Slim

"Target in sight!  Where in Hell is Major Kong?" ...

From thescoopblog.dallasnews.com

Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece Dr. Strangelove (1964) is loaded with first-rate performances, from Peter Sellers (in three roles), Sterling Hayden, and George C. Scott.

But, the most iconic moment in the movie is owned by Slim Pickens riding that H-bomb to the target and into eternity.

How on earth did he even get there?  By a combination of serendipity and pure accident.

Rodeo Days ...
Once upon a time, 12-year old Louis Burton Lindley, Jr. wanted to become a rodeo performer.

As he was born June 29, 1919, in Kingsburg, California (a bit south of Fresno), that time was probably 1931.  Child Protective Services didn't even exist, child labor laws were different then and many children of that age worked for wages on farms and ranches so this was not at all unusual.

He told a manager of a rodeo that he had his father's permission as long as he didn't use his real name.

Supposedly, the manager told him that he might as well call himself "Slim Pickins" as that was all he could look forward to in wages on the rodeo circuit. Louis said that was just fine with him. The manager wrote down the name, spelling the last name with an "e" near the end instead of the "i", and thus came Slim Pickens into our world.

He did pretty well on the rodeo circuit, and became a rodeo clown; perhaps the most dangerous job in the profession. When a bull rider gets thrown, that bull may decide to wheel around and finish the job.  If you are the clown, your duty is to get that bull's attention, draw him away from the thrown rider (to you instead), and Oh, by the way, because of that word "clown", try to entertain the crowd while running for your life.

He did that for almost twenty years, when his distinctive Oklahoma-Texas drawl (although he was pure Californian), his height (6'-3") and general appearance got him in a role in Rocky Mountain (1950) starring Errol Flynn.

The Days of the "Singing Cowboy" ...
Nope, I'm not aware of Slim ever singing, but that might have been interesting. In the '50's we had the likes of Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, (even John Wayne went through this with other people dubbing in the singing (as he couldn't sing) and the guitar (as he couldn't play one either).

In those times, the hero usually had a comic sidekick; often a bit murderous - The Cisco Kid (not even remotely like the cold eyed killer that O. Henry wrote of in "The Caballero's Way", from which the TV show claimed origin) had Pancho, whom the Kid had to keep from shooting anyone with whom they came in conflict, and Roy Rogers had George "Gabby" Hayes, who was equally ready to commit murder on occasion.

Among the ranks of the Singing Cowboys was Rex Allen, ...

Slim Pickens and Rex Allen - from bobnolan-sop.net

... and Slim became his sidekick. While not so ready to ventilate people as the other sidekicks, if you wanted to make a new window in a saloon wall by putting someone through that wall, Slim (kinda slim in those days, with shoulders like a bull) was always willing to oblige. He did dozens of these and other comic roles until ...

"Calm down, Slim. There's someone I want you to meet"  ...

As Deputy Lon Dedrick - enlarged from thelin.net

Marlon Brando got involved with a western, One-Eyed Jacks (1961), he eventually went on to direct. I'm not going to spend much of this post on that movie, except for the essential parts that led to Strangelove.

There's a story, I've had no luck at all in confirming, that when Slim was called in to read for the part of Deputy Lon Dedrick, while waiting for the interview a cowboy type next to him began ragging him in various and insulting ways until Slim finally stood up and invited him outside to settle things; at which point Brando walked up, laughing, and told him, "Calm down, Slim. There's someone I want you to meet". That cowboy was one of the stuntmen and Brando was trying to see if Slim could be convincing as Dedrick (a cowardly bully and one mean son-of-a-bitch; quite a departure from his earlier roles). As Slim got the role, apparently he passed.

Part of the serendipity mentioned above was that Stanley Kubrick was originally set to direct, before he decided that he simply couldn't work with Brando and his (costly and time-consuming) quirks, and left the production. Kubrick had met Slim, seen him at work and would later remember him.

"Stay on the bomb run, boys. I'm gonna get those bomb-bay doors open if it hare-lips everybody in Bear Creek!" ...
I mentioned above that among the performances in Dr. Strangelove were three by Peter Sellers:  RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (who's trying to deal with Sterling Hayden's General Jack D. Ripper), President of the United States Merkin Muffley, and Dr. Strangelove himself.

Sellers was also meant to play the B-52 pilot USAF Major T. J. "King" Kong. During the shoot, Sellers fell and badly sprained his ankle, making it very difficult (almost impossible) to work within the confined sets of various parts of the B-52.

Remembering Slim from his aborted One-Eyed Jacks experience, Kubrick thought he would be perfect and gave him a call. Slim responded by flying to London, only to discover that, OOPS!, he didn't even have a passport. Slight delay while the U.S. Embassy sorted that out.  A lot of the Brits weren't quite sure what to make of him, thinking that his habit of going around in jeans and a cowboy hat was "method".  Nope, that was just "Slim". :-) ...

After the experience with Strangelove, Slim noted that "the parts, the dressing rooms, and the paychecks all started getting bigger. It's amazing what a  difference a single movie can sometimes make."


"What did you do before becoming a stock detective, Mr. Beige?"
   "I was a horse thief"
"Why'd you quit?"
   "I got caught." ...

As Henry Beige - screencap from DVD

That's from a very laid-back modern day western set in Montana, Rancho Deluxe (1975) in which Jack McKee (Jeff Bridges) and Cecil Colson (Sam Waterston, who much later played District Attorney Jack McCoy on "Law and Order") are low-grade cattle rustlers, poaching an occasional steer from a wealthy rancher and selling the meat.

When that rancher has had more than enough, he hires legendary former-rustler-turned-stock-detective Henry Beige (Slim) to deal with it.  This is Slim's best role since Strangelove and is the main reason to give this one a look.

Slim left us on Dec 8, 1983, in Modesto, California. He was 64.

"When that man died, they broke the God-Damned mold."
That's from the movie "Lone Star", about someone else, but it sure applies here.  As does this from the same movie ...

"Never be another like him!"
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"Big truck just went by. ...

-- Now it's gone."   ~Morning traffic report on the "Res"

My previous post "Toughest Pawnee" ...  resulted in this email from an Air Force buddy in Montana ...
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Hi Paul,
    Good stuff on Wes Studi and the other Indian actors.  I grew up with Indians, adopted and raised two Indian kids, and still call them all Indians.  None of my Indian friends seem to mind; they haven’t yet insisted I refer to them as Native American.  I love Studi’s performances; you’re absolutely right—he owned Dances With Wolves for those few minutes..  Graham Greene and Adam Beach are other favorites.
    Adam Beach first came to my attention in Smoke Signals, an excellent film made on a reservation near Spokane and Couer d’ Alene.  If you’ve seen that film, you’ve witnessed scenes (drunken parties, domestic violence) right out of my life.
  
 * * *

    Anyway, nice catch.  These guys are all great actors.  I felt the entire cast of Smoke Signals deserved awards, particularly Gary Hall.  It sure portrayed the “Res” way of life accurately.
    Now to look up those PBS titles you gave.
Thanks,
***
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One of my greatest joys is when something I've written strikes a chord with someone, and I hope he forgives me for using part of his email in this post.

