Now most of you will think this is very old history. Another bit of 60s’ paranoia. Who shot JFK, MLK…….? If you want to brush up your conspiracy theories for the rest of this jeremiad, here is a Wikipedia article, Moon Landing Conspiracy Theories

But, wait, there is more to my mental weirdness around this moon landing.

You have to get the context of the moment that made it more than a little plausible that the government would do such a thing. Here we were in a country that was busy attacking a little country, Vietnam, a little smaller than the land areas of Wisconsin and Minnesota, with half a million men on the ground, helicopters, tanks, the whole armamentarium, and a bombing campaign as intensive as those seen during WWII. What was the governments rationale? A made up attack on a destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin and the big strategic objective of avoiding dominoes. Yep, The Domino Theory. Great visual image, but grand strategy? Worth killing say a million people?

On the home front we had multiple assassinations, riots in urban areas, a general sense that the government was not in control and perhaps the American people were a bit mad. In the Presidential race Richard Nixon, a well known thug politician, was well in front of Hubert Humphrey who didn’t have the fiber to reject LBJ’s war that most knew was wrong or at the very least they wanted it over with.

Hippies, drugs, wild sex, weird young people, not just here in the US but around the world….. It was a strange moment……

So, why wouldn’t one think that this same government would avoid the possible public relations disaster of three guys sitting on top of a giant Roman candle blowing up ignominiously right there on live TV. Lets go to Hollywood. They can be bought.

(That’s a picture of a Vanguard missile blowing up on the launch pad in 1957. Film was shown nationwide on the evening news. And there were more of these events.)

I have not been a supporter of the Mark Lane, Oliver Stone, et al., conspiracy theories. Too baroque for my tastes   But I have always had a soft spot for the theory that NASA actually spent more time in Hollywood than Cape Canaveral. I had seen 2001 a space odyssey in a movie theater in Appleton WI (hometown of another conspiracy nut, Joe McCarthy) in 1968. Now I must confess that I was a bit stoned at the time, but a year later the quality of the video from the alleged landing on the moon at least showed that NASA had not hired the right director. Kubrick was probably already working on his next stoner movie, Clockwork Orange, and couldn’t be attracted back to do something that would have been a big step down from 2001.

So flash forward to this morning. I have not been proselytizing recently about the Men on the Moon thing, but my eyes stopped on an article from Gizmodo about this guy S. G. Collins who had made a video definitively proving that there was in fact insufficient technology back in 1969 to fake the moon bit.

Boy am I depressed…..

Here it is SG Collins on the Moon Landing fakery theory (http://youtu.be/sGXTF6bs1IU)

While you are on YouTube check out some of this guy’s other videos. I love the production values. This seems to be further proof that good content, even kind of wacky good content, needs no flashy production values. (I have written earlier on by business blog about this, “Who Says Content Is Not Still King on the Web“) Gee, maybe that applies to the crappy video quality of the 1969 moon landing?

PS – other images are shots from Kubrick’s 2001 a space odyssey, used without permission.

I received an email today, five days after my initial attempt to communicate with Cuisinart and two days after my second attempt. The initial posting on this toaster meltdown is here

So far Cuisinart has expressed no interest in the fire, only the fact that our toaster is apparently out of warranty.

Valued Customer,

Thank you for your inquiry. We apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced. Based on the information you have provided, your CPT-120/90416 is out of warranty. If you have a proof of purchase that states you have had the unit for less than 3 years, please let us know. We will be able to provide you instructions on how to obtain a warranty replacement under that circumstance.

The only other option that we can offer to you is another unit, at the cost of $29.95 plus shipping and any applicable tax.

If you have any further questions please reply, with history, to this email. We welcome you to call our Customer Service Department at 1-800-726-0190, if you prefer. The hours of operation are 7 AM -11 PM EST Monday through Friday and 9 AM – 5:30 PM on Saturdays and Sundays, excluding major holidays.

Sincerely,
Laney
Cuisinart Customer Service Representative

I will follow-up with Laney about any interest they have in investigating this fire. Maybe this is part of corporate liability avoidance. If we act as though nothing happened beyond “inconvenience”, nothing happened. I wonder, has the Consumer Product Safety  Commission survived our age of little or no government (excepting, of course, the burgeoning allotments for domestic and international “security”)? Will have to Google for that.

