The story that follows is true. Names have been changed to protect the innocent.
The year 2001 started out well enough, but with September began a bit of a slump, for reasons that should be obvious. Christmas left me with little to celebrate that year, newly unemployed and wondering what I'd be doing next. So, when we all decided to go to the midnight Christmas Eve service, that gave me something to look forward to. I had never been to a midnight service before. It promised to be something new, something wonderful, and something inspirational.
It lived up to the new part. I'm still not sure about the rest.
We had been attending the little Presbyterian church for about three months, maybe four. We had all enjoyed the experience so far. The interim minister had just preached his last service, and we were sorry to see him go. The new minister hadn't started yet. As I understand it, there's a list of pastors without regular commitments who will preach on an as-needed basis, and we had rounded up one of these. He came with good recommendations, and had done well with the earlier service. So, we settled in for a comforting, enlightening message about the Advent of our Savior.
Right away, it became apparent that something was simply not right.
You have to understand something about Presbyterians. They live and die by the Book of Order. There is a very specific sequence in which things are to happen within a service. You can almost set your watch by the order of worship. In, say, a Baptist service, the minister might well deviate from the plan if he thinks of something better; in a Presbyterian service you bloody well stick with it to the bitter end. It is simply the way it is done.
So, when the minister began skipping around within the order of worship, we suspected something might be up.
He called for the offering mighty early. He skipped around with the hymns, which flustered the choir director mightily. He even skipped a few hymns, I think. Parts of that evening are still a blur. But the staff rolled with the punches fairly well, and the thing hung together, up to the time he began his message. We settled back into our pews, expecting a sweet message on the miracle of Christmas, the birth of the Christ child.
Oh, no. It wasn't going down that way, not at all. Those poor, unsuspecting Presbyterians looked on in mute horror as the Right Reverend Punchy MacAngry regaled them with a fiery sermon on the Gospel of the Two-Fisted Fightin' Jesus.
"I hear all this talk about love, but no one ever wants to talk about SIN," he thundered from the pulpit. I thought this to be a decidedly odd way to begin a Christmas sermon. It went downhill from there. He went on to rant about his sister, who had apparently told him once that being a military chaplain wasn't a man's job. His response: "It takes more of a man to preach the Word of God than to be out WHORING AROUND!" I had never actually heard anyone curse from the pulpit before. Oh sure, I have heard ministers talk about Hell and damnation. But outright cursing is something I hadn't heard in that venue before that night. And the fist-shaking rage, the purple-faced profanity-laced tirades, which would not be at all out of place for a Marine Corps drill instructor, but not quite what you expect from a mild-mannered Presbyterian minister.
Me, I was bewildered and somewhat confused by all this. But I had been raised by a retired Senior Master Sergeant, cussed at by an experienced professional, and didn't take any of it personally. The other poor people in that room, who had not been so inoculated, stood transfixed like deer in headlamps. The white-hot profanity seared their ears like branding irons. When the tirade finally wound down to a conclusion, you could hear a pin drop.
The choir director somehow had the presence of mind to direct the conclusion of the service, Christmas hymns sung by candlelight.
It was more or less at this point that my sister-in-law's hair caught fire.
Part of our goal in going to the late service was to tire out the children so that they would sleep in the next morning. (A dismal failure, by the way. They woke up as early as they always do.) Problem was, they were so tired, they couldn't hold the candles without setting fire to themselves. She leaned down to help one of her kids hold it steady, and one of the locks of her hair dipped into the candle's flame. The fire wasn't big, thank God, but she had to beat it out or it would have spread.
After the last hymn, the crowd filed out in silence. Not the respectful silence following a solemn service like, say, Good Friday, but the stunned silence of the witnesses of a massacre. Not a word was spoken, until we were in the car, on the way home. Then, I think I turned to my wife and asked, "Did I imagine that, or did he really go there?"
And so it has come to pass that re-telling this story is now part of my family's Christmas tradition. A very surreal ending to what had been a pretty dismal autumn. Sometimes the things that happen make no sense, no sense at all, but you just have to get through them anyway.
Life does, after all, go on.
