What a (Weird and) Wonderful World

During my morning perusal of the Book of Face, I noticed a link one of my (fellow) space-cadet friends had posted to a Slate story about the rusting ruins of Canadian engineer Gerald Bull's High Altitude Research Project... an effort to use huge artillery guns to fire satellites into space!

The Slate piece is just a few paragraphs and a couple of pictures of the abandoned guns, along with a map of how to hike to the site in Barbados. Interesting, but what caught my eye was the posted-by byline, which listed not a typical author's name, but instead "Atlas Obscura." In addition, the end of the article included several links to other stories on Atlas Obscura. Well, a name like that is just too intriguing not to check out, right? So I clicked.

As George Takei might say, "Oh, my!" Atlas Obscura turns out to be the self-proclaimed "definitive guide to the world's wondrous and curious places": a kind of encyclopedia of the weird, wonderful, and obscure spots on the globe. In addition to browsing the accumulated stories, you can search by category or proximity to a location (there were a surprising number of covered spots near me) or just click the "Random Place" link if you're feeling lucky. If you create an account, you can mark places that you've been to, or that you'd like to go to; you can give tips on places to be added; and you can edit existing entries.

In addition, the Obscura Society consists (apparently... I've just discovered this place this morning and am still sussing it out) of local volunteers who lead related field trips and other events. Indeed, if Atlas Obscura weren't going to be enough of an Internet Timesink™ on its own, a link on the Events page to an Obscura Society San Francisco salon led me to the website of the Five Ton Crane arts collective, the builders of (among many other cool things) the Burning Man project Raygun Gothic Rocketship (to bring us back around to things that appeal to space-cadets like me), and I think Five Ton Crane's site is going to turn out to be a nontrivial timesink, too!

You Keep Using That Word; I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

The word I’m thinking of is “security.”

It can only have been a concern for — or should I say, a hypersensitivity to — security that last week made a fellow Quantas Airways passenger perceive an actual threat in Wynand Mullins’ t-shirt bearing the famous The Princess Bride quotation:

Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.

I suppose it’s not too hard to imagine someone not recognizing the quote, even though it’s from a much- beloved comedy and has been in circulation for over a quarter century; what is hard to imagine is that a passenger could think the line, printed on a shirt in the form of the ubiquitous “Hello, My Name Is…” sticker/badge, could possibly be a true threat, merely because it contains the word die. Even presuming the passenger wasn’t aware that it was a movie quote, didn’t the flight attendant who took the complaint know that? Did the complaining passenger think this “threat,” proudly emblazoned on Mullins’ chest, had been missed or ignored by the security personnel, gate agents, and flight crew that Mullins had passed on the way to his seat?

This ultimately turned into a no-harm/no-foul situation — Mullins wasn’t bothered further after he explained the line to the flight attendant and said he didn’t have another shirt to change into — and it would be easy to write it off as a cute little human interest story. But when I hear stories like this, I find myself thinking about the peculiar ways we understand risk and seek security.  One of my favorite audiobooks is Daniel Gardner’s The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain. Leaning heavily on the pioneering work of cognitive scientists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Gardner exposes our tendency to misperceive and misunderstand risks, often leading us to"fix" things that are not problems (or at least, not statistically likely to be significant problems) while blissfully ignoring genuine threats.

Thus the absurdity of forcing old folks and small children to half disrobe before boarding an airplane, or of school zero tolerance policies that punish children for "weapons" that are actually simple tools and "drugs" that in fact are innocent (and parentally approved) over-the-counter remedies.¹

As we embark on the shared cultural problem of responding meaningfully to the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, CT, I fear we'll make the same kind of mistakes, turning our schools into locked-down prisons, at a steep cost to their intended primary role, while doing nothing to alter the sea of guns they head out into when they leave for home. Events like Newtown always prompt calls for more school security, in the form of locked doors, closed campuses, armed guards, and the like, and it's hard to argue against "tighter security in our schools"... but I can't help wondering if students aren't more at risk from the conversion of an open learning environment into a tense and guarded fortification than they are from actual murderers. As the Centers for Disease Control put it:

While shocking and senseless shootings give the impression of dramatic increases in school-related violence, national surveys consistently find that school-associated homicides have stayed essentially stable or even decreased slightly over time.

