Oh Nigel

Y’see, Nigel, there is a subtle difference here.

Making 10 louder may well accomplish the same as having amps that go to 11 across the board, but having amps that go to 11 across the board kinda demonstrates, in an obvious way, that your ten isn’t loud enough.

I need to amp u p a lot of things in Doleful Creatures –characters’ motivations (notably the evil ones or neutral evil ones) among many things. But I don’t want to do it with characters that are obviously pegged at 11. Because my potential readers are going to read and say, yeah, 11 across the board. And it’s obvious and a bit expected and boring.

I want the natural ten in the books I read. And trust me, I can tell when someone hits 11. I think that’s what drove me nuts about Terry Brooks’ books. Many of his characters shot up to 11. Others, like Tolkein and Pratchett, can get up to that ten and make it believable and subtle enough you don’t notice that their ten is as loud as potentially an eleven could be.

Granny Weatherwax sticks out as one who hits ten on a regular basis (viz, the climax in Lords and Ladies).

No exclamation marks. None. And she doesn’t need them. We see the transformation from Queen to “elf-woman” as a natural consequence of what Granny does and says. We don’t need to go to 11 to see it.

Ray Bradbury goes to ten in Fahrenheit 451, and doesn’t need to hit 11 across the board:

“If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change.”

I’ve got some ideas for Doleful Creatures. It’ll hit ten yet.

Cancelled Christmas Follow-Up

Funny I should use a clip from A Town Called Panic when I wrote last about the drive at work to revise documents that had just been released after extensive review.

Because Christmas is not cancelled, though I have seen a lot of wish-listing and catalog-searching as I worked on revisions this week, just as this new clip shows. We’re revising documents! Time to check to make sure everything including the kitchen sink is in there, even if we removed the sink at the last revision!

But it’s not that bad. Just little stuff, not extensive rewrites. Well, one extensive re-ordering, but not a re-write.

I’m just glad I casually found out yesterday they want to use the procedures in full next Monday – nobody was going to tell me that otherwise, apparently. Most of the time, they think I can read minds. I have to remind them I’m too lazy to do that.

I have to give the people I work with credit – once they decide on a new direction, they go quickly to implement it and everyone is happy with the world. Even me, as I sit here on an early Wednesday morning with only minor pushing to do to get the reviews completed.

This means I should have a quiet rest of the week. Though I’m not going to tell anyone that, lest they suddenly pour on the changes. Yeah. I should not have said that. I can feel the tidal wave coming . . .

Ooga

I have become Mordac, Preventer of Information Services.

Or at least his less-competent minion, The Guy Who Maybe Gets Stuff Done If You Ask Him Enough Times to Do It.

That’s at home, at least, where I spent a good portion of my time working to get InDesign put back on Michelle’s desktop computer.

And what a pain that was. Some of it was necessarily self-inflicted, but most of it was due to Adobe.

You know Adobe – they created InDesign, which Michelle loves. Many moons ago we bought the third iteration of their Creative Suite. They have, as is the wont of software companies, moved on. But they have moved on from an insanely-expensive product – as I recall, we paid more than $300, with student discounts for CS3 – to an even more insanely-expensive monthly subscription service for their newest iterations.

And a while back her computer crashed so I had to try to reinstall her suite, which wouldn’t work. Last weekend, I reset her computer back to factory settings – minus the removal of the Windows 10 upgrade, which apparently has its tentacles wrapped and locked – and tried again. Got to the last step, and no-go. Then had to go online with Adobe support for more than an hour for a new product key, and a new setup file. Not happy. And not, technically, sure it’s fully installed and operational.

And because we had to reset to factory, I had to reinstall a bunch of other software, printer drivers, etc. And I’m not sure I’m done with those, either. The next thirty days will tell. Or sooner, if she gets messages about any trial use and such, which I hope she does not for InDesign.

One Mordac success this weekend: We replaced two keyboards.

Which One, I Must Ask, Are You?

Are you sure you’re you? Or are you a copy, a veneer?

The real deal?

A fake?

Or a mixture of it all?

Say something the Internet finds offensive, and you may find out.

I’m new to the concept of “context collapse” as academics struggle to define it.

But it sounds intuitively familiar.

Let me give an example: My father and oldest brother are bricklayers. Bricklayers have a lot of specialized tools, notably the mason’s tape measure. A standard American tape measure has on it familiar units – inches and feet. A mason’s tape measure has those, but it also has markings that show how many courses of brick a mason may lay in a given standard measurement. In the context of bricklaying, the course markings make sense. But hand the tape measure to, say, a carpenter, and the carpenter is going to find the tool harder to use than a standard tape measure because of the specialized markings on it.

The context of the tool has collapsed. For the carpenter – not for the bricklayer.

Context collapse, then, can be defined as “The absence of additional information that would give the viewer a more well-rounded overall picture of the person or institution offering an isolated comment”.

