It worked for Batman.

It worked for Apollo and Starbuck.

James Bond did it, and so did Kirk, Spock, and Optimus Prime.

Even G.I. Joe and the fascist space lizards of V are going to give it a shot.

And now that all the cool kids are doing it, I figure it's my turn, time to reboot my personal franchise, as it were.

Time for a new career ... in a new place.

After a few months as a paradoxically busy layabout, I'm proud and exceptionally pleased to report that I have returned, with a distinct lack of kicking and no real screaming, to the ranks of the gainfully employed. Continuing my extraordinary run of good luck at building new jobs from the best bits of the old ones, I have accepted an extremely generous offer from the Experimental Aircraft Association as their new Online Community Manager.  Thus, my wife and I will soon be heading to America's heartland, more importantly known as the Mecca of sport aviation - Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Relocation will be bittersweet, naturally, though the Microsoft layoffs last January certainly have scattered some of my close friends and colleagues to the four winds already. Thankfully, things like email, Skype, Facebook, and my retired-United-pilot dad's giveaway "companion passes" make the world a lot smaller than it used to be. I've been a proud EAA member for many years, and the opportunity to actually work for them is extremely exciting to say the least. I'll be working alongside a number of friends I've made over the years, so immersed in the aviation world that I'll go to work each day inside a building that's actually located on two airports. (It's tough to explain if you've never been.)

I'm eating a lot of cheese to try to build up an immunity, and honing my pronunciation of the phrase "Go, Packers!" even though I have absolutely no idea what it actually means.

I'm also dreaming of great big skies and the rolling green hills of the countryside I've fallen in love with over my last dozen or so trips to the area. Not to mention enjoying four distinct seasons instead of the local two (grey and gorgeous), and the sheer number of aircraft I'm going to try to weasel myself into flying because that's just who I am.

I'm expecting to have an EAA-specific blog up and running at some point, but I plan to keep this one around as well for the more personal bits of esoterica that need to find their way out to the Internet.

And should Microsoft decide to reboot that other franchise, the one that deserves it more than Knight Rider and The Bionic Woman combined, I'll be first in line at GameStop. And happily reminding them that they've got friends at the EAA.

See you at EAA AirVenture — July 27 – August 2, 2009!

Note: rumors that the part of Hal Bryan will be played by Katee Sackhoff, Dick Sargent or Barry Van Dyke are total fabrications.

Or, why I love the Internet, Vol. MCXXI ...

A few months ago, I found myself completely entranced by a video of a young woman on the Internet.

While this sort of thing is not  uncommon amongst broadband-connected men of my age or any other, her talents most certainly were, and are. Her name is Julia Nunes, and, you'll be pleased to know, my interest in her is decidedly non-creepy.

Julia is a twenty-year-old musician who sings and plays the ukulele just like I do. Except she's way better than me. And I don't sing unless there's some kind of a cappella emergency and somebody needs a bass for a "bom buh-buh-bom duh-dang-di-dang-dang" sort of thing. Anyway, I was free-associating my way through YouTube and found her cover of one of my favorite songs of all time, the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows. " That was followed quickly by a another favorite, the Beatles' "All My Loving", done slower, like the first part of the version in the film "Across the Universe."

After watching these two, I was hooked. Her singing, her playing, her choice of songs, the tricky chord and tempo changes, the multitracked harmonies, her writing (on her originals), and the video editing captured my attention immediately, but there was something else. There's a charm to her style, something that makes me happy and glad to have ears. Something the French elegantly fail to define by calling it je ne sais quoi. She's engaging and witty (some of her "answers" videos where she responds to viewer comments are brilliant), but that's not all of it. It's that she projects a rare sort of fearlessness, as if it never occurred to her not to record her music and put it online for the world to see.

Something in our culture, something ugly, says that talent should be hidden and that success demands apology. It says that only those people who are A) willing to suffer indefinitely and 2) extraordinarily lucky will be allowed to enrich the lives of the rest of us. And then, only after a staggering army of faceless middlemen has stepped in to tell the talented what to do ... and to tell the audience what to like.

Conventional wisdom says that we'd describe her as unselfconscious, which dictionaries define as "...natural or genuine." This is completely backwards and upside down to me - people who are literally "not conscious of self" are hollow, timid shells, there's nothing natural or genuine about them. Julia, clearly, has a profound sense of self that's brightly displayed as one watches her doing what she loves to do.

Julia clearly works hard for her success now, but twenty years ago, even as little as ten, her story would have been dramatically different, if not simply impossible. In the days before the Internet (which, it kills me to realize, she might not even remember), her very ability to make and share music and video would have been entirely dependent on the impenetrable whims of giant corporations. In the heyday of record labels (a record is like a giant CD made of black vinyl) less than 1% of those artists who tried were actually signed. She's become something of a phenomenon, a meme (a word that itself was invented not long before the Internet), and for the right reasons; she's talented, and people enjoy hearing her music and watching her perform. She sells CDs published on a label she co-owns with her parents, does shows on her own, and has even toured with Ben Folds.

The tools, technology, and reach of the Internet have made it possible for artists like her to interact and trade directly with their audience. By creating and publishing her work online as she does, Julia is asking to be judged not by the cleverness of her marketing or the salaciousness of her scandals. She's simply willing and able to succeed or fail on her own merits.  And she's succeeding, as she should.

By way of a postscript, I recently ordered a CD by another singer-songwriter called Wade Johnston. I found Wade's music because he'd done a duet with Julia that I'd spotted on her YouTube page, and from there I made with the clicking and the linking and the listening and the buying. Wade's CD showed up promptly, and with it, in the envelope, was a receipt. I would suggest, with characteristic lack of hyperbole, that this was probably the best receipt in the entire history of people receiving things. It was, literally, a scrap of paper, torn edges and all, entirely handwritten. At the top, in block caps, it reads "OFFICIAL RECEIPT." Below that, it says "Dear Hal, you gave me $6 for my CD. THANKS! enjoy," then it's signed.

Yes, I gave him six dollars and he gave me a CD. Other than the costs of duplication and printing of the CD and the sleeve, and the postage to mail it to me, Wade got most of the six dollars, orders of magnitude more than he'd have gotten in the "old days."  While I'd suggest that I got the better end of the deal (it's good music), it really was a win-win, the best kind of business. And in these ridiculously turbulent times, it's only the very best kinds of businesses that will survive (unless they're so dreadfully bad at it that they qualify for a government bailout.)

Just knowing that there's talented, smart, and enterprising young people out there like Wade and Julia actually makes me optimistic; it's more than just the music that puts this smile on my face.  It's amazing that, thanks to the Internet, it's not amazing that a couple of kids armed with ukuleles and computers (and, of course, talent) manage to reach out three thousand miles to their left and brighten my days.

Plus I get to watch videos of a college girl in her dorm without going to jail!

My business cards, both my last cards from Microsoft and my current "between jobs" variant, read "Hal P. Bryan, Super Genius." When presented with one of these, most people get a good laugh out of my particular brand of mildly ironic self-aggrandizement, while a few actually get the specific reference. For any that don't, it's a nod to the cherished Warner Brothers cartoons from my childhood (when they were already more than 30 years old, thank you), as the terribly bright but hapless Wile E. Coyote identified himself the same way.  I grew up thinking not about how great it would be to actually be a super genius, but how funny it would be to put that on a business card. Such are the choices one makes.

The first time I added it to my Microsoft cards, I assumed they'd be denied and I'd get some sort of a talking to - I crave attention, after all. That faulty assumption was based on another one - the idea that, in a company the size of Microsoft, my humble request for a thousand business cards would actually be attended to personally by a human being, instead of just being fed through an automated and ridiculously efficient process. Suffice it to say that my official business cards identified me as a Super Genius, not to mention a Notary Public - but that last bit is another story.

Regardless, the reactions have always been positive, and good for starting conversations. Most recently, I gave one to a potential colleague while doing some work for the National Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton, OH. This gentleman, Paul, gave it a long look, frowned a little, making me wonder if I'd finally found someone willing to be somehow offended by it. Then, he lowered the card, slowly, and, still frowning, looked me in the eye and said "So I'm assuming that you have close ties to the ACME Corporation?"

And that's how I make friends.

Anyway, just last week, I actually found myself deciding not to give out a couple of my cards. This was unprecedented, and I regret it now, as I suspected I would. Here's what happened:

My friend Scott, an Airbus driver temporarily between gigs, posted on Facebook that he was spending some of his days at the University of Washington's  Aeronautical Laboratory, specifically in the Kirsten Wind Tunnel. This sounded interesting to me, and, being a fan of interesting things, I wrote him and invited myself to come visit. As it happened, Scott was working with a friend of his, Mike, who was also a long-lost childhood friend of mine. Thankfully, Mike had forgotten enough to think that it might be good to see me. Anyway, Mike works for a company that had built a wind tunnel model for another company that's working on what could be a spectacularly cool new business jet. This jet is not pictured, to the right. (I think the names and such are public knowledge, but I'm erring on the side of circumspection here.)