No, I had not seen Smoke Signals (1998), although I had heard about the title. I took so long to reply because I needed the time to hunt it up and watch it.

It's a keeper, and I loved it enough that I decided this would be my response.

"Big truck just went by. -- Now it's gone."
That local traffic report, on the "Res", would also be an accurate report on the part of rural Arkansas that I've experienced. (***'s comment in his email, "... you’ve witnessed scenes ... right out of my life." also apply to rural Arkansas.)

The movie is mostly about Victor Joseph (Adam Beach) ...

 Adam Beach as Victor Joseph - from aveleyman.com

... coming to terms with the recent death of his father Arnold (Gary Farmer) who had left the family ten years ago.

As I can find no mention of a Gary Hall involved with the movie, I suspect that *** was really thinking of Gary Farmer,...

Cody Lightning as young Victor Joseph and Gary Farmer as Arnold Joseph

(Screencap from DVD)

... who truly does rate at least a nomination.

There's an inside joke in the movie involving Farmer: In the movie, while riding on the bus on his way to where his father has died, Victor remembers a drunken party during his childhood, where his father is repeatedly asking him, "Who's your favorite Indian?", to which young Victor replies, "Nobody!"

Three years before "Smoke Signals", Farmer co-starred with Johnny Depp in one of the weirdest westerns I can recall, Dead Man (1995), in which a hapless soul, William Blake (Depp) is on the run for an accidental killing, is slowly dying from a bullet wound and encounters a very strange Indian (Farmer) who calls himself Nobody. 

Nobody tells a tale of being captured by whites ("Stupid White Man") as a kid, taken from one town to another ("Every time I was moved, I found people waiting for me that looked the same as the ones before. I wondered how they kept moving whole towns like that") until he was eventually taken across the ocean to London, where he was educated (somewhat) and introduced to the poems of William Blake, telling Depp's character, "Now I know that you truly are a dead man.".

He continues the tale of his escape, of returning across the ocean and working his way back to his village, where no one believed his story, laughing him out of the village, calling him a name that translates into, "Man who talks loud, saying nothing!". He concludes, "I prefer Nobody".

Instead of giving a summary of "Smoke Signals" that would spoil things for any of you who've yet to check it out, I'm gonna concentrate on trivia that relates it to "those PBS titles you gave" (referring to four Tony Hillerman Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn mysteries I mentioned in the "Toughest Pawnee" post.

"Smoke Signals" won the Audience Award and Filmmakers Trophy (and was nominated for Grand Jury Prize); all in Dramatic category, for first-time Native American (Oh, alright, Indian) director Chris Eyre, at the Sundance Film Festival. That festival is an annual event by the Sundance Institute, an outfit devoted to helping and promoting independent film makers. It was founded (and is presided over) by actor Robert Redford.

Redford's production company was involved with all four of the Hillerman titles and I doubt that it's much of a leap to think he saw "Smoke Signals" and was impressed with Eyre; enough to maybe being the one who chose him to direct "Skinwalkers" and "A Thief of Time".

Adam Beach was pretty early in his career when he did "Smoke Signals", but this is some of his best work.  Not because he's stuck at some level, but because this role allows him more range than most roles he's gotten, from being an asshole (when he torpedoes a blonde on the bus who claims to have been an alternate on the Olympic Gymnastic Team) to releasing pent-up grief from the very bottom of his soul in another scene.  I expect that Eyre was the one to pick him for the role of Jim Chee in "Skinwalkers", already knowing what he could do.

Farmer is in three of the Chee/Leaphorn movies; as a Hopi policeman in "The Dark Wind", and as Leaphorn's superior Captain Largo in "Coyote Waits" and "A Thief of Time".

As *** notes above, almost all of the cast in "Smoke Signals" deserved awards.

Someone I was particularly impressed with I had never even heard of, much less seen before: Evan Adams (Thomas Builds-the-Fire)...

(Screencaps from DVD)

... an Indian nerd, always telling stories that no one (especially Victor) wants to hear.  I said above, "The movie is mostly about Victor Joseph", but in reality it's about Thomas telling the story of Victor Joseph.

As much as I like Adam Beach, right there is the true owner of this movie. :-)
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"Toughest Pawnee" ...

... is how actor Wes Studi (a full-blooded Cherokee from Oklahoma) is listed in the credits for Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves (1990).

In it, he plays the lone survivor of a Pawnee raiding party that has not fared so well in a skirmish with the Sioux. Before the surrounding Sioux close in to finish him off, he takes his moment to loudly try to educate them about their ancestry, personal hygiene, sexual habits, and whatever else he feels they might need enlightenment on.  For a brief moment or two, he owns the movie.

(This movie was also the introduction (for most of us, although he'd been acting for 14 years by the time it came out) to Canadian Indian Graham Greene, as Kicking Bird. I mention him because he's gonna show up again, below.)

Magua say, "Understand English very well." ...

Wes Studi as Magua - from nativeamericanactors.tumblr.com

If "Dances with Wolves" was the first movie in which I saw Studi, Michael Mann's absolutely wonderful Last of the Mohicans (1992) was the one in which I really took notice of him.

An English Officer, leading some troops and a few civilians from Albany to  Fort William Henry, has given an instruction to whom he believes to be a Mohawk scout, not knowing that Magua is a Huron who was taken in by the Mohawks after his village was destroyed by English soldiers. So, you could say that Magua has serious issues with the English.

The Officer punctuates his instruction with, "Do you understand?". After hearing Magua mutter something in Huron (NOT at all complimentary) he asks, "What did you just say?".  Magua, looking straight at the Officer he's leading into an ambush, replies, "Magua say, 'Understand English very well'."

Wes Studi is mesmerizing here, playing an adversary who has reasons for being what he is.  I truly think he deserved a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination for this. He probably wouldn't have won as Gene Hackman took it for his role of "Little Bill" Daggett in "Unforgiven" that year and was pretty well unbeatable, but he should have at least been nominated.

"NOW what?!!!" ...

Wes Studi as Hanover - from weirdwildrealm.com

... would make a fine alternate title for a guilty pleasure of mine, Deep Rising (1998), in which Treat Williams appears to be having the time of his life playing a boat captain for hire, in the South China Sea, who keeps finding plenty of reasons to utter that exclamation.  

Famke Jannsen ("Goldeneye", "X-Men") plays a con-woman on a floating casino, apparently playing her in Sandra Bullock mode.

And, Wes plays Hanover, the leader of a pack of mercenaries who hire the boat to launch a bit of piracy against that casino, only to discover it wrecked by a monster, with only a few of the passengers (including Jannsen) and crew still surviving.

In truth, to call this movie "dumb" is a disservice to the word. But, it is a "fun" dumb, and makes you wonder, "Where the Hell is Mystery Science Theater 3000 when you really need it?".  This is absolutely perfect material for it.

As for Studi here, he has a demise (earned) that is worth the price of admission by itself. If his kids ever saw it, I'll bet they just ate it up. :-)

"That's not very Navajo." ...

Wes Studi as Joe Leaphorn and Adam Beach as Jim Chee

from italychile.blogspot.com

Author Tony Hillerman wrote a series of novels, set in the Navajo Nation ...

from nnrecovery.navajo-nsn.gov

from destination360.com

... and mostly about Sergeant Jim Chee and/or Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn; both of the Navajo Tribal Police.

