Ponderings and Musings

Earl and I have decided that we will be relocating in 2017. We are still working on the details, so I won’t comment right now as to where we will be moving to as that part is still up in the air, but we have decided that at ages 48 and 56, it’s time for us to have another big adventure together.

The Mohawk Valley is relatively close to my native land. In the past I’ve always described it as being comfortably far enough away that we wouldn’t have to worry about family dropping in while we were running around the house naked (doing God knows what [insert mischievous laugh here]). Aside from friends met over the years, Earl has no deep roots in the area. I’ve had “, N.Y.” in my address for 45 of my 48 years, so moving elsewhere in the country will definitely be a big adventure for me.

I’ve casually mentioned to a friend or two and to my mom and sister that we are moving next year and have clumsily explained that I’m moving “in support of Earl”. That’s been rather cowardly of me, it’s not his decision to move, it’s our decision to move. I have to admit that I’m going to miss several aspects of living here (mostly a couple of friends that I made at my job a decade ago and the flying community that I am involved with) and that has given me pause, but it’s not fair for me to sound like a follower of this plan because it’s not true. I want to move just as much as he wants to move. I’m just more emotional about it than he is.

As we make plans for Earl’s continued retirement, this move and such, it’s a little odd that we have to make contingency plans for our financial well-being, playing out “what if” scenarios when it comes to our marriage and some of the things that the incoming administration is cooking up for LGBT Americans. What was a guaranteed certainty a year ago (mainly spousal benefits and legal recognition for same-sex couples) could easily change with a few votes from the new Administration. While Earl and I have very supportive friends in the area that we can always count on, I still have a hard time reconciling the knowledge that several of our family members voted for a ticket that is so blatantly untrustworthy. I keep hearing that I should have a positive attitude, but when I already see cheers for a “First Amendment Defense Act” that would basically give folks the legal basis to ignore same-sex marriages (denying benefits, service, the ability to visit in the hospital, etc) based on one’s religious beliefs, I can’t help but not trust people. And when these things come into question, I’d rather live in an area that is solidly “blue” with a more progressive mindset. Folks says “everything will be fine (the worst four-letter word in the English language)” but I want to know things are better than fine.

I have higher standards than that.

2017 is going to be a year of change. That goes without saying. Earl, Jamie and I are going to do everything we can to make sure it’s a change for the better. And that starts with my vocal support of our decisions together.

If there was a headline that served as the perfect example of what I feel plagues our society today, it would be this:

I didn’t bother to click through to the article, so I have no idea what the author’s beef is with his Apple Watch, but apparently he wants to destroy the watch because he doesn’t like it. It’s interesting that I assume that author is male. Now mind you, as I said, I didn’t read this article that came up in my Apple News feed, but the headline is telling.

1. The author has written a click-bait headline to grab my attention.
2. The author doesn’t like his piece of technology so he’s going to be very demonstrative in public and do something extreme to get attention on the Internet. God forbid the author give the watch to someone or sell it for charity or something. It’s more fun to destroy things, make a video and get lots of Google Ad revenue. And in my defense, I would feel this way if he was saying the same thing about a Microsoft Zune.
3. The author is contributing to our disposable mindset for our disposable society. His Apple Watch doesn’t make him feel special so he’s going to waste it and move on to something else.
4. Clicking through to the article would probably lead to an article that is poorly written and hastily put together with the sole purpose of generating ad revenue. In my defense, the majority of my blog entries are poorly written and hastily put together but I don’t share them for revenue purposes. Honestly, upon reflection I have no idea why I share stuff online. Maybe they mold an opinion or something.
5. The author is apparently focusing on the negativity instead of any positive aspect of owning an Apple Watch.

