A Golden Age

Imagine the following incident happening tomorrow: An American Airlines 727, headed from Athens to Rome is somehow hijacked by Shiite militiamen armed with grenades and pistols. The 727 then embarks on a remarkable, 17-day odyssey to Lebanon, Algeria, and back again. At one point passengers are removed, split into groups, and held captive in downtown Beirut. A passenger is murdered and Israel is forced to release 700 Shiite prisoners but the hijackers are able to come out of it scot-free.

Can you imagine the hell that would break loose in the air travel world if this scenario came to pass? The FAA would immediately order a halt to all air travel over the United States, probably for the full 17 days, to make sure a duplicate hijacking is not in the works somewhere else. America, in effect, would grind to a halt. The utter chaos that would result would have repercussions in the world of travel for decades, if not permanently. Security checkpoints would become day-long marathons. Iris scanning and biometric profiling would become mandatory, even for old people and infants. Travelling anywhere would become a nightmare. The First World's way of operating would be forever, irrevocably changed and indeed, the way all of humanity conducts business across the globe would have to undergo a complete rethink.

It's impossible to predict the full consequences of such a brazen terrorist act, but it's actually quite easy to imagine what would happen to humanity in general. Aren't we all glad such an incident would never be possible?

Well, guess again: this exact scenario has ALREADY HAPPENED. What? you say, appalled. Terrorists take a passenger airplane and go on a 17-day, trans-world hijacking spree? Impossible.

But it happened. This was during the so-called Golden Age of Air Terrorism, during the 70s and 80s. There were so many hijackings on commercial aircraft that the general public just began to shrug it off when another one happened. I myself remember hearing about one of these on the news and thinking, before I turned away to whatever I was doing at the time, "Not AGAIN."

Believe it or not, this was a common occurrence the world of air travel before 9/11. In a way, the 9/11 terrorists did us all a huge favour. They made sure that after them, no sane person on a hijacked commercial aircraft would allow it to be hijacked, knowing what we know now. They wouldn't stand a chance; no matter what the risk, the entire planeload of passengers and crew would band together and stop the hijackers, instead of sitting in their seats like sheep and hoping "the authorities" would take care of it.

I myself am proof of that in my own mind -- I know that I would never allow a hijacker, armed or not, to proceed with his plans if I were anywhere nearby. In 2007, on an evening flight from Montreal to Paris, the plane, 95% full of passengers, was about to push back from the terminal when an odd moaning and shouting started coming from the back.

At first, no one reacted. The plane fell deathly silent. Then, we noticed a commotion at the rear. I was about 20 rows further forward, in the window seat. We saw people walking up and down the aisle. I had heard enough.

I got out of my seat, inconveniencing my seat mates, and walked to the back to find out what was going on and to lend a hand if needed. The commotion was on the other side of the plane, in the rearmost seat row. A stewardess immediately intercepted me as I walked to the back of the plane. "Please sit down, sir!" she told me, but I said "Okay, I'll sit down. I'll sit down right over there," and I gestured to a couple of empty seats in the last middle row, immediately next to the row from which the strange shouts and moans were emanating, and brushing past her, I sat down and buckled myself in. She didn't stop me. If this asshole, whoever it was, was going to put my life in danger, I wasn't join to sit there like some sheep and allow myself to be slaughtered. I was going to do everything in my power to prevent that from happening.

Finally, the rear door opened and some police of airport security came on board and removed the offending passenger. It later became apparent that the guy was just a loony-tunes with a fear of flying. But I didn't care -- I would not let anybody threaten my life and was prepared to die in the attempt to stop that from happening. I hate to sound dramatic, but I'm deadly serious.

Later, back in my seat and in the air, I asked the same stewardess for a scotch on the rocks. She gave me a double and said "No charge. Thanks for your support!"

What's disturbing, however, is that I was the only passenger to do this. The rest of the plane sat there like sheep . . .

No LolCats Here

At last . . . the true purpose of the animated gif.

