The Northward Contrail

The blank slate

The summer slowdown is starting to set in.  I'm developing a taste for it.  Progress is continuing on the A-4C.  For another boon to my life, I can report to work later in the morning, so I'm able to get my running in before work, before the heat and humidity kick in.  And the interruptions of life are subsiding.  They'll return a few months from now.  But, for now, the relaxed pace of life is like a cool glass of lemonade.  I can listen to music again and really enjoy it.  Certain songs to me are like escapes -- they put happy pictures in my head, highly-personal visions that I enjoy, and those get spoiled when the world intrudes, so I don't really let myself listen to them until I have time to be away from things.

I have exactly one thing planned thus far for the summer, and that's a four-day trip that's coming up in a couple of weekends.  (Okay, if you count my dental check-up at the end of July, I have two things planned for the summer.)  Aside from that, the summer is a blank slate, full of possibilities.  What will I do?  The potential is almost unbearable.  Whatever it is I do, I hope I make the most of it: maybe making a dent in the stash upstairs and getting some projects completed at long last, or maybe getting the documentary finished that's languished on the hard drive for three years, or maybe even getting my dissertation polished up (at long last) and ready for the editors at the local university press to look at again. 

What will I do?  Good question.  Stay tuned.

A moment for us....

This morning, I was up for my usual pre-work routine: feed cat (who, as usual, woke me up earlier than I'd have liked, but that's the breaks), drink a glass of water, start heating water for my coffee, check the Interwebs.  And I turned on the television.  There's a certain radio program that's simulcast on a cable network, starring a certain grumpy cowboy, that I like to watch.

After a few minutes, though, I realized something: if I turned off the television, I'd have something glorious that I haven't had in a long time.  That's some quiet time, just by myself.

All day long, no matter where I am, I'm surrounded by noise.  At home, it's the television.  At work, from the time I get there, there's noise: the conversations of the cleaning ladies out in the hallways, the sounds of students in the hallways (who don't always use inside voice), constant interruptions by the phone or by drop-in visitors, the sounds of doors slamming shut in the building (and I do mean slamming shut, since many of our building's doors have boost-assisted hinges).  All of this usually interrupts whatever it is I'm trying to do, and I spend my time constantly expecting to be interrupted.  It's no wonder I have the attention span of a mosquito. 

Last night I was able to steal away a few moments for myself, upstairs in the workshop, listening to some tunes I haven't been able to listen to in what seems like forever, getting some bodywork done on the A-4C (which is coming along very nicely so far, thanks).  It did wonders for me.  I've developed a taste for it.

This morning, as I write this, I've had the television off for about an hour.  (I really don't feel I've missed much, either, since the aforementioned cowboy has lately sounded like a broken record.  Again.)  The only sounds I've really heard have been the whir of the refrigerator motor and the occasional call of a bird outside.  It's been bliss.

I'm sure that when I go to the office in a little bit, there will be plenty to interrupt me and distract me, slowly driving me bonkers.  For now, though, the calm is priceless.

Shut it down!

Remember what I wrote the other day about how I was starting to get a little sentimental about the end of the semester?  Well, so much for that.  The High Drama is returning, especially among the kids who have last-minute things they need to get completed before they can graduate, and in some cases  procrastination is coming back to bite them.  (And me, too.)  I was getting a little mushy-hearted about some of them leaving the nest, but now I'm ready for it to be over, and ready for them to become part of the real world, where procrastination has much more serious consequences.

Our commencement exercises are coming up in a couple weeks, and I'm on the fence about being there.  Hubby has an all-day engagement that day, and I really would like to join him for it.  I haven't been able to do much with him in a while, and it would really be nice to spend a good bit of quality time with him, of the sort I haven't had in what seems like ages.  

(Plus, I'm not our commencement speaker's biggest fan.  Let's leave it at that.)

On the other hand, I feel I owe it to my kids to be there.  I've seen them through this far, and my heart tells me I'd be letting them down if I wasn't there.

