For the record, the first few batches of word-synch files are ready. I’ve located the wireless television transmitter and am setting it up for testing. (So I can place my karaoke monitor anywhere in the premises as opposed to a table near the stage.) I have successfully placed advertising over instrumental music, such as my warm-up tune (the theme from Bonanza). Other improvements are less obvious such as I am now compressing all music in the new sets.Compression. Um, in case that throws some people who just found out what an MP3 was last year and now think they are the leading edge of technology, that’s dynamic compression. Not zipping the files. You know who you are. The last person in town to get an iPod and you think you are some kind of computer genius. Yeah, you.
I’ve begun reading a fascinating book that must be based on fact. This is the best fiction for me, where like Michener, only the characters are invented. Return for the title another day. The book is about a doctor who is assigned to look after air force personnel who crack up something besides their airplane. Other than flying, the war was not that hard in the air corps. The brass, figuring that was too comfortable, insisted that everybody go up in a plane, even the cooks and mechanics. The ones who got the permanent beejezus scared out of them were marched into Section 7. They were labeled cowards, including decorated pilots who had flown twenty missions before snapping.
Looking for Wallace later, I dropped in to the Holiday Bowling lanes y’day. He was gone but Heather was there. So was a rather 1950-ish karaoke show. They had great equipment because it made my singing sound great. Either that, or I am learning to sing, but that could never be. I reciprocated by walking the tip jar around the bar and getting them some gas money. I used the term “Kamikaze Karaoke” recently and should define it.
Kamikaze refers to a show where the vocalist gets no selection and sings whatever comes up next. This will vaguely resemble my show but there are important differences. My show is “live” and thus is not expected to have an extensive song list. As well, up to six people can sing along at once by picking up a microphone. I’ve discovered that people who would never solo will sing along if everybody else does. This procedure is proven, I just have never tried it on a larger scale.
Later, the wireless TV is set up and works only on channel 4. During breaks, I read more on Antarctica. I’ve got the impression that the “exploration” embodies all the worst evils of contemporary man. Since the area is uninhabited, allow me to extrapolate parallels to what baggage some people would take along on any Mars mission. Imagine yourself in 1957, standing on the brink of a completely untouched land. What do you see?
I see the chance to start over. Other things I see are a clean slate to leave behind all the hindrances and evils of earlier mankind. The opportunity to eradicate everything from taxes to disease to welfare by just not allowing anything that has ever harmed man into the new environment. However, it appears there was not one thoroughly practical person permitted on the original treks.
While I can grant that ideals of Empire were more recent in men’s minds in that era, there is no justification for intentionally infecting a pristine land with anything that, under any disguise, has ever hurt people. Here is a place that existed for millions of years without politics or religion. Yet the usual percentage of men were lamenting that they found nobody to who needed conversion or leadership. Weren’t there a week before building a chapel and requisitioning scarce heating fuel. I can imagine how they justified that.
Say what you want, but that is the kind of people I would intentionally have prevented from setting foot. Do your praying and politicking on your own time. It seems not one of these people who needed to administer to “spiritual needs” said a word about it before the last supply ship was frozen in. The book is made needlessly ponderous as the author clearly sides with the social crowd.
The author neglects serious explanations. He regularly refers to the east and west of Antarctica. Say what? I’m over half-way through the 300 pages and he has not defined it. By noting that all maps showed the “panhandle” on the same side, I speculate there is a convention of considering north to be longitude zero. My point is the author never says so, yet it is elemental to understanding the book. Since I had to figure it out myself, let me propose it as today’s trivia, as follows.
Take a map of Antarctica and rotate it so the Prime Meridian and International Date Line bisect the continent through the South Pole, with Greenwich to the top. Argentina will be to the left, the Pacific Ocean to the right. That’s, respectively, West and East. Up and down become North and South. If that is too hard to visualize, plunk the book on a map of Wyoming. Not only are the directions the same, so is the distance between full service gas stations.
