Filed under: Daily Kos, General Musings, movies, Society, Survival, Violence
It’s always dangerous to quote yourself. But I think this is worthwhile:
“You think about those famous truths in our culture-about a son’s coming to adulthood and seeking to avenge his father’s death. It’s been a recurring theme in Western culture for centuries. Look at Shakespeare. The first ‘Star Wars’ movie was largely that.
“One of my favorite movies is ‘The Princess Bride.’ There you have one of the main characters, Inigo Montoya, say, ‘You killed my father. Prepare to die.’ And that refrain plays out through the entire movie. It is interesting because one of the things that same character says in the movie is: ‘There’s not a lot of money in vengeance.’ That’s a very insightful thing. I could not have allowed that to twist my life, to give me that sort of single-minded determination, to seek revenge in one way or another.”
At the mid-century point of his life, the pain is still there.
“Talented authors can explore these themes, but I was actually faced with dealing with it. My father was murdered and the man who did it was sentenced to death for that crime. But his sentence was commuted to a life sentence without parole by the court in the mid-1970s,” reflects Downey.
“If I dwelled on who he was and what he had done, there would have been a lot of rage that would have been given personification. I really wanted to avoid dwelling on the negative things. This man is presumably still in prison. I have tried my absolute best to ignore him. By distancing myself that way, I don’t feel like I have to seek vengeance personally. But the thought still crosses my mind every time I watch a movie that has that theme, every time I read a book or watch a movie, or an officer dies,” he adds.
That’s from page three of an article in this month’s POLICE magazine, titled “What Happens to the Children of Fallen Officers”.
Trust me, that was not an easy interview to give.
I’ve written about this subject before, and mentioned it in passing. It’s obviously, and appropriately, been a major factor in my life – one which has never been far from my awareness.
It’s almost trite to say “we are defined by the choices we make rather than the experiences we have,” as if life were just simply a game of cards where you sought to win some small pot of money. I know hard choices. Choices that have to be made again, and again, and again, in the face of ongoing societal pressures pushing you to make different choices. And because I have had to face this, I am much less inclined to pass judgment on those who have chosen poorly. I know full well – as lucky as I have been to have a loving wife, a loving family, and friends who care deeply – I know full well how close I have come to making poor choices myself.
Rage and vengeance are part of our heritage, part of what makes us human, part of what has enabled us to survive. That cannot be denied. But they are less important than love and community – which have allowed us to start to build a civilization.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to Daily Kos.)
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Art, Book Conservation, Failure, General Musings, Government, Guns, Humor, Predictions, Press, Publishing, RKBA, Science Fiction, Society
I’d mentioned previously that I had been up for consideration for appointment to the local Planning & Zoning Commission, but had been mercifully spared selection. Well, when it was my turn to interview for the position with the City Council, it wasn’t just before the Council and city staff – the local press was there. No surprise.
Anyway, earlier this week I got a phone call from a pleasant young man who writes for the MU student newspaper. He had been at the interview, and thought that I might be an interesting subject for an profile piece for a series they’re doing about local weirdos. No, strike that, let’s say “personalities”. Anyway, he asked if I would be willing to chat with him about myself.
“Sure,” I told him. “Let me send you some links for background information. Then you can decide whether you still want to do the piece, and how to approach it.”
This is what I sent him:
Righto. First, here are my own websites/blogs:
My professional site: Legacy Bookbindery
My novel: Communion of Dreams
My personal blog: CommunionBlog
A big ballistics-research project: Ballistics By The Inch
And the related blog: BBTI Blog
My ‘archive’ site: A Fine LineThat last one also contains all the columns I wrote for the Columbia Trib when I was doing that, under the “Art & Culture” heading.
A few years ago someone actually created a Wikipedia page on me (which I need to update): James Downey
Then there’s this forum I created for the Neighborhood Alliance effort in June.
And I’m one of the primary writers at this blog: Unscrewing The Inscrutable
Beyond that, you can search the archives at the Missourian, and the Tribune for stories which have been done about me/my businesses over the years. You might also look under “Legacy Art” or “Legacy Art & BookWorks”, which was the gallery I had downtown (where Slackers is now) for 8 years.
That should get you started. 😉
Thinking about it later, I came to the conclusion that perhaps my life hasn’t been a total waste to date. More than a bit . . . eclectic . . . perhaps, but not a total waste. That’s a good feeling.
Oh, I may have some news this weekend concerning getting Communion published.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Civil Rights, George Orwell, Government, Privacy, Society, Wired
OK, I’m having a hard time believing this, good skeptic that I am:
Government wants more CCTV cameras in homes
Latest Home Office initiative wants to watch 20,000 problem families 24/7The UK Government’s Children’s Secretary Ed Balls has announced a controversial new CCTV monitoring scheme, in which thousands of problem families are to be monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Balls claims that the £400 million “sin bin” scheme will put up to 20,000 problem families under 24-hour surveillance in their own homes, to ensure children go to bed and school on time and eat proper meals.