Chee is very enamored with the old ways, wants to become a spiritual healer and still has superstitions around bodies and burial sites.

Leaphorn is almost a polar opposite; having been born on the reservation but raised outside of it.  He has little tolerance, and even less patience, with those superstitions; preferring reason and logic.  

One of his quirks is the map of the reservation he keeps on his wall, using pins with different colored flags to mark the locations of various crimes and incidents. He once admitted that he doesn't know how it helps him to solve crimes other than the fact that it seems to help him think.

Four of Hillerman's novels have been made into one film and three made for TV movies; thanks to Robert Redford's production company.

The Dark Wind (1991) was a theatrical release, with Lou Diamond Phillips and Fred Ward as Chee and Leaphorn, respectively. Nice piece of work; worth seeking out.

But, the really good versions are the three that were made for PBS's American Mystery series: Skinwalkers (2002), Coyote Waits (2003), and A Thief of Time (2004).  These are the ones pairing Adam Beach and Wes Studi.

In "Coyote Waits", we run into evangelical Christian/con-man Slick Nakai ...

Wes Studi as Joe Leaphorn and Graham Greene as Slick Nakai

Modified from avalon-medieval.blogspot.com

When we meet him here, he's using his Cadillac as a taxi, delivering someone to Leaphorn's house.  When Leaphorn inquires about his driving a taxi, Slick mentions losing his permit to set up his revival tent on reservation land.

Leaphorn: "I heard about that. Something about a collection plate."

Slick: "Everything I get, I give to God. Everybody knows that. -- 'cept you."

(Slick is also in "A Thief of Time". I've a reason to bring him up. You'll see.)

In "Coyote Waits", Chee and Leaphorn are investigating the apparent killing of Officer Delbert Nez (a close friend of Chee's) by Ashie Pinto.  Local Defense Attorney Janet Pete (also Chee's current girlfriend) has gone to Leaphorn's office to get his take on the situation.

On seeing the familiar map on Leaphorn's wall, with its colored pins ...

Janet Pete (seeing three yellow ones that Leaphorn uses for "oddities"):
 "What about those yellow ones?"

Leaphorn (pointing to each in turn): "Here's Ashie Pinto's shack.
 "Here's where Officer Nez lived. --  And, here's where he died."

Janet Pete: "Forms a triangle."

Leaphorn:  "Very large triangle. Two Navajos, who might as well have lived on two different planets -- they met here. I don't think it was by chance."

Janet Pete: "You're sure about that?"

Leaphorn: "Nothing happens by chance."

Janet Pete: "That's not very Navajo."

Leaphorn: "No. That's me."

Now, I love these movies and consider Joe Leaphorn as my favorite of Wes Studi's roles.

But, not everyone agrees.  Here's the reason I referred to Greene so much.

A visitor to the IMDB page for "Coyote Waits" wrote a review, in which he stated preference for Graham Greene as Joe Leaphorn, noting that in the books, Leaphorn had a way of interrogating you by putting you at ease and letting you talk and ramble on and on, while he's just sitting there and taking it all in, quietly putting the pieces together.

In contrast (he noted), Studi's version would look at you as if wondering how your scalp would look on his lodge pole.

I suspect that reviewer would take this photo ...

Wes Studi as Joe Leaphorn - from pbs.org

... and declare, "I rest my case!"

Ok!  I have difficulty in arguing with that.

But, Hell!  I still like the guy. :-)

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"Cast in the Name of God,

... Ye not Guilty"

The Japanese have a whole series of series, in manga and anime, involving giant robots (or mecha, as most of these are not actually autonomous but have human pilots; either remote, or more often in a cockpit in the head area).

One such is The Big O (1999 TV Series), in which Roger Smith (the Negotiator) summons and pilots a skyscraper-size behemoth against various other monsters, most of whom are also mechanical in nature.

From animepaper.net

From forums.comicbookresources.com

When he fires up Big O, the boot sequence shown on the screen is ...
 "CAST IN THE NAME OF GOD,  YE NOT GUILTY".

Where did that come from?

Series director Kazuyoshi Katayama had read a magazine article about John Milius and his 1982 movie "Conan the Barbarian". The opening title sequence of that movie shows Conan's father casting, forging and tempering his own sword. Engraved on the blade, in Runic characters, was "Suffer no guilt ye who wields this in the name of Crom": a variation of phrases sometimes engraved on the swords of executioners in the 17th century. Katayama liked it and incorporated it into the series.

Another staple in Japanese manga and anime are kaiju.

That word is often taken as meaning "giant beast", but its literal translation is "strange beast" and usually refers to a bunch of Japanese films featuring such; Godzilla (1954) being the archetype ...

From wallpaperpin.com

The name "Godzilla" is a romanization, by the film production company Toho Company Ltd., of the original Japanese name "Gojira" — which is a combination of two Japanese words: gorira (gorilla)  and kujira (whale). The word alludes to the size, power and aquatic origin of Godzilla.

And now, get ready for a live-action incorporation of mecha and kaiju.

From director Guillermo del Toro (The Devil's Backbone (2001), Hellboy (2004), Pan's Labyrinth (2006) ) comes ...

From Wikipedia

... Pacific Rim (2013), due to open 12 Jul 2013.

When Earth is threatened by kaiju (one source says released from a crevice in the Pacific, another implies that they are the tools/weapons of aliens), we construct giant robots/mecha (called Jaegers; from the German word for "hunter"; pronounced "Yeager"), with which to fight them.

I was bitterly disappointed at the news, last January, that Universal had pulled the plug on del Toro's project to bring H.P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" to the screen ("Hellboy" had some scenes that were positively Lovecraftian, suggesting that he could do an excellent job there). I understand that he has not given up on the project, and it may eventually happen someday.

But, in the meantime, he's concentrated on "Pacific Rim".

Giant robots fighting giant monsters?  From a practical point of view, that might be the only thing they would actually be good for.  While cool as Hell, I suspect that what amounts to a walking destroyer would make a truly awesome target in a real war.

But, I expect to be first in line when this opens. :-)
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"Your Honor, he NEEDED killin'."

As a Texan, I feel pretty confident that it is only an urban legend that that phrase was ever actually used as a defense in a Texas courtroom.

But, the sentiment seems very appropriate towards the surviving member  (now in custody and charged in Federal Court) of the pair that made and set the bombs that killed several people and injured dozens more at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

If you've noticed that I haven't named him, it is because I'm not really interested in who he is nor whatever he might have to say.

I'm far more concerned with what he is: a sick asshole who probably found  gratification in exercising godlike power over others by taking their lives, in the name of radical Islam.

No doubt, he will be assigned a team of crack defense lawyers, who may well argue successfully that the environment under which he was raised poisoned him to the point that he may have been doomed to carry out what he did.

They may well be right, but, SO WHAT?!!!  Too Damned Bad.

Shall we sentence him to life in prison, where he can infect others?  Where, in spite of whatever the length of his term, he may very well be released in twenty years (still younger than when I began my IT career), probably still just as sick and free to resume where he left off?

When a dog has rabies, it's very likely not the fault of the dog.  But that does not make it any less sick nor any less dangerous.  Putting it down is simply a matter of common sense.

