The NY Times this morning has an article about Vesna Vulovic, the Serbian stewardess, who holds a Guiness Book record for surviving a 33,000 foot fall after her airliner was blown up. The article was unclear as to whether she air-surfed down herself or was part of the falling cloud of wreckage, so I ask Mr. Interwebs to clear things up.
An hour later, not only have I found that the "equal transit time" theory I was using to explain airplane lift to Frank for his report was mostly wrong, but I discover this brilliant movie, based on a true story, of what it's like to actually live the two and a half minutes it takes to come down from 20,000 feet, based a guy who got blown out of his B-17 in WWII and survived the fall. One of my personal nightmare/fantasy scenarios.
(See also the Pink Floyd song "The Gunner's Dream"). Needless to say, I'm not going to share the nightmare movie with him. Ah, here he is now.
Just awesome. I am struck dumb by the enormity of it all. And you should hear him do the presentation.
Frank G.
Third Grade, Room 13
Planes
Flight has been dreamed of for many centuries. Most old flights were when a person got into a flimsy glider and jumped from a high tower. The basic property of gliders is that they have no engine. Another kind of glider is tied to a powered airplane, and when they are high enough it falls away and glides to the ground.
One kind of plane with an engine is the propeller plane. One kind of propeller engine is the rotary engine which was linked directly to the propeller so when the propeller spun, the whole engine spun. Radial engines are linked to the inside of a plane instead of the propeller. Propeller engines are also called piston engines. Most light aircraft today are propeller planes.
But when Germany built the first jet plane, the HE 178, people could make much faster planes. A jet engine works by sucking air in the intake, squeezed by going through the compressor blades, then fuel burns to make the air expand, then it shoots out the back which powers the plane forward and turns the turbine which is linked to the compressor blades so that they could turn. Almost all planes today use jet engines.
Just 4 years after the Wright Brothers first flight a aircraft rose into the air. It had an engine but it but it did not move forward. It was the first helicopter. A helicopter has a propeller engine which is facing up so that it could take off vertically. Most rescue aircraft today are helicopters.
Lift is what makes aircraft go up. Lift works by air moving over a curved wing. When the air on the top of the wing moves faster it creates less pressure on the wing and with less pressure the airplane can fly.
Richard Platt, Flight, DK Experience series, Dorling Kindersley, 2006
Ian Graham, Aircraft, Smart Apple Media, 2007
Sometime around 1996 or 1997 I started going to the monthly English Country Dance in Noe Valley in San Francisco. At the time it was within walking distance of my apartment in Hayes Valley. Since it was so convenient, I was a regular at the dance, and since I was a regular they asked me to be the house manager when the old one left. The responsibilities were pretty minimal and I worked to see they stayed that way.
But 1997 was about four lifetimes ago. I moved to Berkeley, got married, reproduced. The nice thing about being the house manager was that I had an obligation to be there every month, so I could always say "Gee, I'd love to go to your neighbor's brother's nephew's three-and-a-half birthday party, and thanks for inviting me, but you see I have to go to this dance thing..." So every month I've been down there.
When Frank was a tiny baby, we would stash him asleep in the daycare nursery down the hall. When he was slightly larger we could occupy him in the nursery, which was full of toys and balls and blocks and stuff, a kid's paradise, really, almost as good as being locked in a toy store. One of us would hang there with him while the other danced. Then Mom and him would drive home at about 8:30 while I stayed the rest of the evening and got home on the train.
Then, when he was about six I think, I decided he needed to get out there on the floor. It matched up perfectly with three of his weak spots that really needed work: interacting with strangers, listening to instructions, and moving around physically getting exercise.
Knowing what a powerful incentive lies behind materialistic gain, I bribed him. Starting out small. "If you can do one dance, I'll buy you a toy" and printed out a real certificate. Kicking and screaming, but he survived ten minutes on the dance floor. Later it was two dances, then three. Now we're up to four dances, done well (that means smiling and making eye contact), over two or three months are worth one toy. And he's doing it.
Plus I've started him on his first job. He gets paid five bucks to help me lay out the fliers at the beginning of the dance and to fill out the money form for the BACDS the next morning, with the take from the fez.
I'm pretty proud of the whole thing, myself.
But all good things must come to an end. The church is renovating, and closing the hall for a couple years, so it's time to say goodbye to that hall
It's a grade-school kiddie gym. Like twenty feet by forty feet. Definitely old and funky, some character, some just tawdriness, and a frighteningly patchwork electrical system. But it's got a stage for the band, and the acoustics are just fantastic. No mikes necessary, and when you're dancing it sometimes feels like your head is inside the fiddle.
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And the rent was good and the neighborhood was good and parking always worked for me. And there was a kitchen and extra space and wacky old architecture that would never pass code nowadays and the world is poorer and less interesting for it.
Oh, well. We'll see what comes next.
Feeling something like an ice-cream-headache-type pain in my left temple
this morning on the train listening to Beethoven's Seventh while reading
David Foster Wallace's surreal account David Lynch and his movies and the
production of Lost Highway, a recording of the Seventh from 1959 or 1960 by Joseph Krips
and the London Symphony Orchestra that my dad probably bought before I was
born and that I recently ripped from the original vinyl I've been carrying
around for twenty years and have always considered, since it was the first
one I heard, as the definitive interpretation of Beethoven, made me think
of the story I found on Jill Sobule's blog of Jill Bolte Taylor (no relation) telling at the TED
conference what it felt like to have a stroke herself, listening at that moment
to the slow movement of Beethoven's Seventh, I say "slow" even though it's listed as
"Allegretto" that I first heard while mistakenly seeing the unforgettably cheesy and strange
film Zardoz as part of a double feature, when I decided that I would
be perfectly happy to die while listening to the slow movement of Beethoven's
Seventh, much as I dislike the though of my last moments being spent on BART--
that would suit me just fine.
Back around 1996, when I first got interested in English Country Dancing, the monthly San Francisco dance was going on at a little church in Noe Valley, Bethany United Methodist at Sanchez and Clipper. It was in a gradeschool kiddie gym, unpretentious, but quite effective, as the smallness made the acoustics intensely immediate, like the violin is playing inside your head. After a couple years the house manager, the guy in charge of the keys and the money every month, had to move on to other things and they drafted me into that role, where I've been ever since. After I moved to the East Bay and got married and reproduced I stayed with it, because the commitment was an excuse to get out, to go to The City, and to dance, and I could safely excuse myself from having to attend insipid stand-around-and-drink parties and whatever else might come up on an evening.
But now Bethany church is starting in on a remodel which will last a couple years and the BACDS is looking for another place to hold that particular dance. Mary Watson came up with the suggestion of Danceground Keriac, a dance studio on Divisidero and Bush, so we're looking into that.
The address is on the uphill side of Geary, the nice side, and the neighborhood is full of up-scale restored gingerbread Victorians and the street itself is quite vibrant. There are a ton of restaurants--it was all I could do to keep from having a second lunch while I was there. There are a couple of bars, and apparently the area is still active after dark, which is good to know. Right down the street from UCSF Mt. Zion hospital.
I'm not sure at all about parking in that neighborhood. The closest public parking I can find mention of over the internet is the Japantown garage, which is a mile away. I guess it's street parking, and I honestly can't say how that's going to go. Personally, I hate parking.
For public transit to the East Bay or anywhere else by BART, I think I'd take either the 3 Jackson or the 38 Geary.
Highway access is actually as good as our current location in Noe
Valley, once you know the trick. It's less intuitive, possibly:
The hall is about 25x50 feet. It looks slightly smaller than what we're in now, and it doesn't have a stage, so it would be even smaller with the band set up on the floor. But the floor itself is in good condition. The mirrors on the walls would be an interesting effect, they might make the dancers self-conscious and uncomfortable, or they might improve the dancing, who knows? There are skylights in the ceiling, which might add a nice touch in the summer when the sky is still light until 9:00.
An unexpected pleasure going through a pile of CD's, a recording of the one time I got to hear my wife sing; a movement of Libby Larsen's Seven Ghosts, the letter from Jenny Lind to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Even she didn't know she had a copy of it.
The tracks on the CD were badly labeled, I had to do some research to figure out what exactly they were, but was gratified in so doing to learn that especially worthy of mention were soprano Anne Goess...
You may feel excluded by Christian symbolism, but you're in America. Work with it.
