former in-laws used to have a little bumper sticker on their fridge: “Nostalgia--it ain’t what it used to be!)--but this time it seemed especially so.

I have three other siblings, two of whom are older than me. My youngest brother was unable to attend the festivities (and was sorely missed), but the rest of us hung out together for a whopping 36 hours. My family has always been on friendly terms, but we were raised to be pretty independent. We have always tended to do our own things and we get together mostly for holidays and such. But as I grow older I find I value them more and more, and I find the bedrock things we have in common with each other to loom larger than they did when we were kids.

This is all garden-variety enough. But I’m feeling old, I guess; indulge me a little.

The drive from Wisconsin to central Minnesota passes thru Minneapolis / St. Paul, where I lived for 20 years. Even after I moved to Wisconsin six or seven years ago, I've continued to think of Minneapolis as home (though I also maintained a presence in Brainerd for most of those 20 years--I guess I’m just predominantly a city person). But lately every time I pass thru Minneapolis (only two or three times per year now) I’m struck by how it has changed. The city I knew is kind of gone now, morphed into something else. And that leads inexorably to the realization that it’s no longer “my town.” 20 years of life here: years playing drums in a band, time driving a cab, selling motorcycles, going to college. I drove a city bus here for 10 years, and I used to be the guy who knew what was going on in the city: buildings going up or coming down; demonstrations or parades, crimes or accidents, new restaurants opening or old favorites closing--it was my city and I felt connected to it. But life has changed, my home is now somewhere else, my friends are different (some of them, anyway), my work has changed. Days, months, years pass; time moves on.

When I see my siblings as rarely as I do now, the additional gray hairs and other detritus of the passage of time are more striking. We are all, inarguably, middle-aged now. The silly conceits and self-delusions made possible by my not having kids are eventually shattered by other people’s kids. Say, by the wedding of a nephew who, though young, is absolutely of an age where he legitimately might be my kid.

This makes you think about stuff. I am sometimes a bit shocked to catch an unexpected glimpse of myself in the mirrored walls of a hotel elevator or reflected in a storefront window as I walk in a strange town. A flash: who is that fat, middle-aged guy? How this process, old as life itself, grinds away at us all, each day passing behind us and changing the balance of what has been versus what is yet to come.

The weekend was not about me. It was a lovely, small wedding, a nod to a tradition thousands of years old, a connection of two young people to a vast human stream flowing down for thousands of years and, probably, thru them onward to points unknown. But even as we gathered there, friends and family, to celebrate this event in the lives of the family’s youngest adults, still the observations and thoughts are carried away from the events and will stay with me, like a little scar which is now a permanent part of the landscape.

The ex-in-laws had another little plaque on the wall: “Old Age Ain’t For Sissies!” Guess I better buck up.

Requiem for Bob Moog

For years my license plate in Minnesota was “JS Bach.” One of the recurring ironies in my life is my attachment to music which is religious in character or theme when I’m not a believer. (On the contrary, I have little patience for the supernatural, and for spiritual explanations for anything. But that’s another entry. Or a whole other blog.)



Back to Bach. How can one even attempt to explain him? There are so many aspects of greatness in him that it’s hard to know where to begin. Like the absolute perfection of Abraham Lincoln’s prose, there is a sense in Bach of leanness, of purpose and of discipline all focused to the service of really profoundly beautiful aesthetic sense.

Bach is eminently worthy of whole blogs devoted to himself, but today he’s really only my doorman, my oblique entry point into the world of Bob Moog and the explosive arrival on the musical scene in the late ‘60s of easily-manipulated electronic sound production.



These were heady days, with the birth of the synthesizer giving rise to a whole vocabulary of editing and production techniques and skills adapted to this new sonic world. There were rock artists--Rick Wakeman, or Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake & Palmer--who brought these sounds into their acts. And that is not strange or any kind of a stretch. Rock and Roll kind of by definition was about blazing new trails. But I’m a classical guy, and this brings me to the crux of today’s subject.



It’s considered old hat now--passe, even--but I return again and again to the work of Wendy Carlos, whose Switched-On Bach album in 1968 was a revelation and sold a zillion copies. My wife despises the bloops and bleeps, but I’m absolutely taken with the vibrancy of it, with the elan and cheek of harnessing these new and unruly timbres and bending them to serve the great polyphonic writing of a composer over 200 years dead.

It’s another testament to Bach’s greatness (as so many have observed before me) that his genius shines thru regardless of the medium: Bach is still spectacularly Bach in arrangements and transcriptions, even the off-the-wall ones. I’ve heard organ and keyboard works played on marimba, orchestral works transcribed for piano, harpsichord works transcribed by string orchestra, choral works played by a steel drum band, everything in Bach’s catalog transcribed for his favorite instrument, the organ; and now we found all of the above transcribed for the monophonic Moog synthesizer.

Producing a complex recording with the Moog was an arduous process. I said before that the Moog enabled "easily manipulated" electronic sound production, and compared to what preceded it it was. Still, the instrument required hours to painstakingly fashion a collection of individual sounds, often rather stumbling in the dark, and there were no means to record the settings of a zillion patch cords and a mess of parameter knobs (short of pen & paper). God help you if you stumbled upon a sound you liked and didn't save the settings: you'd likely never find it again.

