Filed under: Feedback, Marketing, N. Am. Welsh Choir, Patagonia, Promotion, Publishing, Travel, Writing stuff
Well, this is post #500. Figuring that posts average about 500 words (that’s a guess, but I bet that it is pretty close), this blog has generated about 250,000 words – about twice the number of words in Communion of Dreams. Of course, even at that it has still been a whole lot less work overall than it was to write and revise the novel. And it has been a good venue for me to promote the book, as well as to explore a number of things happening in my life.
A bit about that first point: CoD has now had just shy of 12,000 downloads, and I would once again like to thank all those who have helped to spread the word. Given that this has been done entirely word-of-mouth, that’s very gratifying. In the coming weeks (once we’re back from vacation and things settle down) my wife will be taking over the job of promoting the book – I just haven’t had the emotional energy for the long slog it takes to try and go through round after round of submissions and follow-up. She’ll be a bit more removed from the thing, but still has a great desire to see it succeed. And she may decide to explore some non-conventional options for publishing and may do some guest posts here to solicit ideas and support.
In a week we’ll be going on vacation – I’ll set up the blog to automatically post some items, so those who like to stop by will find fresh content on a regular basis – but I will not be posting from Patagonia. Look forward to getting some travelogues from our trip later, though! Things might also be a bit light in terms of posting here over the next week, because I still have a lot to wrap up before we leave.
And speaking of such, I need to get busy . . .
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Civil Rights, Constitution, Government, Humor, Preparedness, RKBA, Society, Terrorism
Couple of weeks ago I got my notice from the state that it was time to renew my CCW permit. The whole process was fairly straight forward: go to the sheriff’s office, hand over my driver’s license and other ID, have them renew the paperwork on their end (checking to make sure I hadn’t done anything which would warrant losing my permit); then over to the Driver’s License center for a new ID.
I use a non-driver’s ID for my CCW permit. It costs me an extra couple of bucks to have a separate ID, but that way if I have to hand over my DL to someone, they don’t know that I have a permit to carry. It’s not an issue for the police, should I get pulled over or something, since the CCW info is tied into the driver’s license database. And this way, I always have a second photo ID.
So, I got to the Driver’s License center. Light crowd, and it only took me a minute to get to a clerk. Who took my paperwork, pulled up the info on her computer, and said that since none of my information had changed, the simple thing to do was just to issue a renewal with the updated CCW expiration date. Cool.
Then she asked if I had a birth certificate or passport.
Yeah, the Real ID Act.
Now, think about this for a moment. I was getting a renewal of my CCW permit. Said permit requires initially a fairly thorough background check by the State Highway Patrol, along with plenty of ID and documentation about competency. The renewal paperwork had to be processed by the local sheriff’s office, and then an additional form issued requiring me to get the new ID endorsement within a week. Nothing had changed in my file since the original ID was issued three years ago – all they were going to do was just change the date of the CCW expiration. And yet they did not trust their own system to confirm that I was who I was.
Yeah, I had my passport with me. I knew not to underestimate the stupidity of the bureaucracy. I handed it over, and the clerk scanned it for just a moment before pushing the final key on her computer that spat out my new ID. But boy, I’m sure I’d have been in trouble had I not brought it.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
“I’m glad it was just the two of us. Seems appropriate.”
* * * * * * *
My wife’s family settled in Missouri in the Nineteenth century. I don’t know (or I should say, don’t remember) all the details, but they wound up south of here in Maries County. They started a small community which no longer survives, and a church there that does. The family still meets in the church annually for a John Family reunion.
I’ve mentioned previously my own connections to the southern part of the state, and how much I actually enjoy going there. Particularly this time of year, when the air is crisp but not cold, when there is fall color starting to settle onto the trees. It’s the reason my wife and I decided to get married in October.
So there was some pleasure in the drive today down highway 63. But still, we both cried.
* * * * * * *
I spent some time this afternoon reading journal entries from my partner in writing, dating back to the early onset of his mother-in-law’s Alzheimer’s. Raw stuff. Honest stuff. Bits about some of the early signs of declining mental ability, confusion about where she was, what was happening. How he and his wife were trying to cope with it. And now and then, when his MIL had a particularly bad period, or her health required hospitalization, wondering how long it would be before “Mumsie” passed away, how long he would be able to see through the role of care providing.
Thing is, this was *two years* before her actual passing.
Sometimes, the only way you can keep going is if you don’t know how long you’ll have to do so. If you knew the true length of the road ahead, and the condition of it, you’d be too likely to give up.