So context collapse can occur on social media – or the Internet at large – when something someone says or shares is isolated from everything else that person has said or shared. In context, the shared item may appear to be one of a long string of, say, sarcastic or devil’s advocate statements. Taken in isolation, however, the absence of context allows multiple interpretations to come into the picture – painting a person as a bigot, a homophobe, a gun-nut or a gun-lover, ripe for the social justice warriors to vilify.

We saw that happen to Quinn Norton.

(Context-heavy article there. Go read it, because I can’t reproduce the context here and give it justice.) And that right there is why context collapse is a significant phenomenon. It’s easy to find offense in isolation – but harder to justify it as the longer it takes to build up a context around the thing one finds offensive.

Here’s an example: After the dust settled over the Boy Scouts of America allowing gay boys and leaders to participate fully in Scout activities, I saw nothing wrong with the change. (Furthermore, I’m in full support of ongoing changes allowing girls to join the BSA and earn its Eagle rank.) You can, however, search my Internet past and find instances where I shared the opposite view.

Which one is the real me?

Well, both of them. Because my thinking on the topics evolved over time.

One could, however, isolate one of my past statements and paint me as a homophobe. Easily. Without knowing that over time, my thinking turned the opposite direction. Accusing me of being a homophobe based on those past statements would be an example of context collapse.

What do we do about it?

Let’s let Quinn Norton answer that:

Here is your task, person on the internet, reader of journalism, speaker to the world on social media: You make the world now, in a way that you never did before. Your beliefs have a power they’ve never had in human history. You must learn to investigate with a scientific and loving mind not only what is true, but what is effective in the world. Right now we are a world of geniuses who constantly love to call each other idiots.

Diagram THIS

I remember enjoying(!) sentence diagramming when I was a kid. I could quickly see there was no real future in it, but it was an amusing thing to do at the time.

So when a Facebook friend launched the challenge to diagram this:

I thought I'd take up the challenge. Pretty sure I failed miserably.

Experimenting with The Farming Dragon

“It’s daft.”

We stood on the thin grass verge next to the muddy field. Coxcomb thrust her snout into every badger hole in the hedgerow, snorting and occasionally flaming as she shot dirt from her nostrils.

I had to admit I was nervous.  I’d finally trained her to hold a bit in her mouth, but gave up after she melted each one. The blinders, I’d given up on them too, because they confused her so. With them on all she could do was stand stock-still and pant heavily – and you don’t want dragons panting heavily when all your roofs are made of thatch.

And I’d never tried her with the weight of the plow behind her.

“When do we need to plant?”

“Weeks ago,” my father said, and spat.

“And why haven’t we planted?”

“Soil’s too wet. All this blasted rain.”

“So we’ve got to try.”

“It’s still daft.”

I nodded. It was daft. But we’d never know if it would work if we didn’t try.

I patted Coxcomb on her head, between her ears and spines. “Let’s go to work, shall we girl?” She looked at me with one rotating eye; the other stared still down the last badger hole she’d explored with her nose.

I pulled her halter from my bag and quickly strapped it onto her head. She snaked out her tongue and tried to grab the leather, my hands, whatever she could get, but the hide I used for the halter was thick and my gloves were even thicker. She shook her head as I buckled the halter down.

I played the straps out to the waiting plow. Shaking his head, papa fastened the straps to the plow and stood on the plowboard.

“You’ll run her like an ox,” I said. “I’ll run the flame.”

“We’ll have it all on fire, the house, the barn, the neighbors too,” he said, wiping the rain-slicked hair out of his eyes.

“But we’ll have the seeds in the ground,” I said.

“Maybe.”

He shook the reins and clicked his tongue, and Coxcomb lurched forward. With my strap, I pulled her snout gently toward the ground, then jiggled the strap. She snorted, then belched a burst of flame at the ground, which sizzled.

“Slowly,” I said to papa. “Until we get the hang of it.”

He nodded and twitched the reins.

Coxcomb walked slowly forward, firing gentle bursts at the muddy ground. She left footprints in the soil – but that was it. As the plow hit it, it was soil – not mud.

With his stick, papa poked holes in the earth and dropped in seeds.

Coxcomb lumbered forward, whispering flames and shaking her head as I jiggled the strap attached to her jaw.

We took a break after the first row. I removed her halter and straps and let her go back to the badger holes.

Papa stood by the side of the field, staring at the planted row.

“Seeds went in nice, did they?”

“That they did,” he said. “But got a lot more planting to do. And a lot more mud to pass.”

“But it’s working, right?”

We watched the rain patter onto the plowed soil. The rain would quickly saturate the soil again, but we could dig ditches to help the draining. And Coxcomb could come out into the field again if things got too wet.

“When the field is planted and the seeds are sprouted and not drowning, then I’ll say it works,” papa said.

“Then let’s finish.”

“Aye,” he said. And for the first time patted Coxcomb on her rump. Coxcomb hiccupped flame into a badger hole, then pulled her muddy snout out to look at us.

“Let’s get to work, girl.”

Nil Desperandum

I look at the professional writers I long to be like and despair.

And yet . . .