And all this to be only able to play one note at a time. I think not everyone grasped that at the time (or even today): a Moog synthesizer cannot play chords. The chords you do hear are several passes on the tape, with each note played individually. So the production of, say, Bach’s Third Brandenburg Concerto took an unbelievable amount of very painstaking work in several distinct phases to get the exotic-sounding 14 and a half minutes that made it onto the recording.



But what a sound! A trained musician can look at a printed score and feel the power of the music, but for the rest of us the proof is in the pudding. And even the printed score won’t give you THIS sonic world! There’s something in Carlos's alien soundscape that absolutely transports me. Some of the lure of the final product is Bach, sure--there’s always Bach; but I think the basic timbres of an analog synthesizer are part of it, too. Isao Tomita was working with the same instrument about the same time, producing very different-sounding renditions of Debussy. I love these as well (and it doesn’t hurt that Debussy was another almost unfathomable genius).

Now so many of these tools are available for one’s computer, that one can do quite simply what Carlos took years to develop. Indeed, she helped define the playing field. But today I raise a glass to Bob Moog. He helped put a whole new wing onto the Hall of Music, and it’s one of my favorite wings.

Where's Chuck Shepherd When You Need Him?

OK, weird thought of the day.

We have an exchange student staying with us. From Brazil. A 16-year-old girl. She’s a sweetheart, mature for her age, no trouble at all.

But due to a series of snafus she’s going to a local private Catholic school. The plan, since she comes from a private Catholic school setup in Brazil, was for her to experience the American Public School system. The crossed wires in the whole proceedings that led to this could take up a couple blog entries by itself; and that’s not the weird stuff. Well, it kind of is, since I’m a bit horrified at the whole Catholic school thing. I have ABSOLUTELY no Catholicism in me. Nada. So this is the last educational option I would have chosen for anyone. Or anyone I cared about. But she’s not horrified, and her family thinks this is the best option left to us, so I’m happy to do what they think is best for her.

Anyway, the weird. The school has a policy prohibiting all girls in the school from using the bathrooms for the duration of the lunch hour (to include the next class period).

This policy has the avowed outcome of preventing bulimia in the bevy of teenaged girls in the school’s care.

The boys are allowed to use the bathroom since, it is reasoned, the guy who yacks up his lunch in order to meet his wrestling weight is not suffering from an incipient mental illness. This is all so just-give-the-priest-some-chastity-pants I can hardly contain myself. Put a cork in it and the icky stuff will stop flowing, right?

I guess this isn’t that far off from school uniforms. Well, yes it is. OK, yeah, WAY off. This seems so... draconian and lacking any spark of psychological savvy.

Is this really reasonable and I just don’t get it?

Some Figures to Ponder

The current U.S. National Debt: just under $8,000,000,000,000 (eight trillion dollars).

The per-citizen portion of this debt: $26,665.00. (Family of four? You owe $106,660.)

The estimated U.S. budget deficit (the amount to which we are adding to the national debt) for 2004: 412 billion dollars.

The per-citizen portion of this year’s deficit: $1387.

_______________________________________________

Nobody likes to pay taxes. I think the closest we get is a desire for the services which require tax dollars to provide. That’s not very close, but when we see government doing things we need or universally approve of--highway maintenance, say, or disaster relief--I think we feel less cranky about shelling out a portion of our earned income or putting in an extra dime for every dollar we spend at the grocery store, to contribute to these things.

Still, it’s a long-standing axiom that any candidate for political office signs their own death warrant if they advocate raising taxes; conversely, any candidate who sells a tax cut on the stump has a leg up. This is a failing of our political and educational systems, in my opinion, and it’s only made worse by our sound-bite-driven media climate. Nobody grasps the big picture.

It has been a criticism, or maybe just an observation, depending on your politics, that our current president, and the particular constituency he speaks for, intends nothing less with his tax policy than the dismantling of the present welfare state,to include that safety net for bad financial planners, Social Security. I certainly can’t see into the mind of anyone, but this speculation about W’s motives is not a ludicrous stretch when one looks at what has become of our country’s finances. These above figures are positively alarming.

The decision to pursue a war against a country nearly half a world away, whether we deem it a worthy endeavor or not, is an extremely serious drain on our country’s financial health: the bill for that undertaking is currently approaching a quarter of a trillion dollars, far in excess of original projections, and with the end of the expenditures nowhere near in sight.

Again, that may or may not be totally justified. But in light of these questions, the decision to go ahead with a massive tax cut concurrently with the pursuit of war should raise eyebrows, if not riots in the streets.

When W took office, he inherited from Bill Clinton a record budgetary surplus of 230 billion dollars. (During Clinton’s last three years in office, the national debt had shrunk by 360 billion dollars, to 5.7 trillion, and projections were that another trillion dollars of debt would have been retired in the ensuing decade.) Halfway thru his first term, with the war and tax cuts an intrenched reality, this record surplus had become a deficit of $158 billion; for 2003, a record deficit of $304 billion; 2004’s deficit is projected at over $400 billion, and Bush’s own 2005 budget calls for an astounding $512 billion dollar deficit.

This is something that needs serious contemplating.

My struggle is to try and connect the dots of what we all can clearly see with the claims made by our government on behalf of these policies enacted. (There are so many claims and tactics of which I’m skeptical, like the fantastic and spin-heavy names for initiatives: “Patriot Act,” “Clear Skies Initiative,” the “Healthy Forests Initiative;” I am profoundly skeptical of any administration claim at this point. But back to taxes.)

The administration sold the tax cut with the claim that it would bring greater relief to lower income groups than upper ones. And I have heard a lot of people angrily defend this claim. But an honest look at the details derails it as more cynical spin; the lopsidedness of the distribution of the tax cut is now a matter of record, with projections of W's plan giving the top 1% of incomes a whopping 52% of the tax cut! The average middle-class taxpayer saves a couple hundred bucks, if anything.

OK, this is all old news (though I think it bears repeating). But comes Katrina and we’re facing a world of shit financially. The estimated costs to our government for recovery of the hurricane are upwards of $200 billion. This matches the costs to date of the war in Iraq, and is another $700 of debt for every citizen of this country (since we’re bleeding from every vein before this expenditure).

And how does this government propose we pay for this? W insists that an increase in tax revenue, and specifically the rescinding of the tax cuts, is out of the question. The sacrifice, he says, is to be in the form of spending reductions.

I earnestly fear what spending reductions he comes up with.

Another Strange Job Description

Onto happier things.



This saucy fella is Italian Valentino Rossi, and he is arguably the most talented motorcycle racer ever. Really. Ever.

I’m aroused from my usual sloth by any tactical form of racing--America’s Cup sailboat racing, Formula One, Champ Car, World Superbike; anything that doesn’t involve steady speeds and ovals (e.g. Nascar--a car race where the drivers are not called upon to steer, shift or brake is like, say, a wrestling match where the participants only play athletes on TV).

Motorcycle racing is to me the greatest of all forms of motor racing, and MotoGP is unquestionably the greatest road motorcycle racing series. It most densely presents everything racing is about: the machines are technically cutting-edge, the products of huge (and hugely expensive) engineering and research programs; the speeds are incredibly high--200 mph and above; the tracks are far-flung and the sport deliciously international; the competition is close both in riding talent and mechanical prowess. (Well, pretty close after Rossi.) And best of all, the talent of the individual riders is nakedly on display.



The control of a motorcycle, especially a racing bike, is achieved both by manipulation of a small number of totally visible controls, and also by a rider’s constantly-shifting position on the motorcycle (since he represents about 30% of the total weight of the racing unit, his shifting weight hugely influences the kamakazi cornering and also traction for acceleration and braking). So the rider’s influence is greater than in any form of car racing, and his efforts are completely visible. Indeed, he is hanging right out in the windstream at those 200 mph speeds, which is like watching a circus high wire act. Without all the aerodynamics of modern wing cars (like in F1), the racing is incredibly close, and the narrowness of the bikes enables 3- and 4-wide racing thru corners, and the choice of a large number of viable racing lines. This is all really good stuff.

So back to Valentino Rossi. Rossi’s domination of every series he has competed in has been absolute, and he has demonstrated again and again the ability to put any other rider in the shade pretty much at will. This year’s trick was, after a couple championship-winning seasons with Honda (demonstrably the team with the deepest pockets and, therefore, the best machinery), to capriciously decide to move over to Yamaha, and to try to win on what is widely thought to be an inferior machine. And he’s walking away with it again this year.

The man’s a racing genius.

A Sad American Story

A front page article in today’s Chicago Tribune gives horrific details about what went on inside the Superdome and the convention center in New Orleans in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, and it just turns one’s stomach. And, politically correct or not, the truth is that my mind reels at this information with an uncomfortable mixture of pity and sorrow, and of disgust, despair and revulsion.

On the one hand there is an obvious amazement and horrification that these incredibly third-world-looking scenes took place in America, in a very public place in a major American city. It’s hard to accept that this degree of despair and mass pain and panic and suffering could happen here, directly under all our eyes (without even addressing the tardy governmental response, which has justly been noted). I am ashamed and sorry and depressed at this.

But--I hate that there’s even a “but”--I’m lying if I don’t say at the same time that I am taken aback by the extent to which civilization departed this crowd, at how completely a lord-of-the-flies kind of mob violence took over. Is this what our police forces are keeping us from becoming? People died of knife and gunshot wounds, and from dehydration, women and children were raped, the elderly were robbed, gang fights raged, huge areas of the facilities were wantonly destroyed, possibly beyond reclamation.

I feel like I’m searching in vain for some explanation as to how what must surely be a small, maurauding group of miscreants could basically cause the descent of 20,000 people into brutal survival mode. How could the great, upstanding majority of this crowd not have banded together to protect people? How could the weak and helpless and elderly be victimized under the noses of surely more numerous, able-bodied, well-meaning people?

I’m heartened to read that there were people trying actively to counter the thugs and criminals. But it’s little comfort that these people seemed to need some serious balls to stand up to the maurauders. How could the criminal element not be seriously outnumbered and thrown out on their ears for their bad behavior? As it was, people literally were dying while each person was looking out for themselves. There was not enough compassion to extend to those who needed help. Those few who dedicated themselves to helping others were simply overwrought and outnumbered.

Are we really no further from our basest nature than this? Is this, as I hate to say has been suggested to me, just a glimpse behind a door we try to keep tightly locked at all times? Or was the situation simply that dire? I’m terrified that I’m blaming the victims, passing judgment on people who’ve been thru hell; but the descriptions make it seem as though people were suffering at the hands of others as much or more than they were suffering from the effects of a horrible natural disaster. I guess I just don’t know how to process this. These scenes are absolutely heartbreaking, and I’m not ready to abandon my sense that people are basically decent.

