The Alaska Permanent Fund is Alaska’s way of giving back to the residents of the state. Profits from oil sales are put into a fund, only 1% of which is then invested. Every October, the average earnings over the last five years is split among us 600,000 (or so) residents. (It’s more complicated than that, but only slightly.) Our dividends dipped during the dot-com crash, but that five-year average insulted us from a huge cut. Conversely, it’ll take a few more years before we see how high these record oil prices push it back up.

Everyone’s waiting for the checks, which could arrive as soon as Friday. This year’s dividend is the biggest ever, at $2,069. Of course, our illustrious governor decided that her constituents were unfairly burdened by high oil prices this year, so she spearheaded an initiative to share a little more of the state’s wealth. Each resident will receive an extra $1,200 in “energy relief” this year. (No wonder she has such a high approval rating!) The energy relief packaged is issued by the same office, the Alaska Permanent Fund Division, so in essence we’re each receiving a $3,269 dividend this year. Think of it: A household of five will receive a bulk sum of $16,345! Sky’s the limit for Mormons and Catholics! Who wants to move now?

I can remember back to the very first Alaska dividend in 1982. I wasn’t quite 10 years old, but that was old enough to understand that if my dad’s Coast Guard transfer had come just a few months later, our family would have been $5,000 richer (over $10,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars today.) I got to thinking: How much would I have received if I’d been eligible for every single dividend? How much would I have in the bank if I hadn’t spent any of them? What if I’d invested them?

I plugged some numbers into Excel. Take a look:

The second column has list of the PFD amounts since 1982. Total amount given to a resident eligible for all 27 years is $30,805.41. The average yearly dividend is therefore $1,140.94.

I freely admit that I know little about global interest rates, yields, and investments, but after a scanning through the Department of Treasury’s tables, I found one that may be a fair gauge of a low-risk investment over the years. It’s called “Market Yield on U.S. Treasury Securities at 1-year Constant Maturity, Quoted on Investment Basis.” I take that to mean it wouldn’t be too hard to find a nice, safe CD (Certificate of Deposit) near that amount. Anyway, the pattern seems to fit what I know about the U.S.’s recent financial history: Great interest rates in the 80s, horrible after the dot-com crash.

I’m only slightly better with accounting principles than interest rates, but I think I’ve got my compounding interest formula correct. The fourth column, labeled Yearly Principal, totals up what a resident would have if they invested their dividend in CDs at each year’s rate. The formula is: P * (1 + r), where P = the Principal and r = the interest rate. Of course, the principal rolls over each year.

Looks like if someone safely invested all their dividends in CDs, they’d have $51,891.89.

I thought it might be interesting to average out the interest rate over the same 27 years and came up with 5.85%. Investing consistently at that rate (which would probably still be relatively low-risk for a savvy, market-knowledgeable investor) would result in holdings totaling $63,826.66. That’s just a bit more than twice the original dividend amount.

Yeah, okay, so my numbers are based on some barely-educated guesses, but still. The state of Alaska has given out quite a bit of money and we’re all looking forward to this year’s record check.

Next week, everything goes on sale. Costco’s probably stocking up their inventory of plasma TVs and computers, the Honda dealerships are probably offering deals on jet skis and generators, and furniture stores all over the state are advertising their no-interest dividend specials. Even Alaska Airlines knows how to get in on a good thing – tickets out of the state were just discounted this week.

While most people in the country are facing some tough decisions due to rising fuel costs, Alaskans are actually benefiting. As long as the Permanent Fund Corporation continues to invest our money safely, dividends should continue to climb right along with oil prices. For many of us, it easily offsets a year’s worth of gas.

More than makes up for the occasional crappy summer, too.

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© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2008. | Permalink | No comment |

Right around the holiday season last year, I noticed that HDTVs on the market were finally starting to combine all of the best features. Full 1080p resolution, low-latency/burn-in free LCD panels, built-in HDTV tuners, 1920×1200 RGB support; it looked like it was almost time for me to enter the market. Oksana always said I could get an HDTV when the price dropped to $1500…

I decided that 2007 would be the year we upgraded, but we had to wait until August 20^th before we found the model with the right price/performance ratio.

Months before, Costco had sent out a mailer with upcoming coupons. There it was, finally! $200 off a 52-inch Vizio with all the features above and more. Waiting three months was torture.

I researched everything I could about the Vizio and its competitors. There were few other 52″ models on the market and the only other two I entertained buying were from Sony and Sharp. Both were probably better than the Vizio, but they both cost at least $1500 more, too.

As the magical date neared, I began seeing reviews of the Vizio appear online. Apparently some Costco warehouses were selling the TVs before the coupon went active. On Friday, August 17^th, I went to my own Costco for a look-see. Sure enough, on the top shelf, four giant boxes sat wrapped in cellophane – they had the 52″ in stock three days before I could use the coupon.

I decided to see if I could pull a fast one. I talked to one of the floor managers, asked him if I could buy one that day and then “price match” it the following Monday with my coupon. In effect, I would pay $200 more, but get that $200 refunded after the weekend. Unfortunately, not only wouldn’t he do the price matching, not only wouldn’t he even sell me the TV, he wouldn’t even let me reserve one! “I’m sorry, we only have 4 of them in stock and if they’re already sold out when the coupon drops, my customers will kill me.” His suggestion? “Just be there when the doors open at 10am and you’ll be sure to get one.”

Come Monday morning, I humbly begged my boss to skip out on a big, campus-wide meeting to stand in line at Costco. Oksana borrowed a minivan from work and we got to the warehouse about 10 minutes before the big steel doors rolled up. Oksana was embarrassed; I was fine. It wasn’t like we camped out there all night.

As soon as the doors opened, I grabbed a pallet cart, flashed my membership card and went straight to the HDTV section. A Vizio box was right there on the front corner. Oksana and levered it onto our cart. I looked around for the display model, to see what it looked like when it was set up. Then I looked everywhere else, trying to spot the other three boxes. Nada. Either the floor manager let someone buy them over the weekend, or employees had already snatched them up.

We took our new HDTV straight home and then returned to our respective workplaces. We were leaving for a vacation in three days; we barely had time to set up our new toy, let alone enjoy it.

When we got back 10 days later, it was time to spend more money. You can’t just jump into the HDTV market by buying a new TV. Think it through: If you want to take advantage of all that resolution, you’re going to have to shell out for more hardware. Oksana and I had already budgeted for:

• (1) 52″ 1080p LCD HDTV = $2050

• (1) 80GB Sony PlayStation 3 (for the Blu Ray format, a next-generation DVD) = $600

• (2) New bookcases to hold all the stuff on our old entertainment system = $300

• (1) 750GB hard drive, 1 wireless keyboard for our entertainment system’s PC computer = $250

• (1) New HDTV cable package = $21 / month

• (1) Subscription to Blockbuster Online = $15 / month

• (1) Set of HDTV cables = $75

• (1) New power strip = $35

• (1) New entertainment system = $ ??

I expected Oksana to balk at the price list. Going $500 over the “You can buy it when it hits $1500″ price just for the HDTV didn’t help. Her only comment? “If we’re going to be buying a TV that’s going to last us 5 or 10 years, wouldn’t it make more sense to just amortize the extra $1500 on the better Sony model?” Guys, don’t ever think marrying an accountant is a bad thing.

We didn’t tell any of our friends about our new purchases. When we returned, I spent most of a week cannibalizing our old entertainment system (because we couldn’t find a single decent HDTV stand that met all our needs) to make a platform for our new 110-pound TV. I hooked everything up, plugged in the cable box, the surround sound receiver, both DVD players, a 200-disc CD changer, both Sony PlayStations (2 and 3), and my old “TiFaux.” Everything patched together elegantly… except for the mess of cables webbing the TV stand to the audio pier.

That Friday, when everyone was due for our weekly social gathering, we fired up a visually stunning game called flOw on the PlayStation 3 and watched people’s reactions as they came through the door. Greetings were dropped mid-sentence. Profanities were uttered. It made keeping the secret for three weeks all worthwhile.

Now that we’ve enjoyed our purchase for a few months, I feel like I can comment on the new quality-of-viewing HDTV offers.

First, Blu Ray is awesome! For my birthday, my mom bought me Planet Earth in that format and it’s stunning. HD movies look great, too. Once you’ve seen 1080p, there’s no going back.

GCI’s HDTV cable package is anemic, to say the least. They advertise that it’s only $6.99 a month to get HDTV, but what they don’t mention is that the new cable box / DVR combo costs an additional $15. What does your 22 bucks a month get you? Well, not the promised NFL games, I can tell you that. The NFL network is one of your 8-or-so channels, but they’re not allowed to broadcast any games live. ESPN HD is also on there, but they’ve got what, one Thursday night game a week?

To make matters worse, much of the content on their other HD channels are still broadcasting standard definition content. None of the networks (NBC, FOX, ABC, CBS, CW) are high def. It’s annoying and probably a waste of money. But even so, I must admit that when you do manage to catch an HD movie, it looks stunning.

Standard definition, what the broadcasters refer to as NTSC, looks terrible on our new TV. We’re taking a low-resolution picture with many digital and/or analog imperfections and blowing it up on a massive 52″ screen. Every stray pixel, each blurry edge, is magnified six times. It’s awful. But unlike Joe Consumer, I actually expected my $2000 purchase to worsen TV viewing experience, at least in that respect.