Mike was kind enough to give me an in-depth tour of the facility, which was fascinating to me. Construction began in 1936, and the place has been operational since 1939. You can't take a step without tripping over or ducking under history, given the designs that have been tested there. You can check out the link above for a detailed list, but my favorite had to be the the Taylor Aerocar model I saw hanging from the ceiling. You'll also find models of cars, skiing helmets, boats, and even a Commerson's Dolphin.

The tunnel itself is about what you'd expect - a big tube with windows, holes on both ends for the wind, and a sticky-uppy bit on which to mount a model for testing. But the rest of the place is overwhelming in its largely analog complexity. Every few steps there's a half-flight of stairs that leads to a door beyond which there's an impossibly giant room that's filled with impossibly giant-er generators, electric motors, and giant metal boxes with levers and gauges calibrated in things like kilo-pascals-per-furlong. Between rooms, there are mazes of pipes and valves and the like that make the whole place look as if you took a submarine and turned it inside out in the Batcave.

There's even a giant-scale working model of the facility itself that they use to plan tests, experiment with different airflow patterns, etc. I abruptly stopped looking at the model when I realized that I was afraid I'd see a tiny me looking back.

The single most fascinating part of the place for me was the fact that so much of the analog technology is still in use. And it's not only viable, it's extremely effective - their 6-degree "balance" (the thing underneath the aforementioned sticky-uppy bit) measures "moments" at resolutions in tiny fractions of inch-pounds, to offer an example that even a Super Genius can understand. In these mazes of elegant industrial complexity, it's an overstatement, but not much of one, to say that computers are nearly an afterthought - the thing you plug in at the end so that you can use Excel instead of graph paper for making charts. This idea of history being used to build the future really resonated with me.

What also resonated with me was the fact that the facility is run by students. I say again, students.

Now, I don't know how many of you have actually seen a college student lately, but be warned: these days, they're less than half my age. And they're smart, too. Granted, I can talk aerodynamics a bit better than the average lay person plucked at random from, say, the stands of a tractor-pull. I can nod sagely and pepper the talk with phrases like "pitching moment" and "Reynolds number" without being entirely disingenuous. But these people, these ...fine, I'll say it ... these kids that are younger than the Internet and have no idea that Battlestar Galactica, Knight Rider, and the Bionic Woman are remakes ... these kids are brilliant. And they not only understand the magnificent melange of technologies at their fingertips, unlike what I might expect from some of their peers, they genuinely respect it.

While that gives me all manner of hope for the future and all that, it was undeniably, and uncharacteristically humbling. Somehow, being a laid off 40-year-old who spent the last ten years of his career "sitting on his *** playing vidya games" seemed the tiniest bit less Super Genius-y in that company. So the cards, cards I've given blithely to test pilots, movie stars, authors and astronauts, they stayed in my pocket.

I got over it, and quickly, and now, as I said, I regret it. It would have been fun to keep in touch with some of these rising stars, and I'd guess that they'd appreciate the fact that even an old man of 40 can have a sense of humor. But I suppose it didn't kill me to be humbled like that, however briefly.

Just don't expect me to make a habit of it.

After all, "Hal P. Bryan, Genius" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

And it listens, too. And usually understands. 

Usually.

Even before I left Microsoft, I was never an angry Apple-basher. Any grumbling I did about them was usually motivated by a slightly begrudging envy about how intuitive their products are and how miserably spot-on they were with their "Mac vs. PC" ad campaign, especially when it came to the classic Vista-basher, "Cancel or Allow."  While I confess that I'd really get shoe-tossingly frustrated at their ads that tout all the things you can do with an iPhone, because I've been doing all of those things and so much more with my Windows-based phones for several years, even that was envy-based. Apple repeatedly "wins" in three key areas: branding, marketing, and usability.

However, their key marketing message around the latest version of the iPod Shuffle is, not to put too fine a point on it, wrong.

One of its cool new features is a text-to-speech function that they call VoiceOver. According to their marketing site, VoiceOver is "...the feature that gives iPod shuffle a voice. With the press of a button, it tells you what song is playing and who’s performing it."

Because of this, Apple touts the new Shuffle as "The first music player that talks to you."

But it isn't. It's not the first at all.

And I don't get that - Apple doesn't need to lie. All they need to do is show some vaguely hip Gen-Z half-slacker smirking at the chrome and rounded corners of whatever they're selling while the next Feist or Ingrid Michaelson sings plaintively in the background, and they'll sell more of the next iAnything than there are people on the planet.

I've had a long and tumultuous relationship with my Windows Mobile gadgets.  I love what they can do, and I find that I actually, if masochistically, enjoy the ridiculous amount of tinkering required to make them do it. On the other hand, I hate what a bad job Microsoft, the hardware manufacturers and the cell carriers have done over the years in giving them useful names and then telling people about them. For example, I currently carry an AT&T Fuze, aka HTC Touch Pro, aka Raphael, aka P4600, aka Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional Device.

See what I meant about branding?

In addition to being my phone, my phone is my mini-laptop, my GPS, my ebook, my web browser, my camera, my barcode scanner, my inventory tool, my camera, my game system, and my media player - music and video. I use it with headphones or in a cradle wired to the stereo in my car.

Anyway, one of the indispensable components of my Fuze (and of my Tilt, my 8525, my 8125, my MPX220, my SMT5600, and a host of Compaq-then-HP Ipaqs before it) is a Microsoft application called Voice Command. It comes standard with some phones and PDAs these days, but I've been using it since it came out as a standalone product.

And, just like VoiceOver, if I want it to,Voice Command will tell me the name of the song that's playing and who's performing it. And it's been doing this, as I said, since 2003.

What's more, it'll do this if I simply ask it to by saying "what song is this?" It'll also play music that I ask for by artist, album, or genre, even genres that I've made up: "Play The Beatles," "Play Pet Sounds," "Play 80's Hair Band Crap That I Wish I Didn't Actually Own." I can control other functions by voice as well, launching programs, making phone calls, asking it to read my email aloud, tell me the time, etc.

The recognition itself is surprisingly good, though, like all such applications, when it misunderstands, it does so  in ways that most humans would not. Humans that have some interest in maintaining a polite and orderly society that is.

A few years ago, just after the film Walk the Line came out, my ever-malleable consumerism sent me on a Johnny Cash kick.

<tangent> It was around this same time that, for a brief period, I had two WinMo devices. One of them was playing music, Johnny Cash singing "Folsom Prison Blues." The other one, in my pocket, was making phone calls without my knowledge. It had decided, for some unfathomable reason, to call a friend and colleague of mine who works at the Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museum. I'll call her "Victoria Portway", A) because that name has a certain Jane Austen ring to it and sounds like someone who would work in an important place, and 2) because that's actually her name. It was only after leaving more than two minutes of me singing at the top of my lungs along with the late Mr. Cash on her voice mail that I realized what had happened. Now, to this day, Vicki insists she never got any such message. At the time, I suspected she was just saying that because we were just good enough friends that she didn't want to humiliate me. Now, a few years on, I suspect it's because we're considerably better friends, and she's waiting for just the right moment. I live in constant fear. </tangent>

Anyway, in addition to picking up some Cash CD's, I bought the soundtrack to the film, because I thought Joaquin Phoenix did a pretty credible job with the singing. (This was back when Phoenix himself was somewhat involved in polite and orderly society and not reinventing himself in awkward Letterman moments.) I'd ripped the soundtrack to my media player (my phone, probably the 8125 at that point), and wanted to listen to it next time I was in the car. I keyed the mic and said, clearly, "Play Joaquin Phoenix."

Voice Command confirms your choices with an audible response in a vaguely female voice. In this case, then, "she" said "The Wondermints" and started playing one of their albums.

I tried again. "Play Joaquin Phoenix."

"The Beach Boys" she said, and off she went.

"No", I said, then keyed the mic again. "Play  Joaquin Phoenix."

"Fruit Bats", came the response, and the music.

I laughed at that one and dove back in. "Play  Joaquin Phoenix."

"Please repeat."

I thought this was a good sign. "Play  Joaquin Phoenix."

"Death Cab for Cutie."

What?!?! "Play  Joaquin Phoenix!"

"Oasis."

"Play  Joaquin Phoenix!"

"The Moody Blues."

"Play  Joaquin Phoenix!"

"Apples in Stereo."

"Play  Joaquin Phoenix!"

"The Flaming Lips."

At this point, I started to lose it a little, wondering just when the passive-aggressive little woman who lives in my phone had started to hate me.

"For the love of all that is holy, PLAY JOAQUIN PHOENIX!"

"The Carpenters." (Yeah, I know, shut up.)

I could have given up. I could have simply said "Play Walk the Line - Soundtrack" and gotten the music I'd asked for. Instead, I thought it might be helpful to start giving Mr. Phoenix middle names.

