Stormy weather, California-style

As follow-on to yesterday’s thoughts on the effects of bad weather on our lives, I give you an example of how the innovative, disruptive thought-leaders of the Valley They Call Silicon bravely adjust to the vicissitudes of Mother Nature.

I’m a member of a couple of meetups that get you out in some of the local parks or on the trails. It makes a nice change from the gym or networking events. One of them, the Cupertino Walking Club, is fairly leisurely (as opposed to one or two others, whose idea of an “easy hike” is a pace in excess of four miles per hour climbing a considerable elevation. In the dark). The CWC aims to cover all the parks in the city, and then move on to those in other towns.

We were supposed to take on one of them this morning, but there was the possibility of rain forecast, which prompted a whole lot of hand flapping amongst the five people who’d signed up for the event. (“Oh, gosh—I’ve got my fingers crossed that it doesn’t rain!”)

So much so that at 2000 last night the organizer sent out this notice:

Yes—a mild walk of less than a mile in a city park was cancelled because it might rain.

Evidently all of these hard-charging high-flyers who are boldly shifting paradigms with their superpowers for the benighted masses will freaking melt if a few raindrops fall on them.

In the event—there were indeed a few clouds in the skies this morning. But not a hint of precipitation.

Stormy weather

You know, there’s a lot of coverage of the bad weather that has struck much of the US, successive blizzards dumping feet of snow across the heartland and up and down the East Coast.

People getting cabin fever, despite 500 cable channels, video games and the Internet, etc.

What I’m wondering is this: will there be a spike in the birth rate long about October-November? Because there are only so many things you can do when you can’t push your front door open for the snow drifts piling up against it.

I seem to recollect that, long about late September, 1996, hospitals around the D.C. area were prepping for a higher-than-usual call upon their obstetrics resources, because we’d had a really bad storm in early January.

Yeah, I know—back then there were fewer cable channels, no video streaming at all, not as sophisticated gaming, and not a lot of Internet around, as compared to now.

Even so, if you’re an obstetric nurse, you might want to consider booking your annual vacation prudently now.

Air traffic

Last year I reported on the vicissitudes of national military budgets, which resulted in several first-world nations claiming they were unable to find the money to maintain 24x7 readiness for dealing with violations of their air space.

I suggested that Baltic countries in particular might want to rethink that situation, because living next door to Vladimir Putin, and being former entities of both the Russian and Soviet empires, would sure as hell make me uneasy.

Since then, it’s come to my attention that there have been incidents involving Russian aircraft flying into Sweden, Denmark, Estonia, near-Canada (yeah, not in their air space, but pretending to launch Cruise missiles on the US), the Netherlands, Alaska (yeah, I know: you can see Russia from there; I understand how those pilots might have got confused), and near-UK.

When I say “near-“ I mean “close enough for the countries involved to actually launch fighter intercepts. This includes the one earlier this month off of the coast of Cornwall.

There have also been other incidents where Russian aircraft buzzed US and Canadian naval vessels in the Black Sea. Although I can understand the attraction—I mean, if the Ruskies were engaging in naval exercises off the Gulf Coast, wouldn’t the Top Guns from Pensacola be itching to play some chicken?

Shoot—every redneck on the coast from Corpus Christi to Cape Coral with a huntin’ rifle, a six-pack and a bass boat would be powering up for a swipe at them. So, yeah.

At any rate, earlier this week Lithuania announced that it is reintroducing a limited form of military conscription; for years they’ve had a volunteer, professional army. So far neither Estonia nor Latvia appears to be following suit. I hope they’re not counting on the Litvaks to provide full protection.

And I hope they’re all gassing up their fighter jets and staffing their radar stations, 24x7.

C'est un peu compliqué

Well, this is really interesting--at least it is to a software product manager interested in the user experience. A friend of a friend posted this graphic on Facebook:

The initial word in the top five lines is pronounced “say”. They all sound exactly the same. The sixth sounds like “saw”. Pretty close.