Which brings me to my rant on the state of HDTV today…

Ten years or so ago, we had one television standard in the United States: NTSC. It was pretty much terrible, but at least it was a standard. It worked with every television set.

Then congress decided that the government needed to reclaim a certain range of radio frequencies in the broadcast spectrum. No problem, newer digital technologies allow us to convert old analog signals into 1s and 0s and compress them into a smaller package while doing so. Congress was ready to mandate that every single broadcaster in the U.S. purchase new equipment, but they knew that would be an uphill battle. Instead, they mollified them all by illustrating the advantages of going digital. “You’re getting a smaller slice of the spectrum, but by using digital compression, you can actually ‘fit’ more video in that smaller space!”

So congress set a date… and it passed without full adoption. Then they set a new date, and it passed, too. Now the deadline is February 17^th, 2009. We’ll see how that one goes.

Don’t worry. You only have to buy a $2000 HDTV set if you want to! You can keep your old 1970 Zenith oak-paneled floor model television set. If and when the last broadcasting and cable company switch over to digital-only, you’ll be able to buy a little $20 converter box (kind of like those old coax-to-RF y-clamp antennae converters we had to use to get our Ataris working.)

So, what’s the problem? The whole digital conversion thing is good for our country, right? We can finally leave standard definition, NTSC video behind!

Not so fast.

It’s a common misconception that congress is pushing us towards HDTV. Not true. They only said we have to go digital. “Digital” is a very nebulous concept in the TV world.

By not dictating a new standard, congress opened the doors to media mega-corporations like Sony, Panasonic, JVC, and even Microsoft. It seems like every company out there has a different opinion on what the next generation television format should be. Currently we have 18 (eighteen!) broadcast “standards” split among three broad resolution categories: SDTV, EDTV, and HDTV (standard-, enhanced-, and high-def.) Gee, thanks congress. Now I can’t even tell if the new TV I bought can display what I want to watch.

It gets worse. We all want HDTV, right? Better picture, surround sound, thin televisions you can hang on your wall, abandoning a standard that was developed in the 1930s… what’s not to like? Well, congress knew it would be impossible to get broadcasters to convert all the equipment in their stations to new format. Can you imagine how much it would cost even a tiny rural TV station to convert everything – from cameras, to editors, to tape playback machines, to the actual broadcasting equipment – to HDTV? There would have been a rebellion.

So they just said “convert to digital.” When stations balked at even that, congress reminded them that they were actually getting more room in their little piece of the spectrum. What to convert your signal to HD? Go right ahead, you’ve got the overhead now. Want to keep all your standard definition equipment and just broadcast it digitally? Be our guest. Want to keep all your standard definition equipment and then split your new digital pipeline four ways, creating three new channels, and therefore quadrupling your advertising revenue? By all means.

It wasn’t hard to get them on board after that.

It makes more business sense for a station to keep their standard definition signal. Spend millions converting a whole studio to HDTV and then essentially keep producing the same content, but at a higher quality? Will that really gain you a bigger viewing audience… especially with the current slow consumer HDTV adoption rate? How will you pay for all that equipment?

On the other hand, if you keep using your old equipment to capture and produce your shows, all you need to buy is one analog-to-digital converter. Slap that in the path just before your signal leaves the station and you’re done. Not much to pay for and the viewers you have won’t notice any real difference. (Well, except for a few pixelization artifacts replacing the old vertical roll and static snow).

With the easy retrofit complete, the station is left to contemplate the rest of their unused spectrum. Most opt to create new channels out of that space… if they can find content for them. Of course, the professionals they’d hired to produce shows on their original channel are already working at capacity, so they need to look elsewhere. Maybe hire some aspiring amateurs…

500 channels and nothing on.

That’s the state of television today, and it sucks for the consumer. It’s my opinion that congress has unwittingly encouraged our television content producers to quadruple their output, thereby lowering their overall quality. What’s worse, any station that’s gone down this not-so-hypothetical path has painted themselves into a standard definition corner. How can they ever move up to HDTV now? Not only would they still have to find a way to buy all new equipment, but they’d also have to ditch three-out-of-four of their ad-money-generating channels to free up enough room to broadcast just one HDTV signal.

Oh, well. Maybe it’s time to give up on broadcast TV. Blockbuster Online is doing alright by us with their Blu Ray rentals, and when you have a PC hooked up to your living room entertainment system, the Internet offers plenty of HD viewing options, too.

And just for the record, despite congress’s best efforts, our new HDTV is worth every bit of that $2000!

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© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2007. | Permalink | No comment |

A group of us were talking the other night about that online site that was taking votes for the “New 7 Wonders of the World.”  Before looking at the list, we had fun brainstorming what should be on there.  Machu Picchu, Stonehenge, Teotihuacan?   The Hoover Dam, The Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the Panama Canal?  My best idea was one that nobody really wanted to concede: The Internet.

When I think about it – and I think about it often – I’m amazed at how the Internet has changed the world.  Or at least my world.

For instance:

• I handle almost all my finances online now.  My paycheck is direct deposited, our monthly expenses are paid automatically by our Alaska Airlines credit card (which is, in turn, paid off by our bank account – got to get those miles!)  There are exceptions, of course.  I still have to pay rent with a check, and people will probably still be using the ATM to grab theater money in 3007.  Even so, I’d estimate that 90% of my own wealth never manifests itself as anything more than numbers in databases.

• The Internet has also brought the world closer.  E-mail, the ubiquitous and obvious tool, has allowed me to stay in touch with friends and family the world over.  In recent years, new tools have sprung up and I find myself taking advantage of them more and more.   I remember how surreal video conferencing seemed when I first peered into my own living room from an Internet cafe in Peru; now it seems blase.  Oksana uses Skype to talk to her brother in Russia; the quality on both ends is better than any phone call, and ever since we bought a cordless Skype phone, we’re no longer tied to the computer’s clunky headset and microphone.  Even Internet Messaging, simple as it is, recently surprised me when a friend started a live chat message with me while I was at work… and he was standing in front of the Easter Island statues with his Blackberry.  (And later that week, he IM’d me from a bus in Santiago to ask me what a Spanish word meant, because, you know, it was easier than looking it up.)

• The way in which the Internet impresses me most, though, is with its vast store of information.  I’m old enough to remember when a 26-book set of encyclopedias was the best way to get information for school.  Now to research and learn anything – anything! – all you need is a computer, a connection, and time.  Learning, learning, learning!  I use the Internet all the time to learn new things.  Photoshop tutorials, screenwriting advice, HDTV and next gen DVD formats.  Recipes, desktop publishing, video editing, astronomy, home design.  Want an answer to a question?  Want to learn something new?  It’s ALL RIGHT HERE, and it’s all FREE (and usually on Wikipedia.)

  My latest project, naming 3000 or so digital pictures I took last year in Russia, is a great example.  I wanted to be thorough and accurate in my naming, so I had to do a fair bit of digging to find the English names for all the things we saw in Moscow and St. Petersburg.  It took time – I just finished naming them last week and we were actually in Russia this time last year – but the learning I did was worth it.  Here’s how I found some of the more difficult picture names:

Wikimapia.  I can look at just about any sequence of pictures and remember about where I was standing when I took them (I don’t know if other people have such a… “positional memory.”  I can pretty accurately visualize my past surroundings in my memory.)  Wikimapia let’s people label anything in Google Maps.  With the satellite view, I can zoom in on something like the Kremlin and see all those buildings that people have labeled.  Let’s say I took a picture of one of the towers.  If I knew where I was standing when I took the photo, I can eliminate many tower names by ruling out the ones that were out of my line-of-sight.  I can then click on the remaining towers and hope to see someone else’s photo.  If the photo’s subject matched mine, I had the tower’s name.  Sometimes, I had to zoom in close enough to use roof details (especially useful with the distinctive Russia Orthodox onion domes) to match my own street level photos.

I wish all the images were that easy to identify.  Sometimes Wikimapia only had Cyrillic names.  In that case, I’d jump over to Altavista’s Babelfish and translate the text from Russian to English.  That would give me something to search for on Google’s Image Search.  If I could find a similar picture there, it would more often than not lead me to a site confirming the name.

Sometimes I could find sites dedicated to a particular place, like Catherine’s Palace or the Hermitage.  The ones with maps were invaluable in assisting my memory and I took advantage of any virtual tours to track my past room-to-room progression.  I relived my tour as I labeled my photos.

Finally, when all else failed, I would unearth the names of buildings, exhibits, bridges, etc., on personal web pages.  People just like me post their travel photos online; I have high praise for those that take the time and effort to accurately name their photos and I curse the ones that dump 200 pictures of Tsarskoe Selo in Flickr with the original DSC0000 filename.

Amazingly, there were less than 100 photos (out of 3000, remember) for which I couldn’t find names.  Some were of tiny displays of artwork in the Hermitage, some were random buildings in Moscow, some were unimpressive rooms in a palace.  But I have no doubt that more time on the Internet (and being a little handier with Cyrillic) would have whittled that number down even further.

Of course, the Internet isn’t all puppy dogs and rainbows.  If you’ve got an e-mail account, you know about spam.  For me, e-mail spam is a minor annoyance.  I’ve gotten used to it over the years and my eyes glide over it without interruption.  A few check marks, a delete button, it’s gone.  Same with banner ads – I couldn’t tell you the last time I consciously examined, let alone clicked on one.  The bane of my existance is comment spam.  I hate seeing someone trying to sell their crap on my blog.  Filters keep the majority of it at bay, but some of it still gets through.  I wish you people would quit winning at casinos, losing weight, making millions on penny stocks, and buying Viagra.  You must be buying what the spammers are selling, otherwise… wouldn’t they stop? 

