tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-67310272024-03-07T23:23:33.555-05:00Half-Life and TimesRadioactive Ramblings of Tony PlutoniumTony Plutoniumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10819851762049845001noreply@blogger.comBlogger840125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731027.post-41463185580457339782023-06-06T06:50:00.002-04:002023-06-06T13:17:18.912-04:00A Million Miles Away<p><span style="font-family: arial;">So I officially became a published author today, when I self-published </span><span style="font-family: arial;"><u>A Million Miles Away</u> on Amazon.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">I started writing it as part of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), surpassing the goal of writing 50,000 words or more in the month of November. This was in 2020, the first fall of the pandemic and before the first vaccines were available, so we sure as hell weren't traveling anywhere. The timing, for bad reasons, couldn't have been better.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">But the origin of the book goes back decades. I had written the first paragraph almost word-for-word when it was actually still the '80s.I just never had anything else to add to it. People always say "write what you know" but as far as I could tell, all I knew was the IT stuff that I've now done for four decades. I (conveniently?) forgot all the other stuff that I've done, including owning a rock and roll club, running the local chapter of an animal rights group at the height of the last AR movement in the early 90s, being a half-way decent photographer, etc. It hasn't been a boring life.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">When I put together the <u>Rhythm Alley Redux</u> blog posts in 2014, I started thinking that maybe I really could write a book. A couple of ideas started forming but it was still many years later before it started coming together into some sort of narrative.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><u>A Million Miles Away</u> was actually originally conceived as a mystery, even though that's not a genre that I read. But that's not where the story took itself. Side characters wrote themselves into starring roles, other characters' motivations changed from what I thought they were in order to find their truth. I've always heard people talking about how characters wrote themselves or took on a life of their own - I know that to be true.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">I've edited this thing to a fare-thee-well and gotten the help of a number of folks (mentioned in the Acknowledgements section) and it should have been out at least a year ago, but getting rights to publish song lyrics, figuring out if I wanted to pursue a publisher, and all the other stuff that goes along with putting something out took time. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">And now it's here! You can search for the title in Amazon and wade through a dozen or more books with the same or similar title. Or you can search "Tony Patterson" and wade through all of the copies of Richard North Patterson's "Tony Lord" series. But I hope you'll make the effort to find me. I'm rather proud of this thing.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> You could also try <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Million-Miles-Away-Never-Late-ebook/dp/B0C726RFHT/ref=sr_1_5?crid=12B8WMFVKQDOC&keywords=tony+patterson&qid=1686071711&s=digital-text&sprefix=tony+patterson%2Cdigital-text%2C77&sr=1-5" target="_blank">this link </a></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">I hope you'll read it, I hope you'll enjoy it and I hope you'll let me know what you think - good, bad or meh. I've got a pretty thick skin.The main thing is that it was fun as hell to write!</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirUrOdC35NHbX06nrnfSFi9gPVRDRUSIiMd6PpqMxa8FUzA0moeSZ7E45CayOy3wTDjw86CRTEAKNWL8Ums7bw2vRarb0XWVOncYSfm_FNG2ZVP5RzpL8ttd00BD3kupW4IzGXbqYrZodZHsDeLlhBBRW725cne4qR1s0Z3pN9MPk85ZWiREk/s1028/IG%20Launch.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1028" data-original-width="1028" height="541" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirUrOdC35NHbX06nrnfSFi9gPVRDRUSIiMd6PpqMxa8FUzA0moeSZ7E45CayOy3wTDjw86CRTEAKNWL8Ums7bw2vRarb0XWVOncYSfm_FNG2ZVP5RzpL8ttd00BD3kupW4IzGXbqYrZodZHsDeLlhBBRW725cne4qR1s0Z3pN9MPk85ZWiREk/w541-h541/IG%20Launch.jpg" width="541" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">One disclaimer - YOU are not a character in this book. While I do name-check a few real bands and a few real people (all of whom remain off-screen), none of the characters are based on real people or are even composites. They all take up real estate in my head. And now maybe yours. :-)<br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><u><br /></u></span></p>Tony Plutoniumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10819851762049845001noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731027.post-56007577926801588202021-10-24T13:44:00.004-04:002021-10-24T13:44:24.753-04:00Why has no-one filmed...?<p><span style="font-family: arial;"> It hit me today while waiting to watch Dune tonight and while reading a GQ article on the filming of The Wheel of Time and being reminded that Tolkien's Second Age is also coming to Amazon, it's time to re-up the discussion on what sci-fi/fantasy series are out there waiting to be turned into cinematic or streaming hits.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><u>The Chronicles of Amber</u> - I've long thought that Roger Zelazny's Amber series would be perfect for a movie or series treatment. I would do the first series, based on Corwin, as a movie trilogy and then do the same for the second series, based on Corwin's son, if the first was successful. The right are apparently held by Disney/ABC, but I've heard nothing of any development. The first series is heavy on family intrigue, power politics, sword and sorcery - Game of Thrones material. The second ventures more into cyber-thriller territory. As I recall, they both feature some strong female characters that could be updated.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><u>The Belgariad</u> - A Science Fiction Book Club discovery for me, not long after they came out. And I read the subsequent series and one-offs as they were released. Best-sellers, even if some people wrote them off as Tolkien-light. Polgara is one of my favorite literary figures. Yes, it's another literal hero's journey (as are LOTR and Wheel of Time) - lots of walking and riding from place to place, but that lends itself to cool scenery and world-building.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><u>Saga of Pliocene Exile/Galactic Milieu</u> - Julian May's series is another that I jumped into about half-way through its publication history. It takes place both in a near-ish future as well as six million years in the past and would make one hell of an extended prestige TV series, with lots of opportunities for fabulous sets/costuming and some pretty cool CGI work.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><u>The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant </u>- NOPE. Nopitty-nope-nope-not-on-a-bet. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">According to Wikipedia, classicist Nick Lowe (not the singer) suggested </span><span style="font-family: arial;">"a way to derive pleasure from Stephen Donaldson books. (Needless to say, it doesn't involve reading them.)" This proposal involved a game he called "Clench Racing", wherein players each open a volume of the <i>Chronicles of Thomas Covenant</i>
to a random page; the winner is the first to find the word "clench".
Lowe describes it as a "fast" game – "sixty seconds is unusually drawn
out"</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">So what would you guys like to see on the screen?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"> <br /></span></p>Tony Plutoniumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10819851762049845001noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731027.post-77495916732984830472021-01-29T13:53:00.001-05:002021-01-29T13:53:22.475-05:00Pandemic Thoughts<p><span style="font-family: arial;">It hit me this morning that one year ago today, I was in Bangalore accompanying a new customer on a tour. The night of the 29th, we were sitting in a gorgeous outdoor restaurant, drinking craft beer (a new concept in India) and talking about coronavirus.Yes, it was still January and we were fully aware of the potential danger and already talking about the potential for sending people to work from home (in the US) for a period of time.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">My customer had routed their flights through Hong Kong to get the airline and schedule they wanted and by the end of the trip, their travel department had changed their flights home to go through London. We laughed about them having come in via China, but it was nervous laughter. <br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">It has never been unusual in international airports to see people wearing facemasks.It has been a common practice in a number of Asian countries. But as I was going through customs in Mumbai on the way home, I saw a definite increase in mask wearing. This was still the first week of February.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">When I landed in New York, I zipped through customs in no time at all (Thank you, Global Entry Program!) but I did see people being pulled out for questioning and their temperature taking by TSA. I assumed it was people coming in from China. </span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-family: arial;">I was surprised even then that the TSA folks were not masked. Again, this was still the first week of February. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">All this is to say that this was not a goddamn surprise. Even an uninformed rube like me saw the potential for this creating serious problems in the US all the way back in January. And as we know, our government officials, including the President, knew as well and while some profited from it, they chose to hide it from the US public and continued to not only downplay it, they actively worked to discourage people from taking precautions. We don't talk about that much any more but we should. Over 400,000 (and counting) American deaths later, those deaths are on their heads.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Without looking it up on a calendar, I can tell you that the last live performance I saw was Destroyer at the Cradle on the second Wednesday of March. That Friday was the last time I went out for a beer after work, sitting down at Gizmos (the old Rathskeller) and chatting with the manager about the lockdown that was starting on Monday. The last time I ate inside a restaurant was that Saturday, when we stopped off at Sushi Bomb and sat at a bar table after stocking up on groceries, thinking that we'd keep our heads down for a few weeks and stop this thing early. Those small, normal events stand out sharply in my memory almost a year later.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Everything since then has pretty much been a blur. I tracked my grocery store visits for awhile, in case contact tracing was needed. But I've stopped being very good about that. We've gotten away for a couple of short hotel stays (room service only, wipe everything down, masks everywhere) and one glorious week at a condo in OBX last fall, but everything else has been pretty much an undifferentiated fuzz of work and... well... work.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">I used to try to imagine how we would come out the other side of this. Now I frankly have no idea. It's been clear for almost a year that what was normal will likely not be normal again. What that *new* normal will look like, I haven't a clue. I realized yesterday while out for a walk that the thought of being in a crowded space anymore fills me with loathing. "Social distancing" has become the new norm and I'm not sure that, even when Covid winds down, I'm going to be in a hurry to be in close proximity to a bunch of strangers. I was usually more inclined to stay to the side or in the back at the Cradle and other clubs anyway (that stool at the back of the bar in the Cradle Back Room is MINE, dammit!). I have no idea how I'll deal next time (and there will be a next time, hopefully soon).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">All of this being said, I realize how incredibly fortunate we are. We're not worried about where we're going to sleep tonight. We're not having trouble making ends meet. We're not having to go out and put ourselves at risk in order to keep working. Hell, I was mostly working from home anyway. I also recognize that all of that could change in an instant. So many people are hurting so badly from this and will continue to do so long after it is over.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">So get your vaccinations. Keep your distance. Wear a fucking mask (a good one or at least 2 less-good ones doubled up). Wash those paws. And let's try to create a new normal after this that is safer, saner and more honest.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p>Tony Plutoniumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10819851762049845001noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731027.post-86125100457152984052020-07-17T09:26:00.001-04:002020-07-17T09:26:06.430-04:00RIP, Reverend Vivian<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I learned this morning that Reverend C. T. Vivian passed away last night at 95 years old. He never got (nor I suspect craved) the public acknowledgement (from white America, at least) that John Lewis or other leaders of the civil rights movement in the late '50s and early '60s got, but he was a towering influence in many ways and a remarkable human being.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the late '90s, I was working for Nortel Networks, a Canadian-based high tech company responsible for the digital switching revolution that really allowed for the growth of the internet. We had a distribution plant up in Creedmoor, NC, between RTP and the Virginia state line. The plant director realized there were racial tensions on the floor that were disrupting operations and he brought in Rev. Vivian's consulting company to hold a handful of two-day seminars that proved to be so successful, management extended them to the main offices/manufacturing floor in Research Triangle Park.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I grew up in about as un-bigoted a household as you could find in Nashville in the '60. My elementary school was over 60% African-American - when they instituted busing after my 5th grade year, I got bused to a whiter school. There's nothing about that that ensures that I would not be prejudiced of course, but I was sure that I was not.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I got signed up for the seminar and viewed it as a couple of days off of work (and maybe a chance to feel a little superior to my fellow white folks who would undoubtedly learn some painful lessons). Yeah, not so much.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Rev. Vivian gently and insistently led us toward truths we hadn't considered and that I think a lot of people are only now starting to understand. That the problems of being black in America didn't end with the Civil War or with the Civil Rights Act or with the end of Jim Crow (or now, later, after having a black President). That "I don't see color" is a bullshit statement. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The seminar was personal, not about societal problems like red-lining and hiring preferences etc. It was about *me* - each of us as individuals and how we feel in our heart of hearts and what we could do about it. It was intensely personal. That's a long, arduous path to take to change the world, but he spent decades doing it one small group at a time and doing it well.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">After the first day, I called my dad. My grandfather (an unfortunately racist man) drove a Nashville city bus during the formation of the SCLC and NCLC and the sit-in movement with students from Fisk University and American Baptist College, where Rev, Vivian was an older seminary student. Dad was right out of high school and driving a bread truck and while John Lewis and others were sitting in at a restaurant (while the manager turned the heat on full blast or sprayed them with bug spray), Dad might have been in the back, pulling bread back onto the truck because there wasn't going to be anything sold that day.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I made sure I sat with Rev. Vivian at lunch the second day, to share a little background and get his take on, well, those days I guess. He was gracious, engaging and funny. At the end of the second day, he had us line up and he went down the line, shaking hands and having a quiet word with each of us. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the days and weeks that followed, I fought back internally against some of what I learned about myself during those two days. Thankfully I mostly lost that fight and realized that there were unlearnings that I had to do. Some of that continues to this day and I hope that the past few months of racial reckoning is doing the same for others. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's ok to consider yourself to be not a racist. I still do (but I'm more not a racist today than I was before that seminar, if that makes sense). It is probably <u>not</u> ok to consider yourself "not a racist" without some ongoing self-reflection and self-assessment. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">All of this is to say that I am a better person for having met Rev. Vivian. I think about him and the seminar often and the world will miss his grace, his wit, his compassion, his love and his strength. Rest in Peace. </span>Tony Plutoniumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10819851762049845001noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731027.post-71405246242853904922020-03-15T14:58:00.001-04:002020-03-15T14:58:25.210-04:00Working from Home - A Guide for Noobs<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In 1998, while working for what was then a rapidly-growing Nortel Networks, I took advantage of their telecommuter program and started working from home full-time. Office space was at a premium, I was working with or managing teams in London, Ottawa, Texas, Toronto, Sydney etc, so when I *did* go into the office, I spent most of the day on the phone wearing a headset.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The bandwidth available wasn't stellar but I was managing people rather than systems so it was fine. And except for a couple of times when I had to spend a few months at a customer site, I continued to be a full-time telecommuter from 1998 until 2006. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I've since had to spend most of my time in various offices, partly because of the workstyles of the companies I was working for and partly when I had a lot of direct reports (or reports of reports) all in the same place.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But the past three years I've been back to full-time working from home, with (as you will have seen on FB) frequent trips to visit customers.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If you're new to working from home, particularly if you are new to being a people manager from home, I've got a few thoughts that might help.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">1) Get ready for work in the morning! No, you don't have to wear a tie but I highly recommend that you <u>not </u>work in your PJs or a robe or your "Too Drunk to Fuck" shirt that you still have from college. I generally go for jeans and a sweater or a button-up shirt, even though I rarely use the webcam. It reminds me that I am a professional, that I'm at work, and it helps differentiate between work-time and personal-time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">2) Which brings me to the second point - clock in and clock out! We all already have enough problems with that, responding to emails at all times of the day or night, letting people schedule you whenever it is convenient for them. It's worse when you're working from home. Not long after I started WFH, we bought the house we're still in - downstairs master bedroom and and upstairs workspaces - so there is a clear delineation between work and not-work. I realize that many/most of you won't have that option, but I would strongly suggest you do your best to find a space your can carve out specifically for work so that you can LEAVE it at the end of the day. Corner of the den, space in the basement, whatever you can do.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">3) Under other circumstances, I would suggest getting out and working from your local coffee shop occasionally during the day if you are someone that craves constant contact - I generally don't but I know plenty of folks that do. That is NOT a good idea right now. Instead, take a few minutes throughout the day to step outside, walk around the block but also have a chat online with a friend to maintain contact.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">4) On the other hand, it is easier when working from home to let yourself get distracted by social media, the constant news stream, etc. Set break times to check out your Tweeter feed or to see how your FB friends are coping but do NOT leave them open on your screen. Just don't.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">5) On the OTHER other hand, those same social media techniques can do wonders to keep you connected to your teams and co-workers. Whether you use Teams or Slack or Skype for Business or WhatsApp or any of the other work-share and communication apps, they provide a way to check in with your team (especially as a manager). Note that I said "check IN" and not "check ON". Look for work output, not whether they are online every second of every day. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">6) Go ahead and take a break to throw some laundry in (you'd be amazed at the number of people I've heard argue against their people working from home - "what if they're doing laundry instead of working?"). The time it takes to throw in a load of laundry pales in comparison to the thirty minutes those same blowhards would waste regaling you with their vacation stories or what they watched on HBO the night before. You need to get your ass up and move around anyway.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">7) Trust but verify. So I'm talking about IT professionals here, right? We usually have deliverables and project plans and deadlines, whether we're developing code or installing virtual servers or whatever. Sometimes we miss those deadlines but we should be clear on why that happened. Trust your people to do the work, verify that they did or that they had legitimate reasons for not and they will (usually) reward that trust with good work. For the handful that do not, do what you would if you were all in the office - make sure your expectations are clearly understood and reasonable, put 'em on a performance improvement plan if necessary and if that doesn't work, you might have to replace them. Chances are you'd have had to do that anyway.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">8) If you're the boss, schedule regular team meetings. Sure you'll be communicating with team members and groups all the time, but it is good to have a set regular meeting to catch up on all the other stuff that needs to be shared.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Of course your mileage may vary. And I know that many many people can NOT work from home. That makes it even more imperative for those of us that can to do so, to slow down the spread of this thing as much as possible. These are just a few thoughts - I'll likely add to this. And I welcome your own ideas and experiences!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Stay safe!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span>Tony Plutoniumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10819851762049845001noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731027.post-56626626104674675882020-02-04T17:56:00.000-05:002020-02-04T17:56:50.357-05:00Customer Service - good and bad<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I feel like I've spent my life working in Customer Service. Not only when we owned/ran a bar, but my whole life in IT support also qualifies, even if our contact with actual customers is sometimes limited. I very much appreciate our local restaurant culture and cringe both when I see bad customer service as well as when I see shitty customers that demand too much and that treat staff badly.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I had lots of opportunities to see all of that on my trip home from India - good customer service, bad customer service and boorish behavior by my fellow customers.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My itinerary for my return trip was an 8:45pm (IST) Saturday night flight from Chennai to Mumbai on Vistara Airlines (one of two full service airlines in India), a 2.5 hour-ish layover before a 12:55am Delta flight to JFK then a two-hour layover before my Delta flight home to RDU.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I know it takes a long time to get into the airport and I didn't have anything I wanted to try to do Saturday afternoon, so I arrived many hours early (around 3pm), hoping to check my bags, get through security, and then do a little shopping and hang out in the Priority Pass lounge. But Vistara would not let me check in until 6pm, leaving me hanging out in the departures lobby for three hours dragging around three bags. Bad customer service (I'm pretty sure that is not an airport or government regulation as I have checked in way early before on other airlines at the same airport.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At 6pm IST on the dot, I went back to the counter only to find out the my flight was delayed by 1.5 hours, leaving me very little time to make my connection. The agent suggested that I not check my bags and that I carry them ALL onboard on the slim chance that I could make my flight. He also said he would inform the ground crew in Mumbai that I had a very tight connection and that they would help me get to the Delta gate. If you read my previous post about security, you'd know that even if the plane had been on time, I would have been hard-pressed to make it through, so while I appreciated the helpfulness, they really should have known that there was no chance in hell that I could make that connection.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I did drag all my bags through security and up to the Priority Pass lounge and noted that there was a further delay in the flight from Chennai, leaving me no more than half an hour for the connection, clearly impossible. So I called Delta from the lounge and sat on hold. And sat on hold. And sat on hold. And sat on hold. For 45 minutes. (This after having to search the web for a non-US tollfree number since those don't really work from India.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When I finally did speak to an agent with Delta, she was actually very helpful. I had done some research while waiting on hold and noted a flight from Mumbai to DeGaulle in Paris with a 3.5 hour layover to the direct Paris flight to RDU. It was leaving Mumbai at 2:05 am (still tight) but maybe possible. So she got me booked on those flights since my next best option was the flight I was scheduled on - but 24 hours later.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So I finally boarded the Vistara flight, found room for three bags in the overheads (making enemies of every other person on board) and we took off close to 10:50 pm IST. We landed around 12:15 am and I grabbed my bag and my other bag and my other other bag and took off for the departures area and the Air France counter as the Paris flight was code-shared with Delta. The only promised help that I got from the Vistara agents in Mumbai was pointing me in the direction for transfers. Not all that helpful. It was probably 12:40pm when I got to the counter and they basically said no. Delta had booked me but not ticketed me (something about having already checked in to the Vistara flight) and while there was room, they determined that it was too late for me to make it (the flight wasn't scheduled to leave for another hour and 15 minutes and I still saw bags tagged for CDG waiting to go on the belt). So boo Air France (although if you read my post on airport security, they were probably right).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So now it's 1am IST, I'm exhausted, my cell phone is down to about 25% and my backup charger is dead and I can't find a fucking outlet anywhere in the airport. I called Delta back </span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and sat on hold. And sat on hold. And sat on hold. And sat on hold. For another 45 minutes. Finally got another also very nice and very helpful person who confirmed what I suspected - that I was fucked until 22 hours later and the next iteration of that Mumbai -> JFK flight that I'd missed.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So I was booked on those and was able to go to the self-service kiosk and actually print out real honest-to-god boarding passes for both flights, which helped tremendously with the security stuff (see my other post). App-based eboarding passes are still not a thing in India.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I did some looking for hotels (it's getting towards 3am by this time) and found that there is a hotel in the International terminal in Mumbai ("hey, that's where I am!") that had pretty good reviews. I called them, confirmed that they had rooms available, and then set out to find it. That's when I realized that I was not allowed to leave the damn Departures lounge without a hall pass. The first soldier didn't really speak English so I had to wait for the second guy, who sent me back up the escalator to the information desk.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I talked to the nice lady there and found out that someone from the hotel would have to come up and escort me. She called them and a bellman came up a few minutes later. He asked if I had a reservation, which I did not yet. Apparently that was bad, as he was supposed to show a piece of paper with my name on it and a reservation. So he pulled one from someone else out of his pocket, scratched out the other information and put mine in, and away we went. And it worked.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So I checked into the hotel around 3:15am with a checkout at 10pm. Very nice looking place. Also, as you'd expect, quite expensive - ~$150 US (really nice hotel rooms in India are often no more that $70-80 a night). But it was there (no having to deal with transportation) and I was too damn tired to worry about the cost.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So I had a shower, slept for a few hours, had a very decent room-service veg biryani (no beer as the hotel apparently isn't licensed) and hung out in the room as basically there was nowhere I could go without going back past a security checkpoint.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">From a customer service perspective, the rest I guess is anti-climactic. I found the service on the Mumbai->JFK flight to be just fine (Delta has become one of the best for service) but the food was mediocre at best (at least compared to my past British Airways flights). For the flight over, I had ordered "vegetarian" meals which might seem superfluous since pretty much every flight into and out of India is going to have a veg option or two. But the problem is that sitting back in steerage, you get served last and choices may have run out. ALWAYS order a special meal, even if you don't have to. You'll never regret it.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, what are my conclusions? Avoid Vistara, first of all. I had a much better experience with IndiGo (a low-cost local airline) on my flight from Bangalore to Chennai mid-week) than I did with Vistara. Their app didn't work at all, their agents were ill-informed and I think next time if I have to make internal transfers, I'll look for IndiGo.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For Delta, other than the ridiculously long wait times, I was pleased with their service. The agents I talked to were helpful in every case (and they were NICE), their app works better than that of most airlines and their flight attendants are a cut above American and United. And I'm guessing employee satisfaction is pretty high since the company just announced a profit sharing total of the equivalent of 2 months salary for all Delta employees!</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Air travel is just not fun. I don't think it has been since the 80s, with deregulation and ever-tightening security and ever-shrinking seats making it an ordeal to be survived rather than a pleasant way to get from point A to point B. Since I've been traveling much more frequently the past three years, I'm looking for every little break I can get, whether it's TSA Precheck and Global Entry (both a huge help) or spending the dough required to get a credit card that has travel perks like airport lounge access (I'll never travel enough miles + segments to qualify for Gold or higher status with any airline). The other thing that makes it tolerable is good customer service - be happy if you find it!</span></span><br />
