"... or something. :-)"

- Memories of Michigan - Spring of  '84.

In 1984, I left Houston to join an Air Force buddy, Claude W****, to manage the Data Processing unit of his Seismic Exploration Company in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan.

I arrived on March 23rd (THREE days into Spring) ... STILL snow and ice all over the place.  

A beautiful blonde Data Entry lady, Jane R**********, took one look at the Bomber Jacket I had for Winter wear ...

... and just laughed, "PAUL!!! YOU'RE gonna DIE!!! :-)".  By the time Winter returned, I WAS much better prepared.

When I arrived, the bookkeeper, Ceile S*******, introduced me, "This is Paul Gordon - our new Data Processing Manager ... or something."  

That was not a put down;  it was just the way she talked.  BUT, I've often regretted NOT having that "or something" on my business cards;  it was such a PERFECT description of some of the positions I've held!  :-)

-

To ALL Veterans ... with LOVE ;-)

 Found THIS on facebook some time ago. ...

Paul Gordon - Ex United States  AIR FORCE.  ;-)

NOTE: I was BORN Paul Gordon Binkley (Legally changing it to Paul Gordon on 26 OCT 1966) and THAT is how I was known to buddies in the USAF ...

(Originally posted late November 2018;
 and reposted 2254 CDT 04 MAY 2019)

-

"... Time to die."

On January 23, 1944 in Breukelen, Utrecht, Netherlands, was born Rutger Hauer: an amazing actor, once referred to as "a Dutch Paul Newman". 

His IMDb page (linked to his name above) shows 173 credits, but it was Paul Verhoeven's Soldier of Orange (1977), about the Dutch Resistance in WW2, that introduced him to me ... 

Cropped from image at https://www.filmlinc.org/films/soldier-of-orange/

In The Hitcher (1986) he was a chilling psychopath (more of an elemental force than a man), who seemed to have stepped right out of a Stephen King novel.  HIGHLY Recommended ...

From https://www.virtual-history.com/movie/film/8522/the-hitcher

But MY favorite of his many roles is the replicant Roy Batty, in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) ...

Cropped from http://www.teladoiofirenze.it/cinema-teatro/30-anni-di-blade-runner/attachment/blade-runner-rutger-hauer-as-roy-batty/

Although an adversary (NOT a villain), he is nothing less than the heart and soul of this movie about a soulless future; facing his (ENGINEERED) demise thusly ...

From https://et.glbnews.com/07-2019/52780338982960/

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.  Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.  I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.  All those moments will be lost in time ... like tears in rain ... Time to die."

27 JUL 2019 - Piece of trivia found on IMDb ...
Rutger Hauer came up with many inventive ideas for his characterization, like the moment where he grabs and fondles a dove.  He also improvised the now-iconic line "All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain".  He later chose "All those moments" as the title of his autobiography.

He left us on July 19, 2019 (age 75) in Beetsterzwaag, Netherlands.

RIP Sir; you WILL be missed! :(

-

Shaking our tree.

- 04 Oct 1957 - SPUTNIK!!!

This little dingbat scared the Hell out of many of us then ...

from citizenship typepad.com

Nothing but a polished metal sphere of 585 mm (23 inches) diameter with a mass of 83.6 kilograms (184 lb) and carrying only a radio transmitter, it definitely got our attention.

THEY got there FIRST! Oh, Man!!!

You see, those were the thrilling days of yesteryear when the Soviet Union was ruled by Nikita "We will bury you" Khrushchev who, just the year before, had sent columns of tanks into Hungary to crush a rebellion there (just his way of stating "THAT is a NO-NO!").

The days of "Duck and cover" drills in public schools (not at all insane; if a nuke hit several miles away instead of on top of you, that could make the difference between surviving versus being shredded by glass blown in by the shock wave if all you did was just stand there and gawk at the explosion. Nukes are powerful, but not infinitely powerful. They can be survived, and have been. See reports of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for hard evidence. (Although, in an essay on civil defense, Robert A. Heinlein advocated situational awareness (paying attention to what's going on in the world) and summed up surviving the bomb in seven words: "Don't BE there, when it goes off!" ))

That innocent looking thing was placed into orbit by ...

from on6wj-sputnik.blogspot.com

... the R-7 launcher (for a long time referred to as T-3), which evolved from an ICBM whose primary purpose was to transport a thermonuclear bomb from Point A (somewhere in the Soviet Union) to Point B (somewhere in the USA).

The local newspapers ...

San Antonio Light, 05 Oct 1957 - from newspaperarchive.com

... published times of when to see it in the morning or evening, when it would be brightly lit by the sun.

To read or hear about the Soviets (listening to the radio when they were stomping on the rebellion in Hungary was heart-wrenching) while they were on the other side of the world was bad enough, but a bit abstract.