This guy may be human (although I think he forfeited that when he set the bombs), but I truly think the same rule applies here.
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COME AND TAKE IT

Apparently, the City Council of New Rochelle, NY was offended when the United Veterans Memorial & Patriotic Association replaced a worn-out American flag at the New Rochelle Armory and flew this flag below it ...

From the Gateway Pundit post linked below

This is what is known as the Gadsden Flag.  It has been a part of our history since before the Stars and Stripes, and has flown from the mainmasts of some of our first Naval vessels.

Because it was adopted by some groups within the Tea Party (as a protest over our rights being trampled on) some City Council member complained about it being "hateful" and wanted it taken down.  The City Manager had more sense and chose to leave it alone, but was overridden by the City Council and the flag was taken down. The Council voted 5-2 to refuse to let the veterans restore it.

See Outrageous! Gadsden Flag Removed By New York Town For Being An “Offensive” Tea Party Symbol


If they got their panties in a twist over that, just imagine their reaction to ...

From conservativeblogscentral.blogspot.com

That is the Gonzales Flag.

The earliest shots in the Texas Rebellion were fired at Gonzales, Texas.  Prior to the Battle of the Alamo (in March 1836) tensions had been building up for several years between the Mexican authorities and the Texian settlers.

In 1831, they had given the settlers of Gonzales a small cannon to help against frequent Comanche raids.  Not wanting to leave such a weapon in the hands of potential opponents, they decided to take it back.  The settlers balked, and sent out word to neighboring settlements for help.

When a contingent of Mexican troops arrived to take the gun, they were greeted by a large party of armed Texians carrying that banner with its invitation.  A brief skirmish resulted in two Mexican soldiers killed, and one Texian injured (to be fair to the Mexicans, they were not under any orders to start a war and withdrew to prevent a bad situation from becoming even worse than it already was).

But, this was the first known instance of armed Texians taking on the Mexican army, and that genie was not about to go back into the bottle.  While not readily apparent on that day (02 Oct 1835) events were set into motion that I honestly don't know if could ever have been stopped.
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What IS it with the Republican Party?!!!

- Some quite lethal things actually. I'm going to address two of them here.

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 - Damned near USELESS!!! - See update at end. :(

"Drunks, passed out in public places, are more truly symbolic of the USSR than is the Hammer & Sickle."    ~Robert A. Heinlein, "Inside Intourist" (1960)

He and his wife Virginia had taken a tour of the Soviet Union in 1960 and he was referring to the Russian proclivity to use vodka (often dosing themselves to unconsciousness), to insulate themselves from the absolutely soul-crushing hopelessness of life under that system.

That could be where we're heading.

Only three years into his first term, Barack Obama has already launched us well on the way. Just think of what he could manage with yet another term.

Sadly, many Republicans seem Hell-bent on making that second term all too likely.

Part 1 - The Circular Firing Squad ...
... and our shark-like feeding frenzies when going after Republican candidates with whom we disagree.  All too many of us appear to have no idea of what "Pyrrhic Victory" actually means.

Unfortunately, the Democrats do seem to understand, and consistently do a much better job of uniting behind the eventual winner of their primaries (or in this case, their virtually unopposed candidate).

"When your enemies are destroying themselves, do not interfere!"

I don't know if that saying goes back to Musashi Miyamoto, Sun Tzu, or even cave paintings, but I'd be very surprised if it's not framed on a wall above David Axelrod's desk.

When the campaigns started, I had wanted, so much, Sarah Palin as our candidate. But, that was not to be.

After her, I'd have preferred Rick Perry. But unfortunately, it appears the thing he's best at is governing. While I believed (and still do) that he would make a truly excellent President, there remains that pesky detail of winning the nomination before you get a chance at going for the job itself.

Next up was Newt Gingrich: A fighter, with an idea-a-second mind and the willingness to actually run against the system currently in place.  But he goes all over the map sometimes, following an excellent South Carolina campaign where he focused on issues, with a badly mistaken Florida campaign where he reverted to "destroy Romney" mode, losing badly as a result.

Roger L. Simon (long a fan of his) tore him a new one in Florida: Why Gingrich Lost Big and What’s Next. While Simon's post is disturbing enough, what absolutely terrifies me are the comments.

It appears that whoever emerges as the nominee, all too many of those against him will throw a tantrum, sit out the election, and then on the first Wednesday this November, will be wailing about what just happened and wondering "Who's responsible?".  Well, in that case, I suggest that you look into a mirror. And, may God Damn you to Hell! Because that's precisely what you will have done to the rest of us.

If any grown-ups remain in the Republican Party, their #1 concern absolutely has to be about getting some kind of unity behind whoever emerges victorious in the primaries, and get him all the support he needs.

Because, the safest bet on earth right now is that the Democrats will turn out in force to be damned sure their candidate makes it.

Or, would you prefer Obama getting a chance to complete the job of turning our country into the despair-ridden Hell that Robert Heinlein visited so long ago (and apparently remains the blueprint of the society Obama's administration wishes to force upon us)?

It is truly up to you.

I wrote those preceding paragraphs, about Roger L. Simon's post and the resulting comments several days ago, in the post that is replaced by this one.

Today (05 Feb 2012), he has a new post on Romney's win in the Nevada Caucus ...
Republican Nomination: The Fat Lady Sings at The Venetian but the Losers Aren’t Listening "To the candidates themselves who treat each other like they were refugees from a leper colony, when their actual views are close to identical, I say take your extreme narcissistic personality disorders and go see a reputable psychiatrist. The country is more important than you are."

... and once again the commentors scare the Hell out of me, making me hope to God they are not truly representative of the electorate, as they totally confirm what I said about them in the preceding paragraphs.
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Part 2 - Kdaptist Republicans ...
The other problem is that, for an opposition party, all too often we really aren't.

We appear to have a GOP Establishment of insiders for whom the commandment is "Watch thou for the mutant."

If you recall the old Frankenstein movies in which the villagers are coming for the monster with torches and pitchforks, that is the fate of any Republican who dares to be distinguishable from a Democrat.

Do I exaggerate?  Ask Sarah Palin, or Florida Representative Col. Allen West, who's greatest enemy is not a Democratic opponent, but his own party (see Is The Florida Republican Party About To Sacrifice Congressman Allen West)

Now, divisions within our party aren't that new or unusual.  I remember Barry Goldwater's campaign in the '60s, running on the theme of his book, "A Choice; Not an Echo."

I also remember that he lost (although, what would have happened had Kennedy not been assassinated is anyone's guess;  he was in Texas that day to mend political fences -- he was in trouble. Don't forget that while he handled the Cuban Missile Crisis very well, it was his handling of the failed Cuban invasion and the rise of the Berlin Wall that set the stage for the crisis in the first place. He was not invulnerable politically at that time).

It may be that loss that has given us an inner corps of GOP insiders that are terrified of anyone distinguishable from a Democrat.  Indeed, four years later, George Wallace would run as a third-party candidate on the grounds that, of the Democrats and Republicans, "There's not a dime's worth of difference between them!"

