Yellow Journalism

Back when cursive was the advanced method of handwriting, I wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to follow my grandfather into the printing business at the “Daily Plainsman” (a.k.a. The Huronite). He was a Linotype operator, I wanted to be a writer. I loved the smell of the ink and the roar of the printing press. The war, my scattered sense of self, and life in general derailed that plan and I went off to do something I’d never imagined. However, I remain very interested in the art, science, and practice of journalism and I’ve concluded, that for the most part, pure journalism is in a sad state of affairs. I’d like to say that IMHO, “The Plainsman” is a notable exception, the journalism on that paper remains superb.

I’m not sure my opinion is objective and it probably isn’t but nonetheless... Wikipedia tells me: “Yellow journalism and yellow press are American terms for journalism and associated newspapers that present little or no legitimate, well-researched news while instead using eye-catching headlines for increased sales. Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism.” This certainly isn’t a new concept, in fact, it’s been around for 130+ years. Rich and powerful people, Hurst and Pulitzer, for example, bought newspapers, and used the papers to influence public opinion by selectively printing stories about the Spanish American War, crime, etc.

Sensationalism sells. Sells newspapers, sells TV time, radio hours, and now social media. We seem to have settled into becoming “single channel” folks. The people who watch Fox or CNN or MSNBC or NPR or PBS are going to continue using those channels, mostly exclusively. No matter what. They are comfortable, they don’t want news that doesn’t agree with what they think. We all know that, that is not a revelation. That’s life.

Fox just settled for a ton of money because they maliciously lied about certain things so that they could increase viewership. Now that’s news. But Fox viewers won’t see that and may never know about the lawsuit. And they probably don’t care.

Media channels are owned and controlled by billionaires…they control the channels from which we receive our information about the world around us…economics, politics, war, famine, disease, everything. Rich people used to buy sports teams, now they buy news channels. Musk bought Twitter, Bezos bought the “Washington Post,” the Murdoch family has “Fox News,” “The Times” of London, “The Wall Street Journal,” and “The New York Post.” And on and on and on.

I don’t have an answer. I admire NPR and PBS. I check Reuters. I use CNN as a “shopping list” of issues. I look at Fox to see how and who they want to inflame today. Except for NPR and PBS, when I select a newsfeed, I feel like I have dropped into the middle of a Jerry Springer show. It’s nuts. No news. All conclusions! Based on the flawed logic train of whatever channel I happen to be watching. And the rich get richer. But that’s just my opinion and I’ve been wrong at least twice before.

The image is sunrise at The Superstition Mountains northeast of Phoenix, AZ.

Lee - Version 1.0

Self Portrait

During the last 40+ years, I’ve written this post in my mind hundreds of times. I’ve gotten close to articulating my thoughts, but still, I’m pretty sure I don’t have the words quite right. It starts with, my generation generally runs things here in America.

Sorry.

I’m a baby-boomer. Born in the 40s when everyone was celebrating the War’s end, a new economic cycle, and the vision of ever upward mobility. Well, most people were, not everyone. This post is not political, it’s about me and how I feel about the world around me.

My greatest humiliation was in 1980 at a fighter bar at Luke AFB, AZ. I know what you’re thinking but this is not the “standard” fighter pilot in a bar story. I was a captain, very full of myself, a brand new F-16 pilot, and on temporary duty to Luke to fly their full motion F-16 simulator. I’d gone to the bar the first night of the trip, I was by myself and enjoying a scotch. A female lieutenant slid onto the bar stool next to me and said hello. That didn’t happen often so I was very attentive.

She introduced herself and we began to talk about flying. In those days, the USAF trained women pilots but it was a new thing just started three years prior. And women fighter pilots still weren’t allowed. Sometimes, sometimes, I argue just for the sake of arguing, but this time I was serious…women should not be allowed to fly fighters. She and I argued through many scotches and neither convinced the other. Howsomever, I’m a slow learner and this young lady sparked an internal Lee analysis, of “Why shouldn’t they be fighter pilots?” But that epiphany did not come that night or that week or even that year. Rather my journey was a slow drip, drip, drip bit of looking about, looking inward, and seeing with a better set of eyes.

