Jerry points out this flight lesson journal, interesting partly becasue it records someone’s experiences obtaining their pilot’s license via lessons based at Boeing field. The opening entry quotes ballpark rates ranging from an “unrealistically low” $4,000 to a top end of $12,000.
I believe I will get my driver’s license first. But after that, who knows?
‘Pol Pot’: The Killer’s Smile: On Sunday, in the book reviews, William T. Vollmann will review this book.
[map.search.ch] offers a quick-zooming interface presenting satellite photos of Switzerland overlaid with maps. I was able to find my teenage home in Lausanne after one false start, which had me poking around the countryside to the north of the town.
We lived in a ville-radieuse of upper-middle-class apartment block towers, swaddled in Le Corbusier’s greensward and literally on the highest point in the city. The basement of the apartment complex, which included about fifteen twenty-story-or-so towers, linked all the buildings atop the shorn and flattened hill. The basement complex had at least five levels, each level equipped with hermetically-sealable blast doors and generous supplies of industrial-sized drums, marked with the Swiss symbol for civil defense. I never did actually find the bottom of the basement complex, as below minus five we never found a light switch. But it was very clear that the complex could house many more persons than the inhabitants of the apartment buildings surmounting it.
Asking my Swiss peers about this remarkable find – even more remarkable for the fact that it was not in any way locked or marked as off limits to the general public or nosy teenagers – yielded bored teen “pffoouh” sounds. Apparently the Swiss building code had required all buildings over a certain size to incorporate fallout shelters and provisions since sometime in the fifties.
The whole of the built-up countryside, then, in my imagination, grew enormous, unmapped complexes of cavernous underground spaces.
Many years later, in Brussels, my sister, her boyfriend, and I went to a secret party, a sort of proto-rave, held in an abandoned industrial building on the outskirts of town. The building, a decrepit mass of brick archwork looming unlit in the night, was host to a conventional nightclub on the main level.
But we squeezed into a sort of crevice in the women’s bathroom, which led to a long, narrow hallway. At the end of the hall, a shaven-headed fellow in a leather jacket was collecting vouchers and cash before admitting people to a square-plan spiral stair that went down, and down, and down.
As we descended, music began to be audible, and dust began to make people sneeze.
After a long descent, we emerged into a cavernous space, defined by what I now know are groin vaults and brick columns, towering fifty or sixty feet above our heads. A parachute draped low over a makeshift bar was illuminated by portable halogen lamps.
Flashing strobes from several directions illuminated three separate music stages on which performers strutted and yowled through the haze of gritty dust. The floor was the source of the dust. It was made of fine powdery dirt, possibly sedimental. It was not laid flat, but rose and fell across the vast interior space. The gentle hillocks and hollows combined in some places to entirely occlude lines of sight.
At no point while in that remarkable exile from Piraeus’s Piranesi’s prisons did I see an opposite wall.
[argh! stupid Word spellchecker!]
While there, I amused myself by imagining that it was possible – likely, even – that were I to set off into the darkness beyond the lights’ reach I would eventually emerge beneath my old apartment atop Lausanne.
Who can say that in another direction I would not have found myself emerging from a cavern in the vicinity of a small town called Lascaux?
Yipes! I just got off the phone with my editor and my next round of contributions will be due in about 30 days. I have not one pitch ready or interview in the can.
Something’s gotta give! Internet, you look like the prime candidate.
The word-count totals are actually really pretty doable. The problem is sourcing – it’s about ten short pieces, of which only two are feasible without input. Since I have to do this on weekends and after work from the West Coast, this makes my life considerably more complicated than it might otherwise be.
Ah well, I didn’t start doing this because I thought it would be easy, exactly. Well, maybe a little.
Ask MetaFilter: What’s the best screenwriting software?
the verdict: Final Draft. An occasional blogreader will find this of interest, I think. eBay shows the product to be moving at well under $200 for new, unencumbered product.
MT Approval 1.1.0 is a product of the not-obviously identified blogger at jayseae.cxliv.org, who also has a load of other bloggy goodies on offer. If you squint, you can see the outilines of the antispam solution Which Must Not Be Named.
I’ve closed old entries to trackback, which bums me out. If TB had the same UI and publish-only-on-approval setup that comments under MT 3.x and MT-Blacklist offer, I would not have had to do that. I bums me out, actually.
Ruiners!
MT-Close2 is a plugin to close old entries to comments and trackback.
Via this useful site, which includes a host of other promising links such as a trackback-script-name randomizer. So far, I have not found links to references about an approach which an unnamed smart person shared with me sometime last month. I think of it as the spam-fighting tactic Which Must Not Be Named.
Learning Movable Type, the site that hosts the resource page above, looks interesting to poke around.
For best effect imagine me waving my hands around as you read the next sentence
But dang, I don’t have time to dink around with this stuff anymore!
Last night at practice Karel was talking about a certain kind of old-timey sound that features rough vocals. Greg and I started telling him about the Delta blues and so forth, and mentioning artists I have on vinyl. I jumped up to play some records – and then I realized that my stereo amp has been DOA for nearly six months.
But no more! This weekend is the weekend we pick up a new one. I mentioned I needed to make a list of what I want to Viv, so, this blog entry serves that purpose. I’m looking to get the cheapest one on sale that matches my feature needs.
The amplifier will be used for movies and TV as well as CDs and records (and video and audio tapes). Therefore some surround-sound would be nice, but I’m not buying a bunch of new speakers or anything so it needs to be able to support what I believe is known as 4.1 in addition to whatever absurd high speaker count surround sound befuddlers they use to jack the price up.
An onboard AM / FM radio.
I’m not an audiophile or hardware snob; I just want something reliable.
The primary video output needs to support both coax out and s-video because depending on where the video is being routed I might need either or both. I have an inline rgb-to-digital firewire bridge obtained long ago to digitize old VHS stuff, so it’s quite conceivable to imagine running two TVs off the stack when I finish frankensteining it all together for capturing stuff.
I do not anticipate attempting to jury rig a home-made DVR into this batch of gear.
The busted amp came with a remote, which I mocked without mercy and then began to use instead of all the other remotes. I imagine that this is basically a standard feature these days.
I currently maintain a series of hand drawn maps of the wiring of the current stack. I began to use OmniGraffle to map the connections as though they were a LAN, but the default clip art unaccountably lacked audio and video components.
I made vague gestures toward googling an online tool for developing and maintaining these diagrams, but my google-fu proved sorely lacking and I fell back against the pillowy cushions of the daybed in a swoon.
Murray! Murray! Bring me my bacon!
My buddy Chuck has a new “putt-putt mobile.”