CKB: Prognosticator

Three things I thought would happen that have come true.

Ban on all carry-on luggage on airlines
When predicted: Early 2002
When the new TSA rules went into effect after 9/11, I figured that it would be only a matter of time when the prohibition would be expanded to include all carry-ons. As of this morning, this has now happened because of fear of “the liquid bomb.” Of course, fear sells a lot of ad revenue regardless of whether the fear is reasonable or even makes any goddamn sense (quote from CNN: “Don’t use your cellphone within 50 feet of a suspicious object, you might detonate something…”) Case in point, these TSA workers who have ordered “potentially dangerous liquids” to be emptied into a tank of other “potentially dangerous liquids.” Maybe it’s just me, but don’t you think that if something is airplane-unsafe, a big container full of the stuff in an airport is, um, really unsafe?

Remember, the TSA is here to protect you.

Anyone care to take any wagers on how long this ban will stay in effect and/or when it is expanded to include domestic flights? Assuming that the terrorist plot of this morning is legitimate, you could argue that the terrorists achieved a partial success in terms of permanently disrupting passenger air traffic, given now that you’re recommended to arrive at an airport a full four hours before departing.

Also, anyone care to wager on how soon this “victory over terrorism” will be connected to a strong and vigorous domestic spying program?

Soviet-style tourism (not to be confused with Soviet-era tourism)
When predicted: Early 1991
As soon as the Berlin Wall collapsed and Germany set about reunifying, I predicted that Checkpoint Charlie would become a tourist attraction and that paintball fans would soon be re-enacting escapes with one group playing the East German military and the other group as escapees. I suppose it was a little too much for the Irvine Albertsons grocery store I was in when I was exclaiming this to friends, as some guy shouted “that’s not funny!” at me.

Apparently, the current lag time between political oppression and ironic political oppression entertainment is fifteen years. Take a trip to Club Gulag…

Care to stay the night in a former KGB prison in Latvia? How about a weekend in an abandoned gulag 100 miles above the Arctic Circle? Or do you just want to make like a Volga boatman, pulling a barge up the river? According to The Age, the night at the KGB prison is already a hot destination for masochistic tourists. “On some nights, for extra money, they call out the guard, and the shivering guests can witness a mock execution, with the ‘corpse’ being flung like a sack of potatoes into a lorry before being driven away, presumably for a reviving cuppa,” Allan Hall writes. “Once past the humiliating stripping and donning of prison garb, the gruelling physical exercise regime, the interrogation and the solitary confinement cell—for those that answer back to Ivan—there is dinner. It is a delicious melange of stale rye bread, pickled fish heads, pressed meat from some unidentifiable mammal, pickles and black, sweet Russian tea.”

Manic home buying speculators = Manic home losing foreclosings
When predicted: 2005
Home buyers in 2006 = tulip speculators

“Orange County’s foreclosures nearly doubled in June, rising to 65 property sales from 35 in May. Overall, foreclosure activity, including default warnings to delinquent homeowners, was up 60 percent last month, the report shows. The county had 639 new foreclosure filings last month, up from 399 in May.”

As one commenter noticed, a big November housing tax installment payment may put a big wet blanket on Christmas spending. Stay tuned for unexpected ripple effects coming soon to a shaky economy near you!

The South African Riviera

Audi has some fun with a speed camera in South Africa, but what I zeroed in on is that fantastic 1972 Buick Riviera boattail merrily cruising along. I used to own a 1972 Riviera years ago and I’m pretty sure that South African one is a 1972 since there’s no vents on the trunk lid. Nice to see one so far from home in such great condition. Can’t tell if it’s right-hand drive – it’s pretty rare if it is.

P.S. Attention Autoblog: 228K for a 369 x 417 picture is friggin’ ridiculous! Do you just not know how to optimize a jpg for the web, or do you just like wasting money on bandwidth? Even a basic Photoshop “save for web” drops it down to 32K.

FileMaker serial number follies

For the past couple of days I’ve been bonking myself on the head repeatedly trying to figure out what would seem to be a simple FileMaker operation. I want to create an alphanumeric serial number that increments as follows:

A1
A2
A3
…
A998
A999
B1
B2
B3

…and so on until it rolls over at Z999 and resets back to A1. Resetting is OK – there’s no need to keep a permanent archive as once these references have passed out of the larger tracking system they just get deleted.

