Brief Update: No Update

Visited a school in Beaver County, PA, which has good potential. Speaking with one in Baltimore, MD which also has good potential. If I hear back positive from Baltimore that is where I will be, if I don't then I will apply to Beaver County. Actually I'm applying anyway, but that's because space is limited. I'll lose my deposit if I don't go there, but that's okay by me simply to ensure that I have somewhere to go.

I should know later this week.

There's always the chance that DWC will wake up, too, but I find that to be unlikely at this point.

King Cranky Ping-Pong Ball

Birth - 2002: Arlington, VA
2002 - 2004: Falls Church, VA
2004 - 2007: Fairfax, VA
2007 - 2008: Richmond, VA
2009 - today: Nashua, NH
2010+: Denver?

So, as you may or may not know, I am currently enrolled in Daniel Webster College as an Air Traffic Control student. I started here in January this year on the understanding that I would be done by Spring 2011 (or possibly earlier). Today, that was dashed. How? They added 40(!) credits to my requirements. Yesterday I needed 20 credits, today I need 60 (2 full years for those of you who haven't been in College for a bit...) That puts graduation in Fall 2012, a full year and a half later than anticipated.

On Monday I will meet with my professor and dean to hopefully sort this out, but no idea how this will work out just yet, and I'm not horribly hopeful. Though I do have a couple trump cards (including an email trail of promises and full access to some damn scary lawyers). However, since this is my future career we're talking about here, clearly I do not wish to burn any bridges that I can possibly avoid burning -- and I dislike using the litigation method since it feels so damn childish... but sometimes we have no other choices.

Because, honestly, the other choice is to transfer schools and finish somewhere else, and in this case that "somewhere else" is Denver. 2000 miles from here. I love Denver, but that's a MASSIVE move... not looking forward to that.

King Sickly Kitty

Woke up this morning with minor sniffles, which is nothing really new, so I didn't really think of it except to take some decongestant. A few weeks back I had some severe congestion, probably from pollen related allergies. Went to class and about half way through my first period I'm just floored. Aching joints, a pulse behind my eye tapping out an Indian war beat, sudden exhaustion... the whole nine. I ultimately decided to stick it out, and probably infect all my schoolmates (woo!), so I haven't made an official temperature check or anything, but I don't seem feverish. My suspicions are that it is a cold and will be gone soon enough, but this does mean I need to seriously reconsider my weekend plans (which originally involved flying to Virginia to go to a halloween party and seeing friends). That will probably get pushed back to the weekend of the 8th, which is a friend's birthday so it still works out in the end.

Still, being under the weather, whether it be hamthrax or the common cold, sucks hard.

Inglorious Bastards

Tarantino is one of those directors whose work generally interests me, even if I can't stand to listen to him outside of his works. His movies are generally worth at least one watch on the simple basis that, no matter the genre, you never really know what is going to happen. Generally speaking there are very few surprises left in movies, but Tarantino is still able to routinely craft stories with unexpected twists and turns. You never really know who will live, who will die and who will shoot a random person completely by accident. His characters tend to not die nobly... they just die, often after very bloody, very short battles. He also has a knack for writing some of the finest dialogue you'll find -- which makes his inability to speak coherently outside of his movies all the more perplexing (a trait also shared by a one J.K. Rowling, incidentally).

His latest film, Inglorious Bastards, takes Tarantino out of his gangster lineage -- although not far -- and into Nazi-occupied France. A band of pissed off Jewish-American soldiers, led by Brad Pitt, is dropped behind enemy lines and wrecks unholy havoc on the Nazis. Pitt is an actor who, despite my better judgment, has actually grown on me over the years -- ever since I saw him in Fight Club and Snatch. He works best in quirky roles, and this is about as quirky as they come this side of Guy Ritchie.

Like most Tarantino movies, though, the real star is the villain -- in this case Christopher Waltz as Hans Landa, an SS officer. He gets most of the best lines, and his delivery is so silky perfect that you can't stop loving and hating him all at the same time. He is very much the calm, sophisticated predator who traps his opponents before they even know that they're in a fight. It is brilliantly done, and his monologue about rats and squirrels is one of the best in the movie (just a few steps down from Carradine's Superman monologue in Kill Bill).