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<br />Tony Plutoniumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10819851762049845001noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731027.post-27343431238839744172020-02-03T18:20:00.001-05:002020-02-03T18:20:26.202-05:00Security Overload<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'm going to write a long post on the air travel experience to India that I just finished but I wanted to give you guys some idea of navigating airports in India, especially when it comes to security.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">First of all, never expect security procedures in other countries to be anything like those in the US. Partly because security concerns are different (India has had both internal political violence as well as ongoing disputes with Pakistan, particularly when it comes to Kashmir) and different governments have different ideas for how to address the same problems.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So let me give you an idea of the security checkpoints I went through on the trip home I just completed, with a route of Chennai -> Mumbai -> JFK -> RDU</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To get inside the airport in Chennai (or any airport in India), you have to present a boarding pass and ID to military security outside the terminal. But for the most part, eticketing is not a thing in India. So luckily I had printed out my itinerary and presented the officer with the sheets showing my Vistara flight from Chennai to Mumbai and the Delta flights to get me home from there. But... what I showed him didn't include my name. He directed me to the outside Vistara counter (all the airlines have counters that face outward from the terminal, which makes sense given the requirements to get inside). I stepped out and then realized that I needed to pull out the first sheet of the itinerary printout that had my name on it and got back in the mercifully short line and got through. Passport check #1.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">After going through the line at the Vistara desk, I got my boarding pass (but NOT the passes for the two Delta flights) and took my bags through security. The security checks at Indian airports are much different than those in the US. It's a bit of a mob scene, for one, with just a table for bins in each queue that people don't really queue up for all that much. Laptops AND cellphones come out and belts come off, but I was wearing sneakers and did not have to remove them (no sneaker bombers in India, I guess) and nothing about liquids. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I travel with a CPAP for sleep apnea and left that in my carryon sometimes, took it out others, and it was never questioned. But the young man in front of me at one checkpoint that had unsealed containers of what appeared to be protein powder may still be in the airport. Or disappeared.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Everybody gets wanded and patted down. Everybody. They have metal detectors that look like the ones they installed in US airports in the late 60s after idiots kept hijacking planes to Cuba, but everybody gets a pat-down. So they direct female travelers to separate lines, including splitting families up. Passport and boarding pass check #2.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Passports were checked again at the gate and away I went, but 2 hours delayed with no way to make my connection - more on that later.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mumbai is where things got even weirder. I had carried on three freaking bags in the vain hope that I'd make my connection so I didn't have to deal with baggage claim. So I hauled all the bags up to Departures, with a military check of passport and boarding pass/printed itinerary to get up there. Check number 1.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Having missed my flight as well as the flight through DeGaulle that Delta had put me on, I ended up booked on the flight to JFK leaving the next day at 1am (my original flight +1 day). I found that there was a hotel inside the Mumbai airport, called to ensure they had room, then went off in search of it. But security stopped me from LEAVING the Departures lounge as I didn't have a reservation. They sent me to the Info deck in Departures, who called the hotel to come up and escort me down. Checkpoint number 2.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Given the restrictions of movement, I spent the next 20 hours in a very nice hotel room in the Mumbai airport, trying to get some rest and eating a pretty decent veg biryani.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I *had* managed to get my Delta boarding passes from the self-service kiosk so I was prepared to get through security to get to Departures. Checkpoint number 3.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">While in line at the Delta counter for the bag drop, Delta agents walked through the line, checking passports and asking immigration-type questions (reason for visit , point of entry, places visited, etc), then stickered my passport. Checkpoint number 4.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At the counter of course, I had to produce the passport again. Checkpoint number 5.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Go through security - similar rigamarole to above, maybe a little less chaotic. Checkpoint 6.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The to the very long line at immigration. Checkpoint 7.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Walk through the mall-sized Duty Free shop to get to the gates. I was confused about why the desk agent told me that boarding was going to start at 11pm for a 1am flight and I checked with the gate agent to see if that was right (I really wanted to check out an airport lounge and relax a bit). But no, the 11pm checkin was correct.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Scanned boarding pass at the gate plus passport check. Checkpoint 8.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Found that there was a temporary looking FULL SECURITY CHECK between the gate and the airplane. Take everything out of bags, wanded again, etc. Checkpoint 9.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I *think* that was it. But it wouldn't surprise me if I missed something - unlike previous trips I never got into a good sleep pattern and I was living on 3-4 hours a "night" and was a little punchy. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I understand a "belts and suspenders" approach to security. But this seemed like a "belts, suspenders, bungee cords, Superglue, staples and duct tape" approach. Even if my Vistara flight had been on time, I would have been hard-pressed to grab luggage off the carousel, go to the Delta desk to drop it off, make it through security and customs and still reach the plane in the two hours that were originally scheduled. All my previous trips to India (all TWO of them, so not that many) were direct flights into Chennai, so this was my first experience with combining domestic flights with international. Lessons learned.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The other thing that I find very different is that so much of this is handled not by a TSA analog, but by camouflage-uniformed military personnel, including pairs of uniformed soldiers patrolling the Departure area with machine guns at the ready. Takes some getting used to.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Additional security measures vary at hotels and work spaces. This trip, they actually seemed a little less than the trips I took in 2017. Where before the hotel security would run a mirror under any car to check for bombs and baggage had to go through a scanner, that didn't happen this time in either Bangalore or Chennai. Guess it depends on current tensions.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The good news was the Global Entry when I reached JFK was a fucking miracle. No line at the kiosks, 30 seconds for it to take my picture and print out a slip with a grainy photo, no more than 5 minutes in line to present to the Customs officer, and that was it! If you travel internationally, I highly recommend going through the hassle of getting it (it also gets you TSA Precheck, which helps not one whit internationally but is a huge help domestically). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I've never seen anything really describing this whole process. I was lucky I printed out my itinerary as I don't usually for domestic travel. Guess the moral of the story is be flexible, be patient and be as prepared as you can. Now at least you are prepared for your next trip to India!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span>Tony Plutoniumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10819851762049845001noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731027.post-10342697486656196792020-01-04T23:20:00.000-05:002020-01-04T23:20:04.299-05:00The Cradle<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My history with Cat's Cradle doesn't go back 50 years. It goes back around 38 though. I had seen the Fabulous Knobs on the lawn at Connor Beach during Springfest in '79 with a bunch of friends and one day a couple of years later, my friend Kevin Bruce suggested we grab dinner at Tijuana Fats and then catch them again at the Cradle next door.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I was hooked from night one. By the band, certainly, but by the vibe of the room and the people. I went on to see the Knobs at the Pier (I even got pulled on stage to dance with Deb for "Teenage Boogie" one night) and other venues but it was never quite as awesome as the shows at the Cradle. They were always on fire and the audience was too.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Then it was the dBs and the Pressure Boys and a bunch of other bands and I was in love. DR moved the club to Franklin Street (the location alternately known as the "long skinny Cradle", "the shoebox" and "the bowling alley") and Judy Hammond opened Rhythm Alley in the old location. While I spent a lot of time at the Alley (and fell in love there and got married there and bought the damn place with my bride), I never stopped going to the Cradle. I'd sneak out to take in a couple of songs from time to time and catch a show when we didn't have anything booked.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When we were a few months into our ownership of the Alley, in 1986, DR announced he was closing the Cradle. A number of folks coming to the next couple of shows commented that that was good news for us. But we knew it was not. What was magic was being able to plop down the price of an import beer at two different clubs a couple of hundred yards apart and catch incredible music in both places. The west end of town got lonely after the Cradle closed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Later that summer, I was putting up posters on West Franklin Street when Richard Fox stopped me and introduced me to the new owner of the Cradle, some dude named Frank Heath. 33 and 1/3 years later, he's still running the place. That is clearly impossible - it just doesn't happen that someone owns a club for that long. Frank (and he will tell you, all the folks like Derek and Andy and the rest of the team) are the reason that the Cradle thrives, 50 years on. It's impossible, yet here we are.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The other thing that makes this work for local musicians, though, are the other clubs and venues that give bands starting out places to play, learn, and build an audience. So don't *just* support the Cradle (although support them with all your might!). Spend some dollars at the Cave and Local 506 and the Pinhook and Motorco. And I promise to take my own advice and do the same.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Cheers to Bill, Jim, Marsha, DR, Frank and all the other owners, managers, bartenders, soundfolks, stage managers and other folks that keep the Cradle rocking - thanks for 50 years and here's hoping for 50 more.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span>Tony Plutoniumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10819851762049845001noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731027.post-65600864770465798572019-12-18T08:51:00.002-05:002019-12-18T08:52:48.476-05:00Glasses Half Empty<div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="doc49" data-offset-key="f7i32-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
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<span data-offset-key="f7i32-0-0"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Well, *yesterday* was a mixed bag! The morning started with an early flight to JAX via ATL and was the first time I've had the full benefit of spending craploads of money to make air travel less shitty. TSA Precheck made security a breeze, an upgraded seat via Skymiles points made it quicker to deplane in Atlanta and access to the Sky Lounge meant I could park my bags, hit an uncrowded restroom, grab a cup of coffee and catch up on a couple of emails - all in about 15 minutes. Budget Fastbreak meant picking up the car was a breeze. All in all, the way travel is supposed to be.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Then while at the hotel before meeting my customer for dinner, I broke my glasses. Not a lens - I broke the frames, right at the bridge. They're effectively wire-rims, so a nerd repair with tape or a bandaid wasn't possible.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">So I found myself driving a strange car on strange roads in a downpour in the dark in heavy traffic wearing my prescription Ray-Bans. Probably not the safest choice but I was already running late and didn't have time to try to get a Lyft.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">It is likely that none of you other than my family have seen me without my glasses on, unless we've gone swimming or had sex together. I've been wearing glasses since I was in first grade, which was @^#%%@@% years ago. I do not look like *me* without my glasses, even to me, since I can't really see myself clearly without them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">So I'll navigate through the day today looking either like I'm nursing the mother of all hangovers or trying to be incognito. I'm curious to see if anyone asks me for a selfie at the airport, thinking I must be SOMEbody they know. (The last time anyone seemed truly convinced that I was someone else was in 1983 in a bar in Georgetown, when some drunk young thing was sure I was Max Weinberg. Springsteen was in town the next night, I think, and she was absolutely sure despite my protestations that I was the E Street Band drummer, despite the fact that he's ten years older).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Wish me luck!</span></div>
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Tony Plutoniumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10819851762049845001noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731027.post-10127887559249428532019-02-10T21:28:00.000-05:002019-02-10T21:28:21.760-05:00What's Up With Your Taxes?<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Just finished filing our income tax today and no surprise, I've gone from getting a low 4 figure refund the past few years to owing a small amount to the IRS. That seems to be the norm, so what's going on?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">First of all, I'm not a tax accountant. Second of all, those of you that are already scoffing at me for not planning my withholding to the penny so that the IRS didn't get to use my money interest free all year may as well stop reading - I'm not writing this for you. Yes it's smarter to minimize your refund, but it ain't easy to do and most people would rather get something back than run the risk of paying (hence the uproar now).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So what happened? Let me give you an example (these numbers <u>ARE NOT</u> my actual numbers - they are made up round numbers for illustration purposes). We'll look at Jack (a high school teacher) and Jackie (a Windows server admin at a mid-sized company). They file married/jointly and their income after the little bit they carve out pre-tax for her 401K is right at $100K.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Their first combined paycheck in the middle of January 2018 was $100 more than last year. Hurray! They get paid twice a month so that's $2400 a year! Not enough to go buy a new car, but it's significant. Might mean some new clothes, dining out more often, maybe even a weekend at the beach. Awesome! The $100 is nice, but by April they've kind of forgotten about it and then Jackie get a little merit raise at work in June and it all blends together.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So now it's February 2019 and tax time. Jackie and Jack are used to getting a decent refund (around $1500) and using that to take a vacation after the school year. But as they go through the tax program, they start noticing some things. They're used to itemizing deductions, claiming mortgage interest, property taxes, donations, state income tax, etc. But some of those are now being capped. They're pushed into the standard deduction of $24K for a married couple - higher than it was previously, for sure. But the personal exemption is gone which counters some of that gain. After all is said and done, they end up owing the IRS $150!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So did their taxes go up or down? Well, they did go down, But not by $2400. They went down by $750. That's not a figure to be sneezed at, but it's not nearly as much as they thought a year ago and they miss having the big refund that they can use for a down payment for a car or for a getaway.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For those of you that have already filed, does that look like what you've seen? Were you smart enough to change your W-4 at the beginning of the year? And for those of you that pay a lot more attention to such things, do I have this right or am I missing something?</span>Tony Plutoniumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10819851762049845001noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731027.post-49367636151296028642018-11-07T09:41:00.001-05:002018-11-07T09:47:35.248-05:00Take the win<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">While a lot of you knuckleheads spent Election Night with your favorite disinformation channel on the tube and FiveThirtyEight open on your iPad, Jeannette and I spent the night at the Cradle enjoying a fantastic Psychedelic Furs set (nice opener by Liz Brasher too). We got home by 11 and I took a quick look to reassure myself that the House was going to be majority Dem and then went to sleep.