Letters From Home

In this day and age, when we see so many rotten people getting far too much attention, sometimes it’s best to remember the truly good people of the not so distant past.

YouTube video: Mr. Rogers talks to Congress.

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You know, I’ve been a Trekkie practically from day one.  The first episode of Star Trek I watched was the second half of “The Menagerie” in its first run and I was a devoted fan from then on.  (The really funny thing is that I never got to see the first half of “The Menagerie” till a good 20 years later–during the intervening years I always seemed to tune in one episode too late.)

But I was idly watching an episode of TNG the other day and was reminded yet again that the people who wrote the series weren’t really interested in science, per se.  Now, focusing on the human element is not a bad thing.  But if you’re creating a universe for people, it does help to follow just a few commonsense rules.

If you get an “intruder alert” you don’t send a security team down there to check it out, fool–you have the computer analyze the intruders and if they’re the bad guys, you beam them out into space pronto. Duh.

Oh, and somehow I doubt future space battles will be fought by people screaming orders at each other across the bridge–the computer will analyze what needs to be done and then do it, Nomad be damned.

You’ve just blown open the door to a room full of bad guys. What do you do? Apparently you don’t just spray the room and kill everyone in it–you STAND there in the doorway for dramatic effect. Of course, the bad guys don’t immediately vaporize you either, so it’s a Stupid Stalemate.

If you’re running through a dark hall with a weapon, you sure want one with a BIG RED LIGHT on it. Might just as well have a homing device for the other guys or a big red illuminated target. Oh, and you’re fighting guys who live in the dark, and the idea of just cranking up the lights to “kill off those snot bugs that got Spock a couple hundred years ago” intensity doesn’t occur to anyone?

Two starships run into each other in outer space. One’s bigger than the other one. Does one crunch the other? Riiiight. Later on, one tries to pull away by “thrusting” in reverse. The two ships separate. That sound you hear in the background is Isaac Newton spinning in his grave, and boy, is he pissed.

Your ship can detect “positronic” energy from light-years away, but you can’t figure out where Riker is inside the ship?

Why does TNG’s idea of an alien always involve a human with a bumpy forehead?

What kind of energy does a phaser use, that moves slower than a speeding bullet?

I could go on, and as more questions occur to me I probably will.

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The problem with putting a mailto: link on one’s home page is, sometimes, that people use it to email you.

Today I got a flame mail from some fuming punk who accused me of “trashing products” on Gizmodo.  Didn’t identify the product, or why he was so hot under the collar about it, or give his name or business credentials.  All of which leads me to believe that he was just scattering buckshot hither and yon for the sheer joy of doing so.

After replying to the email (which I debated deleting outright) asking Mr. Fume and Fuss exactly what “product” he thought I “trashed,” I went back and reviewed my Gizmodo comments for the past few weeks.  Still can’t find any place where I “trashed” a “product.”

Some people have way too much time on their hands, and way too few manners to go with it.

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In Japan, a calico cat with its paw upraised is a symbol of good luck.

We were lucky to have had Calypso.

Calypso, May 1994 - August 2007.   Rest in peace, beloved kitty.

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I haven’t been writing much lately. One of our cats, Calypso, is very ill and my mind has been occupied with that. There isn’t much we can do for her other than make her comfortable and assure her that we love her, but that doesn’t keep me from fretting.

However, I think writing about miscellaneous “good stuff” is an appropriate way to take my mind off that, so herewith…

When I was a kid, the book A Hole Is To Dig was one of my all-time favorites. My grandmother gave it to me, and hearing her read it in her cultured British accent was a real treat. I can still hear the way she did it. One of my fondest memories.

That book came back to me today when I spotted a link to a really nifty web site (thank you, userfiriendly.com Link of the Day) that lets you plot on a map exactly where you’d come out if you dug straight down. We always assumed it would be China. It isn’t. Who knew?

I’ve been seeing more and more links to “How to keep your house cooler” tips these days, and quite rightly so. Unfortunately, one of the best tips is “Live in a dwelling that was built before people assumed everyone was going to have air conditioning.” This house was built in 1930 and does a reasonably good job of keeping us cool sans a/c on hot days if we just do a few simple things like pull in as much cool air as possible with fans at night, close up all the windows before the air starts heating up for the day, and go spray down the southwest-facing wall with the hose late in the afternoon to help cool the hot stucco wall. But I don’t suppose that kind of common sense advice will fly with just everyone. I wonder how people like me and my brothers survived all those years without air conditioning. Three out of four of us are children of the 50s when a/c was a luxury for the rich and nobody ever heard of air conditioning a public school. Not that I’d want to go back to those days and make all the kids swelter in class with only a fan or two and an anemic “blower” under the window to try to push away the sticky, sultry heat, but still…

There were several things that parents did, that I swore that I’d never do when I became a parent. I think I’ve done pretty well on “Don’t tell your kids they aren’t entitled to their own opinions” and “Don’t make arbitrary rules about curfews and bedtimes without considering the individual kid and his or her needs” and “Don’t view boys and girls as differently important,” but I’m still having problems with “When I was your age…” and I utterly failed in the matter of “Because I said so.”

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I read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood when it first came out. My mother had read the excerpts in the New Yorker and went out and bought the book practically the first day it was on sale, and when she was done with it, I read it.

I found some eerie parallels–Lowell Lee Andrews had been executed while I was celebrating my birthday, for example–and could get some feel for the midwestern landscape, since it hadn’t been all that long since we’d moved from central Virginia to Iowa. But it wasn’t till, as relative newlyweds, we moved to Wichita, Kansas in 1974, that I really began to appreciate the setting of the book.

Capote himself, I never had much appreciation for. All I saw was the clown act he so often performed on various TV shows, and his eventual meltdown while talking to Stanley Siegel. While it was easy to acknowledge his gifts as a writer, his public persona was so annoying that it was hard to find any reason to like him, himself.

That finally changed, yesterday, when I saw the film Infamous. While it was somewhat jarring to try to picture “James Bond” (Daniel Craig) as Perry Smith, it was finally clear why Capote melted down after In Cold Blood was published and never really accomplished anything much as a writer again.

The movie was based on George Plimpton’s Capote biography, which was not so much a biography as a collection of reminiscences by the people who’d known him. I read that book several years ago but it didn’t communicate as powerfully as this movie, at least not in my recollection. Clearly, I’m going to have to read that book again.

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The past few days I have been feeling really good.  And feeling that more good things are right around the corner.

My health is improving, my outlook is brighter and the worries of the recent past seem to be fading.

In celebration of that, I’ve been trying to remove everything that might be contributing to negative energy around me.  No, I’m not a wholehearted believer in feng shui, but I do think that there are things in one’s environment that can contribute to general improvement by their removal.  If that makes sense.

So today I went through the file drawer in my desk.  The original idea was to get out all the computer instructions and registrations and so forth and put them in the binders I bought weeks ago, but in the process of unearthing those I discovered a whole bunch of things from my last job that I absolutely, positively, did not need to keep.

I shredded the worst of them, put the rest in the recyle bin, and feel lighter already.  I had disposed of the worst of the worst long ago, but had forgotten these last unpleasant remnants were still filed away.

I’m going to search through the rest of those files and see what else I can get rid of.  It sure felt good to run that stuff through the shredder.  Now I need to rustle up a brown paper bag so I can empty the shredder into that per city recycling instructions and give the seething remains the permanent heave-ho.

Onward and definitely upward!

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