Chunk Potatoes

I hardly ever post anything here even though Nick has graciously allowed me access. A year and half ago we purchased from Costco one of those T- Fal ActiFry machines.http://reviews.costco.ca/2070-en_ca/10329764/t-fal-t-fal-actifry-fryer-reviews/reviews.htm

One of the things this machine does to perfection is golden potato nuggets

Is the Blog Dead?

Don't ask me. No clue. Was it ever alive?

I think the blog as a communications form has been severely under-hyped. I mean, it's now been around for how long? I know I had a proto-blog -- two proto-blogs -- going as early as 1995. The only difference between them and this was that no one could leave a comment.

They didn't have names. Things like them were simply called "home pages" or something similar (oddly enough, this obsolete term is still in major use in, of all places, Japan, who call any website a "ho-mu peiji").

I think GeoCities was the place they first exploded on, again, about four years after I was doing that thing which didn't yet have a name: "blogging." GeoCities made it easy for anyone who don't know any HTML to make a page about something. Looking back, they were laughably primitive (that's going to be almost twenty years pretty soon, people!) but they were so completely new that no wonder they didn't have a name.

There simply was no previous equivalent. People didn't write and publish their own personal newspaper. They kept diaries, I suppose.

But now, as I contemplate this blog and ask myself "Why?" all I can come up with is "Why not?"

But the old guard seems to have folded up their tents and stolen away into the desert. Blork rarely posts anything any more. Jim Donahue keeps posting despite what he says is an extremely dwindled readership. I do not see why. Both those guys had/have extremely interesting blogs. They were/are extraordinary places to go, part of a regular circuit of the Web that I'm sure all of you have. "Hmm, let's see what's going on in Blork's world today . . ."

I wish I could say "Well, every blog has its day" or "You can't teach an old blog new tricks" or call Blork "The Blogfather" but I can't. Why is that? Because the venerable blog has been replaced by that venue of complete and utter destination of all things banal called Facebook.

Quite frankly, I can't -- never have, never will -- see the appeal in Facebook. MySpace. Remember that? Hey, it's still there!!! Not dead! Yes! You thought it was dead but it is not dead!!!

And I count the seconds that inexorably tick by for that first stirring, that first intimation, that first frisson of excitement that is going to indicate that the public's fascination with public navel-gazing has finally begun to flag. Finally . . . begun . . . to . . . flag. No signs yet, Flock, no signs yet! But as the arbiter of all things based on, or stemming from, HTML, I predict that Facebook has ALREADY begun the long slide into oblivion . . . we just can't see it for all them trees.

My S/O is still firmly entrenched, a Member Until Death, grimly "liking" and "friending" and "defriending" and checking in every six minutes, I regret to say . . . but take heart -- Facebook is not long for this world. I predict that by the year 2018 Facebook will be a receding nightmare for most of the planet, just a remnant of an experiment gone horribly wrong . . . kind of like . . . TWITTER. Yes, that abortion of a new form of communication will also be joining its buddies LinkedIn, Facebook and other similar DOA concepts to be replaced by . . .

Ah! The eternal question. What abomination will cross the mind of some Mountain-Dew-eyed freshman, even as I type sitting around, unwashed and wolfing down a slice of Domino's pizza and dreaming of a new way to become an instant billionaire and major buddy of Charlie Sheen? What's it gonna be, huh, people?

Are YOU going to join the other 4 billion sheep who march to the drums of a "Coldplay II -- the Revenge," or are you going to actually just raise your hand and say, "Enough! I WILL NOT be lured into eternal lameness, will not follow, blindly braying a common chorus of the faceless masses who jostle around me as they shamble into the Void into which all intelligence gets sucked, screaming, that big black hole from whence no one ever returns?"

Hey, if you want me, give me a call. I'll still be here.

Hmm . . . Choices, Choices

No come on, be honest. If one of three things had to happen to you, there was no way you were going to get out of it, no chance, pal, which would you choose?

1. Being waterboarded. Aaaaah, I don't think I'd like this too much. Nothing bad actually happens to you physically, though the nagging question is, if it isn't so bad, how come people like the CIA and the Gestapo love it so much?

