Category Archives: Psychological Musings

Progged

Psychological Musings

It has been an unusually cool1 July in Portola Valley. Too cool for my taste and I keep hoping for a change. Every morning I check the forecast as far out as as the little pictures – with fog, sun-filtered fog, fog covered stars, fog then afternoon sun – go. I use NOAA2 for my weather bookmark because they have a nifty little gizmo that I can move around to get the weather right at the location of my house3and they are fairly accurate, but they are pretty conservative in how far ahead they will predict the weather. Fortunately, they have a rough, couple of weeks – weaks? – forecast hidden behind a Forecast Discussion button at the bottom. Today it said,

UPPER LEVEL TROUGH IS PROGGED TO REMAIN NEAR TO OR ALONG THE
WEST COAST THROUGH THE COMING WEEK. THE UPPER FLOW WILL BECOME
MORE ZONAL OVER THE WEEKEND FOR A WEAK WARMING TREND BEGINNING
FRIDAY AND CONTINUING THROUGH EARLY NEXT WEEK….BLAH, BLAH, BLAH

Looking at this, my first reaction – after, Oh! Good, it will get warmer –  is What the hell does Progged mean?  I must not be the only person who wondered because progged  has a link to a definition and it means Forecasted. Would it be too amateurish to say UPPER LEVEL TROUGH IS FORECASTED TO REMAIN NEAR…? Progged annoyed me way more than is reasonable.

It reminded me of my father when somebody used plethora. He had no idea what it meant – and knowing my dad, probably just nodded rather than asking the meaning – and, when he looked it up, the only meaning was An excess of a bodily fluid, particularly blood (this was the early 60s when the word was just transmogrifying into its, current, primary meaning of An excess of). My dad was pissed which I now interpret to mean that he was embarrassed. My dad was an intellectual – in that he spent alot of time thinking and talking about ideas – but he had a very strong anti-intellectual streak and this became shorthand for pretentious.

Progged seems due for its own transmogrification. As in Real Syria experts have progged the downfall of Assad  for some time now. I hope they are right. Oh! and I hope that upper level trough stays around.

1A projected 71° for Friday and a projected 77° for Saturday.

2 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

3It is -obviously, I think –  a computed number based on real forecasts from some nearby, real, weather station, but still….

Sally Ride RIP

Americana, Psychological Musings

Dr. Ride died from pancreatic cancer last Monday. She was only 61 and is survived by her partner of 27 years, Tam O’Shaughnessy. The fact that she was gay came as a big shock to me. Not that I have spent much time thinking about Sally Ride in the last twenty years.

I was hyper-interested to the space program when it started in 1959 with Mercury and read everything I could on it. But the presentation by the news was so un-factfilled, that it was hard to stay attentive. Project Gemini was more of the same and going to the moon, in its own way, more of the same. In Wernher von Braun’s books, the moon lander would take off from Earth orbit but Apollo had the moon lander take off from a Moon orbit; I never did find out why (and I tried). And the astronauts were so so white bread, so bloodless, so flag-lapel-pin-American, so characterless, that they were not interesting.

Then I read The Right Stuff  by Tom Wolfe and the astronauts were brought to life as flawed, crazy – in a good way – over achieving test pilots. They were fascinating and it makes me wonder why they were presented as so boring. It seems to me that the only time public figures aren’t presented as boring is when the press is getting ready to hang them. By all accounts – made after her death – Dr. Sally Ride was an equally fascinating astronaut and it is too bad that she had to hide who she was and it is sort of nice that she was able to.

May she rest in peace.

A couple of random thoughts on the Colorado shooting

Americana, Current Affairs, Psychological Musings

I keep thinking about the Colorado shootings. It makes my heart ache. All the victims: the people who got killed, the people who got shot and will live, the people who were there and escaped – using the term very loosely because nobody who was there escaped – the people who had to go to the hospital or morgue to identify some child or loved one, Holmes’ parents. All victims of a man who spent alot of time and energy to destroy lives.

I keep asking myself, Why would anybody do this? I guess that it is the obvious question, I guess that it is the questions almost every asks, it certainly is the question the police are asking. Yea, sure, he is nuts, but then I hold the position that anybody who kills somebody is nuts. But being nuts just begs the question, Why did he think he was doing it? I can understand the guys who flew into the World Trade Center; I have never been that dedicated to anything, but I can understand it it. I can even sort of understand Columbine or Virginia Tech, But this is incomprehensible to me.

This was not a suicide: this was not somebody so unhappy they wanted to take their life and then added as many people as they could. James Holmes – does anybody call him Jim? – went out and bought some guns and also bought body armor to protect himself as much as possible, he then went out and shot as many – totally random – people as he could. He seemed to want to live through this. He then told the police that he had booby-trapped his apartment.  Why would anybody do that?

Ever since Charles Whitman climbed up the Texas Tower, we hear the same thing, “He was really shy, really quiet, but really nice and sweet.” I read somewhere that you can tell how likely someone is to have road-rage by the number of bumper stickers they have on the back of their car. But I think that the scary people are the ones who are shy, quiet, and sweet.

As an aside, the even more scary people are like Luke O’Dell of the National Association for Gun Rights who took the opportunity to say  “Potentially, if there had been a law-abiding citizen who had been able to carry in the theater, it’s possible the death toll would have been less.” Scary because they are trying to change public policy and – in many places – seceding. Imagine that nightmare, a shootout in a dark movie theater between several idiots as a way to cut the carnage. End aside.

 

The Peenemünde effect

Psychological Musings

In the early 50’s – the long gone 1950’s when everything was possible – I became obsessed with rockets and space travel. My favorite author was Wernher von Braun who, at the time had written several articles – with lots of great pictures – in a, now-defunct, magazine called Colliers. Then I devoured several well illustrated books that came out of those articles, and, eventually, that lead me to a book about the German V-2 project. I totally missed that the V-2 was a Nazi killing machine – a sort of random killing machine at that – and got caught up in wonder of the whole thing.

Much of the testing was done at a place on the Baltic Sea called Peenemünde and one story I remember was about a night launch. It burned an indelible image in my mind. I can still conjure up the launch: the rocket ignition almost impossibly bright on the dark launching pad, the engine coming up to full thrust with the roar drowning out all other noise, the rocket slowly – at first – lifting, levitating really, off the ground; pushing itself into the sky on a tail of flame. Then, engine cut-off as the missile goes ballistic and is lost in the silence and darkness. Only moments later to reappear as it passes above the shadow of the earth and enters sunlight again.

Almost every warm, summer, night, I see a mini-version of this as we sit in the twilight on our deck and see airplanes turning to land at San Francisco airport, thirty miles away.  We are sitting in the gloaming light and, above us, the airplanes turn orange in the sunset. The air is warm and soft, nobody will be killed, there is no roar, only the groan of the plane’s landing flaps opening; but I still think of it as the Peenemünde effect.

Henry Hill died

Around home, Film, Psychological Musings

Henry Hill was a low level Mafioso in the Lucchese crime family. He became famous because, when he ratted out his buddies to the FBI, he ended up having two movies tell his story. Both Goodfellas and My Blue Heaven were roughly based on his life (My Blue Heaven more roughly). Goodfellas was Michele and my first date.

I once heard Pauline Kael  say that she would never date anybody who didn’t like the same movies that she did. At the time, it seemed like a good idea, and it still does. Our second movie was La Femme Nikita. 

A year or so later, still together and still enjoying the same movies, we went to see a revival of  The Wild Bunch at the Castro in San Francisco. Standing in line, we noticed two acquaintances we had met in Temenos workshops, Peter Kuhlman and Ophelia Ramirez, and we knew we would become friends.