"Play Joaquin ***ing PHOENIX!!!"

"Fountains of Wayne."

I tried other additions, profane and scatalogical, to no avail. She kept coming back with seemingly senseless choices, delivered with icy digital patience. She listed artists that I didn't even know I had. At one point, she launched a game of Solitaire, which I read as her playing HAL9000 to my Dave Bowman and suggesting that I "...take a stress pill."

I thought about throwing the phone out the window. I thought about just unplugging it and listening to the radio. I thought about pulling over and having a good cry.

Then it hit me. (Not literally, though I wouldn't have been surprised.)

I'd been pronouncing the name properly. "Wah-keen Fee-nix."

What if ... what if I said it wrong?

I took a deep breath, and, as clearly as I could, said "Play Joe-Ackin Puh-Ho-nix."

I'll swear to my dying day that I heard her smiling as she said, perfectly clearly, "Joaquin Phoenix."

I tried it a dozen times to be sure, and it was conclusive: she knows how to say it, she just doesn't understand it when she hears it.

They say the biggest challenge in any relationship is communication, and that was a watershed day for us.

So, Apple, there you have it. My music player talks to me, and it was doing that 6 years before yours.

And it listens.

And, sometimes, just once in a while, it drives me into fits of screaming apoplexy.

Let's see your fancy new Shuffle do that.

Thanks to David @ FuzeMobility for the post that brought this to my attention: http://www.fuzemobility.com/the-future-ipod%E2%80%A6today-no-ipod-needed/ And for his closing sentence in that piece that I so desperately wish I'd come up with first: "Voice Command has been out a few years now and comes standard on the Fuze so it’s nice to see that Apple finally invented it."

I'm unemployed for the first time in 12 years.

My group, the Microsoft studio responsible for Flight Simulator, Train Simulator, and ESP, was closed in January. My severance package included 60 days' paid leave with recruiting support to find a position elsewhere in Microsoft. I looked at a number of job descriptions, most of which started with a question, something like "Are you passionate about integrating SQL server with dynamic .PHP calls and cross-referenced bubble-sorted data groups with an eye for increasing performance as much as 4%?" At this point, my answer to that is a respectfully sighed "...no, I'm just not." (But ask me again when the money runs out.)

Yesterday was day 60, and I turned in my cardkey, my parking passes, and my belov'd corporate American Express Card, sauntering off into uncertainty with a distinct lack of fanfare.

My last break was a mere 18 hours (I had to formally quit one job before the next company could make me an offer without violating a non-compete agreement) back in the summer of '97. If you don't count that, then my run was even longer - about 21 years.

If you include part-time work, then my history goes further still: I got my first job when I was 14, which was 26 years ago.

Instead of working in a field and "picking berries and building character," my dad's suggestion, I was a professional musician, believe it or don't. I was a drummer, accompanying my friend Tom Gire, a piano playing prodigy who remains the best keyboardist I've ever heard. We worked the restaurant circuit, entertaining diners eating Sunday brunch at Andy's Auburn Station and dinner at Jabingo's, playing for tips, and, in the case of Jabingo's, barbecued pork sandwiches.

Tom and I threw ourselves into the rock star lifestyle with rebellious teenage abandon. After our moms dropped us off, we'd jam sedately through a set list that included Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie, and, when we thought we could get away with it, Bobby Hebb. And the groupies ... I can still feel that tingle at the base of my neck that I'd get whenever some babe would catch my eye, and, with a wink and a smile, send her great-grandson up to the piano to drop a quarter in the jar.

Since then, I've held the following positions (many of which have overlapped):

• Actor
• Security Guard
• Day Care Worker
• Radio Voice Talent
• Mailman
• Emergency Medical Technician
• First Aid / CPR Instructor
• Police Officer
• Emergency Communications Specialist
• Database Developer
• IT Consultant
• Senior Technical Support Engineer
• Toy Store Proprietor
• Technical Support Instructor
• Sr. IT Technician
• Software Test Engineer
• Beta Coordinator
• Notary Public
• Software Test Lead
• Subject Matter Expert
• Software Design Engineer in Test
• Community Evangelist
• Business Development Manager
  

The last two blend together a bit and describe my final two and a half years at Microsoft, and, in combination, encompassed a lot of different roles: writer, editor, web publisher, public speaker, media spokesman, networker, researcher, amateur marketeer, etc.

Clearly, I don't know how to do just one thing.

I'm utterly baffled by what my friend Jim calls the "40 years and a gold watch" crowd. Barbara Sher's books call me a "scanner", Ned Hallowell's books tell me I have Attention Deficit Disorder*, conventional wisdom tells me that I just lack discipline and my friend Glenn simply calls us "Swans." My personal favorite came from my friend and "other mother" Donna who has no idea the gift she gave me when she called me a "Renaissance Man."

The tagline on my résumé closes with "...I’m looking for a new place to hang at least some of my many hats." And therein lies the challenge, and the promise.

While I am seriously considering a couple of "real jobs", the kind where I'd be employed by somebody and paid by them to go to where they are and do the things they tell me to for eightish hours a day, those are the exception - not many places are actively advertising for world-class-hyphenates.

In the meantime, then, I'm trying an experiment: As of today, I am now officially a full-time part-timer, a freelance thinker working from a home for which I hope to continue to be able to keep paying.

I'm consulting (in some cases as a volunteer at this point) for groups like the Museum of Flight, the National Aviation Hall of Fame, the BRAVO 369 Flight Foundation and Topgun Simulations, as well as a couple of other ventures (including one that I'm starting with two close friends) that aren't quite ready to be discussed. And, above all, I'm finally, and I hope fully, committed to writing, something that the universe has been patiently screaming at me to do more of for years.

Yesterday, I came up with a daily schedule for my new job, one that specifically delineates periods of writing, as well as email, mucking about on Facebook, and semi-aimlessly surfing the web. I wasn't sure if it would work, but, as I write this, I'm actually 19 minutes ahead of schedule.

Not bad for my first day.

*-For the record, it's not that I have a deficit of attention, it's that I have a surplus of tangents.

In my continuing quest to vent my irritation at the mistakes of everyone in the world but me, I've written here about strange messages from machines (mojay and NO2), and, more recently, about things that are printed backwards by people who should know better. Sitting here in my glass house, it's my duty to throw more stones, this time at yet another Swiss watch company.

The culprit today is Torgoen watches, though given their propensity to reverse things, they may actually be called Neogrot, which is much more fun to say. They first caught my eye in this month's issue of the Smithsonian's always enjoyable Air & Space Magazine. They have a full page ad, scanned and shared here, that shows one of their watches in the foreground with a grainy, monochrome, slightly fish-eyed airplane  behind it. I'm about 95% certain that this is a CP-121 Tracker on display outside somewhere (note the anti-bird mesh riveted over the engine ... maybe the museum at Trenton or Comox?) though the distortion makes ID a little tricky. I am about 104% certain, however, that the image is ... wait for it ... backwards: note the words "RESCUE" and "DANGER" in the detail blowup, not to mention the pitch of the prop.

To make matters slightly worse, when I went to their website to snarkily try to find some text about how proud they are of their attention to detail, I found no less than three other pictures that were also reversed. I don't make watches, nor do I make advertising, but, in the words of laymen everywhere ... come on, why not just do it right?

Oh well, at least Torgoen watches cost about 98.5% less than their IWC counterparts, about which I ranted previously.

And now back to all the things I was supposed to be doing.

So there's an email floating around the Intertubes that purports to show a Boeing B-52 Stratofortress being transported on an aircraft carrier. The image is accompanied by the following text:

While this may look like a gag shot, it is actually a "transport of a transport" necessity. The B-52 was in Beirut, Lebanon undergoing routine fuel tank cleaning. Workmen accidentally damaged the bladder system and had to install the bladders from smaller C-130s temporarily. The plane was flown to nearby McCollough air base where it was lifted upon a barge bound for Tyre on the Mediterranean. Once there it was off-loaded onto the carrier deck for transport to Crete where the appropriate tank bladders were installed. It was then flown back to Beirut. Military cooperation in action.

Even before seeing the picture, I was skeptical - and not just because it came from the Internet (over and over and over.) There's a lot wrong in just the text - the US has no military bases in Lebanon (in Beirut or Tyre), there is no McCollough air base as far as I can tell, I highly doubt that anyone could or would install C-130 fuel tank bladders in a B-52, etc.

An inspection of the picture yields even more evidence: the shadows are incorrect - the B-52 is lit from the upper right, while the rest of the scene is lit from a point closer to center or lower right. Then there's the height problem – there’s no way that the (mysteriously unshadowed) F-14 would fit under the right wingtip of the B-52, nor would the F-18 fit under the nose like that, not to mention the EA-6B and the S-3 just outboard of the #4 engine. This led to the single biggest giveaway which was one of scale: according to some organization that refers to itself as the United States Navy, the width of CVN-68, the USS Nimitz, is 252 feet. As anyone (and by anyone I mean my brother Chris, who is a bubbling cauldron of B-52 trivia, among other things) will tell you, the wingspan of a B-52H is 185 feet, which means that, as pictured, the airplane is roughly 36% too big (or the ship is the same percentage too small.)