Bring Your Earplugs

The V-10s are running their final races. Sunday was the last race for these fantastic engines at the Spa-Francorchamps circuit in Belgium, the greatest track on the whole Formula One calendar. Kimi Raikkonen drove a masterful race, but that's another story. Today we bow to the singular technological spectacle that is a modern Formula One race car. If you have never seen an F1 race, set the TiVo to record the Spa rerun on Speed Channel. It is the pointiest point of motor racing. Even my techno-phobe wife is intrigued. (OK, she thinks Fernando Alonso is "hot, hot, hot!" No technology there, I guess.)

Next year, as payment for the loss of the 3 liter 18,000 rpm V-10s, we will be treated to 2.4 liter V-8s spinning at a mind-numbing 21,000 rpms. The sounds alone are worth the price of admission. It's the sound of pure money. The technology of an F1 car makes every other racing series seem like duelling haywagons, because of the insane amount of money poured into this sport. It's estimated that Ferrari spend around $400 million per year to run two cars in the world championship.

Breasts, Breasts, Breasts!

OK. There’s nothing in here about breasts, really. I was just teasing. But keep reading anyway. It’ll help you sleep if nothing else.

I suppose I don’t do very well with conflict. I can’t imagine wanting to be a politician, since the waters in which one must swim are continuously fraught with conflict and strain. What kind of person moves in that sphere? I’d hate to live with that all the time.

I’ve read a fair bit of science, which, I must hasten to add, is not the same thing as saying that I’m capital-E educated in any of the sciences. Indeed, I’m practically inumerate, being unable to even balance my checkbook without Quicken; and without math a fella’s gonna miss a lot, at least of certain sciences. Like physics & astronomy. I love to read about these subjects, but always there is a sense that I’m only getting the USA-Today version, the terrifically-dumbed-down-to-the-point-of-being-simply-wrong version, because I can’t decipher the simple truths which a few wonderfully-wrought equations would illuminate for me.

This all ties in somehow. Alluding to a previous post, I think often about truth as a concept, and about how we bandy this word about in an argument as a kind of trump card. We confuse desire with fact. We claim knowledge we haven’t, celebrate conclusions we have not reached. We all do it. Science and politics and religion are different-colored glasses for looking at our world. But they’re all three trying at times to occupy the same space. I think what is so frustrating about politics to me is that it is purely the realm of opinion. And a person’s opinions, far from being some kind of verified truth, are the products of feelings and impressions and desires. A person’s opinions are no better than their intellect--my blathering idiocy is made clear in these posts, which are, after all, just that: my opinions. But more importantly, an opinion is no better than a person’s information, and than the logic and order employed in the processes used to reach the opinions. To me, all political coverage, and especially the blogospheric coverage, is depressingly noisy and messy and imprecise. It’s hard for the dialog to rise above its weakest contributor (which is often depressingly weak).

Science, by contrast, deals with probability, with test and verification, with frank admission of what is known and unknown. The scientist observes reality as it is, manipulates variables and records results. Implications from these tests are theoretical until more data--supporting or refuting evidence--are amassed. Thus do theories gain or lose support, and hard knowledge of our universe moves forward with small, hard-won steps; certainty is reserved only for ideas graced with iron-clad verification. A black and white, I-know-and-you-don’t, view of the world has no place in science.

It is the supreme democratic right in science--an obligation, really--for scientists to attempt to topple current theories. If a theory can be shown to be wrong, we are at least not moving down the wrong path. And every attempt to topple a theory which fails to hit its mark gives that surviving theory a stronger claim to correctness.

What is particularly interesting, and different from the non-scientific world, is the tenet that theories stand or fall having nothing whatsoever to do with the eminence of the theorist: it’s all about the strength of the supporting evidence. The facts are king. There is no argument from authority. History is reverent about Isaac Newton, in part for the comprehensive mind he brought to the tasks of figuring out fundamental things about our physical world. But along comes Einstein, and Newton--however much loved and respected--is toppled. That’s the way it is. We still teach Newtonian physics, because it’s a great method both for learning the scientific interface with the world and it gives a good fundamental understanding of the forces of nature. But thanks to Einstein we now know that Newton was not correct. The boundary moves out another step.

This method of learning factual things about our world is a fundamentally different sphere from the realms of politics and religion. These are apples to science’s oranges, though political and religious claims often purport to be factual.

I’m again led to ponder these things as I have been innundated this past week with frantic opinions about the hurricane and our government’s response. Our politics and opinions shape our perception of these events and our reactions to them. I’m trying to refrain from reaching conclusions prior to really knowing what the facts are; I’m trying not to let my preconceptions and desires--and I certainly have my share of these--corral me into making claims I cannot verify about things I don’t really understand.

But I think it is time for asking questions--there are so many questions--and for seeking the verified answers which will enable us to know what is true. That's the whole name of the game.

Why My Wife's Life is Hell

I have owned something like 25 cars and 11 or 12 motorcycles over the years. This is either really cool or a source of profound concern, depending upon whom you consult. I try to hang out with the former group, but I have the otherwise-happy habit of marrying the latter. Thus I assimilate the stresses this subject begets in my spouses (yes, there have been a couple) when I might otherwise go blithely thru my days shopping, test driving, trading, spending (ah, the halcyon days of bachelorhood). My days of new vehicles on the 12-month rotation are over, I’m afraid.