The first three words in the last line translate to “its [sic] not complicated”, which I’m taking as a deliberate joke, using the possessive in French to achieve the incorrect possessive in English, on account of the number of people who swap “it’s” and “its” as though they mean the same thing and the apostrophe is optional.

However, the part that interested me is the final three-word expletive. I typed them into Google Translate, because while I knew the words independently, I wanted to check what they constitute in the collective. Unaccountably, this expression (and others like it) is never taught in college French classes, and (perhaps more unaccountably) I've not encountered it in my travels or work experiences.

Anyway, I typed "putain", and got "whore", so fine. 

As soon as the "d" of "de" went in, "whore" changed to "fucking". (I can say that, can't I? I mean, Google did...)

Google Translate uses predictive text; it recalibrates its response with each letter you enter, which I find most entertaining. 

The progression of "Putain de mer" got me "sea fucking". 

And then "putain de merde" first time round gave me "fucking shit", because I typed in an extra "r".

 And, as I corrected my input, it became "fuck off".

They give you a little icon to correct their translation, but frankly, I was laughing way too much to be able to operate dangerous equipment like a keyboard and mouse.

Il n'y a de rien.

Capturing the moment

Monday was the anniversary of the raising of the US flag atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima in 1945. Planting the flag there signaled attacking Marines that a key goal had been achieved in a battle that eventually resulted in the deaths of 20,000 Japanese and nearly 7,000 Americans.

If you have never seen the photograph taken by AP photographer Joe Rosenthal, well, I totally do not understand that. It is one of the most iconic pictures ever taken, and it formed the basis for the Marine Corp Memorial statue at Arlington National Cemetery.

I can think of only two photos taken in the 70-plus years since, which even touch on the power of the flag-raising. Both of those are from Vietnam: Vietnamese police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a Viet Cong prisoner in the head on a Saigon street in 1968 (AP’s Eddie Adams), and nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running naked after being burned by napalm (AP’s Nick Ut).

But what I’m really here to talk about today is the power of the still photograph. We forget about that because we’re so wrapped up in videos—images flashing by so we never have to dwell on something visually, much less really think about it. Like sharks, our eyes are always in motion. And we’ve been led to believe that video is somehow truer than the single image. More lifelike. Or deathlike, in the case of ISIS footage.

Well, I dunno about that. And the flag over Suribachi is a case in point.

There actually is motion picture footage of that flag raising, which, as it happens, was the second flag raised that day. (But it wasn’t staged for the camera, as some have claimed. The first flag wasn’t very big, and so wasn’t visible to Marines who still had a hard fight to go before the island was secured. So it was taken down and replaced with a larger one.)

And that film has nothing like the power of Rosenthal’s perfect frozen moment, capturing the Marines (and one Navy corpsman) as the flag was only just beginning to flow in the wind.

Yes, there are times when having both film and sound is the best way to tell a story. But if you’re a true photographer, and you have your share of lucky moments of being in exactly the right place in the Big Moment, a single shot is worth more than a thousand words, and more than a lot of videos that get spread around the Internet.

Gratitude Monday: Practice, practice

In addition to my posts here for Gratitude Monday, I’ve taken up the practice of calling out three things each day for which I’m grateful. I could do it privately, but I just started slapping up posts on Facebook, in this format: “May I spill over with gratitude for the blessings bestowed upon me, of which there are many. Today I am grateful for:” and then I slap up three things.

There are days (the ones when it totally sucks to be me) when I really have to reach for something, much less three of them.

(And because it totally messes with the karma to use a negative, I have to refrain from such things as “Not having an allergy to shellfish” or “At least Anthem is no longer my healthcare insurance”.)

The other day I was talking with a friend who’s also job hunting. She practices conscious gratitude as well—last thing before going to sleep she names ten things she’s grateful for, “Even if it’s just my favorite jam on my breakfast toast.” And she told me she really loves my little triad of thanks.

So today I am grateful for the practice of gratitude. I know it makes me a better person, and it certainly improves my attitude about pretty much everything.

Except Anthem, of course. They totally suck.