The workbench is calling

It's going to be another long day today.  I hope it will be the last really long day for a while, but you never know how these things are going to play out.  Blergh.

At least the short-term "what next?" question has been answered: yesterday I started cutting the plastic and applying the appropriate solvents and paints to a Hasegawa A-4C in 1:48.  I've had this kit for about seven years or so, since not longer after it came out.  For a long time, I've been wanting to build an aircraft from VSF-1, a Navy squadron that operated Skyhawks from the Essex-class anti-sub carriers (among others).  It's a simple, fairly attractive scheme, and you can build the kit pretty much from the box.  Thus far, the build is going well.  Which means, of course, it's inevitable that something's going to crop up and keep me away from the workbench for a little bit. 

I'm also thinking about longer-term summer projects, perhaps stuff from which I can get an article worth publishing.  One concept that tempts is reworking one of the 1:540 scale Revell Essex-class carriers into an accurate representation of a SCB-27A/125 ship.  And, since the best "frozen in time" moment I have the most documentation on is the recovery of Apollo 8 by USS Yorktown, that'll be the moment I represent. 

The Final Cut is the deepest

Now that things are winding down at work, I'm having time to get some chores done that have gone undone for too long.  Among them is a bit of video editing -- well, several pieces of video editing, some projects that have been sitting around too long with no particular deadline on them.  I got one project ready to go yesterday, and today I'll spend the day trying to get the other one finished and ready for burning to a DVD.

I haven't done a terribly large amount of video editing.  I know enough about it to be dangerous, and I know my way around Final Cut okay.  I can only scratch the surface of what Final Cut can do, which is the sad part; it's an extremely powerful tool, in the right hands.  At most, though, I fear I'm only using it as a glorified version of iMovie, but then again, all my projects have turned out the way I've wanted them to, so I can't complain.  My tastes in filmmaking are simple enough, and if I can edit, tweak the sound, do fades and dissolves and what all, then I'm content. 

One long-term project is to finish an expanded version of a documentary a class of mine worked on three years ago.  Due to some technical issues, the original cut of it got dumped, so I had to re-cut it from scratch.  While I was at it, though, I did some additional location shooting, and the new cut, whenever it's finished, should really be something nice. 

Working on the project was really fun and I enjoyed the location shooting.  Somewhere in my heart, I'd love to be a documentary filmmaker; there are quite a few stories I would love to put to documentary film.  On the other hand, as with many dreams of mine, it would involve money, lots of it.  That's not just for logistics and expenses and equipment; it's also because a lot of the stories I would love to tell would involve the licensing of a good bit of footage from the network news archives.  An acquaintance of mine who runs an esteemed documentary film company said long ago that he looked at licensing some footage from the networks, and the cost he was quoted was nothing short of staggering.  So that's out, at least for now.  (I also lack the required assertiveness, persuasiveness and persistence you frequently need to get what you want, like certain locations and what all, so that's another strike against me.)

Down the road, though, if we hit that oil well in the back yard, I'll look at it again.

Cold War kid

Yesterday, in between chores, I followed a link to a writeup about The Day After, the famous 1983 made-for-TV movie about a "nuclear exchange" (it sounds so upbeat, no?) between the United States and the Soviet Union.  Which led, predictably, to following the Internets down the predictable Wikipedia rabbit hole, first to the Wikipedia article about the movie, and then to this little article about something called Able Archer 83 that, in retrospect, is absolutely chilling. 

I'm approaching the point at which I'll soon be teaching students who are a full generation removed from my experiences.  That said, even with the students I've been teaching most of my career, I may as well be from another century.  Those of us born in the early 1970s are even a bit removed from those born later in the 1970s.  Why?  Because I remember growing up in absolute terror of nuclear war.  For the kids I've taught most all my career, the Berlin Wall's always been gone and the Soviet Union is a trivia answer.  For me, though, even the mention of the word "Soviet" or the mention of names like Brezhnev, Andropov or Chernenko bring back memories.