To that young lady, whoever she is and wherever she may be, I’m sorry. I was so absolutely wrong and so astoundingly arrogant and ignorant that you probably wanted to deck me. I hope that the angst you must have had after our encounter inspired you to become a fighter pilot and that you loved flying fighters as much as you ached to fly them that night in Luke.

That’s not the only blind spot I brought out of my youth. We didn’t have many people of color in Huron, maybe two or three families. Although South Dakota is 10% Native, I only remember one family in town. I didn’t really get the civil rights movement because we didn’t have many Blacks in the state, we had Natives but they stayed mostly on the reservations. The first black man I met and made friends with was in college. He was from Africa and taught me to play three ball billiards. Hanging with him, I began to sense the difference in how he was treated, and me when I was with him. And LGBTQ…I don’t remember that we even acknowledge they existed.

I’m still learning, I do have ingrained behaviors that are part of my baby boomer generation and the place I grew up. I am acutely and painfully aware of how racist and divided we are in America. I am very conscious that because I am tolerant and embrace race differences and LGBTQ, many folks in the country would not hesitate to hurt or kill me. I clearly see that we humans are cultural cannibals and hope to hasten the end of cultures and people not in our own image. I’m trying to not be like that anymore. I am hopeful that the youth of today will replace my generation with people who respect everyone, no matter.

To that young lieutenant, I hope you kicked ass.

Exploring Iceland

These are just my opinions and my memories from the year I lived in Iceland. I might be mis-remembering or looking at them through the lens of time but they are mine. Only mine but perhaps worth sharing.

Today, Iceland is a top tourist destination with many, many tailored photo tours as well as awesome adventures to wander about on the island. The Blue Lagoon is famous and one of National Geographic’s top destinations. When I was there, just the opposite was true, there was no Blue Lagoon and the Icelanders were fiercely protecting their culture, language, land, and sea rights. Fiercely!

The year before I arrived Iceland was involved with the UK in a dispute about fishing. Iceland increased its national waters to 200 miles which gave it exclusive fishing rights in that zone, a zone that the UK also fished. The dispute was nasty and Iceland threatened to leave NATO and Keflavik was a NATO base. The Icelanders dumped a huge load of stones in front of the entrance to Rockville, essentially isolating the facility. The dispute had been worked out but there were still some angst towards outsiders.

In addition to being a NATO base, Keflavik was the main airport of Iceland. When I was there the entire base was surrounded by barbed wire and access was only through two or three gates. Those gates were guarded by members of the Icelandic Police (IP). In our indoctrination briefing, we were told that the act of leaving any US/NATO installation was the same as crossing the border and entering Iceland and therefore all the rules about entering Iceland were in effect each time you left the base. And, so what, you wonder. Let me give you a teeny idea about the rules. And, all the rules were there for a reason, to protect the economy and culture of the country.

You were not allowed to take alcohol off base. I don’t remember the exact ratio but the cost of a bottle on the economy was three or four times the cost of a bottle on base. Even on base you weren’t allowed to just buy the booze, we all had ration cards. Ration cards! I don’t remember exactly what the ration was but something like one bottle of booze or one case of beer per week. Booze was strictly controlled because it was so expensive off base. Of course, I knew that some guys had secret compartments in their cars but the price of getting caught was high…immediate deportation and a really bad mark on your record. Getting caught off base with a bottle that didn’t have a duty free or Icelandic tax sticker meant the bottle came from one of the bases and deportation was the same punishment.

Cigarettes were also strictly controlled. You could take two packs off base, one had to be open. If you had an expensive camera, it had to be registered with the IPs and you could only take two rolls of film with you and one had to be in the camera. On the main base, when you went through the main gate you were more than likely going to be searched by the IP. If they found something, you were hosed.

