Sleeping with the enemy (metaphorically, I hasten to add)

Regular readers will know that I often pick up blog-worthy items from Andrew Sullivan. Why do I read him? I mean, he’s a pompous right-wing blow-hard… but he did turn against Bush in the recent election, he’s done the right thing on Abu Ghraib while others have ignored it, and… oh, I don’t know, maybe it’s that gay chic thing, you know? “Queer Eye for the Political Guy”…. And then Terry nails him with a directness that jerks me out of my composure.

It starts with Sully’s “QUOTE FOR THE DAY: ‘I’d much rather be doing this than figthing [sic] a war,’ – helicopter pilot Lt. Cmdr. William Whitsitt, helping the survivors of the south Asian tsunami. Earth to Whitsitt: you’re a soldier.

This earns Sully a swift rebuke from Terry: “having been to a war, and having helped people, I’d rather be doing the latter than the former. If Sullivan wants to question why… I’ll be more than willing to hand him a rifle, a flack vest, and a Basic Load, and take him for a couple of long walks in Falluja.”

Apparently Sully caught a ton of flak for this piece, and he had the good grace to include a couple of responses on the front page and the feedback section. Sully bleats pitifully that his “point is that the military is primarily about fighting and winning wars” – but does that mean that a soldier has to prefer killing to helping?! Does Sully want a soldiery composed of amoral robots with no compassion or humanity?

(Why did that last point remind me of Rumsfeld? Anyway, from now on Sully has to earn my readership.)

The Return of the King

I’ve been laid low for the last 48 hours with flu, but curiously that hasn’t meant that I’ve been stuck in bed. In fact I’ve found myself sleeping for 4 hours getting up for 2 or 3, and so on. I’ve tried reading, but that doesn’t work, so I’ve mostly been watching the bonus features on the The Return of the King (Extended Edition) DVD. I’d watched the film itself on Thursday, with some friends, and now I find that dipping into the various documentaries is exactly the right speed for my fevered brain at 4 in the morning. Among the high points:

  • Home of the Horse Lords, about the horses in the film – their selection and training, and the extraordinary actor-horse relationships that developed. The dedication of the equestrian extras. The breathtaking work of the stunt rider who doubled for Gandalf on Shadowfax. Stunning.
  • In the sequence about the world-wide premieres of RotK (towards the end of The End of All Things), the Norwegian event was unexpectedly special. It was held in a sports arena, with a huge screen, and before the film was shown 200 volunteers reenacted the key scenes from the first two films.
  • The Abandoned concept material about a version of the battle at the Black Gate in which Aragorn would battle Sauron. WHAT?! How could they even think of betraying such a key element of Tolkien’s vision by rendering immaterial evil as concrete? Fortunately, sanity was restored.
  • The documentary material on Cameron Duncan, a teenage New Zealand film-maker who succumbed to cancer while LotR was being filmed. Peter Jackson introduces a tenuous connection with the film (to do with the closing song), but he didn’t need to do that. After pulling off such a stupendous achievement, he’s entitled to put anything he wants in the DVD extras.
  • Odd things, like the fact that the scene with Sam and Frodo on the stairs (when Frodo sends Sam away) was shot in two sessions a full year apart.

So that’s how I’m spending my time. Well, that and watching Tottenham’s 5-2 win over Everton.

Happier New Year

Over the last 12 hours a flu-like bug has attacked, so while Merry goes out to celebrate with some old friends (as I insisted), I’m sitting here with a temperature of 101.5F and delirium-style tremens. Oh well, mustn’t grumble…. Happy New Year, everyone.

Nuptials successfully concluded

ChrisCelesteAnne.jpgChris and his fiancée Celeste were married this morning in the Thomsen Chapel of Saint Mark’s Cathedral here in Seattle. Their good friend, The Reverend Ann Holmes Redding (shown here with the happy couple; click for full-size image) presided. It was an intimate and beautiful service, with family and friends doing all of the readings. After lunch at the Café Flora, the newlyweds headed off to the airport in a vintage London taxi – see cameraphone pics below.
Taxi1.jpg Taxi2.jpg

Geeks preparing for nuptials

Chris.jpgI spent yesterday evening at the Joe Bar with Chris and a bunch of friends, getting nicely mellow and shooting the breeze in advance of Chris’s wedding to Celeste today. Jon Lasser (author of Think Unix) was there; he’s already blogged about it, and posted a couple of pictures to Flickr. It was a nice, low key, geek kind of evening, with talk of music, PDA software, the benefits of seamless WiFi-GPRS, Unix file system APIs, and puppetry. Oh yes, and embarrassing confessions from all of us (like Chris admitting a fondness for the music of Garth Brooks, and a certain person’s recollection of a schoolday “chastity pledge”….).

(The photo on the right was taken outside St. Dunstan’s church in Carmel Valley last February.)

Seattle public library

This morning we visited the new Seattle Public Library building. It’s an extraordinary, surprising and inspiring work of architecture. We took the strange, green-yellow escalators up to the reading room, and then walked down the spiral stacks structure, emerging into the stunning womblike meeting room level. Rather than posting any of the inadequate photos that I took, let me recommend that you check out the photo gallery and virtual tour at the Seattle Times’ page.

The science behind the earthquake

For those who want a more detailed explanation of the massive Sumatran earthquake than you’ll get from CNN, the BBC, or the NYT, check out the US Geological Survey page for the quake. Not only was it a huge quake; it was the result of a huge shift: “Preliminary locations of larger aftershocks following today’s earthquake show that approximately 1000 km of the plate boundary slipped as a result of the earthquake.” The accompanying map shows the location of the plates and faults; the Indian plate is moving northwards into the Burma plate at 6 cm a year.

I couldn’t find much on the web about seismic activity in this area. Roger Bilham’s history of earthquakes in India is a reasonable starting point. If readers know of other good studies, could you link to them in comments to this blog entry? And please consider making a donation to the Red Cross, or the emergency aid organisation of your choice.

Finally I set foot on Concorde…

Concorde1.jpgWe visited the Museum of Flight this morning. I was last there 4 or 5 years ago, I think, and it’s grown significantly. The new Personal Courage Wing focusses on combat aviation of the two World Wars; a dreadful title, but a stunning exhibit. The section on World War One does a great job of relating the air action to the grinding, bloody mess that was trench warfare. (Too often the affairs of men like Bishop and von Richthofen, and machines like the Sopwith Camel and Fokker Triplane, are portrayed as if in another world, unconnected with the slaughter below.)
There was an interesting presentation by two docents entitled Blackbird Tip-to-Tail, in which they described the history of the Lockheed Blackbird program and conducted a detailed walk-around of the unique M/D 21 variant in the Museum. How fast could that thing really go? It was designed for Mach 3.2-3.5, and according to the docents none of the pilots really pushed it beond that, even though they were only using 70% throttle at that speed. Despite rumours to the contrary, it was never actually taken to Mach 4 – nobody wanted to be the one to find the actual limits.
Concorde2.jpgAnd then across the road from the main museum is the Airpark, with a Concorde, Air Force One (the VC-137B version of Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon), the first Boeing 747, and others. So after dreaming for years that one day I might get to fly in a Concorde, I finally got to walk through one….
(Click the thumbnails for the full-sized images.)

2004 – the answers

Many of my colleagues have blogged on the “best of 2004” (I particularly liked Hal’s and Craig’s.) I was thinking of doing the same. Then I thought I’d do it in question and answer format. Then I decided to skip the questions (for now). Enjoy.

  • Because she woke up with a bat in her bed.
  • It was a large one, but we managed to get it all.
  • How d’you feel about being a grandfather?
  • A thousand pounds of rusty cast iron hanging from the ceiling.
  • Spending more time in church than since I was a 12 year old altar boy.
  • Reading all seven volumes of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower?
  • The tension between autonomic behaviour and “choreography” or “orchestration”.
  • Groove Armada, Blackfield, Morrissey. (But why did Al Stewart have to slip?)
  • Philosophy. Poetry. Blogging.
  • Flying to Seattle for my son’s wedding; then hanging out with The Fellowship watching the extended edition of “The Return of the King” while sipping Laphroaig.
  • Yes – but only if there’s a meaningful way of expressing semantics without simply showing us the code. Otherwise, no.

And finally:

  • Nailing Robert Wright over the Dan Dennett interview.

I may not be blogging for the next few days, as I’ve explained in one of these answers. Have a great winter solstice, wherever you are and whatever you celebrate. (Memo to those who want to “reclaim Christmas”: this celebration predates you by thousands of years. Don’t be greedy.)

Now the truth comes out

A few days ago I noted here that American popular opinion seems to have shifted sharply against the war in Iraq. This provoked a plaintive – indeed anguished – comment from Mark: “Why oh why did they have to wait until AFTER the election to decide this?” It’s a good question, and Josh Marshall has an interesting take on it over at Talking Points Memo.

Josh first agrees with Kevin Drum that the main reason is quite simple: support has been declining ever since the initial invasion, and the latest numbers simply reflect that trend. But why did pro-war sentiment seem to to hold up during the election campaign? Josh suggests that “during the slugfest of the campaign, supporting Bush just meant supporting the war and this is what people told pollsters when they were asked, because one question was almost a proxy for the other.” Given that “close to 50% of Americans were dead set on voting for President Bush almost no matter what”, it’s clear why support for the war stayed above 50%. (Imagine “how many conservatives […] would have been so staunch in their support for the war if it were being fought under a President Gore or a President Clinton.”) And the result is that “the end of the campaign season has departisanized the war, [and people] are now freer to see the situation in Iraq a bit more on its own terms”.

(Memo to self: During the run-up to the election, I used to read TPM all the time. I think that after November 2nd I tuned out a lot of the political blogs. Bad idea. Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.)