Monday, June 28, 2004

Winds of blog change OK, for reasons explained elsewhere and probably in the great scheme of things not all that very exciting or interesting to the world at large, I'm done with the Radio blogware and am continuing my online spouting activities through an outfit called Typepad. My new blog address is infospigot.typepad.com. I'll also have infospigot.com redirect to that site. Meantime, this site will remain online at least until I've figure out how to make the archived posts available elsewhere or until my Radio subscription runs out, whichever comes first. Thanks for reading. 5:13:57 PM    comment []

Monday, June 21, 2004

Me and Kate and SpaceShipOne Just back from covering the first private manned space flight in history. It was a beautiful event, really, and a busy 38 hours spent driving down to the launch site in Mojave, California, attending a press conference on the launch of SpaceShipOne, driving to our motel 25 miles away, writing, sleeping four hours, getting up, driving to the launch site, talking to folks, watching the launch, writing, going to another press conference, writing, and driving back to Berkeley. Kate came along and acted as aide de freelancer and commiserator in chief and solutions czar(ina) during my freqent tech crises (motel DSL, nonworking cellphones, etc.). What reading about and seeing pictures of SpaceShipOne and its carrier plane (somewhat dorkily called the White Knight) hadn't prepared me for was how beautifully unusual they are. I likened the White Knight to a giant dragonfly; someone else said it looks like it's an origami plane. The impression it gives is fragility, but during a post-launch fly-by it did a roaring brief climb to show that it's a real honest-to-goodness gutsy jet plane.  The launch process is a long one: It takes the carrier plane a full hour to get to the 50,000-foot launch altitude, and the whole time the aircraft are circling the airport. The ships are both white, so what you see looks like a seagull wheeling higher and higher into the heavens. Eventually, the carrier plane leaves a gently arcing contrail in the perfectly clear blue desert sky. It's space and technology, but there's plenty of poetry in this launch system, too. My stories on the flight -- a successful one and a true milestone in aviation history, are on the Wired News site: The prequel: Space Shot on a Shoestring. And the launch story: Private Space Shot a Success. 9:50:07 PM    comment []

Thursday, June 17, 2004

Anniversary: Third-rate burglary It's June 17, the thirty-second anniversary of the Watergate break-in. Man, does Nixon look good now. But I digress. To mark the occasion, a minor-league baseball club in New Hampshire called the Nashua Pride is sponsoring a giveaway: The first 1,000 fans through the gates will get Richard Nixon bobblehead dolls. And that's not all! Anyone named Woodward or Bernstein will be admitted free, public-address announcements will be suspended for 18 and a half minutes. (This news by way of a segment on NPR's "Talk of the Nation.") 1:05:16 PM    comment []

We regret the error ... Well, a couple posts down, I mildly celebrated the first story in my renewed freelance writing career, about a private space launch this coming Monday. And in the first couple of hours after my story was posted on Wired News, I got a couple of very nice notes from readers. But instead of wanting to tell me what a genius I am, they wanted to point out a mistake. I reported that SpaceShipOne rode on top of its carrier plane. That's not necessarily logical, but that's the way it looked to me in the pictures, and I'm not an aerospace engineer, so that's what I wrote. It turns out that the spaceship is carried below the plane, not above it. As someone once said somewhere about a situation like this, or not at all like it, "Shitfire." One beauty of online publishing, as opposed to the print kind, is that you can fix an error like that right away. So within about 20 minutes of sending off a correction, my original prose was changed to more accurately reflect reality. 10:51:53 AM    comment []

And speaking of spaceflight BoingBoing is hosting a blog account of preparation's for Monday's launch of SpaceShipOne from Mojave. Two posts so far: part one and part two. Nice on-the-ground color, along with valuable advice for the mini- or maxi-horde that might descend on Mojave for the launch: "BRING LOTS OF WATER! ... Our rule of thumb out here: if you're not peeing every couple of hours, you're not drinking enough." 9:28:02 AM    comment []

Back in print ... Or back online. Or back in the saddle. Or something. In any case, I've got a story this morning on Wired News, about the first private manned space launch: "Something big is supposed to happen in the sky above the California desert town of Mojave early Monday. Just after dawn, a spindly white jet plane is scheduled to ascend from an airstrip with a rocket ship strapped on top. ..."  Feels good to have something out there in print, or in bits, or whatever, again. 9:13:13 AM    comment []

Wednesday, June 16, 2004

'Sixteenth today it is' A fictional 100th anniversary: The action in "Ulysses" was set on June 16, 1904. There's a nice editorial in The New York Times marking the occasion. It notes that while the novel has become a symbol of impossible, elitist literature -- a perception sadly reflected in a human-on-the-street poll today in the San Francisco Chronicle -- it's actually anything but inaccessible: "Its stuff is the common life of man, woman and child. You take what you can, loping over the smooth spots and pulling up short when you need to. Dedalus may indulge in Latinate fancy, and Joyce may revel in literary mimicry. But the real sound of this novel is the sound of the street a century ago: the noise of centuries of streets echoing over the stones." 9:02:01 AM    comment []

Monday, June 14, 2004

They're off! Eamon and Sakura at the airport this morning, about an hour and a half before they took off for Tokyo. The clerk at the airline desk didn't quite get it when Eamon said he didn't have a return ticket: He's going to Japan to stay (well, his initial spousal visa is good for a year and will be renewable for three years). Eamon and Sakura's trip has been coming for such a long time that I think I took it kind of for granted and only thought briefly about how I'd feel when they were gone. But now that they are -- it kind of hit me this evening when Kate said to Tom, "It's just the three of us here now" -- I miss them both and feel like they're very far away. But what a great adventure. And the next time we see each other, I hope, will be in Tokyo. 10:23:09 PM    comment []

Ralph Wiley, 1952-2004 Just saw this on ESPN: Ralph Wiley, an author who worked on the network and for a long time as a feature writer for Sports Illustrated, died. OK: I have not read one of Ralph Wiley's books, and didn't follow his magazine career avidly. But I remember him when we were both "copy clerks" (an upgrade from "copyboy") at the Oakland Tribune in 1977. I was personally in a pretty bad state at the time -- was angry with my life and the paper and treated the job like a piece of crap. The Tribune let me go at the end of my three-month probation period. That felt bad, though entirely deserved, and for years I thought I would never work for a paper again. Eventually, I learned something from the episode about not burning bridges. Ralph learned something else. On the job -- at a not-first-rate paper run by a publisher who liked to put on disguises to visit the city room, a paper living under constant threat of going under or getting sold -- Ralph made an impression Smart, quick, good-looking, and funny; he seemed like someone who was having fun and was really on his way someplace. He moved up from copy clerk to writing for the sports department, then became a beat writer and columnist, then moved on to Sports Illustrated. Here's a decent obit from theWilmington (N.C.) Journal . Next-morning update: The San Francisco Chronicle has a nice piece on Wiley by columnist Ray Ratto this morning. And the Oakland Tribune remembers him, too. 7:30:03 PM    comment []

Saturday, June 12, 2004

Friendly advice From fuckinggoogleit.com. As in: Q.: How many more people voted for Gore than Bush in 2000? A.: How the hell should I know? Why don't you fucking Google it. By way of John Battelle's Searchblog. 8:05:37 PM    comment []

Friday, June 11, 2004

Names on the land I printed out a little map from Yahoo! Maps yesterday because I was driving over to the scary suburbs of northern Contra Costa County to pick up a box of tile. I noticed this morning that the map contained the name of a place I'd never heard of before and thought was a humorous misprint: "Herpoooo." I know that some mapmakers salt their products with deliberate errors to catch cartographic thieves who betray themselves by repeating the mistakes. I was wrong on two counts. First, the name is "Herpoco" but was unreadable on my poor printout. But still -- Herpoco? Never heard of it. Though when I thought about it, it occurred to me it might have a connection to nearby Hercules, which itself has a link with an explosives company that ran a plant there (here's the history). Still -- look where Herpoco is placed on the map -- smack in the middle of a freeway interchange. But having too much time on my hands, obviously, I plugged Herpoco into Google. The result shows it's an actual place name, though I don't think it would mean a thing to most of the hundreds of thousands of people who live close by or pass through every week. The U.S. Geological Survey's Geographic Names Information System delivers this hit when you query the name Herpoco: Feature Name: Herpoco Feature Type: populated place Elevation: 60 State: California County: Contra Costa USGS 7.5' x 7.5' Map: Mare Island 380042N 1221612W And the gay-lesbian community search site ePodunk lists Herpoco, too, with a note that it was named after the Hercules Powder Company (successor to the California Powder Works and a long-ago spinoff from DuPont. But that's another story). 12:21:05 PM    comment []

Slice of life Nice little reading from Harper's online site -- the transcript of a call from an Oklahoma prison inmate to his parents after his funeral: KEVIN: Hey, Momma. MARTHA: Kevin, I cannot believe this. KEVIN: Wait. It’s not my fault. MARTHA: We buried you today, boy. 9:50:19 AM    comment []

Funeral, hold the blather Kate wanted to watch the Reagan service before she went off to school this morning, so she turned on CNN about 6:30. Within a minute or so, one of the "hosts" asked such an offensively insipid question about Reagan's legacy that we switched to C-SPAN's coverage. Not a new observation, of course, but it's great to get a chance to watch events like this free of the network's insistence on providing running commentary on everything. Aside from the awful quality of most of the noise the TV people provide, it's like we in the media are terrified of ever letting anything speak for itself. 9:37:15 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 Dan Brekke.