The IPs were also highway patrol for the main island and had full access to the bases. That was critical because of the Icelandic view on drinking and driving is strict. Don’t do it. They are ferocious about this and will arrest you even if you are just heading to your car with keys in hand. I heard of a guy who was drunk, went to his car and started it because of the cold, and then he got into the back seat. He was arrested. I also heard they could test you long after you’d been driving and still arrest you. I think the max blood alcohol level is .02%. So needless to say, I never, ever drank and drove. But I drank a lot…more on that in another post. Interesting side note, the Icelanders used to drive on the left side of the road, they switched in 1968. Can you imagine?!

Rockville was several miles from Keflavik and usually didn’t have an IP in their guardhouse. They just treated us out there on the “honor” system. Mostly. On Friday and Saturday nights an IP often sat in the guard shack with the USAF guards. They were supposedly ensuring that no Icelanders were staying past the time the club closed…that was the rule. Of course, they never really knew who’d gone into the club and who came out.

The black market was a “thing.” But it was krona that was the popular contraband. Iceland did not have an “official” exchange rate outside of the country so if Icelanders went on vacation, they usually had to buy “all included” vacations where all the food and drink and hotels were part of the package, usually through an Icelandic tourist bureau. They didn’t have US dollars to spend or exchange and so there were limited. Consequently, the market for US dollars was high. You could get several times the exchange rate which was good for us service people because although we liked wandering about Iceland, it was super expensive. I’m sure that’s all changed now, too, but that’s what happened in the wayback machine.

Today, all the places I’d hung out are gone or changed and Iceland is a major tourist destination. The Icelandic language is the close to the Old Norse language because the Icelanders were the first to write down their language, freezing it in form and making updates more evolutionary and recorded. They used to carefully guard that language by having a meeting once a year to debate adding new words to their language. For instance, I think the words for television were something like “throwing pictures” although that may have changed. There are only 340,000 people on the island, I’d guess that all but a few speak English, we never had difficulties talking with the locals. I wouldn’t mind going back someday but then, my memories are good, why change them.

Back in the day when I went on adventures with my friends, there weren’t many rules or fences or guarding of things in Iceland. Consequently, this group of rather fearless people (me included) felt free to get up close and personal with this geyser. I don’t know for sure but I’m guessing there’s a fence there now lest people of low self awareness (like us) get too close to the edge of this very hot place. We might have seen common sense down in that boiling pit. Nah.

Welcome To Iceland

Iceland is a beautiful country with a very proud heritage. But more on that in another post. This post takes a look back at my first few weeks on that special island. Nothing, and I mean nothing was what I’d expected. Nothing.

My background…small town boy from South Dakota trained to fly in West Texas with a brief sojourn in Florida so there is nothing exotic or continental about my upbringing. I had a lot to learn. I flew from Dover AFB, Delaware (my first time on the east coast) to Keflavik, Iceland (my first time away from North America) on a military transport C-141. We flew in jump seats on the side of the cargo bay. The time was mid-July, 1976, middle of the summer in the land of the endless sun.

The only possessions I had were in my deployment bag, a couple of uniforms, flight suits, flight helmet, you know, just regular stuff you’d pack for a trip. A couple of days before I left, my wife had said “Adios forever” (I no doubt deserved it) and so I had no “household” items except for the 600 pounds of stuff I’d shipped from Florida. When I hit the island, I had my carryon bag and a shipping receipt for my hold baggage. Nothing else. But wait.

Also assigned to the island was my Weapons Controller training partner, John. He was supposed to go to Rockville Air Force Station (The Rock, more about Rockville in a later post) to be a Weapons Controller and I was to go to the USAF Operations Center on the main base at Keflavik which was actually a combined Icelandic airport and a US Navy base with a USAF contingent of F-4Cs. John outranked me by a year or so.

We reported together to the USAF HQ. I wasn’t unhappy about the base, it was modern, populated with lots of people, and not “remote” at all. John was called in to the commander’s office first and then me. Turns out they were having a personnel problem in the Ops Center and needed a more senior captain (how is that possible?) and so decided to switch assignments between John and I. I’d lost my assignment. YGBSM.

