"It's got 'United' on the side, you can't miss it"

 

I get the feeling that air traffic control started to enter the public consciousness around the 1960s. In the very early days of commercial flight the idea that the pilots weren't entirely in control, that they needed help from some guy who wasn't even there, would have delegitimized the whole enterprise in the minds of many potential passengers. Eventually, though, it became a source of comfort and something you could afford to joke about. 

Certainly it helps if the person making the jokes is an acknowledged master of speaking into communication devices for comedic effect.

As it happens

Not too surprisingly summer leads the other three seasons in days you can sleep with the windows open. Days you pretty much have to as well. So things that happen in the street you can hear loud and clear. I don't pay attention to the details, which don't really make sense out of context anyway. A few weeks ago a drunk woman was freaking out at her boyfriend sometime in the AM. Luckily, it was a weekend. He was in his car, though, so I had to wonder why he didn't just drive away sooner.

Hear today

All bestsellers today, and really any book that wants to sell, will come out in audio format. Naturally. This is how many people today "read." It allows them to multitask, do things like drive and work out at the same time.

I have to wonder, though, what the technology does to standards of writing. Nothing good, I suspect. There's a kind of alchemy that happens when you read with your eyes. A false sentence, be it description or dialogue, will grate on the brain. In audio an actor with bills to pay can take a stiff drink or two and wallpaper over the flaws.

Training and taming

During the Summer of 2020 unrest following the death of George Floyd, I was fairly sanguine. Whatever else resulted, I was sure, at least the public encouragement to go and join protests meant that COVID panic must be over. 

Needless to say, this did not turn out to be the case. But as to why we continued to live under the thumb of public health after they'd seemingly voided their authority, well, that's a rich topic. It's one that Matthew Crawford addresses here, suggesting that both COVID and the racial reckoning shared a common purpose. A new―or at least unfamiliar to us―ethic was being put into place, placing the utmost importance on deference to authority.

This antihumanism, as Crawford calls it, also extends to the apocalyptic embrace of artificial intelligence in recent years, which is based on the concept that human thinking and mechanical computation are in essence the same thing, a task the machines do better. In the opening anecdote a Google engineer sees the malfunction of one of the company's autonomous cars as prove that humans need to become "less idiotic." Sadly this does not seem to have been self-deprecation on his part.

Tudor Jeep Wrangler

One of the books I'm currently reading is The Children of Henry VIII by Alison Weir. Weir is a meticulous researcher, and she really nails the soap opera aspect of royal history. 

One thing that many people don't realize is that Henry considered himself a Catholic his entire life. And at one time he'd had an honored place in the Church. He wasn't trying to split England from Rome so much as he was holding out for a better deal from a more amenable Pope. The first ultra-Protestant monarch was his son Edward VI, who started reigning as a literal child and had a boy's inhuman level of commitment. He was followed by Catholic traditionalist Mary and Elizabeth, who nudged the modern Anglican Church into being.

Edward was the son of Henry and Jane Seymour. The Seymours were a colorful bunch. Edward Seymour (well, this particular Edward Seymour) was Lord Protector for the young king, and a truly harried bureaucrat. The Lord Protector's younger brother, Thomas, emerges as the villain of the early chapters. Whether this is a fair assessment of the man, one could ask, but he certainly seems like a great role for hammy stage actors. Marrying Henry's widow Catherine Parr made him the young Elizabeth's stepfather and...let's just say he wasn't exactly an all-star stepfather.

Nacre

Brian Eno has always stated that Stranded was his favorite Roxy Music album. Which is big of him to say, since it was the first album they made after he was basically canned from the group. I'm not sure it's their best, but it is quite good.

This song in particular sounds like something Eno would be involved in, starting at freakout and ending at hush. Probably would have sounded a little different if he were still with them, but still feels like his kind of thing.

Vices of all kinds

It's from a few days ago, but Jamie Kirchick has a pretty good rundown of how pink-tinted organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign have grown more censorious and oppressive. Taken in isolation this phenomenon is alarming. Looked at in a broader context it's less surprising, but no better. 

Is choosing a side and then becoming less tolerant of everyone not on it simply what institutions do? Manifestly it's what they've been doing lately. And it goes beyond purported "LGBTQ+" issues into foreign policy, COVID, etc. Elites simply don't respect neutral values, including honesty. And rights never extend to their opponents.

Switches

Until recently I always assumed that Queen Victoria had been the daughter of George IV.  It seems like the obvious conclusion. But I was wrong. George was her Uncle. Her father was aristocrat Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn. 

Not exactly a commoner by birth, but at the same time reigning over Britain wasn't in her plan for most of the time leading up to her reign. She had to catch up and become a queen that Britain would take seriously. So it's definitely a British story.