To walk out into your back yard and actually see this bright little silver dot in the sky slowly moving overhead, and realizing there they are;  well, that's a whole 'nother story.

(Originally published  1239 CST,  03 OCT 2012)
-

Serendipity

noun - the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.

Through all my careers, I have become self-taught on slide-rule, logarithms, computers and programming.

I taught myself how to use the slide-rule while still in the USAF. It wasn't part of my training; someone had discarded one and I salvaged it, just becoming fascinated with what I could do with it.

Same with logarithms; after I became a civilian, with none of my Air Force skills all that useful, the unemployment agency sent me to a local junior college for a drafting course. A book we were given on mathematics for engineering had a chapter on logarithms at the back. Once again, it was NOT part of the curriculum, but I just thought it so cool to be able to perform fractional roots and powers with them.

The early part of my engineering career was in the slide-rule days. Give one of those to modern day engineers, and I'll bet you some would be trying to figure out, "How do you turn it on?"  ("With a really interesting problem.", I would respond. :-)

That particular career (before I moved into IT) was from 1964 to 1984, and during nearly half of it, the most modern tool we had was an electric adding machine.  I truly kid you not; we had one engineer who used an abacus (and was damned good with it).

It was the late 1960's before someone tried to interest us in a four-function electronic calculator, about the size and shape of an IBM Selectric typewriter, using a bank of tubes showing 7-segment numbers for the display and costing about $600.00 (at a time when that was one third the price of a brand-new Volkswagen Beetle).  We passed on the deal, at that time. 

A couple of years later, I bought a Miida calculator (still only four-function) for about $170.00 from Sears, making me the first in the company to have one.  It got popular very quickly.  I even worked out a three-step method of averaging to get very precise square roots from it (we used those a lot in electrical calculations) and felt pretty damned good about that (although slide-rule accuracy was actually more than sufficient for our purposes -- it was an ego thing for me, I suppose).

Of course, another year or so, and the same amount of money bought an 80-function calculator.  Since then, prices and sizes of those things have dropped so much that the only thing keeping them from becoming Cracker Jack prizes is fear of lawsuits if a kid swallows one.

Twice in 1972 and once in 1975 I had made trips to Titusville, Florida (12 miles due West of Cape Canaveral's launch pads on Merritt Island), to watch the launchings of Apollo 16, Apollo 17, and the Apollo-Soyuz missions.  (Be patient;  there IS a reason for THIS item in THIS post.)

I left the Air Force early, but honorably, and had no contact with any of my former buddies there until 1975 (I think) when, in a Sears department store here in Houston, a man stepping off the escalator behind me asked, "Excuse me.  Aren't you Paul Binkley?". 

I was trying to remember if he was an architect client of ours when it hit me that he had addressed me by a last name I hadn't used in nine years (another story, probably never to be revealed). He was one of the bunch I had been with, and was now living just north of Houston and working as an exploration geophysicist for Shell Oil Company.

I got back together with him and his family. That was a bit of a miracle. Have you ever run into someone that you knew from long ago, only to find so much has changed that you no longer have anything in common anymore?

A couple of years later he and his family moved up to Mt. Pleasant, in central Michigan, where he joined a seismic exploration company there. Another couple of years and he's broken off from them and started his own company (also seismic exploration).

In the meantime, several things had been going on. I'd been an electrical draftsman, evolved into an electrical designer (almost an engineer, but sans license and seal;  my work required approval from a Registered Engineer) and had been doing the same thing for almost two decades.

Into our engineering world arrived a micro-computer, in 1981, primarily for use by our secretary as a word-processor (A lot of her work was typing up engineering specifications, usually from existing boiler-plates;  this made her job enormously easier.) and an HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning) program in Basic, that never worked properly.

But, it had a professional grade level of Basic included, and I had found me a new toy. Soon I was teaching myself programming on it, and making programs to handle some of the calculations required in my work.

I had made several trips to Michigan, to visit my friend, and we had talked several times about the possibility of me moving up there to join him. After nearly 20 years of drawing circles and home runs, one gets ready for something new. (Any reader who has done electrical drafting, design and/or engineering knows what I'm speaking of.  As for the rest: Nyah, nan nan nan nyah! :-)

In September of 1983, one of the Space Shuttles was scheduled to go up at night. I could afford it, had plenty of vacation time available, and decided, "Let's do it!".

This time, it didn't go so well. When it was time to get rolling, I was asked to not go; our sometimes crazy work schedules had piled up too much (and this wasn't the first time by a long shot. Their recurrences was one of the reasons I had so much vacation time built up; I'd had several vacations aborted this way). So, I didn't go.

