Monthly Archives: February 2013

View 764 Monday, February 25, 2013

Still catching up. We went out for brunch after mass yesterday, and then I watched the Oscars from Red Carpet arrivals to the end. I like to see the red carpet arrivals, so I was watching when the Oscars opened with host Seth MacFarlane showing me why I have not and won’t see his movie “Ted”, then a skit with William Shatner as an aging Kirk in Star Fleet uniform, followed by the Los Angeles Gay Men’s Chorus singing an interminable skit song called “We Saw Your Boobs,” illustrated by the camera seeking out the women in the audience who have managed so show a bare breast or two at some time in the past. Some giggled. Some were clearly annoyed.

Eventually they got to the awards themselves, along with some activities that actually seemed to have been chosen to be compatible with the “theme” of “as celebration of music”, although it did that by among other things not performing many of the songs nominated for Oscars. Odd show planning. All done professionally. The Kodak Theater – oops, Hollywood and Highland Center – oops, Dolby Theater – is a great plant with the latest in lighting and stage mechanics, and that always helps. But why Hollywood can’t manage to do a better show than the Hollywood Foreign Press Association isn’t obvious. Probably more internal politics in the Academy.

They did manage to have Adele sing “Skyfall” and the whole darned cast of Les Miserables. And I had not known that Charlize Theron could dance so well; I much liked her dance number with Channing Tatum. Fred Astaire he may not quite be, but they sure are good together, and her high heels were higher than Jeanette MacDonald ever tried. There was a minor wardrobe failure during the act – something tore – but I didn’t notice anything. She did all her later appearances perfectly. Class act all around.

And indeed, the awards ceremonies themselves were well done. It was the host and the ‘enhancements’ then went on too long and were often irrelevant. They’d have done better to have more cut scenes from nominated pictures and performances, and perhaps give the presenters a little more ad lib time.

But it all went pretty well until it was time to present the Best Picture award, when they suddenly cut to the White House; and there, on a gigantic screen, was Madame First Lady Michelle Obama, with an entourage of military in full dress uniforms. Mostly officers, but for the first time in my life I saw a buck private (happened to be female) in full dress. I never knew any buck privates who bought full dress. Most officers can’t really afford them. I bought dress blues for my daughter when she was commissioned, and career officers generally manage to acquire them when they reach field grade, but unless things have changed a lot in the military since I last paid attention, most career officers and enlisted troops don’t buy the full dress regalia until later in their careers than the ones I saw in the ceremony.

It looked for a moment like a patriotic moment, but in my judgment it didn’t turn out that way. She gave a talk that was more political than Hollywood. Then back to the Dolby Theater where the nominees were read off, then – then back to Big Sister smiling down on us as she opened the envelope and gave the award to Argo.

Now I find it hard to believe that she didn’t know who the winner was before she opened the envelope, but perhaps it was so. Anyway it was then back to the Dolby, and Ben Affleck getting the Oscar along with two other producers, although everyone knew it was really the general Academy membership giving the shaft to the Directors’ Guild members who had not nominated Affleck for Best Director. One suspects that if Zero Dark Thirty had won, the President himself would have crashed the party. As it was, the movie celebrates how Hollywood saved the Americans who had escaped from the Iranian sack of the US Embassy. In the real world most of us – including me – celebrated the Canadians who risked having their Iranian facilities sacked and their people captured back when the story was revealed. But Hollywood can take some of the credit for the script. The climactic scene was really when the actress with the thick horn rimmed glasses did the pitch for the movie the Iranian security guy. She managed her makeup for the part so well I can’t pick which actress played that part, but it staged well. The rest of the ending with the car chase on the tarmac never happened, and was added for dramatic effect as Affleck has said several times. I enjoyed Argo. It was a good story to watch, unlike Lincoln which seems more like a duty than entertainment. For some reason I am not tempted by Pi. The one movie I hoped would not get awards was Silver Linings Playbook. I tried to watch that, but gave up before I saw Jennifer Lawrence’s first scene. All the people seemed to be losers trying to double down, and I saw no one I cared much about; but as I say, I gave up early while the lead actor was wearing a garbage bag while resisting his meds. It must have got better somewhere along the line, and I am sure that Miss Lawrence added a lot to the picture. Someone must have.

I suppose that is enough chatter about the Oscars. And of course impending doom comes this Friday when the sequestration takes place. We’ll still spend more money this year than we did last year. Nothing will be cut. We’re merely not spending as much more than we had sort of planned to. Why that requires layoffs of park rangers isn’t clear. Perhaps a better way would be to abolish some offices. Start with Bunny Inspectors. Then go on to whoever was in charge and everyone who participated in the Waco massacre. We can’t jail them – statute of limitations and all that – but do we really want people who fired automatic weapons blindly, spray and pray in the general direction of the house, to stay on the Federal payroll? Surely they can get jobs in concrete breaking.