Oh, and finding the original, undoctored photo didn't hurt either.

Last year, I was beset (if something happens twice, I can say it beset me, right?) by strange messages from vending machines - a gas pump that asked me to remove my NO2 and a stamp machine that prompted me to insert more mojay. This year, the universe is expressing its contempt for my stability by (among other things) occasionally showing me things that are backwards.

Thank You For Flying Arganap
First, there was the Antonov AN-2 biplane in the film Indiana Jones and They Should Have Quit While They Were Ahead. The magnificent Russian biplane was decked out in Pan American-Grace Airways colors and was shown in a traveling shot, superimposed over a map. For some reason, I was completely willing to forgive the fact that Panagra never flew AN-2s, even though the idea is every bit as preposterous as pretty much everything that happened before and after that scene in the film. What I couldn't forgive, however, is that the scene was printed backwards. I can almost understand a lazy editor thinking that the "PAA" logo looked fine as "AAP", or even that Arganap was a real-sounding name for an airline, though I have more trouble with the use of the word "Ecarg" in the "PAA Grace" logo. But certainly the reversed letters would have jumped out at ... anyone?

As an aside, here's a bit of trivia from the same scene that is coincidentally flossy, in a spine-tingling sort of way: The registration number used on the AN-2 in the film is N48550. In real life, that number belongs to a 1939 Grumman Goose, currently owned by Larry Teufel of Hillsboro, Oregon. Larry's Goose was the one that we used for the majority of our photo shoots, sound recordings, and flying research for Flight Simulator X. His airplane's beautiful blue and gold paint scheme, complete with prominent "N48550" on the fuselage and in the cockpit, is the default livery. Click here for a screenshot, and here for an article about this airplane in particular.

Why I Won't Buy a $14,000 Watch
The next incident happened in Orlando, Florida (watch this space for more on that trip shortly.) I was in a shopping mall, looking for a watch, and I happened on a display case featuring a number of watches by the plainly-named International Watch Company (IWC) of Schaffhausen, Switzerland. I remembered IWC from their peculiar nine minute commercial starring John Malkovich as a pretentious bellhop, and featuring some nice flying scenes with two (real) Spitfires and an awkwardly CG'd Ju-52. You can watch the film here, and even (speaking of pretentious) a "making of" featurette here.  IWC used the film to launch their collection of pilot's watches and they continue to use an image of a Spitfire in their advertising and store displays.

Did I say "image of a Spitfire?" Sorry - I meant "backwards image of a Spitfire!"

This is a company whose "undisputed specialty" lies in crafting "unmistakeable (sic) originals of chronometry", a company who promises watches that take you "...from the No-Longer to the Not-Yet," and enable you to "...experience the Right-Now in the form of a mechanical work of art" without a hint of irony ... prints their advertising materials backwards. Click the image for a closer look at the not-great camera-phone picture I snapped.

Swiss watchmakers are stereotypically synonymous with precision, quality, and detail (and, in my mind, most of them look like Charlie Watts, but that's neither here nor there.) If they can't be counted on to get things just right, especially when they're trying to sell me a watch that costs more than I make in ... a while, who can?

Et Tu, Disney?
Apparently not the Imagineers behind the Mission: SPACE ride at Walt Disney World's EPCOT Center. (Note: Yes, I know they changed the name and call it "Epcot" now, but, as far as I'm concerned, it's still an acronym, and will always be the Experimental Prototype Community Of To-MORROW!) I'm sure most of you (both of you?) are gasping in disbelief as you read this, but it's true: Disney made an ekatsim, to coin a term.

In the queue for the ride, there are a number of stage-setting props and displays that, admittedly, do a pretty good job  of melding real history with the fictitious future (is that redundant?) timeline of the ride itself - pictures of astronauts from the early '60's through 2038, a real lunar rover on loan from the Smithsonian, etc. One of the display cases shows plausibly mocked up spacesuits with the "Mission: SPACE" emblem patch on the front. Just below the patch on the suits are switch panels for "environmental controls" and the text is, as you've no doubt surmised, backwards. (Another grainy camera-phone pic to the right.)

Granted, this didn't ruin the ride for me (the fact that I was *not* selected as Pilot in my four-person crew did that), but still ... Disney should know better. In fact, Leonard Mosley's thoroughly discredited biography Disney's World states that Disney's apocryphal interest in cryonics was based on his desire to be revived " ...in time to rectify the mistakes his successors would almost certainly start making at EPCOT the moment he was dead."

Should Walt be thawed and return to clean things up, this should be tops on his list ... right after shutting down every incarnation of the horrific "It's a Small World" attraction, but that's neither here nor there.

Comes Sky King!

Sky King was a television series that ran in the US in the 50's (see the Wikipedia link above for the convoluted history of networks and run times) that was based on a radio series by the same name. It featured the adventures of the titular character, a rancher and pilot, and his niece Penny, a pretty and blonde Robin to Sky's Batman. The plots usually involved some wayward criminals passing through the area, the local sheriff needing help, and Sky flying his airplane (first a Cessna T-50, then a Cessna 310) to the rescue, landing on a dirt road in the desert and punching the bad guys in the head.

I have a soft spot for the show since the first airplane I ever flew was a Cessna T-50, and, as my friend Glenn hates me pointing out, at Oshkosh in 1989, I not only got to fly one of the T-50's used in the series, I waved an original screen-used Sky King cowboy hat out the window when we taxied by the crowd.

The whole series is now available on DVD, or, thanks to the good people at American Flyers, you can watch most of the episodes online here - click the logo above to watch the first episode right now.

My thanks go to my friend Bruce of BruceAir for sending the link, and for undoubtedly giggling quietly to himself about my use of the word "titular."

If you're inspired by the flying in the show and want to take a virtual T-50 around the patch, Alphasim's version is now freeware and can be had at Simviation. (Note: the red one is our family airplane (though ours has never been on floats to my knowledge.))

In the meantime, why not reach for Nabisco?!? After all, the bright red seal on the package end means mighty good cookin' inside, my friend ... Or at least have a look at the NabiscoWorld web site, which is almost certainly the only place on the whole Interweb where you can download a recipe for Crunchy Stuffed Zucchini Boats whilst playing a spirited round of Nut Vendor.

They're coming, honest. In the meantime, I wanted to share the breaking news of whom I was quite pleased to have met tonight, thanks to some mutual acquaintances.

I didn't ask to have a picture taken, though naturally I was tempted. By not taking a picture, I can stagger off to sleep pretending that we're peers, and that I wasn't in any way just another fan, reverting to the me from 31 years ago at the first handshake.

Insert obligatory (and apropos) reference to "delusions of grandeur" here, and kindly enjoy the artist's conception of how the untaken picture might have turned out.

In answer to the inevitable questions:

1. Gracious and patient.

2. Strong, with a shoulder squeeze and good eye contact.

3. No.

“If you’re ever in the Bay Area, you should head out to the Nut Tree and say hello to Duncan Miller … he’s been around a long time … still flies, and has hangars full of interesting stuff. If you’re lucky, you can sign his guestbook like about 4 million other people.”

This bit of advice came, more than once, from my friend and former colleague Marty Blaker. (Marty – if you’re reading this, “Hey.”) It came most recently about a week ago on a trip that found me in said Bay Area with a bit of extra time on my hands.

Now, I’m a gregarious sort of fellow – after all, one doesn’t become the single best Flight Simulator Community Evangelist in a company the size of Microsoft without being a bit of a people person. But I already know a lot of people, and I’m inherently skeptical when anyone says “Oh, you have to meet so-and-so”. Given that, my knee-jerk response to such a suggestion is to want to simply smile and nod, say “I’ll be sure and do just that” while gingerly filing the whole thing under “I’m really just being polite.”

(Besides, the last time I went to the Nut Tree, a roadside fruit-stand turned fly-in restaurant and mini-theme-park, I had a soul-shatteringly terrifying experience involving a miniature train and a scarecrow; was I really ready to go back to that area, only 36 years later?)

Thankfully, I have two knees, and, in this case, the second one jerked and reminded me that Marty wouldn’t steer me wrong, not to mention the fact that I’m a connoisseur of interesting stuff. So, like George Costanza ordering a chicken salad on rye, I decided to give it a go. I called Marty and asked if he would call his friend Duncan and give me an introduction.

Marty’s response filled me with the opposite of confidence when he said “Oh, he won’t remember me at all! Just show up, and tell him that you heard that, if you’re into old airplanes, you have to stop and say hello to Duncan. It’ll be great!”