Actually, wait a minute.  I just thought of a killer business plan!  A casino that pays out in Viagra and penny stocks!

I’m going to go read up on that.

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© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2007. | Permalink | No comment |

When shopping, have you ever noticed a product completely out of place?  I’m not talking about a display set up in a strange place – canned corn, now on sale in the bakery! – I’m talking about a single item, set among a whole shelf of different products.  You know, the kind of thing you’d see if someone decided they no longer want something they’d put in their cart.  Ideally, the poor item should have been reunited on with its brethren, but shoppers can be lazy.

Back in high school, when I worked in a supermarket, I hated that.  Now I amuse myself by reconstructing the thought processes of those thoughtless shoppers.

For instance, this weekend at Costco, I noticed a lone box of Zipfizz Liquid Shots sitting atop of an almost-full palette of Sunkist soda.  “What led to that decision?” I wondered.  My brain gave me back something like this:

Next time you’re shopping and you see an orphaned item, you might take a moment to think about what it was exchanged for.  For the people that are selling these things, there just might be a marketing strategy hidden away in the forensic evidence.  For you, perhaps just an entertaining yarn.

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© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2007. | Permalink | No comment |

1. 1. My writing on the Alaskan mystique started an internal process of comparing and contrasting the same with New York City.
2. 2. At dinner last week, my friend, Mike, related the story of how one of his friends referred to New York City as, simply, The City.
3. 3. A perfectly ego-centric, 1976 “map” of New York was posted yesterday on Strange Maps. 

I find New York City, or rather the perception of New York City, very interesting.  In our media-rich culture, New York is everywhere.  Any number of movies — Spider-man, Ghostbusters, King Kong, Taxi Driver, to name a few – couldn’t be set in a different city.  There’s a peek into New York almost every night on any number television shows:  Law & Order, Friends reruns, The Apprentice, and, of course, CSI: New York.  Sex and the City pretty much makes The City a supporting character.  Dominos Pizza gives us a glimpse of New York culture with commercials touting their new Brooklyn Style Pizza.  Even popular websites like Kottke.org nonchalantly mention New York City.

That New York is on our consciousness isn’t impressive.  Sure, it’s a big, important American City; I get that.  What interests me is the matter-of-fact way in which it’s presented.

New York City is served up to us by New Yorkers, and to New Yorkers the city is forefront in their daily lives.  That’s understandable.  I can imagine that living in a city that big would have an impact on your life.  Here’s the thing, though:  By virtue of it’s media-onslaught, even though I’ve never been there¹, New York has an impact on my life, too.

For instance, without ever visiting or studying the city, I know many things about it.  There are taxis everywhere; most people don’t own a car.  Everyone that lives in New York has a mugging story.  There’s a huge ethnic diversity including, but certainly not limited to, neighborhoods of Chinese, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Irish, Italians, and Russians.  Messenger bikers are both dangerous and in danger.  New Yorkers are known for the attitudes and their accents.  The major airports are JFK and LaGuardia.  Tiny apartments are amazingly expensive, but, hey, if you can make it there you can make it anywhere.

Blindfold me, spin me around, and teleport me to any number of New York landmarks.  I’ll bet you I could identify Central Park, Times Square, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Statue of Liberty, Rockefeller Plaza (especially in winter), the U.N., the New York Public Library, Broadway, Madison Square Garden, and Grand Central Station.  I might even be able to make a decent guess at Wall Street, Carnegie Hall, and the Brooklyn Bridge. 

But my inherited knowledge of New York runs deeper than just the landmarks.  If given a pop quiz, I could have named 4-out-of-5 of the city’s boroughs².  I know the names of many of the city’s neighborhoods: The Village, the Lower East Side, Tribeca, Harlem, Madison Avenue, the Upper East Side, and SOHO.  (I even know what SOHO and Tribeca stand for, though given a map, I’d have to hunt around to find either Houston or Canal Street.)  In some cases, I have a good idea of what social classes you can expect in each neighborhood.

All this I know (or at least think I know) because of what I’ve picked up from my entertainment sources.  In fact, New York seems so familiar to me that I really don’t have any desire to visit the city.

Because of where I live, it’s hard for me to make direct comparisons between the average person’s perceptions of Alaska and New York.  Generally speaking, I would venture that both places have an equal hold on the global consciousness.  But where Alaska is foreign and mysterious, New York is well-known and matter-of-fact.  While people know much about the day-to-day life in The Big Apple, misconceptions about Alaskans are the norm.

I guess I’m looking for adjectival labels.  Alaska has a mystique.  New York City has a reputation.

—

¹  Full disclosure:  I actually lived in Staten Island when I was about 6 months old.  I remember none of it.
²  In brainstorming, I came up with The Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan.  Ironically, I left out Staten Island.

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© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2007. | Permalink | No comment |

Last week she discussed the defining characteristics of high-brow and low-brow jokes.  High-brow jokes are ones that normally only high society types would understand.  She demonstrated a joke she’d seen on Frasier.  It was based on an opera I’d never heard of, Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors –

And then, of course, on the ride home that night I caught an entire NPR segment on Menotti.  I always wonder if things like that are coincidences or if they’re going on all around me and I’m just not tuned into them.  Had I heard of Menotti’s opera before the one-two punch of blog-radio that day?  Maybe I don’t remember because it wasn’t on my radar.  No way to know.

– Low-brow jokes, on the other hand, appeal to a different class of people.  She does a good job of deconstructing high- vs. low-brow.  I never really stopped to consider that the distinction has nothing to do with whether the joke is good or bad, smart or dumb.  The dividing line has to do with socio-economic boundaries.  I inferred from her writing that a good joke, high-brow or low, probably shouldn’t even be understood by the opposite group.

The following day, Ms. Espenson continued the joke dissection by adding in “obscure-reference” jokes.  She quotes a fellow writer who, in turn, describes one of his favorite obscure jokes from 3rd Rock:

“… [M]y all-time, ALL-TIME favorite obscure-reference joke was on 3rd Rock. They had a scene in which Dick Solomon (John Lithgow) goes to the airport to pick up his supervisor, the Big Giant Head, played by William Shatner. “How was your flight?” asks Lithgow. “Terrible,” Shatner replies. “There was some kind of gremlin on the wing!” Lithgow gasps: “THE SAME THING ONCE HAPPENED TO ME!!”

That’s a great one, I admit.  I wish I had seen that episode, because I would have got that joke and felt proud of myself for doing so.  That’s the great thing about “obscure reference” jokes; when you get them, you feel like you’re a part of the “in-crowd.”  (Which is why I think we usually call them inside jokes.)  There’s a flip side to inside jokes, though.  Make them too obscure and no one will get them at all.  (See also: Dennis Miller.)

I think Ze Frank tip-toed along the too-obscure line in an episode of The Show last week.  Because I’m a Cowboys fan, I laughed out loud at the following setup and punch line:

“So who gets to play?”
“Well, this year, it’s the Colts and the Bears.”
“Why are they called that?”
“‘Cause all the teams are named after cool, badass things like Bears, and Jets, and Cowboys.”
…
“So, to play in the Super Bowl, the Colts and the Bears must be the best teams!”
“No, they don’t play enough games to figure that out. But they are the best at balancing a ball on the ground with their finger long enough for someone to kick it.”
“You’d think a cowboy’d be better at that than an animal.”
“You’d think, Timmy. You’d think.”

Get it?  To be a part of this very small in-crowd, you’d have to:

A)  Be an American football fan,
B)  Know that, on average, kickers score the majority of points in a football game,
C)  Know that The Dallas Cowboys were eliminated from the playoffs this year by The Seattle Seahawks (an animal),
D)  Because Tony Romo bobbled the ball on a game-winning field goal attempt as he attempted to place it on the ground for the kicker.

Now that you’ve read the explanation, you might admire the obscurity of the joke.  But does anyone ever laugh out loud after having a joke explained to them?  Rarely.

All this reminds me of our second Doctrine video.  It was riddled with inside jokes, but I’m responsible for the most obscure one.  It was about colors, and to understand it, you had to have some passing familiarity with the subtractive properties of combined colors of light, the additive properties of paints or inks, and the way in which computers and printers deal with each (RGB vs. CMYK).  We even referenced the joke at the end of the video with some red, green, and blue credits.  I thought it was funny – and I expect those few that got it felt suitably rewarded – but I always worried that it flew over too many heads.

It’s like one of those situations where old friends get together to reminisce and laugh about the good ol’ days.  Great fun for them, but confusing (and probably boring) for anyone listening in.  You can explain the inside jokes, and you can describe your memories, but for those on the outside, the results will never be as good as being on the inside.

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© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2007. | Permalink | No comment |

Yesterday, I read in the paper that the cause of the power outage was an eagle flying into a power substation.  The eagle had been carrying a “deer head,” scavenged from the local landfill.

Today must be a slow news day, because the story has been picked up by the AP Wire and is making the rounds online.  I’ve seen it on at least two popular blogs.

Why does this fascinate people so?  Is it because a bald eagle fried?  Are people imagining that it was hauling the equivalent of the deer bust you’d see mounted above the mantle in someone’s den?  Or is it just a slow news day?