I can think of ways to save money – oops. Since we are spending more this year than we did last year, why is anyone being laid off? But of course it’s government.

And next month comes the next act in the Debt Limit Drama. Ground Hog Day.

More Nanoracks

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/11/21/nanoracks-is-making-space-science-affordable-for-everyone/

Dan Steele

Port Ludlow, WA

NASA and private enterprise cooperate. That worked back when we were developing the aviation industry. It seems to be working again.

You wrote:  "when they suddenly cut to the White House; and there, on a gigantic screen, was Madame First Lady Michelle Obama, with an entourage of military in full dress uniforms." 

Those are actually mess or evening mess uniforms; not the dress blue, class A uniform, which looks similar but is much less elegant.  Dress mess is normally worn for a dining in or a dining out and has a modified version of the civilian tail coat — making it, arguably, the most elegant dress uniform a soldier can wear for a formal occasion.  On a non-formal occasion, a dress blue is the best and, normally, dress greens are worn.  As an aside, the fabric of the dress greens is also important.  I paid for the nicer wool rather than the standard issue polyester bs, but I took more pride in my appearance than your average soldier. 

The easiest way to tell the difference between your class A dress blues and your dress mess — for men who lack a sense of formal attire — is to look at the medals.  The dress mess uniforms will sport miniature medals vs. the full sized medals worn on class A dress blues or class A dress greens. 

I find the U.S. Army dress mess uniform to be the most elegant of any I’ve ever come across.  Even Hermann Goering — admittedly a monster but with good taste in uniforms and soirees — never wore anything as elegant and majestic as the U.S. Army dress mess uniform. 

I also found found myself amused at the picture you posted.  The soldier on Obama’s right has this smile of "wow, I’m on TV", the one on her left has this look of "really?" and everyone else has this look of "WTF, over?"  As you may remember, you say "over" on the radio when you are done speaking and await a reply to what you’ve said or asked. 

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Thank you. I never had any form of dress uniform in my days in the Army, and I’m sure what I bought my daughter was the dress blues.  I know in civilian life there is a difference between black tie and white tie with tails and I presume that’s the case here. Why a buck private is wearing full dress formal is still unclear to me; I am pretty sure that’s the first time I have ever seen anyone wearing one, and for that matter, for all that I’ve been involved in reasonably formal events with the military for fifty years, I have rarely seen the outfits worn in the Oscar ceremonies; surely they were more formal than the people in the Dolby Theater.

One reader has decided that my observations about FLOTUS (his term) demonstrate that I have “completely lost it” and in fact he suspects I have lost my mind and competence.  Perhaps so but if so I am not alone: I am reliably told that the Hollywood Press in the Press Room at the Dolby were taken in surprise by the sudden appearance of Madame First Lady with a military entourage, and then made rude remarks and expressed displeasure; and I see by the Internet that I was not the only one to think her speech was political.  Since President Obama has made it clear that he is in continuous campaign mode I suppose no one should be surprised to find that they have plans for Hollywood as well. Had it not been for the speech this might have passed for a national unity event, one of the ceremonial functions of the office of the President, but the speech was not a national unity speech, and was less appropriate than some of the winner speeches which have been condemned.

Then there is the use of the military. They were hardly guards, as if the President’s family needs military guards during a White House broadcast event. What were then doing then? And who paid for the uniforms, because I just don’t believe that many buck privates need or have full formals or many opportunities to wear them. 

If this were intended as an event of national unity, then I have misjudged it.

View 763 Saturday, February 23, 2013

The Cable Guy showed up this morning at 0820, looked at my TV, and went out and climbed the pole. Ten minutes later we had TV and high speed Internet connection. Someone had disconnected the cable to our house up high on the pole across the street. No clue as to who had done it, but presumably a Time Warner Cable Guy working on a neighbor system. No reason why it should have been disconnected. I pay my bills. Do they do this to make work for each other? I doubt that, but I have no other explanation as to why my cable TV should be disconnected.

We missed the game last night, which of course turned out to be The Second Best Lakers game yet, and Kobe’s best game of the season (40 points). It’s always interesting when Kobe goes mad. He says he intends to keep doing that so that the Lakers will make the playoffs. It looks to be an interesting season but the Lakers have to win a lot of games to get in the playoffs. We’ll see.