Fortunately we had not wandered too far from the kitchen and realized that the crackling sounds were not those of burning toast. Even more fortunate was the fire extinguisher at hand to douse the flames that had already burned a good portion of the plastic housing along one side of the toaster adjacent to the electronics inside. But, the bread was barely warm!

Here is a close up of the burn zone.

You may be thinking that this fire was caused by sloppy housekeeping here. But, in fact the crumb tray had been cleaned within the last month and this picture of the crumb tray clearly shows no evidence of fire. It didn’t get started there. From the location of the fire right where all of the electrical components are, the obvious conclusion is bad design and/or manufacturing by Cuisinart.

I sent off an email with a picture to Cuisinart last Friday. Still no reply from them.

Saturday morning we went shopping for a replacement toaster. This time we bought a model by Hamilton Beach that has an all metal housing instead of the obviously flammable plastic housing.

By the way, if you want to replicate this experience at your house, the very same Cuisinart toaster is for sale at Lowe’s where we bought ours.

Fire Extinguisher Is Handy

One lesson is clear – the value of having a fire extinguisher in the kitchen ready to go. make sure it is one designed for the kitchen environment.

To kick this off, and provide annual advice, we are seeking an independent financial advisor. This person must have the expected financial planner certifications, work on a fee only basis, and understand that we will not buy any financial products from them nor retain them to manage assets. We only want to pay for their expert advice. The advisor does not have to be local to Hudson, NY. We are happy with videoconferencing.

Though the Bogle strategy is straight forward, visits to companies like Vanguard and Fidelity reveal a surprising number of choices. These need to be sorted out. In addition, we need to understand better the mechanics of withdrawing money from funds, tax issues, and probably other matters not currently visible to us. Based on our current investment strategy we have a good starting point for the distribution of funds between equities and bonds.

If you meet the minimum requirements set forth in the second paragraph, contact me at mark@markorton.com

Posted with Blogsy

Jefferson stand up desk from monticello.org

A week ago, Karen, always finding ways to improve my life, sent me a link to a New York Times article “Don’t Just Sit There” criticising our sedentary lifestyles. Turns out that our ritual of 2 3/4 mile walks are insufficient. All of the time spent shifting from one gluteus maximus to the other in front of the computer and on the phone has such negative effects that I might as well forgo the walks and have another donut.

Dating back to my days at Augat (in the ’80s) I have wanted a stand up desk. Never got around to it, though I did look for stand up desks in furniture catalogs and knew that  they were very common in earlier times. Jefferson used them including the one in the photo. Otto von Bismarck reportedly began his day at a stand up desk. Hemingway was photographed at one.

Then there are the health claims for standing. The ArtOfManliness.com has a lengthy discussion. I particularly liked their images of jury rigged stand up desks. Right up my alley. Or. another discussion at The Graham Peterson Desk Company.

I examined a few do-it-yourself options. Some cheap and bad. Some expensive and maybe good. One peculiar design came from the LifeHacker.com website. I like the 2x construction.

My problem is that I already have a desk custom built (ipse fecit) to fit in the space allotted to me. I can’t very well start to agitate for a new corner office.

The only one available is out in the barn. It is drafty out there and I would have to share with whatever critters might happen along. And, because of my already proven sloth, we have a conduit underground, been there for a year, but no one has dragged electric power out there.

Maybe I could work with the LED headgear Ed gave us last year for Xmas. Worked fine camping. Wonder what the clients might think on Skype?

So I came up with my own solution. $34 of material (mostly for the extravagant oak veneer plywood) and now Mr. Wonderful is vertical. If I had done this earlier I could have saved on the real extravagance of the plush office chair that inclines and reclines in every imaginable direction.

BTW – since the photo was taken I have filled in the screw holes, sanded, and slathered three coats of urethane on the desk.

from LifeHacker.com Is the fan on the floor part of the cooling system?

