A clockwork Marine

I have another association with the subject of yesterday’s post—the commentary by a colleague that his Marine-in-the-making son’s only association with the name “Gomer Pyle” was with Full Metal Jacket.

I love reading local, small-town newspapers—reflecting their readership, they give such a different perspective on things than I’m used to (having grown up in LA). And when I was in grad school, that local rag was The Virginia Gazette. And, to help them keep atop of the fast-breaking news in that swinging community of Williamsburg, Va., the Gazette had a hotline. This consisted of a phone number and an answering machine, where anyone could leave a message—anonymously—on any topic. And the paper would publish a compilation of the, er, printable ones.

(Children—this was in the deep, dark ages, before you could spew your crack-brained half-formed thoughtlets all over the Internet on forums, Twitter, FB, the Wall Street Journal, etc.)

I always thought that one of the lousiest jobs ever (and certainly the worst in the ’Burg) was that of having to pick up those messages off the answering machine every morning.

Well, one day, there was a rather lengthy rant (the answering machine evidently didn’t cut you off after 60 seconds) from a Williamsburg Public Library patron absolutely fulminating about having checked out a video of Full Metal Jacket and being outraged and horrified to discover that the content was vulgar, violent and offensive.

(He might have thought he was getting a sequel to No Time for Sergeants. I don’t know.)

He was appalled—appalled, I tell you—that the library should have such filth available, and he’d expressed these feelings by writing “filth” on the cassette before returning it.

Then he was further outraged that the library fined him for defacing library materials.

It was not his day.

I don’t know for sure, of course, but I’ve always imagined that the caller was one of the many, many retirees in the area,and he had no frame of reference for either the Vietnam War weltanschauung or Stanley Kubrick.

But, leaving aside the former, anyone who’d ever seen so much as a theatre poster for any Kubrick film—Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove, Paths of Glory, 2001—ought to have twigged to the fact that it was just not going to be the very model of a modern major general.

Semper fi, y'all

Speaking of TV, as I was yesterday, a colleague of mine commented about a remark he made last weekend to his son, who went off to boot camp at Parris Island on Monday. Here’s what he said:

“I made a passing comedic reference to Gomer Pyle, USMC, and Chris was horrified. Say 'Gomer Pyle' to him and he thinks of the recruit who kills his drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket. He didn’t know where the character's nickname came from. Clearly I did not subject my children to enough re-runs.”

And all of a sudden I thought about all the times I’ve first encountered some man-made marvel—Galeries Lafayette, downtown Chicago, “The Raft of the Medusa”, the multi-product single-push soda dispenser—I just stood there slack-jawed and muttered, “Well, gawlll-LEE!”

Don't make me no never-mind that I have a master of arts from a stellar institution of higher learning. In Virginia.

I am also wont to chirp brightly—when some entirely predictable but unaccountably unplanned-for cataclysm befalls a project at work—“Su-PRISE, su-PRISE!”

I’m sure this endears me to my colleagues.

So perhaps it’s just as well that Chris doesn’t have the Gomer Pyle vocabulary; at least while he’s in boot camp.

Love story maybe; or maybe not

I don’t actually mostly watch TV commercials. I mean, the instant—the absolute nanosecond—that whatever I’ve got on cuts to a break, I tune out. Don’t even really need to hit mute; my attention is completely disengaged.

(Actually, I’m usually doing something else while the TV is on, so I’m almost never paying complete attention to what’s running anyhow. But back to my point.)

So, the first time this commercial penetrated to my brain (on The Military Channel, BTW), it was just ending, and I had that gobsmacked sensation that says, “What the hell did I just see?”

The website it’s advertising purports to be an “international dating experience” with “thousands of profiles”, all of women. They also assure us that they “conduct one-on-one interviews with each and every one of the women listed on our sites”, and “ensure that they have a genuine interest in exploring romantic relationships with men from overseas.”

Oh, and they’re “approachable, affectionate and beautiful”.

(I’m sorry—I just can’t stop repeating this stuff.)

Of course they are.

One wonders what the sad gits who pay for this service look like. & one won’t know because the site doesn’t mention any vetting of the sad gits who pay for this service.

Well, okay—I’m sure there’s a credit check.

I’m wondering that the marks—I mean customers—haven’t seen any of the many episodes of Law & Order (or SVU) that deal with the aftermath of “international dating experiences” when the online bride shows up in the US. Because this sort of thing usually seems to end up in the police files, not My Fair Wedding, if you catch my drift.