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I see a lot of hand-wringing from folks that did watch the results all night - I like the perspective I got by NOT watching it like a tennis match and just looking at the end results (I know there are still some undecided races out there, but you get my drift). By not sweating over every precinct return, I think I kept a little perspective.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Democrats won enough seats to take the House. That might not have been the ONLY thing that mattered, but it mattered more than everything else. That means that Adam Schiff and Maxine Waters and Elijah Cummings are likely now to be committee chairs. That is a Big. Fucking. Deal.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Democrats picked up a large number of governorships, which will make a huge difference. Scott Walker and Kris Kobach went down in defeat. No, Dems didn't win Florida or Ohio, but they won a bunch. That is vitally important as we head into the 2020 census.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Closer to home, the GOP lost supermajorities in both sides of the NCGA, meaning that they will no longer be able to automatically override Gov. Cooper's veto. <i>[Edit - I see I spoke too soon as there are races that are undecided. No more supermajority in the House but Senate is still uncertain.]</i> And the two referenda that would have restricted the NC governor's powers were defeated. And the Dem won the State Supreme Court race. We've got districts that have been found to be illegally gerrymandered and we're in better shape now to ensure that that is resolved.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It was a good night. Maybe it wasn't a fantastic night, but it was a good night.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Now the cries will begin for the new House majority to "show restraint" and to "avoid legislative overreach". Complete and utter bullshit. The GOP House did not suffer from spending millions of dollars and 1000s of hours in incessant investigations of non-scandals like the IRS and Benghazi. The Dem House will not suffer from actually investigating the vast amount of real wrong-doing that is out there to be brought to light. If we have learned anything in the last two years (or last forty years) it's that there is no such thing as overreach anymore. The House turned more blue-ish because of Trump, not because of Devin Nunes or Trey Gowdy.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What the Democratic House does have to do is prove that it can walk and chew gum at the same time. There is no reason that they can't put forth a reasonable, progressive legislative agenda at the same time they investigate the massive fraud and misdeeds of the Trump administration. Yes, that agenda will be stymied in the Senate but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't try - that's what they were elected for. And that doesn't mean that if there's some area of common ground with the GOP, they shouldn't pursue it. But being seen as a roadblock to the Trump agenda will *not* be a negative, despite what corporate media will try to say.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And yes, they should pursue investigations professionally, reasonably and to the fullest extent that they can. There is plenty to investigate that others have pointed out over and over. And once they've started turning over those rocks and shining a light on what comes wriggling out, along with the next few weeks of Mueller investigation reveals, yes they damn well should start impeachment proceedings against Trump. The Senate may not vote on it but the Senate election landscape for 2020 is much more favorable to Dems than 2018 was and putting GOP Senators on the line for their votes on what will be obvious illegal activities from the Preznit will not hurt.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Nancy Pelosi will pick the the majority leader gavel again and should keep it until someone comes along that has her fund-raising and cat-herding abilities and not one second before. The fact that she's the boogie-woman that GOP uses to scare their sheeple at night should be seen as a badge of honor, not a detriment. They will use WHOEVER is in the position in exactly the same way, so it really doesn't matter.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Things have started to change for the better. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Yesterday was a good day.</span><br />
Tony Plutoniumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10819851762049845001noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731027.post-66454276116060073562018-07-13T17:58:00.001-04:002018-07-13T17:58:18.638-04:00First World Problems - Business Travel Sucks"You'll survive all of this if it kills you<br />
Just to show them that you never lost your nerve."<br />
- The Old Ceremony, "Ghosts of Ferriday"<br />
<br />
I have not always been a frequent business traveler but I'm an experienced one, both domestically and internationally, both pre- and post-9/11. But I'm ready to stop. Just quit it completely, unless it's a drive rather than a flight away.<br />
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I don't blog about work often and I'm not really talking about work itself here, just some of the wonder that surrounds it.<br />
<br />
A couple of weeks ago I was visiting a customer in Andover, MA, around 45 minutes north of Boston. Being the good corporate citizen that I am, I scheduled my flight for relatively late in the day so I could get a good day's work in before signing off. The flight into Logan was uneventful, I picked up my rental car, plugged in the destination in Google Maps and away I went, through the Big Dig and off into the rainy night.<br />
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I arrived at my hotel around 11pm, maybe 11:15 and there is where the trouble began. I had no reservation. No record of it. None. And of course the hotel was completely booked. The guy behind the desk suggested a couple of other places to call (he did NOT offer to do that himself) but they were booked as well. As a matter of fact, one of the people I spoke to at another hotel said she had been trying to find rooms as far away as Maine with no success. There was some sort of huge softball tournament or some such going on and rooms were just not to be had.<br />
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Thinking that the travel folks our company uses had screwed the pooch, I emailed them and (to their everlasting credit) they responded within 5 minutes (meanwhile I had powered up my laptop and was looking for other options myself). I heard the phone behind the reception desk ring and realized that the guy behind the counter was being reamed out by our travel people but to no avail.<br />
<br />
I tried a few more places on my own as did the guy from our travel team. I had zero luck. He kept finding places that had rooms available online but when he called them to confirm, they were not actually available (again, I've derided these guys before but they performed admirably).<br />
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By this time it was around 12:30 am and I was contemplating sleeping in the back seat of the little Mercedes crossover I had rented and then blowing off my customer meeting and flying the fuck home. I had been pretty well convinced that this had been a screw-up on the part of our travel people but just for the hell of it, I called the toll-free number for the hotel chain (yes, it was Holiday Inn Express). I gave the guy my reservation confirmation number, telling him that the guy at the deck hadn't been able to find it. No, the voice on the phone said, we had it but we canceled it because you hadn't checked in.<br />
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What the ever-loving fuckety fuck?!?!?<br />
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After blowing off a little steam venting at the sap on the other end of the line, I asked him how the hell that could happen, given that the room was guaranteed. Apparently that doesn't mean doodly in situations like this where they've overbooked and everyone else around is booked solid as well. After questioning the parentage of the dumbfuck that thought up that policy, I demanded the smug little shit from customer disservice find me another damn room. And he did. In Seabrook, New Hampshire. Another 35-45 minutes north. Okay then.<br />
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I packed up my crap, which by this time was spread all over the lobby, and headed up through the rain to Seabrook. And a bed. And all of about 4 hours of sleep.<br />
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After a good meeting with my customer, it was time to head back to Logan. I knew I was going to have a few hours to kill at the airport and figured I would use some Delta Skymiles to buy an afternoon in their Sky Club so I could have a comfortable place to sit and get some work done before flying home. So I did. It looked like a refugee camp. The thunderstorms rolling through Boston were holding planes destined for Logan at their destination for hours, so everyone that had any way to access the Sky Lounge had done so. I was lucky enough to find an actual chair (there were people sprawled all over the floor, leaning against table legs, etc and the line for the free (sucky) beer was 30 people deep). All of that being said, I was more comfortable that I would have been in the terminal while I saw my departure time slip out by 1 hour. 2 hours. 3 hours. For a second time in 24 hours I thought about calling my friend Lynn at BU to see if she'd come get me and let me crash on her sofa.<br />
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We finally took off around 11:30pm, landing at RDU well after 1am. By the time I got out, got the car and drove home it was 2. By the time I actually wound down enough to get to sleep it was 3, with a full day of work ahead of me starting a couple of hours later. Another 4 hours of sleep.<br />
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Okay, so that sucked but how often is THAT going to happen. Well, apparently, every. fucking. time.<br />
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I'll admit that Wednesday's flight through Charlotte to Birmingham went without a hitch. Rental car achieved. Hotel was fine. Dinner with our team was fun and the food was good. Good meetings with the customer. Uneventful trip back to the airport and a quiet gate to catch up on some more work and make a few phone calls. I was traveling with one of my guys and we had 50 minutes to get from our flight to the next in Charlotte, which I thought was cutting it close but figured we had a shot. Then the delays started. 15 minutes. 45 minutes. Then they stopped updating it but I was watching Flightaware and the equipment we were going to use was coming in from Charlotte, which was under a very angry-looking thunderstorm. The good thing was that lots of planes were being held at their departure location before coming into Charlotte. Except for one, apparently. Our connecting flight was coming in from Providence RI and was perfectly on time, no delays, might have even been a couple of minutes early. Naturally. I heard others around me talking to the gate agents to rebook their connecting flights and they were all the next day at 10am, 11am, 1pm. Fuck that. We finally boarded about 50 minutes late and before they buttoned up, I pulled up the Budget website, logged into my Fastbreak account and reserved us a car for a one-way from CLT to RDU. I figured I could cancel it if by some miracle we made our connection but as we landed at Charlotte-Douglas, Flightaware showed our connecting flight as taxiing on the runway.<br />
<br />
So off we went to the Budget counter and our grey Nissan Sentra and a long drive to RDU. We left around 11:15 and I figured we'd get to RDU around 1:45, which was after the Budget counter closed, so I had a 1pm turn-in time. The drive was uneventful despite the construction on vast stretches of I-85 between Charlotte and Greensboro (lots of night work). I dropped my friend off at the terminal so he could catch a shuttle out to park-and-ride to get his car and then headed for home, music blaring to keep me alert and awake. Home at 2:15, asleep a little after 3, an all-to-familiar story.<br />
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My calendar for Friday was a disaster. I was determined to blow off my 8am meeting and the hour-long 8:30 meeting but I was doubled-booked for the rest of the morning. I finally had a break around 12:30 with my next (must-do) meeting at 2pm, giving me exactly an hour and a half to drive the rental to RTP, gas up, turn it in, take the shuttle to the terminal, walk over to the garage, pick up the XTerra and get home. I pulled off on Miami Blvd to gas up and as I got back onto I-40 I realized that I had neglected to grab either my parking ticket or my freakin' keys to my XTerra. So exit onto Page Rd, hop back onto I-40 (westbound this time) and back home. I called Budget and spoke to a robot for 15 minutes in order to extend my rental for another 3 hours, then did my can't-miss meeting and tried it all again.<br />
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Luckily this time I was successful and things went off without a hitch, which is good as I was pretty much incapable of handling complexity after only around 4 hours of sleep.<br />
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I'm not sure if there are any lessons from any of this. I'm pretty good at packing for air travel, I know how to manage the security lines even without TSA Pre, I always get to the airport with a few minutes to spare so that I'm not crushing people trying to reach my gate. But some things are clearly beyond my control. Which is actually the worst damn thing about air travel. Other than unexpected traffic, I feel much more control if I'm driving, and if I can get to my destination in 6 hours or less, I'm driving not flying. But that doesn't help me with Boston or Birmingham or Atlanta or London or Chennai or really anywhere beyond the DC Metro and Charlotte.<br />
<br />
So I'm going to have to find a way to cope with this but any more of these 2am homecomings and I may have to find a way to retire early.<br />
<br />
<br />Tony Plutoniumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10819851762049845001noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731027.post-40129242665697902772018-04-19T23:11:00.000-04:002018-04-20T08:08:05.277-04:00The CaveEveryone that has ever considered themselves a Chapel Hill townie is going to be posting their remembrances of The Cave over the next few days, as it closes after some 50 years as a Chapel Hill landmark. Everybody's got their own Cave and mine was a little different than yours.<br />
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My Cave was created when I was a freshman at UNC, Fall Semester 1978. I was taking Honors English with Dr. Julius Raper and spending way too many afternoons and evenings at Troll's (despite being under the drinking age during the first 2 months of school). During an after-class discussion with a couple of guys that turned to darts, they had to take me down to this place way on the west end of Franklin Street (or so it seemed to this dorm-bound freshman) that they had discovered. I was admonished to behave myself, as this was a townie bar that did not tolerate asshole students being assholes. I was led down the dark steps by Clive Stafford Smith (then Minister without Portfolio of Double-Barreled Hyphenless Last Names and later an OBE and internationally-known civil rights lawyer) and Adrian "Che" Halpern, currently (still, I think) a local immigration lawyer. Being so pre-lawyered up, we walked into the low-ceilinged underground haven around 4 in the afternoon to be met by a couple of geezers (they had to be at least 40) playing backgammon and the clack of billiard balls coming from the back room. But most importantly, the two lovely dart boards up front, undoubtedly positioned at precisely the regulation height. We managed to behave, I managed to not get completely crushed by the Cambridge-raised Mr. Stafford Smith, and we managed not to get stared at for being, well, freshmen.<br />
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I was in and out of the Cave a bit over the next few years, back when amplification was outlawed (I used to know who was the first performer to break the "no amps" policy but I no longer remember). But when we bought Rhythm Alley in the mid-80s, the Cave became both a refuge and a bank. I would escape to Tijuana Fats or the Cave when necessary during sound checks and Meg was always willing to sell us quarters when we inevitably ran out during busy weekends as the pool tables in the back were serious metal collectors. It was at the bar at the Cave that I loudly pronounced to Greg Stafford and anyone sitting within 50 feet of me that the Pressure Boys were the best damn band in the world. (I was right.)<br />
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After we sold the club and moved away and then moved right back, I didn't spend a lot of time down there, partly because I'd stopped smoking and could no longer deal with being in smoky rooms. But I did catch a show there every now and then after they installed a big-ass smoke extractor and of course like all clubs they stopped allowing smoking as well.<br />