Watching the lift-off, on TV at home instead of the Titusville beach, I'd HAD it! I was feeling "G*D D*MM*T! I'm not the only one there!". After the lift-off, I made a long distance call to my friend in Michigan and told him that if he still thought I could do something up there, I was definitely interested.

As I noted above, he had started his own company. He was farming out the data to a data-processing company, was not real impressed with the results, and decided to set up his own data-processing center.

In early 1984, he called back and asked me if I would come up and manage it for him.

And so, because of what amounts to a hissy fit over not being able to go to that night shuttle launch, I was soon on my way to Michigan, a new career, and a whole new future.

Damn little of my life has ever been carefully planned; most of the time I seem to drift up on whatever shoals the current takes me to and I go on from there. The career change noted above is the closest thing to careful planning, and it resulted from an impulse; the only planning involved was that, when I left the engineering company, at least I knew where I was going and what I would be trying to do. Most of my odyssey has been far more random and capricious. I'm seriously considering a post on the utterly random and unpredictable events that have led me to where I am today.

And HERE it IS! :-)

-

Coming to terms ...

NOTHING lasts FOREVER.

At seventy-six and a half, I've outlasted a LOT of people;  some of whom I've known personally, and many others I've known of, greatly admired, and am saddened at their absence.

Not a bad  run at all;  could have been worse.  :-)

-

IFEL - K-4-61 - QUESTIONS

- Trying to sort out memories from 57 years ago.

The K-4-61 part of the title refers to Korean class of April 1961, at Yale University's Institute of Far Eastern Languages, that I attended as an Airman of the United States Air Force Security Service.

When I arrived, the the Company-sized detachment (Detachment 2 ???) was headquartered in THIS building at 109 Grove Street (???)'  ...

THAT building was one of FOUR dormitories we had; only ONE other of which I remember (the one I was assigned to) at 1 Hillhouse Ave, New Haven, CT,

Searches for "1 Hillhouse" come up with THIS pic of Warner House ...

... which looks KINDA familiar ...

... plus THESE, which look a LOT more familiar ...

Mistrusting my 57-year old memory, I HOPE some of you will help me get it RIGHT about Hillhouse.

My arrival was TWO YEARS before the release of "The Haunting" (based on Shirley Jackson's novel, "The Haunting of Hill House"; of which I was NOT aware at that time). but that TOP photo of the Warner House would CERTAINLY qualify as "spooky", and the OTHERS can be unsettling on a "dark and stormy night".

I HOPE some of my IFEL buddies can help me on the questions.  If ANY of you have photos from that time, I'd LOVE it if some were scanned and emailed to me.  I recall Joseph W*** sending a few, some years ago, but they were LOST when my previous computer DIED in 2015.

I HOPE I can UPDATE or REDO this post, FAR MORE ACCURATELY, down the line.

I'm ALSO gonna see if I can find some department at Yale that might help with the the Hillhouse history.

Thanks, in advance,  ;-)

If you remember THIS song, ...

... then, BOY, are you OLD.  :-)

While the video is obviously of fairly recent vintage, the song by The Four Lads was a #1 hit in 1953)
-

Christopher Lee

A couple of weeks ago, I updated "Of COURSE, they're naked!!!" ...  because of the sad news that one of my all time favorite actors had passed away, on 07 Jun 2015, at age 93.

As if the man wasn't already fascinating enough, I found this at
  http://buzzfeeduk.tumblr.com/post/121266080043/rip-christopher-lee ...

What more needs saying? :-)

-

Memorial

Found THIS in a tumblr porn blog, of all places  ...

In my earlier engineering career (1964-1984), one of my co-workers had a coffee cup I wanted very much, but I could never find one like it.

I wanted it because of a quote that was on it;  a quote I later learned came from the Peanuts comic strip, by Linus van Pelt (Lucy's kid brother; the one with the security blanket):

   "I love mankind;  it's people I can't stand."

That sentiment seemed to perfectly fit that co-worker, it fit ME at times, and I suspect the subject of that memorial was on the same page with both of us. :-)

-

And that's all she wrote ...

Ever wonder how that phrase came to mean "It's over!" ?
No? Never?!!!   Well, tough.  I'm gonna tell you anyway.

It's from a Hank Williams song of late 1950 or early 1951 (Dear John), and each verse ended with that phrase and a chorus of  'Dear John (I've sent your saddle home)'.

To me, that's the big mystery of the song. 'I've sent your saddle home' is perfectly clear English.  At 71, I just haven't been around long enough to understand its use here. I have searched and searched (and searched). In this matter, google is not your friend.  All I've ever been able to accomplish is to verify that those are the actual lyrics.  If any of you can answer, I'd love to hear from you.