I look at the professional writers I long to be like and see they struggled too.

Take Rincewind the Wizzard, the character created by Terry Pratchett.

In the first Rincewind book – Pratchett’s first – we see a lot more of the classic fantasy novel environment (exotic settings, exciting, scantily-clad women, fantastic creatures, etc.) than we see in Pratchett’s later novels. As a reader, it’s clear that The Colour of Magic is a lot closer to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars than, say, Thud!

What I’m getting at is best summed up by what Stanford University educator David Labaree says in his article “Writing Essays by Formula Teaches Students how to not Think,” published at aeon.co.

The point is that learning to write is extraordinarily difficult, and teaching people how to write is just as hard. Writers need to figure out what they want to say, put it into a series of sentences whose syntax conveys this meaning, arrange those sentences into paragraphs whose syntax carries the idea forward, and organise paragraphs into a structure that captures the argument as a whole. That’s not easy. It’s also not elementary. [Author Stanley] Fish distils the message into a single paradoxical commandment for writers: ‘You shall tie yourself to forms and the forms shall set you free.’ The five-paragraph essay format is an effort to provide a framework for accomplishing all this.

I’m going to argue that the best authors do exactly what Fish admonishes: They learn the form, and then set themselves free from it.

Pratchett’s later novels are filled with the satire and humor we expect from him. They’re present embryonically in The Colour of Magic, but don’t come out fully because Pratchett was still learning the form.

The discouraging thing here – for novelists and for teachers of writing – is that to set writers free from the form is something that cannot be taught. It has to be learned through long practice in writing to the form, experimenting with the form, and then finding ways to use the form to one’s advantage (I don’t believe anyone actually strays completely form “the form” – whatever form it takes in the genre they’re writing. It can also be said that in Pratchett’s last novels he’d again become slave to the form of his own making, as he battled with The Embuggerance as well.) But they do become the better writers they want to be. Over time and with lots and lots of practice.

What does this all mean for me as a writer?

It gives me hope.

Maybe I’ll get better. I’ll certainly get better the more I write. I can see that in Doleful Creatures. It’s a long shot from where it was as a finished NaNoWriMo novel in 2005. And I can see the potential in other projects I’ve done. I just need to write more. Practice more.

What does this mean for me as a teacher of writing?

Maybe somewhere in the swamp of students I have had over the years, there are a few I’ve helped start on that long writing journey. Maybe.

Plug it in and Turn the Crank

A common lament is heard in English class – not necessarily this one; you’ve been an extraordinarily patient bunch – is (and it’s sometimes said with a lot of volume) WHY DO I HAVE TO KNOW HOW TO DO THIS?

I have a very simple answer:

So you can get better at it.

The Argumentative Synthesis essay is, by nature, one dependent on a formula:

1. A     An introduction where the writer identifies a problem and explains why the problem is significant.
2. B     A body where the writer explores at least three solutions to the problem, going over the solutions in detail to explore their strengths and weaknesses.
3. C     Concluding on describing their preferred solution in greater detail, along with an explanation why it’s the best of all possible solutions.

We’re used to formulas. I recall something about the Pythagorean Theorem from my high school days – don’t ask me what it is now; I was a communications and English major in college. But I do recall my high school algebra teacher saying we’d live or die by formulas, and that to solve the problem, all we needed was the right formula, and to “plug it in and turn the crank.”

Well, I remember plugging it in. I remember turning the crank.

But the formulas never worked for me (see previous note about communication/English majoring).

But I have to ask: Was it the formula’s fault?

No.

Mine. Because I didn’t practice turning the crank enough.

It can be argued that I won’t necessarily need the higher maths for the rest of my life. But if I agree with that, I miss the point.

And the point is this: LEARNING.

We have formulas in English composition for a reason. And the reason is is that writing is hard work. I’ve been a professional writer since I started in newspapers in 1997, and there are still things I’m learning about writing. And once I master one aspect, there are other aspects to learn.

Plugging it in and turning the crank – whether in math or in writing – means putting in a lot of practice so you can tell when you’ve got the wrong formula, if you’ve accidentally plugged it into a 220-volt outlet, or if they’ve replaced the crank with a push-button starter.

I want you to progress on your “learning how to write” journey in this class. Thus the learning of a new formula, the argumentative synthesis essay.

But once you master it, oh, the things you’ll do.

Let me draw on an example from the world of music. Namely, Victor Borge. For those of you who don’t know Borge, he’s a classically-trained pianist. Behold:

He plays beautifully, no? He knows his way around a piano. He can plug it in and turn the crank.

But, oh the places he went. Once he knew the formulas, once he could plug it in and turn the crank with efficiency every time, he really began to learn. And what he brought to the world was uniquely Victor Borge. Behold again:

We hear the formulas coming out. But we hear Borge too. Unique Borge.

And that took a lot of practice too.

So. Plug it in. Turn the crank. And keep on doing it. After enough practice, you’ll be surprised at what comes out.

