Mary Travers, and Peter Paul and Mary

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There is a generation out there that has never heard of Mary Travers, nor of Peter, Paul and Mary.  In fact, there is a large proportion of young people who are not familiar with the genre of Folk, a musical style which has been all but completely co-opted by Christian Gospel, to the dismay of those of us who loved it.

I live in a small town in Pennsylvania, which nevertheless manages to attract a variety of major musical acts, simply because we happen to be on the way from one performing venue to another, and a convenient stop.  (We also have a beautiful theater, in which singers like to perform.)

On one occasion, Peter, Paul and Mary performed here, one night only, and I saw this amazing group live.  Anyone who would like to hear the particular PPM songs that I am most familiar with should get this collection, which has not a single cut that isn't brilliant: Peter, Paul and Mary: 10 years together.  They performed many of these songs at the concert, interspersed with monologues by the three principals, notably Mary Travers.

Evidently PPM was a synthetic band, put together by a music recording executive, or at least that was what I understood from what they said that evening.  (I just read that the responsible party was Albert Grossman, who managed Bob Dylan, and PPM.)  Mary Travers, evidently, was a single mother, who had been singing in various bars in NYC, and whose voice caught the attention of the fellow who had lined up Noel Paul Stookey and Peter Yarrow already.  Whatever the sequence of events, they found themselves singing very well together, accompanied by the two guys, who were able guitarists, and later on by a very talented bassist, Dick Kniss (who passed away earlier this year: 2012).

The talent of the group was to sing rhythmic, harmonically conventional versions of songs written by a variety of other songwriters —covers, as they have come to be called.  In not a few instances, the covers of PPM brought the songs to the public ear faster than the originals; an example is Leaving on a Jet Plane, by John Denver, That's what you get for loving me, by Gordon Lightfoot, and Don't think twice, it's alright, by Bob Dylan.  In other instances, the Peter, Paul and Mary version helped an album of the original artist rise to the top of the charts.  The three musicians have been well trained, classically, though all I have been able to learn about them is that Mary Travers attended the famous Little Red Schoolhouse in NYC, Peter Yarrow graduated from Cornell University, and Noel Paul Stookey graduated from Michigan State.  The arrangements for their songs reveal a sensibility a cut above the level of harmonic intuition required for the basic skill of getting the right chords, which is not difficult.

I have heard Mary Travers sing solo, and in my humble opinion, to my ears she sounded best when driven along by the rhythmic engine which consisted of Yarrow and Stookey.  It is funny to realize that though I think of Peter Paul and Mary as a group whose forte was melody and harmony, one of their greatest assets was their driving rhythm, assisted by the able Mr Kniss.

As a racontress, Mary Travers was inimitable.  She told us a story of her eldest daughter, whom she carried on her hip at rehearsals in her younger days, and how she grew up to marry a Republican.  I loved the way she rambled on, with a big grin, while the Republicans seated all around me squirmed in their seats —this is a strongly Republican area, I have to tell you.

Mary Travers passed away some years ago, and it is clear that the surviving members of the group find it difficult to recapture the magic without the energetic singing of their female accomplice.  She had a voice that could cut through the hubbub of a noisy bar, but still round mellow and musical.  The three of them seemed absolutely equal on stage, none of them appearing to wish to unduly grab the limelight; they seemed a perfect team.  In my mind they were the very model of a perfectly harmonious group.

I wish that the folk music I love so well should get a new lease of life.  I wish that the music of Peter, Paul and Mary would regain some of its popularity and fame.  I wish that the ideals for which they stood should regain their shine: tolerance, a sense of fairness, a sense of urgence about injustice, a sense of connectedness with people everywhere.  And I wish that the legacy of Mary Travers should not die.  She tread lightly on the Earth.

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A Fable: Bridge to Terabithia

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This one turned up unexpectedly in our mailbox; I had put in the Netflix queue long ago, and it had crawled its way to the top, despite furious rearrangements of the list.  (Since I got married last Summer, a lot of cinematic evangelism has taken place!)

It took me a while to get onto the wavelength of Terabithia.  Since all the science fiction and fantasy has been blazing across the screen: Avatar, Tangled, Brave, Transformers, John Carter, and Pirates of the Caribbean, oh my, not to mention the Lion, the Witch, the Wardrobe, and Ted and Alice, it took me a minute or two to get the lie of the land.  In this story, the pretense is truly pretense, and imagination becomes very real, but is recognized to be mostly imagination.