As for "That's all she wrote" becoming synonymous with "It's over!", I think the verses make it pretty clear how.  Especially the last one. :-)

Dear John (I've sent your saddle home)
 Written by Aubrey Gass and Tex Ritter
 Recorded by Hank Williams  12/21/1950

Well when I woke up this mornin'
There was a note upon my door
Said, 'Don't make me no coffee, babe
 'Cause I won't be back no more'
And that's all she wrote
'Dear John (I've sent your saddle home)'

Now Jonah got along in the belly of the whale
Daniel in the lions' den
But I know a guy that didn't try to get along
 And he won't get a chance again
And that's all she wrote
'Dear John (I've fetched your saddle home)'

Now she didn't forward no address
Nor she didn't say goodbye
All she said was if you get blue
 Just hang your little head and cry
An' that's all she wrote
'Dear John (I've sent your saddle home)'

Now my gal's short and stubby
She's strong as she can be
But if that little old gal of mine
 Ever gets a hold of me
That's all she wrote
'Dear John (I've sent your saddle home)'

Now Jonah got along in the belly of the whale
Daniel in the lions den
But I know a man that didn't try to get along
 And he won't get a chance again
And that's all she wrote
'Dear John (I've fetched your saddle home)'

Now I went down to the bank this morning
The cashier said with a grin
"I feel so sorry for you Hank
 But your wife has done been in"
And that's all she wrote
'Dear John (I've sent your saddle home)'

-

Hamlet - (Corrected 01 SEP 2019)

I know, I KNOW!  Someone has already written about this guy.  So?  :-)

Method in the Madness ...

Some of you have probably come across that phrase and wondered where it came from (or not).

Well, it comes from Hamlet, wherein Hamlet is a young prince of Denmark whose father (the King) has recently died. Uncle Claudius has ascended to the throne and married his mother (Queen Gertrude).

As Shakespeare's play opens, some friends of Hamlet tell him that the guards of the night watch have reported seeing an apparition, a ghost "very like the late King", wandering the battlements of Elsinore Castle in the wee hours before the dawn.

Hamlet goes to see, and the specter beckons him away from his friends and tells him that his death was not natural, that it was "MURDER, most foul" and that Claudius had poisoned him.

Hamlet vows bloody vengeance. He wants it to be so complete, that when he finds Claudius alone one night (unaware of Hamlet's presence because he's in the midst of meditation and prayer) Hamlet draws back, fearing that if he struck now, Claudius would be sent straight to Heaven. He not only wants the bastard DEAD; he wants him IN HELL!!!

But, Hamlet is not a kamikaze. Regicide carries some pretty stiff penalties. They come up with some pretty awful ways of doing you in; not out of mindless brutality, but out of very thoughtful deterrence meant to make it crystal that THAT is very definitely a NO-NO!

However, even in those medieval times, there had developed the idea that a person "not in his right mind" may not be responsible for his actions.  So, Hamlet begins laying what would amount to an insanity defense by acting peculiar and going about muttering gibberish and nonsense.

(Now, I seriously doubt that, if he killed the King in that state, they would just let him go. I suspect that he would spend the rest of his days in a medieval version of an asylum, not very different from the worst cells in the dungeon, and might soon wish they had just killed him and gotten it over with. But, if he didn't think it all the way through, he wouldn't be the first.)

King Claudius has asked his adviser Polonius to keep an eye on Hamlet. He finds Hamlet buried in a book, and when he asks him what he is reading, Hamlet (who knows what Polonius is up to) tells him, "It says that old men ... (but I don't believe this) ...", openly mocking Polonius while pretending not to do so.  Now, while Polonius often appears to only be full of platitudes (to his son, "Neither a borrower nor a lender be.", "To thine own self be true."), he is not stupid.  Recognizing the mockery that Hamlet is pulling, he casts this aside to the audience, "Though this be madness, yet there is method in it."

The old boy smells a rat and is not completely sold on Hamlet's madness.

Anyway, that's where the term comes from.

The "Lost" Hamlet ...  

The first time I ever saw the play performed was in the mid 1960s, when I saw Hamlet at Elsinore (1964)  broadcast on the local NET (National Education Television - precursor to PBS) station (Channel 8 in Houston).  

It was a made for BBC Television production, filmed at the actual location the play is set in (Elsinore Castle, in Denmark) on black and white film. That choice was made because a lot of the location shots depended on whatever existing light there was, and black and white film was the only type fast enough to do the job. (It was a decade later before Stanley Kubrick could do something similar with color film when shooting Barry Lyndon. By then, color film speed had greatly improved, and he rented a hideously expensive camera lens from NASA that had a HUGE aperture in order to pull that off.) - See Correction - 01 SEP 2019 below.