I needed a place for the USAF to send my my salary, I didn’t want it going to Texas anymore. Fortunately, American Express had a bank on base. I went to the bank, opened an account and then went to personnel to make the formal change. Back in those days, most things were done with paper so I filled out the forms and took a copy back to the bank. Pay day came and went, no deposit. I visited the payroll office. They didn’t have a clue why it wasn’t deposited, they showed that it had been. The bank was clueless, too, but they were kind enough to lend me the amount of my allocation. And MY DEPOSIT went missing for THREE MONTHS. Thank God AMEX kept lending me money. How am I doing so far…no relationship, only carry-on luggage, different job, and no pay from the USAF.

I’d found a golf course in Iceland, all I needed was my hold baggage to show up because my new golf clubs would be perfect. And I waited. And waited. And waited. I finally gave up and started buying clothes and stuff. December rolled around and I received a phone call, my hold bag shipment had arrived, I should come down and get it. That was puzzling, it was two huge boxes around 600 pounds, but I had a 1970 Volkswagen Squareback and so off I went. There was one box. Three feet by three feet by three feet. How can this be? I opened the box and almost puked; the rotting, putrid smell of mold and rotting was overpowering. It turned out that the shipping company in Florida had been broken into, the thieves dragged boxes onto the loading dock and then went through them looking for good stuff. Most of mine was not. It rained. The moving people packed some stuff into a box, taped it up and put it in the corner. Months later, someone noticed it and sent it to me. In the meantime, the mold and rot had a field day. So, no hold baggage. New job. No paycheck. No relationship.

And then, the Navy called. Since I was no longer assigned to an on-base job I had to give up my room in the Officers’ Quarters. Fortunately, the tin quonset hut barracks out at The Rock had a vacancy.

So indeed. I rebaselined my life from almost zero when I got to Iceland. I was glad that my ex in-laws cared for my basset hound and my MGB.

The image above is taken from a clifftop in Iceland in the springtime of 1977. From the left, Buff-Buff, Hutch (me), Crazy Lady, Fred (spouse of Crazy Lady), and my good bud Starsky (Rocky).

Living on the Beach

I’m from a little town in South Dakota where the only beach we had was the sand hauled in by truck to Ravine Lake. I’d been to the beach in California when I was a young teen but that was an abstract memory. Then, all of a sudden in my mid twenties, still chasing common sense and adrenalin, I found myself stationed in Panama City, Florida. I was there (1) to learn to be a radar weapons controller, and, (2) to learn how to fly the T-33, both in preparation for my assignment to Iceland. The weapons controller school was scheduled for about three to four months, T-33 school for four weeks (I don’t remember the exact lengths). The T-33 school was scheduled after the weapons controller school finished. I had a rental car but needed a place to live.

The temporary quarters office at the air base didn’t have a place for me to live for that long and so they gave me non-availability. Normally that means you head off to a motel somewhere but…I thought I’d try something different. It was the off season in Florida, why not look for a beach house. Easier said than done. Hurricane Eloise had devastated much of the beach just 5 months earlier so there weren’t a lot of houses available. Read none. I ended up driving 10 miles east of the air base to Mexico Beach, FL. Mexico Beach had been lightly hit by Eloise but not horribly. I found a tiny little house only 50 yards from the beach on 41st Street. Lightly furnished. Sadly, Hurricane Michael in 2018 destroyed much of the entire town. But I digress.

My little house was three rooms, probably 600-700 square feet. One quarter of a mile east was a beach bar. Eloise had buried most of the place with sand but you could still enter on the beach side, I spent a lot of time there. Fresh oysters were fifty cents a dozen! Fifty cents!! Shrimp was equally as reasonable. In fact, most days I’d walk over to the inland waterway just across the highway and buy fresh shrimp right off the boat. It was a lonely life but I was okay with that. Not many people, no tourists because of the time of year. That changed as spring came and it was fairly crowded in June. A stray dog adopted me. I fed him and let him sleep inside when he wanted. Here’s the twist.

The weapons controller course was “self paced.” We were assigned a “learning partner” and the two of us could go as quickly as we were able…all with an instructor, there was no just go off and do it, it was all supervised. I was paired with another pilot, John.

The Weapons Controller’s job is to look at a radar scope, plot an intercept course between a friendly aircraft and an enemy aircraft, and give constant direction to the fighter to complete the intercept. Weapons controllers were seldom pilots and consequently, the course spent a great deal of time teaching the basic language of aviation. For instance, a full hour was dedicated to how to tell time on a 24 hour clock. John and I finished that course in what our instructor said was the fastest time ever. Three weeks. Not three-four months. But then what? The Air Force would not send me home, I had another course starting in just a few weeks. I couldn’t start T-33 school early. I couldn’t stay in Weapons Controller school. I was in limbo.

The T-33 squadron decided that if I called in once a day, that would be enough. They didn’t actually have anything for me to do but, just in case they found something, I should call in. Every morning, I’d get a dime, walk to the payphone at the little beach store, and make my call. Like I said, it was a lonely time but I got to enjoy parts of the beach. I loved the wind, the smell, the food. The sand…not so much.

The image above is NOT from Mexico Beach. I have no images from there, rather it’s from Santa Barbara, California.

Me & School

You’ve probably gathered from previous posts that I and education don’t always get along. But that’s only half right…I love the act of educating and being educated…it’s the administration of that process that drives me bonkers. I decided to count up the number of months in my life that I’ve been in a “formal” education program and the answer surprised me. Counting K-12 (9months/year), my university degrees, my Air Force training, and my post retirement matriculation…I’ve been educated for three hundred months. 300! Months! I’ve been alive for a very numerically symmetrical 888 months. Math. One third of my life. In school. What drove me to this insanity?

It could be because my ADHD is terrible (it is). Could be I get bored very easily (I do). Could be that I just love to learn (I certainly do). Might be that new gadgets often come with learning and I am a gadget geek (oh, so, so true). Perhaps I have trouble with commitment. Well, that used to be true, not so much anymore.

I enjoy the act of learning and having meaningful conversations. Learning is about finding out new things, things that I might not like or agree with or find consistent with my past. And so, I want to learn about them to decide if the new “thing” is entertainment, fact, fiction, or unknown. That’s what keeps me going. I’m starting to feel like I might be falling behind in some of the learning techniques though. For instance, a few years ago a student in a literature class said he was setting up a “Discord Server” for the class discussion. A what?

I’ve probably overdone the education thing. In fact, I’m sure I have. Law school, for instance, was a colossal waste of time and dollars. That was my own fault, I wasn’t a good lawyer, didn’t work hard at it, and didn’t feel comfortable in the profession. The punch line of this rambling post is that in each of my years of educational institutionalism, there is at least one notable story. I was often challenged by the system and often challenged the system. My victories were few but the stories are kind of cool. I’ll tell some of them in the days to come.

The image above is Miller School of Albemarle. It’s a high school. I did not attend there (it’s $60,000/yr) but was driving by and had to have a picture. A gorgeous campus not too far from Charlottesville, VA.

Time. And birthdays.

Abstract inside Bromo Seltzer Tower in Baltimore

Time is funny, it’s a constant (we think) and it’s relentless…time does not go on vacation. Momentous things sometimes happen on our birthdays. Today is my wife’s birthday and it will be a fun celebration. In many ways, a birthday is just another day, celebrating another trip around the sun. In other ways, it’s a celebration of life and longevity and the labor of our mothers. Happy Day, Diane!!

Memories of my birthdays popup in my mind once in a while. My seventh was the whooping and that memory won’t go away. I passed my driver’s license test on my 16th birthday and started driving immediatley. I registered for the draft on my 18th. On my 19th birthday I was old enough to drink 3.2 beer (in South Dakota). On my 21st birthday I was old enough to drink hard liquor. On my 30th, I was on an all night pig roast with my fellow Forward Air Controllers of the 23 Tactical Air Support Squadron. My birthday cake was a little OV-10 going over the hill, just like me. When I turned 70, Diane was in her second cancer challenge and was between Chemo sessions #4 & 5 and felt well enough to go on a picnic. Kelsey and Kyle joined us at a local vineyard. I’m sure the other birthdays were fantastic, too, but those memories are in gray cells that have retired.