“Private security guards will also be sent round to carry out home checks, while parents will be given help to combat drug and alcohol addiction,” reads a report in the Sunday Express.
The other sources I find also link to the Express article, which can be seen here. Here’s a bit from Wired:
Britain To Put CCTV Cameras Inside Private Homes
As an ex-Brit, I’m well aware of the authorities’ love of surveillance and snooping, but even I, a pessimistic cynic, am amazed by the governments latest plan: to install Orwell’s telescreens in 20,000 homes.
The rest just repeats what is in the Express article. From that article:
Pupils and their families will have to sign behaviour contracts known as Home School Agreements before the start of every year, which will set out parents’ duties to ensure children behave and do their homework.
The updated Youth Crime Action Plan also called for a crackdown on violent girl gangs as well as drug and alcohol abuse among young women.
But a decision to give ministers new powers to intervene with failing local authority Youth Offending Teams was criticised by council leaders.
Les Lawrence, of the Local Government Association, said they did “crucial” work and such intervention was “completely unnecessary”.
OK, can anyone else, maybe someone in the UK, shed any light on this? Because I just have a hard time believing that the UK public would put up with any scheme which would put CCTV cameras into the homes of people for 24-hour monitoring. I don’t care how used the Brits are to having their public life tracked by these cameras – this just strikes me as extremely unlikely. So, is this just the Express making shit up, or what?
Because if not . . .
Edited to add, 12:50 PM: Discussion on MetaFilter seems to conclude that the whole story is just BS from the Express, which has an agenda to push. That fits with my first impression of the story. Anyone else?
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Wow – I *really* wish I had written this:
There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.
When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.
Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.
When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.
For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.
There’s a lot more, but I have already excerpted more than I usually consider “fair use.” So go read the whole thing. Seriously, do so and you will understand people like me a whole lot better.
Because I am a “maker”. Whether it is the time I am writing – working on a book, or trying to come up with what I consider a worthwhile blog post, or creating content for this or that ‘project’ – or whether it is the time I am doing conservation work, I need at least a block of a half day in order to really accomplish anything. It takes a while to get sorted, situated, and settled enough so that my mind (and my hands, actually) has the necessary calm to be creative in the appropriate way.
Most people just do not understand this. They are used to living by “manager” time, even if they are not actual managers themselves. That’s because managers usually set the rules by which other people work. And naturally they set rules that they understand and are comfortable using themselves. So even if someone is not a manager themself, they have acclimated to living on manager time.
No wonder I hate meetings and interruptions so much. I cringe when someone calls and wants to “drop by” and talk with me about this or that. Yeah, it is necessary – even in my business, I need to function as a manager sometimes – but good lord, does it disrupt me, and ruin an otherwise productive block of time.
Huh. I wish I had written that. Because in writing something, I usually have to really think it through sufficiently to bring my thoughts to crystal clarity. And this would have helped me understand some vague notions I have had much more completely.
Jim Downey
(Via Freakonomics, where the discussion is also pretty damned good.)
Filed under: Apollo program, Failure, Government, NASA, Science Fiction, Society, Space
I mentioned the other day that I would provide some further recollections about the Apollo 11 landing and Moon walk, but yesterday after all other coverage of the event that I read and heard, I wasn’t really sure what to add. You can find a brief description of how I experienced that historic “small step” at UTI, if you’re interested.
But last night, after thinking about the whole thing a considerable amount, I decided to pop open the new NetFlix disc that arrived in the mail yesterday. Another in The Invaders! series I wrote about in June. And on it was an episode titled “Moonshot“.
Well, of course I had to watch it.
And I was . . . rather amazed.
Oh, it was the typical formula for the show: something happens that seems to indicate alien involvement, and the star of the show hears about it and comes to the site to investigate. There he meets up with someone else who has suspicions about the aliens, and together they try and thwart whatever evil plot is being cooked up (sometimes successfully, more often not – this is a series in which the good guys win at best marginal victories).
But this was different. Not because of the formula, or acting or anything. But because of *when* it first aired: April 18, 1967.
What is significant about that date? Well, because it was just three months following the Apollo 1 disaster. And the episode is all about how the aliens are killing off the astronauts selected for the first manned Moon mission.
I’d bet the episode was already “in the can” by the time of the Apollo 1 tragedy. Maybe not. But either way, it is rather astonishing that they decided to run the episode so soon after that event. Most people now don’t remember, or don’t appreciate, the impact that Apollo 1 had – it has been subsumed into the greater glory of the subsequent successful launches. But at the time, it was quite traumatic.
I’m just old enough to remember the series, as I mentioned in my June post. So I don’t remember any controversy around the airing of this particular episode. If anyone does and can shed some light on it, I would appreciate it.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Apollo program, Art, Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Buzz Aldrin, Government, NASA, Neil Armstrong, Science, Society, Space, tech, Travel
. . . I decidedly *do* remember this, but it is a blast to see the pix again! From Phil Plait:
You just knew The Big Picture would take on the premier space event of the 20th century now, didn’t you?