The story is as follows: Jesse (7th grade) is fourth in a family with four sisters.  As the story opens, we find out that his working-class family is undergoing financial hardship.  He loves to draw, and is a great runner, and his greatest fan is his kid sister, May Belle.

New neighbors move in next door, including a girl his own age called Leslie.  Leslie makes friends with Jesse (though we're told later that Leslie has trouble making friends).  At school, and on the school bus, the big bully is an eighth grader called Janice, who makes the kids pay admission to use the bathrooms.  Both Jesse and Leslie are frustrated by Janice's shenanigans, but neither of them has the guts to confront Janice, or even the boy bullies in Jesse's class, who pick on them every chance they get.

After school, though, Jesse and Leslie retreat into a woods adjacent to their two houses by means of a rope swing.  They call the woods Terabithia, and the rope swing is the Bridge to Terabithia.  In Terabithia, every tree and bush becomes either a magical hero or a villain; for instance a tree becomes a huge troll, and dragonflies become their own soldiers.  Jesse picks up a little dog, who becomes a prince and a fighter on their side, and a troll hunter.

Jesse never allows May Belle to play Terabithia with him and Leslie, though she never gives up asking to come along.  Leslie is kind to the kid, and gives her the Barbies she no longer plays with, but leaves Jesse to handle his sister.  Clearly Jesse has trouble with his jealousy, as well as cowardice.  In Terabithia, the two teenagers fight their imaginary foes, and build up courage to face their school bullies, and earn some minor victories.  They play a mean trick on bully Janice.  But Leslie hears Janice crying alone in the girls bathroom, and Jesse insists that she go in and talk to the crying girl.  Leslie returns to report that she helped Janice deal with a problem, and seems pleased with herself for having done so.   (This is the only instance we see of Leslie growing, in the movie; the rest of it's mostly about how Leslie helps Jesse to overcome his cowardice.)

There are two teachers we see: the hard as nails English teacher, and the warm, guitar-playing music teacher, with whom Jesse is sort of in love.  We're left to discover this without too much help, but Jesse's admiration of the music teacher is a jealous one, and he resents Leslie participating in it.

Jesse is invited on a weekend by the music teacher, Miss Edmunds, to visit the museum in a neighboring town.  When he returns, he finds that Leslie has died, hitting her head while crossing the creek to Terabithia.  Jesse is devastated.

Somehow, Janice, the former bully, and little May Belle, and Leslie's heartbroken parents, Jesse's father, and, unexpectedly, the English teacher, between them, are able to make Jesse come to terms with Leslie's death.  His last achievement is, significantly, to make inroads in his fight against his jealousy: he takes May Belle across the creek to Terabithia.

It is likely that the original book, by Katherine Paterson, is better able to address the subtleties of the story, and the morals it presents.  The youngsters attend church together, and there is a brief discussion about belief and dogma, couched in the language of children, between Jesse, May Belle, and Leslie.

Leslie is presented as an almost angelic girl, quite unnecessarily, in my opinion.  Part of the reason for that is the intense personality of the young actress herself (AnnaSophia Robb), who is ethereally beautiful, in the Hollywood tradition of a character who is destined for premature death.  The book and the movie are based on actual events, in the life of the director of the movie, it so happens.  While the story is a great vehicle for animation and graphics, and the graphics do manage to convey the idea that the fights are essentially imaginary, the fantastic element of the story is a little too subtle to be conveyed by a movie alone.  Still, it is an excellent movie for young adults, and one can hardly imagine it being executed any better than it is.

Green Illusions: Why Ozzie Zehner claims that Electric Cars are nothing to crow about

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In a recent book, it has been claimed that many of the so-called green initiatives do more harm than good.  The author is Ozzie Zehner, and his main argument is that these steps are so tiny, that they only appear to help the problem.