2. Being put in a real small box and not being able to move a muscle, and then be told they were putting a centipede in there with you. No, silly, not one of those tiny ones. One of these little guys. The pincers would be removed first, of course. But still.

3. Having a root canal with only ONE injection of anesthetic allowed.

Out of all three? Tough! Tough! But it's gotta be done . . . hmm, let's see . . . I take DOOR NUMBER THREE! I just pray that he gets it right the very first (and only) time . . .

Crystal Palaces

These were taken with my macro lens this morning. This is the sun shining through the screen and glass of my window. The thermometer says it's -6°.

Right-click and open in new tab to be able to enlarge these to the max. Where noted, they have been desaturated (made black and white):

Barbed Wice (Desauturated)

Looks like ice feathers (Desaturated)

Brittle Glory (Color)

A Break from Nazis

 B elieve it or not, I've been taking an extended break from WWII and the Nazis, with whom I've been pretty much obsessed for the past couple of years.

I think it finally just got to the point where there wasn't any new insight I could glean from their horrors -- kind of like specializing in the study of a particular serial killer, hearing everything he has had to say at least three times over, and him still blustering along but providing no new information. In other words, a crashing bore.

For the past couple of months, at least, I've been immersing myself in the Golden Age of Exploration, which is mentally a lot less taxing to absorb and doesn't leave me in a semi-depressed state most of the time.

I'm now on Henry Morton Stanley, having already done Shackleton, Scott, Mawson and Amundsen umpteen times, and find this corner of exploration lore to be almost as, if not more, gripping than that of the polar types, because of the addition of the anthropological side of things -- namely, brutal, restless natives. Lots of them (penguins do not make for a lot of dramatic pauses).

In this vein I think I shall continue, because I have so much more reading to be done -- I've started on Hernan Cortés and no doubt that will lead to Pissarro, and I still have Darwin and countless others: Newton, Socrates, Napoleon and many, many other figures of history that must be studied.

Lucky for me, I have the Apple TV, upon which resides YouTube (and others) which provide an endless audio-visual backup to all those incredible stories.

And I don't have to read about madmen and murders every day. How much more lighthearted I feel, overall. A couple of Aztecs piercing tongues with ropes, hordes of natives being offed with antique Spanish blunderbusses . . . greed, greed, viciousness, lust and more greed . . . bring it on!

See what a little de-Nazification can do for a soul? Hmm . . .though there's the nagging omission of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which still needs to be consumed and digested . . . may give that one a dig after I'm done with old Stanley here. Oh, and the Indian Mutiny -- must add that to my list.

"Found" 30-year Old Music Track

I recently bought a cassette-to-mp3 converter box and among the few remaining cassettes I still carry around with me -- in this case, one that has survived every move since 1980 -- I found a very curious track that I must have made when I was 23, back in 1980. It's quite the strangest piece of music I have ever produced, and I don't remember one iota of making it, why I made it, or when I made it. All I know is that I must have used my brother's Sequential Circuit's Prophet V synthesizer and then, well, gone to town.
If you listen closely you'll hear parts of the jazz standard "Take Five" in there, and also the chords to Steely Dan's "Green Earrings," with my heavily-echoed voice singing the line "The busy world was not for me" somewhere in there. You can hear a brief chant of "Jazz, jazz, jazz" in there as well. When you consider that at the time, I was heavily into writing pop music, this is doubly puzzling. I must have been listening to more jazz than I thought.
I'm surprised at the complex arpeggios -- how did I know how to do that? Sorry, I didn't know how to make a video out of it, so this is all you get. Listen, and wonder. I can't wait to see what's on the rest of those tapes.

I'm Not The Man, I think I Am A Doll

I know you probably haven’t ever really given it much thought, but it’s something that in your life has probably affected you more than possibly anything else.