What I have learned to do instead is shop for my next motive purchase continuously and voraciously, and to carefully space out my visits to dealerships so as to balance the desire for at least a weekly test-drive of something with my need not to be labeled by sales people as a time- and resource-sucking pain in the ass who will never buy ("Me, never buy?! You fool!" I want to scream. ...Yet this is what I've become). It helps that I live among a string of cities with a lot of dealerships. Also, my job takes me away a fair portion of the month, and divvies up my work days between a couple places, thus adding greatly to the dealerships at my disposal. And it helps that my interests range over a fairly broad spectrum: trucks versus cars, Japanese versus German versus American, sporty versus comfortable, expensive versus cheap, etc. While many people are, say, Porsche fanatics, and pour all their enthusiasm into a single marque, I am a generalist: a machinery fanatic. I’d be a boat and small airplane nut as well (and was headed in that direction some years back) except that I learned that there just isn’t enough money to dance down all these lanes at the same time.

Lately I’m all about motorcycles. I don’t race, but I’ve ridden for years, and I think that the things that make for an effective race bike--good brakes and sticky tires and stiff chassis components and engine refinement and light weight and economy--are all things which benefit a normal street rider.

I’ve never owned an American motorcycle, having had mostly Hondas and BMWs. The only real American option in my lifetime has been Harley Davidson, which, while I mean not to pee in anyone’s pool, is to me an exercise in nostalgia and the antithesis of everything I admire in motorcycles. A Harley is a fashion statement. (The idea that one’s riding posture on the bike can be cool or not seems so junior high.) But a motorcycle is a machine. It should be graded almost entirely on function.

So I rode an American bike a couple days ago that I’m damn tempted to make my next purchase. This, to me, is news.



The Buell Ulysses XB12X is an all-purpose bike with Erik Buell’s performance emphases as an integral part of its DNA. I’m fascinated by a lot of things on this bike, but I’m primarily taken with how well it works. It seems an improvement on almost everything about my current late-model BMW (and that’s not an assessment I was expecting to make!), and seems carefully assembled out of high quality components. It’s fascinating to me that a small shop--a single guy, really, though he has surrounded himself with other talented people, of course--can still innovate and end up producing a product which will honestly hold its own against the products of gigantic industrial and design enterprises. And it's not just American, but Wisconsinite; the bike is designed and built about two hours from my house.

This bike has a number of really noteworthy and functional features not found on other bikes I’ve looked at. First, it’s very light weight. Erik Buell knows that weight is the enemy of any performance machine, and of any motorcycle, regardless of its genre or purpose (other than as a boat anchor), and this bike is ingeniously designed to be feather-light while retaining its rigidity and integrity. It must be 50-60 lbs. lighter than my BMW Rockster, which is also a naked bike, and BMWs are not known for being portly. (By contrast, a typical Harley is a good 100-150 lbs heavier than my bike.) Second, the front brake--the single most important feature of any motorcycle, in my opinion--is unique in motorcycling. Instead of two discs fanning out from the wheel hub and grabbed from the outside, this Buell has a single huge disc around the inner perimeter of the wheel rim, and it’s grabbed from the inside. Ingenious. It has a large swept area and greater leverage than standard brakes. It’s a huge weight saver and functions as well as any brake I’ve tried. Third, Erik keeps the exhaust system tucked under the bike out of everyone’s way and in a location to do the least harm from a C.G. point of view. It also doesn't toast your bum or burn your legs, and it stays out of the way of saddle bags. Very smart.

And he has lots of other innovations as well: the fuel is carried inside the frame; the oil is carried in the rear suspension swing arm; he uses a belt drive which is warranted for life--no noise, no maintenance, no driveline slop. If he is handicapped by anything, it's having to use an engine which is not as technologically advanced as what the foreigners use (since its genesis is trying to please people whose motorcycle enthusiasms are about 50 years ago). It just seems less refined; but for all that, it makes more power than my BMW and though it vibrates like the dickens at idle, it's smooth and tractable under way. So, in the end, no complaints.

None of this innovation would count for much if the bike didn’t work. But it rides beautifully. It’s comfortable and fast and seems really versatile. I could happily ride this very long distances, and I could see keeping it for years (not that I’m inclined to do that...).

Anybody looking for a good deal on a beautiful used BMW?

Our Backbone: the Soldiers, Not the President

I have a brother who is a Captain in the Army. He has done year-long tours in Korea and Iraq, and is now preparing for another deployment, probably (I'm assuming) to Iraq or Afghanistan. I love my brother and I'm very proud of him, and I try always to be cognizant that he and thousands of others like him--men and women with families, spouses and kids and parents and siblings--have voluntarily signed up to put themselves in harm's way to protect my country and my freedoms. His stories about his deployments have made it clear as day that this is not child's play. I must acknowledge right away that his contributions to our country already in his young life far outshadow any contributions I have made, or ever will make. And I'm aware that my thoughts rightly belong under a heading of “Those Who Have Not Served.”

This acknowledgement of the debt we owe to our country's soldiers makes my feelings for our current president and government, and especially my criticism of them, a sensitive issue for me. I'm not ambivalent about what I feel, but I'm sensitive that my opinions are not things that a person deploying to a war zone wants to hear. Even if the criticism is just, I can't imagine a soldier being happy that orders they are bound by oath to follow are in pursuit of a policy which is not supported by the citizens of their country. Or worse, that the policy, and the mission that pursues it, are thought to be ill-advised and unworthy of the sacrifices required. I'm not even sure that as a country we are on board about the most general goals of our current policy in the Middle East. Anyway, long and short: I want not to fire off my dislike of W and his governance lightly.