So … I was not only expected to just walk into some stranger’s hangar and say “Hello”, I was supposed to do it entirely unannounced. With a jaunty “why not?”, I set out to do precisely that. And I would have made it, too, if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids at the TSA who decided to erect fences and security gates around this little airport in a fit of post-9/11 spending. Thanks to those precautions, I arrived at the airport and found myself peering at Duncan’s hangar and what I could see of his airplane collection, clutching at the chain link fence like a Dickensian orphan or a really easily deterred terrorist.

“I am,” he said.

“Well … my name’s Hal, I’m an old airplane guy, and I’ve heard that, if I’m in this area, I have to stop by and say hello. So … hello!”

Duncan sized me up for half a beat, then said “Head down to the gate over there. The code is and I’ll meet you back at the hangar.”
When Duncan said “hangar,” he may well have said “museum,” or, simply, “home.” I walked in past the Lockheed PV2 and the Grumman S-2 Tracker parked on the ramp and saw two beautiful restored Stearmans, two vintage Fords, and a spotless Piper Cub, all surrounded by photos and parts and memorabilia, the seeds of a thousand stories. Duncan got me a soda from his refrigerator, and we sat in an air conditioned “ready room” in the corner of his hangar. One of his hangars, that is.

There’s an unspoken ritual when pilots meet, especially those of us with a penchant for the old and unusual. It’s something that my friend Jim called “authentication,” and he was spot on. In this case, I was the interloper, the stray punk off the street who may or may not have been selling something, so the burden to authenticate was clearly mine. This process usually, and often very subtly, involves answering three questions in the course of a conversation: “Do you know what you’re talking about?”, “What have you flown?”, and “Who do we both know?”

My authentication took the form of interested commentary on some of the pictures on the walls, and then we started leafing through one of Duncan’s sixty-five overstuffed photo albums. He pointed at one picture and asked if I recognized the location—I did, it was Reno/Stead. Other pictures came and went, each with their own stories, spun quickly and handed off by a man who has been flying nearly every day since 1939. I mentioned flying Tiger Moths and growing up with a “Bamboo Bomber” (a 1944 Cessna T-50), and, naturally, Duncan used to own one, back when he started a non-scheduled airline flying C-46’s out of Boeing Field near Seattle, which reminded him, did I know so-and-so, oh, great, he thought I might …. The connections were found and forged almost synaptically, and before I knew it, it was time to go.

Time for Duncan to go, that is. He had to run an errand, so I started to take that as my cue to leave, but he asked me to stick around. He gave me the keys to his other hangars, reminded me about the refrigerator, asked me to sign his guestbook, and told me to make myself at home. I’d clearly been authenticated. Wandering through his hangars I saw Stearmans and T-28s and more classic cars and even a Vultee BT-13, not to mention countless more bits of aero-ephemera. I was like the proverbial kid in a candy store except that nothing was for sale and there was no risk of diabetic coma.

After about thirty minutes, some kind of 70s Oldsmobuick docked itself outside, and a guy named Mike hopped out.

“Hello there. If you’re looking for Duncan, he went to get a part and said he’d be right back,” I offered, helpfully.

“Oh, hi … yeah, Duncan told me he was going to go get a part, and said he’d be right back” said Mike.

With that superfluous redundancy out of the way, Mike and I sat down for a chat. He’s based in Alaska but had come down to stay for a few weeks and fly the BT-13 to a few air shows. I never did get Duncan’s age, but Mike is 86 and adamantly identifies himself as the younger of the two. They’ve been flying and working together for a long time, at least as far back as the early 50s, and, when Duncan got back, the three of us settled in for a marathon of story-swapping and a few more test questions for me, though all in good fun.

There was an unobtrusive wooden sign on the wall that read “Pals Forever.” It seemed a little trite at first, frankly, but, in talking with these two guys, the cynicism ebbed. Sometimes, people actually do say just what they mean.

Between the two of them, I’m fairly certain that they’ve flown everything and been everywhere. We talked about the handling of the BT-13 compared to the Harvard, we talked about Moths and Bamboo Bombers and Beech 18s, about one of their friends who flies a DC-3 out of a 700-foot grass strip. Duncan talked about ferrying an RP-63 King Cobra during WWII, and how heavy it felt with the additional armor plating. It seems the R model was used for gunnery practice— not as a remotely piloted drone or towing a target but as a manned target that fighter pilots shot at with plastic bullets, their hits scored automatically by what the pilots called the “pinball machine” inside the cockpit.

Lousy work, if you can get it.

Duncan had mentioned earlier that he was going to show me “something that Churchill gave back.” When I reminded him, he responded with a question, another test:

“Do you know what an AT-19 is?” he asked.

The wheels turned, the gears ground…. AT was the U.S. Army Air Corps designation for “Advanced Trainer.” Our very own Cessna T-50 was known in some guises as an AT-8 or AT-17, for example. In addition to those, I could identify an AT-6, AT-9, an AT-11 …. Then something clicked, and a picture snapped into my head.

“Was that the gullwing Stinson? The V-77?” I asked with what I’ll call “confidesitancy”.

As it happened, I was right, and that seemed to be the last of the tests. Duncan asked if I wanted to go and look at one, and I replied with something articulate like “well, duh!”, but before we got up, Mike interjected.

“Wait. What was the AT-19? Did we figure it out?” he asked.

“Yes, Hal got it. It’s a gullwing Stinson. Where were you?” Duncan replied.

“I was busy trying to remember what the hell an AT-19 was!” Mike responded.

“Don’t you remember? You crashed one!” said Duncan.

“I crashed? Are you sure? I don’t remember … “ Mike said.

Duncan gave an exaggerated eye-roll and I said something about hoping to live long enough and spend enough time flying that I’d someday not be able to remember something as dramatic as a crash. They both laughed, and then Duncan said that it was great to see that the younger generation was taking an interest in these things. Having accidentally turned 40 a couple of days ago, being referred to as “the younger generation” was surely the best present I could hope for.

As promised, Duncan took me to look at the Stinson, and, as expected, it was absolutely gorgeous. Of the 500 or so built, about 380 of them went to the UK as part of our Lend-Lease agreement and this was one of the aircraft that was given back—truly lent, rather than leased. This example looked factory new in British Royal Navy colors, ready to patrol the seas on the lookout for enemy Unterseebooten. It’s for sale, too; a fact that I immediately tried to forget.

At this point, something like six hours had flown by, and I started to politely make my exit, not especially looking forward to the 90-minute drive to my hotel with a stop at a restaurant where some fancy waitress with big hair and fake nails tries and fails to find a polite way of saying “Oh … just one of you tonight?” Then, mercifully, the idea of the three of us having dinner seemed to spontaneously suggest itself. I agreed to join them, but only if they were sure I wasn’t intruding, and if they’d let me treat.

It was then that Mike suggested Taco Bell, and Duncan shot him a look filled with what I’m fairly sure was mock indignation and said:

“Mike! We have a guest! We are NOT going to Taco Bell!
We… are going … to Denny’s!”

And so we did, Mike and I shrugging and shaking our heads while every waitress in the place cooed and giggled with Duncan, all but sitting on his lap to take his order. Duncan must be somewhere around 90 and belies the old adage about there being no such thing as an “old, bold pilot.” If he ever does leave this world, heaven forbid, the odds are it won’t be in an airplane, or in a hospital, but at the hands of a jealous husband. God bless ‘im.

After dinner, we (and by “we” I mean Duncan) got one of the waitresses to take a picture of all of us, after she had several taken with him, of course. While we sat smiling for the camera, I heard Duncan whispering something. It wasn’t “cheese,” it was something that sounded like part toast, part mantra: “Pals forever, pals forever.” There was obviously a story behind it, but it seemed private, and I was perfectly happy to just take it at face value.

And so it is that I’ve found another home-away-from-home, a reminder of the kinship of aviation, where just a few key pieces of trivia are a viable shortcut to a very real friendship. And all I had to do was trust somebody I already trusted anyway, and then simply show up.

Pals forever, indeed.

So, here’s a bit of advice. If you’re ever in the greater Bay Area north of San Francisco, California, and you like old airplanes, you just have to stop in and say hello to Duncan Miller. And if you go out to eat, don’t settle for Taco Bell.

Note: Anything in the following that might remotely resemble an opinion is mine and mine alone, and reflects neither the stuff nor the things of the Microsoft Corporation, its subsidiaries, associates, customers, antitrust investigators, or anyone who ever has or has not actually heard of the company.

So.

A while back, somebody sent us a fax. Faxes, or facsimile transmittals, for the cognoscenti, all go to one place at Microsoft, and are then routed individually thanks to the tireless efforts of our crack team of certified faxographists. If a fax isn't specifically addressed to an employee by name, sometimes it takes a little while to find the right person, but, eventually, they get there.

(Postal mail works the same way ... the customer who sent back their boxed copy of Combat Flight Simulator 3 to "Microsoft" with a piece of paper taped to it that read "won't download" with no other identifying information would be happy to know that it arrived on my desk just about one week after it was sent. This timeliness is appreciated on my end as well, since the sooner something like that arrives, the sooner I can start spending weeks and weeks frowning at it, wondering exactly what it is I'm supposed to do about it.)