I’m talking about music, but in this case I’m talking specifically about LYRICS to music. Probably as far back as you can remember you were humming or singing along to, or god forbid, actually sitting own and LEARNING lyrics to some of your favorite songs. And how often has it happened to you that a favorite song comes along somewhere in public, and you, showing your best singing powers to your pals, start belting out the actual lyrics along with the song — that is, until you sing the wrong line (that’s in the NEXT verse), or worse yet, completely flub an important line and forget the most important part of it. Face it, it makes you look like a fool.

It probably makes you feel like a real dolt when you realise you never actually knew WHAT Elton John was singing in Rocket Man . . . what was it — “I think it’s going to be a long long time, uh . . .touchdown? brings me in a bit too fine?” Could that be it?  "I'm not the man, I think I am a doll" (that's what I always thought he was singing). Is THAT it? “Rocket Man, burning out a lot of lose alone?” Can THAT be it????*

These "misheard lyrics," by the way, have an actual name -- they're called "Mondegreens" and how they got that name is a very interesting story in itself.

It’s downright embarrassing though, isn’t it? Hey, think about THIS: I was once a professional musician, and I couldn’t remember the words to MY OWN songs, let alone anybody else’s. Even if I hadn’t also been playing an instrument at the same time (I always was) I STIll wouldn’t have remembered what the words were. Hell, I had enough trouble remembering whether we were supposed to repeat the chorus twice or four times (this can be crucial! If you’re going to call yourself a band! If you start playing the wrong chords when everyone else is playing the right ones!)

But back to lyrics. Having been on both ends of the stick, so to speak, learning them AND writing them, I feel I know as much as anyone can know about them. I know that through absolute DECADES of practice, I’m a walking rhyming dictionary; I can make up rhymes to words almost instantly, and almost at the same moment know whether they will be able to fit into the line that I want to write, let alone the SONG I am writing. For many, many years, one of the ways I have put myself to sleep is to take a word and just run off the rhymes to it endlessly . . . when I get bored of one word, I go on to another. There’s also the magic art of the pseudo-rhyme — most of the time it’s a copout because you couldn’t think of a real one, or there was no real one that you could make fit the meaning of the line, but a lot of the times it’s such a perfect fit in meaning that you can be excused a million times that it’s not a “hat” to a “cat” but rather an ”end” to a “when.”

Which brings me to famous lyrics. If I asked, "Name me the most famous song that contains lyrics in English of all time,” I think there may be a few arguments, particularly among the younger set.  But I really don’t think there is any but one single answer to that question: the song is “Yesterday,” by Paul McCartney (none of the others except possibly George Martin had anything at all to do with it).

I dare you to name me one more famous, one more played, one more interpreted and re-interpreted by others, one simply by dint of existence the most famous piece of music ever composed by any human being in any time period, ever, including Beethoven’s Fifth or in terms of written words, The Lord’s Prayer.

Go ahead: I dare you. There are many uniquenesses about this song: the fact that it is in English, not French or Russian; the fact that it is considered a pop or even a rock song, not a piece of Western classical music, and possibly the least considered but maybe most important component of the song: its complete, abyssally deep and all-encompassing sheer banality.

I don’t remember what an undoubtedly peeved and no doubt monumentally jealous John Lennon had to say about the song, but it couldn’t have been any more than a grudging, backhanded compliment, if anything at all.

But if you think about the lyrics alone, you are struck by the impossibly puerile emotivations (is that a word? If not, it should be), the almost childishly simple choice of rhymes, the meandering, nothingness of any true meaning, actually just kind of a string of words conveniently assembled to fill in an incredibly simplistic, naive collection of chords which are actually NEGATIVELY ENHANCED by the inclusion of a string quartet, the maudlin, shamelessly sentimental keening whine of a melody that after only a few listenings grates harshly on your ears . . . in other words, all the makings of possible the WORST piece of music ever penned by a human being.

I believe Paul even summed up the pure badness of the lyrics by, probably after being asked for the 200 millionth time of how he came up with the lyrics, said something along the lines of “I dunno, they just came to me, you know . . . “day” rhymes with so many words, you know, it’s really easy to just make up anything at all, really . . . I probably did it with a hangover on a bit of paper sitting on a train somewhere.”

