Here are two things. They are related, at least in my mind, probably in no one else’s mind, but related for me. Call them threads in a larger, much more heavily threaded cloth of tragedy; call them key elements in the “decline and fall”; call them what they are: stupidity and cynicism. Whatever you call them there is a stench rising from them, although, to the cultured stench detecting nose, they differ slightly.
Abject Stupidity: A majority of Americans have no idea what the larval health care bill contains – as neither do I – but they are “agin” it. I’m not “agin” it.
Cynical emulation of being principled: The republicans have found nothing in anything the new administration has proposed that they can favor. So they say. The facts are, they have a super minority with which, armed with the blanket threat of filibuster, they can bring down a presidency. They hope to then replace it with one of their own.
How nice.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Friday, January 22, 2010
The Bath At Cluny
There are a number of Roman ruins spread around France. Among them are the remains of a coliseum at Bordeaux and the still-being-used coliseum/bullring at Arles. But my favorite is right in downtown Paris. It is the Bath at Cluny. It is on Boulevard St-Germain not far from where Boulevard St-Germain bends to cross the river at Pont de Sully and becomes Boulevard Henri Quartre.
The Romans built it sometime in the early centuries of the first millennium, and, after they left it was turned into a monastery or convent, I never can remember which. Actually I can’t remember whether it was turned into either of those things. But it was turned into something other than a Roman bath, and that something – whatever it might have ever been - caused the then residents to install stained glass windows. I really like stained glass windows, which is odd because I don’t have any affinity for churches or religion.
Actually I have developed a great deal of affinity over the last few years for the cathedrals of Europe. Except for London and Brussels the only cathedrals I have ever actually seen are all in France, but it sounds more impressive – to me at least – to claim affinity with the cathedrals of all Europe rather than just those of France; and cathedrals, I have been told, are churches, although they have no similarity to the down-at-the-heel things that are called churches and are on offer in the United States; and I really like the Cathedrals’ stained glass windows. Even though Cluny has stained glass windows I don’t think it was ever a cathedral.
So that is what is imbedded in the beginning of this little drop of drivel.
I really wish that Blogger would let me, or I could figure out if it does let me and I am just too stupid to figure out how, to put my pictures where I want to put them.
But I guess campared to the implications of the new republican super minority in the US senate, or the bothersome realization flowing from the fact, that, thanks to the strictly constructionist five judges on the supreme court, we won't even get to choose who to send back to Washington to get bought by the lobbyists, my problems are really trivial.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
The Joys OF Adobe Illustrator: Part Two
Recently my son sent me an email with this raster image – it was a bitmap (bmp) file. He asked me if I could work any magic that would improve it. At least that was what I interpreted his email to say. Emails from Joe are always terse to the point of incoherence. But that is what I interpreted him to be asking.
Imagine my excitement when I saw before me another chance to use Adobe Illustrator to make the world a better place. It looked to me as if just getting the clear color of a vector image to replace the muddy color of the starting project would be an improvement. I assumed that the ability to “scale” the finished vector product would be a plus. Scaling allows the finished product to be made massively smaller or massively larger, or any stop in between those extremes, and retain perfect clarity and resolution no matter what the level of the scale. That means an Illustrator file can be used for anything from logos on a business card to pictures on a billboard. I was not at all sure what anyone might want to do with the “challenged boaters’ forum” crest, but I figured that scalability couldn’t be a bad thing.
So, my return email said “I can and I will”. And then I set out to do it.
With Illustrator one uses “layers” and “sub layers” which are digital versions of acetate overlays. To use them it is desirable to decide ahead of time what the individual components of the illustration are going to be, what their layer order is going to be, and what if any sub-layers are going to come into play in each component layer.
In the case of this project the choice was obvious - at least to me. I started out at the lower left and planned to go to the right and up through the image.
Without going step by step through the nuances of how I got the thing finished, it is at least worth mentioning that the apparently easy starting point – the white flag with the red parallelogram – almost brought me to my knees. But I finally figured it out and ultimately triumphed.
Here is the finished product.
Imagine my excitement when I saw before me another chance to use Adobe Illustrator to make the world a better place. It looked to me as if just getting the clear color of a vector image to replace the muddy color of the starting project would be an improvement. I assumed that the ability to “scale” the finished vector product would be a plus. Scaling allows the finished product to be made massively smaller or massively larger, or any stop in between those extremes, and retain perfect clarity and resolution no matter what the level of the scale. That means an Illustrator file can be used for anything from logos on a business card to pictures on a billboard. I was not at all sure what anyone might want to do with the “challenged boaters’ forum” crest, but I figured that scalability couldn’t be a bad thing.