In a sudden flash of post-ice coffee-enhanced thought, I came up with the solution. Make sure that the serial field is set to auto-enter a serial number on commit. Set “Next value” to A1 and “increment by” to 1. Create a “New Record” script that looks like this:

New Record/Request
If [ Int(SerialField) > 998 ]
Set Next Serial Value [ SerialField ;
Let ( [
alphabet="ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" ;
CurrentLetter = Left( SerialField ; 1 ) ;
CurrentLetterPosition = Position ( alphabet ; CurrentLetter ;
1 ; 1 ) + 1 ] ;
Middle ( alphabet ; CurrentLetterPosition ; 1 ) & 1 )
]
End If
Commit Records/Requests

It’s an obvious solution in retrospect and I can’t believe it had been vexing me for so long.

The Official Beer Of Global Warming

When you’re in Sisimiut and you’ve finished up your lovely Chinese dinner, don’t forget to pick up some Greenlandic beer on the way home.

A brewery in Greenland is producing beer using water melted from the ice cap of the vast Arctic island. The brewers claim that the water is at least 2,000 years old and free of minerals and pollutants.

The first 66,000 litres of the new dark and pale ales are on their way to the Danish market.

The beer from Greenland – a semi-autonomous Danish territory – costs 37 kroner (£3.40; five euros) per half-litre bottle.

It is the first ever Inuit microbrewery – located in Narsaq, a hamlet 625km (390 miles) south of the Arctic Circle.

…

It is claimed that the Greenland beer, officially launched in Copenhagen on Monday, has a softer, cleaner taste than other beers, because of the ice cap water.

El Lay

My rant about “Silver Lake” and a subsequent conversation with Nicholas reminded me of some old struggles over how to pronounce “Los Angeles.” A series of fights that involved rival car dealers and a separate fight between the Los Angeles Times and the east coast.

Back in the 1920s, the Los Angeles Times promoted the Spanish “Loce Ahng-hail-ais” pronunciation, even printing the Spanish phonetic pronounciation below the editorial page masthead. The popular pronunciation was the anglicized “Loss An-je-les,” and when the U.S. Geographic Board officially recognized that pronunciation in 1934, the Times was outraged, complaining that the pronunciation made the city “sound like some brand of fruit preserve” and intimated that Easterners were plotting to remove Spanish pronunciations all along the west coast and that “Sandy Ego,” “San Joce,” and “San Jokkin” were next.

Meanwhile, the rivalry between Packard dealer and NBC broadcast station magnet Earle Anthony and Cadillac dealer and CBS broadcast station magnet Don Lee spilled over into pronunciation. The NBC stations (KFI and KECA) used the common “Loss An-je-les” pronunciation, however Don Lee insisted on a hard-G pronunciation for KHJ announcers: “Los ANG-less.” Lee died of a heart attack in the 1930s, but the hard-G pronunciation continued to be used through the late 1940s.

You can sort-of hear the early KHJ pronunciation in the 1931 aircheck file at the top of this page.

2011-07-15 update: The LA Times looks back at the different pronunciations.

Putting the Silver in Silver Lake

Los Angeles City Nerd throws down the authority on the proper name for Silver Lake. Folks, it’s TWO WORDS, not one word. May the ghost of Herman Silver smite you otherwise.

People who contract it into one word are clearly newbie hipster gentrifiers who are not to be trusted. As a geography snob, misuses like this are a completely irrational hot button issue with me.

Still unsolved (so far) is the name origin for Silver Dry Lake – the basin just northeast of Baker. I suspect that it’s related to the long defunct Silver King mine, but during the era (1900 – 1940) when the Tonopah & Tidewater Railroad was operating there was a small town on the line called Silver Lake. Only a few foundations and a cemetery are left, but on older road maps you still might see a “Silver Lake” listed there.

Dead Car - Silver Dry LakeI had no idea that folks had found meteorites at the desert Silver Lake. Best I was ever able to do was this wreckage of an indeterminate-looking car embedded in the playa.

More Harbies!

Harbie #1 (Harbor Blvd.)I recalled from some net research that there was supposed to be another Harbie The Harbor Gasoline Seal on Harbor Blvd. in either Garden Grove or Anaheim and a short drive revealed not just one, but TWO new Harbies – both of them cheerfully guarding the front of an RV park in Garden Grove.

These are actually Harbies #3 & #4, Harbie #2 is at a used car lot in Bellflower that I don’t have a picture of yet. Of course, there’s the Bisbee Harbie that started it all.

Karl Precoda on, well, everything

Matt Maxwell (who provided the cover art for the album) interviewed Karl for the Ptolemaic Terrascope back in the day and the full interview never made it into the mag but Matt posted the complete text on his blog. Read here for a macroscopic discussion on The Drone, the psychology of people who want to be in a band, and the dog biscuit factory.

K: Not exactly. That just seems the inevitable objective analysis. Simply because, when I started trying to play rock years ago, I wanted to be in the [Rock] tradition. I wanted money and girls and fame. For about a minute.