Which is why the passing reference to The Day After grabbed me.  I remember the night that movie aired.  My age had made it to double digits a few months before.  I remember the buildup to it.  I also remember that, geopolitically, the times weren't the happiest.  I was no student of modern politics, but I could follow things closely enough to know Reagan and whatever Soviet premier was in charge that week (remember, this was about the time Brezhnev died, then Andropov took over and died, and then Chernenko took over and died) weren't exactly going to be drinking buddies.  I remember watching President Reagan give an Oval Office address about the ongoing tensions with the Soviets one night, and I burst into tears talking with my mother afterwards because I was scared to death of war. 

It's funny, because so often I think of the year 1983 and it makes me happy, because I was a kid and there was so much going on that I loved.  But 1983 was a scary year.  You didn't know who was going to be in charge in the Soviet Union (granted, Brezhnev was no huggy-bear, but at least he was a familiar face).  There was all this tough talk going back and forth.  Then something ultra-scary, like the shootdown of KAL 007, doesn't contribute to any feelings of security.  I think I even vaguely remember the period surrounding the aforementioned Able Archer 83, like something didn't quite seem right about that time.

All of this meant I couldn't bear to watch The Day After when it aired.  That night, NBC counterprogrammed the first half of a two-part movie about President Kennedy, and I watched that instead down in my parents' bedroom.  My brother, though, watched The Day After in his bedroom.  The next morning, ABC's movie was the lead story on all the morning programs, and it scared me a little more.  I think I even wondered if the airing of The Day After was going to make it more likely to actually happen.  Funny how your mind works when you're that young.

I wish I could say I outgrew it, that I got smarter as I aged, but the specter was never that far away.  As I said, back then I wasn't wise to the ways of global politics, so any global episode, I feared, had the potential to get bad.  I remember the raids on Libya in 1986, and sitting in homeroom the next morning wondering if war was going to erupt while I was there.  I remember seeing drawings of nuclear missiles in boxcar launchers and feeling a little sick, wondering if it was all going to come to nothing sooner rather than later.  I remember the frosty end to the summit in Reykjavik.  I remember the Saturday afternoon that the siren at the volunteer fire department, controlled from the county seat, started blowing the "air raid" tone when a keyboard operator, meaning to send a fire signal to another fire department, punched in the wrong code and sent the "air raid" signal countywide. 

And then I remember a night late in 1987, seeing Reagan and Gorbachev at the White House, having completed a successful summit meeting.  I started to think that maybe there was some hope.  A couple of years later, I remember watching the Berlin Wall start to come down on live television, and then buying a little chunk of it myself at a local store a few months later.  And then I remember the day there wasn't a Soviet Union any more. 

As with many things that frightened me when I was a kid, I now have a fascination with the Cold War.  I've got a good many books about Soviet politics, about the arms race, about the cultural effects of the Cold War.  I think my fear leads me to try to understand it.  I have a few artifacts from those days, too, like a genuine government-issue "Fallout Shelter" sign that now hangs over my workbench.  I have a bit of fascination with air-raid sirens, and think this miniature version of the Federal Signal Thunderbolt (like the one we had in my hometown) is downright neat.  And though I couldn't bear to watch The Day After when I was a kid, I've seen it quite a few times since, and though in places its effects are cheesy by modern standards, there's still enough vivid memories of those days that the movie can still disturb me a little bit, and it's a movie that still packs a punch.  And, as I posted some time ago, to this day I can never see a "Special Report" bulletin slide without my heart momentarily stopping.

I don't want to make it sound like my generation experienced a worse Cold War than did my parents' generation.  I've heard their stories of the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, of practicing air raid drills at school, and of just how scary those days were.  The Cold War I experienced was a little different, and in its own way, it added a certain amount of terror to my childhood, and to the childhoods of my peers.  And I'll always believe it separates us from those who came after.  To a later generation, Dr. Strangelove may be an interesting piece of comedy, or Fail-Safe may be a very brooding, dark drama, but to even those of us born in the early 1970s, it evokes an awful lot more.