Many have argued, in various contexts, that the Good is the enemy of the Best, and it is an irrefutable argument, both ways.  The "best" here is so impossible to attain: to get most households in the temperate zones to save energy by insulating their homes as much as they can, to get most households in the world using energy-efficient light fixtures, to get all energy-inefficient cars and vehicles off the road, and finally, to completely move towards mass transportation (and make it energy efficient).  He argues that the energy standards of present-day hybrid and electric cars are laughably minimal, and I agree.  They're good only compared to the average non-hybrid, non-electric vehicles, which are absolute fuel hogs and polluting monsters.

We know we've got our fingers in the dyke, but what does he want: that we should take them out?  While we watch disaster grind towards us at slow speed, it is some consolation that we're slowing it just a little.

A lot of what we do—what I do, certainly—is with a view to setting an example.  A million people are not watching what I do, but perhaps it makes a difference to my immediate family, and a few of my friends, and a few of my students.  We've got the students trying to increase the level of recycling that goes on at our school, and around us, barely perceptibly, more recycling is happening: stores are offering to recycle, new recycling bins appear in odd places.  Recycling is a significant way of saving energy and lessening our carbon footprint.

Elsewhere in town, of course, big executives are making decisions to cut costs by streamlining their purchasing and their trash disposal.  While one business chooses to improve their public image by placing a recycling bin in a prominent place, another business lays off an employee who used to be in charge of recycling, and recycling is added on to the duty of another employee who's already overworked.

But we can't be deterred by every stupid and uncaring thing that any business anywhere chooses to do.  As soon as a business goes public, the stockholders hold it to ransom, you see (or at least, the management likes to pretend that the stockholders have tied their hands in regard to environment-friendly activity inside the business).

I like to think that not every board of directors is as bottom-line as the cartoons make them out to be.  In order for businesses to be a little more green, stockholders must make do with a little less green, meaning smaller dividends.  Not hugely smaller, but significantly smaller.  Businesses, politicians, economists must all get together about slowing down consumption of the environment, and consumption of energy.  This might mean slowing down of traditional measures of "productivity", e.g. GDP.  If so, so be it.  If we live by the GDP, we're going to incinerate ourselves by the GDP.

Anyway, get hold of brother Ozzie's book, but don't buy it; just borrow it.  The good and the best had better call it off; we've got to have both.

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"Sanity Restoring Rally" in Retrospect

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My wife and I were thrilled to attend the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in October 2010.  Since then, periodically, we looked around for a DVD of the event, but there were none to be found.  (Possibly the organizers were sensitive to accusations of having staged it for commercial reasons.)  But recently, we found a video-recording of the TV coverage of the event and watched it.

A lot of it was more fun to watch live, I have to admit.  But a lot of it did stand up to time: the MythBusters guys, for instance.  Though the fellows were a lot of fun to watch, it was kinda lame; the audience-participation stunts that they did were pitched at a warm-up for a spelling bee event, I thought.  I guess it follows that it was certainly pitched at the right level.

It was wonderful to see Cat Stephens (Yusuf Islam), Guido Sarducci, Tony Bennett, Sheryl Crow, and Sam Waterston, who read a brilliantly zany poem attributed to Stephen Colbert.

But, as I reported in the original post, what impressed me in the faces of the people in the crowd on the video, just as it impressed me on the faces I saw around us, and the the voices I heard, was the niceness and decency and eagerness to cooperate, and to be seen reaching out and embracing everyone.  It was a mass hug waiting to happen.

Can niceness and willingness and friendliness make a better America for us all?  I really don't know.  Somehow, the paranoia of the bad days of 2010 has died away, and the harsh voices on both the left and the right are being regarded with disapproval.  I know more names worthy of disapproval on the Right: Rush L, and the gentleman with the manic conspiracy theories, whose name I should look up later, and Ann C.  These voices have most definitely softened, and are no longer viewed with the same adoration as they were.  Throughout the country, there is an awareness that vicious diatribes are no longer useful and welcome.  Sarah Palin is not presently a major force to reckon with, but Mitt Romney could easily be persuaded to sign her on, I suppose.

Did Jon Stewart achieve this softening of rhetoric?  Did the Occupy movement absorb some of the fury that was expressed so harshly two years ago?  We can never know, but I for one needed to know that I was not alone in the alarm I felt, and from what Jon Stewart said that day, it seems that he needed to know, too.  And we all found out.

As the elections come closer, the voices will become harsh once again.  The campaign workers are desperately looking for sound bites which can be lined up for TV and radio, clever ways in which the false steps on both sides can be capitalized upon for negative publicity.  Men and women with striking voices are being auditioned on both sides, to voice over the unflattering videoclips that warn voters against trusting the candidates for one reason or another.  Just don't watch.  Make up your mind about the needs of the country and the society as dispassionately as possible, and refuse to be swayed by psychological warfare.  People are getting darned too good at playing games with our heads.

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Blogging -- You Can, Too!!

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Just in case my readers would like to start their own blog, I thought I’d give you some information.

What is a blog, in the first place? Well, you ought to check it up on Wikipedia (--says it's "an online diary") or Google, or something like that, but I’ll tell you what it is as far as I’m concerned.  (I may lose a lot of readers because of what I’m about to say.)

Though basically a blog is just a website on which you post your thoughts (which is in line with the etymology of the word, which comes from “Web log”, an intermittent log of your thoughts), it was originally intended to be a record of your daily –or periodic – web browsing.  Blogs have traditionally contained lots of links, and the blogger’s editorializing was minimal in the old days.  A blog was initially an index to all the interesting websites that the blogger had discovered, in more or less reverse chronological order.

What goes into a blog?  In my case, one of two things happen: sometimes a topic arrives in my head, and I try to find websites that illuminate whatever ideas I have concerning the topic.  I might, for instance, want to write a blog (a blog post, actually; the blog is the totality of all my posts) about Julie Andrews.  I write it like a feature article, and illustrate it with links to Julie Andrews websites, photos, and videoclips, etc.

Other times, I see a post on Facebook, or in the junkmail I get that catches my interest.  If it is self-explanatory and I largely agree with it, I just share it on Facebook.  (No, you do not need to friend me, please; I’m a lot less fun on Facebook than I am on my blog.)  If it needs some counter-arguments, or if the material needs to be amplified, I blog about it.  So that’s what goes in my so-called blog.

Why should you blog?  One reason I blog is that writing clarifies my thinking.  You’re probably wondering what my thinking is like before I blog, seeing what a mess my blog is.  The answer is: it’s not pretty.  Some of the blogs I’ve seen are terrible: bad grammar, sloppy thinking, runaway emotion, bad data aggravated by prejudice.  I know I have my biases, but no one could possibly doubt that I at least try to be moderate in my criticism.  When you think about it, nobody is forced to read a blog; if anyone at all is reading yours, you know it must be helping someone.  Or at least, giving someone a good laugh, which I don’t grudge them.

I got started in this business by writing reviews for Amazon.  A lot of good reviewers write for Amazon, but relatively few reviewers are able to present a good case for either liking or disliking a product, and fewer still can do so with good grammar and spelling.

Liking things is something I see as an important part of what I do.  My office is often filled with good music, and when we’re waiting for something in class, I’m not above showing the students an interesting clip on YouTube.  Young people these days are growing up among adults who are culture-poor, or who feel bashful about sharing their likes and dislikes with young people.  My experience with young people is that they’re sure of what they like, but they’re open to the possibility that other stuff might be interesting under the right circumstances.  So if I did not ever play Träumerei to my students, the chances are that they would never, ever get the opportunity to either like it or hate it.  Tom Corbett’s budget for schools has made certain that kids aren’t going to hear Träumerei in school, that’s for damn sure.  So, quoting from Arthur Conan Doyle, or John Donne, or the Bible is almost an evangelical imperative for me (atheism notwithstanding).

Should you publicize your blog?  I have the blog listed in some sort of List of All Blogs, and of course Google has it linked into their search engine in a minor way.  (I get to indicate keywords with each blog, which generates pointers to the blog if anyone searches on any of those words, or all of the words, or something like that.)  I figure that the less I publicize the blog, the more I’m likely to get away under the radar of liberal-blog-haters.  What’s the point, anyway?  I’m already famous in some quarters, and those are the only quarters that matter!

How can you get started?  All the way at the top of this page, you should see a white B on an orange background.  This is a link that takes you to the Blogspot headquarters.  There you’re guided through the steps of creating your very own blog in words of half a syllable; it is very easy.  You could easily create a nicer-looking blog than this one.  All you need are a Google mail account (and I think they might even be satisfied with a Hotmail account), and maybe a clean digital photo of yourself (or even your pet mongoose, or even no photo at all).  Let me know if you do successfully set up your blog!

