Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

An Eventful Week

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It’s been an eventful week. I already talked about having to take our youngest cat to the emergency vet for a digestive blockage, which was a blast, let me tell you. Since then, we’ve been feverishly working to get all the paperwork lined up for settlement on our house in less than a month. On top of that, we’ve set up all the utilities (including the super-critical Internet access) to start on-or-around November 20, we have a quote on homeowners’ insurance, appointments next week to get quotes on blinds, a security system, and movers, and probably twenty other things all spinning around all at once.

Since that all wasn’t enough, I interviewed for and was offered a new job and put in my two-weeks notice at the old one. Now the chaos is having a multiplying effect on itself; the change in jobs means a whole new round of paperwork for the mortgage! Weee!

Anyway, the new job is a very exciting opportunity with a well-known technology firm (I’ll provide some more info over the next week or two). After five years at the same company, most of which on one project, it will be nice to have a change of pace. I’m really looking forward to it. It’s also a move from government sector work to private sector work, and the office will be much closer to home.

I thought this was funny though: the office is reasonable walking distance from our apartment . . . and we’re moving out of the apartment to a house 20 or 30 minutes away less than two weeks after I start. Oh well.

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Landing on Taxiways is a No-No

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I’m not a pilot—not even a private pilot [yet]—but I have a long-standing interest in aviation. Back when I used to have free time, I spent a fair amount of it flying in computer flight simulators like X-Plane. I was to the point (and probably still am) that I could take off in real-world weather conditions (which X-Plane downloads from the web), navigate successfully to my destination airport, and land safely. I even used to test myself with disaster scenarios—landing with one or more engines out, navigating in poor weather, instrument failures, etc.—and usually survived. Not always though ;-).

Because of this experience and my own interest in this field, I am more knowledgeable than many of my peers about aviation news. I, for example, was able to explain to my coworkers what a pitot tube does and why it’s important when we were discussing the crash of Air France flight 447 this summer.

That’s why I know that the pilots who landed their airliner on Taxiway M (instead of, say, a runway) at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport on Monday have no excuse. Runways have very, very different markings than taxiways—different day-time paint jobs, and different night-time lighting—and even I, with my very limited experience, can tell them apart from a great distance in the air. The article says nothing about the weather conditions in Atlanta on Monday, but even in poor visibility you don’t land unless you know what you’re landing on (duh).

Thank God this incident didn’t kill people. It’s not uncommon for aircraft to be sitting on taxiways (waiting their turn for takeoff) while planes are coming in to land, and usually it’s frowned upon for a landing plane to land on the waiting plane(s).

Deficit Architect Bernanke Now Opposes Deficits?

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According to The Washington Post, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke thinks that the United States government should reduce the federal deficit.

Bernanke, originally appointed by President George W. Bush (R) and recently reappointed by President Barack Obama (D), is a bit perplexing as the new cheerleader for reductions in the federal deficit. Bernanke was one of the architects of last year’s bailout bonanza, where the federal government wrote billion-dollar checks to all sorts of random financial and automotive businesses, seized control of banks, shredded the United States Constitution, and more. After he and other officials from the Bush and Obama administrations created the largest deficits in the history of the United States—four times larger in 2009 than the previous record [from last year]—now he says large deficits are a bad thing.

This is reminiscent of when Bush, fresh off of ‘saving’ the auto industry [which went bankrupt anyway a few months later] with 10 billion dollars of your and my dollars, told foreign leaders not to abandon the free market economy. He had just abandoned it himself! Like Bush had no right to talk about the value and importance of the free markets that he spent his last three months in office trying to dismantle, Bernanke has no right to talk about how bad federal deficits are when half of those deficits are, at least in part, his fault.

Of course, we all know now that former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Bernanke lied to us about last year’s bailouts, and we all know that the new administration (which came in promising ‘change,’ remember?) immediately accelerated the same mindless spending (and reappointed Bernanke). How long do Obama and Bernanke and others in this administration expect us to keep believing them when they say they don’t believe in deficit spending or government waste?

Bernanke is right, of course . . . we do need to reduce the federal deficit, and we need to do it now. But where was this Ben Bernanke last year when he was running up the deficit he now decries?

Sick [and Expensive] Cat

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Vincent, our youngest of two cats, has always had occasional . . . digestive issues. Nothing too serious, but sometimes he gets a little backed up and his rear end gets sore for a day or two. This seemed to be happening again, but it didn’t clear up after a couple days and was really bothering him so we took him to the emergency vet yesterday afternoon.

Long story short, he’s doing okay now. They had to keep him overnight and do a procedure (complete with anesthetic) to clear out his system. We picked him, his stool softener, his pain medicine, and his butt cream up this morning. The poor guy was glad to be home. And oh boy, does he love his medicine (sarcasm).

Of course, the $800 it took to cover all of this could have gone to other use . . . but that’s just part of pet ownership, I guess. Got to love those large, unexpected expenses, especially right around the time we’re buying a house! Maybe next week one of our cars will break down, now that mine is a few hundred miles out of warranty!

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‘Balloon Boy’ Isn’t News

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Let me put this very, very clearly for the ‘mainstream media’: The so-called ‘Balloon Boy‘ isn’t news. Perhaps, for the brief period of time on Thursday that officials thought the boy was actually stranded on a giant Mylar balloon, maybe then it was news . . . of the passing ‘random thing happening now’ variety on the 24-hour cable networks. In-depth reporting on this story would really be more appropriate for a local broadcast than for, say, NBC Nightly News.

Once it became clear that the so-called ‘Balloon Boy’ hadn’t actually been on the balloon, but had been hiding in a box at his house, the story was over (even for local media). Even if it gets passing mention in the days to follow, well, he isn’t a ‘Balloon Boy’ and shouldn’t be called one. Turns out he’s just a ‘Cardboard Box Boy.’

When ‘Cardboard Box Boy’ gets interviewed on television the next day and pukes in front of millions of viewers, guess what, that isn’t news either. Nor is it news that the kid said something cryptic about the event being ‘for the show.’ Nor is it news when the boy’s father calls a press conference to announce another press conference. Nor is it news when, at the second press conference, the father asks the media to put its questions in a box. None of this is relevant to anything for anybody. Can we please take it off our front-page news sites now?

Even on the slowest slow-news-day, there are more important things to cover than ‘Cardboard Box Boy’ and ‘John & Kate + Eight.’ I get that people like to have a little escapism now and then, but really, there are other things going on in the world. Who in their right mind would rank ‘Cardboard Box Boy’ above health care reform, an earthquake in Java, or any of the other important stories over the last few days? Are our priorities really this out of whack?

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.