Negativity and sensationalist language are the name of the game these days. It’s like the recent fad of “Elf on the Shelf”. Now, we don’t have kids so I have little more than a cursory grasp of how this Elf on the Shelf thing works, but apparently parents put a little elf somewhere different in the house on each day leading up to Christmas to help keep the kid in line. Perhaps Santa needed reinforcements. Whatever the motivation, the exercise is innocent enough and if it keeps said child from pooping on the television or setting the couch on fire, have at it. The thing is, many on the Internet are now perverting the whole thing. Elf on the Shelf is found next to a naked Barbie doll. Elf on the Shelf is holding a meat cleaver next to GI Joe. Elf on the Shelf has a mouse trap next to Mickey Mouse. Why have something lighthearted with great intentions when you can make it dank and dark like the world so apparently, desperately wants to be in the 21st century?

Look, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a critical, judgey bastard that can point out the flaws of anyone at a moment’s notice and share these observations on the Internet. It’s a fault of mine that I am desperately trying to correct. Be the change you want to see in the world and all that. But sometimes it feels like people just want the world to be dank and dark. Destruction. War.

Well war, war is stupid and people are stupid. And love means nothing in some strange quarters.

The thing is, we can make love, or at the very least, a positive outlook, a trend again. Share your smile. Join me in trying to share what we like rather than what we dislike.

Let’s be the change we want to see in the world.

Early this morning my phone chimed with an alert usually reserved for “Breaking News”. I set this up a while ago. The chime has sounded for earthquakes, tsunami warnings, mass shootings, things that are happening in the world that can be quite concerning. This morning, the Breaking News was that Time Magazine had announced their Person of the Year for 2016.

Abuse of “Breaking News” notifications results in the deletion of that app (name intentionally withheld) and my ignoring of anything further spewed from that “news organization”. It’s almost as bad as talking about the lives of the Kardashians on Twitter. Instant deletion in my book.

Time Magazine has named President-elect (PEOTUS) Trump as their Person of the Year.

The caption under Mr. Trump’s name is “President of the Divided States of America”.

At first I was angry that Time was pandering to PEOTUS. I felt like they were trying to get in good graces for his upcoming dictatorship Presidency. Mr. Trump has mentioned, in a backhanded way, that he doesn’t like the media and his actions have historically indicated that he enjoys punishing journalists. This Breaking News announcement felt like an olive leaf of sorts.

But then I looked closely at the photo.

First of all, this is not a flattering portrait of the President-elect. He looks menacing. The lighting is dark. The shadows are stark. Mr. Trump’s head is placed squarely under the “M” in TIME. The first thing I saw was a pair of horns. All that was missing was a graffiti quality to the lettering. There’s also the “President of the Divided States of America” byline.

This is not a flattering cover. This is a portrait of a man who sees himself as Big Brother. And I’m not talking about Julie Chen.

Upon further study and reading on the Internet, I began to wonder if the chair featured in this photo was a reproduction of a chair used 78 years for a similar Time magazine cover.

It was then that I remained irked by the abuse of a “Breaking News” alert for this announcement but my displeasure about Mr. Trump being named Person of the Year seemed to be not so bad. Time stroked the PEOTUS’s ego, albeit in a backhanded way, but they deftly conveyed the current mood of the nation. We are a divided nation. Many of us do feel that we have entered dark times. Many feel that Trump has no understanding of the role of President and that he has confuses it with a dictator-like role. 

Honestly, if anyone has impacted the United States in this seemingly dismal year of 2016, it would be Trump. So now when I see this cover being, er, trumpeted across the web, newsstands and television, I smirk a little bit. Kind of like when this crazy eyes photo was featured a few years ago.

We are in for some crazy times in these here Divided States of America. We might as well make the best of the situation and smirk while we can.

It’ll keep us from becoming weeping alcoholics.

During our travels today Earl and I wandered around the quaint downtown of Lambertville, New Jersey. I walked through a large antique and such type of store (though the name escapes me at the moment). The owners were out on the front sidewalk having some sort of lover’s/owner’s quarrel/cat fight. It was a bit of a spectacle.

I went inside and looked around and found a couple of items of interest. I didn’t buy anything but I enjoyed the memories.