Actually, I think it has more to do with the Alaskan mystique.  For the people who live here, Alaska is pretty normal.  With only 30,000 people, Juneau’s small by Lower 48 standards, but that doesn’t mean we’re the frontier town that resides in most people’s imagination.  No igloos, dogsled teams, or rampaging grizzly bears here.  No friendly moose roaming the streets, at least in Juneau, a la Northern Exposure.  Tourists fresh off the cruse ships may not bat an eye at a Hummer driving down the road — it might fit in with their preconceived notions of an Alaskan vehicle – but I think most would do a double take when one of the local Dodge Vipers passes by.

Sure, their skewed perception of Alaska does have some basis in fact.  Salmon, halibut, and king crab practically jump into our frying pan, waves from calving glaciers are a real cause for fear and panic, humpback whales frequently collide with boats, hungry bears break into homes for food, the aurora borealis is out every night, we never see the sun in winter, and bald eagles fly off with the pets and infants of the unwary.

Yeah, actually, not so much.  But tell a tourist in the street that you live here, and they’ll probably ask you about one of those things.  And where they can exchange their American dollars.

When I heard that an eagle was the cause of our power outage on Sunday, I mentally shrugged and moved on.  Happens all the time.  Take a look at the Alaska Electric Light and Power website:  Eleven outages in 2006 were caused by “animals;” many previous incidents are listed as “Bird,” “Squirrel,” and one rogue “Raven.”  (It looks like they stopped specifying the type of animal sometime in 2003.  You can bet that at least some of the “animals” listed now are “eagles.”) So why haven’t the AP Wire and the Blogosphere run with this story before?  Maybe it’s the deer skull.  My vote’s on the slow news day.

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© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2007. | Permalink | 2 comments |

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

Wow, blockquotes work weird with pictures.

Anyway, they go on, describing their vision, but I’m bothered that you never see a disclaimer.  ”NaNoWriMo: Pushing people towards disillusionment because they can’t even follow through on writing ‘crap.’”

Oh to be sure, there are some that finish writing their crap.  12,959 of 79,896 people over the past four years, if my non-scientific tabulating of their authors page is correct.  That’s 66,937 failures, though, or about an 84% failure rate.

I’ll bet that’s on par with your typical New Year’s resolutions.

I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions, and because they’re such a huge tradition, I wonder why that is.  (Probably because my family didn’t make a big deal out of them when I was younger.)  In fact, I can’t remember a single New Year’s resolution I’ve ever made.  Still, it wasn’t until I made the (tenuous) connection with NaNoWriMo that I began to wonder if they might be bad for everyone. 

Think about it.  How many New Year’s resolutions do you know of (your own or others’) that became permanent changes?  And how many were forgotten or were discarded before spring?

What’s wrong with New Year’s resolutions?

• Most New Year’s resolutions are ambitious in scope.  “Stop smoking,” ”Go to the gym regularly,” and “Eat healthy” are noble goals, to be sure, but oh-so-easy to slip up and make one mistake.  Tell me, when you smoke that one cigarette, miss that one promised gym visit, or eat that one pint of Ben & Jerry’s, do you feel your resolution is still intact?  Or has it been broken and is no longer the motivational tool it was meant to be?
• The dead of winter has to be the worst time to make resolutions.  You’ve got shorter daylight hours, miserable weather, and maybe even some Seasonal Affective Disorder working against you.  How much easier is it to rationalize sitting on the couch and watching TV when it’s dark and snowy outside?
• Your friends and family, likely your support group, are dealing with (failing) their own New Year’s resolutions.  If your resolution-in-going-to-the-gym partner misses a day or two?  Is that going to help or hinder your own motivation?  And people working against their own vices often aren’t people we can look to for support.  I’m all for people quitting smoking, but I’m all for avoiding them while they do it.
• I can’t speak from experience, but I’ll bet a common first reaction to failing at a New Year’s resolution is, “Oh, well.  I’ll try again next year.”

That last bullet is the heart of the problem, both for New Year’s resolutions and NaNoWriMo.  Most people’s enthusiasm for anything, be it writing a novel, dieting, or stopping smoking, doesn’t just happen to correspond with the Julian calendar.  I can remember the time I resolved to work out and run 2 miles every day (for the four months leading up to a sunny-destination vacation) or the time when I resolved to lose 20 pounds (after a particularly food-centric vacation.)  I was successful in both because I resolved to do them when the time was right for me (read: when I was so sick of things I needed to make a change.)

So, if three days into this new year you’re still going strong on your resolutions, congratulations, because I think the system is working against you.  If you do fail at them, though, don’t give up.  Keep your thoughts on them and maybe in the next 362 days you’ll find the ideal time to make those resolutions your own, not the New Year’s.

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Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about spoilers. For hours at a time. Really.

A few weeks months ago [I’m late in posting this entry], the Sci-Fi channel made the purchase of my HTPC completely worthwhile with just three blocks of programming. They aired the entire first season of Battlestar Galactica, the entire first season of Stargate Atlantis, and the entire eighth season of Stargate SG-1. Three days in a row, 7am to 2am, the little PVR in my media PC wrote episode after episode to its hard drive.

When all was said and done, I had literally hundreds of Gigabytes of new sci-fi programming. But there was a problem. I couldn’t leave it all on the HTPC because the software would automatically start removing programs to make way for newer shows. I thought about watching them on at my computer desk, but it didn’t have the most comfortable seating arrangement. The obvious answer was to burn them all off to DVDs – especially since they were already encoded as a decent-quality MPEGII stream.

If I was going to archive them to disc, I wanted to make sure that the quality remained high. Granted, there was nothing I could do to get rid of the Sci-Fi logo imprinted over each episode or, more annoyingly, all the little promo bugs they threw up (“You’re watching the SG-1 Marathon!”), but I could at least edit out the commercials. Next step: Find a program that would allow me to do that without a multi-hour recompression of each episode.

Nerovision Express 3 did the trick with its “SmartEncode” feature. After a bit of fiddling with the settings, I was able to export a commercial-free episode just as fast as my hard drive was able to write – usually around 4-6 minutes. Too bad Nero couldn’t auto-detect the commercials; I would have been done even quicker.

Alas, no. It would take time. In order to remove each of five commercial breaks from an episode, I’m forced to scan through each one, looking for marketing crap. In addition to the brief images that flash by while I’m scanning, I inevitably see bits and pieces of the episode when setting the in- and out- points. Even though I usually mute the sound while I work, it’s hard not to pick up clues about each episode from the 30-40 still images that pop up in front of my retinas. Sometimes, I wish I could shut off my brain.

It’s not too terrible. Rarely does a single frame of video convey enough to spoil a plot element; it’s not even in the same league as when someone has told me all about an episode before I watch it. Still, I can’t help but be taken out of the enjoyment of the story every time I see a previously-seen image. It’s like my brain has to tell me, “Hey! Now you know why that spaceship crashed!” It takes me out of the story, if only for a brief moment, and ruins the suspension of disbelief.

But I have to keep editing – the alternative would be 30 DVDs, permanently burned, with corporate American distractions left intact. So I as sit at my computer, hours on end, editing out commercials and playing FreeCell (during those 5-minute re-encodes), I think about spoilers.

Why do some people read the last page of a mystery novel first? Why would one ever want to read an internet-leaked Hollywood script before the movie is released? Why in the world are studio marketing teams releasing movie trailers that reveal key plot points?

Okay, so I just saw The Island [more proof that this entry should have been posted months ago.] Yeah, I knew it wasn’t going to be a great movie, but it was sci-fi, and I was hoping for a new slant on an old story. Didn’t get one, but that didn’t ruin the movie. The trailer did.

There’s a good 30 minutes to an hour of set up in The Island that would have been fairly interesting had the trailer not already told me that “there is no island” and “you’re copies of people out here.” If you know these two things, there is little suspense left in the movie. Fortunately, Michael Bay is at the helm, so unsatisfying and unrealistic violence fills the void.

I probably wouldn’t have thought much of it – I wasn’t exactly expecting to be surprised by a Michael Bay movie – if not for a slew of other spoiler-trailers going all the way back to Terminator 2 (Clue: Act 1 is not suspenseful when you know Arnie is gonna be the good guy). Mr. and Mrs. Smith, that Jolie-Pitt movie, had the same problem (Clue: Act 1 doesn’t fool me with its infidelity misdirection because I already know that they’re both spies!) And even in the middle of all the trailers for The Island, another perfect example pops up – Red Eye (Clue: Hard to fall for Cillian Murphy’s charm when we already know, before the movie even begins, that he’s gonna hold Rachel McAdams hostage.)

On a similar note, you have trailers that only ruin key scenes. Take the trailers for The Forgotten and for the upcoming Jodie Foster movie, Flightplan. Both probably patted themselves on the back for not ruining an entire act, but in each there are key moments that ruin what would have been, I suspect, compelling, revelatory scenes. I’m thinking here of the “sky-yank” and “steamed window” scenes, respectively.

Look, I’m a cinema junkie. I don’t mind paying $20 for a movie that involves me in a story and whisks me away for a couple hours. The Matrix? Awesome. Sixth Sense? Great twist! Perfect examples of movies that could have been destroyed by trailers that give too much away. Why did I enjoy them so? Probably because, going in, I knew almost nothing about them.

I had seen trailers for The Matrix, but other than showing a handful of out-of-context bullet time effects, they revealed almost nothing about the characters, plot, or setting – just the enigmatic tagline: “Unfortunately, no one can be told what The Matrix is, you have to see it for yourself.” (Does there exist a more perfect marketing sentence?) I was suitably intrigued, and because it was sci-fi, I saw it close to opening weekend – before anyone had the chance to spoil it for me.