This version of Hamlet had the absolutely finest performances of the two lead characters; Christopher Plummer as Hamlet and Robert Shaw as Claudius.

Plummer played the Dane as if he was genuinely mad, and Shaw as Claudius was sexy, charming, and dangerous as Hell. You could easily imagine Gertrude falling for him, much more than you would believe that for others who had that role.

After seeing it that time, I never even heard of it again for a long time. I looked all over when videos and DVDs came out, but to no avail. The movie was shot on film and transferred to videotape (in those days (before Beta and VHS), videotape was 35mm film stock, with a magnetic recording layer in place of film emulsion). Also, in those days, the BBC had a horrid habit of re-using those tapes; recording new material over whatever was there before.

Correction - 01 SEP 2019 - Some of that is WRONG.  Don't recall original source of info but have learned, "This programme was recorded and edited on video tape (2" quadruplex) and not 'filmed'."  The part about the BBC re-using the tapes IS correct;  and THEY weren't the ONLY ones.

Movies meant for theatrical release usually have hundreds (more often thousands) of copies made for distribution to theaters, greatly improving the chances that people can restore an old movie later on.

As this was a production meant for a showing on television, it was all too possible that not a single copy existed and that it was gone forever. 

Found ...

After writing that, I searched on google for information and whatever images I could find, and came across this ...

I'm guessing that the original negative was available, or that a few 16mm prints may have been made (for schools). However they pulled it off, the BBC was able to remaster this movie, in time for a film festival in Sarasota, Florida, and then they issued a DVD in October 2011, which I now have. 

Correction - 01 SEP 2019 - Steve Says: 
February 19th, 2012 at 12:32 am

The good news is that the BBC is releasing a lot of their vintage material on DVD, whatever they have in their archives after dumping or erasing a good percentage of it at the time (or so I’ve read). The even better news is that HAMLET AT ELSINORE is one of the productions that survived, and it was released on DVD last October.

I've now confirmed my 47 year old memory of how great those performances were, and you can too. Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, even some Walmarts have this.

Christopher Plummer as Hamlet - 

from filmsworthwatching.blogspot.com

Robert Shaw as Claudius - from the DVD cover.

Enjoy! :-)
-

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. :(
-

They're rioting in Africa.

They're rioting in Africa.
They're starving in Spain.
There's hurricanes in Florida
   and Texas needs rain.

The whole world is festering with unhappy souls.
The French hate the Germans. The Germans hate the Poles.
Italians hate Yugoslavs. South Africans hate the Dutch
   and I don't like anybody very much!

But we can be tranquil and thankful and proud
for man's been endowed with a mushroom shaped cloud.
And we know for certain that some lovely day
   someone will set the spark off and we will all be blown away.

They're rioting in Africa.
There's strife in Iran.
What nature doesn't do to us
   will be done by our fellow man.

~"The Merry Minuet" - Performed by The Kingston Trio (1959)
    Copyright 1959, by Sheldon Harnick,.

"The more things change ..."
-

Marquee (Updated)

(Originally posted Thursday, 30 Aug 2012 - Updated below)

This pretty well mandates where I will be late this Friday evening (Aug 31) and past midnight. ...

Taken Thursday afternoon, 30 Aug 2012

That is the River Oaks theater, of which I've written before in The Zen of Firefly and Serenity ... and "You keep using that word.

It is our Mecca for art films. The listing at the right is for the normal daily schedule, and is pretty representative of what they schedule.  The panel on the left is usually for whatever they schedule for their weekend (Friday and Saturday) midnight specials.

And what does that panel promise this weekend? ...

I first saw Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) (but not in 3D) as a kid in San Antonio, in the mid '50s, at a 16mm showing in an elementary school.  I recall watching it with my hands over my eyes, peeking through fingers. (Not at all sure how that kid would have handled the "chest burster" scene from "Alien" 25 years later.)

So, YES, I'm going. But, I've had several instances of seeing again something I fondly remembered from years ago only to discover that I was remembering it as better than it actually was.

I'll try and keep my expectations within reason and hope for the best. :-)

For those in Houston, here's the latest Midnight Movie schedule ...

Right-click on it and Open in New Tab for easier reading.

Update - Tuesday 04 Sep 2012 - I went to see it that Friday night.

As I feared above, I remembered it as better than it actually was. Not bad, but the movie a twelve year old kid watched peeking through his fingers might now be considered as "quaint".

The worst part of the experience was watching it through cardboard 3D "glasses" with red and blue plastic filters to see through. Just trying to keep them in place was a serious detraction.

To give the movie a fair shake, I got the DVD (not 3D, so much clearer and less headache inducing). From one of the bonus extras on the DVD, I learned that the original 3D process they used in the '50s used two separate projectors for the left eye and right eye images, through polarizing filters and had polarized lenses in the glasses to make for a better viewing experience.