According to the CDC’s School Associated Violent Death Study, less than 1 percent of all homicides among school-age children happen on school grounds or on the way to and from school. So the vast majority of students will never experience lethal violence at school. [emphasis added]

Horrific as they are, school shootings and spree killings are rare. What's not rare, in the U.S. at least, is a loaded gun in a nightstand, a cabinet, a car glovebox, or a coat pocket. Are we going to, once again, focus on emotionally satisfying "fixes" to illusory problems while blithely ignoring the more pedestrian, but much more present and deadly, real threat?

Inconceivable!


¹ Mind you, I always skeptically assume the horror stories about this are largely apocryphal, or at least that there's more subtlety in the details than in the popular retelling... but even allowing for such "windage," it seems likely that zero tolerance policies in general reflect confused thinking about risk.

Another Cheap Shot Republican Sex "Scandal"

I don’t know much of anything about Neil Livingstone, and there are probably lots of perfectly good reasons the Republican counterterrorism expert and "international risk management" consultant shouldn’t become governor of Montana (Hell, according to me, there are plenty of good reasons most Republicans shouldn’t become governor of any state)… but the fact that an out-of-print book of his included safety tips for travelers who patronize prostitutes isn’t one of them.

Livingstone’s 1996 book Protect Yourself in an Uncertain World: A Comprehensive Handbook for Your Personal and Business Security reportedly includes a chapter on nightlife that deals with “adult entertainment districts.” The chapter begins with…

I do not recommend that you indulge in illicit pleasures such as gambling, drugs, or prostitution, but experience suggests that many people, despite the risks, do so. This chapter is designed to help you minimize the personal risks involved, especially when you are traveling in a foreign country.

…and there’s no reason not to take that preface at its face value: In the same way that many travel guides give cautionary advice about how to stay out of trouble over certain kinds of risky/illicit behavior (namely sex and drugs and, in some cases, even rock and roll) in foreign lands, it’s hardly surprising that a book like Livingstone’s would give advice on how to stay out of trouble while doing the kinds of things many travelers actually do, regardless of anyone’s moral attitudes about those activities. Especially considering that in many of the places Livingstone’s readers might find themselves, prostitution (along with other “adult nightlife” activities) is not actually illegal.

Because Republicans are generally sanctimonious and priggish about human sexuality, and have been increasingly intensely so recently, it’s tempting to leap on any whiff of a Republican sex scandal. Too tempting, I’m afraid: For us to indulge in kneejerk sexual shaming of Republicans actually reinforces the very sex-negative predisposition that’s at the heart of so much of what’s wrong with Republican ideology.

If there were evidence that Livingstone had promoted illegal prostitution, that would be a scandal; if there were evidence he’d merely patronized prostitutes himself, that might or might not be (I’d be inclined to say not, unless there’s a direct connection to his performance of a public trust); but on the “evidence” of a few excerpts from an old book, it’s not only not a scandal, I’m not sure why it’s even a story.

I've made a similar point previously in these pagespixels regarding attacks on Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich. For all I know this Livingstone character is as nasty and dangerous a piece of work as those two, but the point remains: When we engage in this kind of sniggering and shaming, we're validating the puritanical frame that's so much of what's wrong with our Republican opponents.

Let's not, shall we?

Who Knew Matt Lauer Was So Shockable?

I'm a bit bemused at Matt Lauer's reaction to this story about private "suites" in First Class on Singapore Air's A380 jumbo jets. If the compartments are truly private, as both the headline and the story describes them, why shouldn't couples do what couples do? And why would they need "chaperones"?

Geez, Matt, you have "don' it wif' a lady" haven't you?

Last Dance in DC

I realize the shelf-life of "what I did at the inauguration" posts is just about expired, but I did promise I'd post my pictures from Monday. I started out by volunteering at the MLK Day of Service event at RFK Stadium, assembling care packages for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan (does anyone else recall that "CARE package" used to mean something more specific?). Also helping us pack goodie bags were (during my shift) incoming Attorney General Eric Holder, incoming VA Secretary Gen. Eric Shinseki, incoming Homeland Security Secretary Gov. Janet Napolitano, and Senator Chris Dodd (with his kids). Plus, I gather, my group just missed seeing Michelle Obama. As far as I could see, these worthies were actually taking turns working; not just gladhanding and talking to the press.