Untitled - 1962 (8 x 7 x 8 inches) from John Chamberlain Choices - exhibition catalog Guggenheim 2012

Miss Remember Ford -1964 (25 x 36 1/2 x 30 1/2 inches) by John Chamberlain - exhibition catalog Guggenheim 2012

Kiss #12-1979 (30 x 31 x 27 inches) by John Chamberlain-from Guggenheim show catalog

Though he is apparently usually noted for his wide use of car parts in his sculpture, he noted, in an audio clip, how annoying this is to him, “Do you ask a painter what brand of  paint do you use?” Any connections to Pop Art or other commentaries passing as art was clearly not his intent or desire. The car parts were just material to him.

As I moved up the ramp it dawned on me that his use of painted/colored metals introduced, for me, color as a major element of sculpture. Although there is obviously color present in every sculpture, for the most part, I have been most focused on the 3-dimensional form not its color or even surface textures. Looking at Chamberlain’s work I started to see the color not as a surface element but in an entirely new dimension.

As I moved around the sculptures, the fields of color shifted into new juxtapositions of color. Because my mind does not process 2-dimensional forms with much interest I have always been left mostly uninterested in abstract expressionism and other non-figurative 2-dimensional art. Chamberlain’s work has given me new access to these forms of abstraction.

As we were leaving the Guggenheim I purchased the catalog. A bit later I opened it to a few of the photos of works that I had liked the most. I was immediately struck by how unsatisfactory these photos turned out to be. Though the photos were of high quality and the reproduction on the pages very good. They lay flat. It was not possible to get any of the experience of moving around the sculpture.

This reminded me that for years I have taken multiple images of sculpture with the intent of providing a weak simulation of this experience. With this in mind I went back to my photo collection and created a little slide show of a work Karen and I saw earlier in the winter on a walk through the field sof Omi International Arts Center in Ghent NY.

Excuse me for being very late to comment about the piece you wrote last year regarding the frequency of letters used in the English language. The article was posted on September 15, 2010, but I have only recently just read it. Anyway, in the article you had given the assumption that the frequency of letters used in English should be based upon their frequency as occurring in the Concise Oxford Dictionary. I have no objection to using that dictionary for the frequency of letters used in English words, but to assume that the frequency occurring in English words is the same as the frequency occurring is English usage is an absolutely untrue assumption. This is because not all words are used equally.

The simplest way to explain this is that while there is only one word “quiz” in the dictionary, and only one word “the” in the dictionary, why would you expect that the two words (and their component letters) to be used with equal frequency? My point is that you will hear (or see) the word “the” (and its component letters) hundreds of times more frequently than you will see or hear the word “quiz”, yet you only counted each letter (T, H, E, Q, U, I, Z) only once in your analysis of the dictionary. Most analyses of English usage that I see reveal a rather different ranking for letter frequency from the one you showed in your posting of 15 September 2010.

Thank you for your time in considering my opinion on the matter.

In thinking again about this question it struck me that in the case of Scrabble, though a word may be appear more than once on the board, there is no real connection between the words on the board and words used during conversation and in writing. Scrabble players select words to place on the board based on the letters available to them and the maximization of the score based on the scoring rules of the game. One could play Scrabble with just the lexicon of chemistry and find the game works quite well, though with a much smaller universe of likely players.

Thus, the issue for the frequency of the use of the letters in the lexicon of English is the appropriate question, not the frequency of the letters as found in a real stream of communication or “usage”.

This frequency topic reminded me of how peculiar frequency can be in human language.  Consider the English phoneme “th” (e.g. in the word “then”) in words in a lexicon of over 70,646 in an advanced learner’s dictionary and the frequency of use in the spoken text. The phoneme “th” occurs in only 0.12% of the words, yet comprises 3.56% of the phonemes in spoken usage. It ranks 43rd out of 44 phonemes in English as occurrences in the lexicon but 6th in spoken usage.

Below is a chart for further exploration.

One small revelation is that my recent lust for a fedora (thanks to that all around maven of the hip, David Drake) has been replaced by the need to get a hat like Popeye’s (not the spinach eater).

Karen informed me that this is actually Hackman’s hat, not the invention of the wardrobe dept.

Dinner, pot roast, I always get potted food on airlines, much less likely to be anything more than potted, was incongruously accompanied by a fortune cookie. The message is propitious,especially in light of my conversation in Berkeley Heights in the morning before departing for the airport.

