It’s all so Bobby Bittman around here tonight what with my favorite right-wing blogger telling the world I’m his favorite left-wing blogger.
Category: Uncategorized
Keeper
I have a great friend who in his youth was a great rugby player in a great rugby nation. Once, while we were playing pick-up soccer, he shared that he never told us truly who he was, told about his skill in that other football and that once a stadium of 60,000 chanted his name in a national level contest. Today, after I made each save in the 0-5 game, the beer tent of the team that was in the 1-1 game cheered. It was my small slice version of my pal’s greater fame. It was good.
Serious and Nutty
I know it is all deadly serious whether the CBS memos about Bush are fake or not but I think it is hilarious when any major news item attracts this kind of reporting:
Some former engineers who worked in the typewriter division said they were not aware of a standard typewriter that could have produced the Killian documents because the superscript letters in question were so rare. Robert A. Rahenkamp, a former I.B.M. manager who wrote a scholarly history on its typewriters for a company journal in 1981, said, “I’m not aware that we had any superscript technologies back in those days” on standard proportional space typewriters. Bill Glennon, a technology consultant in New York who worked for I.B.M. in Midtown Manhattan for 14 years and repaired typewriters throughout that time, said that the Executive had proportional spacing and that its typebar could be fitted with superscript characters. Documents from the period show the Air Force tested the Selectric Composer as early as April 1969. But spokesmen for the National Guard and Texas Air National Guard said it was impossible to trace the machines that Colonel Killian’s unit, the 111th Fighter Intercept Squadron, or any unit, used so long ago. Mark Allen, chief of the external media division of the National Guard Bureau public affairs office, said there was no way to reconstruct the equipment or whether Colonel Killian typed the memos or had a clerk type them.
“…the Air Force tested the Selectric Composer as early as April 1969” – Classic. I am so glad that the US general election, the vote for who gets the nuclear bomb codes, is going to turn on the fact of whether the IBM Selectric Compostor model was in the Texas Air National Guard’s secretarial pool or not. War, deficit, character of the candidates – nah, who needs to consider that stuff.
Three Years Ago
I wrote this at Steve’s blog three years ago in the replies to his post:
Alan McLeod
[7:48 AM September 17, 2001]
elal@pei.sympatico.caI have found myself, like everyone else, having been staring at the TV in a daze for days. I was in the middle of a presentation at the curling rink in Summerside last Tuesday when someone came into the room to tell what was going on. I drove home at lunch and the TV has seemingly been on ever since. One thing that has happened here in New Glasgow, PEI is that there are no passenger jets overhead flying between Europe and the US east coast. Usually there are 5 to 10 in the sky at any one time. You notice the silence. I have seen two con-trails but am reliably told that it is likely a US military refueling tanker. Moncton airport apparently has about 5 US jets operating out of it now, according to a PEI air traffic controller.I flew the flag at half mast. Most people did around here. I have thought alot about the bit of business I have done in the US on four trips in the last year and the people I have met. I thought about the road in Connecticut I drove down with Dan and Nathan after getting a bit lost one evening trying to find the sea from a place near Hartford. The road was parallel to the one we wanted as it turned out. It was fifty miles of large homes on forested lots – multi-car garages, guest houses. As we drove south cars passed us going north, going home for the night. When we hit the coast road, the commuter train station was full of people heading for what looked to us Maritimers as luxery cars, coming home from a workday in the City, in Manhattan. The next day, I bought a big Connecticut flag – like I like to wherever I travel. I flew it at half mast Sunday.
Alan McLeod
[7:56 AM September 19, 2001]
elal@pei.sympatico.caI was interested in reading Peter’s comments as a first crisis as a Dad. The same is true for me. I have these echoes of war in the past that the 1990’s had silenced. When I was a child in suburban Ontario in the late 60’s I remember asking my mom if we were at war. We were watching Vietnam on TV. I remember having bombing dreams after Dad told me for the millionth time that when he was my age, Hitler carpet bombed his grannies house along with their whole town – Greenock, Scotland – for three days. I remember heading about the fall of Saigon on the school bus heading to junior high. I remember the fear in high school and undergrad that Ronnie R. and Leonid B. would vaporize us all. I remember in law school wondering with the rest of the team if the intermural basketball game should go on given that the US had just started bombing Bagdad. And Rwanda and Bosnia…and then nothing… No big events for eight years. Relatively speaking peace was breaking out, the UN acted in Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo. Things were being handled. I moved into a good career, got married, got a mortgage and a couple of kids. Then the buildings fell down…Driving to work the other day I actually got a start when I saw, coming down the Brackley Road, low on the horizon a Dash Eight coming into land at the airport. I saw in my mind that building. One one hand, we gen’ x’ers have some experience of this stuff. On the other hand, we gen’ x’ers have some experience of this stuff…
Alan McLeod
[10:38 AM September 19, 2001]A good reference but, for me, at 38, having lived my first 28 or so during the Cold war, the presence of war and the potential to be sucked into one personally was never “violence unthinkable” despite how the life of a Canadian 20-something gen’ x’er in Nova Scotia was so peaceful and fun. On top of the fears, I wrote about above, my folks moved in ’56 to avoid the Third World War believed coming due to Hungary, French-Indochina and the Suez. When I got my UK Right of Abode in 1981, my mother thought Maggie T. might draft me for the Falkins. The fear of the bomb. We were living in our own minds on borrowed time and as a result were in no rush to prepare for kids, mortgages and careers. My 20’s were different from your – perhaps until now. From the fall of the Wall until the falling of the WTC there was a period of freedom from “the bomb” that I think I will not experience for a while.
Alan McLeod [7:33 AM September 24, 2001]
elal@pei.sympatico.caLike everyone, I am still thinking about what has happened and how things have changed since 11 September. One thing I think has changed is that irony and cynicism as a guiding principle for one’s life has been severely undermined. In North American popular culture for 20 years or so, the ability to comment upon any proposition with a tongue in cheek reort has been acceptable, almost expected and often a winning point in a conversation. David Letterman was an early adherent. We were so witty that we could turn any philosophical proposition or political stance around to show its paradoxical components and therefore its lack of integrity. Few principles could sustain the probe – wealth was bad but being a bleeding heart helping the poor is pointless emotionality; liking art was lightheaded but disliking art was neanderthalic; being involved with politics was self-interested, not being involved…well that was OK because that serves irony. The dominance of irony seems to have been swept away this month. Friends, beauty, nature, reflection are all assets we are being told to lean upon to understand the world now. Causes are largely just, protests are mute and people have gotten nicer on the highways. Will it last? Will street people have enough coin to get things to eat? Will we like our new neighbours and ask to try their strange foods? Will we stop thinking about our own inadequacies at work or home and enjoy the day?
David has posted his remembrance here. I glad Steve kept his archives.
Hydrogen Scooter
I saw this on Boing and wondered what are we waiting for? A zippy machine that drinks split water and runs by reforming it and doesn’t make you look like a dork like the mythical but seemingly world-winning and innovative except if you want to do something other than drive it around a parking lot Segway.
As if a Quadrophenia would ever be written about Segway riding.