Larry Niven wrote about those establishment types in his "Known Space" series
(and I'll bet you thought he was just writing science-fiction :-).  In it, among humankind's greatest adversaries were the Kzinti: eight-foot tall, bipedal, carnivorous cat-like aliens for whom the word aggressive is a masterpiece of English understatement.

After Louis Wu has had to challenge one (who had not yet earned a name, but was referred to by his function: "Speaker" - short for "Speaker to animals"), and an intervention from another Kzin prevented that challenge from reaching its tragic conclusion ...
  Speaker: "Louis: I found your challenge verbose.
  "A simple scream of rage is sufficient.
  "You scream and you leap!"

They had fought us many times, always losing.  In another story, when the possibility of their involvement in some mysterious happening was raised, Beowulf Schaeffer observed, "It's not like they're a real threat;  they'll always attack before they're quite ready."

In the novel "Ringworld", Speaker tells Louis about the "Kdapt-Preacher heresy": The mad Kzin Kdapt-Preacher had his road to Damascus moment and concluded that the Kzinti constantly lost their wars with man because the Creator had, in fact, made Man in his image and favored him.

So, disciples of his cult wore skins and masks made of human skin in hopes of deceiving the Creator and finally managing a victory.

"You kept winning!", Speaker explained.

Or, another example (I swear I'm still on topic here) ...

To the best of my knowledge, the AIDS virus does not harm you directly but does its damage by infiltrating your body's defenses and infecting the white blood cells that are its first line of defense, so that when you come under attack from something else you find that your guardians are on perpetual coffee break.

Are those examples the standards to which the Republican Party aspires to?  To win by only being impostors of the Democrats?

I'm not at all keen on the idea of a third party to split our opposition to Obama, but I'm leaning hard in that direction once the November election is behind us. If the Republicans insist on being only a pale shadow of the Democrats, they are damned near useless.

I've usually been opposed to the idea of term limits, but I'm reconsidering that;  the establishment types described above make a wonderful case for the notion that serving in the Executive or Legislative branch should never be a lifetime profession.

(Originally posted 1234 CST, 05 Feb 2012)

Update - Wed, 11 Apr 2013 - Damned near USELESS!!!
I originally posted this on 05 Feb 2012, and I stand by every word of it.

This item (Taxes, Guns, and Chuck Schumer as GOP Leader) on Redstate today caused me to resurrect my post and bump it to the top.

I'm frankly "Mad as Hell ...", but am not at all sure just what to do about it.  My misgivings about a third party splitting opposition to the democrats still remain, but it may very well have to come to that. My biggest hope is that the Tea Party supporters will work on (and eventually succeed in)  instigating enough of a revolt within the Republican Party to make it worth a damn again.

What I am certain of is that there is no hope in Hell of accomplishing anything useful with a party made up of democrat wannabes.

Revolution within the Republican Party, or total replacement of the party? That, I believe, is the question.
-

A-10 WARTHOG ... baaaaaaaaaaaad to the bone

One of my best friends and an Air Force buddy forwarded to me ...

  I thought you might be interested in this.

-------------------------------------------------------
WOW!!!

A-10 WARTHOG ... baaaaaaaaaaaad to the bone

"One shot will knock a turret off a tank. You cannot fly the airplane without the gun because of center of gravity being off too far".

----- First, there was this gun ...

It was developed by General Electric, the "We bring good things to life" people.

It's one of the modern-day Gatling guns.

It shoots very big bullets...

It shoots them very quickly...

Someone said, "Let's put it in an airplane."

Someone else said, "Better still, let's build an airplane around it."

So they did. And "they" were the Fairchild Republic airplane people.

And they had done such a good job with an airplane they developed back in WWII .....called the P-47 Thunderbolt!

They decided to call it the A10 Thunderbolt II ... AKA the Warthog

They made it so it was very good at flying low and slow and shooting things with that fabulous gun.

But since it did fly low and slow, they made it bulletproof, or almost so.

A lot of bad guys have found you can shoot an A10 with anything from a pistol to a 23mm Soviet cannon and it just keeps on flying and shooting.

When they got through, it looked like this.

It's not sleek and sexy like an F18 or the stealthy Raptors and such, but I think it's such a great airplane because it does what it does better than any other plane in the world.

It kills tanks.

Not only tanks, as Sadam Hussein's boys found out to their horror, but armored personnel carriers, radar stations, locomotives, bunkers, fuel depots... just about anything the bad guys thought was bulletproof turned out to be easy pickings for this beast.

See those engines. One of them alone will fly this plane.

The pilot sits in a very thick titanium alloy "bathtub."

That's typical of the design.

They were smart enough to make every part the same whether mounted on the left side or right side of the plane, like landing gear, for instance.

Because the engines are mounted so high (away from ground debris) and the landing gear uses such low pressure tires, it can operate from a damaged airport, interstate highway, plowed field, or dirt road.

Everything is redundant.

They have two of almost everything.

Sometimes they have three of something.

Like flight controls, there's triple redundancy of those,

and even if there is a total failure of the double hydraulic system, there is a set of manual flying controls.

Capt. Kim Campbell sustained this damage over Baghdad and flew for another hour before returning to base.

But, back to that gun.

It's so hard to grasp just how powerful it is.

This is the closest I could find to showing you just what this cartridge is all about.

What the guy is holding is NOT the 30mm round, but a "little" 50 Browning machine gun round and the 20mm cannon round which has been around for a long time.

The 30mm is MUCH bigger.

Down at the bottom are the .50 BMG and 20x102 Vulcan the fellow was holding.

At the bottom right is the bad boy we're discussing.

Let's get some perspective here: The .223 Rem (M16 rifle round) is fast.

It shoots a 55 or so grain bullet at about 3300 feet/sec, give or take.

It's the fastest of all those rounds shown (except one).

When you move up to the .30 caliber rounds, the bullets jump up in weight to 160-200 grains. Speeds run from about 2600 to 3000 fps or so.

The .338 Lapua is the king of the sniper rifles these days and shoots a 350 grain bullet at 2800 fps or so.

They kill bad guys at over a mile with that one.

The 50 BMG is really big.

Everyone who picks it up thinks it's some sort of fake, unless they know big ammo.

It's really huge with a bullet that weighs 750 grains and goes as fast the Lapua.

I don't have data on the Vulcan, but hang on to your hat.

The bullet for the 30x173 Avenger has an aluminum jacket around a spent uranium core and weighs 6560 grains (yes, over 100 times as heavy as the M16 bullet, and flies through the air at 3500 fps (which is faster than the M16 as well).

The gun shoots at a rate of 4200 rounds per minute. Yes, four thousand.

Pilots typically shoot either one- or two-second burst which set loose 70 to 150 rounds.

The system is optimized for shooting at 4,000 feet

OK, the best for last.

You've got a pretty good idea of how big that cartridge is, but I'll bet you're like me and you don't fully appreciate how big the GE GAU-8 Avenger really is.

Take a look.

Each of those seven barrels is 112" long.

That's almost ten feet.

The entire gun is 19-1/2 feet long.

Think how impressive it would look set up in your living room.

Oh, by the way, it doesn't eject the empty shells but runs them back into the storage drum. There's just so dang many flying out, they felt it might damage the aircraft.

Oh yeah, I forgot, they can hang those bomb and rocket things on 'em too, just in case.

After all, it is an "airplane"!