I knew about polarizing, but did not know about the separate projectors (assuming they had put the double images on a single film as they do with the two-color process - which was the version shown at the River Oaks).

The use of two simultaneous projectors made for a much brighter picture, but was a nightmare for the theaters, as they had to be in perfect synchronization for it to work. Get out of sync by just a few frames and the image went to Hell when any motion was involved (as did the viewer trying to watch it).

I saw one of those polarized 3D movies when it first came out (a western called The Charge at Feather River (1953), which of course had things coming at you in 3D, including a rattlesnake strike) and it was a thing of beauty.

But very few theaters could afford projectionists professional enough to handle the complexities of properly showing the films. I'm pretty sure that's a major reason for 3D dying out for such a long time. Modern day digital equipment makes it possible for a minimum wage projectionist to manage it without screwing up (although one should never underestimate the possibilities in that regard).

Bottom line on "Creature":  An underwater version of King Kong (1933), with one of the most iconic monster suits in movie history ...

(Screencaps from DVD)

Pleasant dreams. :-)
-

The Eagle Has Landed ...

Patch from randomramblings-absentmindedprofessor.blogspot.com

... at Heaven's Gate, and so has its pilot ...

Neil Armstrong (1930-2012)- From guardian.co.uk

Yesterday, Saturday 25 Aug 2012, a genuine American Hero left us.

There's really not much I can say that hasn't already been said far, far better by people who knew him. The closest I ever got to him was when he passed by about 60 feet away in a parade in downtown Houston, shortly after his return to Earth.

I still envy the young man who did what I never had the nerve to do;  jumping over the retaining line, running over to the car Armstrong was in and shaking his hand.

As I recall, no undue fuss was made over the incident, but even if there had been, how on Earth could they ever take away from you the experience of shaking the hand of the first human to set foot on another world?

Of course, that's not even a pale shadow of actually being the man to set foot there, but as only eleven others qualify for that, you must settle for what you can get.

Rest In Peace, Sir.

-

“The French have a phrase for it ...

...The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right.
   To say goodbye is to die a little.”
     ~Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953)

I had considered naming this post "Moving on" or "To absent friends ..." but, while I liked the punch of the latter, I have no reason to believe any of them dead, so it didn't seem appropriate.

Those of you who usually receive my cast of thousands (Ok;  a couple of dozen then :-) email notices may notice a few names missing from the mailing list.

Friendships and relationships do not always last forever; circumstances (in a word - LIFE) intrudes and entropy will have its say.

Sometimes, the true miracle is what does last.  In the mid '70s, by purest accident I ran into an Air Force buddy I hadn't seen in 13 years.  I didn't even recognize him at first, wondering if he might be an architect client of the engineering company I worked for then.  But he knew me right away, at least enough to inquire if I was Paul Binkley (my name when I was in the USAF).

He gave me his telephone number and asked me to give him a call.

I dithered about that for awhile (probably most of you have had the experience of running into someone you knew long ago and then finding that so much has changed since then that you no longer have anything in common anymore), but finally found the courage to do so and am so glad that I did.

I went to see him and his family (including a six or seven year old son that I felt like I was almost an honorary uncle to.  He turned out all right, and I'd sure like to think that I was a decent influence).

In this case, my friend and I reconnected almost at once.  Some years later, I even moved out of state (to Mt. Pleasant, Michigan)  and worked for him as a data-processing manager, until he had to let me go (partly economic circumstances, partly my own failing - management was not my greatest strength; I was much better at playing with the computers).

Some of my other Air Force friends, upon reading this, will probably rag on him a little bit, "You FIRED Him?!!!"  Well, give him a break.  Under the circumstances, I don't see that he had any other choice.  We're still good friends, even though he's been seduced by the Dark Side and is now a lawyer :(.  He even reads my blog once in a while.

E-mail communications don't get very wordy though.  In that he shares a trait with the other Air Force buddies of mine, in that long-winded conversations just aren't their thing.  He's perfectly capable of replying in an email, to a long and detailed question, "Yep!"  (Strangely, for a group that was a language unit in the USAF, if Clint Eastwood could be described as a man of few words, they would be of even fewer. :-)

With him and most of my other Air Force buddies, that friendship and relationship will likely outlast the lot of us.

But other people have lives of their own and circumstances make it very unlikely that we will ever get together again.  I suspect that for some, occasional purging of superfluous contacts may be necessary for their own sanity, and to cling leech-like to them is simply not fair.

So, as for AK, BW, IC, JC, JG, JV, RC, SB, and TW, they were (and still are) my friends and I wish them all the best. I will never forget them.

But, they have moved on (it's really as simple as that) and it's high time I did so as well.