Same with Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense. I saw the trailer, but in it, they didn’t reveal very much at all. Truth be told, it may have suffered by not telling enough – After watching it, I had no desire to see the movie. Nevertheless, about two weeks after it came out, a friend decided to alleviate a boring afternoon by dragging me to it. Glad he did.

I know what you’re thinking. There’s a simple solution: STOP WATCHING TRAILERS. Yeah, I tried that with the second Matrix movie – skipped the viewing opportunity on Apple’s trailer site, changed the channel on TV every time it started to come on, and even plugged my ears and hummed through the trailer when it played at the movie theater. Did it work? Well, yeah. Except the movie sucked.

Even if I could avoid trailers (wish me luck), I wouldn’t want to. How else am I going to know which movies to spend my hard-earned money on? I suppose I could read reviews…but they often have an even higher chance of spoiling something. Movie posters, maybe. Just trot on down to the multiplex and browse selection of 24″ x 36″ artwork! Does anyone make viewing decisions based solely on those? I doubt it.

So, I’m stuck with trailers, but I think I can live with them. Too bad there are other areas of my life where spoilers ruin the fun.

Take World of Warcraft, for instance. I’m essentially paying $15 a month for a computer game that I haven’t played since May [Not true: I started up again in mid-August, but go with me here…] Why? Because I’m afraid of spoilers.

There was a time, not so long ago, where I spent every waking hour playing WoW. It’s an online game, epic in scope, with hours upon hours… upon days upon weeks of content to explore. It took me about three months to reach the “endgame” – the point at which I had seen perhaps 98% of the world and my character could advance no further without teaming up with other players.

I had yet to explore a handful of epic dungeons, though, and looked forward to seeing the best the game had to offer. Unfortunately, the remaining content was too difficult to tackle alone and my friends’ characters were lagging ten levels behind. I decided to put the game aside and wait for them to catch up. I looked forward to the day (and night and weekends) where we could all explore those dungeons together.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work out as I’d hoped. My friends didn’t catch up all at once, and when they, in turn, ran out of places to explore, they decided to continue on into those dungeons with other players. Now it feels like I’m the only one who hasn’t been in them.

WoW has many repetitive elements – combat, cashing in treasures for money, and working the auction house. You wouldn’t be wrong to think that a couple hundred hours of that would get boring fast. My favorite aspect of the game was exploring new areas – the thrill of discovery! Grouping up with people who have already plumbed the depths of a dungeon doesn’t hold much appeal: “Go left; kill that guy; here’s the way you have to fight the boss monster; you’ll get a +3 sword of such&such when he’s dead.”

Spoilers.

Those pesky friends. I don’t mind that they played on without me, but at the same time, I find it interesting that they way I avoid being led around by the nose… is by not playing any more.

And wouldn’t you know it? I spent months worrying that those same friends wouldn’t spoil things about Buffy the Vampire Slayer!

Okay, now, let’s tie it all back to the commercial-free TV theme I gave you in the intro. Ready? Here we go.

When TV shows first began being released on DVD, it rapidly became the preferred method of television consumption for my core group of friends. Pristine quality, no commercials, and whole seasons worth soap-operatic cliff-hangers could be enjoyed in a matter of days. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was the first set to go around.

At first, I couldn’t get into Buffy. I took Season 1 on vacation with me and got almost all the way through it before it hooked me (with the ventriloquist episode). After that, I couldn’t wait to see more and couldn’t bear the thought of upcoming episodes being spoiled. Buffy, you see, has the potential to be ruined like no other TV show. There are more cliff-hanger endings, main character deaths, and “big events” than any other show I can think of… and yes, that includes the X-Files.

Problem is, that the Buffy DVDs (and Angel, and Firefly, and Stargate, and Battlestar Galactica, and Lost, and…) were passed around among all my friends and everyone was dying to talk about them. It was often difficult, if not impossible, to remember where in the story arc individual people were, and it only took a couple accidental spoiler revelations to make us swear off talking about them altogether… at least when there were more than a few of us in attendance.

That was frustrating, too, because not everyone shared my sensibilities about spoilers. I cringe when I hear something like, “It’s okay, this won’t spoil anything…” because whatever comes next inevitably does. True, what they’re about to tell me may not reveal a key plot element or give away the ending of a movie, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a spoiler. Describing anything in a movie (or a TV show or a game) will prevent me from getting the full enjoyment out that particular scene because, when I eventually do watch it, I’ll be transported right back to the “This won’t spoil anything…” moment as I think, “Oh, so, that’s what she was talking about!” In a way, any comment will taint a scene, and prevent me from making my own judgment about it, good or bad. That’s just not fair.

I told you I had been thinking a lot about spoilers lately.

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Despite working in a department that actually rebroadcasts the NASA channel; I regrettably have very little time to pursue all the latest news of their findings. Still, the bits and pieces that I catch online and on the news are intriguing; what’s more, they sparked a memory I had of doing some research on the Cassini probe back in 1997 while I was still in college.

This is where being an amateur archivist pays off. I was able to dig up an old CD-ROM backup of the screamin’ 90Mhz Pentium (with 16MB of RAM, and an impossible-to-fill 730MB hard drive, baby!) I had throughout my college career. Written for Freshman Comp. (taken in, yes, my senior year), this is an unexciting, compare-and-contrast, research paper, but I thought I’d post it here for nostalgic purposes and for a look back at the NASA hoopla of seven years ago.

Safety in the Space Program

January 28, 1986 dawned cold and clear on the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It was the 25th mission for the space shuttle program and the 10th mission for the Space Shuttle Challenger. The American public had lost much of its interest in the space program. This mission made us all a little curious by sending the first person not trained as an astronaut, a civilian grade-school teacher, into space. (Gagnon).

Thousands watched from the designated areas around the Kennedy Space Center and millions more from their television sets as the Challenger left the launch pad at 11:38am. Seventy-three seconds into flight the vessel exploded sending the still-firing booster rockets in an erratic path and fragments of the shuttle Earthward. For the next few moments, America sat stunned while they listened to their radios and television sets as the events were replayed and the seven crew members were presumed, then pronounced, dead. (2).

Months later, results of the search to find a cause for this tragic accident resulted in the conclusion that an O-ring aboard the shuttle had failed causing gas to leak, ignite, and start a chain reaction that destroyed the Challenger and her crew in a matter of seconds. This was neither reassuring news to the family and friends of the crew members, nor to the personnel in charge of safety at NASA. (Mahal, 3)

Over 10 years later that question is still on the minds of the public relations staff at NASA. October 6th saw the launch of the Cassini mission, but the public opposition to this project was larger than any preceding space launch. The reason? Once in space, Cassini was to be powered by over 70 pounds of plutonium. If the Titan IV rocket that is to launch Cassini was to explode as the Challenger did, countless miles of landscape and thousands, perhaps millions, of people would be irradiated with deadly plutonium dust. (Broad, A4)

Many people joined a coalition to stop the Cassini mission because they were adamantly against the use of any radioactive material in an earth-launched, space-bound vehicle. Instead of wasting time and resources trying to ban such programs, they should have been attempting to encourage NASA in their attempts to develop and enforce ever stronger safety procedures.

Cassini was successfully launched in October, but it won’t reach its destination, Saturn, until the year 2004. The probe was launched by a Titan IV rocket using conventional methods, but the power source on Cassini is 72.3 pounds of plutonium-238, a highly radioactive substance. The plutonium is split among 216 marshmallow-shaped pellets and comprises part of the radioisotope thermal generator (RTG.) These containers have been used before in other missions, but never with so much plutonium on board. NASA assured the public that the risks were minimal; the RTGs are encased in impact-resistant graphite, blast-resistant iridium and heat-resistant ceramics, and could withstand practically any disaster. Critics believe that when dealing with human lives, any risk of releasing plutonium-238 is too great. (A5)

Indeed, the critics have a valid concern. There have been many cases throughout the history of the space program where catastrophe has struck. In fact, one was a Titan IV launch, one of only twenty, which destroyed the rocket and its payload in a fiery explosion over the Pacific Ocean in 1993. Another, more recent, accident involved the possible release of plutonium. Late last year, citizens of Australia were told to prepare themselves for the possible crash of a failing Russian satellite. Luckily the spacecraft missed Australia completely and fell “harmlessly” into the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Chile. It was reported that no plutonium had leaked, but critics believe that the search was not conclusive. The plutonium may have been turned to dust by the satellite’s reentry into the atmosphere, or it may be resting on the bottom of the ocean waiting for nature to wear away its casing. All told, at least 3 of the known 24 U.S. missions involving nuclear power and at least 6 Russian missions have met with disaster. These incidents prove that accidents do happen, and that the results are very serious indeed. (Hewitt, 6).

NASA, though, maintains its stance that the RTGs can successfully withstand almost any catastrophe, and, in fact, back it up with video footage from their field tests. NASA claims to have done extensive probability testing on the possible release of radiation during the launch as well as when Cassini returns near the Earth in 1999 in a final “catapult” maneuver that will help hurl it out towards Saturn. They place the odds of plutonium release at launch are as little as 1 in 1,400 and the slingshot maneuver at only 1 in a million. Even so, if plutonium is released, it is not expected to cause a worldwide epidemic of cancer. Only a few hundred people, at most, would be at risk. (13).