Christmas is Cancelled

So we’re now in that crazy little valley between a big document publishing push at work and when the documents actually have to be used for work, and the reviews are coming in.

Typically, I hear only the bad news, and there is some if I can say revision=bad news. And revisions are expected. Thusfar, the number of revisions requested is pretty small. Knock on wood.

Still, part of me wants to cancel Christmas.

We’ve been reviewing these documents for months. Some of them for more than six months. It didn’t help that the process we’re documenting evolved over time, with more evolution coming toward the end of the review cycle. Then again, that’s just standard procedure here.

We write. We review. We publish. And then we panic and do it all over again, thankfully on a much more compressed time schedule than the first round, as the major lines in the sand have already been drawn.

Yeah. Just got off the phone. A philosophical change that was made just before the documents were published may be reversed. And that’s nothing unusual. Right now, the scope of the changes is limited to two documents, so that’s not so bad. Holding my breath for more phone calls, though.

I’m not complaining. Dealing with change is part of the job, especially on a new process like the one we’re dealing with. I’m more relieved to have the big document push over and done with, so we can let the dust settle a bit and then figure out where to go from here, rather than have additional change add delay to getting the first round of documents out.

And I do work in the perfect industry to call such change and second-guessing “fallout.”

Nut Behind the "Wheel"

Representative Simpson,

I have three children in school. I pray often that as they go about their school day, they'll be safe themselves and be kept safe.

But I look at school shootings like the recent one in Florida and I know prayers are not enough.

If there were a quick solution to this problem, it wouldn't be a problem. But we can start somewhere. The folks at 99% Invisible recently created a podcast outlining the decades-long push to use data, science, and cooperation from industry and politicians to make the cars we drive and the roads we drive on more safe. Key to that safety push was the creation of a database that tracked automobile accidents and the injuries they caused.

Such a database on gun-related injuries and deaths would be a good first step toward perhaps making guns safer, and workplaces and schools safer from those who misuse guns. However, political and lobbying will has thusfar made such a database illegal in the United States.

I'm confident if I sent my children to school in a car -- our oldest drives now -- they would be relatively safe if they were in an accident, because of the long history of safety in the auto industry, that was aided by a database that collected information without names to allow engineers the chance to see what was causing fatalities and injuries in car crashes.

I'd like to see you advocate for a national gun-safety database, similar to the one used for automobile safety. That alone will not solve the problem we face as a nation, but it would be a good first step.

Sincerely,

Brian Davidson

Different Perspective

So the writing challenge is thus: Can you work your craft from 2 angles? Homework: Write a paragraph from 1 person’s POV, then write the SAME paragraph from the point of view of someone else entirely.

This is important for me for a few reasons:

1. I might find writing the story from the point of view of a different character might help me fix things in the story
2. I might find ways to introduce more female characters – because beta readers have pointed out one thing to me about my WIP, re: Female Characters. They’re a) Evil or b) Dead.

So here we goes. Scene (not a paragraph; I need more practice at this) from the POV of Character No. 1:

The blast of light ricocheted off the canyon walls, forcing shadows to scurry into cracks and melt underneath rocks.

“Jarrod.”

At the sound of his name again, his heart leaped.

The black star grew larger still. Two of its arms fringed. Feathers.

And with the fading of the white light into hues more normal, he could see on the feathers patterns of white.

Patterns he knew.

“You.”

That was his voice. That was his voice saying something his brain had urgently cried for many moments, watching the star grow larger. He spread his wings to fly but felt no strength in his muscles.

“You.”

“Yes, me. Who else should come?”

The voice too, softened with the waning white. He could see eyes in the dark face, moires of green and purple reflecting off the black feathers of the wings, the shoulders, the breast.

“But you’re dead. I saw you.”

“Yes,” Rebekah said. “Yet here I am again.”

She lit on the branch next to him and leaned into his side as she had always done, and when they touched the last of the white light snapped away and the world was vivid green and blue.

And from the POV of someone else:

The blast of light ricocheted off the canyon walls, forcing shadows to scurry into cracks and melt underneath rocks.

For a few moments, the only movement was that of birds in the air struggling to right themselves as the wave of light hit them.

Those on the ground froze, some rolled into tight balls and tried to hide under the rocks with the shadows.

Aloysius looked up to see Jarrod dumb on a branch jutting over the canyon, beak agape, staring into the quickly-waning light.

“It’s The Lady,” he thought. “Some hypnosis.”

He tried to croak out Jarrod’s name, but his throat was parched.

Then as the light faded he saw a black star at the center of it.

“Oh, the venom,” he thought, and shuddered. How long had he been held in thrall to The Lady’s blackness?

“Aloysius.”

Something like a jolt of lightning pinned him to the ground, set his long-broken teeth on edge.

“Aloysius.”

Just as suddenly, weightless. Young as a badger cub. Old as the mountains yet ready to race to their peaks. Race with . . .

“You’re dead. I know you’re dead.”

“Yet in the Sparrow-Minder, we all live again,” Landi said.