Bottom line: I think Raymond Chandler pretty well nailed it above.
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Gook

n. Slang. 1. A dirty, sludgy, or slimy substance. 2. An Oriental.  An offensive term used derogatorily, [Perhaps from Scottish gowk, simpleton, from Middle English gowke, cuckoo, from Old Norse gaukr, from Common Germanic gaukaz (unattested).]  ~ New College Edition - The American Heritage Dictionary of The English Language (1981)

I came across that while looking up something else in my dictionary.

Lord!  What follows "Perhaps" sounds a bit like Ragetti (the one with the wooden eye) and Pintel (the dour one) in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) having this Monty Python discussion over the origin and pronunciation of the word "Kraken"

The 1981 date of that dictionary attests to how thrifty I am (you're thinking of another word; aren't you? :-), but I've always liked it and found it to be pretty good.

BUT, with all due respect to the gents who wrote that definition above -- Unh-unh!

The term comes from this Korean word ...

"Gook" is its pronunciation, and it means "country".

At first glance, Korean appears similar to Chinese and Japanese characters, but in fact, it consists of an alphabet invented around 600 years ago by a team of scholars dealing with the fact that many Korean words were so difficult to be rendered into the Chinese characters in use at that time, that only the wealthy and privileged could find the time to learn how.

Result: Way too much of the population was illiterate. So, those scholars devised an alphabet of 24 consonants and vowels (clustered in syllables) called "Hangul", designed so that even a commoner could learn to read and write. "A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days." (from Wikipedia)

From thinkzone.wlonk.com

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25 Sep 2012 - Potential confusion I should have addressed long ago ...

Before the chart above, I mention "an alphabet of 24 consonants and vowels".
Some of you may have counted 40 Korean letters in that chart. So, what gives?

Here's the deal. There are 14 basic consonants, in the first row of Korean letters, immediately below the word "Consonants", and 10 pure vowels in the 3rd row, immediately below the word "Vowels", making a total of 24.

BUT, five of the consonants can be doubled (2nd row) to make a harder, sharper sound, bringing us up to 29 letters. PLUS, there are 11 compound vowels (4th row) made by assembling two pure vowels together to represent a sound that is a blend of the two. Now we're at 40.  Crystal? :-)
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From thinkzone.wlonk.com

Notice at the end of the definition of "America" above, that Romanization "Mi guk" follows a phrase that translates into "beautiful country". That it is  pronounced "me gook" is almost certainly the source of the term that is the title for this post, coming from Koreans simply using their name for our country.

Now, we're not really that dense (I hope :-);  I've no doubt that our soldiers very quickly learned what those Koreans were really saying, but by the time they did the damage was done and the term stuck.

When I was first introduced to the language, at Yale's Institute of Far Eastern Languages (courtesy of the USAF), the Romanization (rendering those sounds into our Roman alphabet) was Yale's version.  The form used above is the Revised Romanization system, developed in the late '90s, eliminating a lot of diacritical and accent marks to make things easier.

The alphabet is very phonetic and quite consistent.  A Korean speaker encountering a new word in that alphabet has no problem figuring out how to pronounce it, and going the other way, can usually spell it correctly if he hears it pronounced properly.

At the time I learned this (50 years ago), I marveled at the Korean's ingenuity at coming up with and maintaining such a system, and never even considered the flaw in my reasoning.

The consistency I worshiped then was (and had to be) the product of a very insular society.

Our English (especially American English) gets enriched from every other language on the planet (thousands), many of whom use the same Roman alphabet we do but in their own wonderful and mysterious ways, giving us this anarchy in which a word is often impossible to know how to pronounce without seeing it in context.

Yes, a system that can conjure up something like "ough" to be part of our words may truly rate an "Oh My God!!!"

But, consistency is highly overrated. Probably terrific for robots and ants. I'd like to think that we are a bit more flexible than that.

Considering the enrichment of our language (and so much else) by those contributions from others, I wouldn't have it any other way.
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CALL it "The Freedom Tower" ...

... Not that mind-numbing bureaucratese of "One World Trade Center".

(Originally published 1404 CDT 10 SEP 2011 - Updated below)

"Freedom Tower" is what it was originally meant to be called anyway, until somebody got their panties in a twist and thought that such a name would be a gigantic Foxtrot Yankee to those who tried to bring us down. (Sounds to me like an excellent reason to so name it.)

From the Wikipedia entry (for what that's worth) ...
In 2009, the Port Authority changed the name of the building from "Freedom Tower" to "One World Trade Center", stating that this name is the "easiest for people to identify with".

All I can say is (EXPLETIVE DELETED!!!).

I saw a NOVA special on TV a few nights ago, all about the design and construction of the  1 WTC Building (They've already forgotten the original name) and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.