Garrison Keillor's essay at Salon.com. And I didn't even know he had a column there.
I just got a Christmas card from a friend of mine, known him since high school (actually the card was from his wife, maybe he's pissed at me, whatever), who is living in Cairo. His wife, a doctor, got a job with the State Department. The card shows their kids on a camel in front of the pyramids.
Myself, I go to work in the morning, and in the evening I go home. I haven't been to Egypt. But I do get a lot of reading done. So I thumb my nose at him, and here are the books I've been reading lately.
It's a bunch of essays, most of which were published elsewhere already, so there's a range, a variety, some stuff is just ok but some is quite good. Her father was Alfred L. Kroeber, of the Anthropology Department at Cal Berkeley, in the days when Ishi, the last of the Yahi, wandered out of the woods into civilization, in 1911.
She writes about reading, and memory, and happy families (the Tolstoy quote), and gender, and feet, and where ideas come from, and, in a very detailed analysis, stress rhythms in poetry and prose. In that one, she actually counts words and stresses and syllables in paragraphs from Three Little Bears, Mark Twain, J.R.R. Tolkien, Virginia Wolf, Jane Austen, and Gertrude Stein. How they were written to sound out loud. Just looking at it now makes me want to go back and re-read some of it, which is good, because I just finished the last book on this list and this afternoon was reduced to reading the newspaper on the train on the way home. There is a great page where she compares a paragraph taken at random from Pride and Prejudice with a paragraph taken from Sense and Sensibility, to show how different the rhythms are and how completely in tune with the different senses of the two novels are the two rhythms.
My favorite line from the book I think is this:
When I was thirteen and fourteen I felt like a whippet suddenly trapped inside a great lumpy Saint Bernard. I wonder if boys don't often feel something like that as they get their growth. They're forever being told that they're supposed to be big and strong, but I think some of them miss being slight and lithe.
She has a whole chapter on "Rhythmic Patters in Lord of the Rings." That and the season got me thinkng about this book, which I'd read aloud to my wife a couple years ago. Tolkien wasn't just a fantasy writer, you know, he was an actual, accredited, and respected scholar of medieval English. If you ever read the Icelandic Eddas, it's obvious how much he borrowed from the literature of the time. Sir Gawain is a poem from the west of England, around 1400, contemporaneous with Chaucer from from a quite different tradition. For them, poetry was about alliteration within the line, not just rhymes at the end. Here's some lines chosen at random:
It's a Christmas book, the story starts on New Years Day and concludes with the Christmas season and New Years Day a year later. It reads aloud really well, that metricality and alliteration just drive it and drive it. And Tolkien thoroughly rocks on it, I couldn't imagine anybody doing it better, although according to the New York Times book review this weekend, somebody has recently tried, which was good, because in the review I learned the little four-line rhyming turnaround at the end of each stanza is called a "bob and wheel", the hanging two syllables before it is the "bob":Then he put spurs to Gringolet, and espying the track,
thrust in along a bank by a thicket's border,
rode down the rough brae right to the valley;
and then he gazed all about: a grim place he thought it,
and saw no sign of shelter on any side at all,
only high hillsides sheer upon either hand,
and notched knuckled crags with gnarled boulders.
So since it reads aloud so well, I determined to read it to the little family in the evenings, as Frank was going to bed. My plan was to do this and Dicken's Christmas Carol in the month of December. Well, I just finished this, and we're not going to get to the Christmas Carol this year. Frank listened patiently through it, which was certainly good, but I don't think he got much of it. I was usually rushing through it too, so that he could get to sleep at a decent hour.'A man must do as he is placed; be not pained nor aggrieved,'
said he.Said she so comely clad:
'Nay, noble knight and free,
though naught of yours I had,
you should get a gift from me.'
I've taken some interesting pictures with it, but I continue to wonder if I didn't actually take a greater number of more interesting pictures with the little pocket camera, that was around more often and didn't have very many distracting features.
But dad's recommendation sounded interesting, so I picked up Anne's college copy (Norton critical edition, too many footnotes) and started in on it. It wasn't like I remembered it at all, the encyclopdia stuff was actually interesting, and it certainly wasn't in the proportion that I remember it. But the plot doesn't really go anywhere, it's like this summer's movie Sunrise where these guys are flying a spaceship into the sun, there's not a lot of suspense about how it's going to end.