And the badger, teeth broken, right hind leg in a limp, blood spattered on his fur, felt new and clean as if he’d just emerged from one of the beavers’ ponds, his love at his side.

Conclusion: These scenes are bringing two characters – both female – back into the story. Can’t decide if this is a deus ex machina element, or if it’ll lead to something else. Need to study.

Just Because it Goes in the Dumper . . .

Remember how I gloried about our vastly improved internet service?

Well . . . I might have been a bit premature.Because the good ol’ net is up to its old tricks again.

I’m going to try a few things this weekend – looking at router settings, testing to see if we have a wifi weak spot in the study, etc. The latter is where my money is – although the craft room is right next to the study and NEVER seems to have any wifi problems. Then again, the study is nested underneath furnace ducts whereas the craft room has a straighter shot to the router upstairs.

So maybe a wifi extender. Or we just nuke it from orbit to be sure.

The nuclear option might also include having Cable One pay us a visit, now that the house has been “re-wired.”

In any case, if Freddy deCordova were here, he’d disavow himself of the whole situation too.

Storyoboarding Scribbles

Tried my hand at storyboarding the next scene I need to write for Doleful Creatures. Clearly, I am NOT an artist.

Also, the story is taking a little bit of a dark turn. I hope it turns out well for Aloysius and Rebekah. As I don't outline much, I'm not necessarily sure how this is going to end.

Users are the True Dictators

I was taking online classes in technical writing at the Utah State University at about the same time I signed up for Facebook.

Occasionally as I peruse my Facebook memories – thoughtfully tossed up by the social network itself – I see one of those early posts where, like so many others, I engaged in the hokey syntax of assuming my name was part of the post: “Brian John Davidson is sick of eating green bananas,” or some other such nonsense.

At the same time, David Hailey, one of my USU professors, was asking us a poser.

He’d have us visit a website and report back on what we thought was wrong with it. Of course he was fishing for a pet answer – but a pet answer that, once we figured it out – made a lot of sense, though it took us a while to figure it out. Most of what we were seeing wasn’t written or conceived for the Web – it was being shoehorned into service and being used by people who wouldn’t use it in the sense intended. People don’t come into the Internet, or our material on the Internet, through the front door. They come in via search algorithms, and zero in on the stuff they need. If it’s there, they’ll linger. If it’s not they depart as quickly as they came.

I still see vestiges of this. For example, a few weeks ago I was furiously scrubbing the Internet, trying to find addresses where I needed to have universities where our oldest son has dual enrollment credit send his transcripts. Universities were enthusiastically telling me how to order transcripts from them, but it took a lot more poking through their websites to find addresses to send transcripts to (nevermind the backwards approach of having to physically mail the transcripts; only one of the schools my son had credit at would offer an electronic option).

So that lesson Prof. Hailey was trying to teach us way back in 2009 is still a struggle to learn today, and for people who supposedly have much more internet savvy than I.

Enter Facebook.

In an excellent article at Wired, Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein outline how Facebook has grappled – and continues to grapple – with how its users use Facebook. Facebook’s founders envisioned the social network as a place for friends to get together. Recent events have shown the platform is being used for political and social manipulation, some of it on the part of Facebook.

A few illustrating quotes:

“And I’m sitting there going, ‘Guys, seriously, I don’t think that’s how it works,’” [Roger] McNamee [an early Facebook investor] says. “You can assert till you’re blue in the face that you’re a platform, but if your users take a different point of view, it doesn’t matter what you assert.”

To McNamee, the way the Russians used the platform was neither a surprise nor an anomaly. “They find 100 or 1,000 people who are angry and afraid and then use Facebook’s tools to advertise to get people into groups,” he says. “That’s exactly how Facebook was designed to be used.”

The article is definitely worth reading.

And it all goes back to Professor Hailey. We can put whatever we want on the Internet – but we can’t make our users use it in the way we intended. It’s just like Homer Simpson finding Henry Kissinger’s glasses in the toilet.*

*I’ll leave it in a sidebar conversation for those who want to decide if it was Kissinger or Simpson who used the toilet glasses for evil.

"Can’t Make A Move Without A Form"

I feel a bit like Tuttle this week.

Over the weekend, filled out our federal taxes. After three rejections and fixes (mostly for minor issues) I got the taxes submitted, with a refund on the way.

I know – celebrating I’m getting a little bit of my money back, even though less than we’d hoped, as one of our kids has aged out of the dependent tax deduction even though he’s still living with us and costing us plenty.

Also got us within one step of having same said child’s application to Brigham Young University-Idaho completed (more on that later).

Also, revised a FAFSA form, already submitted, now that FAFSA and the IRS’ websites agreed to talk to each other, though our home internet service, which still wants to randomly crap out on my computer* tried to throw another snake into the works.

Also started same child on a scholarship application which, if all goes well, could be submitted this evening if all the paperwork has come in. Mercifully, this one has had a lot less paperwork than anything else we’ve done in recent memory.

