Commuter Reflections

As I drove home from work last night, I thought about the flying car. Technological limitations aside, it could never really happen for one mundane reason: insurance premiums. Conventional car insurance rates are already hefty, and automobiles only travel in two directions, forward and backward. A flying car, potentially[1], could travel forward, backward, hard left, hard right, up and down. That’s two more sets of axes, so at the very least we’d triple our potential for accidents, and thus triple our insurance rates. Then take into account the amount of skill needed to pilot such a craft, and how many people have a hard enough time not crashing their cars as it is.

Of course, while I’m dreaming, I think really the only way for a flying car to be a viable mode of transportation for average people would be for it to somehow conquer gravity. Propellors and turbine engines are just too dangerous for Joe Sixpack. The mythical flying car would have to involve some kind of anti-gravity buffer that protects it from hitting the ground and from hitting anything else around it. A force field, I guess. Only then would the accident rates drop low enough to be cost-effective, possibly even lower than automobiles.

Anyway this is the sort of thing I think about during rush hour traffic.

1.) I’m assuming the flying car is VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) because not everyone has access to a safe runway.

Attention Television Executives

Television as we know it will be dead soon. Everyone will have a DV-R at some point and we will skip commercials, rendering your revenue source nearly nil. What you must do to survive is this: digitize your entire catalog of old programming (if you’re smart enough to have saved the tapes) and offer your own YouTube-style service in which you can sell website ad space. You’re sitting on a goldmine of over 50 years of programming you thought you’d only air once or syndicate for reruns. But we want that content on-demand. Especially the nightly talk shows of which there are so many episodes that DVD just isn’t feasible: classic Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, early David Letterman in particular. You’ve got it and we want it. For example, I want to be able to go CBS’s website and search on “Mel Torme Buddy Rich” and find this choice gem from Merv Griffin’s show in 1978.

We want to be able to watch what we want, when we want. It’s your content; you control it. If you build it, we will come. So get to work. It’s your only chance to survive.

In Your Latest Little Rock Free Press

In the latest Freep, on page 25, is an ad for an interesting product available at RAO Video…the entire ad is encoded, though, and looks like gibberish. At first glance it appears to be an error of some kind. But keen nerds like myself will quickly recognize that it’s a simple cryptoquote wherein all the letters are simply 3 places removed in the alphabet (w = t). The encoded message describes a device for committing technological pranks, so I was kind of disappointed.

Also in the same issue is a brief piece on Butch Stone’s new music business class at UCA called “The Music Business in America.” The title of the Freep article was “How to Make It In the Music Business and Keep the Sharks Away,” which is particularly ironic given that the course will be taught by one of the region’s more notorious sharks. Butch Stone is an interesting character: ask any prominent figure (newspaper, radio, business, etc.) and they’ll tell you he’s a powerful promoter who gets big names to come to Little Rock, and as a manager is responsible for giving the world Black Oak Arkansas and Roger Clinton[1]. Ask most musicians and they’ll tell you stories about his raw deals and promises unkept. For example, click here and phrases like “Stone skimmed money from concert beer sales” pop out out at you.

For most bands, though, the recurring story for everyone from Ho-Hum to Sugar and the Raw is that Butch comes in with a smile and a handshake, makes promises to assist them, and never returns their calls afterward.

One of the segments of the course is called “More money has been stolen with a briefcase than with a gun,” and one has to wonder if it’s a “How-To” course taught by a qualified expert.

1.) Evidence enough for high crimes against humanity.

Attention Visa Cardholders

If you have a Visa card, and you have a wreck that requires a rental vehicle while your car gets fixed, it’s very likely that you’re eligible for Visa to pay for your rental car insurance, and maybe even your insurance company’s deductible for the repair of your car.

For example, my insurance company is covering my rental car rate, but not the extra insurance on the rental vehicle. Because I’m paranoid, I opt for the $16 a day insurance on the damnable GMC truck I’ve been driving for two weeks. Visa could have paid for that, and maybe even my $500 deductible…if only I had notified Visa within 45 days of my accident.

Don’t be a doofus! If you have a wreck, ask Visa what they can do to help! Chances are the answer is, a heckuva lot. God only knows what I’m paying Enterprise Rent a Car for the damnable GMC that I will hopefully turn in today.

What’s So Great About Elongated Trapezoids?

Rainy days make for peculiar interior adventures. I started off trying to record some music for my friend Jessie’s art project at RISD, but I’m having some weird flutter in my audio signal so I gave up and practiced scales and arpeggios on piano for an hour or two. Then I ate some dinner and started catching up on my DVDs of Mysterious Cities of Gold, which then led me, naturally, to start investigating the Nazca Lines on Google Maps.

I had always assumed that the Nazca Lines were reasonably organized and well-laid out. They really aren’t; they’re remarkably scattershot, and if there’s an overall theme it appears to be “failed rectangles.”

There are a lot of these.
And a lot of these.
And mixtures thereof.
I think the curly part here is the tail of a monkey but it’s hard to tell.

The entire plain northwest of the town of Nazca was apparently treated like a giant Etch-a-Sketch, only there was never any shaking up to erase anything. For me this pretty much dashes any UFO-related theories as to the lines’ origins; clearly these were people making it up as they went along. And unfortunately the most artistic designs (the hummingbird, the condor, the spider, and the human) are too small for Google Maps to show. Still fascinating to think about, though.

Oh and I found a cool shot of an airplane in flight.

And as long as we’re in Peru, let’s check out Machu Picchu, which looks totally odd from the sky because you have no depth perception. It just doesn’t look as impressive because you can’t tell, for example, that its entire west side is an incredibly steep dropoff.  Google Earth, however, will allow you to get some idea of just how freakishly high up that place is.

Creative Giving

My favorite part of Christmas this year was making wrapping paper out of old Entertainment Weekly photo issues.

I think this means I’ve officially reached adulthood, because I enjoyed giving more than receiving, and because I’ve reached a point where there is nothing that I want that I can’t buy myself.

What am I Listening To?

I’ve added the Mog widget to the left nav. Mog tracks the music I’m listening to, and if those songs are in their database, you can hear samples. If you click the widget, it takes you to my profile and in the list below “Last Songs Played,” you can click on the speaker icon to hear a sample of that song.

My new favorite song is “Got Nothing” by Under the Influence of Giants. Check it out. Also take a listen to “Lost in a Whirlpool” by Frank Zappa. Captain Beefheart is the vocalist, and it was recorded in the late 60’s. I really have to wonder if that song wasn’t somehow the inspiration for South Park’s Mr. Hanky.