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Excitement in the Air

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My wife, my daughter and I have just returned home from a very long vacation trip.  We have a little more than a day to get on top of jet-lag, and we have to get Junior to the airport some 200 miles away in Newark, NJ, so that she can head off to where she lives, in Arizona.  (This is sort of routine; we all are experiencing a significant lack of discretionary income, so we prefer to drive to a major airport nearby, rather than pay the exorbitant additional airfare to the local teeny-weeny air terminal.  It saves us close to $200, which is, let's see: something like 100 hamburgers, not to mention some fries!  Okay, that's enough levity.)

Our friend Jeffrey, a colleague, is a pilot, and owns a small plane.  (One doesn't really own a plane outright, around here; one owns a share in a plane.)  It so happened that, some months earlier, Jeff had talked with my wife and me at Stammtisch (which is a German institution that sanctions the use of beer as a bonding material.  This idea has been very cleverly adopted at our local watering-hole to promote beer consumption).  Jeff had disclosed to us, over a glass of beer, that it was pretty easy to ferry a passenger to any major airport in the vicinity.  This, we had all thought to our separate selves, would beat the heck out of a 4-hour trip out to the airport, and a 4-hour trip back, not to mention numerous other inconveniences that knew not their right hands from their left, to paraphrase the Prophet Jonah*.  So now, anticipating a very long road trip to Newark, NJ --not, I might add, one of our favorite places to visit casually, and don't get me started-- I asked Jeff whether it might be in the cards to get Junior flown out to Newark in his plane.

Jeff looks up his busy schedule; a trip up to Toronto has just been cancelled, and he is free!  We iron out the mathematical details, and it appears that, for the low, low cost of around $165, Junior and I can hop over to Newark with Jeff, and Junior can catch her plane to cactusland, while Jeff and I return, and celebrate with a nice lunch.

Junior's flight is at noon, so we figure that she has to check in around 10:30 A.M. (or 10:30 hours, as we say in the flying culture).  "If we leave at 9:00," says Jeffrey, "we can make it with a little time to spare.  If you get to the private plane area at 8:30, you can go through the pre-flight check with me!"  After he explains what a pre-flight check is --just going through a very extensive list of safety precautions-- we agree to be at the airfield at 8:30 AM.

As you can imagine, we hardly get any sleep that night.  We watch Meet the Robinsons, a maniacal animated feature by Walt Disney (not bad, actually), and then I stagger off to lie down in lieu of sleeping, while Junior and my wife watch Tangled, while Junior tries to pack her stuff in such a way that both Jeffrey and the airline which will convey her to AZ will be happy with the result.

We're up long before 6:30 AM.  More frantic packing.  All the bags are weighed, and carefully labelled with their weight.  We also weigh ourselves; there is a detailed analysis of the balance of the plane, in order for optimal maneuverability.  My wife had volunteered to stay behind to give Jeff a little more flexibility.  We find the place where we are to meet at the airfield --obviously a place we've never been, since we've not flown out of our town in a private plane before.  Jeff rolls up, does a little paper work, calls the control tower, we load the bags onto a golf cart, and roll out to the hangar.  Jeff opens up the hanger, and there is the --very small-- Cessna that is to transport the three of us to Newark!  All the finicky enumerating of the weights of the people and the luggage becomes very reasonable.  (It is all about what we call moments : the rotational effect of a weight in a particular place.  You multiply the weight by its distance from the center of gravity of the empty plane; weights on one side must balance the weights on the other side.)

Jeff loads the bags, while the rest of us anxiously look on.  We go through the fabulous pre-flight check.  We check the oil, the fuel (any water in the fuel?  Luckily, no), the tires, the control surfaces (tail elevators at the back, the rudder, the wing elevators) the propeller blade for nicks, take out the air intake covers (prevent birds from nesting in them), the cover of the pitot tube (a gadget which measures "air speed", the speed of the plane relative to the air around it.  There is a GPS on board that estimates the true speed; from the two we can calculate the wind speed, but I know you don't really care at this point!).

Finally we're ready to leave.  He hands us each a head set, which we plug into sockets near our seats.  We close down the doors and windows, Jeff straps his log book onto his left leg, and his Ipad onto his right leg, loudly calls out "Clear!", and starts up the engine.