Then today, got the state taxes ready to go – another refund, much smaller this time around – and got the BYU-I application sorted out. I don’t know if my call got them to ferret the last of the dual enrollment transcripts out of the file pile or if it had just coincidentally arrived this morning, but the button is now READY TO BE PUSHED. That should happen once said child is out of school, or I get home.

There are other applications to sort out, of course. Not looking forward to them. Because paperwork, it’ll kill ya. Tuttle knows.

And this is outside the regular paper-pushing I do at my full-time job. And at my part-time job, ho help me.

*The home internet, while working wildly better than it has in the past, is still a bit hinky. But less so.

"Some People Say that You Are Very Vain . . . "

So there is now a midnight cherry red 2008 Tesla roadster in orbit around the sun.

Aside from this being the biggest advancement in automotive advertising technology since the air-powered flapping noodle man, I’m not sure I understand the value of this mission. If it can even be called a mission.

Sure, I get the proof of concept. Proof that the Falcon Heavy rocket can deliver payloads to space. But the car to Mars thing – pure ego. Which, I suppose, it what makes Musk go round.

And he has his phanbois:

Sending the trailblazing Roadster on a trailblazing mission to Mars is amazing. If it gets to Mars, a trailblazing electric car will be in orbit around a future home of humanity and the first car “on Mars” will be the only type of car ever on Mars, an electric one. If it blows up on launch, it will go out in a blaze of glory. If it drifts off into space, it will be going where no car has gone before.

There is no way for this to be less than an epic end for an iconic car.

I suppose it is a less ignominious end than the accident that claimed my Dad’s Lincoln Mark 4, but that accident was at least a lot less spendy.

And yes, I did say “orbit the sun,” because the Tesla is not orbiting Mars, nor is it ever likely to see Mars, except via some cosmic accident of proximity as the car orbits the sun, crossing the orbit of Mars only twice each orbit.

As far as I can tell, their goal was to light that candle and see how fast it would go, and hope it didn’t blow up. The Tesla was just something to get Joe Sixpack at least moderately interested in the launch, or at least something to brag about to the media and the other elites as the launch window approached.

The Apollo training missions certainly had more training and scientific gravitas, though they were probably met with at least as much meh as this launch has seen.

We Get to Drink from the (Almost) FIREHOSE!

So last summer, while the family was at camp, our Internet crapped out. I couldn’t connect at all and it was getting frustrating not only trying to update this fabulous blog but also get into the class I was teaching. You know, the paying gig.

Riveting stuff, I know. But it gets better.

Cable One sent out a technician and he poked around for a while at their outside box (a long while, but more on that later) and then poked around inside for a while. He asked if we had any other cable connections in the house. I showed him, and he was not impressed.

He did manage to get us connected again, but in talking with their tech support afterward (they called to follow-up on the visit) the guy said something classic:

“Looks like you might have something wrong with your wires.”

He meant the wires in our home, and suggested we contact an electrician to have at least one new connection put in so we’d have a better overall internet experience.

I chalked it up to the typical “We don’t know what’s wrong, so let’s blame the wires” talk and did nothing about it apart from look at the costs of CAT-6 cable at Home Depot.

So you know where this is going.

This weekend, in a fit of frustration trying to connect with the FAFSA website (don’t get me started) I decided I’d had enough. I grabbed the new cable we had just purchased that weekend and marched outside to the famed box on the side of the house. I remembered clearly the guy on the phone saying “When you get your house re-wired, call us and we’ll come out and get you hooked up.” So I was hopeful but not optimistic when I opened the box – to find one simple screw-in connection and a ground wire. I think I might be able to stave off a service call, I thought. I connected the wire to the box. Then strung it through the garage, through the back door of the house and to our wireless router.*

After a few sparks and a quick whiff of ozone, GLORY BE we had an internet connection that stretched for miles. Relatively. But you get the idea. We could have MULTIPLE devices connected at the SAME TIME.

I’m still wrassling with FAFSA (again, don’t get me started) but everything else has been wonderful. We were able to watch the Super Bowl this weekend, streaming it, with only a few temporary glitches.

So the question from my wife came up: Why did you wait until now to fix this, when you knew what the fix was this summer?

Answer: I’m a man. But I can change. If I have to. I guess.

This isn’t to say our connection is perfect – we still see a slowdown in the evening when lots of people are using the net – but it’s nothing like the slowdown we’d seen for months.

We’re drinking from the fire hose, folks, and it feels great. Should have found that marble in the oatmeal a long time ago.

*Naturally, once I saw the improved connection I installed the new cable properly, even digging through the insulation in the wall to get the cable to come out the proper box in the kitchen. While my wife is a patient woman and put up with lousy internet access for months, she would NOT put up with a cable snaking in through the back door for more than the necessary time to test the new connection.

Headology – and the Holy Ghost

Everyone knows and loves Terry Pratchett the satirist.

But once in a while, I read one of his books – particularly an earlier one – and remember there’s also Terry Pratchett, the fantasist.