Plus, I can’t help thinking of that Discover® Card commercial—you know, the one where when you call customer service for any credit card except Discover, and you get “Peggy”:

I can’t get the picture out of my mind of some guy named Ted, sitting in Houston, IMing away at $10 a minute (or whatever it is) to…Peggy.

Does that make me a bad person?

More sorrow in South Dakota

Ah, another notable passing in South Dakota. Russell Means, American Indian activist and actor, died Monday of esophageal cancer. He was 72.

Means made news leading the American Indian Movement in the 1970s. His methods included flamboyance and violence at times. One of the most memorable protests was the 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee, S.D., the site of the massacre of 350 Lakota men, women and children by US soldiers.

But if you’re not politically inclined, you’re most likely to remember Means from the 1992 Michael Man film, The Last of the Mohicans. He played Chingachgook. Means and Wes Studi, playing Magua, were the embodiment of the destruction of indigenous New World peoples by European invaders. Whether you allied yourself with the English or the French, whether you were Mohican or Huron, whether you sought accommodation or revenge—it was basically a death march.

And you saw that all in the faces of Means and Studi, those stunning, evocative faces.

I was very sorry to hear about Means; and that type of cancer has to have been particularly awful for a man who was exceptionally articulate in support of his beliefs.

Sorrow for South Dakota

American politics should be mourning the loss of George S. McGovern. The former Senator from South Dakota died Sunday at age 90.

You can read retrospectives on McGovern pretty much anywhere. He represented the people of South Dakota diligently & for three terms in the US Senate, suffered one of the worst defeats in presidential electoral history & yet remained a public servant in the very best sense of that term.

(McGovern was the target of Nixon’s Dirty Tricks campaign of Watergate fame.)

The man was gracious, generous, conscientious, considerate. In fact, if ever there was a gentleman in US politics, it was McGovern. He, in fact, was a statesman.

From the time of his first Senate term, beginning in 1962, McGovern was at the forefront of US and global campaigns to wipe out hunger. He felt it was the duty of governments to help those of its citizens who were least able to help themselves.

What a concept!

I can’t think of anyone in either house of Congress who comes within the same Area Code of McGovern’s sense of honor & duty. American politics should be mourning that.

But they’re not.

In a bind

As I am oft wont to say, God bless the Internet. The words “binders full of women” were hardly out of Mitt Romney’s (R-18^th Century) mouth before the meme was sweeping the Web.

During Wednesday’s debate Romney, the Republican presidential candidate representing the 17^th Century constituency, was trying to convey the idea that American women need not be concerned about things like access to healthcare, equal pay or protection from domestic violence under his hypothetical administration on account of some of his best minions have worn skirts and pumps to the office. Why, when he became Governor of Massachusetts he immediately decreed that his staff should go out to all the Commonwealth and bring him likely candidates.

Which they apparently did by the binderful.

(He also preened himself over the idea of allowing his female chief of staff to go home at 5 pm “for making dinner” for her family, a wholly Leave It to Beaver moment; but that hasn’t made the Internet rounds that I can see so far.)

Well, within 90 seconds of Romney’s classic phrase, Veronica De Souza, a 23-year-old social marketer who was laid off the very morning of the debate, had secured a tumblr URL Binders Full of Women, posted a graphic and the race was on. By bedtime she had more than 3000 followers, and she’s probably well into the five or six figures by now.

As with Princess Bea’s royal wedding hat and the iconic photo of the White House situation room during the takedown of Bin Laden, everyone with Photoshop and an ISP has been uploading graphics comments on the theme. Warning: once you start scrolling down, it’s going to be wicked hard to stop.

A couple of images that I’ve found on De Souza’s site and elsewhere:

(Okay—this last doesn’t relate directly to Romney’s performance this week; it’s from the debate earlier this month.)

But of course, the Twitterverse has been alive with the hashtag #bindersfullofwomen:

  

But the phenom isn’t limited to the strictly social networking milieu. Go to the customer reviews page for Avery Durable View Binder on Amazon, and take a gander at what the folks have to say about this totally new use for the old office standby. Some of the headings:

“Too small! Not enough room for nail polish and makeup!!!”

“In The Binder, But Still Unemployed”

“Soft, Durable, but Doesn’t Wash Windows”

“Life in the binder—it’s the good life!”

Okay—I have to give one of the full reviews:

“not satisfied”

“This binder when filled with women cannot be strapped to the roof of my car. Thus, I will continue to use the crate to transport women and am returning the binder for a 53% refund—the other 47% of its cost is attributable to victims and others who lack self-sufficiency. If that doesn’t make much sense, who cares? I have great hair. As Phil Johnson once said about Mitt, he was the Paris Hilton of Massachusetts politics.”