The President has excoriated the Republicans for not bailing us out of the sequestration which is going to end life as we know it. He says the only way out is to keep borrowing more money – the sequestration was his idea on how to insure that we did some spending cuts when we raised the debt ceiling, but he has forgotten that I guess.  Now the only hope for the nation is to raise taxes. Supposedly on the rich because there are plenty of tax rises that will affect us all coming inevitably.

The notion is to blame the coming Depression – and that looks to be inevitable – on the sequestration, although we will be spending more next year than we did last year, and more the year after that than we will this year: the sequestration will not be a “cut” in the budget, merely a diminution of the increase that is automatically built into the budgets we don’t pass any more. And Obamacare will cost a lot of money, the 2% increase in salary tax (as opposed to income tax which hits what’s left after the 12 to 20% salary tax), inflation, raise in minimum wage, and other economic disincentives will cost more, and the incentive to expand a business is lowered, fewer businesses start – maybe we won’t hit a full Depression, but the probability is there. We are doing it to ourselves.

Minimum wages of course hit those entering the work force; they don’t yet know how to make money for their employer, and as we make it harder and harder to fire incompetent people, the reluctance to hire them to earn more than they are worth in the hopes that they will learn to produce enough to earn their starting salaries — well, you get the idea. And the schools which ought to be teaching people to be worth at least minimum wages have not been doing that – it is unlikely they will get better at it so that graduates will be worth a higher minimum wage.

Ah. Well.

Not everyone is hurt by depressions. Some do well indeed. Others scrape by. But it’s really hard on those just entering the work force. Fortunately, Story Tellers always survive, and with the eBook revolution my backlist is worth something. Unlike physical books which sell out and have to be reordered, eBooks are always on the virtual shelf and the store is always open. And Young Adult books tend to do well in times of high youth unemployment; many of my books appeal to younger readers as well as to adults. They sell well in PX stores, too. I should get through the coming worse times. And thanks to all those who subscribed or renewed during the current pledge drive. That helps a lot.

It’s time for a walk. I have a lot of mail that has accumulated. I’ll try to get some of that up tonight.

And we have this for your amusement:

Great Moments in Contemporary Publishing

February 14, 2013

This is just too good to keep to myself.

An independent bookseller I know landed a major bestselling author for a rare in-store signing. He got the word out, took advance phone and internet orders for signed copies, and called his sales rep at the publisher to make sure the books would reach him in plenty of time.

“You’ve ordered 450 copies,” the rep told him. “I’m afraid we can only ship you 200.”

Why, for God’s sake? Hadn’t they printed enough?

“No, it’s policy,” he was told. “Two hundred books is our maximum order. We can’t take the chance of huge returns, or credit problems.”

http://lawrenceblock.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/great-moments-in-contemporary-publishing/

The rest of the story is worth your time. It’s one more reason that print publishing is being eaten by Amazon

(Sunday: I intended to do mail last night, but we went out to dinner, and things caught up. And today will be the Oscars and I have an odd desire to watch them, probably because my oldest granddaughter is interested in fashion and design and will undoubtedly be watching it…)

View 763 Friday, February 22, 2013

1200 Noon. Time Warner will send a truck sometime but probably not until tomorrow. Meanwhile I am cut off from the internet. Also my television isn’t working. At all. And the feeling of helplessness is building. I am contemplating using the modem and phone line. Pathetic. I’d have to transfer all the files over to the ThinkPad and connect that to the phone lines. And of course I don’t have an antenna set up to let me get broadcast TV, which has always been lousy at Chaos Manor anyway. But I don’t miss TV. I do worry about not being connected. I wasn’t for most of my life, and now the prospect of a few hours or even a day of not being wired is scary.

Of course I could transfer all mail and other necessary files to the ThinkPad, and carry that down to the local Starbucks which happens to be next to the – now my memory fails me. The telephone network that isn’t AT&T or Verizon. I’d use the Internet to figure it out but my iPhone doesn’t work too well at connectivity because it wants to use the wireless network rather than the phone to connect to the Internet. Turn off the net connection on the iPhone. Google phone networks. Sprint. The Starbucks is next to the Sprint store and I have a Sprint data account which I ought to have given up long ago but I keep largely because it doesn’t cost much and it is an alternate way to maintain this place. So if I move everything over to the ThinkPad, then go down to the Starbucks and have a coffee as I connect to my Sprint account, I can check my mail and post this. Seems a big use of time.