Anyway, so I got this fax from someone who identified themselves as a pilot and Flight Simulator customer who had some questions about our latest release related to an upcoming book that he'll be self-publishing and selling out of a van down by the river. Click the thumbnail to see the actual fax, censored so I can take the moral high ground and avoid a lawsuit.

I made the call, and it was answered promptly by a reasonable-sounding gentleman who seemed glad that I was able to make the time to contact him.

He was right, it was brief. Of his promised 3-5 minutes, he spent three of them berating me for the fact that a company as high-tech as Microsoft had to rely on something as archaic and "totally 1975" as a fax. He was wondering why he hadn't been able to simply reach us directly by phone, a method that I didn't point out is archaic and "totally 1876". I did, however, suggest that he could have gone to our website and clicked the link to send us an email, something that might be charitably referred to as "fairly 1995 or so", at which point he changed the subject.

The subject to which he changed was a question of realism. He said a few kind things about our products and the time and energy he presumed we spend on details and things, but said that there was one gigantic, glaring error.

My first thought was "Only one? You're not paying attention!" My second through fifth thoughts were quick guesses as to where we had failed this particular pilot-author. Stalls and spins? SIDS and STARS? Winds aloft? No yaw string on the glider?

I could have been precisely none more wrong.

"Now, I got my numbers straight from the FAA - you can check them yourself", he said. "According to their statistics, only 2% of all the commercial pilots in the US are <edited> or women. In FSX, though, when I look at the exteriors of the airplanes and see the pilots inside, they're 25% <edited> or women. My book is about how political correctness is ruining this country, and I'd like to know whose idea it was to make this one area so unrealistic? Is it company policy, just somebody's idea, or is it part of your settlement agreement with the government?"

Wow.

Never mind the fact that I dislike political correctness more than most, personally (though people like this make curmudgeons like me look squishily sensitive and fanatically open-minded.)

Never mind the fact that we sell Flight Simulator all over the world, so US-only statistics are bogus to begin with.

Never mind the fact that we sell many times as many copies as there are pilots in the world, so, if the appearance of the figures in the cockpits were to reflect anything, it would be our customer base.

Never mind the fact that the makeup of the characters modeled in FSX was all but random - if there was an edict, it was something like "Let's show more than just middle-aged white guys flying the airplanes", and it would have come from retired FS artist and middle-aged white guy Jason Waskey.

No, let's set all that aside.

Let's also forget terrorism, high gas prices, sub-prime mortgages, the falling dollar, our own apparently anti-competitive tendencies to charge too much money for some things and too little for others, people with mullets, war, and the impending return of the Camaro, and pretend that political correctness is the thing that's actually ruining this country.

Having swept the elephants in the room under a rug, I'm left with one question:

Is there anyone, anywhere who actually thinks that some textures wrapped around a handful of polygons and viewed through a virtual camera system that doesn't let you get that close anyway could actually influence anything?

Well, okay, yes.

There's one.

And he's writing a book. A book that I, on behalf of Microsoft, declined to support, with Herculean politeness.

I won't mention his name here, tempting as it is. But I will say that when one Googles performs a Windows Live Search for his name, it turns out that he runs a consulting company that trains sales people by modifying their thoughts and institutionalizing behaviors to help them better connect with their customers.

I wonder if he teaches a section on what to do when you get a fax from someone like him?

Not too long ago, I published a few million words on FSInsider about my role demonstrating Flight Simulator X to His Royal Highness Prince Philippe, Duke of Brabant, Prince of Belgium. For those of you that read me here but not there <Hi, Donna! - ed.>, here's a link to the article:

http://www.fsinsider.com/team/Pages/UsetheHatSwitchtoLookAround,YourHighness.aspx

This particular article was, I report with happy confusion, quite well received. So much so, that a number of people were compelled to comment via electrical mail.  In order to keep my perpetual vanity machine well lubed, I thought I'd share excerpts from two of my favorites here.

The first was from a gentleman in Germany, who said:

Gentlemen,

I'm a (mostly silent) fan of the Flight Sim since Version One was released on 5,25" disk, later swapped to the Amiga and returned to the MSFS with version 4.

Normally I prefer to stay silent but Hal's very honest and subjective report about this incident is really a rare PR stunt with more benefit for the company (MS) than a few millions of normal (and likewise stupid) advertisement for those, who can't read anyway...

Hal, I bow deeply and "Chapeau" for this great article!

As someone who knows a thing or two about stupid advertising and PR stunts, all I can say is Vielen dank!

My other favorite came from an actual Belgian, who wrote:

As a Belgian resident I can safely say that Hal Bryan’s ”A tale of a Royal visit!”  is by far the funniest FS related story I have ever read. BTW, in Belgium the prince is also known as <no need to reprint it here - ed.>, but let us not be too disrespectful (anyway, he prefers to be called <skipping this one too, just in case - ed.> ).

Also, Hal forgot the “accent aigu” in chargé d’affaires - but otherwise not bad for a ‘yank’ ;-)   And his Dutch is excellent – “eenvoudige missies” indeed, “te eenvoudig zelfs!” :)

Best regards!

For the record, it was Sharepoint Designer <no need to reprint my occasional nicknames for it here - ed.>, that stripped the accent aigu, but I should have caught that and fixed it after the fact. Excellent eye, safely anonymous Belgian customer! Excuseer me en Dank u!

I spend a lot of my workday these days tinkering with web stuff. I'm no stranger to the mysterious vagaries nor the vague mysteries of dynamic content roll-up queries and the like, nor am I an expert. I know just enough to get it wrong three times, then right on the fourth try. At least one of the three tries finds me cursing the designers of a particular software tool we use occasionally, though I tend not to do so loudly, as there's at least slim chance they'll overhear.

Anyway, I've noticed every once in a while that Slate Magazine's headline listings on the MSN home page get munged together in wonderfully senseless ways. If I happen to see an instance of this first thing in the morning, I'll stare at it angrily for a minute or so, as if the downward pressure of my eyebrows will somehow squeeze that part of my brain that is certain that, while it agrees that what I'm reading should make sense, just shrugs and returns only a gruff "...can't help ya."

Then, happily, I remember the immortal words of Francisco d'Anconia--"Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong."

Of my premises, I'm not sure if "Things on the Internet must make sense" or "Software people don't make mistakes" is the faultiest.

Regardless ... here's my current favorite. Don't stare too long, it won't get any better.

The other day, someone on the Flight Sim team sent around a screenshot of an early version of FS, side-by-side with a contemporary shot from Acceleration. This started a lot of us stumbling down amnesia lane, sending screenshots and other reminiscences of versions we remember. Such are some of the slightly curmudgeonly joys of working on the longest-running consumer software franchise we know of. There are people on the team, myself included, who've been customers since Version 1.0 for the IBM PC ... and there are others who haven't even been alive that long.

Then there's our own Dave Denhart, who worked alongside Bruce Artwick in the earliest days of Flight Simulator, even before Microsoft got involved. Dave loves to enthrall the team with colorful tales of those heady times when you had to whittle your software by hand, with only a rusty buck knife, a bag of pistachios, and a healthy dose of determination to see you through. Then sometimes he starts to spit a little bit, his voice goes up an octave or two, and he explains what's wrong with the government and that he can prove that Steve Jobs is monitoring his thoughts while we mutter excuses and sidle out.

Anyway, as more people started jumping on the thread, seizing the chance to surf the web and reply all (what we call "pulling a Hudson"), I did a bit of reminiscent waxing myself, thinking back to what was, technically, one of my very, very first flight simulators. It may not have been hand-carved, but it did predate software, at least in our house. It was produced by Schaper, a company that was blissfully unashamed to refer to itself as "the Cootie Company", and it was called, simply, "U Fly-It".

And I did.

So much so, in fact, that it might have been called "U Fly-It and Then U Fly-It Some More Did I Say U Could Stop?", "U Fly-It And Ignore Your Parents, You Can Always Eat Tomorrow Besides We're A Big Corporation And U're Just a Four Year Old Kid So U Should Do What We Say", or "U Fly-It Because If U Don't U'll Get Cooties."

Thanks to the miracle of space-age Ethernet technology, U can can actually watch the original "U Fly-It" TV commercial, delivered straight to your face in conveniently pre-encoded data packlets, courtesy of the good people at Like Television. Give it a look - I'll wait: 

Even though this brings back a flood of childhood recollections, I should probably point out that, unlike the kids in the commercial, I was listening to the Beatles and not to the soul-numbingly repetitive instrumental strains of what sounds like a bad Fifth Dimension cover band and I paid regular visits to both barbers and dentists. And, most importantly, never, not once, have I ever goofed a landing.

Amazingly, about this same time, my dad actually built me, in effect, a life-sized (kid life-sized, anyway) "U Fly-It" as part of an elaborate scheme to get me to go outside and make my mom nervous. It was a pedal-plane of sorts that ran on a wire what seemed like miles up the hill from our house, ending with a carrier-style landing on our back deck. Unfortunately, I don't think any pictures have survived over the years, but I'll ask the family archivist over the upcoming holiday.

After the "U Fly-It", it was a pretty steady progression to the Vertibird, then Star Wars, then Flight Sim, and, finally, girls, where the aforementioned haircuts and dentistry suddenly seemed even more relevant.

Well, perhaps not all of them; I've never been particularly good at hypobole ... But a number of visitors to this edge of the Internet do take a moment to post a comment or send an email. More often than not, it's a race between my undeservedly good friends Owen Hewitt and Francois Dumas to see who can be the first to offer some undeservedly good feedback on whatever I've just published.

Other times it's just a word or several from someone that I don't know, but who happens to have enough time on their hands to say something nice to a stranger. Every once in a while, that something nice ends up being a request for tech support, but those are uncommon and surprisingly polite. (A quick note to anyone who sends feedback or questions via the "send a message" link rather than posting them as a comment - please make sure to include your email address, because most of the time when I try to respond, it's rejected because of your privacy settings.)

And then there are the Spambots, which are exactly the opposite of being as cool as they sound. The term conjures images of great tin behemoths with rounded corners and impossible expiry dates, lumbering through cities leaving only destruction and sticky bits of jellied pork shoulder in their wake. Instead, they're just software, malevolently irritating little snippets of code written by malevolently irritating little snippets of people, repeatedly smearing what we used to think would be called cyberspace with their ineffectual grimy nonsense.

The prolificacy amazes me; I have to wonder if anyone, ever, at all, in the once and future history of words on the Internet, will read an article I've written here, see the comments posted below it, and actually buy some Viagra?

And then there are the corrections, which are often my very favorites. In my post Inattention to Detail, I publicly thanked a reader called Tom who pointed out that I had made a well-intentioned mistake of astronautical import. In reviewing my comments the other day, I came across not one, not three, but two such comments that I'd overlooked. Both of them involve my unwittingly reckless and flippant abuse of the German language, and deserve to be addressed.

The first, from someone called "derMicha", referenced a post in which I asserted that the word helicopter is the same in both English and German. derMicha's comment reads as follows:

"You're wrong about "helicopter". "Helicopter" in german means "Hubschrauber". Sometimes people just use the english word "helicopter" for some reason. More and more the german language gets destroyed by stupid anglicanism."

To derMicha, I offer my standard but sincere entschuldigung, bitte - I was only going by what I heard, but I enjoy your language far too much to participate in its dilution. Believe me, I'd never lazily skate by with helicopter if I knew that I had the opportunity to use a word as much fun to say as Hubschrauber! (And, since I know you're reading this, your Most Reverend and Right Honourable Dr. Rowan Williams, 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, I am quite certain that derMicha meant Anglicization, not Anglicanism. Mea culpa, Your Grace.)

The second correction came from returning visitor Heiko Bröker. In the past, Heiko has helped keep my translation skills sharp by posting entirely auf Deutsch. I enjoy reading those posts, almost as much as I enjoy not admitting how long it actually takes me to understand them. This time, though, Heiko wrote in English, and caught me in the one of the best kinds of mistakes: the misheard lyric.

From the ubiquitous classics, like Hendrix singing "'Scuse me, while I kiss this guy" and Creedence's timeless "...there's a bathroom on the right", to my own insistence that Mike Hill of the Dave Clark Five was ordering "...a huge egg salad and tall steak soup" in the song The Name of the Place is I Like it Like That, a title nearly as ponderous as this dreadful run-on sentence,  people have been practicing the time-honored tradition of mis-hearing lyrics nearly as long as they've been hearing them.

Anyway, thanks to Heiko, I know now that the song I learned in high school German class (and wrote about here) was not, in fact, Bude Jacke, but Bruder Jakob. When translated, it does seem to make a great deal more sense to sing "Brother Jacob, are you sleeping?" rather than asking the same question of something called a "booth jacket".

My ongoing thanks to people like Tom, derMicha, and Heiko for paying attention, and keeping me honest.

It's never too late to get it right.

And it's only November ...

This particular winter started, as near as I can tell, about the end of July, when Gerry Beck was killed in a landing accident at Oshkosh. Then, three pilots - Steve Dari, Brad Morehouse, and Gary Hubler - died in crashes at the Reno Air Races. Most recently, pilot Phil Kibler and skydivers Ralph Abdo,Landon Atkin, Michelle Barker, Casey Craig, Cecil Elsner, Bryan Jones, Hollie Rasberry, Jeff Ross, Andrew Smith were killed when their Cessna Caravan crashed in the Cascade Mountains.

Beck was a friend of two very dear friends of mine, Morehouse died about a hundred yards in front of me, Kibler was a friend and student of one of my closest friends and colleagues, and I'd even logged time in N430A on more than one occasion.

None of that matters, at least not much. The aviation world is small enough that nobody ever seems to be more than a degree or two of separation from anyone else - when a pilot is lost, it's uncommon to not be able to find some connection. While those connections inevitably make incidents like these a little more personal - I'm the first to confess that I react a bit differently to the news of an airplane crash than I might to some other tragedy, all else being equal - of course the losses of life aren't suddenly more tragic just because I find myself somehow connected to all of them.

So, we mourn a bit, more for some than others, then square our jaws and steel our gazes and try to learn from it - most pilots will shamelessly beg, borrow, or steal whatever lessons they can from the misfortune (or even near-misfortune) of anyone else. In that vein, then, you could call it continuing education in risk management. Or you could simply call it coping; regardless, it beats the alternative, railing helplessly against Fate or what have you, insisting that these things just shouldn't happen.

But that doesn't change the fact that we wish they didn't.

One incident like those I've mentioned is too many. More than one, five in an as many months in this case, then, is ... what? More than too many? I don't know, but here's hoping that this long, cold, and lonely winter, as it were, lets up.

Now, anyone who looks to this site for the odds and / or sods that I publish hereon with a frequency greater than, say, hexannually, may have noticed that it has been utterly silent since my prologue at Reno in September. If there were any among you that were unusually charitable, you might say that it's simply been carefully preserved in that time, but my writing doesn't tend to attract the charitable.

Some of you, in reading this piece, might surmise that there is a connection between this unusually tragic flying season and my unblemished recent history of failing to publish.

There isn't. At least not in any kind of direct or tangible way.

This series of crashes does, however, serve loosely (and, perhaps, with unintentionally poor taste on my part) as a sort of public-facing metaphor for the things that have held my attention lately. Tumult, upheaval, chaos ... all of it very, very personal, and none of it, thank goodness, ending anywhere nearly as tragically as the crashes I've used as such callous and costly euphemisms.

I don't stay away lightly, or haven't in this case, anyway, but life came first. As it sometimes needs to, and always should.

Which brings me to my first, and likely only point: I'm not a relativist, at least not when compared to the next guy, but once in a while it's perfectly acceptable to stop, take a breath, and let the phrase "it could have been worse" provide my oft-mentioned "quantum of solace".

Okay. So, things in my world could have been worse. Much worse. But they weren't. Now what?

It's obligatory, certainly, but, first, I'll dig some clichés out of the closet, blow the dust off, and begrudgingly admit that they've lasted this long for a reason: "Life is short", "Carpe Diem", "Family comes first", "Each day is a gift", "Buy low, sell high", etc., etc., etc.

Next, as the coming day slides into what I now refer to as "our" or "American" Thanksgiving, given the number of people close to me that celebrate it in Canada a month "early", I'll be a little extra grateful for friends, family, health, red wine and brown gravy. And even more than those things (even, I daresay, the gravy), I'll be grateful for the fact that ... none of it was worse.

And finally, I'll stand up, shake it off, and get back to it. Enough is enough.

Yes, it's been a long cold lonely winter ... but it's a fool who plays it cool by making his world a little colder. Here comes the sun and the Sun King.  Good day, sunshine, good morning, good morning. Take a sad song and make it (I've got to admit it's getting) better there beneath the blue suburban skies somewhere in the black mountain hills of Dakota ... well, you get the idea.

P.S. As I was finishing this and getting ready to throw it over the wall, a friend sent around a link to a news story about two airplanes involved in a mid-air collision about 30 minutes south of here. One airplane landed at a nearby airport, the other went into the water ... but everyone is okay.

What do you know? It could have been worse.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/340425_aircrash21.html

Ian Fleming's classic James Bond novel Goldfinger is divided, like most fiction has been since there was such a thing, into three acts. Taken from a line of dialogue spoken by the book's eponymous villain, they are Happenstance, Coincidence, and Enemy Action. In reference to his second encounter with Bond, he states that unexpected meetings like theirs follow a pattern: "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action."

With that, then, I'm left to wonder nervously about the next time I encounter any sort of vending machine (or "sales robut", if you prefer) that chooses to present me with choices drawn from a senseless lexicon.

