1978 Poem
I’ve found a poem I wrote in 1978. That makes it the earliest one that I still have.
It’s called Water Sprite.
Airline Maintenance Engineer Humor Meme
Here’s the email. It’s a very good bit of humor. See the comments at the bottom for status.
After every flight, Qantas Airline pilots fill out a form, called a “gripe sheet” (or “squawk sheet”) which tells mechanics about problems with the aircraft. The mechanics correct the problems, document their repairs on the form, and then pilots review the gripe sheets before the next flight. Never let it be said that ground crews lack a sense of humor.
Here are some actual maintenance complaints submitted by Qantas’ pilots (marked with a P) and the solutions recorded (marked with an S) by maintenance engineers.
P: Left inside main tire almost needs replacement.
S: Almost replaced left inside main tire.P: Test flight OK, except auto-land very rough.
S: Auto-land not installed on this aircraft.P: Something loose in cockpit.
S: Something tightened in cockpit.P: Dead bugs on windshield.
S: Live bugs on back-order.P: Autopilot in altitude-hold mode produces a 200 feet per minute descent.
S: Cannot reproduce problem on ground.P: Evidence of leak on right main landing gear.
S: Evidence removed.P: DME volume unbelievably loud.
S: DME volume set to more believable level.P: Friction locks cause throttle levers to stick.
S: That’s what friction locks are for.P: IFF inoperative in OFF mode.
S: IFF always inoperative in OFF mode.P: Suspected crack in windshield.
S: Suspect you’re right.P: Number 3 engine missing.
S: Engine found on right wing after brief search.P: Aircraft handles funny.
S: Aircraft warned to straighten up, fly right, and be serious.P: Target radar hums.
S: Reprogrammed target radar with lyrics.P: Mouse in cockpit.
S: Cat installed.P: Noise coming from under instrument panel. Sounds like a midget pounding on something with a hammer.
S: Took hammer away from midget.
(thanks Bev!)
According to Snopes,
the inclusion of military terminology (e.g., IFF, target radar) pegs this as a list more likely derived from an air force source than a commercial airline, and the mention of propellers eliminates the notion that these items all reference one particular type of modern jet aircraft. It’s possible this list is now an amalgam of entries collected from a variety of sources, a mixture of both real and bogus items, or nothing but a bit of creative humor.
Earlier versions of this list included the following items:
Defect: The autopilot doesn’t.
Action: IT DOES NOW.Defect: Seat cushion in 13F smells rotten.
Action: Fresh seat cushion on order.Defect: Turn & slip indicator ball stuck in center during turns.
Action: Congratulations. You just made your first coordinated turn!Defect: Whining sound heard on engine shutdown.
Action: Pilot removed from aircraft.Defect: Pilot’s clock inoperative.
Action: Wound clock.Defect: Autopilot tends to drop a wing when fuel imbalance reaches 500 pounds.
Action: Flight manual limits maximum fuel imbalance to 300 pounds.Defect: #2 ADF needle runs wild.
Action: Caught and tamed #2 ADF needle.Defect: Unfamiliar noise coming from #2 engine.
Action: Engine run for four hours. Noise now familiar.Defect: Noise coming from #2 engine. Sounds like man with little hammer.
Action: Took little hammer away from man in #2 engine.Defect: Whining noise coming from #2 engine compartment.
Action: Returned little hammer to man in #2 engine.Defect: Flight attendant cold at altitude.
Action: Ground checks OK.Defect: 3 roaches in cabin.
Action: 1 roach killed, 1 wounded, 1 got away.Defect: Weather radar went ape!
Action: Opened radar, let out ape, cleaned up mess!
Rainy Night in Georgia
It’s been raining for more than 24 hours. I’ve just been out walking in the back yard, and found big mushrooms growing under the oak trees. Last week, I saw others of the same type out in the woods; those were even more gigantic – three times as big.
Does anyone know what kind of mushrooms these are?
The ones in our yard are usually very tiny, and grayish, and they carpet whole areas. Perhaps they are a springtime mushroom – I don’t remember. Anyway, this is the first time I’ve seen these here.
Do Political Blogs Change Your Views on Issues?
In answer to NOW’s Question of the Week: Do you read blogs? Tell us if blogs change your views on political issues.
Blogs are of many kinds: scrapbooks, personal journals, advertising spaces, photo logs. Political blogs are only one form of the blog. The blogosphere is about freedom of expression – dittoheads, propaganda portals, soap boxes, fake identities, but also debate, discussion, original ideas, and scrapbooked information/evidence/argument.
Some political blogs actually investigate and report news. Some are focused tightly on one specific topic so that there is a constant flow of targeted and detailed information. Others are like a scream of despair, or a series of billboard advertisements.
Blogs do affect my political views, if for no other reason than that they are a valuable supplement to the information and perspectives that I am able to glean from other media. If you are interested in a particular topic, you can search for related keywords (using search engines or more specific tools like Technorati) and get the latest range of feedback and opinion. Subscribe to your favorite blog rss feeds, and it’s like building your own newspaper. Through a service like Feedblitz, you can even have the feeds delivered via e-mail.