* * * * * * *
This evening I’ll fast after dinner. I go in in the morning and have blood drawn for tests, and later this week I’ll meet up with my doctor for a follow up to my earlier exam. We’ll find out what things other than my blood pressure need attention. We’ll also see if I need to do something in addition to the beta blockers mentioned in that post – possibly, though my bp is down 50/20 already. This is a huge improvement, though I have about that much further to go to get to ‘normal’. Yeah, like I said, it was scary bad.
But I’ve begun to notice other improvements. I sleep longer, better. There are even nights when I don’t wake up at 3:00, listening hard for the sound of Martha Sr’s breathing over the baby monitor.
* * * * * * *
“What are you thinking?” my wife asked.
I watched leaves skittle across the road, tumbling in the draft of the car ahead. A wide and glorious vista opened to the north, ridge after ridge of green, little clusters of other colors here and there. “Lots of things.”
Yeah, lots of things.
“”I’m glad it was just the two of us. Seems appropriate.”
She nodded.
“I mean, we were with her pretty much on our own. It just seems appropriate that it was the two of us to bury her cremains.” I paused, thinking of the memorial service. That was for the family, for the friends. We’d decided on making the trek to the family church, where there is still half the graveyard reserved for family members, on this day, because it was the anniversary of her parents.
I’m an atheist, and I don’t believe in the survival of the soul or any such. But it seemed like the appropriate day to bury Martha Sr, there next to her husband. And that Martha Jr and I should be the ones to do it.
I now know how long the road is, and in what condition. But I am glad I drove it the full distance.
Happy anniversary, Martha and Hurst.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Bruce Schneier, Civil Rights, Constitution, General Musings, Government, Politics, Predictions, Society, Terrorism, Travel
A thought experiment for you: Consider, if you will, at what point the absurdity of “security theatre” crosses the line from the merely annoying to the actively dangerous (to our civil liberties). How would you detect such a point?
How about with a simple American flag?
Metal plates send messages to airport x-ray screeners
One of my favorite artists, Evan Roth, is working on a project that will be released soon – the pictures say it all, it’s a “carry on” communication system. These metal places contain messages which will appear when they are X-Rayed. The project isn’t quite done yet, Evan needs access to an X-Ray machine to take some photos and document. If you have access to an X-Ray machine he’s willing to give you a set of the plates for helping out.
There are two such plates shown at the site, made up as stencils carved into an X-ray opaque plate about the size of your average carry-on bag. One says “NOTHING TO SEE HERE”. The other is an American Flag.
Now, consider, what do you think the reaction would be from your friendly local airport authorities upon seeing such an item in your luggage?
Would you (reasonably, I think) expect to be given additional scrutiny? Have your bags and person checked more thoroughly? Be ‘interviewed’ by the security personnel? Perhaps miss your flight? Have your name added forevermore to the ‘terrorist list’, meaning hassles each and every time you’d try and fly in the foreseeable future?
For having a stencil of an American Flag in your luggage?
I’d say we’ve reached that point.
Perhaps we should reconsider this.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: General Musings
21 years. Old enough to drink, sign contracts, do just about whatever you want, around the country and around the world. A good milestone.
So, Happy Birthday to my marriage! 🙂
Jim Downey
(Seriously – this guy is brilliant on several levels. When he shuttered his blog in January ’07, it was depressing as all hell. Catching his stuff at various other locations now and then was enough to keep hope alive. Rejoice! It is the Second Coming of Bérubé !!!)
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Google, Heinlein, Heinlein Centennial, Jeff Greason, movies, Paleo-Future, Peter Diamandis, Phil Plait, Predictions, Robert A. Heinlein, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Space, Space X, tech, TGV Rockets, XCOR
Last night I watched a movie made before I was born. By coincidence, the timing was perfectly in sync with the news yesterday.
* * * * * * *
Over a year ago, I wrote this, about Jeff Greason of XCOR Aerospace (one of the speakers at the Heinlein Centennial):
Yes, dependable reusable rockets is a critical first-step technology for getting into space. But as Greason says, he didn’t get interested in space because of chemical rockets – he got interested in chemical rockets because they could get him into space. For him, that has always been the goal, from the first time he read Rocket Ship Galileo by Robert Heinlein when he was about 10. It is somewhat interesting to note that similar to the setting and plot of the book, XCOR Aerospace is based on the edge of a military test range, using leased government buildings…
Anyway. Greason looked at the different possible technologies which might hold promise for getting us off this rock, and held a fascinating session at the Centennial discussing those exotic technologies. Simply, he came to the same conclusion many other very intelligent people have come to: that conventional chemical rockets are the best first stage tech. Sure, many other possible options are there, once the demand is in place to make it financially viable to exploit space on a large enough scale. But before you build an ‘interstate highway’, you need to have enough traffic to warrant it. As he said several times in the course of the weekend, “you don’t build a bridge to only meet the needs of those who are swimming the river…but you don’t build a bridge where no one is swimming the river, either.”