In particular, a recent re-reading of his “Lords and Ladies” reminds me that Pratchett really knows fantasy and feels it all the way down to the bones of the Earth, or at least to the bones of the elephants supporting the Discworld on the back of the Great A’Tuin.

Witness the denouement in Lords and Ladies:

“Oh, yes. You know I never entered your circle. I could see where it led. So I had to learn. All my life. The hard way. And the hard way’s pretty hard, but not so hard as the easy way. I learned. From the trolls and the dwarfs and from people. Even from pebbles.”

The Queen lowered her voice.

“You will not be killed,” she whispered. “I promise you that. You’ll be left alone, to dribble and gibber and soil yourself and wander from door to door for scraps., And they’ll say: there goes the mad old woman.”

“They say that now,” said Granny Weatherwax. “They think I can’t hear.”

“But inside,” said the Queen, ignoring this, “inside, I’ll keep just a part of you which looks out through your eyes and knows what you’ve become.”

“And there will be none to help,” said the Queen. She was closer now, her eyes pinpoints of hatred. “No charity for the mad old woman. YHou’ll see what you have to eat to stay alive. And we’ll be with you all the time inside your head, just to remind you. You could have been the great one, there was so much you could have done. And inside you’ll know it, and you’ll plead all the dark night long for the silence of the elves.”

The Queen wasn’t expecting it. Granny Weatherwax’s hand shot out, pieces of rope falling away from it, and slapped her across the face.

“You threaten me with this?” she said. “Me? When I am becoming old?”

The elf woman’s hand rose slowly to the livid mark across her cheek. The elves raised their bows, waiting for an order.

“Go back,” said Granny. “You call yourself some kind of goddess and you know nothing, madam, nothing. What don’t die can’t live. What don’t live can’t change. What don’t change can’t learn. The smallest creature that dies in the grass knows more than you. You’re right. I’m older. You’ve lived longer than me, but I’m older than you. And better’n you. And, madam, that ain’t hard.”

Headology. That’s the magic of Pratchett that I appreciate. Granny Weatherwax has never needs spells (though sometimes she’s had to get along with a bag of Nanny Ogg’s boiled sweets). The magic of Granny Weatherwax is that she’s lived. It’s that she’s old.

Oh, to be old.

And secondarily – and this probably would annoy Pratchett – I see a good level of Christian and even Mormon theology in this passage, indeed, in this entire book. Pratchett the Humanist has come to the theological realization that is perfectly in line with the theology I believe, in that the Devil wants us to see him and his followers as far, far better than we – and it’s the old (the old in experience, the old in knowing the Spirit of the Lord) who can see the Queen for what she really is – an elf-woman, bent on our destruction for her amusement and delight. That’s the Devil’s goal, always has been.

So blessed be the old in spirit, and blessed be the tellers of fantasy, who convince us to believe the little lies, so that we may in turn believe the big ones.

I WILL GIVE YOU A LIFT BACK, said Death, after a while.

“Thank you. Now . . . tell me . . .”

WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU HADN’T SAVED [THE HOGFATHER]?

“Yes! The sun would have risen just the same, yes?”

NO.

“Oh, come on! You can’t expect me to believe that! It’s an astronomical fact!”

THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN.

She turned on him.

“It’s been a long night, Grandfather! I’m tired and I need a bath! I don’t need silliness!”

THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN.

“Really? Then what would have happened, pray?”

A MERE BALL OF FLAMING GAS WOULD HAVE ILLUMINATED THE WORLD.

They walked in silence for a moment.

“Ah,” said Susan dully. “Trickery with words. I would have thought you’d have been more literal minded than that.”

I AM NOTHING IF NOT LITERAL-MINDED TRICKERY WITH WORDS IS WHERE HUMANS LIVE.

“All right,” said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need . . . fantasies to make life bearable?”

REALLY? AS IF IT WERE SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little. . .”

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

“So you can believe the big ones?”

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

“They’re not the same at all!”

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET – Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME . . . RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

“Yes, but people have to believe that, or what’s the point – “

MY POINT EXACTLY.

Out of the best books, they say, we will find God.

When I read Lords and Ladies, I hear this screaming at me, from Ecclesiastes:

And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven: this sore travail hath God given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith. (Ecclesiastes 1:13)

I am, Mr. Pratchett. I am.

Separating the Whatever from the Whatsis

Yesterday, we watched the Super Bowl.

Only one of us cared about the outcome – that would be our thirteen-year-old sports fan. Even though his beloved 49ers weren’t in the game, he wanted to watch.

So, because we love our son, we watched.

It’s football. You know, football. Two teams of players smashing into each other while one tries to get the ball to their end zone while the other tries to prevent it. There are other nuances; our 13-year-old could tell you. At length.

It’s different than when I was a kid, idling through the living room when the game was on – back then, I had better things to do. Or so I assume it was different. Maybe it was absolutely the same. I wouldn’t know.

But I might have an inkling.

I don’t remember any politics or whatnot coming into play. I don’t remember whisperings about what he or she did the last time they performed at the halftime show.