The Presence of Absence ...
That's what the architect of the memorial said it was to evoke;  the sense of loss in the footprints of the original twin towers.

That's not a bad description of what appears to be the attitude of Obama and many of his minions who will appear at the 10th anniversary on 11 Sep 2011.  An attitude of "Let's put this behind us and move on." ;  a good sentiment in some circumstances, but in this context almost like saying that the Holocaust Museum should never have been built.

In the Shadow of the Freedom Tower ...
To add to the mix, we also have the Ground Zero mosque, except we're not supposed to call it that on account of it ain't located directly on the former World Trade Center site, Ground Zero, nor is it primarily a mosque,  ("A rose by any other name ...")

Although the City of New York refused to let a Greek Orthodox church that was destroyed at Ground Zero be rebuilt, they appear to have no problem with this abomination.

Maybe some solace can come from the fact that its location, about two blocks northeast of the Freedom Tower suggests that in the fall (around Sep 11), each afternoon it will lie in the shadow of the tower.

So, where are we now? ...

I don't have a date for the picture on the left, but it would probably be several months ago. The two open squares will be the memorial (hopefully completed tomorrow 11 Sep 2011). The picture on the right is how the tower should look when completed a couple of years from now.  (All images in this post are from www.nyc-tower.com )

This one is dated 24 Aug 2011

And this was taken on 01 Sep 2011 - coming right along.

Where was I on that fateful day? ...
The same place most of you were;  at work that Tuesday morning 11 Sep 2001.  Being in IT, they tolerated my occasional surfing of the internet, but it was other workers who urged me to check out the CNN website that morning; something about an airplane crashing into one of the World Trade Center towers.

I immediately thought it was a horrible accident, with Murphy's Law working at peak efficiency that it would be the tallest thing in Manhattan to be hit.  Indeed, that even made sense as it would be a more likely thing to happen because of its height.

I had read, many times, about the July 1945 incident in which a USAAF (United States Army Air Forces) B-25 Mitchell bomber ...

... tried to land in zero visibility (because of fog) at LaGuardia Airport and the pilot became disoriented and crashed into the Empire State Building between the 78th and 79th floors.  At the moment, I felt that, because of the proliferation of tall buildings near landing approaches, such an accident was almost inevitable sooner or later.

Of course, that second plane hitting the other tower made it painfully clear what had really taken place.

The most horrific part was when the South Tower collapsed.  Most of the people killed would have been those trapped on the upper floors.  By that time, the ones below would have already been evacuated, with the only people still below being responders and others desperately trying to reach those still trapped.

What a horrible word is "only" when applied to people like that. The most merciful thing in their case was that when the rumbling started, they probably barely had time to wonder "What the Hell is that?" before it was over.  It was half an hour later before the North Tower went, and I believe that rescue people were still trying their level best there, knowing all too well what could happen and being totally aware when it did.

A year later, I took a driving vacation and, among other places, visited the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

On display in one wing of the museum was a U-2 reconnaissance plane.  On one wall, curving up from the floor, was a huge aerial photo, taken from that (or a similar) plane, of Manhattan Island.  What you could see so clearly in that photo were the Twin Towers, and it literally took your breath away realizing what was now gone.  I was trying very hard to hold back tears, and I don't think I succeeded. (If any reading this have been to the museum recently, I'd love to know if that photo is still on display.)

Update 27 Jan 2012 - As nobody has volunteered that information, I emailed the museum and received this reply:
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Your inquiry of January 26, 2012, regarding an exhibition has been received in the Smithsonian’s Public Inquiry Mail Service for response.

The oblique U-2 photo of the New York metropolitan area in the 1970s is still on view in the Looking at Earth Gallery (110) in the National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall.
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Update - Sunday, 09 Sep 2012 - What was, ...

(Couldn't find a date for this picture)

... what is ...

As of April 2012 - from urbanpeek.com 

(The only image in this post not from www.nyc-tower.com )

As of today (Sunday, 09 Sep 2012) - from live camera

The steel structure is complete, with work on glass still proceeding and the spire to follow.

... and what shall be ...

The Tower is scheduled to be ready for occupancy in 2013, and at present has about 55% of its leases filled. The current economy isn't exactly helping, but those who worry about being able to find tenants should recall that the Empire State Building and the original Twin Towers took decades to fill to capacity.

Bottom line, about that name ...
I hope this will be read by bloggers with far greater readerships than my humble 3 or 4 hundred a month, because I beg you to launch a campaign to make "Freedom Tower" the official name of this magnificent structure, or failing that, at least make it the de-facto name.

For my part, from here on out, I shall never refer to it as anything else

If honoring the memory of those who fell there was the only reason, that would be more than enough.

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