And this, in a piece about Pat Bahn of TGV Rockets:
And there was a lot of thought early in the development of rocketry that such capability could be used for postal delivery. It doesn’t sound economically feasible at this point, but there’s nothing to say that it might not become an attractive transportation option for such firms as UPS or FedEx if dependable services were provided by a TGV Rockets or some other company. In his juvenile novel Rocket Ship Galileo, Robert A. Heinlein had his characters adapt a retired “mail rocket” for their own spacecraft, used to fly to the Moon.
I find this notion of private development of spaceflight more than a little exciting. When I wrote Communion of Dreams, I was operating under the old model – that the enterprise of getting into space in a big way was going to mandate large governmental involvement and coordination. I’m not going to rewrite the novel, but I am reworking my own thoughts and expectations – this is probably the single largest change for me from attending the Centennial.
Well, yesterday a Falcon 1 rocket from the Space X corporation made it to orbit. From Phil Plait:
Congratulations to the team at Space X! At 16:26 Pacific time today (Sunday, September 28, 2008), their Falcon 1 rocket achieved orbit around the Earth, the first time a privately funded company has done such a feat with a liquid fuel rocket.
* * * * * * *
As coincidence would have it, about the time the Space X rocket reached orbit I was watching Destination Moon, a movie I had added to my NetFlix queue after the Heinlein Centennial, and which just now had floated to the top.
What’s the big deal? Well, Destination Moon was about the first successful private corporation launch, not to orbit, but as a manned mission to the Moon.
It’s not a great movie. But it was fascinating to watch, an insight into those heady post-war years, into what people thought about space, and into the mind of Robert Heinlein, who was one of the writers and technical advisors on the film (with connections to two of his novels: Rocket Ship Galileo and The Man Who Sold the Moon). Interesting to see the trouble they went to in order to explain what things would be like in space (no gravity, vacuum, how rockets would work, et cetera) because this was a full 8 years prior to the launch of Sputnik. We’ve grown up with spaceflight as a fact, with knowing how things move and function – but all of this was unknown to the average viewer when the movie was made and released. They did a surprisingly good job. And the images provided Chesley Bonestell are still breath taking, after all these years.
* * * * * * *
It may yet be a while before any private corporation wins the Google Lunar X Prize, let alone sends a team of astronauts there and gets them back, as was done in Destination Moon. But it’ll happen. When it looks like it will, I may need to schedule another viewing of the movie, and not just trust to coincidence.
Jim Downey
“I feel like I’ve just walked into a Bass Pro shop.”
“Well, they own the place.”
* * * * * * *’
OK, I’m sick. And I was sick when we left Friday morning, then drove 4+ hours to the resort. Take that into consideration for my comments to follow.
I grew up here in Missouri. My folks were solid working class people, and so our vacations were mostly of the camping variety, in the southern part of the state. There are numerous state and federal campgrounds, places to hike and swim, caves to explore, historic sites to be bored with. I also had extended family who lived out in the sticks who we visited regularly, went hunting and fishing with. Fried crappie with hushpuppies, or rabbit stew ‘n dumplings were meals we shared and loved. To this day I’d rather have biscuits & gravy than just about anything else for breakfast – done right, with real whole-hog sausage (my family would make their own) and milk gravy, it’s a little bit of heaven.
I’m comfortable with a rural lifestyle, with the kinds of crafts that were necessities of survival for folks who didn’t have much money for ‘store-bought’. Simple homes built out of local rocks and a little plaster, usually with an outhouse rather than indoor plumbing. Furniture made out of sticks, lashed together with strips of green inner bark. Seine-nets tied by hand, used to catch minnows for fishin’ and crawdads for eatin’. I was in high school before I realized that the term “hillbilly” was pejorative and applied to more than just my cousins in the Ozarks. Granted, I went away to college, and traveled, and have never had any desire to live the kind of life they lived back then, nor to have my world so bounded by the rough green hills. But I still enjoy walking the forests, watching a lizard scramble over the rocks and deer stand and stare at you. We own property south of town, on what is the northern tip of the Ozark plateau. It’d be easy to move into a small cabin there, and ignore the world.
* * * * * * *
I like things that are real. Genuine. Always have. I think that this is why, even as a child, I did not enjoy such places as Disneyland. I think it also explains why I am a book conservator.