M: Say it isn’t so…

K: Oh, well. When you’re 16, things look pretty bleak on the other side of that Pink Floyd album cover. You start thinking about ways to re-invent things. But that lasts for about a second until punk rock comes along and blows things away. And then the lifelong project to destroy all music…(laughter)…starts to take form.

I was just contemplating this question of just what LDOM does. And I cannot conceive of it exactly in terms of tradition. Certainly there are going to be people who can listen to it and say “indeed this is in the tradition of free music.” But it seems to me what we’re actually doing particularly, is a very singular thing. But LDOM is not consciously avant-garde. We’re not pushing the theoretical limit of art. We’re not trying to stretch a conceptual boundary, or to challenge a listener in any way.

M: You’re not bemoaning “the tyranny of the 4:4 beat.”

K: Hell, no. We like that. The only reason that makes it worth listening to is that it rocks out. That’s the problem that Rock has, is that stuff that rocks out is really rare. Lots of people plod and some of them thud. A few of them swing a little.

M: But very few rock?

K: Actually, a lot of people rock, but it’s pretty predetermined. That is, you’re not too often surprised. And generally, audiences don’t want to be surprised.

Visit mysterious cabbages on the Last Days Of May web site.

The Man Who Invented Himself

There’s a bucketload of obituaries on the net and I wager that at least 90% of them contain the phrase “drug addled” or some sort of variation. I know I shouldn’t be surprised by that, but that casual dismissal grates on me. Yes I know that Syd was(is) It Guy Number One for the psychedelic phase of Swinging London and yes, part of the price paid for being that icon is a heroic consumption of drugs of all variations. And OK sure, drugs played a part in exacerbating his already erratic behavior. We all know the stories and Syd’s life is as fundamental to the rock-and-roll bedrock as Brian Wilson’s sandbox or Keith Moon’s hotel room. My objection to the cautionary tale of “creative genius takes drugs, never creates again” is the implied passive-aggressive outrage. As if there’s some kind of creator/consumer trade deficit. How dare this guy check out of being a pop star, after all we’ve done for him!

I think all of us were secretly hoping or even expecting that Syd would have eventually returned. Maybe not a gig, but probably a public “thank you for all your support” or something. There’s precedent too: Peter Green showed up after years in the wilderness and after all kinds of improbabilities, Brian Wilson finished and performed Smile. I remember back in the 90s there was a rumor that R.E.M. had offered a million dollars to Syd if he would enter a recording studio again, even if nothing was released. Just a couple years ago, after years of non-recognition and acknowledgement, reclusive painter Roger Barrett signed a book of vintage-era photographs of himself as “Syd.”

A return would have been just too neat of an ending and ultimately Syd left us with no answers at all – only questions encoded into a couple hours’ worth of music. Still, what a catalog: top pop songs, ultra-experimental abstractness, furious garage rock, children’s lullabies – enough rocket fuel not just for Pink Floyd, but the countless others that plugged into it. No wonder McCartney was sniffing around the door of Abbey Road during the recording of The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn. Yesterday, I listened to “See Emily Play” and after 1.23E+11 listens I’m still hearing new things in it (just how loud is that electric guitar in the break before the last chorus?). Even b-side “Candy And A Currant Bun” would be enough to be the centerpiece of an entire album of Nuggets material.

Ultimately though, once you get past the songs you bonk up against the same questions that dog analysts of any artist who’s critical breakthrough runs concurrent with mental breakdown. Which drives which? Syd himself was the closest on-scene narrator despite layers of unreliability. There’s not much in the way of spiritual narratives, quests for enlightenment, or an occasional door of perception. Syd wrote about himself and how he perceived the world, each time adding some layer of unreality to it like Louis Wain’s famous progression of increasing psychotic cat paintings. Hmmm… Syd wrote a song about a cat too.

Being a pop star isn’t exactly congruent with undiagnosed acute schizophrenia though and it seems like the deck was stacked against Syd from the beginning. To address the annoying “acid casualty” phrase again, I can’t help but wonder if Syd was really trying to chemically address a reality that was rapidly slipping through his fingers. He seems sad in this clip, or maybe just annoyed from having to answer such hostile questions.

I’m not quite sad, but maybe melancholy. There’s always the records and they still mean as much to be now as they did twenty-six years ago when I plunked the needle down on “Astronomy Domine” and shouted “WHATTHEHELLISTHAT!?” I’m angy at the thought of knowing that there are some twats out there who are saying “Dude, let’s do shrooms on Syd’s grave!” I hope that he found some sort of peace and equilibrium with the world and it’s the world’s duty to let him enjoy it. In the meantime there’s a wonderful set of puzzles left behind. RIP.