So that’s all difficult enough for my little brain to process. But it gets worse: W and his surrogate strategy module, Karl Rove (and the rest of his intellectual life-support system), have been very quick to use the honor of the soldiers as a shield for his government's policies; criticism of our government, we are told, is a slap in the face to people who are dying to protect us.

Man, that's a hard thing for me to hear. But this concept is so badly thought-out (and was surely not followed by those same conservatives during the Clinton administrations) that it's hard not to see it as ugly opportunism. Thomas Jefferson said "Dissent is the sincerest form of patriotism," and our freedom of expression seems among the most precious freedoms we have and the most worthy to protect. Criticism of our government is the absolute cornerstone of free speech. In truth, I'm a bit surprised that there has not been more resistance within the military (beyond the ongoing and increasing difficulty finding new recruits) to a mission which, oath or not, many of THEM must also have grave questions about.

It is this honor--the honor of the mission of a country's soldiers, and the honor of the men and women who have chosen to serve--that makes me think that the use of our troops must be governed by the most scrupulous code of ethics. What we seem to have now instead is a squandering of that honor for political advantage, and I for one find it deeply disturbing. Again and again I am reminded that politics is a dirty business: Rove knows that a particular brand of conservative will leap to the defense of W--no matter what--and that his policies can ride the coattails of this blind allegiance. But to me this is another of a host of tricks this administration is happy to play to move its agenda forward, instead of simply being straightforward and honest.

Maybe I'm naive and this is simply not how anything will get done in politics. But I will not allow this sect of Republicanism to define the debate for me. I do love my country, and I am proud of our soldiers.

I agree with the bumper sticker: “Support The Troops--Bring 'Em Home!”

The Lure of the Road

Out for a walk around town, I find that if I cross a railroad track I’m almost incapable of not turning down the track and seeing where it goes. By the time I gave up today I was five miles from home, and if a train had come along I feel like I might just have hopped aboard.



I used to know a fella at my first airline job who hopped the train for recreational travel, hobo-style. He did this for years until he got married, and then he and his new wife took their honeymoon in Europe and they traveled there the same way. I just found the whole idea absolutely fascinating.

While flying over the vast & empty Northern Plains, he would be able to point at nearly any railroad track we’d cross and tell me who owned it and where the tracks led. He would even be able to identify individual trains: “That’s the Union Pacific #666 to Sphincterville.”

In my line of work one comes to expect a certain number of amenities in the way of hotels and local travel. So the idea of--quite literally--slumming it on one’s days off interests me. He would bring certain minimal things he felt he needed (and which he felt he could protect) and he would sleep in some place in the woods inaccessible to cars, next to a campfire along the tracks, sometimes in the company of other travelers. Sometimes, he said, he’d sleep in open freight cars in busy rail yards. Thus, he not only saw the country, but he saw it in a way, and he saw parts of it, that are just not accessible to us in our cars or from airline passenger terminal to passenger terminal.

This is all ten years ago. I wonder if he’s still at it?

Yes, I have... Issues

The blogosphere the past couple days is abuzz with hurricane coverage. There is a lot of finger-pointing, especially at President Bush, about the tardiness and ineffectuality of the government response to this situation. And these postings seem to beget an inordinately high proportion of angry, slashing, name-calling responses from Bush supporters; and thus, with the noise and silliness for which the unmoderated internet is famous, the giant turd of political dissention tightly stops up the swirling water of meaningful discussion.

Of course, it takes no keen perception for me to see a major conflict in this; the last presidential election was, and for many still is, like an open wound in our society. What seems significant to me is that in a time of crisis, a time during which we as a nation might normally pull together, we instead find this thing seething so close below the surface, running away like a cancer under a paper-thin layer of civility. The end result is that we are all angry and become more and more deeply divided by any issue that comes before us which requires the involvement of our political system. I wonder if this was not like the social climate before the Civil War.

I am mostly a centrist (though I imagine I appear leftist in today’s political climate), and I suppose I can lay claim to no greater objectivity than anyone else. But I earnestly try to see things from the point of view of those whose opinions I oppose, and I have increasing difficulty finding the decency and honor in what it is presently in vogue to call conservatism. The party that used to be about small government and personal liberty seems to have become about shoving a particular religious view down everybody else’s throat, about a restriction of liberties and a dismissal of those who do not get on board.

But this is a democracy and it’s fair to say that people have voted and this is what they want, right? Well, no. And that’s a keystone of what I have issues with. Bush campaigned as a moderate and portrays himself as a reasonable fella who would get along with anybody if they could sit and talk. But this is all for show. Any objective look at his record will find him to be anything but centrist. And he knows he is neither personally moderate nor motivated to pursue a moderate, centrist agenda (or even a libertarian-leaning traditional Republican agenda). He campaigned as a centrist because he knew he'd never get elected if he came clean with his views. And in this case I think the tactic sneaks out of the protected harbor of Typical Political Expediency and across the broad gray wasteland to slither ashore in the land of Dishonesty and Subterfuge. He does not sympathize with the common person, because in his own mind he and his friends are nothing like the common person. It should not surprise us, therefore, if his policies benefit the big people of his world at the expense--indeed, off the backs--of little people that pay the taxes. This is not what he says, but it’s the reality without the spin.

