Fun and games with Apple

For the second time in a year, iTunes has wiped out my iPhone and made it inoperable. From bitter experience, I know that it will take me a day or two of work to get it functioning again, whereupon I will find that all my music etc has vanished and must either be recreated from scratch or else picked up from various hiding places on my computer.

Before becoming involved with Apple, I used to think that Rosemary's Baby had grown up to become Bill Gates. Now I know that he is actually Steve Jobs. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

(Later: well, it took four hours, but on the other hand I only lost some audio lectures that I think I can easily replace.)

What price global warming?

It is April first, the lawn is once again white, and the Weather Underground has this to say about our day:

Today
Snow. Snow will be heavy at times. Snow accumulation of 5 to 10 inches. Isolated thunderstorms. Highs in the lower 30s. North winds 10 to 15 mph...becoming northwest this afternoon. Gusts up to 30 mph. Chance of snow near 100 percent.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Great moments in world leadership

Unlike the president of the United States, I am a busy man and must work for a living, so I don't follow Women's Tournament Challenge basketball, whatever that might be. If you have more leisure for such things, here are Mr. Obama's picks (or is it "pick"?) from the official White House website. What a great thing it must be, to have nothing pressing on one's mind!

Next up: a visit to Brazil. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Peugot has a hybrid

 

Just the thing for the budding Dale Earnhardt III with a contemporary conscience! Peugot has rolled out a 550-horsepower diesel-electric machine with an 80 hp electric motor that, the company assures us, will power the vehicle in the pits, though presumably not on the track. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Posted without comment

From the Jackson Hole News & Guide:

Sheriff’s deputies arrested pioneer backcountry skier Roland Fleck on Saturday at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, and ski patrollers tobogganed him off the mountain in handcuffs after he refused to stop skiing uphill.

Fleck, 78, a longtime Jackson doctor, fitness buff and one of the original investors in Teton Village, was arrested on misdemeanor charges of criminal trespass, interference with an officer, unsafe skiing and theft of services. His extrication from the mountain came after up to seven ski patrollers spend 3.5 hours trying to stop him, reports said.

Roland Fleck has always been a big supporter of the ski area but believes he has a right to ski uphill, Dan Fleck, an attorney with The Spence Law Firm who is representing his father, said.
“He was within his rights to access the forest, and he was skiing safely,” Dan Fleck said.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

News from Thermopylae

Four years ago, when I started this blog, I was much taken by the poem at the bottom of the page. I found it while searching for something else in the King's College London database; I wrote down the excerpt as you see them below, but stupidly forgot to note the poet's name. (It was in an academic journal.) I searched for it again but couldn't find it, so it has been anonymous all this time.

Thanks to Wesley Moore and the Harvard University alumni magazine, the omission has now been made good. (The magazine has a "Chapter and Verse" column where readers can ask for help in such matters. This one will appear in the March-April issue.) The poet is Howard Lachtman. A tip of the virtual hat to him, to Mr Moore, and the erudite readers of Harvard Magazine. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The big bell at Sacre Coeur

Isn't that the most hypnotic, most gorgeous sound you've ever heard? It rings between my cheekbones and my heart. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Collectible Beetle

The VW Beetle was the first new car I ever bought, for $1672 including an AM radio and the side vent-windows, which were what we had at the time instead of air conditioning. Among other expeditions, I drove the thing to New Orleans, Tucson, Long Beach, Aspen, and over Loveland Pass to New Hampshire again, sleeping in the car while on the road. (I'd modified the back of the passenger seat to lie flat.) I loved the car, but really, it was the most dangerous thing on the road, with an under-steer so serious that in snow I regularly found myself skidding off the road.

Now the New York Times tells me that the Beetle is a collector's item! The 1964 model above is expected to sell in the range of $12,000-$14,000. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Amazon among the icebergs

That's our only child amidships, with a young Brit steering. The dinghy is Amazon, so called for the Swallows and Amazons series beloved of her daughters. It is 13 feet long, designed by a South African, welded up from aluminum in our garage by our son-in-law, and powered by a second-hand sail from our neighbor Ned McIntosh (who prefers wooden boats). Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Pity about the crowds!

 

Since I made fun of Aspen's "sustainability" pretenses the other day, I thought I should post this photo taken by my iPhone at about 9:20 one morning, with exactly one other skier visible in the panorama. That's why I take my annual ski week in December: good snow, low prices (well, comparatively low), and few people. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Sustainable excess

One of the joys of skiing at Aspen is the breathtaking amount of bling that's apparent here, even at this time of year. Aspen is the home of the million-dollar fixer-upper. (They don't actually get fixed up. They get bulldozed and replaced.) Sally Wife gave up skiing with me in Aspen because window shopping here had become so preposterous that she no longer enjoyed it. Why gaze into shop windows when the stuff on display is so upscale that you can't even pretend to aspire to it? (One time on the  Snowmass bus, Sally nudged me and nodded toward the woman in the seat opposite. "She's wearing," Sally whispered, "more than our net worth!")

But so pervasive is  Good Thinking that it has spread even to the citadel of excess. The Aspen Times has a pull-out advertising section on the theme of Sustainability. I saw a hymn to Sustainability on the safety bar of the Ajax Express high-speed quad lift. And I saw a large sign--green, of course--on one of the lift towers begging me to Fight Global Warming.

Fight global warming? If I wanted to fight global warming, I would have stayed home and snowshoed through the woods. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Snowing on Ajax!

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The season's over?