The Santa outfit was inexplicably lacking a beard. A quick call on the local Web for help brought this offer from Matthew Tudor-Jackson up the street (left).

My first reaction was that this was something from a run amuck costume show for Louis XIV. On further consult with the fashionistas of BeLo3rd it was determined to be BeLo3rd!

So, I was ready for my outing as Santa for Winter Walk, December 3rd.

I dropped the big wig and just went with the ZZ Top length mustache beard combo.

You can see more pictures of this at the Davis Orton Gallery news page.

I was very busy with lots of little kids and not a few babies for three hours. I was amazed that the Santa myth continues merrily along despite the enormous seemingly every larger maw of commerce.

I discovered that kids in the 3 to 4 yr range know who Santa is but don’t know yet that they are supposed to tell Santa what they want for Christmas. I stopped asking and quickly moved the conversation to the imminent arrival of a candy cane. I guess that 3 and 4 yr olds are a blind spot in my life’s experiences.

7 to 10 yr olds wanted lots of electronic games and Ipod Touches (very specific about those). 11 to 12 yr olds wanted a phone. I foolishly asked the first few if they wanted a cellphone? They looked at me quizzically until I realized that they did not know that phones used to have wires coming out of them. What most surprised me is the persistence of some old toys. A significant number of 4 to 6 yr old girls asked for Barbie dolls and accessories. Only one girl requested an American Girl doll.  Their male counterparts asked for trains. Bicycles and scooters are also still popular.

One girl, age 12, (I asked each for their name and age) told me that she wanted a Merry Christmas for her family. I asked how many were in her family, “Two, Five, how many?” She thought for a moment and said “Forty”. “Oh, a merry Christmas for the extended family?” “Of course.” she replied.

Karen and I made our annual Thanksgiving pilgrimage to Berkeley Heights and the Morgan-Ortons. This year we went via Roosevelt Island in NYC to drop of exhibition prints from our October show Street Photography / Surveillance with Bojune Kwon.

Ed went upscale on the wine for this meal

Wednesday evening dinner was cooked by Mr. Wonderful who brought back an old favorite for a re-run, meatloaf. This is the same meatloaf that was the subject of several earlier postings here. Of course all of this attention on a dish which has no recipe necessitated some head scratching. Once I got started in Meredith’s kitchen (I know that Ed makes rice and beans and other delicacies there, too, but this is Meredith’s kitchen) she hung around to kibitz. This lead to the discovery, not surprising given her penny pinching propensities, that she added oatmeal to her meatloaf too. The Wheatena I include was a novelty for her but I left out the carrots that hers included. Since my earlier jiggling of the memory banks I recalled that I also added either canned diced tomatoes or tomato juice to give some fluid for the cooking of the oatmeal and Wheetena. Spices include variably, basil, garlic, red pepper, black pepper, Worcestershire sauce, Pickapeppa, and catsup. Actually, the catsup is a required sealant for the surface of the meatloaf.

Not to get carried away further with TMI (where is Nyla when I need her steadying editorial hand), I also made a dish that was a real novelty for the Morgan-Ortons, kasha varnishke. My original plan was to make a basic Russian kasha, but Karen demanded the Jewish variant familiar in the US. I followed a recipe (this happens occasionally) at yourjewishmother.wordpress.com.

Thanksgiving Day

Since Meredith has to put in an appearance at the annual football contest between her high school and the local rival New Providence HS, we arrived fashionably late half way through the second period and departed after the half time extravaganza marching band foolery. Always the opportunist, Meredith stopped to feed the fish in her classroom after filling up on the the adulation of the crowd.

Before we could get Ed to peel a few potatoes, the following goofiness broke out:

Andrea, Noah, and Nyla arrived. Then next door neighbors Roland and Andrea. The feast was ready to begin. Karen took this panoramic shot over dessert. (Click on the image to see it full size)

Novelty Item

We had not noticed this little bit of wit from Meredith earlier. This inspired by one of Ed’s bad habits. Strikes many that there must be many more of these hidden about and to come. Ed has a lot of bad habits.

This is just to the left of the front door.