Thank you, Sophie Kaya.

BTW—same warning for the Amazon reviews page—once you get started you just keep going.

  

I’ll close by returning to Twitter and a comment from @BigBird:

“Romney wanted #bindersfullofwomen because binders full of men cost more. #EqualPayHisAss.”

True that.

It's creeping upon us

So, Target has apparently won the race for first Christmas TV commercial for 2012. I myself saw it last night. (And we in the Silicon Valley with 89-degree weather, according to my car’s dashboard yesterday.)

Given that, the fact that they’ve got their Christmas decoration department going already in the Sunnyvale store seems hardly worthy of a lifted eyebrow:

And:

(But, to be fair, they have it behind their Halloween decoration department. Since putting up Halloween lights in your yard has now apparently become obligatory.)

Ho, ho, ho.

XY view

Well, alrighty, then—I’ve had a couple of days focusing on women, so how about giving some attention to men? Only fair, don’t you think?

Courtesy of my BFF, just a couple of indoor and outdoor videos for your consideration.

Watch that one all the way to the end, beyond the commercial interlude.

  

And now for the outdoor view:

Always happy to present fair and balanced coverage of, you know, whatever I feel like.

The Ecstasy of Ada Lovelace Day

Here it is again—Ada Lovelace Day, a global celebration of women in science and technology, past and present. (A nice change from the subject of women being in the literal and figurative crosshairs for displaying any reasoning skills beyond those required to work out a recipe for stew or darning a sock.)

Lovelace (1815-1852) was the only legitimate child of Lord Byron, and had a flair for mathematics that led her to a key partnership with Charles Babbage’s proto-computer. She might be considered the Mother of Machine Languages and is certainly well qualified to provide a hook for a day of recognition of the achievements of other scientifically-minded women.

In past ALD posts, I’ve discussed Admiral Grace Hopper, the mother of modern computing languages (including inventing the term “debugging” for the process of fixing logic errors); Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, Nobel Laureate in Physiology and Medicine for her work in developing radioimumunoassay (RIA);and Joan Strothers Curran, a physicist who invented the radar-deflecting countermeasure known as “window” or “chaff”, which played a key role in confusing the Germans about the intended D-Day invasion location.

All these women devoted their lives as well as their careers to technology advancement and scientific inquiry. My subject today…well, not so much.

But still.

Were it not for Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler Mandl Markey Loder Stauffer Lee Boies, you might not be hauling out your Verizon smartphone to Google who the hell this person is. She and her inventing partner, composer George Antheil, were granted the patent for frequency-hopping “secret communication system” on which many wireless communications systems are based.

Ah, forget the Google search: I’m talking about Hedy Lamarr. (And it’s interesting to me that in writing this, apparently Microsoft Word spellcheck doesn’t recognize either name. Seriously? WTH?)

Lamarr is better known as a movie star—from back in the days when a star was a studio product—than an inventor. She started out in her native Austria, was “discovered” by Louis B. Mayer and brought to Hollywood in the 1930s. She took to the glamorous life and bought into MGM’s publicity about her very early on. As far as I can tell, after reading a couple of bios about her, she couldn’t get enough money or adulation.

But she also had a bright mind, and she apparently picked up a lot of bits and bobs from the conversation at social events hosted by her first husband, arms manufacturer Friedrich Mandl. Guests at that table included high-ranking Nazis and table talk often turned to business of what’s nowadays referred to as C3—command, control and communications.

In 1940, Lamarr was kicking things around with a Beverley Hills neighbor, Anteil—an avant garde composer known for mechanistic pieces that involved (among other things) coordinating multiple player pianos. Lamarr was primarily interested in the possibilities that glands might hold for enlarging her breasts, but somehow the conversation turned to radio-controlled torpedoes—as, of course, it would.

Lamarr had an idea for what she called “frequency hopping”—moving the control commands around the broadcast spectrum in such a way that the enemy couldn’t jam the signal. Antheil proposed that the rapid frequency changes could be managed the same way he’d coordinated his player pianos in his “Ballet Méchanique”.

The patent for this protocol was granted in 1942, but wasn’t applied to weapons during WWII. In 1957 those crazy guys at Sylvania Electronic Systems translated the player piano rolls as programming media to electronics as a basis for secure communications. The technology was used by US vessels during the 1962 Cuban blockade; but by that time the patent had expired.