So, my return email said “I can and I will”. And then I set out to do it.
With Illustrator one uses “layers” and “sub layers” which are digital versions of acetate overlays. To use them it is desirable to decide ahead of time what the individual components of the illustration are going to be, what their layer order is going to be, and what if any sub-layers are going to come into play in each component layer.
In the case of this project the choice was obvious - at least to me. I started out at the lower left and planned to go to the right and up through the image.
Without going step by step through the nuances of how I got the thing finished, it is at least worth mentioning that the apparently easy starting point – the white flag with the red parallelogram – almost brought me to my knees. But I finally figured it out and ultimately triumphed.
Here is the finished product.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
The Joys Of Adobe Illustrator: Part One
A number of years ago, for no apparent reason, I decided that I needed to enroll in a certificate program at Bellevue Community College. Actually I had a reason, but I really didn’t realize it at the time: it wasn’t until some years later when I had the time – time be damned; it was the inclination – to reflect on what I laughingly have refered to as my life, that I realized that I had been subject to the subtle influences of “they”. You know, “they” say that one needs to network; “they” say that one needs to have a number of different resumés; “they” say that one needs to keep getting additional education – and all of that “they” stuff.
Somewhere I had heard that Bellevue Community College had a really good multi-media authoring certificate curriculum.
I had no idea what multi-media authoring might be. In spite of that fact it just sounded good.
This had occurred at a time when I was in the midst of teaching myself HTML, with the help of Laura Lemay and her amazing how-to book for HTML 3.2. I was fascinated by it. I had never encountered anything that resembled computer programming that had such an immediate positive or negative reinforcement component. Having completed a chunk of HTML code – using MS Notepad as the editor – all I had to do was save it as HTM or HTML, click on it and get an immediate “it works” or an immediate “what were you thinking?” back from the browser. I used Netscape in those days since MS Internet Explorer was so rudimentary that it shouldn’t have even been called a browser. (The distance Microsoft travelled in almost no time from that Explorer to the one that they unleashed on the market shortly after the morning that Bill Gates must have awakened and realized he was about to lose the whole game if he didn’t turn his company on its axis, was nothing short of amazing; but the Explorer available when I was in my HTML-coder days was a joke.) Anyway, I was having more fun than it ought to be possible to have building my first web site from scratch. I was otherwise employed as an entrepreneur running my own IBM Agent and Wholesale Distribution Consulting and Technical Writing business with my wife, but I had plenty of time – sometimes until three or four in the morning - to pursue the HTML wil-o-the-wisp.
Somewhere during that time I heard about the curriculum at BCC. Under what must have been the influence of “they” (“they” say that multi-media authoring is the next big thing – perhaps) I decided to look into it.
In almost no time I was attending the first night class of what was going to turn out to be one of the three classes that I had signed up for that quarter. Before I finally became a community college drop-out I had accumulated almost sixty credit hours, had an almost four point GPA, and had learned a lot of stuff that was going to prove to be a fortuitous addition to my life as I entered unemployed – some call it retired – old age. I had learned how to make movies with Adobe Premiere, how to invent my own world with Adobe Photoshop and, I wasn’t really sure to invent what, with Adobe Illustrator.
Premiere and Photoshop, each in its own manner – Premiere with aggressive abandon and Photoshop with a passive-aggressive turn of character – deal with raster files. Think of Georges-Pierre Seurat’s paintings and you know what a raster file is. Raster files are goldmines of possibilities: they can be cloned; they can be flipped; they can be warped and woofed and reflected and distorted; they can be gray-scaled and they can be RGB’d or CMYK’d; they can be overlaid with varying transparencies to reveal their inner meaning; they can be selectively cut and pasted. If they happen to come with sound and thirty frames per second they can be cut, overlaid, titled and faded to black or white or in some inventive flow of imagery be rolled over to; those are called movies. The possibilities are apparently endless. But they always end up being in some way or another, just a subset of what all those pixels were when one started to manipulate them. And that is the point. A raster file has to already exist to be dealt with.