Whoa. Head on over there for high-res spacey goodness! Many of those images made me a little choked up, in fact. Sigh.
I couldn’t agree more.
Further recollections on the 20th.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Climate Change, Fermi's Paradox, General Musings, H. G. Wells, Science Fiction, Scientific American, Society, Space, Survival, Writing stuff
OK, this was kicking around in the back of my head when I wrote the post the other day, because I have had a page from the June 6th Economist sitting on my bench for the last several weeks, waiting for me to get around to writing about it.
About what? Us clever monkeys. Well, more accurately, our genes, but for purposes of discussion here I will say the two are functionally the same over the time span I wish to address. (Which, when you think about it, is a rather profound notion. No, this is not my idea.)
The idea discussed in the article is this: that the development of modern human culture was dependent not on intelligence, but on something more basic – survival. Specifically, on population density:
In their model, Dr Thomas and his colleagues divided a simulated world into regions with different densities of human groups. Individuals in these groups had certain “skills”, each with an associated degree of complexity. Such skills could be passed on, more or less faithfully, thus yielding an average level of skills that could vary over time. The groups could also exchange skills.
The model suggested that once more than about 50 groups were in contact with one another, the complexity of skills that could be maintained did not increase as the number of groups increased. Rather, it was population density that turned out to be the key to cultural sophistication. The more people there were, the more exchange there was between groups and the richer the culture of each group became.
Dr Thomas therefore suggests that the reason there is so little sign of culture until 90,000 years ago is that there were not enough people to support it. It is at this point that a couple of places in Africa—one in the southernmost tip of the continent and one in eastern Congo—yield signs of jewellery, art and modern weapons. But then they go away again. That, Dr Thomas suggests, corresponds with a period when human numbers shrank. Climate data provides evidence this shrinkage did happen.
Now, this is a fairly old trope in Science Fiction: that some cataclysm can result in the complete collapse of society, to the extent that most if not all knowledge and technology is lost. Just look at The Time Machine to see how far back this idea goes – and it has been used countless times since. I play off this trope for Communion of Dreams in a couple of ways, of course, using it as both back story for the novel and for the eventual revelation at the end of the book.
It is interesting to see this intuitive idea borne out by some science (though it sounds to me like there’s still a fair amount of work to be done to establish that the theory is correct). And not just because it addresses some curious discontinuities in the archeological record. Rather, it says that intelligence has considerable staying power, at least in our species. Sure, it may not be a sufficient factor in supporting true civilization, but knowing that at least in our case it can last some 100,000 years gives one hope for it lasting for a while elsewhere, even if those civilizations do not.
Jim Downey
Well, at least the court ruled against him:
Man Burned at Burning Man Assumed Risk of Being Burned by Burning Man, Says Court
On June 30, the California Court of Appeal held that a man who was burned by the huge bonfire that ends the Burning Man festival each year could not sue the festival organizers. Anthony Beninati admitted he had intentionally walked into the fire, and that he had previously known fire was hot. But he argued, basically, that the organizers were negligent because they should not have let him approach the fire so closely.He did not win.
Seemed like the perfect item to post for the Fourth of July holiday weekend, as a cautionary tale. Here’s a bit more Schadenfreude:
Beninati’s complaint stated that when he approached the bonfire, the flames were still roughly 40 feet high. He walked around the bonfire three times, each time “circl[ing] a little closer to the fire.” Eventually, he walked still closer, into what was variously described as an area of “embers,” “low flames,” “burning remnants,” and “a spot where there was fire on either side of him.” Basically, he had walked inside a huge bonfire. Then, as you might have expected, he tripped on something and fell into the actual fiery part of the bonfire, burning his hands.
In his deposition, Beninati admitted he knew “fire was dangerous and caused burns” before he walked into one. He knew there was some possibility of falling into said fire. He admitted no one affiliated with the defendants asked him to walk into the fire or told him it would be safe to do so. But he testified that he did not think it would be dangerous to walk into the fire, although he knew it “was not ‘absolutely safe, because there [was] a fire present.'” And, as noted, fire is hot.
One suspects that some really good drugs and/or alcohol was involved.
Happy Fourth!
Jim Downey
(Via BB. Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Brave New World, Civil Rights, Government, Politics, Society, Violence
If you only follow the mainstream news outlets, there’s a fair chance that you have missed what is likely the biggest story this year – the current mass protests in Iran over the fraud of their recent election. From what I have seen and heard, it is being covered only in passing, and with absurd efforts to connect it to our own narrow political squabbles. But if you want to get a sense of what is really going on, I suggest poking around a bit – Andrew Sullivan is probably the best place to start. Though be warned, a lot of the material he is posting is pretty raw – meaning that it is bloody and violent, and much of it of indeterminate accuracy.
But given Iran’s history (both recent and over the long scope of human civilization) and critical position in a volatile part of the world, what is happening there now is incredibly important. And in many ways, it shows both the best and the worst of humanity – the twin aspects of a quest for freedom and a dedicated hold on power no matter the cost.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Communion Of Dreams 