Like I said, this is a beautiful design.

-------------------------------------------------------

That's the email, which has been making the rounds with a number of people.

Feeling that it would make a wonderful post, I sent this to whom I thought to be the originator ...

Mr. ******:

****** thought (correctly) that I would be interested in this.

I'd like very much to have your permission to use this as a blog post, giving you full credit.

Beware, though. It is not great fame you will acquire. My blog (see link in my sig below) does not have a large following; probably only a few hundred people will ever see that post.


He replied ...

Mr. Gordon,

Thanks for the above message. I'm a retired Air Force fighter pilot. E-mails such as this one are frequently passed among us- and those friends that are felt to be interested in military aviation and new equipment - such as ******.

This one on the Wart Hog is not of a classified nature. As a matter of fact, nothing such as this that is classified is sent over the Internet. Don't know who originated this one so no credit or acknowledgement should be mentioned.

My airborne roles over the years were of air-to-air and air-to ground in nature. The guys driving these A-10 Wart Hogs were always doing a great job at being "down and dirty" in support of the ground troops.

This "Improved" version is just great for getting the job done with improved safety for the pilots as well. Your displaying this on your Blog Site will perhaps inform the unknowing of one of the things their Air Force has at their disposal for protecting this nation of ours.

If any questions, please feel free to ask.

Regards, **

Ok. I only hope I've done this justice.  I wish I had originated it. (Of course, when someone else has done your work for you, it's so much easier. :-)

BTW, there's another advantage to the engine location besides being "away from ground debris".  If you are an enemy combatant and trying to take a shot at an A-10 with a shoulder-fired heat-seeking missile, you're probably aiming from below and behind. From that position, you'll find the exhaust from the engines obscured by the horizontal tailplane and the twin rudders, making it difficult for the heat seeker in the missile to get a good lock on the target. That is not an accident.
-

When Worlds Collide ...

... coming soon to the Apocalypse Channel (aka The Weather Channel) .

You know; that place you go to check out what the weather's gonna do.

Where, before (maybe) getting that info, you have to sit through endless replays of "Storm Stories", "It could happen tomorrow" (or maybe not), and, so help me, "Iceberg Hunters" ...

Aim between the eyes, son.  It might charge if it's only wounded.

(Ok. I know! I Know!!! They're shooting off chunks to be recovered and used  for extra pure bottled water.  But, honestly, could you have resisted? :-)

They have a new series, "Forecasting the End!" and it's to include a piece on rogue planets, probably on the scenario envisioned by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer in their 1933 novel, "When Worlds Collide"...

While not the first to venture into this territory (H. G. Wells short story "The Star" (1897) touched on the effects of a close passage), it's easily the most famous (having been adapted into George Pal's 1951 movie).

In 1964, Fritz Leiber published "The Wanderer", also dealing with such a visitor (but he took an approach more metaphysical than scientific. It's been a looong time since I read it, so I could be wrong, but I believe this wandering planet was guided here, in contrast to the random potshots by the others, in which case it's irrelevant to this post.

You see, what I'm concerned with here is the likelihood of such an event involving planetary or stellar size masses colliding or having near misses.

When I was much younger, with much better distance vision, I could take a rifle and put most of my shots (all, if firing from prone or a bench rest) within a 6" (15 cm) bulls eye at 100 yards (or 100 meters), using iron sights. Many people can do better, but that bulls eye is a mighty small target at that range.

It's hard enough to hit with careful aim. If I was to just causally fire the rifle in the general direction, there is an enormous amount of surrounding space into which the bullet is most likely to go. If that bulls eye had thoughts and feelings, I'm sure it would feel pretty safe.

So, just how threatened should a sugar grain (at maybe 0.5 mm diameter) feel about another sugar grain roaming around about 9 miles (15 km) away?

That is the kind of space we are talking about in space.

Trying to get a handle on just how immense the Universe is ain't easy.

The first good attempt I ever came across was ...

Published in 1957, it has been out of print for ages, and the author is no longer with us, so I hold little hope of it ever coming back into print (though it really deserves to be).

It is available for viewing online, at  http://www.vendian.org/mncharity/cosmicview/ and at Caltech.
 ( http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Boeke/frames.html )

The first has larger pictures, but both are only pale shadows of the original. I hope someone with influence sees this and tries to get this wonderful book back in print.

In 1977, the team of Charles and Ray Eames made a short film ...

... that did a wonderful job of presenting it.

Powers of Ten (1977) is available from sellers at Amazon.com (They give a 1968 date, but I believe that is for the initial prototype of the film that was made in 1977) at  http://www.amazon.com/The-Films-Charles-Ray-Eames/dp/6305943877/

In one book about creating the movie, "2001: A Space Odyssey", I read that they originally considered a prologue with interviews of various scientists and having a similar "powers of ten" instruction film.  But, they decided it was better to just get straight into the story instead.

One of my all time favorite movies Contact (1997) ...

... opened with a jaw-dropping sequence, right after the title, looking back at our world while accelerating away through our solar system, through the galaxy and beyond to the ends of creation. If you can watch that without being moved, then I don't know what to do with you except perhaps notify the police that "this guy's DEAD!" :(

From here, I'm gonna take my shot at giving perspective to the universe, using grains of sugar.

First ...

From windows2universe.org

That picture should get you started on that perspective (we'll get to the sugar in a bit).

The Sun is not a large star, nor is it very hot. But it is hot with reference to men, hot enough to strike them down dead if they are careless about tropic noonday ninety-two million miles away from it, hot enough that we who are reared under its rays nevertheless dare not look directly at it.
 ~Robert A. Heinlein, "Methuselah's Children" (1958 -- or 1941 if that passage is also in the original shorter story from which the novel was later evolved).

Those dark blotches on the Sun are sunspots, storms on the surface that are dark only by comparison with the rest of the surface by being cooler. Actually, they would be blindingly bright, so you can guess what the rest of that surface is really like. They are also large enough to swallow the entire Earth as you can see by the small dot representing us.

Note also, the Lord of our Solar System, Jupiter. Of the approximately 457 Earth-masses of material making up the planets, moons, asteroids, etc., about 318 make up Jupiter and another 100 or so are in Saturn. Isaac Asimov once noted that, to an impartial observer from out there, "our Solar System would consist of Jupiter plus debris".

Now, on to Paul's Sugar Grain Scale of the Universe ...
(NOTE: In the figures below, while I try to give SI (metric) equivalents), I'm following our practice of using the comma to break up large numbers.  I am not using it as a decimal marker, as many countries do.)

A long time ago, I came upon a factoid that a pound (454 grams) of table sugar contains around 2,260,000 grains.

Now, the specific gravity of sugar ranges from 0.68 (bagged raw sugar) to 1.5862 (sucrose crystal). (From http://www.sugartech.co.za/density/index.php ).

For our purposes, I'm using bagged table sugar (as it's the most likely type you'll have at home) at 0.7 specific gravity, which works out to 43.7 lbs/cubic foot ( 700 kg/cubic meter). Say, 98,762,000 grains per cubic foot ( 3.488 billion grains/cubic meter)

0.5 mm (500 microns) is a ballpark figure for the average diameter of grain of table sugar. Having this represent our Sun gives us a scale of about 2.782 x 10 to the 12th (or 2.782 trillion) to one.