My major complaint with Bastards, as it is with most Tarantino films, is that he is in dire need of an editor willing to slice away the run time. Two hours and thirty minutes is a long time to be sitting in a theater doing nothing, even for a very good movie. This is not a complain I level strictly at Tarantino, of course, as I can name several other directors off hand who suffer from the same affliction, but with Taratino it's a bit more pronounces since he does such a good job of building details through reaction rather than action (for instance, we only ever see the Bastards at work once or twice, but we know from the German reactions just how effective their campaign has been).

There's also the rather strange throwbacks he tosses into his movies -- one of the Bastards gets an introduction with giant, 70's groovy-stylized yellow text across the entire screen. For certain projects, like Kill Bill and Grindhouse, this works perfectly, for Bastards it's just strange. I know he's doing it as a mock tribute to the films of yester-year, but there's a time and place for them -- I honestly don't think Bastards was one of those times or places.

Ultimately those are minor things compared to all the things that he does right in his movies. Inglorious Bastards is fun, quirky, and it provides you with what it claims on the label: Jewish soldiers getting revenge against the Nazis. Don't go looking for brutally accurate historical details, since Tarantino gleefully tosses the history books out the windows and just does what he wants. There are enough fact-based (or revisionist fact-based, if you prefer) movies set in World War 2 out there... it is sometimes nice to see a writer just do his own thing every once in a while.

You might have noticed that I refer to the movie as Inglorious Bastards, when the title is officially Inglourious Basterds. The reason for this is simple: when he was asked by a reporter about the misspelling in the title, Tarantino's reply was "Here's the thing. I'm never going to explain that. You do an artistic flourish like that, and to explain it would just take the piss out of it and invalidate the whole stroke in the first place." As far as I'm concerned that's a bloody moronic thing to say (see my first paragraph), and is frankly kind of insulting. On David Letterman he admitted he had no purpose to it except to make people wonder about it. I'm fine with artists who ask "what does it say to you?" so long as they have a clearly defined idea of what it means to them; in this case, though, it's very much a situation of him being a prat and then claiming it's artistry. Please, Mr. Tarantino, keep making your movies, but keep your yap shut while you're making them.

The FAA & Boeing

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced today that they are giving Boeing, the makers of the famous 7X7 (x=0...7) series of planes greater autonomy in self-certifying their own planes. This gives Boeing the ability to qualify their own new designs and technologies with less bureaucratic interference from the powers-that-be in the FAA.

Setting aside the obvious issues of having a company safety test their own equipment (which is probably the largest function the FAA serves), this brings up the very troubling issue of the Boeing 787, which has seen numerous safety delays ever since it's 2007 rollout. Originally planned to launch in 2010 to compete with the Airbus 380 superjet, the 787 hasn't even successfully completed *preliminary* safety checks, let alone final certification checks. This is a plane that has never flown, even in tests. Certainly sucks for Boeing and the money they have to be losing hand-over-fist at this point, but safety checks are there for a reason and I certainly don't want to be put into a situation -- as a pilot, passenger or controller -- where my life at risk because checks got bypassed.

Generally speaking I have faith in Boeing, they have a solid track record for safety and the 7X7 planes are simply legendary birds worthy of all the praise they receive. However, anytime any company is given authority over its own certification process, questions arise. The entire point of having an outside certification process is to (in theory) not give the contracting company any leverage over the safety inspection personnel. Obviously having the the inspectors directly on your payroll is counter to that purpose.

Now I'm not saying that the 787 will be a dangerous plane to fly, as I'm sure Boeing does NOT want to be associated with an unreliable plane by any stretch of the imagination... but all the same I think I'll avoid flying on them for a while and stick to more proven planes.

Source: http://www.avweb.com/avwebflash/news/faa_boeing_certification_201034-1.html

Blah

It's 5:45 AM, I got home from work at 2:30 AM. I slept for maybe an hour before I ended up tossing and turning myself awake, and now I can't get back to sleep. I haven't done that in ages... I'd forgotten how much it sucks.

And there's no damn dawn today to at least make me feel better, stupid fog.

Book Review: "City of Pearl" by Karen Traviss

“City of Pearl” by Karen Traviss is the first book of the six part Wess’Har series. Given that I learned about Ms. Traviss through her Republic Commando series of Star Wars novels – which are supposed to be quite good, though heavy on the action and light on the plot – this was not all what I was expecting from her.