Let’s look at them, and please, bear in mind that you are looking at quite possibly the most famous assemblage of human words ever compiled since the first proto-human uttered a grunt that actually meant anything:

Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away

Now it looks as though they're here to stay

Oh, I believe in yesterday

Suddenly I'm not half the man I used to be

There's a shadow hanging over me

Oh, yesterday came suddenly

Why she had to go

I don't know, she wouldn't say

I said something wrong

Now I long for yesterday

Yesterday love was such an easy game to play

Now I need a place to hide away

Oh, I believe in yesterday

Why’d she have to go?

I don't know, she wouldn't say

I said something wrong

Now I long for yesterday

Yesterday love was such an easy game to play

Now I need a place to hide away

Oh, I believe in yesterday

That’s it? That is the sum of human capabilities, from the same folks who brought you e=mc2?

* For the curious, the actual lines in Rocket Man are “‘til touch down brings me round again to find” and “Rocket man, burning out his fuse up here alone”

About 70 Years Ago

Yeah, I know you weren't alive. I'm willing to bet that there is not one single person reading these words who was alive 70 years ago. How about not only being alive 70 years ago today, but being an adult 70 years ago today? My mother, who is still alive, turned 16, on this very day, 70 years ago.

Think for a minute what waking up on January 12, 1943 was like, for pretty much anyone in the world.

For hundreds of millions -- yes, you read that right: hundreds of millions -- waking up on this very morning exactly 70 years ago today was a complete and utter nightmare. To tens of millions -- yes, you read that right again too -- it was a personal nightmare not one of us can even begin to imagine today.

And for a few million -- a few MILLION people -- it was unknown whether or not they would again be waking up the following day.

Yes, I know that it's the same thing today, that a few million people are probably worried that they might not be alive tomorrow -- those in hospitals everywhere, or a few in the few remaining pockets of war zones, or the like -- but for a large part it's because they're quite ill, or very old or just at high risk.

The majority of them are not young people, some very, very young, say, 18 years old, as they were on this day 70 years ago. They aren't about to struggle into a uniform, pick up a weapon, and walk, crawl or slither into a hailstorm of bullets or shellfire, just like they probably did yesterday, and the day before that, or the day after this, and the days, weeks or even months after that, seventy years ago.

1943 was quite possibly the most brutal and horrific year that all of humankind that has ever lived experienced. It was The Year From Hell, more than Hell, a waking, non-stop nightmare that no one could escape except by death, and there are very few people alive today who will be able to stand up and say, yes, I remember 1943.

1943 was the pinnacle, the absolute apex of World War II, the year that so much shit was hitting so many fans in so many places on Earth that any alien visiting it at the time could have well been expected to turn tail and flee without a backwards glance.

I won't go into the precise litany of horrors that were occurring on this very day 70 years ago, but let's just start with one horror, one unspeakable, indescribable pocket of Hell on Earth that was just reaching its final death throes after a couple of years of brutal, insane suffering, mayhem, murder and madness; the city of Stalingrad, Russia.

Just about on this day 70 years ago, several hundred thousand men -- perhaps closer to a million -- were locked in a ferocious battle to destroy or save an entire large city, say, the size of New Jersey today, and things were winding down, with the attackers (the Germans) surrounded by almost a million Russian soldiers and about to surrender. Of the eighty or so thousand who did surrender, only five thousand or so ever survived to go back to Germany.

Can you imagine that now? There are a lot of Taliban, but EIGHTY THOUSAND MEN, enough to fill two Olympic stadiums, were about to go into a nightmare of captivity from which most would never return.