The Cold War as we knew it is now part of history.  Unfortunately, given the black market for weapons of mass destruction, and given that some of our new adversaries are very fond of surprise attacks and are not afraid to lose their own lives in the process, I'm not so sure that what has followed the Cold War is much of an improvement. Every generation faces the terror of potential annihilation; it's just that the cast of characters has changed. 

She's got Sammy Davis eyes

I mentioned yesterday this radio ratings deal we get the privilege of keeping over the next week, and I also vented a bit about how homogenized modern radio is, with the same skinny playlist with a lot of shopworn songs on it.  So, what do I do when I'm going somewhere and don't want to get caught in the same old song trap?  Well...

- Sometimes I'll set it on National Public Radio and listen along.  There are times when this is good, because NPR at its best is one of the last places you can hear a large variety of reporting on a bunch of interesting topics, and some of the reporting you can hear on All Things Considered or Marketplace is about as good as you can find.  The downside?  Well, the news-type programs are only part of the programming on the NPR stations we can pick up around here.  The all-news stations are out of radio range to my receivers.  The ones we can pick up mostly play classical music.  I don't have any problem with classical music (there's some I downright love), but it's not my cup of tea compared to other things.  Plus, sometimes NPR can get a little gassy...but that's another story.

- Sometimes I bring my iPod with me.  I have much of my good CD collection in there, and there's almost always something good I can find there, even obscure stuff.  The downside, though, is that working the iPod while driving can be downright dangerous.  This doesn't help, because I like to skip around at will and don't trust the shuffle feature.

- And sometimes I fall back on the little crate of CDs in the back seat.  These are all CDs I've burned from varied sources.  There's a Warren Zevon compilation, a Joe Satriani compilation, a Dwight Yoakam compilation, one or two from various artists.  And there's one that's just downright awesome.  Two, though, are especially fun, and they're a pair of 1980s music compilations with some of the great, now-cheesy Top 40 hits from back in the day: stuff like "Bette Davis Eyes," "Pac-Man Fever," Taco's "Puttin' On The Ritz," "Mickey" by Toni Basil...you get the idea.  I remember this stuff.  Perhaps one of my guiltiest pleasures is on this compilation: "Come On Eileen" by Dexy's Midnight Runners.  That's a song that never fails to put a smile on my face, and I'm never sure if it's because I genuinely love the song so much (which I do) or if it's because it's the epitome of a one-hit wonder.

:: When you can, send some happy get-well thoughts the way of Lisa Schmeiser, proprietor of Filthy Commerce, as she recovers from a little bit of medical work.

Mad with power

So the mail comes yesterday, and in amongst some books I ordered last week (a history of Western Electric and a book about the history of IBM -- okay, so I'm a nerd, but you knew that already) there's a little box with some interesting contents.

A week or so back, I got a call one evening.  It turned out our household had been selected by one of the ratings services to keep a weeklong diary of our radio listening habits.  Since I teach this stuff and have an interest in it, I quickly agreed.  About 20 years ago, ours was an Arbitron family, and we had to keep a weeklong diary of what we watched and what we videotaped.  That was kind of cool.  This time around, the radio deal lets me see what the other part is like.

That's what was in the little box yesterday, our official kits for keeping our diaries.  There's one for me and one for hubby, along with some supplemental documents.  As it turns out, we're not only to record what we listen to over terrestrial radio, but also over the Interwebs via streaming means.

There's one problem with all this, though.  It's that the most time I spend listening to the radio is in the car going to and from work.  And, even then, I don't really keep it on one station.  It's partly because every radio station sounds exactly the same these days.  Most modern music bores me to tears, and most radio stations that play older music tend to play the same 57-song playlist over and over and over.  There are a few stations that buck the trend, like a really good classic rock station about 75 miles away that plays deeper cuts and more obscure artists, but even it lapses occasionally into predictability.  Radio these days has become so preprogrammed and homogenized, and so many stations are in the hands of so few owners, that you no longer really want to keep your radio on the same station.