Today, it’s hard to separate the whatever from the whatsis.

Want to advertise your trucks and put a little emphasis on service organizations that happen to have your trucks in common? Borrow text from a Martin Luther King Jr. speech (with permission from the people holding the purse strings, naturally) and play it.

Then forget the collective memory of an aggrieved people – or at least the fussbudgety with internet access, and see you same ad re-cut with a different section from the same speech, and see how it plays with the masses.

Separating the whatever from the whatsis is no longer possible.

Our memories may not be any longer or shorter these days, but with the Internet, one can spread those memories – those opinions – those nonseparations of the whatever from the whatsis with ease.

Back in the day, you could have a show like The Brady Bunch set during the Vietnam Era, but have it never mention the war.

Nowadays, even the commercials during premier sporting events have that social conscience. Or pseudoconscience. Until the collective memory catches up to it.

And the message on one level may appear helpful. Hopeful. Or hurtful, looked at from another point of view. Through another lens.

Enjoy the humor of Bill Cosby or the g-rated stuff produced by Louis CK but don't want to deal with the baggage both men carry with them now? Good luck separating the whatever from the whatsis.

Can you watch a football game these days and separate the whatever from the whatsis? Can a thirteen-year-old enjoy the sport without worrying about who knelt during the national anthem and why, and why some want the behavior ignored, others want it applauded, and others want it outlawed?

Ask the thirteen-year-old.

Yes. Yes you can. But you’re aware. You’re aware of what’s going on. And you have friends and family and other influencers who help you shape your opinion of the matter.

But then you watch the game. You watch the missed passes. You watch the sacking of Tom Brady and the turnover that likely cost the Patriots the game. And you marvel that this was the Superbowl with the most offensive yardage ever.

And you tell your parents that night that you’re leaning toward basketball – you play church ball, you see – and aren’t really interested in trying out for the high school team next year.

You switch gears. Because you’re a thirteen-year-old who knows there’s a whatever to separate from the whatsis, but there are also games to play.

This is Not A Drill, Part II

So I’ve been fascinated by the false alarm missile attack that occurred earlier this month in Hawaii. Today’s Washington Post peels back more of that onion, leading to some pretty interesting stuff.

Per the Post, sending the missile alert was not a mistake brought on by a poorly designed user interface or any other factor – but a deliberate act by a person who sincerely believed missiles were inbound.

Per the Post:

The emergency worker who sent a false public safety alert on Jan. 13 warning of an imminent  ballistic missile attack on Hawaii believed that a ballistic missile was truly bound for the state after mishearing a recorded message as part of an unscheduled drill, according to a preliminary investigation by federal officials.

The Post notes that while the recorded message began with the phrase “Exercise, exercise, exercise” (mimicking the “this is a drill” I’m familiar with in my experience in emergency response) it concluded with the phrase “This is not a drill.”

(That’s what the Post says. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser says the message concluded with “Exercise, exercise, exercise” after the “this is not a drill” statement.)

The worker who sent the notification missed the “exercise, exercise, exercise” portions of the recording, and the rest is, as they say, history – mostly a history of soiling drawers throughout the state of Hawaii for 38 minutes before a false alarm announcement was sent out.

Oopsie.

There are other error precursors too:

The drill took place at a shift change, when peoples’ heads weren’t yet “in the game.”

The supervisor of the shift coming on duty was aware of an imminent drill, but thought it was directed at the shift coming off-duty, so he or she was mentally unprepared for the exercise when it started.

The computer system that sends the notification was programmed to ask the sender to confirm actions – but used the same wording for an actual emergency as it would for a drill (not that this would have mattered at this point, as the sender’s mindset was ACTUAL EMERGENCY).

There was no contingency plan in place to correct a false alert, thus a plan had to be drafted while the alert was live – adding time to the debacle.

Only one person had to be present to send messages and alerts – a mistake the state has corrected.

Pile up enough precursors, and the chance for a mistake like this being made go up quickly.

What’s unclear in the media reports is if this action was done in a vacuum – without the presence of others on the emergency response team – or if the action was taken in a group setting (as all of our drills or actual emergency responses take place). Had this been in a team environment, there might have been enough ancillary clues around for the worker who missed the “exercise” portion of the drill to be keyed in on the fact this was a drill, not an actual emergency.

And if there weren’t any immediate clues, someone in a team environment could simply ask “is this a drill?” and get confirmation from others who may have heard (or listened) to the full message that the vent was a drill, or real, or whatever.

Reading the report, though, it’s clear this alert went out in a team environment where others in the room understood the event was a drill, while the one person sending the alert missed that part of the story (link opens a PDF).

Leaving any responder to make a decision like this when there’s no one else to turn to for confirmation is a true Hobson’s Choice, and not good emergency management, even to an amateur like me. However, sending out an alert without asking your co-workers for confirmation is, well, stupid. Even Stormtroopers know that.

Disclaimer: I am a moron. I am not speaking on behalf of my employer or place of work. Anyone who thinks otherwise is selling something.