I’m quite ready to listen to arguments in favor of smaller, hands-off government; in my own mind I’m not convinced that it is the domain of government to be the solution to any problem someone chooses to put on its platter. And I’m happy to have applied a litmus test of sorts which demands an expectation of effectiveness of a program to meet its stated goals. But I’d feel better about listening to these things if the underlying enthusiasm and motivation didn’t all seem so mean-spirited, so seemingly focussed on closing open doors and denying things to people. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, with reasonable protection of others’ rights to same, seems to me a good template for governmental interface with society; enforced adherence to the Ten Commandments and fealty for little people before the Official God seems to me entirely off point and almost exactly what we’re currently at war to rebut.

Holey Spirits

I’ve got some questions about angels.

Studies show that lots of people believe in Angels, so maybe someone can clear these up for me. I’d do the research myself, but the damn creatures never seem to appear for a perusal. It seems like angels used to show up to be portraitized a hundred years ago, as there are many paintings and drawings of them. But since the advent of photography they seem to have become scarce. Maybe there’s something in their contract that bans them from posing for photos (they need a better agent!), or maybe there's just something about them that won't let them show up on film. Hey... maybe that's what's going on in all those blank photographs!!

Anyway, they’re always shown with large, feathered wings. But why feathers? What’s with the bird parts? We’re mammals, right? So wouldn’t they have bat wings? Or why not a webbing between limbs like a flying squirrel? And more to the point, why wings at all for an incorporeal being? Do spirits have weight? Enough weight to warrant a large set of feathered wings? Ghosts never seem to have wings. If I were an angel I’d be pissed that I had these damned things that hang up on doorways and are always knocking shit off of tables, etc., while ghosts just get to float around--and thru!--things.

And then there are the robes. Who makes angel robes? And out of what material? Procured how? And how do they get their robes off and on? Surely one could not do it alone. Are there modesty issues with this maneuver? And what of the muscle and bone structure necessary to support these wings? Does that stuff just grow upon death? Is that wierd? For stuff to grow after we die? They say that hair and fingernails grow after death. Wings too? Somebody oughtta catch that on film.

Let me know if there’s a good Enquirer or USA Today article that will clear all this up for me.

Flying Stuff

I have been an airline pilot now for 11 years, at three different companies. I’ve been at my current job (and what I fully intend to be my last airline job) for four years. I’m currently flying a DC-8, a magnificent design and one of the first major jet airplanes. It is a testament to the quality of the design and construction of this airplane that substantial numbers are still plying their trade almost 50 years after the initial design. (It’s worth noting that the engineers who first designed this airplane would have commuted to work on trains pulled by steam locomotives!) My company’s DC-8s are among the last built, making them 30 or so years old, and have been wonderfully maintained and updated.

Early airliners required a third crewmember in the cockpit in addition to the two pilots. The Flight Engineer, who sits behind the co-pilot or First Officer (the right-hand pilot seat, where I now sit) is responsible for operating the airplane’s systems--the fuel and electrics, hydraulics, heating / air conditioning, and pressurization, etc.--since the systems had not yet attained any degree of automation and the two pilots had their hands full flying the airplane safely.



When I got hired at my present job, the Engineer position was the junior position, and I duly spent just over three and a half years “plumbing” (as it is called) before recently moving back up to a pilot’s seat. This post is a lengthy email to my family & friends about my first couple of days back in a window seat. (Apologies to those of you who have already read this material, to those pilot friends who will find this like a Sesame Street lesson, and lastly to those of you who don’t give a damn about airplanes!)
___________________

I'm in Ontario CA (about 40 miles ENE of Los Angeles and in the LA Basin) after two days of my IOE [Initial Operating Experience, a phase of training], and thought I'd send along a little play-by-play.

I flew an airplane yesterday for the first time in four years (unless you count the simulator, then we go back about 6 weeks) and accomplished a lot of firsts in my flying career: my first flight as a pilot in a jet aircraft; my first flight in a heavy aircraft (technically, above 255,000 lbs); my highest flight with me at the controls--36,000 feet; my longest flight with me at the controls--3 hours, 15 minutes; the highest speed I've flown as a pilot--Mach .84. It's a lot to absorb, and one is generally so busy remembering one's duties, few of which come readily to hand in so new an environment, that it's tough to be appreciative. I'll try to remember some highlights.

The route that I'm flying these three days, Ontario to Des Moines and back, is peculiar in that for a number of reasons Air Traffic Control keeps the airplane up very high until quite close to both of these airports, making a reasonable descent problematic (OK, impossible). This brings into play one of the biggest differences from my past airplanes to the DC-8: conservation of energy. My last airplane, the Dornier 328, had propellers with an 11 foot diameter, and if one put the engines at idle in flight the airplane would come down almost as though you stomped on the brake pedal in your car (we'd say we were "hanging the passengers from their seat belts"). Indeed, in all three turboprops I flew, steep descent profiles were not problematic in any way.

But a big jet like the DC-8 makes descents an issue for a number of reasons. First, the airplane is very, very heavy--nearly 10 times as heavy as my old Dornier--and that makes for a great deal of energy when it is pointed downhill. Second, the drag management on a big jet is very efficient, and the airframes are very slippery; this is how they attain such high speeds in cruise flight. But if you point them downhill, they tend to pick up speed very quickly. Third, a jet typically flies quite a bit higher than a turboprop--middle- to upper-thirty thousands, versus teens to twenties--and so descents are often begun in one state and finished in another. This all requires rather more planning than I'm accustomed to. Lastly, the DC-8 does not have any deployable drag devices--speed brakes or drag spoilers or whatever--or at least none intended for casual use.

