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Lyle Lovett, Public Radio, and Nuclear Engineering (sort of)

It's Not Big It's Large

It’s Not Big It’s Large (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Most of my last year working for United Engineers and Constructors was spent in Syracuse, NY. And Oswego. I enjoyed some things about that phase, which was the tail-end of my nuclear engineering career — the Syracuse Speed Skating Club and living on an expense account, mostly — but I didn’t love being on the road 8-10 months of each year, which is why it was the tail-end.

Not that I loved living in Philadelphia all that much, either. It’s a great town, but I just wasn’t a big city person any more. Visiting is excellent…I spent most of a day in Chicago a couple of weeks ago just walking around and looking at buildings and imagining eating at all the hole-in-the wall restaurants I passed. But the density of cars and people (too high) and trees (too low) always makes me glad I live in a small city in Michigan, minutes away from farms and forests.
Philadelphia did have WXPN, though…88.5 on your FM dial. That and WRTI (90.1) were the first public radio stations I consciously listened to. WXPN in particular introduced me to Bob Edwards, Sylvia Poggioli, Carl Kassell, and a metric ton of great music, and it’s the first NPR affiliate I volunteered at. This was back when stations stuck volunteers in a small room with actual telephones with actual twisty cords and handsets dials and allowed strangers to take Visa and Mastercard numbers from other strangers so they could make next year’s budget.
Because United Engineers wanted me at work at 8 every morning, I volunteered for the early phone shift during Michaela Majoun’s morning show. It was her first year at XPN, and she was fantastic. (She’s still there; she’s probably still fantastic.) So I got up well before dawn and went to the University of Pennsylvania’s campus and didn’t commit any credit card fraud and had a great time inside an actual radio station.
As I left, I stopped at the water fountain to get a drink and while leaning over and slurping I saw a pair of pointy and heavily tooled leather cowboy boots out of the corner of my eye. They weren’t mine — I wore very plain brown ones when I was working at the Nine Mile Point nuke plant, and none at all with my three piece suit at the home office in Philly — so they caught my attention. I lifted my head from the fountain and looked up and then further up and still further up and there was Lyle Lovett’s unmistakeable face and further up still was Lyle Lovett’s unmistakeable hair. So I did what comes naturally: I stammered. “I-I really really liked your latest album.” He smiled, said thank you, got a drink of water himself (from th-th-the same fountain!) and then went into the studio to be charming with Michaela Majoun.
You were expecting more, right? Sorry. But I was expecting much less from that day, so it was 100% worth getting up at 5am for.
All this because we saw Lyle Lovett in concert a few days back, an anniversary present to ourselves. Almost three hours of great music, and as we left the Michigan Theater via a rarely-used exit we found ourselves in the loading area backstage. There, just past the bass player putting away his standup, and after thanking him and the cellist (yes, really, a cellist) for the great performance and picking up a discarded set list which I’ve used to recreate the concert as a playlist for Kat…there Lyle Lovett was, again, taking a photo and chatting with Jeff Daniels.
Nowhere near as close as public radio got me. But close enough.
He’s still really tall.

July 19 at 2pm: Jim and Primates at Barnes & Noble in Ann Arbor

PRIMATES cover

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about Primates, but the folks at Barnes & Noble Store #2107 and Gina at First Second have fixed that! So, if you’re in the neighborhood, you can take a break from the Art Fair(s), skip the corn dogs and elephant ears, and come hear me enthuse about great apes.
The event is part of a nation-wide “Get Pop-Cultured Preview Weekend” held in anticipation of the San Diego Comicon. While I’m not the most pop-culture-y guy in the world, when it comes to being cool and heroic and stuff, you can’t beat Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Biruté Galdikas.

I’ll be working without a net (as in, no A/V) so this will be an interesting experiment in talking about comics with no pictures projected on a screen behind me! There are things to say and books to sign and fun to have. And B&N#2107 is a really nice store to hang out in. See you there?

Alan Turing on the future

“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”
Alan M. Turing (1950). “Computing machinery and intelligence.” Mind, 59, 433-460.
If only that future had included many more years of Turing, and the products of his genius.
Posted in honor of The Imitation Game by Leland Purvis and me…read it at Tor.com, which concludes its online run today. Thanks to Leland most of all, but also Irene Gallo and Chris Lough at Tor.com, Joan Hilty, Nick Abadzis, and everyone else who made this possible. 

More advice from the United States War Department (1942)

“A British woman officer or non-commissioned officer can — and often does — give orders to a man private. The men obey smartly and know it is no shame. For British women have proven themselves in this way. They have stuck to their posts near burning ammunition dumps, delivered messages afoot after their motorcycles have been blasted from under them. They have pulled aviators from burning planes. They have died at gun posts and as they fell another girl has stepped directly into the position and “carried on.” There is not a single record in this war of any British woman in uniformed service quitting her post or failing to do her duty under fire.
“Now you understand why British soldiers respect the women in uniform. They have won the right to the utmost respect. When you see a girl in khaki or air-force blue with a bit of ribbon on her tunic — remember she didn’t get it for knitting more socks than anyone else in Ipswich.”
Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain 1942, issued by the United States War Department in 1942, published by the Bodelian Library, University of Oxford, in 2004 (ISBN 1-85124-085-3)

Alan Turing on brains, machines, and porridge

“[W]e are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge. We don’t want to say ‘This machine’s quite hard, so it isn’t a brain, so it can’t think.'”
Alan Turing (1952). “Can automatic calculating machines be said to think?” BBC Third Programme, 14 and 23 Jan. 1952, discussion between M.H.A. Newman, Alan M. Turing, Sir Geoffrey Jefferson, and R.B. Braithwaite.

Advice from the United States War Department (1942)

“Don’t be misled by the British tendency to be soft-spoken and polite. If they need to be, they can be plenty tough. The English language didn’t spread across the oceans and over the mountains and jungles and swamps of the world because these people were panty-waists.”
Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain 1942, issued by the United States War Department in 1942, published by the Bodelian Library, University of Oxford, in 2004 (ISBN 1-85124-085-3)