It turns out that a large part of what a pilot does is to keep talking to people in control towers.  Since we were flying according to Instrument Flight Rules (IFR), the towers were entirely in control of us, we had to fly at roughly 7,000 feet, and we had to do precisely what we were told.  If we were flying according to Visual Flight Rules, we would fly lower, and fly by sight, using visual landmarks.  ("Not necessarily lower," Jeffrey corrects me.  But low enough to be below the cloud layer, so visual navigation is at all possible.  Today the clouds were roughly at 6,000, so we would have had to fly below that altitude.)

We could hear the Control Tower in our headsets.  "93-Romeo, you're cleared to take off," he says, and follows up with a rapid-fire mumble that essentially recounted local wind-speed conditions.  Jeff reports that there are a flock of geese camped out near the runway, who seem not to be a problem.

Soon we are off, leaving my wife looking after us, with a very anxious expression.  We wave frantically, and head out towards a mid-way landmark, at which point we're supposed to head straight to Newark.  It's a little rough as we pass through clouds on our way to 7,000 feet.  Jeff reports to the regional control center to which he has been handed-off, that the cloud tops are at roughly 6,000 feet, in case "anyone asks."

Junior is seated in front, while I sit in the back.  We're both very quiet, but Junior has a really good camera with which she's systematically taking a photographic record of everything.  Eventually Jeff is talking to us (we hear his voice on the headsets), and we figure it's safe to talk back.

"Would you like to fly the plane?" he asks Junior.  Her face lights up, and he explains what to do.  The hand controls bank the plane to the left or the right, which is how the plane is steered for the most part.  Pulling the controls towards one sends the plane up, pushing it away sends the plane downward.  The main trick, apparently, is to make very slight corrections.  Unlike an automobile, where the steering wheel controls only the angle of the front wheels, in a plane the procedure for a slight correction is quite different to the procedure for a large correction.  For slight corrections, the control automatically returns to "neutral" position (just like the steering wheel in most cars).  So that's what she should do, to keep the bearing of the plane matched up with the bearing recommended by the navigation equipment.

"Pull the nose up ... pull the nose up ... great!  That's good," Jeffrey says, and then after a while, "Turn right; bring it to 120.  Turn right ... keep turning ... that's good," he says.  She's a quick study, is our Junior, and afterwards Jeff is full of praise.

We're handed off to Allentown control, then to New York control, and finally to Newark.  We come down to 3,000 feet, and then, at the urging of the Tower, race in at top speed, to land on the little runway kept for small planes such ours.  We taxi in to a facility (Signature Service), that sends a gentleman over to take charge of the plane, top up the fuel, etc.  The baggage is loaded into a dolly, and then into a courtesy van, and Jeff joins us to drop Junior off at Departures.  I just begin to realize that the General Aviation system is, at least logically, completely outside the virtual enclosure that each commercial carrier maintains.  You only enter this enclosure when you check in and go through security; once you land, and exit through the gate, you're mostly out of this enclosure.  (You know this, because if you try to go back to the gate, you will be stopped.)

Jeffrey and I head back to the private plane area (General Aviation), get ourselves some popped corn and some marginal coffee, visit the restroom, do some paperwork, and then head out to the plane.  Without Junior and her baggage, we're in good shape.

After some more busy talking with the control tower, we're sent out to the runway, and we're off.

"Would you like to fly the plane?" Jeff asks, and I blushingly admit that I would.  He shows me what to do, and I try.  Initially I steer a little too aggressively, which ends up dropping the nose too much.  I gradually learn to make a series of little corrections rather than one big correction (which would require additional altitude corrections, which is not good).  I am far from being a natural at this game, especially as I tend to be intimidated by clouds which seem to be rushing faster towards us if they're higher.  (This is an obvious parallax phenomenon, just as distant trees, or buildings, for that matter, seem to go by more slowly than nearer ones.)