When I was a teenager, my grandmother used to type up all of the correspondence and the billing statements for the family business on a manual typewriter. In the early 1980s her typewriter was upgraded to an electric Smith-Corona typewriter (though it still had a manual carriage return).  At the time I brought home the RC Allen manual typewriter and in 1986 I typed a couple of term papers on the old manual typewriter. I guess I was hipster several decades before it was fashionable to be hipster.  The RC Allen typewriter in question looked exactly like this.

While walking around the antiques and such store, I found a couple of ceramic Christmas trees that were identical to the one I inherited from Grandma City. I know that my uncle’s first wife painted the tree for my grandmother, so this must have been some sort of ceramic kit. I found one tree the same color as the one I have, another with white paint representing snow on the branches, though it was the same ceramic tree mold. The trees in question are in the photo below are the one in the middle with the blue star  and the one in the lower right hand corner with the red star.

 
I was also excited to see a genuine 50s or early 60s silver tinsel Christmas tree. If our next house is of the proper vintage I plan on picking up one of these trees for the season.

I really like the village area of Lambertville, New Jersey. It doesn’t fit anything that I picture to represent New Jersey, though the accent is the same. It’s always amazing to me that the native accent seems to be considerably different from what’s heard just 30 miles away in Bucks County, Pa.

Earl and I climbed to the top of Bowman’s Hill Tower along the Delaware River today.

The elevator was out of service so we made the climb along the narrow, winding staircase.

The view from the top was quite impressive.  Not a bad jaunt for $6.00 a person.

My Dad passed away five years ago today. It’s hard to believe that it’s been a half decade since he passed during his last flight, the second flight in his second homebuilt airplane. He was test flying his Wittman Tailwind W-10 when he crashed on the left downwind to Runway 33 at KFZY Oswego County. I’ve flown over the spot many times. I think of him more often than that.

I consider myself a very lucky man to have grown up around airplanes. My dad earned his pilot license when I was still in elementary school so I spent many hours with him in the right seat of a Cessna or a Piper Tomahawk and later in the backseat of the Piper J-5A he restored. As an adult I flew with him a few times in his homebuilt Acrosport II. That’s the airplane in the pictures on this blog post. Passengers ride up front in that airplane. My first blog post was about flying with Dad in the Acrosport II.

I once asked my Dad why he was building a second airplane, after having restored the J-5A and later building the Acrosport II from scratch. He told me that he liked the Acrosport but flying it was sometimes like driving a car with the hood open. He wanted more visibility.

I had always wanted to be a pilot but kept putting it off while he was still alive. If I wanted to fly I could just go with him. It was while standing in line at the funeral home, hugging visitors as we exchanged pleasantries, that I realized I would not be able to fly in a small airplane again unless I continued the family tradition and became a private pilot. I could not imagine being earthbound for the rest of my life.

Once I became a private pilot I was able to fully understand what happened five years ago today. Carb icing resulting engine issues at pattern altitude, so he most likely stalled into a spin. Having less than one hour in a brand new experimental airplane his familiarity with how the airplane would handle in a stall would be cursory at best. Knowing my dad he read everything he probably could have on the subject but I don’t think he ever flew another W-10 before flying the one he built. His death probably made me a more conservative pilot but that’s not a bad thing; it’s my goal to be a very old pilot.

My dad was my inspiration. You could always tell what he was thinking when he was gazing skyward. Even though he has passed on, he still inspires me everyday.

Earl and I have been meandering out in the Jeep today. At this time of year I enjoy the challenge of following roads that say “Seasonal Use Only / Road Not Maintained Nov. 1 through April 1”.  These roads are fun to drive in a Jeep Wrangler Rubicon.

We found ourselves at Selkirk Shores State Park along the eastern shore of Lake Ontario. This state park is about 10 miles or so from the house I grew up in. We drove by the old house. It’s not really that old; my dad built it and we moved in for my first day of Fourth Grade in 1977. The new owners of the property are being very kind to it. I’m happy to see life thriving in what I used to call home.

Having grown up pretty close to the Great Lakes, I find myself longing to hear the crashing of the waves, even when it’s 40ºF. Earl is a good sport; we walked out on the pier and took some photos. In the distance you can see Nine Mile Point, home to three nuclear power plants. Two of those plants have been active for nearly my entire life and I don’t glow in the dark. Nuclear power doesn’t scare me.

We are now meandering around in the outskirts of the city of Syracuse. We have stopped for a Starbucks break, as we don’t have Starbucks at home and we like to indulge once in a while. After this blog entry and the completion of our treat, we shall continue our meandering with a target of getting home some time tonight. We are only 45 miles from home but it might take us several hours to get there.

Meandering is good for the soul.

I love four wheel drive. 

I’ve been using my Facebook account on a regular basis for the past couple of weeks, since shortly before the travesty we amusingly call “Election Day”. I started out by going back to read a couple of geek and flight oriented groups that are housed within the confines of the Facebook platform. I smile every time I see a pilot share photos of their first solo flight. I read about the experiences of other pilots. I talk with folks that also own a Piper Cherokee. I also keep up with family and friends that I haven’t seen in a long while. Unfortunately I fell into the pits of Facebook hell and got caught up in the whirlwind of disinformation, fake news and the like the Facebook is becoming quite famous for.

The truth of the matter is that I know better. As a fairly well-educated tech guy, I know that Facebook tracks every movement I make on the web. Facebook knows every time I search for something and adds that information to my profile. The paranoid side of me believes that Facebook is somehow _hearing_ my conversations because I’ve had a couple of suggestions come up in the FB sidebar after Earl and I have had a conversation about a product, but I’m still trying to figure out if that’s possible or not. Facebook is a very dangerous platform for many reasons, yet I still wade in the acidic waters, clinging onto some shred of hope that it doesn’t rot me away completely.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve noticed that Facebook has significantly pared down the posts that I see from friends and family. The number of people showing up on my timeline has been whittled down considerably. On more than one occasion, while scanning through my Facebook timeline, I’ve thought to myself, “It’s funny I haven’t seen a post from X in the past few days.”  I’ll then search up their name and see that they’ve been posting right along like they always have, Facebook just didn’t feel it was necessary to share that information with me. Instead, I’ve been barraged with posts from people that I’ve shared a hearty banter with (usually about the “election”), as if to magnify that particular person’s point of view in lieu of just presenting me with a timeline.

When a timeline is skewed with algorithms, it’s not a timeline. It’s propaganda.  Instagram, owned by Facebook, is notorious for this. I keep seeing the same photos from the same six people instead of the 300 or so that I follow on Instagram. It makes me crazy. It’s not genuine. There’s nothing genuine about anything owned by Facebook. It’s not information, it’s manipulation.

I keep saying, and blogging, that I’m just going to share more right here on my blog and less in the Facebook arena, but the issue with that approach is that when I want to get an important point across, such as the fallout from the recent “election” (yes, I’m annoying with the rabbit gestures around the word election, which should give you an indication as to how much I believe it was truly an election reflecting the will of the people), the people I want to reach are comfortable inside the Facebook echo chamber and the folks I want to target with my voice aren’t going to hear what I want to share. 

Unfortunately I don’t have an answer for this. I’m concerned that Facebook isn’t going to go the way of MySpace. A reader on Medium suggested that Facebook be treated like a public utility and subject to the same governmental oversight as the other utilities (power, water, telecom) in the United States. While it’s questionable that any utility will still be subjected to any oversight after we somehow survive the next four years as a cohesive country, the idea of Facebook being considered a “utility” is horrifying to me.

It is really my hope that the country will wake up from some drug induced trip and come back to its senses: in the way we think, the way we act, the way we use tech, the way we think our society should be going, all of it. My gut tells me that this is the new normal. I didn’t think it was possible for us to head in the direction of “Idiocracy” but I’ve been a wrong about a lot of things over the years and I’m afraid this is one of them. To mix movie metaphors, (I was going to paste a quote from “Angels in America” here but Apple’s iOS 10 won’t let me do that, so I’ll paraphrase), “Before life becomes merely impossible, it will be, for a long time, completely unbearable.”

I think Facebook is leading the charge into the unbearable realm.