What it boils down to is that these ratings people are probably going to get an interesting diary back in a week or so.  And I'm not sure how useful it's going to be.  At the same time, I'm having to fight the urge to super-glue my radio to our nearest NPR affiliate or some other non-profit station just to throw a spanner in the works.

:: The last few days have been emotionally odd for me.  The semester is coming to an end, and graduation is coming up.  I would ordinarily celebrate this fact, but the last few days some of the kids (notably some who are about to graduate) have done a couple things that have been really nice and have made me proud, and it's made me a little sentimental about my kids.  I've been through this before, so I know I'll soon be over this little bit of sentimentality (if time doesn't do it, a little adventure that's scheduled for the week after graduation will prove a nice change of pace).  And then, a little bit too soon, the new year will begin, with another group of new kids, and it'll all start anew. 

Those were the days

I'm still no closer to figuring out the "what next?" question I put to myself the other day.  There's so much up there in the spare room, and the possibilities are limitless.  Over the years I've been in the hobby, I've become less productive, and that's for many reasons: work, an increasing desire to get the model right the first time, and a few other reasons.  It's strange that as you get the income to buy really neat stuff, the source of that income takes away from you the time (and, sometimes, the enthusiasm) you need to have fun with them. 

There was a time not too terribly long ago (okay, about 20 years back) when I would build these things almost as fast as I could buy them.  I got back into building models then, for a number of reasons.  It was back when you could go into any department store and there would be this big selection of them in the toy department.  And the variety, too, from all these manufacturers -- Revell, Monogram, AMT, MPC, some of the kits Testors imported or repopped.  The old Testors enamels in the square bottles.  And let's not forget tube cement, either.  Forget the non-toxic stuff in the blue tube that I could never get to work; you wanted the stuff in the orange tube, the stuff with the chemical aroma that would put little puddles on the newspaper you built on, and that probably ate away more than a few of my brain cells.

Back before the hyper-realistic models that model geeks demand today, a lot of the stuff on the shelves was from moldings that had been around since as long ago as the 1950s.  A lot of Revell's kits were that way, and I loved them, especially the ones that still had the same instruction sheets as back then.  One of my favorites was the old box-scale kit of the aircraft carrier Forrestal, a kit as old as the actual ship, depicting the ship in as-built configuration, complete with the 5" gun mounts and yellow lines on the flight deck and an air wing full of Furies and Banshees and even some crude F7U Cutlass fighters.  I loved that kit.  I bought one once and my father told me, "I built that kit when I was a kid."  Back then, models like that could really close the gaps between generations.  (Regrettably, the Forrestal kit had its mold altered in the late 1980s to depict the ship in modernized form; the original issue is a prized collectors' item for which I refuse to pay the eBay going rate.)  There were others: the old box-scale USS Missouri, still available after half a century, a rite of passage for the modeler; the box-scale USS Arizona; the PT-109 kit that will likewise be available forever, complete with 1:72 scale Lieut. (jg) John F. Kennedy; the cutaway Polaris submarine.  (And let's not even get into the perhaps half-dozen kits I had of the modernized Essex-class carriers.  Man, did I get my money's worth out of those!)

If going to a department store provided opportunities for fun, imagine what it was like when we could visit a dedicated hobby shop.  There was one about an hour away that carried stuff that was downright exotic to my young eyes.  What was Airfix or Hasegawa, anyway?  My, I've never seen a model kit of an F-102 before.  Or a VC-10 airliner.  That's pretty cool!  It was like I'd stepped through some kind of portal, towards new and exotic kits.  Then the Model Master line of paints came out, matched to the colors used on the real airplane.  No more spray-canning my F-14s with that stuff from the Testors can, or brush-painting bare plastic with the stuff from those square bottles...now newer realism is calling. 