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While it was certainly not the last time I was there, the last memorable night at the Cave was during the 2005 NCAA championship game. I had ridiculously believed that I could squeeze into a bar as a single somewhere and watch the game. I'd ridden my bicycle into town thinking that would be safest and would get me closer than trying to park. But of course I quickly realized what an idiot I was and decided to stop in at the Cave for a beer before deciding what to do next. I ended up down at the end of the bar, talking to Laird Dixon and Jack Whitebread (at the time I had no idea who the hell either of them were) and peering past the fridge to see the game on the 15" black and white TV on the back bar while being served beers by the incredible Mr. John Howie Jr. I didn't see much of the game but that was a night I will never forget.<br />
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Chapel Hill is an evolving organism. We'll survive the demise of the Cave and Spanky's just as we've survived the demise of Town Hall (before my time) and Pyewacket and Papagayo's and Tijuana Fats and Lizard and Snake and Pepper's Pizza and the Intimate Bookshop and we'll survive the eventual demise of Cat's Cradle and Local 506 and the Carolina Coffee Shop. Things won't be the same, but they'll be ok and we'll have memories of all the crazy shit we've done at places that were much cooler than where people hang out today and those people will tell tales of their favorite places to their kids who will create favorite places of their own.<br />
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So raise a cold one to the Cave and all the people that made it a place to remember, then go make some new awesome memories at your new favorite place.<br />
<br />Tony Plutoniumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10819851762049845001noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731027.post-39697745033318030862018-04-03T10:29:00.002-04:002018-04-03T10:29:58.856-04:00Happy Blogiversary to Me<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I started <u>Half-Life and Times</u> 14 years ago this week, as UConn was beating Dook then Georgia Tech for the nattie championship behind Emeka Okafor and as we were mired in the early stages of two Middle Eastern wars with a preznit that we were sure was the worst we'd ever see in our lifetimes. Ugh.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This actually wasn't my first blog, though. In '99 and '00, I maintained a static webpage that I updated every couple of weeks with bloggie thoughts. I also maintained a very subjective restaurant guide of Chapel Hill/Carrboro and a bit of Durham, primarily for the folks that I worked with that traveled here for meetings (my boss at the time was an Ann Arbor-turned-Chapel Hill guy and used to insist that we meet in CH rather than out in RTP). I've looked but I'm not finding any of those old pages, despite the idea that nothing on the web ever disappears.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">After starting this blog on Blogger, I actually hand-built pages for it for a couple of years until Blogger got better and stopped eating my posts. Those are archived as well (there's a link).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">If there is a highlight of this thing for me, it was the <a href="http://half-lifeandtimes.blogspot.com/2014_08_03_archive.html" target="_blank">series of posts</a> I published in August 2014 about our time with Rhythm Alley (actually a thinly-disguised love letter to Jeannette) - they're still out there if anyone's interested.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Given the way FB is going, it's quite possible that Half-Life and Times will outlive my FB presence, so here's to another few years at least.</span></div>
Tony Plutoniumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10819851762049845001noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731027.post-81993725668589316032018-03-09T09:17:00.002-05:002018-03-09T09:17:32.078-05:00You Kids Get Off My Lawn! - ACC Tournament Edition<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I try not to be one of those people that think (loudly) that everything was better when they were younger. You'll never catch me in an "I May Be Old But I Saw All The Cool Bands" t-shirt. I don't believe that music stopped being good after I graduated college or that there's nothing good on television anymore or that all new fashions suck.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And yet...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">While I understand full well all the economic reasons that the ACC has grown from 7 teams in the 1970s to 15 teams now, it has ruined what was a high holy day for basketball fans in this area. I get that those days are never coming back but that doesn't mean that I have to like it. The ACC tournament first round should not be played on a Tuesday afternoon and it should not be played in (I can't believe I'm typing this) Brooklyn. It should be played in Greensboro (occasionally in Charlotte) and it should start on a Friday afternoon, as God intended.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">With the exception of the teams that are on the bubble for selection to play in the NCAA tournament a week later, the tourney now seems like more of a nuisance than a happening. But for many years, winning it was the only way to make the NCAA tournament. You played the regular season for ACC tournament seeding and the coveted Friday bye and then you played the ACC tourney for the right to play on. Even when the NCAA field started expanding in the mid-70s, the importance of the ACC tourney was huge. For example, in 1976 the UVa Cavs made a run from the 6th seed to the tourney championship (first time a 6th seed had won) to make the NCAAs and almost did the same the next year, starting with a 7 seed and making it to the final game before losing to UNC. That meant something.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The ACC was much smaller then, not just in the number of teams but in geography. Four of the seven teams remaining after South Carolina dropped out were in North Carolina and the tournament was almost always played in G'Boro or Charlotte. The 70s were also the era of the Big Four tournament, an early season 2 day affair with the four North Carolina schools playing each other. So it was not unusual for Dook and State or Wake and UNC to play each other 4 times in a year - Big Four, 2 regular season games and then the ACC Tournament. There was an intimacy to the whole thing that will never be recaptured.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The addition of Georgia Tech in 1980 just added a fourth game on Friday, making for a full half-day statewide holiday. You skipped college classes to go watch in a downtown bar or you took a half-day off of work and went to a viewing party with your work buds or if you were younger, the cool teachers rolled the big gray cart with the TV on it into the classroom and you watched the first game before scooting home to catch the second one. The fortunate few were actually there in the Greensboro Coliseum or hanging around outside to buy Sat/Sun tickets from the fans of the Friday losing teams.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The ACC was always known as a basketball conference but it was football that killed it. The addition of Florida State in the early 90s </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(an openly acknowledged attempt at raising the football profile of the conference)</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> introduced what became known as the Les Robinson Invitational - the abomination of a Thursday night play-in game was the beginning of the end. Additions of Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College at least evened the number of teams to a more tournament-friendly 12 but by then the magic was gone. Due to television contracts, the final is on Saturday night instead of Sunday afternoon the way it is supposed to be (dammit!). The tournament is played on foreign soil most years and starts on a bloody Tuesday, which just ain't right.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I have to admit that I didn't grow up with this. We didn't move to North Carolina until just after the tournament in 1975. But I quickly adopted the Tar Heels as my team (thanks primarily to watching Phil Ford) and started marking that weekend on my calendar months in advance. Even after college, I pored over Barry Jacobs' annual ACC preview and knew every player on every team, even the scrubs (I still have some of the guides in my home office). Now I'd have trouble naming all the schools in the ACC without looking them up. Part of that is just growing up, dealing with multiplying responsibilities and just not having the time or brain-space to absorb that kind of information. But part of it is just not giving a crap about who Pitt's 6th man is or who on Boston College's team is coming back next year (sorry, Lynn!).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We all lose bits of our youth as we get older. I'm not particularly nostalgic and despite the current political shitstorm we're living through, I do believe that we're living in the best of times with tremendous possibilities ahead of us. I don't wish for the pre-cellphone days or think that there's anything fundamentally wrong with "those kids today". But I do miss my intimate little ACC Tournament, when the world (at least MY world) stopped for three days to focus on nothing but the best college basketball in the universe.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>Tony Plutoniumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10819851762049845001noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731027.post-56841650600809818312017-12-19T18:03:00.000-05:002017-12-19T18:03:25.570-05:00Star Wars thoughts and many, many spoilers<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">A
few thoughts on Star Wars and on the latest chapter – beware, here
there be spoilers galore…</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">I
was exactly the right age when the first Star Wars movie was
released. Just like Luke, I was a whiny teenager complaining about
having to do homework or chores rather than run into Tosche Station
for some power converters (and to hang out with my friends). I was
going to LOTS of movies then – midnight showings of Kentucky Fried
Movie and Rocky Horror, first runs of almost anything that looked
decent (and many that didn’t) – from Rocky to Rollercoaster.
There was a LOT of build up for Star Wars and my girlfriend and I
made it to the very first showing in Charlotte - at the old
Charlottetown Mall theater. It might be a little overkill to say
that it was life-changing, but it certainly blew me away. A few days
later I was in Winston-Salem for the summer attending Governor’s
School, surrounded by fellow geeks who had already seen the movie 3-4
times before they arrived on campus and it was a major topic of
conversation.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">All
of this is to say not only that the Star Wars cosmology is very
important to me but also that I come at it differently than someone now in their 20s whose parents made them watch the original trilogy over
a weekend before taking them to see Phantom Menace in the theater.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Let
me first get out of the way that Eps I, II and III are mostly
unwatchable – the result of Lucas being so completely in charge.
The man may be the worst writer of dialog in the history of
screencraft and it didn’t help that the actors chosen to portray
proto-Darth Vader were completely inept. The guy that created the
Machete Order for watching the first 6 films makes a very valid point
that The Phantom Menace can be completely ignored without any effect
on the rest of the series. Darth Maul and Qui-Gon are both
introduced and both killed before the end of the movie. Jar Jar
almost completely disappears after TPM, other than a couple of short
scenes where he is used by Palpatine. On the other hand, II and III
do offer some insight into the backstory – I don’t watch them
often (and I take extended bathroom breaks during the Anakin/Padme
<shudder> courtship) but they do provide some insight into both
Vader as well as the path that Luke is trying to navigate. But they
are not good movies.</shudder></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">The
Force Awakens had to try to do a lot. It had to bring back people
like me that were turned off by the prequel trilogy while not losing
the younger generation that grew up wearing Darth Maul backpacks to
school and it had to attract an even younger audience as well. So I
get the fan service aspect (the retelling to some extent of A New
Hope, the reuniting of the original trio as a new one is being
formed, etc) and I certainly have no problem with the broadening of
casting by adding more women and people of color (I found that
refreshing). I found the movie enjoyable but thin (a common
criticism of JJ Abrams, I suppose) and ultimately somewhat
forgettable. In other words, it was par for most movies that I’ve
seen (ever, frankly) – a good couple of hours entertainment. Which I guess is fine but I wanted more.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Then
there’s Rogue One. One can argue whether it needed to be made or
not but I’m damn glad it was. It wasn’t just a good Star Wars
movie – it was a damn good movie, period. The final 45 minutes make it one
of the best war movies I’ve ever seen (admittedly not a genre I go
very deep in). I kept expecting to see a pack of Luckies tucked into
the helmet band of one of the rebels. There was a time when movies
ending in major character deaths were fairly common – in this case
it was inevitable and known before you saw the movie but the way they
handled that ending was excellent. If they want to tell more stories
about the stuff that happened off camera and they’re as good as
Rogue One, I’ll be all over them.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">My
expectations for TFA were not that high. My expectations for The
Last Jedi were actually QUITE high and they were met. Yes it could
have been a little shorter and yes it did drag for a few minutes in
the middle and yes they wasted a perfectly good Del Toro (unless he’s
back in IX) so I’ll give 4.5 out of 5. Still a fantastic movie and
a worthy entry into SW canon. I honestly don’t understand most of
the critiques I’ve read (by non-critics) – they don’t like the
humor (there has always been humor in SW), they don’t like the way
certain prominent characters were killed off (still trying to be a
little careful about spoilers despite my warnings), the alt-right
puppies don’t like the fact that the cast isn’t lily-white and
possessing a Y chromosome, blah blah blah. The folks that say this
doesn’t feel like Star Wars to them don’t have the same
understanding of Star Wars as I do. I’m not saying they’re
wrong. But they’re wrong. :)</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Let
me talk about Princess Ambassador General Leia Skywalker Organa for a
minute. I wrote elsewhere today about her story arc in the original
trilogy and her often-overlooked kickassedness. In the prison deck
of the star destroyer, she was the one that took action that allowed
them to make a (smelly) escape. She had complete control of the male
attention coming her way. Even in the first act of RotJ, despite her ridiculous outfit, she
single-handedly kills her oppressor. She was not only a leader of
the Rebellion, she was the one they trusted to receive the Death Star
plans and to get them back to the rebel base. In the last couple of
years, I started following Carrie Fisher on Twitter and came to love
her as much as her character. So I was prepared for emotions. I was
not prepared to lose it three times – in her last conversation with
Holdo, with her exchange with Luke’s projection and in her last
scene with Rey. Niagara Falls, Frankie. In this movie, I see Leia as
George Washington, who was known more for his strategic retreats than
his military victories. Live to fight another day – that’s the
premise for the whole movie. She was brilliant. And I miss her.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">One
of the best things about The Last Jedi is one that I’ve seen fans
complain about – Poe’s arc throughout the movie. Apparently some
want their dashing heroes to be faultless. Instead you start to
understand Poe as the Star Wars version of the World War I flying
ace, doing one-on-one combat above the trenches with little regard
for the boys below or the ground crew (or overall strategy). His
jubilation after expending the whole damn bomber force to take out
one Dreadnought is followed by Leia watching the lights representing
bombers (and crews) blinking out. You know she was both lamenting the
loss of life as well as thinking about what the hell they were going
to do when the NEXT Dreadnought showed up. Follow that with Poe’s
mutiny against Holdo (which he probably only survived because they
were so short-handed – otherwise I’d have spaced him) and one
hopes that he may finally be learning about command and strategy
beyond his tactical combat skills in ways that will show up in the
next movie.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">I’m
still pissed off that years ago Lucas replaced the planet of Wookies
in the initial RofT scripts with “the forest moon of Endor”
populated by annoying furry mini-Chewies called Jawas. And I was
prepared to hate the Porgs. But they were such a small (get it?)
part of the movie that they were just fine.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Middle
movies of a trilogy are always tough. If the Interwebs had been
around when Empire Strikes Back came out, I can only imagine the
screams from ANH fanboys - “Vader is Luke’s father? Where did
THAT come from!” “You froze your best character!?” Yet it is
considered by most now to be the best movie of the lot (I still place
A New Hope ahead of it because it is a complete movie – it all
could have stopped there and the ending would have been
satisfactory). In middle movies, you have to break up the
“fellowship” so you can reunite them and they have to end dark so
that the third movie can restore the light. The Last Jedi does that
in ways that are enough different than the original trilogy that it
doesn’t suffer the same “we’ve seen this before” issues that
plagued The Force Awakens. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">I
was not a believer in Kylo Ren in TFA. He just didn’t seem that
formidable of an opponent. That changed during the scenes with Rey in
TLJ – while his grandfather was content to essentially be muscle
for his mentor/master the Emperor, Ren wants to be THE GUY. And he
also wants to burn it ALL down and start over – no more First
Order, no more Resistance, just a galaxy united as… Renland?
Kyloville? At least the kid’s got ambition now. I'm a little readier to see him as the Big Bad.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">I
would have liked a little more Rey and a little less Finn, but that’s
a minor quibble. And unlike some fan critics, I hope like hell that
Kylo Ren was telling the truth about Rey’s parents. We don’t need
her to be a forgotten Han Solo by-blow or a hidden Kenobi or Yoda’s
love child. I’m perfectly happy with her being an extremely
powerful force-sensitve nobody and I’ll be disappointed if JJ
Abrams walks that back in XI. The fight in Snoke's throne room was awesome - the best choreographed light saber battle they've yet done. If you've ever seen any videos of Daisy Ridley's insane workout routines, you can see there where it pays off.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">So
The Last Jedi moves into the number 3 spot in my Star Wars order of
goodness – behind A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back and just ahead
of Rogue One. I’m hoping JJ does XI right and I’m much more
interested now in the three-movie deal that Rian Johnson has for new
SW movies to come. Interested in what you guys think!</span></div>
Tony Plutoniumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10819851762049845001noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731027.post-37470988273132428542017-09-27T14:35:00.000-04:002017-09-27T14:37:20.286-04:00Psyched<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">"There's too many kings/w</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">anna hold you down/a</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">nd a world at the window/g</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">one underground</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">There's a hole in the sky/w</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">here the sun don't shine/a</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">nd a clock on the wall/a</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">nd it counts my time</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">And Heaven, is the whole of our hearts/a</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">nd Heaven don't tear you apart</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Y</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">eah, Heaven is the whole of our hearts/a</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">nd Heaven don't tear you apart"</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">- Psychedelic Furs, "Heaven"</span></blockquote>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I'm inordinately excited about the Psych Furs show tonight - more than I guess I thought I would be. But there are reasons.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I didn't pay much attention to their first album and still rarely listen to more than a couple of songs ("India" being an exception). But when my neighbor Sally Dunning (she was the local Columbia Records rep at the time) dropped a stack of promos on my lap one afternoon that included their second album "Talk Talk Talk", I was blown away. The original version of "Pretty in Pink" would have been enough to make it a stellar album but songs like "She is Mine", "Into You Like a Train" and "All of This and Nothing" made it a classic, one of the few albums I can think of that doesn't have a single dud.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">As you would imagine, I was seriously stoked for their show at Page Auditorium with the X-Teens and... it was awful. Just wretched. The band might have been fine, but I was sitting on the last row of the balcony and not only could I not really see them, the sound was just a muddy catastrophe. So I felt like I'd still never seen the Psych Furs.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">A couple of years later I met this Jeannette girl (some of you may have heard of her) as I was getting ready to move to the Washington Metro area (Gaithersburg, MD to be exact). She joined me up there and we were engaged to be married by the middle of August and a week later "Mirror Moves" dropped and "Heaven" became <i>our song</i>. There was a lot of good music around that summer and fall of 1984 but while we were getting to know each other (and eating Chocolate </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Coconut </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sour Cream Blackout Cake at Kramerbooks and drinking and dancing at Cagney's on Dupont Circle and shopping for funky clothes at Commander Salamander in Georgetown), "Heaven" was our soundtrack (and I don't think I ever walked into Commander Salamander without hearing it).</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">So we moved back to NC and got married and bought a rock and roll club and then sadly we sold it. I missed the last weekend as I had to be in Columbia, MD for a tech class (for my day job) so as soon as Jeannette handed over the keys, she got on a plane to BWI and joined me. The consolation was that the Furs were playing at Merriweather Post Pavilion right there in Columbia while we were there. That was one of the first of the big amphitheaters that most cities seem to now have and the Furs were there with The Blow Monkeys (who's entire catalog I think was the single "Digging Your Scene" back by a remix of "Digging Your Scene").</span></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The show was awful. Just wretched. Again, nothing to do with the band. I was in a foul mood, after first having to sell the club and then missing the final weekend. I'm sure Jeannette was not in much better shape. Then we were faced with stringent (and what felt at the time like unnecessarily invasive) security measures to get in, which with the mood we were in did not go over well. Then the Blow Monkeys came on and... uh... oh, damn they were boring. But there was a sizable contingent of people there who were there for them that just annoyed the hell out of me. So by the time the Furs came out, there was no hope that I was going to enjoy the show. I remember very little about the performance.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">So I was 0-for-2 in good experiences in seeing the Psychedelic Furs with few-to-zero chances to see them in the intervening years.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Finally, 25 years later, they booked a "very limited" tour to commemorate the 30th anniversary of "Talk Talk Talk". That "limited" tag was soon replaced as they added a bunch of tour dates that included the Cat's Cradle. And this time, it was magnificent. They played the album in its entirety followed by a bunch of other material and it was everything it should have been. And everything those previous shows should have been. Finally.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">So now they're off the schneid and the pressure's off and now I can't wait until showtime.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>Tony Plutoniumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10819851762049845001noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731027.post-79712588680410230842017-08-13T14:50:00.000-04:002017-08-13T14:50:11.771-04:00C'Ville questions<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I started writing this in my head Friday night before the events Saturday and certainly before the death and injuries from the terrorist attack on the counterprotesters, but the questions are still valid, even if they've been over-shadowed by the need for us to figure out how the hell we're going to move forward as a country.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Most Southern municipalities had (and I am guessing still have) statutes on the books restricting what can be brought to a protest or march. These go back to the Civil Rights and then the anti-Vietnam War protests of the '60s and were certainly still around when I was active in the Animal Rights movement in the late 80s/early 90s.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There were tight restrictions on the size and length and material used to create protest signs (basically nothing much wider or thicker than a tongue depressor was allowed) to prevent signs from being used as weapons. There were all kinds of restrictions on where one could stand, no masks or hoods allowed, and more that I can't immediately recall. New restrictions in Durham have been put into place restricting protests to daylight hours.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Hell, even the Chapel Hill Hallowe'en celebration restricts anything that looks like or could be used as a weapon.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At the Presidential Conventions every year, protesters are separated into "Free Speech" areas usually blocks away from the convention centers and usually blocks away from each other. I'm not saying I think that's the <u>right</u> thing to do, but it is apparently possible to do so without running afoul of the First Amendment.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It is certainly possible that Charlottesville doesn't have similar rules in place (although I know that everywhere I've lived in the Southeast, from Nashville to suburban Atlanta to Charlotte to RTP does, or at least did). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So how do you get a situation where you have a mob of people with lit torches, baseball bats, and long guns marching at night and large numbers of cops, state troopers and National Guardsmen standing around with their thumbs up their butts? What the hell were they there for? And why did it take hours of clashes on Saturday morning before the decision was made to put a stop to it?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'm asking honestly as there may be some good explanations but I'd like to hear them.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>Tony Plutoniumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10819851762049845001noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731027.post-53702390056885140602017-07-31T16:14:00.001-04:002017-07-31T16:14:44.185-04:00The Last Real Chapel Hill Summer<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A warning last week from a Facebook friend that the students would be coming back in a couple of weeks to interrupt our summer-sleepy town once again reminded me of how much summers have changed around here since I got to town.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Okay, before I go any further, I do realize how cliche that sort of backward-looking is. When I arrived as an incoming freshman in 1978 (interrupting someone else's sleepy summer), the following joke was already well-worn:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Q: How many Chapel Hillians does it take to screw in a light bulb?</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A: Five. One to screw in the light bulb and four to reminisce about when Chapel Hill was still a village (alternately, four to talk about how great the old light bulb was).</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So I know that any backwards look like this is inherently fraught with danger, but what the hell. While it's true that summers do still slow down a bit around here, Chapel Hill has over the past 40+ years become more and more a bedroom and retirement community with the influence of the university waning as a result. That doesn't mean that it is not still a college town by any means, but the percentage of residents that are directly associated with the U has dropped significantly. As a result, the tides of the town don't ebb and flow as strongly as they once did. The academic year of the U also seems to have fewer gaps than it once did, so there're no longer those nice long slow weeks between graduation and 1st summer school session, for example, where the town approached empty.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For me, the last real Chapel Hill summer was 1981. The previous two summers I had spent back home in Charlotte, working for a custom cabinet maker in Mint Hill and sometimes working at the movie theater at Eastland Mall. As I finished my junior year, I found a couple of campus jobs that would allow me to stay in town (we were paying for our apartment out at what was then Tar Heel Manor anyway). My friend Lex, who was in the same year at Davidson, was going to come up as well and we planned to spend the summer getting up to no good.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I had managed to find a couple of jobs that basically allowed me to sit on my ass in air-conditioned comfort. One was working the desk at Summer Conference Housing, which was at Morrison Dorm that year. Every summer, groups would schedule various conferences in town to take advantage of the campus downtime and one of the dorms would be made available for cheap stays (there were VERY few hotel/motel rooms in Chapel Hill those days and the Carolina Inn was pretty much a dump). I worked 3 nights a week from midnight to 7am, "working" primarily consisting of unlocking the door for late night revelers that had been wandering around looking for "the party" on Franklin Street <i>(dude, it's summer - there is no "party". Just you and your drunk JayCee buddies looking for the co-eds that are all back home in Wilson or Bryson City for the summer)</i>. That was over by 2am and I spent the rest of the night reading the Playboys that the dorm subscribers had forgotten to stop or the romance novels that the day shift had left at the desk (that was my one and only experience reading Jackie Collins. I still have the scars.).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The other job was sitting (again) at the remote computer room at Cobb Dorm. There was a card reader for one of the campus mainframes (pretty sure it was an IBM 360/75 but could have been an IBM 370 by then) and three or four green-screen terminals that accessed the campus computers as well as TUCC (Triangle University Computing Center) that was shared by UNC, NCSU and Duke. I was there to help folks with JCL (Job Control Language), make sure the card reader didn't get stuck, and not much else.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I was a bit transportation-challenged at the time. I had an old Suzuki 185 that was stolen just before the start of summer, so a typical day was me busing in for a noon to 5pm shift at the computer room, busing back out to the apartment for a couple of hours of sleep, riding my bicycle back into town for my night shift at the dorm then riding back out at 7am past the cheerleading campers starting their early morning barking exercises in the Granville Towers parking lot. Some days I'd be back on campus by noon the next day.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That kind of schedule also made for some long stretches of downtime, much of which was spent at what was then the brand-new Henderson Street Bar. Tim Kirkpatrick (owner of the eponymous Kirkpatrick's) had just opened the place in the old Record Bar location and it still smelled of new wood rather than stale beer and old pee like other bars I frequented. Those entering were greeted with the 8-Ball Deluxe pinball table admonishing them to "stop talking and start chalking" usually followed by someone hitting the jukebox for the 37th playing that day of the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up" (I was probably responsible for a dozen of them most days). <i>Side note: I didn't know Tim Kirkpatrick at the time but he sold us our Honda Fit at Crown Honda a couple of years ago. Very nice guy.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There was also plenty of time to sleep during those 2-3 day periods where I didn't have a shift at either job or to go down to Sugar Lake and float around with a cooler full of cheap beer, catch movies, grab a dinner at Tijuana Fats and generally not worry about much of anything. There wasn't a jug of cheap-ass red wine that was safe from us (or a restaurant menu that didn't have Lex' teeth marks on it). I'm pretty sure that was the summer when I set my personal record of eating pizza for 7 straight meals. Greg Humphreys/Hobex captured that type of summer perfectly with their song "Windows" - all you really needed was a friend with a car that had a working radio and windows that rolled down all the way.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Lex only lasted about a month, as I recall. Day laborer was not in his make-up (mine either). But one loss was made up for by a gain, when one of the daytime folks working the desk at Morrison said some guys coming in that afternoon mentioned seeing a motorcycle off in the woods beside the path behind the dorm. Sure enough, someone had ripped the ignition wires out of my bike and had tried to start it pushing it down the hill. A couple of days over at Motorcycle Supply and I had motorized independent transportation again.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Hell, looking back on it I might have thought I was bored at the time. But in retrospect I was relaxed, for probably the last prolonged period of my life. By the next summer I was working full-time at IBM while finishing up a last class during summer session and that was all she wrote. For the next 35 years.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So I think we all ought to take a month each year and do Chapel Hill summer old school. Take a sabbatical from our real job, hang out in the shade during the day, get lively when the sun goes down and it starts to cool off a bit, go hang out at He's Not Here all night and take a drive out into the county some afternoon with the windows down and the radio on.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>Tony Plutoniumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10819851762049845001noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731027.post-62009377495738950962017-06-25T16:25:00.001-04:002017-06-25T16:25:58.817-04:00Storage Unit Life<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For reasons that are not particularly interesting, we've spent the past couple of weeks moving a whole bunch of stuff out of a self-storage unit over near New Hope Commons and into one out on of Old Greensboro Highway. As we've done this, we've spent a bit of time at the old storage unit clearing things out and have noticed some interesting stuff going on, particularly on Sundays when there's no management on-site (but when one would assume the security cameras are still active).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">On the row that our unit was on, there's a dude that hangs out in his 5'x10' storage unit with a large tower PC and a Mohu Leaf over-the-air TV antenna. He's got a desk set up and enough open floor space for a desk chair in front of it (and not much else). He was hanging out there while the office was open so obviously the mgmt knows he's there but on Sundays he puts up a picnic canopy over the front (it gets hot as hell there in the afternoons). We had a sturdier 8'x8' canopy that we got for free a few years ago and used all of once, so I gave it to him as we were taking the last load out Saturday. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Gotta wonder if he's sleeping in the woods nearby or on friends' sofas and using the storage unit to hang out during the day. I can kinda understand that one.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The weirder one was the guy with the 10'x10' unit on the outside row near ours. As I was carting crap to the dumpster, I walked up that way to take advantage of the shade and walked past this guy. He had an *expensive* canopy up with lawn furniture out under it and was standing in the doorway drinking a beer, with some nice Tejano coming from inside the unit. The next Sunday, he had the hose from the office stretched back to his unit where he was washing his late-model pickup truck. Definitely not sleeping in the woods. Is that just his man-cave? His place to chill away from family? I know he's not the manager but they've got to know he's there unless no one ever reviews the security recordings.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So my question is - is this common? I've typically just run over, thrown a bunch of bins full of Christmas decorations in the XTerra and gotten out, so I've not spent much time over there. Curious as to whether this is a thing that others have seen at other self-storage places.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>Tony Plutoniumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10819851762049845001noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731027.post-34962031821040293612017-06-02T15:19:00.000-04:002017-06-02T15:19:10.719-04:00Public Will<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Note - I wrote this about a year ago, saved it as a draft and never posted it. Seems appropriate to dig it out after the announcement from the President* re: Paris climate agreement.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I've read a lot about the "Greatest Generation" and the mobilization of the whole country during WWII. I think you can also point to the post-WWII build-up of the infrastructure of the country - the Interstate system (probably the biggest boon to US business until the Internet), other massive school and municipal building projects that lasted until the 60's, the Space Race of the 60s and into the 70s - as further examples of "think big, do big" capabilities of humans in general and Americans more specifically. It is a legitimate question to ask whether we as a people are even capable of thinking big anymore (the Internet being something of an anomaly).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There was another mass effort that doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves, I think in part because so many people my age and younger have forgotten what the US (and much of the world) was like in the 60s. I certainly sometimes forget the masses of trash along the roadways, rivers so full of filth and toxins that you could walk across them (just don't drop your cigarette or it would catch on fire), cities (not just LA) where you couldn't see the skyline for the ever-present smoke and smog. Industries poured untreated toxic waste into rivers and lakes and unfiltered smoke into the skies, creating smog, tree-killing acid rains and 1000s of early deaths from lung-related illnesses. Cars were over-powered (sorry, but it's true) and horribly inefficient.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">At some point in the late 60's and early 70's, there was (suddenly in the grand scheme of things) a popular movement to change things. In 1970 alone, you got the first Earth Day, the creation (by a Republican administration) of the Environmental Protection Agency, national ad campaigns about littering - attitudes changed quickly and dramatically, forcing corporations and governments to follow suit. And that happened in the space of a very few years, even while we were still in a war in Southeast Asia and struggling with racial equality and all the other issues of the day.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What I want to figure out is what it would take for another Green revolution aimed at climate change. Greenhouse gases aren't as easy to see as take-out bags strewn along the highway or oil slicks on the Ohio River, so I get that it isn't as easy. And maybe it isn't as clear what needs to be done, although I think there are some pretty obvious ways to approach this. The question is how to get enough people motivated that they take over the conversation (which has heretofore been dominated by the unbelievers) and push industry, government and our fellow humans to take real action.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>Added 6/2/2017</i> - with the abdication of responsibility by the GOP, it is becoming clear that it will be corporations, states and municipalities that will have to lead this fight until we manage a change in the fed government. But I still come back to the public participation in efforts during WWII, the space race (I remember saving quarters to buy savings bonds for NASA funding while in elementary school) and a shift towards protecting the environment and wonder how we get that kind of willpower and personal investment involved again in trying to reduce climate change?</span>Tony Plutoniumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10819851762049845001noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731027.post-86880296667945290812016-12-09T12:41:00.000-05:002016-12-09T12:41:18.209-05:00Jobs, Wages and Income<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Second in a series of posts where I'm trying to figure it all out - this one is going to be a little rambling.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Before diving into the real subject here, let me first say that the cabinet and other advisory positions that The Trumpster Fire has appointed so far are remarkably consistent with GOP ideology to an extent I didn't think possible. We want an aggressive military and we believe that the US military has been emasculated by politicians since the early Vietnam days, so we appoint a crapload of generals to defense and security positions. Check. We think most of the rest of the federal government should do as little as possible, so we appoint a fast food mogul to Labor, a climate change denier to the EPA, a Wall Street insider to Treasury, a completely inexperienced hack to HUD, an enemy of public education to the DofEd and so on it goes. And on top of that, we appoint a white supremicist media mogul as head of propaganda so he can ensure we keep sniping at each other so we don't pay attention as Ryan and McConnell attempt to dismantle the US government. Mission soon to be accomplished.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So as we continue to dissect this damned election, we're supposed to be wringing our hands about how we overlooked the WWC (white working class) and focused too much on "identity politics". Well, bullshit. First of all, it's not identity politics - it's a fight for civil rights that didn't end with Brown vs the Board of Education or the Voting Rights Act or the Obergefell decision. If any Democrat ever apologizes for that, they should be kicked out of the party. The biggest shift though was a bigger focus on the poor rather than the middle-ish class which had had ALL of the spotlight in the previous couple of elections. The Fight for $15 and support for the ACA was the right thing to do, but that shouldn't have stopped Democrats for also spending some time and energy on middle class problems. It really is possible to do both and we absolutely hadn't done both before - it's just that the poorer folks didn't have anywhere else to turn and they were energized by President Obama. Those same people appear to have come out and voted for Hillary Clinton but there was some obvious erosion that must be addressed without compromising what it means to be a Democrat.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I am still planning to walk through the minefield of talking about racism and sexism in a future post (yes, I am still a middle-aged Southern white dude, so THAT should be fun!) but let's talk a little about what the WWC actually <u>say</u> they wanted from a Prez candidate - the promise of jobs. Real jobs, decent-paying jobs, manufacturing jobs (and by the way, mostly jobs that don't require a college education).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Well I hate to be the one to break it to you but those jobs are not coming back. NO jobs are coming back! North Carolina has bled thousands and thousands of textile and furniture and tobacco jobs over the past 30-40 years (most of which really didn't pay that well but you could live off of them) and there is not a damn thing that Donald Trump can do to entice them back. Back in the mid-80s (long before NAFTA) I was working for Bluebell (before VF bought them) - makers of Wrangler jeans and Jantzen sportswear. Can't get no more 'Merican that that. Ed Baumann was the CEO or President at the time and he would go on and on about "buy American!" while all of the shirts we sold were being sewn together in Honduras. "Made in America", my ass. Sure, somebody might open a small boutique textile mill now to make something that will be very expensive and marketed to upper-income people to make them feel better about it all, but it will be a very small drop in a very large bucket. God love 'em for doing it, but it won't make much difference. And I'll guarantee they'll run those shops with many fewer people than they used to because they'll automate the hell out of them. And in the meantime all those WWCs will continue to be addicted to cheap clothes made in Pakistan by people working in inhumane conditions at sub-subsistence wages and sold to them at Wal-mart by our own version of those same people. There was a story a few years ago on NPR about a US city that was buying manhole covers from India. Imagine the cost of shipping the damn things but when they're being cast in foundries by barefooted guys in loincloths with no safety consideration and a high mortality rate, the cost of production is approaching zero. That type of thing, by the way, is one thing that NAFTA and TPP and other trade agreements are supposed to address - raising safety and environmental standards in trading partners (which raises their costs of course) and helps make the US more competitive by making everyone play by the same rules. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Don't think that manufacturing is the only problem. Think health care at least is something that has to remain on-shore? Don't be so sure. Many of the advances like electronic medical records and telemedicine that really will help improve services and help reach under-served communities are already being used to move back-office and diagnostic jobs off-shore. There are buildings in India with whole floors of MDs that do nothing all day but evaluate MRIs for patients in the States. And why not? It reduces the cost of medical care for us, right? But it means fewer high-paying jobs for docs in the US.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Of course everyone knows about the off-shoring of IT jobs - the very technology that we support enables us to move much of that support to countries with lower labor costs. But the move of other back-office services for major corporations like accounting, HR functions, legal etc really hasn't gotten much press but it is happening and happening rapidly.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Think the creative space is safe? That guy that you hired for your graphic design work probably has ten jobs like that that he's "working on" simultaneously, which really means that he's farmed out the grunt work to people in Poland or Manila or Chennai. It's all digital, so he can check in on progress, send stuff back for rework and spend 5% of the time it would take if he was really doing all the work himself. Everyone is a photographer now, so stock photography is dead and most shrinking TV newsrooms now are making their reporters double as camera people. Remember type-setting? Remember film labs? Remember buggy whips? We don't need 'em anymore.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And I get it. I've been working in technology since I graduated college in 1982 and it still amazes me the ridiculously cool things we've figured out how to do. And despite what you might think after a 9 hour day of staring at a computer screen, I do think that technology and automation and all of that stuff have improved human life. But the (possibly) unintended consequences are making life difficult for many, many people and the answers to that are not found in a glib phone call to Carrier or a threat to Boeing. And of course Carrier is already signaling that through automation most of the jobs that were "saved" from moving to Mexico will be lost to automation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Raising tariffs is a dumbass idea (go Google Smoot-Hawley if you aren't sure) and one that runs counter to everything the non-Trump part of the GOP stands for. Congress would never stand for it and they'd impeach The Donald so fast you'd think he'd had a fling with an intern if he really pushed it. Raising the minimum wage is the right thing to do and I'm convinced that the negative impact on the number of jobs will be minimal, but it won't help the situation long-term and we just lost any chance of doing that on a wide scale for at least the next four years. And with the majority of state legislatures in GOP hands and likely to stay that way through 2020, we'll lose another census opportunity to redistrict in a way that is less safe for Republicans and that four years becomes fourteen.