Except for the occasional Seinfeld re-run, we gave up broadcast television years ago, in large part because prime time begins just about the time we go to bed. Then a friend urged us to watch Mad Men. I didn't even like the title! But I rented the DVD of the first season, then the second and the third. Now we huddle around the computer and buy the episodes from Amazon the day after they're aired for a buck ninety-nine--that's how addicted we are.

But it's over, according to the show's creator in the NYT. Mr. Weiner tells us a bit too much about how Mad Men comes to be (as with sausages, the less about that the better), but the big news is that the season ended last night. Good grief. No wonder Don Draper looks so sad: it's back to the Seinfeld re-runs! Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Valhalla at the 'plex

Yesterday afternoon we went to the multiplex, a thing we rarely do. The occasion was the season’s first broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera: Das Rheingold, and also the first in the Met’s new production of the Ring . Gosh, what a great three hours it was! Mr. Lepage’s production has come in for mixed reviews, to say the least, but I was enchanted. I liked the effects. I even liked Bryn Terfel's greasy Wotan. And Jimmy Levine, now pale as parchment and as corpulent as Sarah Caldwell (and like Ms. Caldwell, his legs can no longer bear his weight, so that he must conduct from a chair), proves once again that genius can overcome all obstacles. Ah, the music!

And a tip of the virtual hat to Adam Diegel as Froh (on the left). He was the cleanest of the immortals, and a voice we will surely hear again. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

The parrot who died for love

My granddaughters live on a boat, which is presently in Uruguay, and they are schooled by their mother. She decided recently that they ought to learn to catch a ball, so she sent them out with their father, Hamish to pitch, they to catch. The younger is named Anna. As her mother emailed:

Earlier in the afternoon, a parrot flew into Anna's head and died, possibly of a broken neck, possibly of a heart attack, or even, perhaps of a broken heart.  Hamish and Anna were playing catch with a bright yellow tennis ball (Anna's catch is coming along enormously, as is Helen's.  They can also walk along a 1" wide board fence in crocs, but that's another story). Hamish threw the ball straight up in the air and caught it, and then tossed it to Anna.  The next thing she knew, a parrot came screaming out of the tree and crashed into her nose.  We can only assume that it  was a territorial male and it thought the tennis ball was a handsome rival.  Fortunately, it did not get her in the eye!  It lived briefly after the encounter, but is now interred under a very fine tombstone (with portrait) under a nearby tree.

Or possibly the poor bird thought the ball was a pretty female. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford
 
 

A Final Gulp or Two as the Party Winds Down

Pity the New York Times, which used to be a newspaper but now is a collage of liberal pieties, some feebly muted (those are called news stories) and some screamed at full volume (the editorials and op-eds). But what about the obligation to review automobiles for its wealthy readers, especially those who want something stronger than Starbucks coffee to start the day? Today's paper offers a hilarious example: the Mercedes Benz E63 AMG. The reviewer just loves driving it, but feels he must alternate his praise with disgust at its road-muscling, gas-guzzling ways: the Benz, he says, "feels like a two-ton burrito in habanero sauce: driving it is akin to the last gas-spewing binge before the diet begins." As St. Paul might have said, give me 50 mpg, Lord, but not just yet.... Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France...

Of course France was never occupied by the Nazis; it was occupied by the German army, aka the Heer. That's one of the absurdities of Inglourious Basterds--it uses "Nazi" as a euphemism for "German." Most German soldiers weren't Nazis, though the officers all had sworn allegiance to Hitler personally, beyond their military oath.

With that off my chest, I'm embarrassed to admit how much I enjoyed this movie, especially Brad Pitt as the hillbilly in command of a band of homicidal Jewish commandos, and Christoph Waltz as the SS colonel-detective on the other side. Each deserves a best-actor Oscar, though both can't get it, and neither will. The movie is just too politically incorrect. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

jumping for joy

Congratulations to George McGovern, onetime contender for president (he carried Massachusetts and the District of Columbia). Like another war hero, George Bush the elder, he celebrated a recent birthday by stepping out of an airplane at high altitude. Mr. Bush came down on a parachute; Mr. McGovern on a paraglider. Both men were combat pilots in WWII, Mr. Bush in a Navy dive bomber, Mr. McGovern as commander of a lumbering B-24 Liberator bomber. Two of his grandchildren were on hand for the dive. Mr. McGovern is 88, and he hopes to live to be 100. Considering the alternative, so do I. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

morning swim

We know it as McIntosh Island, for the family that have owned it for about a century, and it lies a bit south of east of our dock. I've always wanted to swim out to the island and back, and this morning the tide was high at eight o'clock, the bay was as placid as a mirror, and the water had warmed up a bit from the chill of June. So I did it. The distance is 1,158 meters, which sounds longer than two-thirds of a mile. Anyhow, it's impossible to swim a straight line (especially on the return trip, when I couldn't make out our dock against the shoreline) so I would add ten percent for that. Call it three-quarters of a mile. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

get your Afghan ribbon here!

When I was in basic training at Fort Dix, there was a store in Bordentown nearby that sold any sort of U.S. Army decoration that might take a young man's fancy. Sharpshooter medals were in especial demand among the 'cruits. I'm glad to see that the internet has simplified this sort of credential-shopping. Want to tell the world that you served in Afghanistan? The medal is yours for ten bucks at Advanced Warfighting Solutions. If your wallet and your head are fatter, you can also buy a flak vest (without the bullet-resistant inserts, alas), a machine gun mount for your Humvee, and a two-thousand-dollar rope for abseiling down from your helicopter to a Gaza-bound blockade runner. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford