Frankenstein: Life’s Been Good To Me So Far. PF celebrates his 3rd blogiversary. Three years? Amazing what time dilation on a September morning will do for perceived temporal duration.
droopy
I’m a bit sozzled with sleepiness.
Viv and I went to the Museum of Flight to see the new wing, and ogle the flying antiques.
After years of hunting, I found a NASA cap, to replace one lost to sleep-deprivation during the dotcom era. The new cap’s OK, but I still miss the old one, which was better made.
As always, I was as interested in the techniques used in presenting the artifacts in the exhibit as I was in the artifacts themselves. One interesting aspect of the expansive WWI collection is the high percentage of reproductions on display. Sadly, there was no rollup to show me the sums, but I’m sure I’ll work it out eventually.
The only well-known plane that did not appear in the WWI gallery that I noted as missing off the top of my head was the Nieuport 17. However, a Nieuport 24 and a Nieuport 27 were both featured.
Here is the complete list.
LAN ho!
Some clients, who live far, far away, have a tangled home LAN that I believe I will be drafted to fix in late summer.
AFAIK, the topology is like this:
[cable modem] –> [non-apple wireless router + 5 port hub] –> Apple OS X PowerBook, Wintel Latop B, Wintel Box C, Wintel Box D
I believe A(pple) and B are wirelessly on the LAN, while C and D are wired to the hub. I believe they have a shared printer, but don’t know if it’s running off a computer, a print server, or has an ethernet connection. I suspect it’s a locally-shared printer running off of one of the wired Wintels. Roadrunner is the cable provider.
I believe they just plugged in the router and the AP and turned them on. They got the wireless hub a few years after the cable router modem. They’ve complained to me of a mysterious, troubleshooting-resistant inability to establish a VPN to his employer, something that ‘just happened.’
I have been unable to traceroute back to their machines; the trace stops at the cable modem. The net effect of this is that I can’t set up VNC to look directly at their computers’ settings.
I strongly suspect that both the router modem and the AP are acting as DHCP servers; I believe this would account for the network problems they’ve mentioned. They said “Huh?” when I asked if their cable provider had given them docs on configuring the cable modem (to do things like setting up port forwarding, for example).
A series of questions, then:
Given a stable, if reerky, IP topology like this:
192.x.x.x -> 172.x.x.x -> 10.0.0.1, 10.0.0.2, …
where
- the 172-class number is a DHCP-assigned address from the 192-class modem
- and the 10-class addresses are assigned from the AP
[UPDATE: it’s unclear if the cable modem is a router itself or if DHCP was provisioned to the home via the ISP’s DHCP on the other side of the modem.]
1. is it going to be possible to set up a dynDNS solution that allows me to use VNC?
2. Do non-VNC remote screen viewers (Apple Remote Desktop and Timbuktu) provide an iChat-like way to route the data through spaghetti LANs so that I can see the local settings and work the problem without going there?
3. What will my options be regarding the cable modem? Can I just replace it with the router, if the hardware connections work? Alternatively, to what extent are Roadrunner cable modems user-configurable?
I am not planning on setting up any outward-facing servers, so I do not believe there’s even a potential violation of the cable provider’s TOS (WiFi notwithstanding).
Finally, in order to do this, I must brush up on my Wintel networking skillz. I’d love to hear some book recommendations.
American Girl
A day or two ago I somehow happened to hear a song that was unfamiliar to me but obviously by Tom Petty, which included the lyric
She grew up in an Indiana town,
Had a good-lookin’ mama who never was around.
But she grew up tall and she grew up right
With them Indiana boys on them Indiana nights
I idly wondered, ‘Huh, is that Tom Petty? Why is he singing about Indiana?’
Now, and I know this may come as a shock, I don’t listen to much contemporary commercial radio, talk, music, or otherwise, so I had no idea that Mary Jane’s Last Dance was a 1994 top ten hit for the blonde, reedy-voiced singer.
The song finished with an Indianapolis-specific lyric:
There’s pigeons down in Market Square
She’s standin’ in her underwear
Lookin’ down from a hotel room
Nightfall will be comin’ soon
Market Square, per se, may not exist. But Market Square Arena was Indiana’s largest venue for touring rock bands, one that Petty has surely played dozens of times since his late-seventies emergence in American rock. When I heard this lyric, I (mis?)understood it to describe the titular Mary Jane as a billboard model on the Arena’s banners, observed by the narrator as he looks down from his hotel room.
The Indiana references puzzled me, and the song reminded me of another song by Petty. Once again, I encountered this song in anomalous way – I learned how to play it with some friends years ago, and had no idea who it was by or what the original sounded like. All I knew was that it was a seventies rock number. My disinterest in the genre prevented me from exploring it further for some time.
Well she was an American girl raised on promises
She couldn’t help thinking that there was
little more to life somewhere else
After all it was a great big world with lots of places to run to
And if she had to die trying she had one little promise she was gonna keep
American Girl is from Petty’s first LP, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, released in 1976. Breakdown is probably the best-known song on that album.
At any rate, these fragments were clacking around in my head when we went to see Spiderman 2 yesterday. the film opens with a slow zoom out from, um, well…
A giant billboard photo of a model named Mary Jane.
This started to give me the willies, a wee bit, and so I’ve spent part of today treading Googlefluid in an attempt to answer some questions. In the excercise I have also learned some interesting things, the most tasty of which is that American Girl was written twenty-eight years ago today, July 4, 1976. The same source, a University of Florida student newspaper, reports that the narrative of American Girl (which involves a woman standing on a high balcony with unclear thoughts of dissatisfaction in her head) is probably not based on a supposedly-true incident of dorm-building suicide.
Why Florida? Well, Petty is from Florida and California. Which begs my original question, why Indiana?
This is a question I believe will simply go unanswered. This page collects some anecdotes about the song, including the tidbit that Mary Jane’s Last Dance was originally titled Indiana Girl, but otherwise sheds no light on the subject.
In my own mind the singer is certainly linked with my experience of the state in which I mostly grew up. It’s fair to say I was one of those Indiana boys in the Indiana night, if possibly not the Skoal-cap variety the lyric may call to mind. I’ve done my fair share of skinny-dipping in quarries as the midsummer night sounds thickened the humid, still air. I certainly hope I did my bit to help some Indiana girls grow up fast and grow up right. Discretion here draws the curtains on this pastoral.
I should clarify. Petty’s role in my Indiana youth was not to illuminate or romanticize the ways of youth, but rather to serve as a somewhat baffling weapon of ostracism. The particular lyric is from 1980’s Damn the Torpedoes. The album’s hits were Don’t Do Me Like That and Refugee.
In Refugee, Petty sings
Somewhere, somehow,
Somebody must have kicked you around some.
Who knows why you wanna lay there and revel in your abandon.It don’t make no difference to me, baby,
Everybody’s had to fight to be free,
You see you don’t have to live like a refugee.
After I returned from living abroad for a year, drastically changed in appearance, some of the redneck students in my high school determined that this song encapsulated something about me, in their eyes. They dubbed me “Refugee,” and I was greeted with it as some sort of taunt for a period of time. I still don’t get it.
Somewhere, somehow,
Somebody must have kicked you around some.
Who knows? Maybe you were kidnapped,
Tied up, taken away, and held for ransom.It don’t really matter to me, baby,
Everybody’s had to fight to be free,
You see you don’t have to live like a refugee.
Were they threatening me? I think, in fact, that this was the intended implication, as repeated violent encounters with members of this group of kids marked my entire high school experience.
If that is indeed the case, I can only savor the inverted meaning. I am threatened with violent enforcement of some sort of social or behavioral code, presumably because I am ‘acting like a refugee.’ The enaction of this violent corrective would involve ‘someone kicking me around some,’ which in the song prompts the problematic behavior. I could only conclude that I was to be encouraged in my deviance.
This campaign culminated in one particularly spectacular beating. It ended when an on-site police officer tackled the much larger goon who was happily engaged in pounding my face into mush against the ground. That event concluded with me holding the goon’s sister in my arms and comforting her as she wailed, because her brother had been arrested (again) and would certainly have to go to jail. Later I learned, unsurprisingly, that said goon had the whuppin’ kind of Daddy.
So in my mind, Petty’s work is associated with a particularly American kind of pointless, inherited violence, self-loathing expressed as a kind of xenophobia. It’s not the artist’s fault, and I have to say, it’s barely the goon’s. But I surely do see it as a deeply embedded part of Hoosier and American character.
Well it was kinda cold that night
She stood alone on her balcony
Yeah, she could hear the cars roll by
Out on 441 like waves crashin’ on the beach
And for one desperate moment
There he crept back in her memory
God it’s so painful when something that’s so close
Is still so far out of reachOh yeah, all right
Take it easy, baby
Make it last all night
She was an American girl
The power of the sun in the palm of my hand
Viv and I caught Spiderman 2 this afternoon, after a few errands. We ran into Tom and Rachel on their way to see F911, outside their building.
There were so many movies opening this weekend or last that I wish to see, I was uncertain what we would watch, leaving it up to semi-random chance. Predictably enough, the film with the highest number of screens won out. (The other film choices were De-Lovely, F 9-11, or Before Sunset, all of which I look forward to seeing soon. So many movies! So little time!)
Miscellaneous reviews had mush-mouthed it that the film might be the most successful superhero film ever (often using a construction that included the words “comic-book,” which appears to me to be related to the manner in which “sci-fi” is employed in mainstream critical assessments of genre film which employ techniques of speculative fiction, but then I’m a sorehead about marginalizing genre, so never mind me muttering hatefully over in the corner, no, pay me no mind whatsoever).
I can break that down for ya: it’s the best of these films by a substantial amount. It’s much better than the first Spiderman.
Its’ more-sophisticated use of visual effects and remarkable overall visual design closely recalls the dramatic, compelling imagery of (oddly) 1970’s Batman comics by Neal Adams. In particular, among these technical adjustments and improvements, the breathtaking fights stood out. These worked on screen as direct visual analogues of the most effective comic-book action sequences, are by far the most effective cinematic expression of that particular facet of comics.
In one scene, Aunt May is being tossed about by Dock Ock, and Spidey is set to leap over to her rescue. Raimi slows time in the shots, leisurely cutting back and forth between May, Ock, and Spidey, dissecting the actions within a fraction of a second. Time, in comics, is a flexible medium. Recognition of this, and discussion thereof, is like a secret password into higher comics greeketry. Repeatedly during the film I found myself gasping in admiration for this and other daring transubstantiations that Raimi and the writers had concocted.
In this sense, Spiderman 2 is clearly the most accomplished superhero comic-book film. But, however successful and amazing these aspects of the movie are, that’s mere window dressing to the beauty and operatic power of the story. The operatic reach and ambition of superhero comics is the single hardest thing to translate to other mediums, and here, it’s done with wit and grace.
Everyone knows that Spiderman and Peter Parker are the everyman of men in tights, due to Parker’s character definition as an uncertain nebbish of a youth. In this story, the writers – principally, I suspect, one writer – utterly exceed any prior Spiderman writing that I’m aware of. I’ll admit to limited exposure to the canon, but what grabs me in the film is not generally what is observed in mainstream comics, and therefore I’m pretty confident that no-one previously wrote Spidey this deeply.
The amount of the script seen on screen which may be credited to Michael Chabon is unclear. Chabon completed a pre-shooting draft which was then turned over to another writer. To me, the particular qualities of the script which lift it into extraordinary territory appear to be Chabon’s. Unfortunately for us, his website hasn’t been updated since November, 2003, a darn shame.
In his remarkable Kavalier and Klay, he takes the basic thematic material of a superhero, as well as the circumstances of his creation, and creates an involving, intricate literary structure in which character is presented in such a manner that the author’s thematic concerns are refracted in a nearly schematic way on to the cast that he writes.
In Spiderman 2, the same thing happens in the depiction and definition of each one of the primary characters. It even affects, for a fleeting moment, the amusing J. Jonah Jameson, as he expresses regret for having driven Spidey off the streets.
The only prior genre-oriented comics-related writing – not counting Chabon’s Kavalier and Klay – that unfolds with such reflective, structural depth is that of Alan Moore on Watchmen (and to a lesser extent in From Hell).
The film is an absolute triumph, better in every way than its’ predecessor, and without a doubt will prove to be a freakishly hard act to follow.
In miscellaneous other notes, there is a scene in which Parker and Mary Jane meet in a coffee shop to miscommunicate about their relationship, when the building-shaking thuds of Doc Ock’s approach definitively disrupt the meeting. The scene is nearly an exact reoccurrence of a scene in local mincomics collective Gannon Studio’s remarkable GoXXilla, a short work which also unexpectedly verges on literary depth.
As we seated ourselves, I noted Christian from MeFi one row ahead of us. However, I had forgotten his name, and therefore did not greet him. Should he one day read this: my bad.
A final trivial note: In the scene in which Peter falls on a group of parked cars in an alley, hard, and stumbles away holding his back and moaning, “my back, my back,” on the wall to the left of the shot, Neckface grafitti is clearly visible. New York is much more directly present as a place, as a superset of specific locations, in this film than in the prior film. Interestingly, New York is also a major theme in Kavalier and Klay I’m quite positive that whatever business is currently located at 233 Bleecker, they are seeing an uptick in business that will probably continue for at least the summer.
(Oh, man, I love that. In the film 233 is a pizza place, Joe’s, that fires Peter. When I googled it for that link, what did I find? Joe’s Pizza.)
Curtiss' Airship
Building Airships and Flying-Machines, by G. H . Curtiss. [at Bizarre Stuff.]
In building an airship, it is well to first determine the weight of the frame, propellers, engine, controlling mechanism and operator; then build, or purchase, the gas bag, of proper dimensions and sufficient capacity to lift the desired weight, together with a reasonable amount of ballast, which in a one-man outfit should be about 50 lb. Experience has taught us that a 7-hp. engine driving a suitable propeller will furnish sufficient pull to drive a one-man airship as fast as it can be readily controlled.
The casual reader may wish to note that Mr. Curtiss is less noted for his contributions to lighter-than-air aviation than for his distinguished contributions to powered flight.
Blimp Week, part 742
Zepps, at the recently cited Dannysoar site, contains plans for not one but TWO stick-and-tissue free-flight model zeps. Ah, lovely.
Dannysoar’s stuff is absolutely top-notch; it’s even somehow appropriate that the site employs aggregational navigation.
UPDATE: Oh my God. Le Gyroptère, a mono-wing helicopter aparently modeled upon the flight technique employed by maple seeds. Amazingly, copious documentation of this incredible thing exists.
Vegan Roadkill
The roadkill cooked slowly, only gradually charring enough to allow one to easily slough the charred skin. Once that material patched off, an unsightly orange tone was observed in the yet-underdone flesh of the item.
Later, we were set upon by a night nibbler.