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">All of this is why I think raising the minimum wage and fighting for universal health care is only the start. The logical and I think necessary move over the next 20-30 years will be to institute a </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">guaranteed</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">minimum income or even a basic income. There are just not going to be enough jobs available to support the population. So either a killer bug gets released that kills off half the population or we have a very large percentage of the population that has no work to do. That doesn't mean that they're lazy, it doesn't mean that they find some jobs "beneath them" - there just will not be jobs available.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There's a difference between guaranteed minimum income and basic income (the former is means-tested while the latter goes to everyone, for example) and I've not done nearly enough research or thinking on this yet, but something is going to be necessary unless we blow ourselves up, drown in the rising oceans or hit a Captain Trips/Walking Dead scenario and that seems to be the best logical bet. There are smart people out there that have been thinking about this for awhile and actually you can go back to a lot of the science fiction written in the late 60s and early 70s that posits a society where everything is automated and the basics are provided but they deal primarily with the effects that might have on the human psyche more than the mechanics of how the posited basic income (or basic needs met) would work.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">But we're going to have to figure this out, including how to overcome the Puritan legacy that seems to continue to drive much of American discussion and thought 500 years later - the idea that nothing has worth unless it was hard to get. We don't like having things handed to us (and we absolutely abhor seeing anyone ELSE have anything handed to them). But now that the lack of jobs is hitting the white folk and not primarily people of color and geographies that have been traditionally poor, maybe they'll start to get the message.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>Tony Plutoniumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10819851762049845001noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731027.post-91841613871232053552016-11-14T23:04:00.000-05:002016-11-14T23:10:27.297-05:00Bubbles and Echo Chambers<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I started writing this in my head a couple of days ago and many folks that write much better than I do have already captured a lot of what I'm thinking better than I will, but I still feel the need to work through this - and it doesn't count if I don't put it out there for others to argue with or agree with or ignore. This is long and rambling because I've been pretty rambling since Tuesday night. So read at your own risk and feel comfortable with ignoring.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There have been a lot of accusations that the Dem leadership and/or the "liberal elite" (whatever the fuck is meant by that) live in their bubbles in San Francisco and New York and Portland (and I would assume my college town of Chapel Hill) and they've lost touch with "real America" whatever the hell <u>that</u> is. I'm also reading a counter to that, that it's Billy Bob Joe Bubba in Podunkville, Kansas that is the one in the bubble, unknowing (and uncaring) of anything much that goes on beyond the next corn field.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Look, we ALL live in not one but many bubbles. Think of it as a big-ass series of Venn diagrams (I know, I just lost the Billy Bobs) with overlaps, intersections and in some cases completely separate bubbles. As I said, I live in a college town in a Southern state that defies categorization as blue or red but I also don't believe that it is purple. Chapel Hill is such a bubble that the late unlamented Senator Jesse Helms suggested we save some money on building a zoo and just build a fence around the town. As it has become more of a bedroom community for Research Triangle Park, it may not be quite as librul, but it is still definitely an outlier.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">At the same time, I've spent most of my 35 year professional career working in the aforementioned RTP, which is dominated by large multi-national technology and pharmaceutical companies. Big on open borders and loving their H-1B visas and generally fiscally conservative/free-market but fairly tolerant on social issues. With the exception of a couple of my neighbors, I'd wager that not a single person that I have a social connection with in Chapel Hill voted for The Trumpster. But I know for a fact that there are people that I have a work relationship with that voted for him, whether or not they held their nose when they did.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I also have a relationship with the western part of the state, where the textile mills have shut down and the mining operations have mostly moved out and logging has died down and the damn hippies have taken over Asheville and are starting to encroach on many of the smaller towns. The natives vote heavily GOP and every damn one of them had a Trump sign on their lawn - but they also have Confederate battleflags on their pickup trucks and voted hard for the state amendment banning gay marriage before the SCOTUS weighed in. I'll come back to this point in my next post. Yes, their lives are tough and in many cases ruled by opioid addiction and diabetes (go to Walmart in some of these towns and look at all the guys younger than me scooting around in the electric shopping carts). But their older siblings were meth addicts and their parents were potheads and alcoholics and their grandparents were 'shiners - things have sucked for them for generations. I really don't mean to be unsympathetic - I do get that they're in a tough place that has gotten progressively tougher due to a number of factors beyond their control.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I have no doubt that millennials living in Cambridge live in a different bubble and people living in Bugfuck, Mississippi live in another bubble still. Where I have issue is this idea that one bubble is more important or more real or more "American" than another. This idea that "the heartland" is the real America and the cities (in particular the coastal cities like NY and Boston and LA and San Fran) are "the other" and somehow less American. The map that shows the concentration of 50% of the US population in a fairly small footprint that is being used to justify the Electoral College says something very different to me - it says that we're undervaluing the votes of a large number of American citizens just because they live near their neighbors.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I (and many like me) have been accused of living in an echo chamber. Yeah, maybe. But we all do - that's the nature of social media as we tend to "friend", "follow" and listen to people that share our views. But we also have had a fundamental shift in the way news is sourced over the past 50 years that we are still coming to grips with. When I was a kid, it didn't matter where you lived - you got your news from a limited numbers of sources. Walter Cronkite or Howard K Smith or a couple of other national news anchors, your local newspaper (or two, depending on how large a town you lived in) and maybe a news magazine like Time or Newsweek. That was pretty much it as local TV news tended (and still tends) to focus on local crime, feel-good stuff and not much else.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Today there are 1000s of news (and "news") sources to choose from and we have access to an amazing number of information (and misinformation) sources. And therein lies both our path forward and our biggest challenge. I'll fully admit that I get much of my political news from Vox, TalkingPointsMemo and a handful of other progressive-leaning sourced. I also scan the Washington Post and NY Times and Raleigh N&O headlines and other more mainstream news sources. And I hit Twitter for posts from people that I think have good ideas and a good handle on what's going on. I like to think that I do some due dlilgence and check out sources and demand attribution and try to ensure that what I'm reading has a basis in objective truth. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The wingnuts will deride you for depending on the NY Times as the defining source of your bubble - so will I as they've fallen well-short of what I expect a real investigative news source to do the past 18 months. Use multiple sources and question if they seem to be repeating each other.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I have friends though that get their information from Breitbart and Fox News and Hannity and Laura Ingraham and I just smh. I do read the stuff they post from time to time and it creates a fictional reality where elections are stolen from them and the only racism is reverse racism and Hillary killed Vince Foster and and and and I just can't read anymore. The point being, I guess, that there are echo chambers and there are echo chambers and we continue to struggle to figure out how to deal with outright, demonstrable lies that other have no issue completely believing and repeating ad nauseum.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So where we used to all get our news from kind of the same sources - at least everyone in Nashville when I was growing up had the Tennessean (morning paper), the Banner (evening paper) and three major network newscasts and not much else. Whether those news sources were impartial nor not, good or bad or whatever, we all got pretty much the same info. Now as part of our bubble choices, we also make news source choices that further focus us on our own bubble/echo chamber.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Where am I going with this? Hell, I don't know - I told you I was going to be rambling. But I guess I'm going a couple of places. One is that with the proliferation of news sources (and more importantly, access to them), there really is no excuse to NOT find better sources for your information than propaganda sites run by Trump's Goebbels. I get that they may tell you what you want to hear but that isn't necessarily the truth. When I read crap that people post from Breitbart, it is <strike>often</strike> almost always unattributed, patently false bullshit that assumes you've read the rest of their crap and believed it so it forms the foundation for the next layer of bullshit. I'm not saying that because it is reactionary, racist, sexist horse manure - I'm saying it because it is easily-researched and easily-refuted horse manure if anyone even half tried.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So yes, we're all in a series of sometimes-overlapping bubbles but so what? It is YOUR responsibility as a thinking, vote-having adult human to figure this shit out. Figure out who you can really listen to - not because they're telling you what you want to hear, but instead what you need to know. </span>Tony Plutoniumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10819851762049845001noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731027.post-71988792348036024682016-08-02T23:00:00.000-04:002016-08-02T23:00:06.294-04:00One-Term Presidents<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It struck me a few days ago that in the first 20 years of my life, we had 5 Presidents of the US (not counting the few months that Ike was still Pres after I was born):</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- Kennedy (assassinated)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- Johnson (declined to run for a second full term)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- Nixon (resigned in disgrace)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- Ford (unelected and lost re-election bid)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- Carter (lost re-election bid)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the 36 years that followed, we've only had 5 more Presidents:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- Reagan (term-limited)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- Bush the First (lost re-election bid)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- Clinton (term-limited)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- Bush the Second (term-limited)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- Obama (term-limited)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For all of the craziness of the US political scene the past few decades, that's a remarkable run of Presidential stability that I believe is about to come to an end, regardless of the outcome of this election.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Historical economic cycles point to a recession or at least a serious correction coming in the US economy in the next 2-3 years. The fact that the recovery from the Great Recession has been as slow as it has may push that toward the end of the next president's term, but my expectation is that Hillary will win and have a narrow Senate Dem majority for 2 years before the Republicans take the Senate back in the mid-terms. After the economy takes a hit in 2018-2019, my guess is that a President Clinton will face a tough challenge from within the party and then lose to the Republican nominee (Cruz? Rubio? someone new?).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">On the other hand, what happens if The Donald wins? I have every idea that he has absolutely no interest in actually being president. I suspect he would wreak serious havoc for two years and then pull a Palin and quit, leaving us with a couple of years of President Pence and paving the way for an Elizabeth Warren Presidency. (I'm fine with the Warren presidency but a lot of people would be harmed in the 4 years before she would take over.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That all may sound crazy but look at that 1960-1980 period again and tell me again that it's nuts. So I will do what I can to get Hillary elected along with as many Democratic Senators as possible and then push like hell for them to make as many moves forward as they can in the short time they'll have to accomplish anything.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Because we won't get another chance for awhile.</span>Tony Plutoniumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10819851762049845001noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6731027.post-61401545885122298392016-03-30T17:32:00.000-04:002016-03-30T17:32:05.648-04:00All-Overlooked Team<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">With the Tar Heels in the Final Four again, we're getting a lot of looks at past UNC greats, from 'Sheed sitting in the stands and Kenny Smith in the TNT studio to lots of talk about Michael Jordan and James Worthy and Lenny Rosenbluth and Antawn Jamison and on and on (and it's one hell of a list).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This afternoon I started thinking about the guys that don't get mentioned that often anymore that would be all-time greats with most other programs - guys that I thoroughly enjoyed watching but who don't get much mention anymore. If I were to build an All-Overlooked team of UNC greats, it would probably look something like this:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">PG - Easy Ed Cota - 3 Final Fours in 4 years, all time leading assist man for UNC and still #3 in NCAA history. When we talk about UNC point guards, Phil Ford, Kenny Smith, Ray Felton, Ty Lawson - all those guys typically come to mind before Ed which I think is a bit unfair.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">SG - Al Wood - team leading scorer for 3 years, 1st team All-American in '81 and scorer of 39 points against Virginia in the '81 Final Four in one of the greatest games I've ever seen a Tar Heel play.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">F - Mike O'Koren - my favorite player while I was actually in school until Mr. Worthy hit campus. 3 time 1st team All-American (despite only making All-ACC 1st team twice - one of the national vs. local press oddities). Led the injury-depleted Heels to the final game against Marquette as a freshman in '77. He really <u>was</u> the team in the interim between the Phil Ford era and the Jordan era.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">F - Sam Perkins - I guess playing in the shadow of James Worthy and Michael Jordan will do it to you, but it astounds me that the guy who is still the #2 rebounder and #3 scorer in UNC history doesn't get more love.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">C - Brad Daugherty - top 10 in field goal %, rebounds, scoring and blocks in UNC history and part of the Best UNC Team Ever To Not Win The NCAA (tm) - the 1984 edition Heels with Perkins, Doherty, Jordan and Kenny "The Jet" Smith that was undefeated in conference play but managed to NOT win the ACC Tournament and NOT make it to the Final Four. Despite that, all kinds of love for Brad who remains a true North Carolina treasure.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'm probably guilty myself of overlooking some folks but I'd put these guys up against just about anybody.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>Tony Plutoniumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10819851762049845001noreply@blogger.com1