No discussion of this period in my hobby's life is complete without remembering the hobby shop that briefly lived in the closest city.  It opened in 1986 or 1987 in an old warehouse building on the fringes of town, and was run by this friendly old barrel-chested fireplug of a guy whose tattoo collection makes me think he must have been retired Navy or something similar.  Most of the floor was eaten up with two enormous slot-car tracks, and there was also a large selection of radio-control aircraft stuff available, too.  But, along the back wall, there was this huge array of model kits, almost up to the ceiling.  Shelves and shelves of stuff.  Back in a little warren near the cash register, there was another wall full of kits.  The really amazing thing is that some of this stuff was downright rare by then, out of production for years.  Every week I'd have my earnings from the chores and other work I'd do, and before every Thursday trip to the supermarket with my mother, I'd beg that we go by there.  And we would.  And I'd emerge with a new prize or two.  The stock never really changed, so I could strategize about what to buy this week and what to wait for. 

For two or three years, this was hobby bliss.  Then the guy who ran the shop and his wife moved about an hour up the road to a new home they'd bought, and took the shop to a nearby town.  It was like losing a friend.  I remember buying a bunch of stuff at the pre-moving clearance sale, and then soon the warehouse was closed and empty.  A couple years later, I got to go to their new location, and was amused to see more than a few familiar items on the shelves along with the new stock.  I managed a few more visits before they finally retired and sold out to new owners (eventually, though, the business closed for good about a decade later). 

Over the years I looked for a hobby shop as great as that one, but I never really have found one that took its place.  The one that came closest was probably Orange Blossom Hobbies in Miami.  The first time I went there was a revelation.  I became a weekly visitor -- sometimes, twice a week, for I'd drive down on some Mondays after work and treat myself to a little something, chat with Pat for a while, go behind the counter and look through the decal drawers, and drop a fair amount of coin.  But even that's gone now, and, like the old shop near my hometown, I sure miss it.

The Internet is great for the hobbyist, sure.  I've used it to buy some amazing things and some great, obscure kits from the States and from overseas.  But I miss what I used to have.  I miss these wonderful old hobby shops with dusty, forgotten stock just waiting to be rediscovered by a wide-eyed kid with a fistful of cash.  I miss the days when a night out with the family also held the promise of stopping in at Sky City or Roses, where you could spend your allowance on a kit you'd probably have completed by the next night.  I miss the days when I could build the Revell Arizona or the four-stack destroyer and have my head full of the stories I'd just read in Walter Lord's Day of Infamy as I worked away. 

My abilities are a universe removed from what they were 20 or 25 years ago; that's for sure.  And I still have fun doing it.  But sometimes I really miss the wonder those days had.

What a drag, man

I'm eaten up today with various obligations and appointments.  (Among them is one of the occupational hazards of my line of work, and that's the full-regalia academic convocation.  Someday I'll write more about this, but convocations where I have to put on the full cap and gown and all that make me feel silly.  I don't really do costumes.  There's a reason why I call these things "academic drag shows."  But, I digress.)

Anyhow, while I'm trying to gasp for breath today, amuse yourselves (or yourself, if there's only one of you reading this) with these items, related to our national pastime:

:: Here's a neat latter-day look at Jim Bouton's Ball Four, a book that is tame by modern standards, but that, back in its day, really caused a stir with its revelations about what really happened in the clubhouse and dugout and bullpen (and elsewhere). 

:: And New York's Citi Field had an unexpected visitor during its inaugural game.  That's interesting enough, but dig what the Daily News did with it.  Do you get the feeling that the folks who come up with these things are like the wisecracking arraignment judges on Law & Order?

(While we're at it, am I the only one who thinks this caricature makes Derek Jeter -- or, at least, I guess that's supposed to be him over on the right -- look like Glenn Quagmire?)