What is still more powerful, however, is that because of the ease of blog publication, more people are writing and publishing. There is a sense of political empowerment that comes from dwelling with your thoughts and observations long enough to claim your own distinct perspective – and then to express it, to “offer it up” to others. Blogs encourage this. People who might never write an article or book for print publication can still have a syndicated column as a blogger. Blogs are used for political opinion, activism and reporting. Blogs can distribute information, and calls for political action. Bloggers can report on things that even investigative journalists never observe – and they offer the viewpoints of many who are otherwise never heard.
Blogs encourage people to read, think, write and debate – all in mutally reinforcing feedback loops that make them better at doing all of them. What’s not to love?
As opportunities for real political discussion in public spaces dwindle, the blogosphere offers one form of the social arena for information exchange, conversation, and debate that in other times and places might have been held at the local pub or cafe or quilting bee or bowling night or barbeque. In many cases, we simply don’t have the places or the occasions for those discussions, but we need them more now than at any other time in my life’s memory.
We need more debates in the public sphere. We need politicians to debate in front of us rather than simply reading their statements to the press. Pundits and spokesmen and think tank representatives aren’t enough for us anymore. Americans do smell mendacity, and we are working it out for ourselves as best we can. Political blogs help us to do that.
What’s your view on this question? Post it there, post it here, post it at home.
Against the Day
I am really looking forward to Thomas Pynchon’s new book Against the Day, which is due out near the end of the year. The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland and Gravity’s Rainbow are already considered classics. This guy is a genius. Vineland is probably my favorite read. The Crying of Lot 49 is a perfect logical construction of undecidability, and if you’ve never read Pynchon, it’s a good place to start. Gravity’s Rainbow is something you have to read to believe – sex and machines, a computational epic.
I haven’t read V. or Mason & Dixon yet. I skimmed Mason & Dixon at a bookstore, but it didn’t appeal to me at the time.
Against the Day looks to be something that I might really enjoy – a mix of that analytical sophistication, humor, complexity and texture that makes you feel like you’re in a completely different reality – maybe. Pynchon is the real deal. I’m not sure how many creative intellectuals that we have in this country, but he’s one of them.
I also take it as a good sign that he wrote the foreword to the 2003 centennial edition of George Orwell’s 1984. Not to mention his voiceovers on The Simpsons (playing himself).
Here’s what he has to say about Against the Day.
(Can you tell I’m excited about this? I’m still grinning from reading this the first time.)
Spanning the period between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.
With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.
The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.
As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it’s their lives that pursue them.
Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they’re doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.
Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.
–Thomas Pynchon
This is going to be a good one – I feel it in my bones.
I’m hoarding my desire for this book, putting it aside – against the day…
Impeach
I am participating in this blogger action, in a limited way. I’m not following directions, which would be to replace my entire front page with the single word “Impeach.”
I am participating in this more limited fashion because we don’t have the congressional votes for an impeachment process and I think there are actually even more important issues to work on. In the November election, we ought to be proposing solutions to this octopus-armed disaster that the Bush administration has created.
Still, there is certainly a solid case for impeachment. Here’s a sprinkling of the many available sources.
Bush Crimes Commission – International Commission of Inquiry On Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration
http://www.bushcommission.org/
Articles of Impeachment
http://www.impeachpac.org/?q=articles
Four Reasons
http://www.thefourreasons.org/impeachbush.htm
“Constitution in Crisis” by John Conyers summarizes evidence of illegal activities.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.com/?q=node/5769
A memo from a January, 2003, White House meeting of Bush and Blair at which Bush made clear that the U.S. would go to war with or without the United Nations and proposed various strategems to try to create a justification for war.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.com/whitehousememo
Bush Crimes
http://www.freewebs.com/bushcrimes/
A report that the CIA had strong evidence before the war that Iraq possessed no Weapons of Mass Destruction.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.com/node/9141
A January, 2003, State Department memo showing awareness that Niger documents were forgeries.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.com/node/8889
A British memo shows that Bush proposed bombing Al Jazeera.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.com/node/5073
A report that Bush was personally informed that the aluminum tubes claims were not supported by the State Department or the Department of Energy and that Iraq was very unlikely to attack the United States.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.com/node/8440
Testimony that Bush and Cheney were involved in the leaking of misleading classified information and in a campaign of retribution against Joseph Wilson.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.com/node/8586
Paul Pillar, who was the CIA’s national intelligence officer for the Middle East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, writes that facts were fixed to support going to war.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.com/node/7732
Top aide to Secretary of State says facts were fixed to support going to war
http://www.afterdowningstreet.com/node/1907
War Crimes
http://www.nogw.com/warcrimes.html
An Amnesty International report on ongoing torture and unlawful detention.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.com/node/8686
Reports that almost 100 prisoners have died in US custody.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.com/node/8078
“State of War” by James Risen reveals illegal spying and reports on meeting between MI6 and CIA that preceded the Downing Street Meeting in July 2002.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.com/node/6558
Henry Waxman collects 237 Bush administration lies in a searchable database.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.com/node/5394
Report that Germans told US “Curveball” was unreliable.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.com/node/4960
U.S. Army admits using White Phosphorous as a weapon
http://www.afterdowningstreet.com/node/4576
Cheney’s Chief of Staff Indicted for Obstruction of Justice
http://www.afterdowningstreet.com/node/4161
NSA spying months before 9/11
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB24/nsa25.pdf
http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/48/16920
Chart of all stolen public data:
http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/Datathefts.php