When we're about halfway, things start to go wrong.  First, some of the navigation equipment (there were at least three independent systems Jeffrey had at call) starts to go on the blink.  We really know that something is wrong when the control tower can't hear us respond to an instruction.  We hear him anxiously asking "93-Romeo, do you read?" several times.  Jeffrey is calling back, "Control, this is 93-Romeo; do you read?" but they don't acknowledge.  We have turned due West to avoid a parachute-jumping event that was in our path, but the control tower is not yet aware of it.  (Eventually they will see us on our new path on their radar, but at the moment they're anxious.)

"The electrical system is failing," says Jeff.  It seems to me that the engine is working perfectly, so the failure seems to be confined to the accessories --thinking of the navigation system and the radio as "accessories", so I'm not too concerned.  Jeff has taken the controls already, to make the turn.  He asks me to look in the back seat for a bag which has the backup radio, a hand-held one.  I can't hear him over the interior intercom, so I take off the headset, though I'm a little nervous that Jeff is still wearing his.  I can hear him pretty well without the headset, because he has quite a carrying voice.

I find the radio, and pass it over.  He succeeds in raising the control tower one last time, and requests to be allowed to drop down to 4,000 feet and switch to visual flight rules because we're obviously losing voice contact.  The control tower is agreeable.

"Well," says Jeff, "thank goodness for good old Ipad!"  He explains where we are, and says he's going to get close to home, and then call our local control tower, and explain that we've got a bad electrical system.  The engine is fine, he confirms (though I don't know exactly how that happens to be the case; presumably the engine is wired to carry on even with a faulty charging system).  I am a little bewildered, because I can't identify any landmarks.  Usually I can spot the big interstate highways such as I 80, but here all I can see are local one-lane-each-way roads.  We spot a pair of cooling towers that go with one of the local nuclear power stations.  That makes me feel a little better, and then I spot one of the enormous geological formations that are characteristic to our area, namely the Nittany Ridge.  We cross over it, and I feel a little better, for no very good reason.

"Here's what we're going to do," says Jeff.  "You fly, while I try to raise the tower.  When we get closer, I'll take over."
"But where am I heading?  I can't spot any landmarks!"
"See the Mall?  Go straight towards it!"
What Mall?  I can't see a thing that I can recognize.  But I take the controls, and concentrate on keeping the plane level, which is easy.  Suddenly, I recognize this crazy sculpture that is a landmark at our Mall, and now I know where we are.

Jeff has managed to raise the tower, and is explaining the situation.  "Oh, any runway is fine.  No, actually," he says, "27 is good, because this is going to be a no-flaps landing."

Evidently the electrical system controls more than just the radio and the navigation instruments; it also controls the flaps.  The flaps are things you use when landing, to cut down the speed.  "Luckily," Jeff explains, "we've been practicing No-Flaps landings just this month.  It's going to be okay!  Right ... right ... a little further right ... good."

I can see the landing strip now.  There is a large diagonal one, and the one towards which we are heading, labeled with an enormous "27" right at the nearer end.  I am given the hand-held radio while Jeff takes the controls, and I'm instructed to relay any last minute instructions from the tower.  I suspect that I was not pressing the right button, or something, because the tower wasn't saying anything!  Or maybe they were too busy watching the plane.  [Jeff says that there is no button to receive, and he's glad I wasn't pushing anything.  You only push the button to talk / transmit.]

Jeff warns me that he is doing a side-slip; a maneouver that enables the plane to lose height and speed at the same time.  It feels weird, but having read a lot of Biggles books in my early youth, I have an idea what it was like.  It is a long, controlled slip, and then we're nicely lined up.  The enormous '27' rushes towards us, and then we see a million skid-marks hurtling up, and we're down.  It really seemed easy.

As soon as he turns the engine off, Jeff heaves a sigh of relief, and the fuel truck chugs up.  Poor Jeff has to unburden himself to the fuel guy, who placidly listens to Jeff's account of how things went wrong.  It takes fifteen minutes to get the plane into the hangar and batten it down.  We head out to the parking lot, get in Jeff's little Toyota, and drive round to the restaurant at the main terminal.  It is a good restaurant, and Jeff orders a Rum and Ginger.  Evidently Jeff only orders a Rum and Ginger when he has come through a particularly hairy experience.

I order one, too.  A Rum-and-Ginger is going to become a ritual for me too, I can tell!

*The very last verse, I believe.  You know my methods, Watson; apply them.