Opponents to the Cassini launch believe the damage resulting from any accident will be far worse than NASA expects. Dr. Michio Kaku, a physics professor at the City University of New York, had put many hours into a lengthy counter-argument to NASA’s probability calculations. Dr. Kaku believed that if the launch vehicle exploded during lift-off, much as the Challenger did, it might have released plutonium dust into the wind. In this case, the accident would have had the potential to irradiate millions of people — a fact which NASA fails to even consider in their calculations. Dr. Kaku does not end his criticism without offering some constructive alternatives to think about. He encourages NASA to consider using heavier, admittedly cumbersome solar panels instead of plutonium and remove instrumentation to make room for the increase in weight. Or, instead of using only solar or nuclear power, NASA should consider using fuel in conjunction with the solar panels. Finally, Dr. Kaku stated that Saturn will be around for a long time to come, and NASA will have plenty of opportunities in the future to mount safer, less expensive missions.

Exploration is a part of human nature. The world would not be the same if it wasn’t for people like Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, and Lewis and Clark. It stands to reason that we’re not going to stop our exploration of our solar system any time soon. Perhaps there is something out there that is easily worth the time, money and risk involved; another life form, a cure for cancer, or a world suitable for terraforming to relieve population pressures. Fantastic ideas, perhaps, but not inconceivable.

It is also a part of human nature to make mistakes. Accidents happen, and there is no doubt that the space program will continue to have its share of problems. In the future we can expect NASA to have a number of setbacks and heartbreaks, but we can also help to minimize them. Instead of putting thousands of man hours into trying to prevent NASA from launching its missions, we should be contributing to their research involving ways to make the missions safe. With help from educated people like Dr. Kaku, as well as volunteer time and money from the activists, we could easily come up with either a viable alternative to nuclear-powered space vehicles, or a container so strong and well tested that it would convince the most skeptic critic of its safety.

The final word is that Cassini launched on October 6th without incident. In this case, at least, the critics were wrong — NASA was able to correctly gauge the risks against the benefits, and, if everything goes well in the 1999 Earth fly-by, we’ll be reviewing valuable, never-before-seen footage from our ringed, 7th planet in June, 2006.

Works Cited

Broad, William J. “Powered by Plutonium, Saturn Mission Provokes Warnings of Danger.” The New York Times. 8 Sept. 1997: A4-5.

Gagnon, Bruce. “Consequences of Launch Pad Plutonium Accident”
http://www.fcpj.cassini.com/nasa/conseq.htm. 20 Nov. 1997.

Hewitt, Don. (Producer). “5-4-3-2-1 Liftoff!” Transcript of 60 Minutes. 5 Oct. 1997.

Kaku, Michio. “Accident Risks from the Cassini Space Mission.” http://www.fcpj.cassini.com/nasa/kaku.htm. 20 Nov. 1997.

Mahal, Davinder S. “The Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, 1986.” Research Paper for Logan Multimedia. 1986.

Merzer, Martin & Long, Phil. “NASA to launch plutonium-filled rocket — Critics fear a mishap would affect millions.” Knight-Ridder Newspapers. 25 Aug. 1997.

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What? You haven’t heard? Come on, it’s been formally declared and everything! By who? I think it’s a Hallmark holiday, let me check…

No, wait, look at that. It’s just an e-mail chain letter that’s been going around! Let’s take a look:

From: Lourdes Paepke
Sent: Thursday, May 13, 2004 10:51 AM
Subject: FW: Don’t purchase gas on May 19

Hey, everyone. We all hate chain letters, but lets try and pass this one around, and also do it!

It has been calculated that if everyone in the US did not purchase a drop of gasoline for one day, and all at the same time, the oil companies would choke on their stockpiles.
Hahaha. How great would that be? Lets see how THEY feel!

At the same time, it would hit the entire industry with a net loss of over 4.6 billion dollars, which affects the bottom lines of oil companies.

Therefore, May 19th has been formally declared “Stick It Up Their BUTT Day” and we’re asking all of you not to buy a SINGLE DROP of gasoline that day!

The only way we can make any kind of impact is if you forward this email to as many people as you can, and as quickly as possible.

Waiting on the administration to step in and control prices is a long game that we’re going to have to pay for in the end. Take some control, and make your voice heard!

We can make a difference. If they don’t get the message after one day, we’ll do it again, until they do!

So do your part and spread the word. Then, mark May 19th on your calendars. Even better, put a post-it in your car reminding you not to buy gas on May 19th!

It’s time to say enough is ENOUGH!

There are so many things wrong with this I hardly know where to begin. Okay, how about we start with a little thing called “credibility?”

This e-mail smacks of misdirection. Lines like: “It has been calculated…,” “…has been formally declared…,” “The only way we can make any kind of impact…,” and my personal favorite, “Waiting on the administration to step in and control prices is a long game that we’re going to have to pay for in the end.” They all come off trying to sound very officious, but without citing any sources they appear to be nothing more than a typical internet rant. (And what does that last line even mean, anyway?)

But, okay, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. Let’s assume that some very important, official organization has provided us, the American public, with a holiday we truly need: “Stick It Up Their BUTT Day.” What now?

I guess we don’t buy any gas. I’m lucky enough to live a half-mile from my workplace and generally only top off my tank, on average, about once every month. I pay so little attention to gas prices, I can’t honestly tell you how much it costs me, but I’d guess it’s somewhere around $27 a tank. My wife drives about 4 miles to work (and usually drives home for lunch, too) but her Mazda is more fuel-efficient than my Jeep so she can get by with only two, $15 tanks per month. If you assume that gas prices have risen by 50 cents per gallon lately (which I doubt), that means I’m going to spend maybe $7.50 more each month. Oh, the pain!

I know, I know… not everyone is like me. Some people absolutely have to spend more money on gas for much longer commutes. But if they’re going to participate in our little Hallmark Moment, wouldn’t they simply gas up the day before or the day after Stick It Up Their BUTT Day? Hey, here’s a plan that’ll work: Let’s boost the oil industry’s profits on Tuesday so we can average everything out on Wednesday!

Wait, wait, wait. I was supposed to give this chain letter the benefit of the doubt. We have to stick it to the oil companies! Americans deserve lower gas prices! We need to punish these heartless corporations into lowering our prices!

I thought that oil was a global commodity and was subject to the laws of supply and demand. At least, what I learned in Econ 101 seems to point in that direction (Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand!) Okay, let’s assume that a perfect, 1-day boycott at the gas pumps will result in an industry-wide, net loss of 4.6 billion dollars like our chain letter says. Spread out over all the companies, is that even enough to cause a dent? If Exxon can survive the Valdez disaster, I’d be willing to bet the industry as a whole could lose 4.6 billon without breaking a sweat!

Whatever. We somehow still we manage to catch them with their pants down… and then kick ‘em in the nuts for good measure. The oil industry is crippled by our plan and everything is great because now they’ve got too much gasoline piled up. They’ll have to sell it cheap before the freighters arrive with the next shipment, right? They’ll have no choice but to sell it to us at a loss!

Now wait a minute. Hasn’t the resent recession has taught us what the big companies do when their bottom line is affected? They start laying people off. So now we’re trading high gas prices for an increase to the unemployment rate. The oil companies will now have fewer resources to call upon to replenish their stockpiles. Hmmm. That’ll make the supply go down… making the demand go up! We’ll just be increasing the cost of gas again!

The whole thesis of the chain letter is that gas prices are getting too high. Why is it that Americans tend to forget that we have far and away lower gas prices most any other country on this planet? And even with today’s prices on the rise, we’re not even close to our all time, inflation-adjusted high.

Let me play devil’s advocate for a minute and argue that skyrocketing gas prices could actually be a good thing.

Somewhere around 1993 or 1994 I saved up to buy my first Discman for around $200. It was by Kenwood and had an awesome feature set, including its own credit card sized remote. The only problem was that it took four AA batteries and with all that juice would barely last two hours. Quite the drawback for a portable audio device I wanted to listen to all the time.

Around seven or so years later I finally gave up that old Kenwood for a new Aiwa. This new CD player cost less than half as much and had things that Kenwood hadn’t even dreamed of back when they were rolling my old Discman off the assembly lines. Not only did the Aiwa’s 45-second anti-shock protection work like a charm, but I could also play 12 hours of music on just two AA batteries!

(As I write this, I’m listening to an MP3 player that uses just one AAA battery and it lasts for 16 hours, has no moving parts, weights about 3 ounces, and doubles as a voice recorder and USB keydrive, to boot!)

See where I’m going with this? Clearly a direct comparison to the automotive industry would be presumptuous, but it’s obvious that market forces actually work. Without an incentive, though, auto makers are quite comfortable sticking to their tried-and-true blueprints for success.

Now, the government has a habit of stepping in with incentives (we call ‘em laws), but they’re geared more towards cleaner air and fuel-efficient cars. But come on. We all know that the government doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to implementing industry-wide changes. Anyone following the digital/HDTV regs? People generally don’t like being told what to do by the government, and corporations hate it.

Even so, some companies are trying to lessen our dependency on gasoline by experimenting with battery-operated electric cars, hybrids, hydrogen powered engines, and even solar power. Think about it. What if gas prices were to keep going up? Don’t you think everyone but the OPEC nations would be doing what they could to improve the alternative power sources? I’m all for prices rising in the short term if it means that our transportation costs could be even lower in the future.

You know what? I’ve still got a quarter-tank of gas, but I might just go out and fill it up on Stick It Up Their BUTT Day, anyway.

—

By the way, Snopes has an article on this here.