Diameter of Sun - approx 864,327 miles (1,391,000 kilometers)
Diameter of Earth - approx 7,918 miles (12,742 km)
Earth to Sun - approx 92,960,000 miles (149,600,000 km)

Shrink our Sun to a sugar grain, and the Earth becomes a bacterium about 4.8 microns in diameter (literally microscopic), orbiting about 53.8 mm (about 2.1 inches away).

On this scale, a light year works out to 2.11 miles ( 3.4 km).

Distance to Alpha Centauri = 4.367 light years.  The nearest known star (other than the Sun), Proxima Centauri, is about 4.22 light-years away.

So, on this scale, the nearest other sugar grain we might have to worry about a collision with would be about 8.9 miles or 14.32 km away from us. And here, we are speaking of things much larger than planets, making bigger targets.

So, with all due respect to the Global Warming/Climate Change Propaganda Channel (the Weather Channel), of all the things I may lose sleep over, rogue planets just ain't among them.
-

Bottled Water

-- A Vent.

In my wonderful part-time job as a grocery cashier, I often ring up carts loaded with bottled water, sometimes cases (plastic shrink-wrapped around 24 plastic bottles) of it, in the endless quest for the purest of drinking water.

Never mind that most city tap water is actually just fine, and doesn't result in landfills full of eternal plastic.

I'm old enough to remember a southern comedian (David Gardner) who, as "Brother Dave Gardner", did comedy routines (around 1960 or so) in the style of an evangelical preacher just telling a story.  On one of the LP's he made ("Rejoice, Dear Hearts", I think), he told this aside to the audience between a couple of his routines ...

"I was in Hot Springs [Arkansas] the other day, watching those stu--pid, ig--no --rant, southerners selling water to them brilliant yankees."

A couple of years ago, I recall a commercial for something (I've forgotten what) in which this bubble-headed blonde was laughing nervously at some remark, and then going completely blank, and continuing, "I don't get it!".

I'll venture that we now have an entire generation of bottled water fanatics who would have precisely that reaction to Brother Dave's comment. :(
-

"Never ascribe to malice ...

... that which is adequately explained by incompetence."
 ~Napoleon Bonaparte

23 Mar 2013 - Updated at end.

Caught Emperor (2012) Saturday night at the River Oaks theater and was surprised to find a packed auditorium for an independent film with almost no advertising. Admittedly, it's a pretty small auditorium, being one of two that the original balcony was divided up as, after being walled up from the main auditorium below. But, still ...

Matthew Fox (left) & Tommy Lee Jones (center) as General Bonner Fellers
and General Douglas MacArthur respectively.    From mysanantonio.com

24 Mar 2013 - A commenter noted "By the way, that is NOT Matthew Fox in the picture above!". He's right. See correction below.

The official storyline ...
A story of love and understanding set amidst the tensions and uncertainties of the days immediately following the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II. On the staff of General Douglas MacArthur (Jones), the de facto ruler of Japan as Supreme Commander of the occupying forces, a leading Japanese expert, General Bonner Fellers (Fox) is charged with reaching a decision of historical importance: should Emperor Hirohito be tried and hanged as a war criminal? Interwoven is the story of Fellers' love affair with Aya, a Japanese exchange student he had met years previously in the U.S. Memories of Aya and his quest to find her in the ravaged post-war landscape help Fellers to discover both his wisdom and his humanity and enable him to come to the momentous decision that changed the course of history and the future of two nations.

Ok. When I heard that Tommy Lee Jones was playing Douglas MacArthur, I knew I had to check it out.

He does just fine; handling his Texas accent the same way Sean Connery handled his Scottish accent when playing a Lithuanian captain of a Soviet submarine in "The Hunt for Red October" and Arnold Schwarzenegger handles his Austrian accent when playing anything: with an attitude of "Accent? WHAT accent?!!!".

I really liked this movie; which the Philadelphia Inquirer dismissed as "an unsatisfying history lesson" (probably because of the interwoven love story which was used as a device for exploring the differences between Japanese culture and ours).

My biggest gripe (and the reason for the title of this post) comes during the end credits.  As with many historical dramas, they show pictures of the real people involved, with a short blurb about their fate.

In the case of General Bonner Fellers, the blurb notes that he was demoted to colonel by General Eisenhower, without a single word as to why, leaving you to wonder if Fellers screwed up or something.

I did a little research to confirm that what I thought may have happened was really the case.

What happened was that the war was over, and we no longer needed the huge army we had built up. The army doesn't hang on to officers unless there is something for them to command; a command appropriate to their rank.

Excess officers can either leave the army, or accept a lower rank for which more commands may be available. In October 1946, Fellers reverted to rank of colonel as part of a reduction in rank of 212 generals.

A total of about 16,000,000 Americans served in some branch of the armed forces during WWII. The U. S. Army had risen from a strength of just 190,000 soldiers in 1939 to a peak of 8,290,000 in March of 1945.

But, until the advent of the Korean War and the Cold War, the U.S. had a history (and a doctrine) of not maintaining a large standing army during peacetime. Thusly, by the end of 1948 that force had been reduced to 554,000, approximately one-sixteenth of its earlier size. Whole divisions and brigades ceased to exist except as placeholders in the organization structure (Order of Battle). Simply a case of "too many chiefs and not enough indians".

Fellers retired from the Army on November 30, 1946. In 1948, his retirement rank was reinstated as brigadier general.

I do not believe for a moment that the end credit slight was deliberate, but just a lack of thought by whoever worked up the end credits sequence. But if any of Bonner Fellers family is still with us, they deserve an apology.

Hence, the title of this post. :(

Update 1440 CDT 23 Mar 2013 - My site meter shows this modest little post getting lots of hits, from all over, by people who (like me) were curious about why Fellers was demoted and were sent here by google and other search engines.

I hope they are satisfied with the explanation I have offered, as I feel it is accurate. I place absolutely no credence on some rumors of bad feeling between Eisenhower and Fellers (they had both served under MacArthur) as the cause. If there's anyone for whom Ike may have had some animosity, it would have been MacArthur himself, having remarked once that he "had studied dramatics under MacArthur", probably considering him a self-promoting showboat.

Correction 1035 CDT 24 Mar 2013 - A commenter noted "By the way, that is NOT Matthew Fox in the picture above!". He's right. The source for the picture identified him as such (as did many other sources using that same picture).

BUT, while I thought it looked a bit like him, the problem is the insignia on his collar.

A brigadier general wears a single silver star there.  I couldn't get enough resolution on that picture to really make out the insignia, but it is definitely gold. I thought it might be the gold oak leaf of a major, but it appeared too wide for that. The best guess I can make is the "Rising Eagle" of a  warrant-officer.

Here's a picture that really is Fox (no longer "LOST") as Fellers ...

from facebook.com

-

On Reading (Updated) ...

(Originally published 04 May 2010 - Updated below 16 Mar 2013)

I'll send out a bunch of emails about this post and, from experience, have a pretty good notion of the seven or eight who will actually take a look at it.

Many of those who wont bother will pass simply because they are busy with this thing called LIFE.  It's silly and selfish to want them to put "Read Paul's blog" at the top of their priorities list, and I'd have to be even more full of myself than I usually am to expect that.