Massacre at the Movies

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We have just heard of the recent shooting in Aurora, CO: a young man shot at some seventy people, killing a dozen of them, at the showing of a movie.  This morning a motive was still unknown, and a good motive is unlikely to emerge.  All that is known about the shooter is that he was evidently a graduate student in neuroscience, who had just decided to abandon his program, or at least the doctoral program he had been enrolled in.

Senator Diane Feinstein has been the only one so far to speak up about gun violence, in connection with this most recent incident.  Evidently she was present when a supervisor of San Francisco, Harvey Milk, and Mayor George Moscone, were gunned down in City Hall in 1978.  Subsequently, Diane Feinstein was catapulted into politics, and was active in passing gun control legislation.  Some of the bans of assault weapons she helped to bring about expired earlier this year, despite all her efforts.

The man who perpetrated the shootings last evening, who surrendered to police after the shooting spree, was carrying an assault rifle, a shotgun, and two pistols.  While personally I am opposed to any firearms being permitted for ownership by private citizens, I see no reason why anyone should own an assault weapon such as the AK 47 rifle that it appears the culprit was toting.  At the very least, state authorities should require that assault weapons be registered as strictly as automobiles, for instance.  That will not prevent shootings such as the present one.  But crime prevention authorities will have a little more information with which to work in discouraging mass shootings.

President Obama has been careful about using the current tragedy as a platform for pro gun-control rhetoric.  This being an election year, he is being careful not to emphasize to moderates that he is an Anti Gun Liberal.  This is what is needed in order to win elections around here; one has to present oneself as not against pretty much anything at all.

We had to realize that the population is inevitably tending towards heterogeneity in all matters.  Already by around 1959 attitudes and beliefs in America were highly varied, so much so that it was impossible to generalize about the Man In The Street.  All you could say was that the typical American had a 9th grade education, and was probably desperately afraid of Communism.  Over the next several decades even less could be said about a typical American, with any kind of confidence.

Unfortunately for me, and anyone who shares my views, if Barack Obama were to return to the White House, it will be on the shoulders of a large number of people who are against at least one of: gun control, family planning, controlling lobbyists, taxation, gay marriage, public education, health care legislation, and so forth.  It is very difficult to be enthusiastic about a President who, in order to appeal to the widest spectrum of supporters, is coy about coming out in favor of any liberal issues at all, except vaguely against big money interests.  While we would prefer Obama over Mitt Romney, who seems not to have a single idea that I can personally support, it is frustrating to see Obama not stand behind the good ideas that he once seemed to espouse enthusiastically.

Man's Best Friend

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A recent program on PBS presented a view of what was unique about dogs.  I had become interested in the subject many years ago, when I was introduced to a book by famed Austrian author Konrad Lorenz (pronounced more like Laurenz).

Lorenz has written many highly readable books, all written in German, a few translated by himself, but most by other translators.  He was interested in animal behavior, and styled himself an animal ethologist.  His two major books are Man meets dog, and King Solomon's Ring.  Unfortunately I can't remember the details of Lorenz's ideas, for the simple reason that I have assimilated them so completely that it's hard for me to tell where his ideas stop, and my own begin.

The PBS program (whose name I can't recall; possibly Man's Best Friend) had the thesis that what has defined the dog as we know it is its entire willingness to relate to its human.  This meshes in very well with what Lorenz had to say --to the extent that I remember it, namely that dogs are adept at reading human body language.

I have little to add to that, except that dogs reflect the personalities of their masters and mistresses to a remarkable degree.  (Lorenz, I believe, was of the same opinion.)  When I see a sweet-natured dog, I usually observe a sweet-natured owner.  When I see an ill-tempered dog, I usually notice a similarly ill-tempered owner, and so on.

I'm staying with an aunt whose dogs are the sweetest I have ever met.  The females are almost without exception even-tempered and gentle.  The males, in contrast, are jolly and mischievous, reflecting the temperament of my brother, who lives in the same house.

I have always wanted to get a dog, but have resisted the impulse, simply because my friends and family are scattered so widely, it would be impossible to visit them at all if I had responsibilities to a pet.  (I can't bring myself to board a pet in a kennel, though I know that these are often fine establishments.)

But beware of getting a dog.  It might tell the world a lot more about you than you might wish.

Arch, hugely enjoying the ten dogs and one cat out here!