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Apparently…

…this is my Apocalypse Costume.

You’re supposed to enter your “first name + apocalypse costume” into a Google search and see what you come up with. I didn’t much care for those results…

…so I used the starryai app and had it generate my own. That one has nipples! Don’t tell me what to do! You’re not the boss o’ me!

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Gutted

A few weeks ago, since most of our current favorite shows were on hiatus, we were searching for something new to watch to fill our evenings. We started on Babylon 5, a show I warmly remember from the late 90s that my roommate in San Francisco and I used to enjoy together. It seemed that my memories were tempered; twenty five years later and the show—while still decent—was obviously plagued by a multitude of sins, not the least of which being the cheesy visual effects and the overly harsh lighting in nearly every scene. I mean, the premise of the show was good—and I remember it actually getting better as the years progressed—but we couldn’t even make it through the first season before giving up and moving on.

Thinking about other shows from the past that might be worth revisiting, we remembered that Fringe had been one of our favorites. We found all five seasons streaming on HBO+.

A full decade has passed since the show last aired, so my memories of the story line were occasionally hazy or at times outright misremembered, but I have to say that after we wrapped up the five seasons last night, I was just as gutted by the end of it as I had been those many years ago.  And while the writers did wrap everything up (unlike certain other shows in this genre, cough, Westworld, cough) by the final episode, I had become so invested in the characters and their stories that it still left me wanting more.

The ensemble cast is top notch and the series has its moments of fun and  laugh-out-loud frivolity (the character of Walter brings much-needed comic relief when things get too heavy)…

…but overall I think it’s a serious and oftentimes—sad—story. It addresses love, family, loyalty, separation, and forces you to ponder the really big questions of life: why we’re here and whether or not there is something more out there. Fringe is one of those shows that stays with you long after the final note of the final closing credits ends. But maybe I’m just listening to the soundtrack as I write this and it’s causing me to wax poetic. Or maybe I’m simply biased because I’m an inveterate nerd, and so many of the themes (whether it’s alternate universes, time travel, or the horror of a being trapped in a ruthless totalitarian society) resonate with me on a fundamental level.

Have I mentioned Joshua Jackson’s awesome perma-scruff?

Quite surprisingly, it appears Fringe is enjoying a bit of a renaissance on HBO+ due to Anna Torv’s appearance in The Last of Us. (A show we’re just starting.) Coming fresh off Fringe, while watching the first episode of The Last of Us, I couldn’t help thinking that this was just yet another alternate universe that Olivia has somehow gotten herself trapped in…

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Digital Hoarding

I am a digital hoarder. I admit it. But occasionally being one pays off.

It took a couple months longer than I initially anticipated, but next weekend I’m finally getting this back from my repair guy in Prescott—along with the distressing news that after he’s finished with his current queue of equipment, he’ll be hanging up his soldering gun and enjoying a much-deserved retirement. (He noted that since I’d already contacted him about my other Kenwood receiver to go ahead and bring that up as “it’s already in the queue.”)

What does this have to do with digital hoarding? Well, I asked Randy if he knew of anyone who could fashion some genuine walnut end panels for the receiver to replace the crappy vinyl veneered ones that it came with. He said he did, but after checking with the guy he reported back that he wasn’t interested in taking on the project.

Well, shit.

When I got my initial Kenwood KR-7400 back in 2007, I’d contacted someone via the AudioKarma website who fashioned new end panels for me. Unfortunately the AK account I had at the time was long gone and I had no way of tracking the guy down now.

Or so I thought. A cursory search through the website was a bust, but since I am like a dog with a bone and not easily deterred once I’m on a mission, I got to thinking…what about old emails? Problematic, but it might work.

In 2007 I was still on a Windows machine using MS Outlook for mail. On a whim I pulled out the external hard drive where I hoard stuff. While I thought I’d saved all my emails from back in the day, it was still kind of a surprise to discover yearly archive files all the way from 1997 through 2008.

I knew they’d come in handy some day!

While I don’t use it, I do have Outlook on my Mac, but I wasn’t sure it would be able to read files that old. (Lord knows Word balks at opening any of its own files older than 2003.)

Not to worry. The 2007 .pst file imported flawlessly and almost immediately I found the email string between myself and the gentleman who fashioned the panels. And it turns out my memory really is shit; the panels weren’t solid wood as I’d thought; he had merely stripped the vinyl off the existing MDF and applied real cherrywood veneer in its place. I could’ve sworn they were solid wood all these years, but obviously they were not.

I fired off a email to him yesterday asking if he remembered me and if he’d be interested in veneering these “new” panels for me. As of this morning the mail hasn’t bounced back, so the address is obviously still active, but who knows how often it gets checked…or if he’s even still alive.

Fingers crossed.

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Of Balloons and National Security

The balloon. 