What the DC-8 does have is the ability for us to deploy the two inboard thrust reversers in flight. This is really quite extraordinary. Virtually all transport category jets have thrust reversers on the jet engines to help the airplanes decelerate after landing. The landing speeds are quite high and with a heavy airplane it's simply too much work for the brakes to take care of entirely on their own. But no other airplane I'm aware of can use its reversers in flight! But the DC-8 can, and it makes the airplane descend much quicker, but it shakes the occupants (and indeed, the whole airplane) around pretty good in the process. We freight dogs don't much mind that, but it's a violent enough sensation that one wouldn't do it with passengers on board without a long announcement and a damn good reason. The company discourages the use of reversers in flight unless they're necessary since it causes wear and tear on the airplane. But on this particular flight we usually find ourselves right on top of the airport with about 10,000 feet to lose.

Well, we've used the reversers on three of our four legs so far, so each approach has been a bit of a nail-biter! It might have been nice to see some more normal approaches first, but the rest of the flight is quite normal and, after all, it's valuable to see what the airplane is capable of in a pinch. Anyway, all has come out well, and it's good experience to become accustomed to what is, in real life, a bit of a rare occurrence. The inflight use of the reversers is generally accompanied with some rather aggressive maneuvering and fairly rapid configuration changes, all quite close to the airport, and it feels a bit odd flying a 250,000 pound airplane like I used to fly my little Beech 1900. My instructor is a splendid fellow who keeps me out of trouble but lets me make and learn from my mistakes.

Today's flight from Des Moines back to Ontario took us over Omaha, Colorado Springs, directly over the center of the Grand Canyon (which is much larger than one might think and absolutely spectacular from five miles up!), just to the South of Las Vegas and Lake Meade and the Hoover Dam, and into Ontario. We had an amazingly clear day for summer (especially a HOT summer) and the views were spectacular. Much of the time we're simply flying too high to see much detail, but it brings a different and fascinating perspective to see stuff from so high up. In so much of Nebraska and Eastern Colorado one can see the herculean efforts put forth by people to make a living off of desert land. A million perfect circles (actual "crop circles" as opposed to those 2X4-created hoaxes that conspiracy theorists and fans of alien abduction are so fond of) are visible where the arc of irrigation booms make agriculture possible.

The country is stunningly HUGE, mile after mile, with uncountable acres of land as far as you can see (from six miles up!) in every direction, all owned by somebody. From so high up it's not apparent that we're travelling over the ground at 450-600 knots (which is 500-650 mph), but if you look at your window sill and trace it along a roadway you can see that you pass a square-mile block in about six seconds. (An aside: I refer to our height above the earth as five or six miles, but we flew the whole time at 36,000 feet above sea level. How high we are above ground varies, depending on how high the ground is above sea level. The high parts of the Rockies were only 20,000 feet below us while Omaha was over 35,000 feet below us.) The Rockies are a whole different kind of spectacular. We discussed today: who OWNs the Rockies? Is it all state or national park? If you wanted to, say, start a ski hill, who would you talk to?

Anyway. The DC-8 is the first airplane I've flown with hydraulically-assisted flight controls. Donald Douglas was not a trusting soul concerning hydraulics, and the DC-8 will operate very well without them, but something other than human muscle power is needed to move flight controls this large. So the airplane FEELS different than what I'm used to. It's larger and more, well, industrial-feeling. The controls are heavier and need a more forceful input than anything I've flown before (and I'm told from people who have flown other jets that the DC-8 is particularly heavy on the controls). The control yoke is made of iron and is large like a tractor steering wheel. One does not fly with one's fingertips (pinkies extended!): a firm grip with both hands is called for, and while the airplane is not unresponsive it's still a slow, deliberative process to maneuver it around. This is in contrast to its great straight-line speed capability (it's the only transport jet to have exceed Mach One in flight testing).

Flying in a straight line or making turns while enroute is not appreciably different from other airplanes. But the aforementioned descent and the landing are a different matter. The DC-8 was certified initially with much smaller-diameter engines on it. When sitting on the ground, the old engines were much further from the pavement than the new (new in the '80s) high-bypass engines are. Now one has to be careful on takeoff and landing not to let any hard parts of the airplane come in contact with the ground. This was never a concern with airplanes I flew before! On takeoff you must be careful to raise the nose slowly and only so far until you're off the ground or the tail will hit; and landing in a crosswind is a pretty hair-raising experience! I won't bore you with a description of how crosswind landings are typically done, but suffice it to say that they're probably the most physically difficult thing to do in any airplane, and in the DC-8 you kind of have to take everything it took you years to learn and intuit and throw it out the window.

Much of the time there is nothing to indicate to you that the airplane extends 180 feet behind your seat. The view out the window is just like any airplane, and the controls, however they feel, do what any airplane's controls do (just as a dump truck's steering wheel does what a Miata's does). But the subtleties are where we live, and the small differences become big things when you live with them day in and day out. There are subtle reminders that there's just a hell of a lot more MASS involved here, and that's kind of scary at times (like when you're hurtling toward a landing at 175 mph!).

I'll save the discussion about navigation for another email. Time for a shower and off to bed in time for my 4:am wakeup call!

Later,

Wm.