Keeping track of time now is different. If I need a jacket, it’s winter. If it’s miserably hot and humid, it’s summer. If tempers are flying and rhetoric is overwhelming it’s an election year. But I always know what day it is, it’s printed on my morning pillbox and that’s where I start every day. Smile.

Happy Birthday, Diane! Today will be fun!

Diane and Sunshine on a winter walk

Diane & Lee at the vineyard.

Words & Time

How hard can it be…put together some words overlaid on a coherent thought and, voila, a sentence. Rinse. Repeat. Paragraph!! See! I’m already halfway there! Writing them down…that should be the easiest part! But it’s not and in the writing process, time is not my friend; if I don’t immediately write down what I am thinking, poof, the thought goes back into the ether. Ironically, many of my more coherent thoughts come to me in the middle of the night, in the dark, no papers or pens. That could be God’s way of critiquing me. Smile.

Many words have a way of sticking around…books, digital, stone, all seem to have found a way to “beat” time. Moses, Shakespeare, Plato, Spenser, Whitman, Woolf, and on and on and on, still live in our libraries, our “Audible” files, our streaming services, etc. As many people as there are, there are that many ideas, as many ideas as there are, there are that many books. And books have been the target of opposing ideas for millennia. Not surprising, however, is that the art of book burning got its real start in Germany, on May 10, 1933, about 90 years ago.

On May 10, the Nazis began burning books written by people that were not in the image of a pure Nazi; the pure Nazi had a certain cultural and ideological core, everything that was written about or by someone outside of that core was burned. Everything. Goebbels said, “The old goes up in flames, the new shall be fashioned from the flame in our hearts.” And the flames in the ovens, but he didn’t say that at first. The process was fictionalized in Ray Bradbury’s novel and later movie, “Fahrenheit 451.” I say fictionalized but in real life that’s happening right now, almost like the movie.

In parts of America today, the state governments and school boards are doing the equivalent of book burning. They’ve started with the school libraries, public libraries are probably next, and then will come the bookstores. And they are doing it for the same reason as the Nazis, “if you don’t look like me,” then you will not be allowed to read about people who look like you.

America was built on diversity. Not always peaceful or kind diversity, but diversity nonetheless. Now we deny it. Now we erect barriers. We can’t agree on books, time zones, of borders much less agreeing to care for one another. Maybe that’s the real reason all of my writing thoughts come to me in the middle of the night; I shouldn’t let my writing see the light of day or they will come for me, too.

Me & The Mighty T-33

My second assignment in the USAF was after the Vietnam War ended and many pilots were being kicked out. The Air Force offered me another option, one that I hadn’t heard of, a “rated supplement.” That’s code for “we don’t have a flying job for you but we’d like to keep you in until we do.” My non-flying job was as a weapons controller, a “scope dope” who controlled intercepts from a ground-based radar site. The site they chose for me was in Iceland, the perk of Iceland (among many) was that I’d also be able to continue flying…in the T-33.

The T-33 was “born” in 1948, a derivative of the P-80 fighter. In effect, the airplane was older than I was. It was heavy, 15,000 pounds which doesn’t sound like a lot, but the engine only put out 5,000 pounds of thrust. And…what an engine it was. When I first looked down the intake, I couldn’t see an engine. Normally, when one looks down the intake of a jet, you see a fan, part of the compression process. The Allison J33 engine on the T-33 didn’t have a fan like that, it had a bunch of tubes. Don’t quote me on this because I’m not quite sure, but compression happened with some sort of centrifugal force process, not the standard fan compression. In the intake was a plenum chamber filled with doo-dads, wires, cables, hoses, and tubes around the outside. but no fan. Something from a Disney ride, not a jet airplane. But, that’s what I flew. A couple of stories about me and this jet.