I'll always remember an episode of Candice Bergen's "Murphy Brown" TV series in which she plays a TV news reporter showing up at a politician's office, starts telling the secretary who she is, only to have that secretary cut her off at the knees with, "I don't watch television; I have a LIFE!"

And, many of those to whom I send my "Look at me! Look at me!" messages are in that situation.

But, I suspect that for a few, the real reason is that reading is an ordeal for them.  I'm not the first to wonder that;  Isaac Asimov noted in an essay of his, probably before some of you were even born,  that reading (just like playing an instrument, sports, and many other skills) is something that some have a knack for, and others have to work like hell to accomplish.

I'm speaking now of extremely intelligent people who overcome that problem, through sheer will and discipline, by reading what they have to but take no real pleasure in it. If you find a profile they've put up anywhere, and there's a "Favorite Reading:" list on it, they're apt to put on it, "I don't like reading."

One of the luckiest things about my life is that I've always loved reading (almost anything), and that it's always been easy for me.

I had to drop out of school after the ninth grade (I did get a GED during a period of unemployment thirty years later), and have never had much study discipline (or any other kind of discipline, for that matter), but it's very hard to read as much as I have without some of it managing to stick. As a result, I tend to do very well on tests.

Such tests impressed the USAF enough that they sent this high-school dropout to Yale for a year (for language schooling) and this accomplishment helped my way into engineering and IT careers. And overall, I can't really complain about how my life has turned out.

But, for that, I have to credit loving reading and never having to struggle with it.  In my case, that was a knack that I had the sheer good luck to be born with.

(Originally published 5/4/10 11:14 PM)

Update - Sat, 16 Mar 2013 - I may have had some help with that "luck".
Today, I came across this post More on reading; a bit of the absurd by Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I sent an email to him, mentioning A Profound Sadness at the Polling Station (my thoughts on how vital mastery of English can be to making it here), and also the post you are now reading.

In Dr. Pournelle's post was an email from one of his readers noting ...

When our daughter was in kindergarten, she read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Yes, she understood it with the help of her Parental Dictionaries and a bit of phonetic guidance with things like wingardia leviosa. My sainted mother-in-law took the place of an English nanny.

This reminded me that some of my "luck" was certainly due to Mom and Dad. Both of them were voracious readers and kept plenty of material at hand.

By the time I was 7 or 8, I was devouring copies of Mechanix Illustrated left by my uncle (who was a subscriber and also read a lot. That magazine had many articles on just about everything besides the usual auto repair and furniture building you would expect (see The Year of the Jackpot).

Dad kept a large supply of Zane Grey and Max Brand paperback westerns I got hooked on.

I think it was about this time that Mom showed me a copy of Treasure Island, warned me that I shouldn't read it as it "might give me nightmares", and hid it away. Of course, I found it and devoured it. It didn't occur to me until much later that it wasn't all that difficult for me to find.

I'm pretty confident that I had been played. :-)

Thanks, Mom and Dad.
-

The "Field of Dreams" Principle

-"If you build it, they will come."

(Nope! This post is not about that particular movie. But, ultimately, it is about a couple of other movies: one current, and the other ten years ago).

My best friend and former co-worker at a software company, at which I was a programmer for 12 years (1986-1998), thusly described the apparent operating philosophy of the owners of that company. We developed what may well have been the finest GIS (Geographic Information System) software used by (all too few) companies in the petroleum industry.

This was attested to by those users, and by observation of the competition at annual SEG (Society of Exploration Geophysicists) conventions. We had a foothold in Shell Oil and Fina Oil & Chemical (now part of Total), and a very good shot at a contract with Saudi Aramco. A good enough shot that I was one of those who had to get a passport in case I ever had to fly out there.

BUT, we spent very little on a sales force to go out and promote that product. When you are a small outfit (maybe a dozen and a half employees at most) and your chief competitor is a subsidiary of Schlumberger, well, you might well guess that "If you build it, they will come" just ain't how the world works. That contract never materialized and the big guy won. Our company closed it's Houston office in '98 and, instead of becoming fabulously wealthy (or at least very well to to) I was out of a job for a loooong time.

The Field of Dreams Principle seems to apply to the movie business as well.

For several months now, I've seen posters in movie theaters for ...

From beyondhollywood.com

Synopsis for Phantom (2013) ...
'Ed Harris' plays the captain of a Cold War Soviet missile submarine who has secretly been suffering from seizures that alter his perception of reality. Forced to leave his wife and daughter, he is rushed into a classified mission, where he is haunted by his past and challenged by a rogue KGB group (led by David Duchovny) bent on seizing control of the ship's nuclear missile. With the fate of humanity in his hands, Harris discovers he's been chosen for this mission in the belief he would fail. 'Phantom' is a suspense submarine thriller about extraordinary men facing impossible choices.

Ok. I kept an eye out for it, and when I got home from work Friday, saw in the IMDB showtimes that it had arrived. Cool!

Clicking on it showed that, out of 55 theaters within a 25 mile radius of my zip-code (with God only knows how many hundreds of screens), it was showing at precisely ONE, in the middle of the day at 11:30 AM and 2:20 PM, at the Star Cinema Grill (a very nice place) in Missouri City. nearly 20 miles away. As it was too late for me to go Friday, I went yesterday.

While waiting for it these past months, I never saw one preview for it, nor a single commercial. Predictably, when I reached the auditorium, I saw that a couple in the middle were the only ones there besides myself. I suppose the psychic powers of our population are just not enough to compensate for the total lack of promotion.

The technical term for this is "dumping". After spending millions to make the movie, they seem to find nothing in the budget for marketing and advertising for it, preferring to spend it on something they probably invested a lot more in and promising far greater returns. Sometimes, what happens is a change at the top when a rew CEO takes over the studio and promoting the efforts of his predecessor is not even on his "to-do" list, as he has his own mark to make on things.

"Phantom" is a damn fine movie, worthy of far better treatment than it's getting, but if I find it to be completely gone next weekend, it wouldn't surprise me a bit. If it's showing anywhere near you at the moment, keep that in mind. Otherwise, you'll have to wait several months for the DVD.

That DVD will be worth getting.

(Update - 1415 CDT 23 Mar 2013 - That "next weekend" (of Friday, 15 Mar 2013) has come and gone, as has the movie. Not really a great insight on my part;  it was (in the words of one of Robert A. Heinlein's characters in "Methuselah's Children") "like predicting an egg will break when you see it already on its way to the floor". The DVD will probably be released by (or shortly before) summer. I promise you, it's worth it.)

This is a case of history repeating itself.

In late 2002, I saw posters for Below (2002) ...

From impawards.com

... about a WWII submarine, supposedly haunted. Mostly a psychological thriller (it's left open as to whether anything supernatural is involved or maybe gas buildup from the batteries is causing hallucinations), this is another first-rate movie that had posters everywhere, no previews nor any  commercials and only appeared in a handful of multiplexes the first week, was down to one the second, and gone by the third. In 2002, you had to wait about nine months after theatrical release before the DVD came out.

That DVD is still available and I highly recommend it.

So!  If you build it, will they come?

Sadly, I kinda doubt it. :(
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