But Illustrator is different. Illustrator generates vector files. Think of Albert Einstein with a black board full of equations to understand what a vector file is. Because each line, shape, color, font, line thickness or drop shadow exists only on the basis of its co-ordinates on their page and on the basis of the mathematical characteristics that have been told to tag along with those co-ordinates. With Illustrator one can start with a blank page on a blank art board and, with various tools, keys and drop down menus, create a world from one’s mind where only blankness had existed moments before. To do that, of course takes artistic talent.
Lacking that one can trace things. That’s what I do.
But even tracing takes some talent and some imagination. Illustrator gives one more brush strokes, line segments and polygonal possibilities than it is possible to absorb in one, or even many, sittings. So, as one stares at the template of some raster file that is about to be traced to its eternal improvement, the choices of how to do it become something of an exercise in itself. And once the choice for any particular piece of the tracing has been made, the actual execution of that choice can become a career in itself. Making just the right curve – a curve that perfectly overlays that which is being traced – with the Bezier curve tool (called the “pen” tool because if you can make the thing do your bidding it produces lines that flow as if they had been produced by the quill of an old fashioned ink pen) can take many tries and require one’s entire cache of colorful expletives.
In the world of vector based artistry, the world of Adobe Illustrator, one can swear and draw, swear and draw, and swear and draw. But in the end, if one perseveres, one can produce something almost from nothing.
And that is a good feeling.
Ultimately the raster-based world has the last laugh, however. The World Wide Web only understands raster files, and of those file types only a few of that large family of image file formats. Chief among those are the JPEG and the GIF.
So, if one wants to promulgate the work of an afternoon’s (or a month’s) vectorizing to the Web, one ultimately needs to bite one’s vector-based tongue and export the masterpiece to one of those formats that the Web understands. Then it can be uploaded.
Here is the first major tracing that I ever did.
Several Years later I did this one, which I posted last year on this blog.
Somewhere I had heard that Bellevue Community College had a really good multi-media authoring certificate curriculum.
I had no idea what multi-media authoring might be. In spite of that fact it just sounded good.
This had occurred at a time when I was in the midst of teaching myself HTML, with the help of Laura Lemay and her amazing how-to book for HTML 3.2. I was fascinated by it. I had never encountered anything that resembled computer programming that had such an immediate positive or negative reinforcement component. Having completed a chunk of HTML code – using MS Notepad as the editor – all I had to do was save it as HTM or HTML, click on it and get an immediate “it works” or an immediate “what were you thinking?” back from the browser. I used Netscape in those days since MS Internet Explorer was so rudimentary that it shouldn’t have even been called a browser. (The distance Microsoft travelled in almost no time from that Explorer to the one that they unleashed on the market shortly after the morning that Bill Gates must have awakened and realized he was about to lose the whole game if he didn’t turn his company on its axis, was nothing short of amazing; but the Explorer available when I was in my HTML-coder days was a joke.) Anyway, I was having more fun than it ought to be possible to have building my first web site from scratch. I was otherwise employed as an entrepreneur running my own IBM Agent and Wholesale Distribution Consulting and Technical Writing business with my wife, but I had plenty of time – sometimes until three or four in the morning - to pursue the HTML wil-o-the-wisp.
Somewhere during that time I heard about the curriculum at BCC. Under what must have been the influence of “they” (“they” say that multi-media authoring is the next big thing – perhaps) I decided to look into it.
In almost no time I was attending the first night class of what was going to turn out to be one of the three classes that I had signed up for that quarter. Before I finally became a community college drop-out I had accumulated almost sixty credit hours, had an almost four point GPA, and had learned a lot of stuff that was going to prove to be a fortuitous addition to my life as I entered unemployed – some call it retired – old age. I had learned how to make movies with Adobe Premiere, how to invent my own world with Adobe Photoshop and, I wasn’t really sure to invent what, with Adobe Illustrator.
Premiere and Photoshop, each in its own manner – Premiere with aggressive abandon and Photoshop with a passive-aggressive turn of character – deal with raster files. Think of Georges-Pierre Seurat’s paintings and you know what a raster file is. Raster files are goldmines of possibilities: they can be cloned; they can be flipped; they can be warped and woofed and reflected and distorted; they can be gray-scaled and they can be RGB’d or CMYK’d; they can be overlaid with varying transparencies to reveal their inner meaning; they can be selectively cut and pasted. If they happen to come with sound and thirty frames per second they can be cut, overlaid, titled and faded to black or white or in some inventive flow of imagery be rolled over to; those are called movies. The possibilities are apparently endless. But they always end up being in some way or another, just a subset of what all those pixels were when one started to manipulate them. And that is the point. A raster file has to already exist to be dealt with.