In a “normal” jet, the nose wheel is steerable on the ground by using the rudder pedals: engage the nose wheel steering button, push the right rudder pedal, the nose wheel turns right, push the left…well, you get it. The T-33 did NOT have nose wheel steering, rather the nose wheel was on a ‘caster’ like device, that is, the nose wheel was not steerable but would go in whatever direction it had been going. If you screwed up your ground taxiing, and we all did, the nose wheel would turn 90 degrees and the airplane wouldn’t move. The ONLY way out of this predicament was to bounce the airplane, yes, you read that correctly, bounce the airplane.

Here are the highlights of bouncing a T-33 out of a 90 degree nose wheel situation. Warn everyone around you; it is going to get noisy and windy. Make sure there is nothing too fragile directly behind you. Stand firmly and very solidly on the brakes. Push the throttle full forward to maximum power. Now there is a natural pause here because the Allison engine took what seemed like forever to get to maximum power. You will note that as you add full power, the nose will get lower and lower. While still standing firmly (very firmly) on the brakes, pull the power back to idle. You will note that the nose rises as the power ebbs. Push the throttle up to full power again. Than to idle. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. You are bouncing. Or at least the front of the jet is bouncing. Eventually, the upward motion of the nose will lift so high that the nose wheel will be off the ground. When that happens and you are at IDLE power, release the brakes, the airplane will begin to move forward, and the caster will work as it’s supposed to and the nose wheel will straighten out as the airplane is moving. You could always tell the new pilots when you saw an airplane bouncing on the ramp.

The other oddity (there were oh, so many) was minimum run landings. In a normal airplane, you slow down a little below normal approach speed, you touch down as close as possible to the beginning of the runway, you push the nose wheel to the runway, and you apply the brakes, hard. Some of that was true in the T-33 but there were three additional steps.
1. While still airborne, stow all loose items in the cockpit and zip up your flight suit pockets.
2. As soon as your nose wheel hits the runway, OPEN THE CANOPY. Yes. Open the canopy. The canopy was this massive contraption on a huge hydraulic pylon. When you landed, the speed was probably 100mph and opening the canopy was a HUGE speed brake. You slowed down very quickly.
3. When slowed to taxi speed, close your canopy. Tower controllers were always worried that something would fly out of the cockpit onto their runway.

That’s my T-bird story for the day. Come back some other time and I’ll tell you about my first flight in Iceland. Scary. The image above is from the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy center outside of D.C.

Three Laws of Robotics

Yesterday I watched a robot, a humanoid, carrying items, walking across a narrow bridge, jumping down a distance of several feet and more. I came to the conclusion that a clever computer animator had done the sequence and I admired the work. But then, I began to wonder. Maybe. Maybe not.

I’ve tried ChatGPT and a couple of graphic based AI sites and they are indeed incredible. I even put “Bing” on my Mac to watch its AI processor work. (Oh the horror, I know some of you are saying). All amazing. I think if I were an illustrator, I’d be worried…if I were a designer, I think I’d have a little more time to practice my craft, but, it won’t be long. And us, the photographers and storytellers…I’m scratching my head.

Certainly most of the photos that could be taken have been taken and those that haven’t can probably be interpolated. Most words are “known” and until something new is invented by “Hal” we won’t need new words. Right now, a human is required to give Hal a “prompt,” a way forward so that all known data can be scanned and a reasonable conclusion can be presented in response to the prompt. But AI isn’t too far away from being the prompt giver. I wonder who figures out the ethics to all of this. Probably no one. Unmanned combat units are already being deployed in fire zones around the world. Will we be able to kill other people remotely? Or will the targets be the robots from the other side? What if the other side doesn’t have robots?

Eighty, yes Eight Zero, years ago, Isaac Asimov proposed three laws for robots: (1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; (2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; and, (3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. Does anyone remember the Global Protection Against Limited Strikes (GPALS) program? They didn’t read Asimov.

I wonder if robots will want to run for political office. That might be a good idea.

The image above is a composite of the Cresson Prison Chapel back door, Ginter Park Arboretum, The Washington Monument, and several overlays. No prompts, just a crazy idea that grew as I went along. Take that AI.