But hey, that's just ONE CORNER of Earth; all over this misbegotten planet, millions upon millions of human beings were locked in life-or-death struggles in which over 65 million, roughly twice the entire population of Canada today, would be annihilated, most in the most horrific and mind-destroying deaths of every conceivable stripe: starvation, disease, imprisonment, torture, execution, genocide, mass exterminations perpetrated by doctors, lawyers, teachers, policemen, politicians, brothers, fathers, grandfathers, sons . . . a veritable tsunami of killing, murder, torture, mayhem, senseless, wanton reckless, even joyful destruction of whole cities full of women, infants, old people, entire communities of human beings burned to crisp, shrunken, dried-out black husks that used to have brains, that used to take out the laundry to dry, that used to enjoy a glass of beer on a warm summer's evening, that used to dream of futures that were never to be; this . . . THIS was what the world woke up to on the morning of January 12, 1943.

Can you conceive of this happening today? Can you imagine Russia, locked in a death struggle with, say, France and Germany, or B2 bombers carpet-bombing Amsterdam, or entire million-strong armies of young Americans shipping off across the Atlantic to North Africa to reduce Egypt to rubble?

Think about it, good people. Think for a second over your morning cereal that a mere seventy years ago this very day, these kinds of things were normal occurrences in the lives of the majority of human beings, completely normal things that you would read about every day in the newspaper, not even a lead story but on page 5, "U.S.S. Templeton struck by torpedo in North Atlantic; 2,300 crew feared lost" which would be an ordinary story on an ordinary day buried in an avalanche of similar stories of other catastrophes halfway around the globe: "Monte Cassino Invasion Falters as 4th Division Surrounded by Enemy; as Many as 24,000 Troops at Risk: Prime Minister."

I think that these scenarios will never -- cannot ever -- occur again on Planet Earth.

But don't for a second forget that they once did . . .

My Dad, the Guy Who Pissed Off a Major Arctic Explorer

 B efore my father crossed the Gulf into the Great Beyond, one day, in pure passing, which was his ONLY style (you needed titanium crowbars to pry any of his life history out of him most of the time) he casually remarked that he had dated the daughter of Dickey Byrd (my nickname), the famed arctic wanderer. To this day, I have no idea what Richard Byrd actually did, but the navy must have thought enough of it to make him an admiral.

Anyway, when good ol' Dad mentioned that I immediately put on my skeptic's hat and demanded to know the name of the daughter of good ol' Dickey Byrd. Luckily, this was in the days of the Internet, so I didn't exactly have to hire a private investigator.

But sure enough, he named her correctly: Evelyn Bolling Byrd was her name, and he'd dated her on several occasions. Now even in those days, which I'm assuming were just pre-war, when he was attending Harvard and was a tender 19 or 20 years old, Dickey Byrd was a household name. He had allegedly been the first human being to fly over the North Pole. Yeah, buddy, you and whose army?

Considering there was just he, himself and him to corroborate his story, I highly doubt it, But hey, he was a famous Arctic explorer and my dad dated his daughter. Dad never actually mentioned anything about marriage, but he did say they were "more than good friends."

Dad . . . the cad? at age 22 in Rackheath, England.

And my Dad, Thor rest his soul, was a bit of a ladies' man. You can see how that couldn't have been hard, from this picture of good ol' handsome Dad in uniform.

I know for a fact that during or just before the war, he dated an English woman. And he had a daughter with her. I've seen a picture of the woman who was the mother of my long-lost half-sister, who would be in her late 60s now (why he left her and his daughter is a mystery, at least to me, to this day. But there must have been a damned good reason for it). The woman was beyond gorgeous, and I'm not just saying that. She was a goddess in human form, and there was also a picture of the baby -- a beautiful one-year old girl. These pictures were discovered by me in a wallet that was in a dusty trunk at my mother's house in California. My mother began to tell me what it was all about but at the time, I didn't want to know I had a half-sister floating around in England somewhere and I cut her off.

Why do I bring that up? Because in those days, my friendly followers, birth control was, err, hit or miss. I never did know why my father didn't pursue the relationship with the daughter of the famed aviator, but she did have a couple of kids . . . probably Daddy didn't like my dad and his roguish charms and put an end to the affair.

But there you go. My dad, dater of a daughter of a dauntless daredevil.