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The Songfight! formula is simple and strangely appealing: Each week the webmasters-that-be post three hypothetical song titles and open the door for anyone to submit a song with the same name. Writers have only a week to write, compose, record, and upload their song before the voting begins. When the deadline passes, the discussion, reviews, and criticisms (constructive and otherwise) begin to gather in the forums. Eventually votes are submitted and tabulated and, by the end of the next week, a winner is declared and is subsequently showered with the eternal love and adoration of the selfless Internet community. Or something like that, anyway.

From the few competitions I’ve listened to, beginning to end, the songs range from very professional to embarrassingly amateur. Each competition has at least one .mp3 I want to save for later listening, but more than a couple songs are so bad that I can’t even listen to them all the way through. Reading the forums can be enjoyable and enlightening, but like any public forum on the Internet, Songfight! also has to put up with its fair share of forum trolls, and song-posting griefers.

Mike’s first entry was for the “Fight the Sea” competition and he came in forth place with 14 votes. He’s obviously holding his own in a forum of very talented musicians. I’m looking forward to seeing how his sophomore effort, “Pass/Fail” makes out when they post the results of the voting next week.

If you get a chance, navigate your way to the “Fight the Sea” page and listen to a few of the entries. You can download them individually, or simply click the “stream all” button to queue them all up (and more easily skip the real stinkers). After the voting results are posted, it’s usually pretty easy to separate the wheat from the chaff, but at least one of the underrated entries is worth mentioning: Jonathan Mann’s.

In my opinion, this was one of the best songs in the fight, and I can’t understand how it could possibly have scored only five votes! It has a cool ukulele, great lyrics, and high production values. Compare that with the (admittedly hilarious) entry by Karl’s Mom that scored 20 votes and you’ll probably see what I mean.

Obviously there are many ways to cheat a voting system like the one at Songfight!, but I don’t think that’s actually what happened here. My opinion is that it’s just too hard to listen to such disparate song styles and fairly pick a winner. What if you think the music rocks, but the lyrics suck? What if you really like a musician based on his forum participation? What about a perfect rendition of a style that you, personally, hate? (Let me tell you, I’d have a hard time giving a vote to a country or rap song just because I probably wouldn’t listen all the way through it.)

In my case, whether or not I like a song has far more to do with the music than the lyrics. In fact, on first listen, I rarely (if ever) give enough attention to the lyrics to even know what the song is about. (Hey, if I were really into lyrics, I’d probably love poetry, too. I don’t.) If the music is good, though, it’ll set the stage for multiple listens and eventually I’ll get the idea – some day I might even puzzle out the meaning behind the words.

In the case of the song submitted by Karl’s Mom, the whole intro is a spoken-word comedy which sets the stage for a rather monotone song. There’s no doubt that the introduction grabs you. There’s so much humor packed into his visual description of the year “two thousand MILLION” that the song can’t help but be memorable. But is the music worthy of being in the top five? No way.

I find that, for me, comedy is immediately accessible. Take the competition of a couple weeks ago (check the archive). The three song titles to choose from were: The Puppet’s Dream, Gettin’ All Sweaty, and Dinga Da Donga. The first two had their fair share of genre entries, but it was Dinga Da Donga’s songs that completely sold me on Songfight! I can’t usually can’t abide rap no matter how well done it is, but there were some truly awful songs done for Dinga Da Donga that I loved just because they’re were so damn funny!

I have no idea if there’s a solution that could correct this problem – of if anyone should even try. It may not work, but perhaps Songfight!’s moderators should consider a different format for voting. I would think that casting weighted votes for your top three favorites would have a better chance of getting the cream to come out on top. Then again, I can imagine only too well the outcry some people would have over changing an established system (any system – some people complain just to hear themselves). Maybe if Songfight! gets popular enough to attract the masses, the inevitable vote cheating will force them into reevaluating their system.

Songfight! has its problems, but even if only as a diverting radio station, it’s worthy of being placed on my list. If you find your way there this week, make sure you check out Mike’s “Pass/Fail” entry – and don’t forget to cast your vote!

Oh, and the obvious disclaimer: Despite what my BLA degree might say, IANAM.

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Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about one of the big conceits of sci-fi – interspecies communication. For each movie, show, or book there is usually a God-like device inserted to enable the author to get past the language barrier. Douglas Adams imagined the improbable Babel Fish (appropriately adopted by Altavista search engine geeks as the name for their web page translation tool), but it was Star Trek that introduced The Universal Translator into the public conscience.

Whatever the contrivance, the intent is the same: To shelve the language barrier in deference to the story being told. It’s understandable. As a viewer, can you imaging watching every sci-fi story with a realistic alien language barrier? You would either have to read a lot of subtitles or miss out on half the story. Of course, if written well, the process of communication barriers could be very interesting – but how many authors or scriptwriters have the ability to create entire languages while telling a compelling story?

It wasn’t until high school that I came across my first spell checker (stick with me here!) Back then they were still fairly simplistic – mine could tell me if a word wasn’t in a dictionary, but not much else. Before long (college, in my case) clever Microsoft programmers introduced new thesaurus and grammar checking features, and it occurred to me recently that these may have been the first steps toward a true Universal Translator.

Think about it. With Word’s ability to spell-check in real time (underlining enigmatic words in your document with wavy red and green lines) it must be going through all sorts of cross-referencing in background databases. I’m sure it wasn’t long after Word became widespread that some cunning linguist realized that translation software would be a piece of cake. All you’d need is fast processing and two big, linked databases. 20,000 English words linked to 20,000 Spanish words – how easy as that? Click the “Translate” button and your fancy program could simply substitute each Spanish word for its equivalent in English.

I had exactly that by the time I was enrolled in my college’s Spanish Literature class, and let me tell you, it wasn’t worth much more than a speedy dictionary. Anyone that’s studied another language can tell you that direct, written translations are not altogether useful. Most of the time, they can give you a good clue towards the meaning of a sentence, but that’s about it.

In studying Spanish, it never ceases to amaze me how many similarities and cognates it shares with English. (Conversely, studying Russian amazes me how few similarities I can find – and I’m comparing it to two languages!) Sometimes the resemblance is obvious. Any English word ending in –tion, for instance, is essentially the same in Spanish — but often it goes deeper than that. Take this sentence: “I have to go to the store.” In Spanish you would say, “Tengo que ir a la tienda.” What’s interesting is that you use the verb “to have” in both cases. Why is that interesting? Well, “to have” usually indicates possession (i.e., I have a car.), but in both languages you use the same verb, the same conventions even, to indicate obligation.

Of course, if parallels like that were universal, becoming fluent in Spanish would be effortless. Often a very common saying in English has no translation in Spanish. “Can I have a ride?” can’t be expressed in Spanish because there is no noun for “ride.” And let’s not get started on idiomatic expressions… If you think someone might be teasing you, in Spanish you might ask, “¿Me estás tomando el pelo?” or “Are you taking my hair?” Doesn’t make much sense, but then when you think about it, neither does: “Are you pulling my leg?”

Have you every really thought about phrases like:

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush?
He let the cat out of the bag?
Or a great one I learned from my grandfather: …So nervous he was pinching his seat.

An episode of Stargate SG-1 was the catalyst that brought all these thoughts together in my head. In it, two members of the SG team are caught in a “time loop” and are forced to repeat 6 hours of the same day. It takes them “months” to break the loop because they are forced to learn Latin in order to translate the instructions on the time machine. The story takes a whimsical approach to what someone might do in six hours if they knew that there would be no consequences to their action – resigning after kissing a coworker one day, taking advantage of the Stargate to hit a golf ball across the galaxy another.

At the end of the episode, the main character used the phrase “The King of Groundhog Day” to describe his situation. Of course, he tells this to an alien character and we have to assume that the Universal Translation makes it understandable (or we could choose to assume that the alien speaks English – I’d rather not.) Think about that. What would a Universal Translator have to say in order to get that particular point across in a truly alien language?

Let’s take a stab at it, but to simplify, we’ll ignore the pitfalls associated with grammar. Believe me, from trying to learn Russian, I can vouch for the fact that even simple things like articles and prepositions might not function the same (or even exist!) in other languages. Let’s just focus on the remaining nouns, shall we? And for bonus points, we won’t even use a dictionary!

“The King of Groundhog Day.” Hmmm, well, “king” should be fairly easy to translate. How about “leader of a nation?” Okay, not quite. How about “principal leader of a nation usually established by birthright.” Okay, good.

“Groundhog Day” is a little harder. A “day” is “one complete axial revolution of the 3rd planet in the solar system.” (I leave it to the reader to figure out what’s wrong with using “solar system.”) “Groundhog” would be the easiest word to translate… if the alien knew what a groundhog was. I doubt it, but let’s hope they have mammals, because I don’t want to get into internal gestation and lactation distinctions. Let’s go with: “A furry, non-sentient animal that lives in a hole in the ground.”

That’s all fine and dandy, but we haven’t even come close to explaining what Groundhog Day is about. To do that, our Universal Translator will have to explain how, on a specific day of the year, people traditionally gather to watch a Groundhog emerge from his hole and observe it looking for his shadow, and if he sees it, the winter season will have been assumed to have been extended. Okay, I’m not going to even try to break up that run-on sentence for translation!

Oh, but we’re not even done. Even assuming that we could get all that information across to the alien, for him to understand the original comment, a translator would have to explain something else: That there was a movie that captured the public’s conscience for a time, and in that movie, the protagonist was forced to endure the same day repeatedly.