Veritas or something

Tonight at a bus stop I heard a very short, slight man say that his tour of duty in the Marines had ended the day the Twin Towers came down. This was apparently on September 11, 2011. Just before that I was on a bus with a rock star who'd been on <i>The Ellen DeGeneres<i> show and met Elizabeth Montgomery there. Everyone's favorite nose twiddler died eight years before Ellen got a talk show, but you can't keep a good woman down.

If you want to talk to guys who turn into Baron Munchhausen after four beers, take public transit on a holiday only your state observes, and pretty much just government workers at that.

There is nothing like a dame

 

A tangential header to be sure, but Laura Knight was eventually titled, which resulted in her being Dame Knight.

Before that, she was an painter. An interesting and significant figure in the world of British art in the early twentieth century, she was catholic in her taste of subjects. The world of the theatre makes its presence known in her work, through the music hall performers such as those shown in Motley (above), as well as many commedia dell'arte performers and ballet dancers. She also painted sunlit landscapes and outdoor genre scenes. Later in her career she created journalistic paintings like her depiction of the Nuremberg trials.

Knight brought a nice balance of composition and looseness to her work. She also had a great eye for light.

It came from Waukegan

The Ray Bradbury Theater aired on the USA network in the 1980s. This was before original-for-cable shows had much cachet, so it kind of flew under the radar. I've watched a few episodes over the last couple of days.

Bradbury is an absolutely indispensable writer, of course. I would recommend that you track down and read any story of his before you watch an adaptation. They come from his mind and his voice.

The TV show mostly seems to do right by him, though. It should, since he's also the one writing the scripts. Some translate better to the screen than others.

What I said about cable shows not having much cachet yet? They didn't have much of a budget either. the adaptation of "The Town Where No One Got Off" looks for much of its duration like a shoestring student production. It's also the best episode of the ones that I saw, which has a lot to do with Jeff Goldblum starring in it.

The show's also an interesting relic because it's obviously shot in Canada. Eventually Vancouver would be a central shooting location for American TV production, really second only to the LA area. When this was made that process seems to have been in a very early stage.

Home of the Brave

I just recently finished reading Amerika or America by Franz Kafka. Which is quite interesting. According to the short afterward by Kafka's friend Max Brod he loved reading travel memoirs and was a big fan of Ben Franklin's diaries. The tale of travel to the United States is entirely fanciful, as Kafka never left Europe during his life.

Is it what one would call "Kafkaesque"? Certainly parts of it are. The part where protagonist Karl Rossman loses his job as a hotel lift boy demonstrates how far systems will go to destroy people who are trying to do well by them. The ending is surprisingly positive, though, and it seems Kafka would have developed it even more if he'd spent more time on the book.

Name's not Polly

 

Not your average musical duo, I reckon. You have a parrot on the song, the parrot will do some improvising. Tico is the parrot, and has a kind of contagious good cheer. I wonder if Mick and Keith have heard this version.

Unsayable

The idea that residential schools―essentially specialized parochial schools―were engaged in the slaughter of First Nations children is a horrible one. Fortunately the evidence doesn't really support that conclusion. Unfortunately, the government does. So strongly that they're weighing the option of codifying it into law, leaving anyone who denies it a criminal.

The term "denialism" does indeed recall Holocaust denial. And that leads me to the conclusion that Holocaust denial shouldn't be criminalized either. Oh, it happened all right. And saying it didn't is an insult to the survivors and their families. But those points can be claimed by any government who want an excuse to restrict speech.

It's a slippery slope, and they're holding ski poles.

Bone to pick

One book I'm reading now is Seven Skeletons by Lydia Pyne. In it, Pyne provides detailed narratives for as many human/hominin fossil finds that have occurred in the last 200 years. These include Piltdown Man and the Taung Child. And there's a certain interrelation there. 

Raymond Dart was assigned to a post in the early twentieth century, when it was not the place to be for a natural historian interested in human origins. Good thing for him, because he wound up finding the Taung Child, the first recognized Australopithecus skeleton. His discovery and his conclusion weren't universally accepted, certainly not at first, but he wound up adding more evidence to the idea that human life began in Africa, as Darwin had thought.

By that time it was generally accepted in the scientific community that Darwin had been wrong on that point, and that humans had begun in Asia or possibly Europe. And Piltdown Man seemed to supThport that theory, being a skeleton with humanlike and apelike features, as much of a missing link as anyone could ask for, and found in Britain. So perfect that it, of course, turned out to be a hoax.

This is a brief rundown of the case, but it does go to show just how much of a consensus-based practice science isn't, or at least shouldn't be.