Oh, sure, I enjoy a good movie or novel, a bit of fantasy or flight of fancy is fine. I think, as Communion of Dreams shows, that my imagination is as good as anyone’s. But even here, I prefer honest fantasy to the easy lie, science fiction to soap opera or situation comedy. I don’t think that a new car will make me a better person, or that my happiness depends on whether I have the right kind of sunglasses. Give me a week tromping around Wales over a week on a cruise ship, any time.
* * * * * * *
There’s a Bass Pro Shop about a mile from my house. I have one of their credit cards, and purchase enough stuff there to annually qualify as a ‘preferred customer’. I actually like going there, and have a couple of friends who work there.
But I have always hated the design of the place. Of all the Bass Pro shops, actually.
Well, “hate” is too strong a term. But still. The place is like a red-neck Disneyland. Fake. Even as it tries hard not to be.
* * * * * * *
“We’ll go in this way. The other road is more direct, but they have this for effect.”
I nodded at my wife, turned the way she indicated. “Sure.”
The road narrowed, and after a couple of turns we were on a one-lane, one-direction country blacktop. To be more realistic, it should have been gravel. But then you’d kick up dust and get the fancy cars dirty. We came around a corner through the trees, and a vista opened off to our left. There was one arm of the Lake, way down the valley. Huge, faux 1920s rustic resort lodges were above us. We crossed a “stream”, complete with a rock (and concrete) bed, then continued to wind our way down the hillside, switching back and forth several times and again crossing the “stream”. Here’s how one travel website describes it:
A typical Ozark country road zigzags through the lush, manicured landscape, playfully forcing motorists to ford two shallow streams.
Well, except the fact that the “stream” is completely artificial. I suspected as much from just a quick glance – there were none of the usual markers of a spring-fed stream in this part of the world, no moss, no trees or bushes growing nearby. Just an Alpine-style stream cutting almost straight down the landscaped hillside.
And I knew what I was in for: a rustic “experience”.
* * * * * * *
I find that now, feeling under the weather, I don’t really have the desire to catalog the many aesthetic offenses of the place. Suffice it to say that the whole resort is pleasant enough, but it’s just playing at giving people a sense of what rustic Missouri life of the last century was like. And playing with a stacked deck, at that. The furniture in our room was made to look like it was from sticks, but in reality was a combination of metal and plastic, probably made in China. The wood-grained blinds were actually cheap plastic. Even the tile wall in the shower wasn’t actual tile, just panels of fiberglass with an embossed tile-like shape to it.
There’s nothing wrong with kitsch, so long as it is honest kitsch. This was not that.
Once I got moving yesterday morning (my wife went off for the series of meetings that had brought us to this place), I wandered down to what had been indicated on the resorts’s website as the “Truman Smokehouse”. Well, as I walked up to the building, I noted that the sign had been changed to “Truman coffeehouse and cafe” (or something like that). Hmm. Went in, and was greeted with the familiar layout of your typical Starbucks-wannabe coffee joint. Canisters of pump-your-own coffee on the left, displays of various huge muffins and whatnot on the right, a cash register below a tiny menu listing mostly paninni sandwiches in the middle. Yeah, they had a “breakfast menu” that consisted of a “breakfast paninni” and “biscuits & gravy”.
Did I order the b&g? Not on your life. There is only so much disappointment I can take in one day. I got a paninni and some coffee. Went outside, parked myself at one of the umbrella tables, sat in metal chair with a stick-furniture motif. Sipped my coffee, ate my sandwich, enjoyed the lovely autumn morning. Across the valley you could see the first signs of color edging the trees. The extensive flower gardens around the patio were doing a great business with butterflies and bees. At least they were happy.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Architecture, Failure, Health, N. Am. Welsh Choir, Patagonia
Gah.
I mentioned the antibiotics I was taking last week. Well, by the time I finished my full course last weekend, I was feeling pretty good. Energy levels back up, exercise felt good, et cetera. So first part of the week I went and got a Hep A vaccination for our upcoming trip, as I had planned. Wednesday I was feeling a little achey, glands a bit sore, and just figured that it was a normal reaction to the vaccine.
Nope.
By late yesterday I was really pretty miserable again, sore throat on the left, nasty headache I had all day, shooting pain behind my left ear.
Yeah, another infection. Saw my doctor first thing this morning. Got another round of antibiotics, something a little more suited to this kind of thing. Anticipate feeling miserable for the rest of the weekend.
Which is unfortunate, because here in about 90 minutes we’re leaving for an AIA retreat thing my wife has.
Charming.
But I want to clear this up and make sure I’m healthy before our trip to Patagonia in less than three weeks.
Anyway, I’ll be mostly offline for the rest of the weekend.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 