Put together, even on the most basic level, that’s a massive amount of information to convey. (To be the principal leader by birthright of a nation for one complete axial rotation of the 3rd planet of the solar system during which a small, furry animal is, one time in each of the planet’s orbit around its sun, observed searching for its shadow to establish upcoming meteorological events, said with irony with respect to a movie in one of the planet’s societies’ conscience about a man forced to repeat the same duration of the planet’s axial rotation many times.) In cases like this (a very common one across alien races and even human cultures, I would imagine), I can’t decide what would be worse: A direct translation, or a complete one. Either way, it’s going to be hard as hell to make yourself understood!

One of the writers for Star Trek; The Next Generation, must have been thinking about languages, too, when he or she wrote “Darmok.” The dilemma in that episode was that, while the Universal Translators were working, their direct translations of everything meant nothing to the characters trying to communicate. Eventually the captain of the Enterprise discovered that the alien race spoke only in metaphors. Without an historical context, the humans were only able to understand the individual words, not the meaning behind them. It’s not quite the same as trying to communicate in idiomatic expressions, but it’s close enough for government work.

It all comes down to your point of reference. So much of a way in which a language is created is dependent on the shared experiences of a society. I wonder: Is language necessary outside society? Differing societies have different collections of experiences and therefore have different words, grammar, and concepts to describe them.

So, will anyone ever build a Universal Translator? Oh, they’re already on their way. My trusty copy of Microsoft Word can tell me when I mistype (not misspell!) you’re and your; they’re, their, and there; or its and it’s. And, more impressively, after I type a sentence in Spanish instead of English, Word will switch over and spell-check my document against a Spanish dictionary. (Which really freaked me out the first time all those red lines switched places!)

Grammar checkers are beginning to understand context, but judging by the number of times I get green underlines and choose not to accept the program’s suggestions, they still have a long way to go. Computers are great at sorting through massive amounts of information in very short periods of time, but they’re not at all “smart.” Unless software engineers make big breakthroughs in coding fuzzy new types of logic, we won’t have a real Universal Translators until computers develop artificial intelligence.

Bummer. If science fiction has taught me anything, it’s that artificially intelligent computers will be far more interested in our destruction than our translation!

(By the way, I just love that if Microsoft Word had had it’s way, you would have read: “…fantastic descriptions of utopian or dustpan futures…” in my opening paragraph!)

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For instance, the Drive-Thru at McDonald’s (Called the “Auto-Mac” in the Spanish-speaking world – how wacky is that?) is always empty and, at the intersection nearby, it’s actually possible to make a left turn (if you live in Juneau, you know what I’m talkin’ about!) And if, like me, you find yourself using your lunch break to run errands, it’s nice to know that the lines at Costco and at the bank are quite short at 2pm. For the most part, late lunches rock.

You know what totally sucks about a late lunch here in Juneau, though? Go on… Take a guess!

AM Radio. That’s what you were thinking, right? Oh, yeah. I’m sure it was your second guess.

In three cross-country driving trips, I developed a sort of love/hate relationship with AM radio stations. Pre-XM Satellite radio, on a long-distance trip, you would constantly find yourself switching stations. Even the most powerful FM broadcasters would only stay with you for about a half-hour on each end of a big city. Just when you find the perfect station, it would fade back into static leaving you cruising the frequencies with the scan button.

AM at least gave you slightly more listening time because the signals propagated farther. (In fact, I remember hanging out with Sheldon some nights in Ketchikan, each eating a pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, and cruising the AM dial to pick up stations from Seattle, Vancouver, even Japan!) Even on the trips where I was forced to drive through British Colombia, long sections of the road had only AM reception. They might have been only logging reports, but at least it was something to listen to.

Now I actually like to listen to AM talk radio stations when I drive. Eventually, even the best mix CDs grow old in your car, and music stations bother me because I end up waiting through a dozen songs I hate just to hear one that I like. Doesn’t matter what station it is, they never come close to matching my musical tastes. Talk radio is usually more engaging, at least for me, because I find myself actively listening to and thinking about the programs.

In the mornings, on my 2-minute trip to work, I’ll catch a piece of the Glenn Beck program or maybe Rush Limbaugh. Afternoons, sometimes, I’ll listen to Mike Reagan’s talk show. Even at night, usually when driving home from late ultimate games, The Laura Ingram show might be on. And of course, every hour (on the hour!) will be a brief CBS news snippet.

At this point, I’m so far off on a tangent that you’ve probably forgotten that I have a problem with late lunches. Let’s get back on track. You see, when I take my lunches in the early afternoon, I almost always catch a piece of the Dr. Laura Schlessinger program. To put it mildly, this woman annoys me.

You’ll just have to trust me when I tell you that I’m not one to form opinions about people without first giving them the benefit of the doubt. In fact, when they have very little bearing on my life, I usually don’t consider what they say and do much at all. But this Dr. Laura character (and how she conducts her show) is just so hard to stomach.

Let’s back up a step and consider one of the other talk radio hosts I mentioned. Rush Limbaugh is a good one. Sure, you’re not going to like him if you don’t share his political views. He definitely takes the party line on every single topic – even going so far as to use “blatantly ignoring his caller’s points” as a debate skill. But in his defense, he’s obviously educated, he listens to what people have to say, and then either agrees with them or vehemently argues with them.

(And here I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt. Let’s take his stance on the war with Iraq. I’ve heard callers, Democrats to be sure, call in to tell him their opinion that they don’t think we should go to war on moral grounds. A typical Rush answer? “So you believe we should just do nothing? Just let them continue their reign of terrorism and development of weapons of mass destruction?” He presents going to war and doing nothing as our only two choices and leaves the caller foundering. I can’t believe that when he cuts a caller like that off the line that he really believes that they didn’t have another alternative in mind – say, working within the United Nations’ guidelines, leveling economic sanctions, or what have you. No, I suspect Rush simply cuts them off to make them appear ignorant and to appease those that are already in agreement with him. If he really does think that the world is as black and white as he makes it out to be on his program, well, I guess he’s a bigger idiot than I give him credit for… But at least he’s still entertaining!)

So how is Dr. Laura different? For one, she’s downright rude to the people that call her. With Rush, I somehow find this attitude more acceptable. You’d be a fool to try to argue with him when he holds all the cards – he can put you on mute or hang up on you at any time. And besides, you’ll never convince him to cross the Republican Party’s line, anyway. But the people that are calling Dr. Laura are, in many cases, different. They are in dire need of advice – personal advice – to help them through tough emotional situations.

Make no mistake, Dr. Laura is just as opinionated as any other radio talk show host (and that’s saying something!) She has set herself up to be a proponent of family values and, to her, there is no gray area. Your relationship with your nuclear family is the most important thing in the world, and she never deviates from her moral stance.

I don’t want to paint you a picture of “Arlo vs. the Family Values.” I come from a family where my parents divorced when I was 11 years old, and I lived, for a time, with a stepfather and stepbrother. I know the importance of family values, but I also realize that there are always extenuating circumstances.

The problem with Dr. Laura’s show begins as soon as someone calls in and, more often than not, Dr. Laura starts making assumptions. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard her verbally cut a caller off in order to render an answer before she even hears the background info! How can you render judgement on someone without listening to his or her entire story?

“Dr. Laura, I really need your help. I’m thinking about getting a divorce from my husband and I’m worried about my kids…”
“Don’t divorce him. Work it out.”
“But, Dr. Laura…”
“No buts… You love your children, don’t you?”
“Yes, but…”
“No buts! If you love your children, and you understand that to raise them effectively they need a father, then you know that you’ll have to work it out with him.”
“But…”
“Next caller.”
(Starring at the disconnected phone in her hand) “But my husband sexually and emotionally abuses me in front of them…”

Okay, so maybe it’s not quite that bad, but if you’ve listened to the show for any length of time, you’ll realize I’m not too far off the mark. The point I’m trying to make here isn’t that she’s too abrupt or too terse with callers. Far from it… it’s a radio talk show and I’m sure they’re working under tight time constraints. You can’t have a caller chatting on the line for a half an hour now, can you? No, what Dr. Laura does, or rather doesn’t do, is listen to her callers.

“Dr. Laura, my mother-in-law-to-be wants me to change our wedding date…”
“So, do it.”
“Well…”
“You want to be happy, don’t you?”
“Yes, but…”
“Then do it. You don’t want to start your new life together fighting with his family.”
“Okay, but…”
“No buts, just change the date.”
“Yes, but my mother…”
“Oh, “Your mother!” “His mother! Just go out and do the right thing!”
(This one was actually a true exchange, if paraphrased)

Yes, granted, Dr. Laura can’t be expected to tell them only what they want to hear. (It’s rather obvious that some of the callers are trying to settle an argument by bringing in the opinion of “an expert.”) But with a little empathy, she might realize that many people are in situations that can’t be simply remedied. Sometimes it appears as though she doesn’t even realize that people are calling out for help.

I really feel for the people that are facing a true dilemma when they call Dr. Laura looking for advice. If Dr. Laura would just listen sometimes and render her advice in a apologetic, yet soothing way that doesn’t take the caller one step closer to suicide, that’d be something. But, no. I just don’t get it… maybe “soothing and apologetic” would lower her ratings. I’m sure there’s an audience out there that just loves to hear people “put in their place” on the radio.

Well, I’m not one of them and I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve stabbed the power button on my radio with the only sentence that seems adequate echoing through my mind: “That bitch!”

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