Which is it going to be? Can you guess?
- After unsuccessfully hunting the whale, Ahab says "Ah, never mind, it wasn't really that important," and goes home.
- In a final climactic battle, they conquer the whale, and bring it back to Nantucket to cheering throngs and a victory celebration, are acclaimed heroes, and live happily ever after.
- They are smashed into tiny, jellied smithereens by the creature for the hubris of having dared to take on the elemental forces of nature face-to-face.
So it wasnt' as bad as it was the first time, but I wasn't the impressed with it. BUT THEN, I needed some text for some test cases at work, and I availed myself of the Gutenberg project for some choice bits, and realized that in isolation they actually sounded pretty good:
So now I'm thinking I need to read it again, just slower this time. One more chance? Well, like I said, I am out of books...I say, tell Quohog there—what’s that you call him? tell Quohog to step along. By the great anchor, what a harpoon he’s got there! looks like good stuff that; and he handles it about right. I say, Quohog, or whatever your name is, did you ever stand in the head of a whale-boat? did you ever strike a fish?”
Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped upon the bulwarks, from thence into the bows of one of the whale-boats hanging to the side; and then bracing his left knee, and poising his harpoon, cried out in some such way as this:—
“Cap’ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere? You see him? well, spose him one whale eye, well, den!” and taking sharp aim at it, he darted the iron right over old Bildad’s broad brim, clean across the ship’s decks, and struck the glistening tar spot out of sight.
“Now,” said Queequeg, quietly, hauling in the line, “spos-ee him whale-e eye; why, dad whale dead.”
Action!! Romance!! Adventure!! Thrills!! All the things you can read about, in a book.
I find it frustrating when things that are obvious to me are not obvious to other people. When I fail to retain my equanimity in the face of that, that also frustrates me, that my empathy seems so restricted.
The oreo cookie video came up on a page with not-so-obvious information, but just as useful, especially for bicycle riders: How Not To Get Hit By Cars
For two decades, Tilden Park has closed South Park Drive from Nov. 1 to April 1 to prevent cars from squishing migrating newts.
Then Frank was all keen on going out into the driveway and taking hitting whiffle balls with his big blue plastic bat. We did it for like an hour, and he still didn't want to stop.
The Lamplighters were having their annual Champagne Gala and Auction. Gilbert and Sullivan greatest hits with made-up lyrics to a Harry Potter theme: Harry Patter and the Willing Suspension of Disbelief, or, A Series of Unfortunate Musical Numbers. Frank just finished book seven a month or two ago. Anne managed to pick up three tickets at the last minute. My god it was hilarious. Instead of "Three little maids from school are we" think "Three little witches on a spree" where the three witches are comprised of Paris, Lindsay and Brittany.
One of the items at auction was a pair of leftover Victorian costumes. I had asked Anne just a week or so ago if we were going to the Dickens Fair this year and if she was going to upgrade her costume. "Hoops!" she said, "Where am I going to get hoops!". The Victorian dress had hoops. It was her color. We bid. We won.
Plus tickets, plus a mirror box, plus a cute book on Victorian Christmas customs.
This was all at the Herbst Theatre. After having met "Snipe" and Harry "Patter" at the reception, Frank has to pee to beat the band and we run downstairs to find the men's room. The doors of the men's room are about a hundred years old, oak and brass, and with an aggressively brisk closing action so guys waiting to go during intermission aren't waiting too long. Frank was halfway through the door, turned to hand me the raffle ticket he'd been holding, and turned back just in time for his forehead to meet the door coming back at him. He got clocked, went down hard, and raised a cartoon-sized lump on his forehead.
When I finally get back to collect our box of stuff and fulfill our winning bid, it turns out the fitter for the costumes is none other than the old friend of Anne's from her Lamplighter days that we've been hanging out with all night. Are you serious? How much kismet can I stand? I figured Frank's lump was balancing out the karma for all the other scores me made that night (along with missing out on the newts). I tried to explain to him that his suffering was for us, for a greater good, that I would never have accepted that deal if I'd been offered it, but The Great Prankster upstairs sometimes just does it that way. He didn't seem to appreciate that idea much.
Yeah, well, whatever.