But Illustrator is different. Illustrator generates vector files. Think of Albert Einstein with a black board full of equations to understand what a vector file is. Because each line, shape, color, font, line thickness or drop shadow exists only on the basis of its co-ordinates on their page and on the basis of the mathematical characteristics that have been told to tag along with those co-ordinates. With Illustrator one can start with a blank page on a blank art board and, with various tools, keys and drop down menus, create a world from one’s mind where only blankness had existed moments before. To do that, of course takes artistic talent.
Lacking that one can trace things. That’s what I do.
But even tracing takes some talent and some imagination. Illustrator gives one more brush strokes, line segments and polygonal possibilities than it is possible to absorb in one, or even many, sittings. So, as one stares at the template of some raster file that is about to be traced to its eternal improvement, the choices of how to do it become something of an exercise in itself. And once the choice for any particular piece of the tracing has been made, the actual execution of that choice can become a career in itself. Making just the right curve – a curve that perfectly overlays that which is being traced – with the Bezier curve tool (called the “pen” tool because if you can make the thing do your bidding it produces lines that flow as if they had been produced by the quill of an old fashioned ink pen) can take many tries and require one’s entire cache of colorful expletives.
In the world of vector based artistry, the world of Adobe Illustrator, one can swear and draw, swear and draw, and swear and draw. But in the end, if one perseveres, one can produce something almost from nothing.
And that is a good feeling.
Ultimately the raster-based world has the last laugh, however. The World Wide Web only understands raster files, and of those file types only a few of that large family of image file formats. Chief among those are the JPEG and the GIF.
So, if one wants to promulgate the work of an afternoon’s (or a month’s) vectorizing to the Web, one ultimately needs to bite one’s vector-based tongue and export the masterpiece to one of those formats that the Web understands. Then it can be uploaded.
Here is the first major tracing that I ever did.
Several Years later I did this one, which I posted last year on this blog.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
The Pipeline Is Dry
The Economist constantly points out that the US has the best University system in the world and that there really isn't a country in second or third place. In an annual survey by the Chinese (they are trying to figure out what they need to do to get to best of breed status, and they are moving forward with vigor) on the top 20 list they are all American Universities (I can't remember whether Harvard was first or not) except for Oxford and Cambridge which were both in the top ten. No French, nor German, nor Japanese were on the list. The U of Washington was number 20, interestingly enough.
Anyway, we - the United States of America - are imminently in position of pissing that advantage away. If the kids entering the system can't read, write, think or talk coherently, and don't know math and have no idea about where anything is in the world or what has happened in the world over the last three or four thousand years, (unless Bishop Ussher's statements which are believed by many of them are taken as valid history) the system won't last very long. And it takes years to fix that problem. An empty pipeline is probably going to be a major contributor to our undoing.
Anyway, we - the United States of America - are imminently in position of pissing that advantage away. If the kids entering the system can't read, write, think or talk coherently, and don't know math and have no idea about where anything is in the world or what has happened in the world over the last three or four thousand years, (unless Bishop Ussher's statements which are believed by many of them are taken as valid history) the system won't last very long. And it takes years to fix that problem. An empty pipeline is probably going to be a major contributor to our undoing.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
The Tombstone
Ruth and Noel and Joe and I went to Moscow Idaho one Autumn weekend. If you read Screen Saver you know that Ruth was my first wife and Noel and Joe were our sons. If you didn’t read Screen Saver, Ruth was nonetheless my first wife, and Noel and Joe were our two sons.
We went one time to Moscow to visit Jack and Ted. Again from Screen Saver, Jack was a close friend whom I had met in high school and who remained a close friend for a significant portion of the rest of my life; Ted was his roommate for awhile during their time in law school; Ted is still my friend.
We went to visit the site of their being roommates, a beautifully finished daylight basement apartment on Moscow Mountain, not far out of Moscow; Moscow is the home of the University of Idaho and the law school that Jack and Ted were attending.
The daylight basement apartment where they lived was the lower level of a recently built house belonging to Doctor Tenny, a professor in the English Department at the University. Doctor – inevitably he was called behind his back “Doc” – lived in the upper rest of the house with his wife.
