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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Rest In Peace, Capt. Phil 


...I don't care about Tiger Woods. Tiger Woods isn't a real person who does real work for a living and I could care less if his rightfully aggrieved Swedish model trophy wife chases him from their exclusive Florida enclave all the way to Casper, Wyoming, with a heart full of hate and a fist full of Big Bertha driver. I care about real people who do real things. Almost all of the time, those real people and their real lives, no matter how hard or brutal or heroic, are anonymous to all but their friends and loved ones, but once in a while there is the chance for a larger audience to drop in and see what it is all about. "Dangerous Catch" is a passion that I have acquired over the last several years, mostly because it provides a hard look into the working lives of otherwise anonymous men who live way farther out on that lonely remote "live/die" edge than most people could ever imagine, much less venture out toward...

When you think about it, what these men do for a living - captains and crews alike - is crazy (although I realize that the idea of walking off into a flaming forest armed with nothing more than Nomex clothing and a pulaski might look the same). But they have been my kind of crazy, and Capt. Phil Harris was a core part of that crazy group. He lived a real life in front of all of us, battling bad seas and cold crab beds and family issues and health issues and all the rest. I am probably most sad about the fact that we have been so obsessed with things that don't really matter that, despite the fact that Capt. Phil first suffered his stroke almost a month ago and passed away a couple of weeks ago, any real broader media acknowledgment of his passing only came in the last few days...

Fair seas and peaceful skies, Capt. Phil. You will be missed. I pray that God's peace and comforting healing will be with your family...

(photo courtesy of www.corneliamaria.com)
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:14 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

If I Ran Ford Motor Company... 

...I would be on the first flight out of Detroit tomorrow morning, on my way to Lake Mary, Florida, to meet with the members of the local school board to make them an offer that they could not refuse. They are in a bit of a bind right now because, as it so happens, their high school mascot logo (the Fighting Lake Mary Rams) is an exact duplicate of the logo that the Chrysler Corporation uses for its Dodge pickups. The Chrysler Corp. has noticed; the Chrysler Corp. is not amused...

If I were the CEO of Ford Motor Company, I would fly economy class or drive a Toyota Prius or hitchhike on a Chevy car carrier or make whatever travel arrangements necessary to get to the next meeting of the Lake Mary school board so that I may suggest that maybe they could be Mustangs, instead of Rams, and I would offer to license my company's Mustang symbol to them for 10 bucks a year. I would sweeten the deal by offering to pay for the expense (estimated by the Principal to be many, many tens of thousands of dollars) necessary to expunge all evidence of the offending Rams logo from the school campus. Tee shirts, backpacks, and benches for everyone!! Gymnasium center court logo needs to be replaced? Done!!

The reasons I would do this are few and simple, primarily centered on the fundamental that the bean counters and mindless minions at the Chrysler headquarters are just simply nuts. If one cares to spin a high school analogy out just a little bit, the picture in any high school year book beside the caption "Least Likely To Succeed" is going to be the entire corporate headquarters building of the Chrysler Corporation. This is a company that clearly doesn't get it, from a public relations standpoint; rather than celebrating any group that wants to hook up with them, the least of the Big Three managed to stagger haplessly into third place one more time, selling less than half as many full size "Ram" trucks as either Ford or General Motors in 2009. If bean counters and losers weren't at the helm of this rapidly sinking ship, there would probably be an opportunity to realize that supporting - rather than legally attacking - any group that might want to honor the Ram logo is A Good Thing. Chrysler's minions are, unfortunately, prisoners of a long-lost past, trapped in the blinding haze of a sort of reflected glory that hasn't actually been Chrysler's reality for a couple of decades...

If I ran Ford Motor Company, I do believe I would step in here - in a totally altruistic gesture, of course - to help this poor little Florida in its time of need. Lake Mary Mustangs, anyone?
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:14 PM 4 comments

Monday, February 15, 2010

How Slow Can You Go 

...it could have been an epiphanal moment as I listened to this story on Orygun Public Broadcasting just a little while ago. It wasn't, but it could have been, because I have spent this work holiday surrounded by various elements of modern technology. While exchanging a flurry of text messages with my first-born, I was editing this humble little blog's template to bring in Blogger comments (which I don't actually like all that much, but the utility is free) to replace Haloscan comments (which worked just fine for the last six years but is now "NEW AND IMPROVED" and costs money). After I wrapped all that up, I logged in remotely to the Borg to deal with some work issues from the disturbing comfort of my bedroom 'office' (and if I had packed my Borg laptop home, I could have logged into a Citrix site and been "virtual", which I can assure you is just exactly what I want to be on my day off yessireebob)...

At some point, the thought crossed my mind "whatever happened to reading books or watching TV or calling someone to exchange information...or even not doing work stuff unless I go to the trouble of actually driving to the work site to do it?" I'm certainly not a Luddite; the choices available to me in my line of work would consist of either being violently hurled out the front door of the office or quietly ushered out the back exit if I refused to learn each and every little bit of up-to-the-minute technology that is amusingly offered up as the newest, bestest work-easing time-saving thing; cell phones are - as far as the initial imagining of these devices is concerned - a pretty cool technology that I struggle to remember how I lived without (even as the Great State of Orygun declares that I had darned well better pull off to the side of the road if I want to chat on one). And I really, really wish I could get a Digital Video Recorder (and maybe even HDTV), but just playing out in my mind the likely trajectory of the discussion with my Financial Advisor in an effort to establish just what exactly is the need for such stuff makes me just be quiet and be happy that I have TV's that display color pictures...

Why, though, do I need cameras in my phones? Both my work and personal phones have them and neither is nearly as capable as the digital cameras that I have for both work and home. Why should cell phones have app's and Internet access and Bluetooth, and why would I want to wander around appearing to be babbling randomly to myself with some sort of device worthy of Lieutenant Uhura sticking out of my ear? Why do my cell phone voice mail inboxes have a pass code, when the bigger tragedy would be some bad guy having my friggin' phone rather than access to my voice mails?

The world has TIVO; I have TV Guide and a handy excuse to occasionally get out of some get-together I would otherwise drink my own bathwater rather than attend ("sorry, the Big Game is on then"). The world has 3G cell service and is headed fast toward 4G cell service; I have a couple of cell phones that let me call and text and don't work when I push that little "off" button and nobody charges me for anything but talking and texting (and, unlike my boss, I cannot harass my employees with Blackberry emails zooming in from every quadrant of the celestial map). The world has cutting edge laptop computers that can do fractal geometry while simultaneously streaming YouTube videos and updating MyFace sites and collecting Twitter feeds and playing GTA:SA, all of which can be stored - along with the entire contents of the Library of Congress - on their capacious hard drives; I have a 5-year-old Dell with a 40-gig hard drive and 2 USB ports...

I don't have any particular interest in setting the clock back to 1985. There is too much cool stuff out there, and most of what I think of as cool stuff is controllable by me. So I won't go back to 1985; 2005 is, on the other hand, negotiable...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:53 PM 1 comments

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