However, the story didn’t end there. The Lamarr-Antheil concept is the basis for modern spread-spectrum communications technology, enabling signals to mostly bounce around the spectrum and allowing us to enjoy incredibly banal conversations shouted into mobile phones and dodge texters staring into their hands on sidewalks of pretty much every country on the planet.

Lamarr didn’t earn anything from the patent, which probably really ate her lunch. (She had an unquenchable greed and kept a lot of lawyers busy, though not necessarily in the chips. She filed lawsuits the way most people file paystubs, but did not like paying for legal or any other services. Her six husbands in particular discovered that she was high maintenance in every sense of the term.)

As a human being, I wouldn’t rate her particularly well. And as a technologist, she was a dilettante. But, for one brief moment, she crystalized overheard conversations, found just the person who could deliver a practical application, and gave us communications capability that has forever changed the way we connect with one another.

Women's place

This cartoon has been making the Internet rounds in the past few days:

The immediate subject is Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old Pakistani girl marked for death because she’s committed the great sin of advocating for education for girls. You know—the barely-a-teenager who was shot in the head last week because the Taliban oppose the notion of educating women. Or basically any notion of education that doesn’t promote the particular world view of their particular sect.

Radical Islamists make a good target in this regard because not only are their views extreme, they are armed and willing to use violence in pursuit of those views.

However, the cartoon is about “religious extremists”, who are not, sadly, limited to those of the Muslim persuasion or Pakistani nationality.

I’m thinking the sentiment expressed—fear of a girl with a book—is equally applicable to males with radical religious views around the world. Throughout our own country, as a matter of fact.

In particular—how about the Michigan state representatives who banned two women colleagues from speaking in the legislature after they dared to utter such reprehensible words as “vagina” and “vasectomy”? That wasn’t 150 years ago, or even during the Eisenhower administration. That was in June.

Or Todd Akin, the Republican Congressman, senatorial candidate from Missouri and proud holder of a masters of divinity degree from Covenant Theological Seminary, who is so glibly able to split medical hairs by asserting that victims of “legitimate” rapes won’t get pregnant for purely biological reasons, and therefore the only women seeking abortions are amoral sluts? (Akin is also proclaiming that doctors regularly perform abortions on women who aren’t actually pregnant, just to collect fees.)

(You’ll notice that this concern about reproductive paraphernalia doesn’t extend to persons of the male sex. Men can clearly put it around wherever and whenever they want without any comment from this crowd. In fact, while the religious right is highly vocal about cutting off insurance coverage for birth control for women on purely moral grounds, you never year Yap One about not covering Viagra or Cialis or the like, or about the morality of using chemical means of prolonging male sexual activity far beyond the years which the Good Lord obviously intended, or He wouldn’t have created erectile dysfunction.)

(Actually, that whole disconnect about it being okay for men to rut like rabbits, but not for women, confuses me, because I don’t exactly know who it is these men are supposed to, you know, rut with. On account of these same religious right being opposed to homosexuality, too. And I believe bestiality is off the list as well, quite rightly. So I just don’t quite get that. And here I’m thinking about radical Christians as well as Islamists. I frankly don’t know that much about world religions, but I’m betting there are plenty of others out there that share these views. I believe the term is hypocrites.)

Or, how about that whole dust-up between the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (those wonderful folks who brought you the Holy Inquisition) and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious—you know, the American nuns who have committed the ultimate affront to the Church Universal and Regressive by advocating an inclusive ministry that doesn’t demand a lifestyle litmus test for communicants?

Or the various men behind the assaults on American women’s access to healthcare, to women earning equal pay for equal work or to women being protected from domestic violence?

To all these men, the sight of a woman with anything but a baby in one hand and a soup spoon in the other is indeed fear-inspiring. And the difference between the home-grown Baptist (or Pentecostal or Roman Catholic or whatever) Taliban and the ones in Pakistan is what we call the rule of law. As much as Akin, the bishops and their ilk would love to suppress everyone holding views not absolutely in line with those of their own narrow sect by any means possible (up to and including RPGs, since doing God’s work is an absolute defense for anything in their minds), the laws currently in place under the framework provided by the Constitution impede them from taking the same action their true-believing confrères in Islamabad and Kabul and Tehran do vis-à-vis those pesky women and homosexuals and others advocating various affronts to their theologies.

So my fellow Americans can go all huffy about how superior we are to religious whackjobs who are so afraid of a girl with a book that they call out a drive-by to terminate her with extreme prejudice. But we might consider cleansing our own temple first.