The story begins with the first human colonists – a community of Christians, not unlike the Plymouth pilgrims – landing on an alien world in 2198, where they make first contact with an alien named Aras. The story then jumps forward to 2374 and introduces the primary protagonist, Shan Frankland, as she commands the second mission to this new planet with orders that even she is unaware of (the orders themselves are rather mundane, and why they are kept from Shan (and the reader) is never really explained). They make contact with the colonists’ descendants and, eventually, with Aras.

Shan is the kind of character that I really enjoy following. She’s practical, confident and smart, but ideological as well. She knows full well the nature of humanity – she’s essentially a cop – and is generally very good at predicting what other people will do or say given a particular situation. Of course that doesn’t help her all that much with Aras, who is a Wess’Har c’nataat soldier. The c’nataat parasite that he houses makes him functionally immortal (think Wolverine from the X-Men), which gives him a rather unique view on life – even among Wess’Har.

Ms. Traviss has made sure that her aliens are suitably alien and mysterious – the Wess’Har thought process only really works so long as you’re willing to accept that it may not make sense. They address all animals, right on down to rats (and probably farther down the pecking order), as ‘people’ and will not tolerate any activity that compromises the natural order of things. Think vegans with very, very big guns. They’re also brutally straight forward and don’t even really understand the concept of lying (except Aras, who has lived with humans ever since the colonists first arrived). Of course, things are a bit different when you can smell when someone is lying…

There are a few other aliens scattered here and there, from the aquatic Bezeri to the expansionist Isenj (the corporate spiders to the Wess’har’s vegan lions). They make brief appearances here and there, but the important parts are that the Bezeri become involved in a critical plot point halfway through the book, and the Isenj are a looming specter through most of the story. They had once landed on the planet and claimed it as their own. Their massive industrial ways caused significant damage to the planet, and virtually annihilated the bezeri. So the Wess’har wiped out the Isenj colonists on the planet. Completely and utterly gone; they even went so far as to destroy all the buildings the Isenj created down to the foundations.

Although there is very much a feeling of nature versus technology to the series, I never felt like Ms. Traviss was lecturing the reader on what is Right and what is Wrong. While the Wess’har are generally presented as holding the moral high ground on the issue, they are also a no-compromise, brutal race that will readily wipe out an entire colony or city over the death of a single indigenous life form in a way that is not natural. Indeed, it’s clear that the only reason we’re meant to view the Isenj as the bad guys is because the primary protagonists are Aras and Shan (who become close friends). It’s certainly implied that the Wess’har are the good guys, and thus the Isenj must be the bad guys, but even Aras is forced to acknowledge by the end that Wess’har way is not necessarily the right way.

Religion is always tricky to write in sci-fi, since throwing aliens into the mix kind of makes things difficult – especially when those aliens don’t even understand the concept of religion or an afterlife. Ms. Traviss, however, manages to handle it quite well and, again, avoids being preachy while still pushing across a positive tone to Christian faith (although readily pointing out its inherent contradictions). Shan herself is a pagan (which is really an atheist in this case, rather than the traditional definition) and tends to stand by her non-belief, but the colonists are Christians, and they’re the kind of Christians that I really wish we would see more of in the world (live a life of peace, and convert by example, rather than by beating your head into the floor with a Bible). They are a good example of good Christians, and it’s very hard not to sympathize with their wish for a simple life on this alien world. (Although they do provide some amusing humor, such as when a Bezeri muses, upon watching an adult baptism, about whether or not their ‘soul-dirt’ will damage the ecosystem). On the other hand, Ms. Traviss is quick to point out that these are not prototypical Christians, and that their view is not necessarily the right one.

If I have a complaint with the story, it’s that this is clearly a setup novel for a series of books, rather than a story that can be read on its own. There is a distinct beginning, middle and end here, but the end is rather unsatisfying taken on its own (and does come a bit out of left field). When taken with book 2, I’m sure it works quite well, but it would have been nice to have an actual, hard-and-fast ending.

“City of Pearl” is, all around, a very enjoyable package. It tends to muse about various subjects like immortality, the natural order, and corporation control of agriculture, but never feels preachy. I went expecting an action fest, but found a nice, mellow read instead, and I’m not the least bit disappointed.