More Christmas cheer can be found in a piece by David Sedaris. Part One can be found here, Part Two here, and Part Three here. Or, if you would prefer not to patronize YouTube, the transcript is here.
Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Saturday, December 01, 2007
No Delegates For You!
Well, isn't this interesting?
To recap the news flash, the Democratic Party has stripped the Michigan delegation of its, erm, delegates to the national convention. The Republican Party has also levied sanctions, though not to this degree.
Michigan's sin, for those of you keeping score, was scheduling its primary on January 15th. Only three states are allowed to have primaries ahead of February 5th, those being Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada.
While part of me applauds at any attempt to forestall the inevitability of National Plebiscite Day, most of me realizes that it's spitting in the ocean. When you're well and truly on the roller coaster to Hades, the only thing for it is to raise your hands and scream "Woooooooo!"
It won't make you any happier to get there, but you may as well enjoy the ride.
To recap the news flash, the Democratic Party has stripped the Michigan delegation of its, erm, delegates to the national convention. The Republican Party has also levied sanctions, though not to this degree.
Michigan's sin, for those of you keeping score, was scheduling its primary on January 15th. Only three states are allowed to have primaries ahead of February 5th, those being Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada.
While part of me applauds at any attempt to forestall the inevitability of National Plebiscite Day, most of me realizes that it's spitting in the ocean. When you're well and truly on the roller coaster to Hades, the only thing for it is to raise your hands and scream "Woooooooo!"
It won't make you any happier to get there, but you may as well enjoy the ride.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
A Minor Complaint
A while back, I made a note about the upcoming election to the effect, "Wake me after football season." Well, that's proving to be a bit of a problem. This election season is beginning to look ridiculously front-loaded to the point that if I were to wait until after the Super Bowl to start thinking about things, the primary contest would be essentially over and done with. So, I need to give some thought to the candidates a little earlier than I'd originally intended to. But before that, I'm going to gripe a little bit about the schedule.
This is just slightly nuts.
A look at the calendar reveals that half or more of the delegates to each party's national convention will have been decided by the time polls close on February 5th. The national conventions aren't until late August and early September.
Can someone tell me why it's a good idea to have a five-month gap between the time when we know who the party's nominee will be and the national convention? Can someone tell me why such an insane amount of front-loading is a good thing?
Look: You know, I know, everybody knows that we're eventually going to have a national plebiscite primary system. It's going to happen by default, if for no other reason. I don't know that it's a good thing, necessarily, but it has it's own momentum and will be darn near impossible to stop. So let's try to think about how we can make it make some kind of sense.
There is no good reason for said plebiscite to happen in early February, with the general election in November. That's just a hair short of raving idiocy.
What would a sane schedule look like? Well, consider this: there's about two months between the national conventions and the general election. That seems like a good idea to me. Now, let's back up about two months from the nationals, and that sets a pretty good window for the state conventions. If the national conventions are in late August and early September, then the state conventions should happen in June, possibly early July. I think that most of them do take place in this time-frame already.
Now, prior to the state conventions, you need to hold local conventions. These can happen in April or May.
There is, therefore, no good reason for the national plebiscite to happen any earlier than March. Late March would be good. Early to mid-April would be a fairly defensible choice as well. This shortens the campaign season by a good bit, and lessens the extent to which the American voter succumbs to election fatigue. Not that this necessarily means that the campaigns will be more focused on serious issues as a result. No, they'll still engage in a race to the bottom with gusto and vigor, same as always.
But we'll have less of it to endure. That's worth something.
This is just slightly nuts.
A look at the calendar reveals that half or more of the delegates to each party's national convention will have been decided by the time polls close on February 5th. The national conventions aren't until late August and early September.
Can someone tell me why it's a good idea to have a five-month gap between the time when we know who the party's nominee will be and the national convention? Can someone tell me why such an insane amount of front-loading is a good thing?
Look: You know, I know, everybody knows that we're eventually going to have a national plebiscite primary system. It's going to happen by default, if for no other reason. I don't know that it's a good thing, necessarily, but it has it's own momentum and will be darn near impossible to stop. So let's try to think about how we can make it make some kind of sense.
There is no good reason for said plebiscite to happen in early February, with the general election in November. That's just a hair short of raving idiocy.
What would a sane schedule look like? Well, consider this: there's about two months between the national conventions and the general election. That seems like a good idea to me. Now, let's back up about two months from the nationals, and that sets a pretty good window for the state conventions. If the national conventions are in late August and early September, then the state conventions should happen in June, possibly early July. I think that most of them do take place in this time-frame already.
Now, prior to the state conventions, you need to hold local conventions. These can happen in April or May.
There is, therefore, no good reason for the national plebiscite to happen any earlier than March. Late March would be good. Early to mid-April would be a fairly defensible choice as well. This shortens the campaign season by a good bit, and lessens the extent to which the American voter succumbs to election fatigue. Not that this necessarily means that the campaigns will be more focused on serious issues as a result. No, they'll still engage in a race to the bottom with gusto and vigor, same as always.
But we'll have less of it to endure. That's worth something.
Friday, August 31, 2007
She's Warming Up...
According to this piece in VeloNews, we may well be approaching an end to the Floyd Landis case. The proverbial fat lady hasn't sung yet, but I can hear her warming up. Mind you, this probably doesn't end the whole case, just the USADA arbitration part. There will probably be an appeal to the CAS in Switzerland, whether Floyd wins or loses.
There appears to be one last closed-door meeting on the docket, with Dr. Botre on September 12. There's a strong possibility that the arbitrators will close the hearing at this point, which starts a 10-day clock, by which time they're required to render a decision.
The peanut gallery over at the Daily Peloton Forums has been reading the tea leaves, trying to figure out what the delay from May's hearing means. I plead insufficient data. You can argue either way, that a long deliberation is good news for Floyd, or not. I'm leaning towards good news, guardedly. It seems reasonable that, if they really believed the laboratory testimony, they'd have little trouble rendering a quick decision. So, maybe...
What I'd love to see is a decision that raps LNDD on the nose for shoddy procedure. Lousy procedures only help the cheats. Imagine how the hearing would have gone, if they'd had a bulletproof chain of custody, meticulously-documented procedures, and fully-archived test results. Every defense question would be met with hard data. Or, it would never have gotten this far; they'd have known the sample was too degraded to test and that would be that.
My point is that the science needs to be sufficiently solid that the cheats won't have a leg to stand on. A good enough lawyer can poke holes in just about anything, but it takes a freaking genius to shred well-documented scientific evidence. "Racehorse" Haynes might have been able to do it, but not many lawyers are quite that [ahem] inventive. Most of you won't have heard of him. He was said to have advised one client: "Deny everything. Even if they have pictures, deny everything."
But I digress. As I said earlier, I want to believe that Floyd didn't cheat, but I can see how you could read the circumstantial evidence that way. But that's almost beside the point. To deter cheating, the testing has to be good enough to detect fiddling, and it also has to be solid enough to stand up to the harshest scrutiny. That would go a long way towards restoring the public's confidence.
Other measures are needed, too, and several teams are making good starts by gathering out-of-competition data on their athletes. This establishes a solid baseline of what constitutes "normal" for a particular athlete's system, and can give a team an early-warning indicator if they're doing something funny.
But in the end, we come back to the fate of one man, whose life has been on hold for better or worse since last July. One way or another, he can finally figure out what to do with the rest of his life. Win or lose, this isn't the end for Floyd, but a new beginning. What sort of a beginning remains to be seen. At least he won't have to wait much longer to find out.
There appears to be one last closed-door meeting on the docket, with Dr. Botre on September 12. There's a strong possibility that the arbitrators will close the hearing at this point, which starts a 10-day clock, by which time they're required to render a decision.
The peanut gallery over at the Daily Peloton Forums has been reading the tea leaves, trying to figure out what the delay from May's hearing means. I plead insufficient data. You can argue either way, that a long deliberation is good news for Floyd, or not. I'm leaning towards good news, guardedly. It seems reasonable that, if they really believed the laboratory testimony, they'd have little trouble rendering a quick decision. So, maybe...
What I'd love to see is a decision that raps LNDD on the nose for shoddy procedure. Lousy procedures only help the cheats. Imagine how the hearing would have gone, if they'd had a bulletproof chain of custody, meticulously-documented procedures, and fully-archived test results. Every defense question would be met with hard data. Or, it would never have gotten this far; they'd have known the sample was too degraded to test and that would be that.
My point is that the science needs to be sufficiently solid that the cheats won't have a leg to stand on. A good enough lawyer can poke holes in just about anything, but it takes a freaking genius to shred well-documented scientific evidence. "Racehorse" Haynes might have been able to do it, but not many lawyers are quite that [ahem] inventive. Most of you won't have heard of him. He was said to have advised one client: "Deny everything. Even if they have pictures, deny everything."
But I digress. As I said earlier, I want to believe that Floyd didn't cheat, but I can see how you could read the circumstantial evidence that way. But that's almost beside the point. To deter cheating, the testing has to be good enough to detect fiddling, and it also has to be solid enough to stand up to the harshest scrutiny. That would go a long way towards restoring the public's confidence.
Other measures are needed, too, and several teams are making good starts by gathering out-of-competition data on their athletes. This establishes a solid baseline of what constitutes "normal" for a particular athlete's system, and can give a team an early-warning indicator if they're doing something funny.
But in the end, we come back to the fate of one man, whose life has been on hold for better or worse since last July. One way or another, he can finally figure out what to do with the rest of his life. Win or lose, this isn't the end for Floyd, but a new beginning. What sort of a beginning remains to be seen. At least he won't have to wait much longer to find out.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
1984: The Year That Wasn't
I probably would never have come across this book if I hadn't had to read it in high school. But I'm glad I did, because it has been one of the most influential things I have ever read. It's an extraordinarily important book, and if you only re-read one book from your high school experience, make it this one.
This is the book that George Orwell wrote as he knew he was dying. It's filled with a driving sense of purpose, a sense of warning. Orwell wrote us to warn us of what the world would look like, if we ever lost the Long War.
The Long War probably isn't what you're thinking, although what we call the Cold War was part of it. The Long War is the eternal struggle of enlightened individualism against totalitarianism, liberty versus tyranny. 1984 spells out in painful details the cost of defeat. It also shows us, obliquely, how to avoid going there.
In the world of Winston Smith, liberty had long since gone down to defeat. The Party ruled all. It governed you from the moment you opened your eyes in the morning to the moment you closed them again at night, and held you to account for what you mumbled in your dreams. If the contents of your thoughts weren't sufficiently orthodox, the Ministry of Love would fix you. We get to see the entire process through to its horrific conclusion. Winston Smith goes from Party functionary to rebel, rebel to prisoner, and finally prisoner to ... what? In a real sense he was always a prisoner. His final transformation was a final realization of that fact. He is, at the end, a completely broken man.
But the world doesn't have to end up like this. That's the key message here.
Our best line of defense at home? A healthy suspicion of those we keep in power. My current blog tagline as I write this states my position perfectly: "In God we trust. Everyone else, keep your hands where I can see 'em." We the citizens have a duty to stay informed, and keep our elected leaders' feet to the fire. Most of them are good, honest people. But even so we dare not trust them with too much power. This means that the government will never be as efficient as it could be. This means that there are things the government won't be able to do. We simply have to accept that as the price of freedom.
But it goes beyond that. For example, this is the reason that I really don't like hate crimes legislation. I do not like the idea of criminalizing the content of a man's thoughts. It is irrelevant to me that those thoughts are indefensible or uncivilized. Because eventually someone will work their way around to criminalizing mine. It's far, far easier to stop this thing from snowballing now, than to try to stop it once the Powers That Be get used to the idea of legislating what you're allowed to think.
It's also why I really don't like political correctness. Mind you, I do think that a proper gentleman should self-censor his speech. I do not always do a good job of that. Some words have no place at all in polite communication, and if you cannot express yourself without vulgarity then your vocabulary is sadly lacking. That said ... There are substantive conversations we cannot have today, because they are not PC. We all know what we are not allowed to say, and about whom we are not allowed to speak. Try to have a serious conversation about a taboo topic, and you're branded a racist, a sexist, or worse. This is distinctly unhelpful, and does no one any real good. Pretending that an issue does not exist does nothing to help the situation.
But forewarned is forearmed: we do not go forward in this struggle unguided. And because an Englishman looked ahead and told us what he saw, we have a better chance to avoid the abyss.
Give it a read if you haven't done so lately. It'll make you think.
This is the book that George Orwell wrote as he knew he was dying. It's filled with a driving sense of purpose, a sense of warning. Orwell wrote us to warn us of what the world would look like, if we ever lost the Long War.
The Long War probably isn't what you're thinking, although what we call the Cold War was part of it. The Long War is the eternal struggle of enlightened individualism against totalitarianism, liberty versus tyranny. 1984 spells out in painful details the cost of defeat. It also shows us, obliquely, how to avoid going there.
In the world of Winston Smith, liberty had long since gone down to defeat. The Party ruled all. It governed you from the moment you opened your eyes in the morning to the moment you closed them again at night, and held you to account for what you mumbled in your dreams. If the contents of your thoughts weren't sufficiently orthodox, the Ministry of Love would fix you. We get to see the entire process through to its horrific conclusion. Winston Smith goes from Party functionary to rebel, rebel to prisoner, and finally prisoner to ... what? In a real sense he was always a prisoner. His final transformation was a final realization of that fact. He is, at the end, a completely broken man.
But the world doesn't have to end up like this. That's the key message here.
Our best line of defense at home? A healthy suspicion of those we keep in power. My current blog tagline as I write this states my position perfectly: "In God we trust. Everyone else, keep your hands where I can see 'em." We the citizens have a duty to stay informed, and keep our elected leaders' feet to the fire. Most of them are good, honest people. But even so we dare not trust them with too much power. This means that the government will never be as efficient as it could be. This means that there are things the government won't be able to do. We simply have to accept that as the price of freedom.
But it goes beyond that. For example, this is the reason that I really don't like hate crimes legislation. I do not like the idea of criminalizing the content of a man's thoughts. It is irrelevant to me that those thoughts are indefensible or uncivilized. Because eventually someone will work their way around to criminalizing mine. It's far, far easier to stop this thing from snowballing now, than to try to stop it once the Powers That Be get used to the idea of legislating what you're allowed to think.
It's also why I really don't like political correctness. Mind you, I do think that a proper gentleman should self-censor his speech. I do not always do a good job of that. Some words have no place at all in polite communication, and if you cannot express yourself without vulgarity then your vocabulary is sadly lacking. That said ... There are substantive conversations we cannot have today, because they are not PC. We all know what we are not allowed to say, and about whom we are not allowed to speak. Try to have a serious conversation about a taboo topic, and you're branded a racist, a sexist, or worse. This is distinctly unhelpful, and does no one any real good. Pretending that an issue does not exist does nothing to help the situation.
But forewarned is forearmed: we do not go forward in this struggle unguided. And because an Englishman looked ahead and told us what he saw, we have a better chance to avoid the abyss.
Give it a read if you haven't done so lately. It'll make you think.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
My Latest Project
Coming soon to this space: I will be re-reading some of the novels that I was compelled to read during high school, and see if I can get anything more out of them now that I'm an adult. The tentative list includes, but will not be limited to:
1984
The Grapes of Wrath
The Great Gatsby
The Scarlet Letter
There are several that I've forgotten, I'm sure. Feel free to remind me.
Updates will follow, as I finish the books in question. I've already read 1984 relatively recently, I just need to think about what I want to write.
1984
The Grapes of Wrath
The Great Gatsby
The Scarlet Letter
There are several that I've forgotten, I'm sure. Feel free to remind me.
Updates will follow, as I finish the books in question. I've already read 1984 relatively recently, I just need to think about what I want to write.
Thursday, August 09, 2007
Property: It's A Good Thing
Last time, I snarked off about a Russian expedition to the North Pole. There are actually some serious implications that probably need to be talked about. To wit: property rights.
A staple of sci-fi for several years was the undersea colony. We've had things like SeaLab, SeaQuest DSV, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and all that good stuff. Well, there's a good reason why none of that is happening. It's not because the technology isn't up to it, though that's part of it. No, the real problem is that no one in their right mind is about to sink big money into deep-sea mining unless and until sovereignty issues have been sorted out.
You see, without sovereignty, there is really no guarantee of personal or corporate property rights. And without property rights, there's no development. You'd have to be nuts to put good money at risk that way, if no one were standing overwatch to guarantee that no one jumps your claim.
Let's leave the particulars of Russia's claim as beside the point for the moment. It's sufficient to note that, unless Russia were able to establish clear title to the sea floor in question, there's no way any Russian company would set up shop drilling there. And there's plenty of legal wrangling to be done, because Canada isn't sure that they can't make the same claim.
But that brings us 'round to the other link from that post.
As much as I might like to think so, the United States has no territorial claims on the Moon. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 prohibits such claims. And that's a problem. Why? Because, as I said before, without sovereignty there's no guarantee of property rights, and without property rights there's no development.
Anyone who wants to start up a business based on extraction of extraterrestrial resources is treading on very uncertain legal ground. Which is why no one has seriously explored such options to date. Oh sure, we're years away from having the technology to exploit such resources. But if the legal basis were more firm, there'd be more of an impetus to develop said technologies.
This is a problem, to be sure, but not necessarily an insurmountable one. I'm not going to guess precisely how this problem gets resolved -- there's more than one way to paint a fence, after all. As long as the path doesn't involve anything heinous, it's the goal that's important. But, sooner or later, we have to come to grips with this problem.
It's raining soup Out There, and the sooner we get 'round to making bowls, the better.
A staple of sci-fi for several years was the undersea colony. We've had things like SeaLab, SeaQuest DSV, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and all that good stuff. Well, there's a good reason why none of that is happening. It's not because the technology isn't up to it, though that's part of it. No, the real problem is that no one in their right mind is about to sink big money into deep-sea mining unless and until sovereignty issues have been sorted out.
You see, without sovereignty, there is really no guarantee of personal or corporate property rights. And without property rights, there's no development. You'd have to be nuts to put good money at risk that way, if no one were standing overwatch to guarantee that no one jumps your claim.
Let's leave the particulars of Russia's claim as beside the point for the moment. It's sufficient to note that, unless Russia were able to establish clear title to the sea floor in question, there's no way any Russian company would set up shop drilling there. And there's plenty of legal wrangling to be done, because Canada isn't sure that they can't make the same claim.
But that brings us 'round to the other link from that post.
As much as I might like to think so, the United States has no territorial claims on the Moon. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 prohibits such claims. And that's a problem. Why? Because, as I said before, without sovereignty there's no guarantee of property rights, and without property rights there's no development.
Anyone who wants to start up a business based on extraction of extraterrestrial resources is treading on very uncertain legal ground. Which is why no one has seriously explored such options to date. Oh sure, we're years away from having the technology to exploit such resources. But if the legal basis were more firm, there'd be more of an impetus to develop said technologies.
This is a problem, to be sure, but not necessarily an insurmountable one. I'm not going to guess precisely how this problem gets resolved -- there's more than one way to paint a fence, after all. As long as the path doesn't involve anything heinous, it's the goal that's important. But, sooner or later, we have to come to grips with this problem.
It's raining soup Out There, and the sooner we get 'round to making bowls, the better.
Sunday, August 05, 2007
Fine...
So the Russkies have planted a flag at the North Pole seabed, in an effort to secure territorial rights along the Lomonsov Ridge.
Well, fine. If they want to go ahead and press that claim, fine.
Just so long as if they can plant a flag and claim the North Pole, we get to assert a certain flag-based claim of our own.
Hey, it's only fair.
Well, fine. If they want to go ahead and press that claim, fine.
Just so long as if they can plant a flag and claim the North Pole, we get to assert a certain flag-based claim of our own.
Hey, it's only fair.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
All's Well That Ends Well (?)
It came down to the wire, in the closest spread between the top three finishers that anyone can remember. After yesterday's time trial, Alberto Contador only led Cadel Evans by 23 seconds, with Levi Leipheimer nipping at Evans' heels by 8 seconds more. Team Discovery kicked commanding butt this year, taking the overall GC lead, the best rookie rider, had two riders on the podium and three in the top ten, as well as taking the overall best team title by a huge margin. And although they're looking for a new sponsor since Discovery won't back them next year, I don't think they'll have much trouble. They've won 8 of the last 9 Tours. That's easy money. [Addendum, 10Aug07: Or not. According to VeloNews, the team is folding for lack of a continuing sponsor. Sic transit gloria Mundi.]
If Cadel Evans had gotten a little running room, he might have made a run for the lead there at the end, but if there's one thing Discovery knows how to do, it's protect a lead. The poor guy never had a chance. But on the bright side, he's the highest-placing Aussie ever at the Tour. He'll be back next near.
And so will Contador. At 24, he's one of the youngest winners ever. With a little more training and experience, he can only get better. Good years ahead for Team Discovery... [Or not: see above.] Well, not Discovery anymore, but you know what I mean.
And now that we've crowned a new King in Yellow, we can go back to waiting to see how the arbitrators rule on last year's case. Maybe we'll find out this week, maybe not.
I almost hope not. It'd be nice to give Contador some time to bask in his well-earned glory before that particular story breaks out again. He's the future, not the past. It's his time now.
Friday, July 27, 2007
High Flight
Well, this certainly lends a whole new meaning to the High Life.
For crying out loud ... is there no adult supervision anymore over at the Astronaut Office?
Mind you, there are some people who think that it's perfectly reasonable to get schnockered before climbing on top of a couple of million pounds of high explosive. I have to disagree. There is no procedure in manned spaceflight that I know of that is improved in any way by crew inebriation. And besides, I kind of preferred things the way they were back in the day when we could reasonably expect our astronaut corps not to embarrass us in public.
Ladies and gentlemen, can we please have some professional conduct? You know, keep 'em zipped, stay sober on company time, the sort of thing us civilians generally have to do? And once in a while, do remember that you're representing America to the world. The best and brightest, and all that jazz. At least, you're supposed to be the best and brightest. Even if you're really not, can you at least act like it?
Because I never before had to worry about the competence of the people riding the rockets. The managers, yes. The politicians, yes. But I always had absolute confidence in the eyes at the instruments, the hands at the controls.
I do not like having to worry about that. Fix this now. This kind of doubt, we cannot afford.
[Addendum, 30Aug07: According to this report, NASA has found that there is no evidence of astronauts partaking of liquid courage prior to boarding any spacecraft. While this is cause for relief, the fact that I can take a story like this at face value is still cause for concern. NASA needs to be seen to be tightening ship, whether they really need to or not. Perception takes on a reality of its own sometimes, and the public needs to see things happen so that they can regain confidence.]
For crying out loud ... is there no adult supervision anymore over at the Astronaut Office?
Mind you, there are some people who think that it's perfectly reasonable to get schnockered before climbing on top of a couple of million pounds of high explosive. I have to disagree. There is no procedure in manned spaceflight that I know of that is improved in any way by crew inebriation. And besides, I kind of preferred things the way they were back in the day when we could reasonably expect our astronaut corps not to embarrass us in public.
Ladies and gentlemen, can we please have some professional conduct? You know, keep 'em zipped, stay sober on company time, the sort of thing us civilians generally have to do? And once in a while, do remember that you're representing America to the world. The best and brightest, and all that jazz. At least, you're supposed to be the best and brightest. Even if you're really not, can you at least act like it?
Because I never before had to worry about the competence of the people riding the rockets. The managers, yes. The politicians, yes. But I always had absolute confidence in the eyes at the instruments, the hands at the controls.
I do not like having to worry about that. Fix this now. This kind of doubt, we cannot afford.
[Addendum, 30Aug07: According to this report, NASA has found that there is no evidence of astronauts partaking of liquid courage prior to boarding any spacecraft. While this is cause for relief, the fact that I can take a story like this at face value is still cause for concern. NASA needs to be seen to be tightening ship, whether they really need to or not. Perception takes on a reality of its own sometimes, and the public needs to see things happen so that they can regain confidence.]
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