Last time, it was a stamp machine in Minneapolis, suggesting that I offer up some mojay - a particularly surreal flavor of happenstance, but happenstance nonetheless. This time, a gas station, considerably closer to home, gave me cryptic instructions demanding that I remove the nitrogen dioxide before filling my tank.

Did I have any nitrogen dioxide? It is a by-product of the internal combustion engine, but how could I say for sure? And, most importantly, how could I remove it?

And, of course, worst of all is the fact that this takes care of happenstance and coincidence, so whatever the next sales robut tries to tell me, it won't be pretty.

In today's world of mod cons like cell phones, electric mail, and constant messaging, I never buy stamps. On those rare occasions that I actually need them, I simply make my own, thanks to the miracle of blank labels, ink-jet printers, and the trusting folks at Stamps.com.

On my recent trip, however, I decided to send a postcard to a friend of mine in Canada - "Having a wonderful time, wish you were paying for it", that sort of thing. I found a postcard, but had surprisingly little luck finding stamps until I was given surly and patronizing directions to a vending machine at the airport in Minneapolis. Given the attitude of the woman at the newsstand, I'm apparently the only person in all of western civilization who doesn't know that there's a stamp machine between gates C1 & C2, in a hallway just past the sign that reads "Beware of the leopard", and the tree that says "I'd turn back if I were you."

Anyway.

I found the machine, put in some money, and bought a 60-cent stamp (in my head, I pronounced it "sitty cent").

That isn't true.

I paid for and requested a 60 cent stamp.

What I actually got was 60 one cent stamps. As tempting as I was to just cover every bit of the postcard in said stamps, including the banal greeting I'd scribbled, that seemed to defeat the purpose. 

Now, anyone who has read my posts here over the past week or so knows that I've been busy, tired, exhilarated, and simply "on" all day, every day. I don't think I ever got more than 4 hours' sleep, so, by the time it was over and I was flying back, I had nothing left. Not a single ounce of extra energy to cope with anything outside of my fragile routine.

So, I muttered something rude, fished another dollar out of my pocket and fed it to the machine. The machine accepted the bill, and that's when I noticed the response. I stared at the screen, convinced that I must have misread it. I even blinked a couple of times, but nothing changed. If I'd had a bottle of whiskey in my pocket I'd have tossed it aside, swearing it off like a cartoon bum, but I didn't. So I just stared, the last threads of my sanity burning away in the glare of green phosphor.

Then I stared some more. Then I frowned, and looked around the room to see if anything else weird was going on. Then, still frowning, I took my phone from its holster and took a picture. Its not a great picture, because its a phone with not a great camera built-in, but it was enough to capture the evidence, and allow me to escape with proof:

Somehow, I resisted the temptation to fall to my knees and have a nervous breakdown then and there, even when faced with this final and irrefutable bit of proof that the world no longer makes any sense at all.

I ultimately got the right stamps, affixed them to the postcard and put it in the mail drop, though I certainly won't be surprised if the postcard ends up in Hackensack, Atlantis, or Cydonia Mensae instead of its intended destination in the greater Toronto area.

In the meantime, if you're in Minneapolis and need stamps, bring plenty of mojay - the machines don't take cre@it cards.

Have I no shame?

Actually, I do, but I'm about to squander the last of it away like Jack giving away his cow, without even some magic beans, much less their subsequent beanstalk, to show for it.

I collect DVD's, and have a weakness for certain types of movies and television shows. Sometimes, my standards can actually be fairly high, tending toward well-written dramas, comedies-of-manners - "Careful there, Vicar", "Very droll, Bernard", that sort of thing.

This isn't one of those times. Not even close.

No, in this case, I'm admitting to enjoying something terrible. Why? Well, because it has a rather surprising amount of good flying in it. Before Michael Bay gave us Pearl Harbor, before Tony Bill gave us Flyboys, flying scenes in movies and television shows were usually real, and, thus, good. If scenes weren't shot for that particular title, then you might see stock footage. If it was faked, it was usually faked so horribly with models that it was worth watching anyway.

In short (though it's already way too late for that), even the worst production can still have some disproportionately good flying bits ... Audiences may forgive bad actors, writers, and directors, but aircraft will almost never forgive bad pilots.

Which brings me to my confession, naming something I've been trading a bit of sleep for the past few nights: Blue Thunder: The Television Series.

I know that some of you are saying "No, no ... Blue Thunder was a movie! You're thinking of Airwolf, with Jan-Michael Lizardskin!" 

(Those poor souls among you who found this post on my site when Googling "Finland" are saying something like "Hän olen I tähän? Nyt kuluva says ei ensinkään jokseenkin Suomi!" To them I say, with all sincerity, "Me puolustella ajaksi epäkäytännöllisyys.")

Sadly, I'm right. Blue Thunder was a television series, spun off from the movie of the same name. Difficult as it may be to believe, of the Blue Thunder-inspired helicopter shoot-em-up series, Airwolf was ... the good one.

For those that are just joining us ... The original Blue Thunder film, released in 1983, starred Roy Scheider as LAPD pilot Frank Murphy, Daniel Stern as Richard "JAFO" (Just Another F****** Observer) Lymangood, and Malcolm McDowell as Col. Cochrane, clearly a villain because he dressed well and spoke with an accent. The plot followed Murphy and Lymangood getting assigned to fly the titular chopper, portrayed by an aesthetically modified Aerospatiale SA.341G.  In the film, the new helicopter represents a dramatic shift in thinking for police air support: in addition to the usual Nightsun spotlight and near-useless PA for yelling at people, it is armor-plated and armed with a 20mm cannon that shoots something like 6,000 rounds per minute. In addition, there is a lot of real-sounding surveillance equipment, a massive onboard computer - some kind of aerial ENIAC, and magic switches that can make the helicopter go really fast, and make the rotors really quiet in "whisper mode".

The movie follows Murphy and Lymangood as they put the helicopter through its paces, blowing things up, dogfighting with the bad guy, and, naturally, using whisper mode to spy on the nice lady in the high-rise apartment who does her yoga without wearing any clothes. Once the token nudity is out of the way, all the cool flying is done, and there's nothing left to blow up, Murphy has  a crisis of conscience. He discovers that the cannon on the front of this helicopter is not simply designed for crowd control at the upcoming Olympics, rather, it's meant to actually kill people! Naturally, he destroys the helicopter, thereby saving Los Angeles from turning into a fascist mini-police-state.

Fast forward about six months, and here comes the television version. In the series, a second helicopter has been built, and is being operated under the auspices of some kind of shadowy government organization called APEX or something similar that I didn't really care about. Skillfully ignoring the pesky ethical and political issues raised in the film, the second Blue Thunder is used in the show by and with the LAPD for the sole purpose of blowing things up.

The pilot this time is Frank Chaney, played by James Farentino, and JAFO (now a "Frustrated" Observer) is Clinton Wonderlove (8 years before the president of the same name was first elected here in the US), played by a pre-Saturday Night Live Dana Carvey. They're supported on the ground by a unit called "Rolling Thunder", which is a big van that seems to have nothing in it but a slightly smaller camouflaged truck, and two ex-football-players-turned-cops played by ex-football-players-turned-something-like-actors Bubba Smith and Dick Butkus.

Every episode is exactly like every other episode, and, in turn, just like every other show in the mid-80's from the likes of Stephen J. Cannell and Donald P. Bellisario: Bad guys that you saw most recently on either The Love Boat or Fantasy Island or both do bad things. The hero, a chip-shouldered iconoclast with a check-kiting ego wants to go after them, but he's held back by bureaucracy, pencil pushers who want it all done by the book. He follows his gut, goes after them anyway, and blows them up, and his bosses begrudgingly admit that he was right all along. Everyone grins, plucky JAFO gets turned down by the pretty blonde behind the desk yet again, and ... freeze frame.

So what makes it worth (and I use the term carefully) watching?

Well, as it happens, Blue Thunder returned to the LAPD just in the nick of time - suddenly, everyone who commits any sort of crime, somehow finds a reason to use an armed (and fairly unusual) aircraft. Whether it's bank robbery, smuggling, assassination, kidnapping, or some kind of shady mob accounting, a dogfight is inevitable, once a week. I've seen Blue Thunder shoot down an F8F Bearcat, an OV-10 Mohawk, a couple of Long-EZ's, an F-86 Sabre, the late great Art Scholl's Super Chipmunk, and a van full of clowns.

Unlike the airplanes, the clowns, naturally, had it coming.

But good flying is good flying, and, I'm forced to admit, in this case it is largely well shot. The fact that the producers spent all of their money on avgas and Jet-A and none on writing is almost forgivable, if only to an airplane geek.

The show only lasted eleven episodes - so far, I've lasted four. I'll most likely make it all the way through to the end, unless I get distracted in the meantime by my boxed set of Air America: The Series.

Blue Thunder - The Television Series is awful, really. Go buy it.