From Greg Fallis:

Jesus suffering fuck. Republicans are terrified of everything but guns–the one thing we KNOW kills thousands of Americans every goddamn year. They’re terrified of gay folks, terrified of the entire concept of gender that’s not based on a toggle switch, terrified of people of color, terrified of beliefs that don’t fall within their wildly idiotic interpretation of Christianity, terrified government agents will break into their homes and seize their gas stoves, terrified of books they haven’t read, terrified of surgical masks, and now they’re terrified by a Chinese balloon.

“My concern is that the federal government doesn’t know what’s in that balloon. Is that bioweapons in that balloon? Did that balloon take off from Wuhan?”

This was no ordinary fucking idiot who said this. This was a special fucking idiot. This fucking idiot was Congressman James Corner, the Republican Chair of the House Oversight Committee. And he said it on FOX News, of course, the primary venue for fucking idiots. This fucking idiot has access to a massive amount of information; he’s a fucking idiot with a staff whose job includes researching issues of national concern and informing him so he won’t come across to the public like a fucking idiot.

I’m not a member of Congress. I don’t have a staff. But I have a Chromebook (I could have just used my cell phone, but the display is smaller and my eyes get tired). So let’s see if we can answer Corner’s concerns.

Did the balloon take off from Wuhan? Nope. Okay, first–because words matter–it’s a goddamn balloon. Balloons don’t “take off.” Balloons are inflated and released. It’s not a fucking missile. Beyond that, we can with a certain level of accuracy backtrack the balloon’s path based on its current height and known patterns of wind currents. And hey, a whole bunch of meteorologists did just that, and we can say with confidence it was released somewhere in west central China. Wuhan is in east central China. So, nope.

Do we know what’s in the balloon? Yes and no. I mean, yes we know what’s IN the balloon, since all high altitude balloons are filled with some lighter-than-air gas, like helium or hydrogen. But he’s talking about the payload. The stuff the balloon is carrying. And no, we don’t know what the payload is. However…

Is the payload a bioweapon? We don’t know, but almost certainly nope. First off, it would be massively stupid for China to attack the US. Secondly, even if China was stupid enough to attack the US, a localized bioweapon attack would be an incredibly weak opening salvo of a war. Thirdly, even if China was that stupid, a high altitude balloon would be a really inefficient and ineffective delivery system for a bioweapon attack.

Here’s a question this particular fucking idiot didn’t ask, but is being asked by lots of other fucking idiots: A) Could the balloon be carrying surveillance technology? Sure. But why? China launches a lot of rockets capable of carrying sophisticated surveillance technology–and by ‘a lot’ I mean they’re second only to the US in the number of racket launches. If China wants to conduct surveillance of troops/bases/deployments, they have the capability to do it without resorting to a balloon.

The thing about balloons is they’re at the mercy of the wind. And yeah, we know general wind patterns at different altitudes, so while it’s possible (by changing the altitude of the balloon) to generally guide a balloon, they can’t be sent to spy on a specific target location. In addition to the wind, high altitude balloons are sensitive to the weight of the payload, to the amount of helium/hydrogen used for inflation, and even the air temperature at the time of release. Balloon guidance is largely a crap shoot; you know the odds, but you don’t know the outcome. To attach surveillance tech to a balloon and hope it drifts by something worth seeing is a really dumb surveillance approach.

Another thing. People keep saying “This balloon is the size of two (sometimes three) school busses,” as if that’s somehow threatening. The balloon IS A BALLOON. Even a really big balloon is just a latex membrane surrounding a lighter-than-air gas. The balloon may be really big, but that doesn’t mean the payload is really big. If the payload was the size of a couple of school busses, then the balloon carrying it would probably be the size of a football stadium.

But but but the military says they won’t shoot it down because of the risk of “debris could land on people or homes“. So doesn’t that mean the payload must be big? Nope. It means if you shoot a missile up in the air, the missile will come back down. That’s how gravity works. Could the US military shoot down the balloon over a rural area to minimize the risk? Sure. But the least expensive air-to-air missile (AIM-9X Sidewinder) costs US$430,818. Add in the cost of jet fuel (and that shit ain’t cheap) and we’re talking about spending maybe half a million dollars to take down a balloon. A balloon, for fuck’s sake.

So just what in the popcorn fuck IS the balloon and what’s it real purpose? I don’t know. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be just an underinflated weather balloon. Underinflated because a properly inflated weather balloon is designed that as the balloon gains in elevation the gas inside it expands to a volume larger than the balloon’s capacity to expand, at which point it…pops. The payload then returns to earth on a parachute. An underinflated balloon won’t reach that height and so won’t expand beyond its tolerance. It can just wander along until the elevated UV light at that height degrades the latex and it pops on its own.

Is this situation a violation of US air space? Yes. It may be accidental, but yes. But it seems highly improbable that the balloon or its payload, whatever it is, is a threat to US national security.

The actual threat to US national security is the Republican Party.

 

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