The reason I have a Sprint account is that American Airlines had Sprint in all their airline lounges back in the days when I travelled a lot, and there are Sprint wireless stations along the highway to Las Vegas which I used when I went to Las Vegas for computer conventions, and other places, and I got in early enough that the rate is low so long as I keep it. So I do.

{Later. Not to spoil the fun of catching me in a glitch, it was T-Mobile I was trying to remember. I don’t have a Sprint account it’s a T-mobile account. Absent mindedness strikes again. at least I generally remember if I’ve had lunch yet.}

So if you see this today that’s probably what I did, although it’s just barely possible that Time Warner will get here today and fix everything. It’s clear the fault is theirs, and there is nothing I can do.

I probably mentioned this before, but it’s not easy to check – unlike Front Page, which I liked a lot even if all my advisors thought it was hokey and out of date, the Windows Live Writer system I use for this journal doesn’t keep local copies of everything so it’s hard to see whether I have or not. Anyway the Forbes for March 4, 2013 has a High Science column on zero gravity research that describes pretty well what my son Richard’s company NanoRacks does: it sells space on the International Space Shuttle. If you can pretty well automate your experiment in a cubic foot or two, they can get it up there and back down. For a price, of course, but they can tell you about grants available for universities and even high schools. And NanoRacks can tell you cheaper ways to do what you want. I’d give the link but I can’t because I can’t connect to the Internet yet. Astonishing how dependent we get on being wired up.

There’s talk of doom and gloom as the sequestration approaches, and the Administration is running in circles flapping their arms like a local school board telling the district that any cut in the budget will end football and college prep courses and everything else so that the students will have to sit hungry in classrooms without a teacher unless taxes are raised. The truth is that under the sequestration the US will spend more this year than last, and next year than this. The “cut” is in the amount of budget increase, not in actual spending. It seems to me that the whole government would be better off for an across the board 2% cut – actual cut, spend 2% less money next year than last. There’s 2% waste and monkey motion in every department. I note that the Department of Agriculture is threatening to lay off food inspectors, but there’s no talk of firing bunny inspectors. Every department has people doing things we don’t need done, particularly since we have to borrow the money in order to do them.

Bunny inspectors, for those who don’t know, look for people keeping rabbits as pets and offering them for sale – or using them in a stage performance. Bunny inspectors go to stage magic shows and if the performance employs a pet rabbit they demand to see the federal license the magician must have, and no, I am not making this up. By the way, if the rabbit is killed in the act, say eaten alive, you don’t need a federal license. You may be in trouble with the ASPCA but not with the Department of Agriculture. And the bunny inspectors won’t be laid off under the sequestration. I bet if there were a 2% cut in the DOA’s budget they’d go. If not, a bigger cut would be in order…

It is 1600. I have not heard from Time Warner. I will transfer files to the ThinkPad and go down to the Starbucks to get this posted. I won’t be dealing with mail until Time Warner fixes things. It went out at 1012 this morning and I had called them before 1100.

I just called TW and they tell me that there is a repairman scheduled to come between 8 and 9 tomorrow.  We’ll be waiting. I am now off to where I can see the Sprint wireless connection.

1800: It wasn’t sprint it was the other,  T-mobile, I have an account with and maintains wireless stuff, but they did not have theirs up when I drove down to Starbucks so I came home and activated the little AT&T thingy that is a sort of cell phone for 3G data.  It is not cheap, but not that expensive, and it is what I used to use on the road.  The procedures for buying more time on it have been improved. It turned out to be pretty easy, and that’s what I am using, with the ThinkPad on a table and all the other big powerful machines looking on jealously.  I usually use the ThinkPad up in the monk’s cell so they don’t see. Anyway it works, and that’s what I am using here.

I very much thank Mike Johns. The first Nook posting of Legend of Black Ship Island by Niven, Pournelle, and Barnes had some glaring errors which must have irritated the heck out of readers.  Mike Johns called it to my attention last December, and we pulled it down and checked the formatting.  Authors ought always to do their own proof reading of eBooks. Like galley slavery. It’s just necessary. We put the new version up on Nook and Kindle. Amazon has posted the new one (did at once when we fixed it) and all is well now. If you have not read it, it’s a novelette set in the Legacy of Heorot series, and takes place after Legacy but before Beowulf’s Children: the youngsters have a secret that the adults are never to know.  It was tricky to work in the story since it is never mentioned in Children,but we explain why, and also shed a bit more light on how the teenagers are developing.

Those Avalon stories have been fun. We show you new forms of life, but it’s still a tiny human presence on a new planet, with limited resources, and a generation gap like you wouldn’t believe except of course we want you to believe it…  If you haven’t read it, I think you’ll like it.