The day we arrived we met the Doctor before we had found Jack and Ted. It was late mid-afternoon on a beautiful blue and gold shimmering October day. Doc Tenny was in the rather large driveway terminus that doubled as a parking pad directly in front of the windows of Jack and Ted’s apartment. Doc Tenny greeted us with almost courtly welcoming courtesy. The majority of that attention and courtesy seemed to be directed to Ruth, but that didn’t particularly surprise me. Ruth was thought by many people to look like Ingrid Bergman – I wasn’t one of them – and I assumed that the Doctor, a man in his seventies, didn’t often have attractive young blonde women as his guest. I quickly felt as if I were a hindrance to something, but that was a fleeting impression. One of the things I learned before leaving was that Ruth was certainly not of a scarce or unusual genre at the Doctor’s abode. He conducted an honors upper division literature class consisting mostly of young women not much different from Ruth, and part of the potential advanced credit curriculum involved visits to the Doctor at his domicile on the Mountain for in-depth literary analysis.
As a part of the welcoming pleasantries the Doctor gestured vaguely in the direction of what appeared to be an automobile. It must have been a 1957 Dodge, but it was somewhat hard to ascertain its exact lineage because where there once had been fins and fenders and lights there were dents and holes and bumps and roundness. Not long in the future from that October day the snows would come and, being on a mountain, the ice would follow. The garage and driveway during that time of the year became a place requiring caution, and caution was a thing that the Doctor, it seemed, lacked. Old Overholt apparently made a bad time of the year for driving not seem so bad at all; apparently due to that spiritual influence, the Doctor’s car had gradually become a shapeless lump of dented and rounded sheet metal. Jack and Ted said watching him get the vehicle out of the garage and launched out of the parking apron, down the mountain-trail-like driveway to the main highway was an experience not to be missed; the return, they said was equally exciting. The essence of the fins could still be perceived, which is how I knew that it was a Dodge; it was a well used vehicle.
The gesture to the lump-like automobile was accompanied by a running dialogue in something resembling drunken Elizabethan (or at least not contemporary American) English. “Behold yonder stands the noblest of steeds. She carries me unto battle and victory over the stanchions of evil.”
Noel and Joe were beginning to pay attention. Ruth didn’t know what to say. Nor did I. With murmurs from the two boys – murmurs of something between admiration and caution – and silence from Ruth and me, he continued. “I gainsay those who call her a cheval qui a la coeur brisé. She is merely reaching her threshold of greatness.”
With that he lurched toward the steps leading to his portion of the domicile. “Join me, children, in the curtilage for an imbibement. “ And up and in he went.
We were just looking at one another, wondering what to do next and wondering where our friends and hosts were when they appeared.
“We saw you coming and saw him out there and decided the only proper entrance for you – since such an opportunity was available – was for you folks to get a shot of the Doc unfiltered. You would have thought we were making it up otherwise,” said Ted. He was something of a poet. “He invited us in, and that isn’t an invitation to be taken lightly,” said Jack.
“What dost thou desire, fair damsel?” boomed across the large great room-with-massive-fireplace. Ruth being the only damsel present, I assumed the Doctor was addressing her. “Gin and tonic?” she asked. “Your every wish shall be granted,” rejoined Doc Tenny. And he set about making one.
As we all sat around talking, and drinking - Jack and Ted and I had helped ourselves to beer from the refrigerator, and the Doctor had poured a large tumbler of Irish without ice – time just seemed to pass. In spite of the awkwardly surreal nature of the encounter to that point, I had to admit, and I assumed the others had had to as well, that the Doctor was a good host and terribly entertaining.
After some time and some drinks he began to speak in a more contemporary manner. “ I have a treasure in the trunk of my car that I rarely share with others, but for this august group, I would like to make an exception.” Ted and Jack just looked at one another. I saw a flash of something pass between them, but I had no idea what it might be. “Yes, after our next re-fill we must go out; we must go out before darkness settles upon us, and I will show you my treasure.” And then we did another round.
Once out on the twilit parking apron, the Doctor moved to what must have been the rear of the amorphous mound of metal that was his automobile, and with a flourish withdrew a key, shakily thrust it in the direction of what was most probably the trunk and a piece of flattish metal popped up at a forty five degree angle.