After my shift was up, I headed over to the Cannon House Office Building to visit the office of Joe Courtney. I didn't have tickets to pick up, but I thought it would be fun to see the office, and to say hello to some Courtney staffers I'd met in the course of a couple campaigns (including John Hollay, the first person I met who knew not only that Obama would be president someday, but that 2008 would be the time). I should've thought harder about this: It turned out that the very many people who did have inauguration tickets to pick up accounted for lines, at each of the public entrances, stretching halfway around the building. I decided it would be the better part of valor to leave the congressional offices to those with actual business there.

So I wandered over to the Capitol, to look at the preparations underway for Tuesday's ceremony, and then down the Mall, checking out street vendors' wares (don't let anyone tell you Obama is bad for entrepreneurship!) and stopping in to visit several museums. The U.S. Botanic Garden was a particularly welcome island of warmth on a frigid day, and I also stopped in at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (as it turned out, my spot on the Mall Tuesday would be adjacent to the Hirshhorn). And, of course, the space cadet in me finds it impossible to visit DC without at least poking my nose into the National Air & Space Museum.

Frozen but well satisfied, I headed back to the Metro, and out to the friends I was staying with in Virginia. As for Tuesday's event, until I'm able to upload my handful of cellphone images, all I can offer are my handsome commemorative tickets from the very excellent Virginia Railway Express commuter train. VRE is selling the leftover tickets to collectors, but mine are legitimately "game used":

Has It Really Been a Week?

OK, I stupidly lost most of my pictures from DC, and the ones I managed to salvage weren't great, but I've finally got what I do have sorted out. Here I am on Sunday, at the We Are One event at the Lincoln Memorial (click here to go to my album from Sunday):


And if my bad photos aren't enough, here's my bad, handheld, movie-clip video of a wonderful moment from Sunday's concert:



Oh, and by the way, in case you missed it amid all the excitement about Tuesday's swearing in, the (then) President-elect gave a great speech on Sunday:



As I noted, I've lost all my pictures from Tuesday's event (except for a few in my cellphone, if I can ever figure out how to download them), but I did get some from my wandering around town on Monday. I'll post those tomorrow.

I Won't Be Doing Field Research... I Promise!

I'm getting ready for my trip to Washington, DC, to party like it's 2009, so imagine my bemusement when I saw this story in the Huffington Post!

Establishing a Prostitution-Free Zone (PFZ) strikes me as somewhat strange in a city (and nation) where prostitution is already illegal. Are they saying that in the Zone it's "not only merely illegal; it's really most sincerely illegal"? Will they set up Prostitution Benignly Neglected Zones (PBNZs) in other parts of the city, far from the tremulous gaze of the gathered multitude?

Enquiring minds want to know!

Ahh, but this enquiring mind intends to stay out of trouble. I expect to post plenty of interesting tales and pictures when I return, but none of them will be about this topic. Honest. ;^)

Who Says Government Can't Get Anything Right?

I'm planning to travel to Washington, DC, for the inauguration, and I've been getting my travel ducks in a row. In the process of researching Metro schedules and costs, I discovered that they're selling commemorative farecards. Well, I fired off an online order, somewhat worried that it wouldn't reach me before I had to leave, but thinking it would be a nice souvenir in any case. This was late Thursday evening.

Well, my card...
...arrived in Saturday's mail! I confess to being flabbergasted that the order was filled so quickly. OK, so a metropolitan transit authority is only quasi-governmental, but still, you gotta be at least a little bit impressed, no?

In other inauguration-trip news.... I'm planning to travel on Sunday, and I had been debating with myself over whether it was worth trying to get there in time for the free Sunday evening kickoff event at the Lincoln Memorial. Well, if the entertainment roster hadn't already made up my mind for me, I think this would have: I had tired of the kerfuffle over Rick Warren's participation in the swearing in, but surely a gay Episcopal bishop is as close to a Warren antidote as you can get!