In the waning light one could see a mass of things, but there was one thing of note. It was the biggest thing in the cavity: it was about three feet in length, eighteen inches in width, was curved on one end and was flat on the other end. It appeared to be made of stone. It was a tombstone.
“I found this in the woods several years ago, and I want it to adorn my grave when I’m gone. It sums me up better than I could have ever contemplated doing myself. I doubt even if Marian would have done as well.” And he, with grimaces and grunts – it was, indeed made of stone – horsed the thing out of the trunk and leaned it against his leg so that all could see. In the rapidly waning light it was still possible to read the chiseled words: “He Was A Good Woodsman”.
Thinking about this story and then telling it as I just have completed, from the vantage point of all of those intervening years has caused me to ponder what might be my exit line, my epitaph. And, I think I have it:
He Nearly Accomplished Quite A Number Of Things
We went one time to Moscow to visit Jack and Ted. Again from Screen Saver, Jack was a close friend whom I had met in high school and who remained a close friend for a significant portion of the rest of my life; Ted was his roommate for awhile during their time in law school; Ted is still my friend.
We went to visit the site of their being roommates, a beautifully finished daylight basement apartment on Moscow Mountain, not far out of Moscow; Moscow is the home of the University of Idaho and the law school that Jack and Ted were attending.
The daylight basement apartment where they lived was the lower level of a recently built house belonging to Doctor Tenny, a professor in the English Department at the University. Doctor – inevitably he was called behind his back “Doc” – lived in the upper rest of the house with his wife.
The day we arrived we met the Doctor before we had found Jack and Ted. It was late mid-afternoon on a beautiful blue and gold shimmering October day. Doc Tenny was in the rather large driveway terminus that doubled as a parking pad directly in front of the windows of Jack and Ted’s apartment. Doc Tenny greeted us with almost courtly welcoming courtesy. The majority of that attention and courtesy seemed to be directed to Ruth, but that didn’t particularly surprise me. Ruth was thought by many people to look like Ingrid Bergman – I wasn’t one of them – and I assumed that the Doctor, a man in his seventies, didn’t often have attractive young blonde women as his guest. I quickly felt as if I were a hindrance to something, but that was a fleeting impression. One of the things I learned before leaving was that Ruth was certainly not of a scarce or unusual genre at the Doctor’s abode. He conducted an honors upper division literature class consisting mostly of young women not much different from Ruth, and part of the potential advanced credit curriculum involved visits to the Doctor at his domicile on the Mountain for in-depth literary analysis.
As a part of the welcoming pleasantries the Doctor gestured vaguely in the direction of what appeared to be an automobile. It must have been a 1957 Dodge, but it was somewhat hard to ascertain its exact lineage because where there once had been fins and fenders and lights there were dents and holes and bumps and roundness. Not long in the future from that October day the snows would come and, being on a mountain, the ice would follow. The garage and driveway during that time of the year became a place requiring caution, and caution was a thing that the Doctor, it seemed, lacked. Old Overholt apparently made a bad time of the year for driving not seem so bad at all; apparently due to that spiritual influence, the Doctor’s car had gradually become a shapeless lump of dented and rounded sheet metal. Jack and Ted said watching him get the vehicle out of the garage and launched out of the parking apron, down the mountain-trail-like driveway to the main highway was an experience not to be missed; the return, they said was equally exciting. The essence of the fins could still be perceived, which is how I knew that it was a Dodge; it was a well used vehicle.
The gesture to the lump-like automobile was accompanied by a running dialogue in something resembling drunken Elizabethan (or at least not contemporary American) English. “Behold yonder stands the noblest of steeds. She carries me unto battle and victory over the stanchions of evil.”
Noel and Joe were beginning to pay attention. Ruth didn’t know what to say. Nor did I. With murmurs from the two boys – murmurs of something between admiration and caution – and silence from Ruth and me, he continued. “I gainsay those who call her a cheval qui a la coeur brisé. She is merely reaching her threshold of greatness.”
With that he lurched toward the steps leading to his portion of the domicile. “Join me, children, in the curtilage for an imbibement. “ And up and in he went.
We were just looking at one another, wondering what to do next and wondering where our friends and hosts were when they appeared.
“We saw you coming and saw him out there and decided the only proper entrance for you – since such an opportunity was available – was for you folks to get a shot of the Doc unfiltered. You would have thought we were making it up otherwise,” said Ted. He was something of a poet. “He invited us in, and that isn’t an invitation to be taken lightly,” said Jack.
“What dost thou desire, fair damsel?” boomed across the large great room-with-massive-fireplace. Ruth being the only damsel present, I assumed the Doctor was addressing her. “Gin and tonic?” she asked. “Your every wish shall be granted,” rejoined Doc Tenny. And he set about making one.
As we all sat around talking, and drinking - Jack and Ted and I had helped ourselves to beer from the refrigerator, and the Doctor had poured a large tumbler of Irish without ice – time just seemed to pass. In spite of the awkwardly surreal nature of the encounter to that point, I had to admit, and I assumed the others had had to as well, that the Doctor was a good host and terribly entertaining.
After some time and some drinks he began to speak in a more contemporary manner. “ I have a treasure in the trunk of my car that I rarely share with others, but for this august group, I would like to make an exception.” Ted and Jack just looked at one another. I saw a flash of something pass between them, but I had no idea what it might be. “Yes, after our next re-fill we must go out; we must go out before darkness settles upon us, and I will show you my treasure.” And then we did another round.
Once out on the twilit parking apron, the Doctor moved to what must have been the rear of the amorphous mound of metal that was his automobile, and with a flourish withdrew a key, shakily thrust it in the direction of what was most probably the trunk and a piece of flattish metal popped up at a forty five degree angle.
In the waning light one could see a mass of things, but there was one thing of note. It was the biggest thing in the cavity: it was about three feet in length, eighteen inches in width, was curved on one end and was flat on the other end. It appeared to be made of stone. It was a tombstone.
“I found this in the woods several years ago, and I want it to adorn my grave when I’m gone. It sums me up better than I could have ever contemplated doing myself. I doubt even if Marian would have done as well.” And he, with grimaces and grunts – it was, indeed made of stone – horsed the thing out of the trunk and leaned it against his leg so that all could see. In the rapidly waning light it was still possible to read the chiseled words: “He Was A Good Woodsman”.
Thinking about this story and then telling it as I just have completed, from the vantage point of all of those intervening years has caused me to ponder what might be my exit line, my epitaph. And, I think I have it:
He Nearly Accomplished Quite A Number Of Things
Thursday, January 7, 2010
No No Fly List
I couldn’t have been more disappointed.
Today, 7 January 2010, the president spoke to the American people. This President, unlike his predecessor, has an intellect and usually applies that intellect to the things that he says – snippets or speeches.
His predecessor lacked that sort of intellect, so there was nothing to apply to the things that he said – snippets or speeches. He was pretty good at speaking, it was just that what he said was what someone had told him to say. His pronouncements were always the words of a ventriloquist’s dummy, although he stood alone rather than sitting on the lap of the ventriloquist.
Today, at least from the viewpoint of the message delivered, the ventriloquist seems to have come back. Because the message was identical to what would have been expected from Bush; as such it was just plain wrong.
The President said that the system failed.
The system didn’t fail. The system doesn’t work. In fact that which the President says has failed isn’t even a system. There really isn’t any system. What there is is an organization. It is an organization that is set up like a corporation. It is not organized like a corporation such as one finds among the successful businesses of the 2000’s, it is a corporation such as one found at the turn of the nineteenth century. It has many levels of command control and information passes slowly through the semi-porous membranes that separate the various layers.
And worse yet, it isn’t just one multi-layered corporate-like structure. It is multiple such entities. They all sell the same product: useable intelligence information. But their manufacturing process is slow. And there really aren’t any standards as to what the finished product might need to look like. As a result, they aren’t really manufacturers at all; they are job shops producing infinite numbers of one-of-a-kinds that they think up to fill their time. And they never are really sure what these individual one-of-a-kinds ought to look like, or how they might be used, or who might want to buy them. In any event, even if they did know, many of the components that they would need to make something if they ever figured out what it was that they ought to be making are in the hands of their competitors, the other manufacturers.
In spite of these challenges, the manufacturers employ really talented, imaginative employees who are really skilled at their craft. They produce a lot of very useable product in spite of all the problems.
But the product doesn’t get distributed on a very broad basis.
That is because the distributor is small and has limited product expertise. It is called the no fly list and it only deals in absolutely known problems. Those problems – the product of the manufacturers – are few in number because no matter how skilled the employees of the manufacturers might be – they don’t know all the possible combinations of use that could be made of their product, so they only ship the product that their limited, albeit highly skilled, knowledge tells them has a market.
But the market is huge. And the customers in that market, in aggregate, know vastly more about all the combinational possibilities of use of the manufacturer’s product, a product that when viewed in this manner is really a monstrous tool kit of components that could be used with great success by that vast market of customers, if only those customers could get that tool kit. But they can’t. The distributor is too small and limited.
So the answer isn’t to try to make the existing multiple competing manufacturers more efficient and more accountable and bigger. The answer is to totally re-organize those manufacturers into a single level – get rid of the layers; look like a modern corporation - processing entity, taking the raw material and turning it as rapidly as possible into useable components, putting them in a gigantic tool kit and sending the kit on a constantly updated basis to all the customers who can use the components each in their own way, having completely eliminated the distributor.
There would be no no fly list. There would just be useable information real time, on line available at all times to those who need it to make the decisions that should have been made in relation to the crotch bomber.
This is a systems problem, not an organizational problem.
There is more on this, including a flow chart for the suggested system at “A Modest Proposal for an Intelligence System” and “Intelligence System”.
Today, 7 January 2010, the president spoke to the American people. This President, unlike his predecessor, has an intellect and usually applies that intellect to the things that he says – snippets or speeches.
His predecessor lacked that sort of intellect, so there was nothing to apply to the things that he said – snippets or speeches. He was pretty good at speaking, it was just that what he said was what someone had told him to say. His pronouncements were always the words of a ventriloquist’s dummy, although he stood alone rather than sitting on the lap of the ventriloquist.
Today, at least from the viewpoint of the message delivered, the ventriloquist seems to have come back. Because the message was identical to what would have been expected from Bush; as such it was just plain wrong.
The President said that the system failed.
The system didn’t fail. The system doesn’t work. In fact that which the President says has failed isn’t even a system. There really isn’t any system. What there is is an organization. It is an organization that is set up like a corporation. It is not organized like a corporation such as one finds among the successful businesses of the 2000’s, it is a corporation such as one found at the turn of the nineteenth century. It has many levels of command control and information passes slowly through the semi-porous membranes that separate the various layers.
And worse yet, it isn’t just one multi-layered corporate-like structure. It is multiple such entities. They all sell the same product: useable intelligence information. But their manufacturing process is slow. And there really aren’t any standards as to what the finished product might need to look like. As a result, they aren’t really manufacturers at all; they are job shops producing infinite numbers of one-of-a-kinds that they think up to fill their time. And they never are really sure what these individual one-of-a-kinds ought to look like, or how they might be used, or who might want to buy them. In any event, even if they did know, many of the components that they would need to make something if they ever figured out what it was that they ought to be making are in the hands of their competitors, the other manufacturers.
In spite of these challenges, the manufacturers employ really talented, imaginative employees who are really skilled at their craft. They produce a lot of very useable product in spite of all the problems.
But the product doesn’t get distributed on a very broad basis.
That is because the distributor is small and has limited product expertise. It is called the no fly list and it only deals in absolutely known problems. Those problems – the product of the manufacturers – are few in number because no matter how skilled the employees of the manufacturers might be – they don’t know all the possible combinations of use that could be made of their product, so they only ship the product that their limited, albeit highly skilled, knowledge tells them has a market.
But the market is huge. And the customers in that market, in aggregate, know vastly more about all the combinational possibilities of use of the manufacturer’s product, a product that when viewed in this manner is really a monstrous tool kit of components that could be used with great success by that vast market of customers, if only those customers could get that tool kit. But they can’t. The distributor is too small and limited.
So the answer isn’t to try to make the existing multiple competing manufacturers more efficient and more accountable and bigger. The answer is to totally re-organize those manufacturers into a single level – get rid of the layers; look like a modern corporation - processing entity, taking the raw material and turning it as rapidly as possible into useable components, putting them in a gigantic tool kit and sending the kit on a constantly updated basis to all the customers who can use the components each in their own way, having completely eliminated the distributor.
There would be no no fly list. There would just be useable information real time, on line available at all times to those who need it to make the decisions that should have been made in relation to the crotch bomber.
This is a systems problem, not an organizational problem.
There is more on this, including a flow chart for the suggested system at “A Modest Proposal for an Intelligence System” and “Intelligence System”.
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