In My Best Jerry Seinfeld Voice…

What the hell is up with the people and their outside cats?! I don’t get it. What goes through people’s minds when they do this? Are they seriously thinking, “I’m gonna adopt a pet, bring it home, and just let it go. This annoying little cat is just what my neighborhood is missing.”

I’ve been roused out of bed in the middle of the night at least six times in the past couple months by the commotion of someone’s wild-eyed outside cat, trying to kill my inside cat (and probably my whole family) through my living room window. It would be hilarious if I wasn’t sound asleep every time it happens. Picture me in my pj’s, charging the front of my house with a loaded firearm, and quite happily I might add, only to find a cat trying to fight my cat with a closed window between them. And my cat just sits there calmly, staring at both of us like the idiots we are.

Frankly, I think these cat people need to be beaten with a bag of oranges.

I mean if you live in the country, with no neighbors and no major roads nearby, fine. Get your outside cat. But when you live near other people, or a busy road like A1A, where a cat is run over almost daily, it’s clearly not a good idea. I’ve even had the misfortune of running over a couple of these cats myself. I didn’t want to do it. I had no choice. They ran out in front of me. And now I have to live with that guilt just because some thoughtless halfwit got a cat and set it free.

There is an upside however. I get the benefit of stylish cat paw prints all over the windshields and hoods of my cars. My wife gets cat poop in her flower pots and planters (free fertilizer), and and my dog loves to find it in our fenced in backyard. And might I say, the occasional sound of cats fighting outside my bedroom window in the middle of the night is truly breathtaking.

Dig this… I talked to my next door neighbor the other day, and he told me that one of our other neighbors claimed one of her outside cats was poisoned. That’s right. Someone else in my neighborhood could actually be poisoning these outside cats. I think it’s far more likely that the cat just drank some ant-freeze off someone’s driveway or something, but I wonder if the irresponsible cat owner will just get another one. I can’t wait to find out.

Safety Is Compromised at OIA

Orlando International Airport is a little less safe as of Sunday because the FAA deconsolidated air traffic control operations there. Yes, the FAA actually ignored a bipartisan Florida Congressional delegation, and executed their plan to separate TRACON (Terminal Radar Approach Control) and tower functions at OIA.

Here’s the Cliff’s Notes version of why this is a problem…

The tower is primarily responsible for ground control and clearing aircraft for arrivals and departures. It depends greatly on the TRACON, the portion of the facility primarily responsible for sequencing aircraft in the airport’s airspace to land and for aircraft departing from the airport hand-offs to an air traffic control center responsible for higher-altitude traffic. Normally, controllers are certified to alternate duties between the TRACON and in the tower cab. By deconsolidating the areas, the FAA will only require certification for the tower cab OR the TRACON and controllers will work one or the other, but not both. Both portions of the facility depend highly upon one another and safety is greatly improved by controllers with experience in both areas.

So who’s benefiting from this foolish decision? Certainly not the traveling public.

The head honchos at the FAA on the other hand, have found a creative way to instantly improve their staffing numbers. Orlando is very poorly staffed. The FAA’s goal is to take one poorly staffed facility and split it into two separate facilities, theoretically cutting the certification criteria and training times for new recruits in half in an effort to make them overnight controllers. The subsequent loss of cumulative experience will have a negative impact on safety.

Am I saying that planes will immediately start falling out of the sky? No.

But this sort of ill conceived decision seems to be the usual modus operandi of this administration, and the system can’t take much more of it.

What He Said

This nugget of news was in my RSS feed the other day and I was planning on writing down my thoughts on it, but Don Brown over at Get The Flick beat me to it. So I’m gonna recommend you go read that news story and then just read his post, as it is better than anything I could’ve jotted down anyway.

I’m in Alabama

Here are a few things I’ve observed here so far…

1. The University of North Alabama’s mascot is a lion. They have real live lions on campus. It’s awesome.

2. Alabama is definitely a red state. Pretty much everyone I’ve met so far has had something negative to say about the state of our country. Not because of what’s transpired the last eight years, but because of what transpired on Nov. 4th 2008. They’re terrified.

3. There is no sun here.

4. The locals are pretty nice.

5. There is a church every quarter mile on every road.

6. The church that my friend Ben is a youth pastor at is one of the biggest churches I’ve ever seen. Heck, the children’s wing is larger than most churches I’ve ever seen.

7. Wal-Mart is doing very well here, but everyone says they hate shopping there. Target needs to convert their regular store to a Super Target ASAP.

8. I find a real, authentic southern accent charming. But at the same time, I’m glad I don’t have one.

9. Ranch flavored sun flower seeds are delicious.

10. Ben’s labradoodle is still the most annoying dog I’ve ever encountered, and I own a jack russell.

Things I Thought I Knew

I don’t know if this sort of thing happens to you, but these past few years I’ve had a few wake up calls that have completely disproved some of my ideals that I just took for granted as being in the bag. This is always a strange feeling to deal with. You sort of feel as though you were misled or lied to by the person or persons that helped instill those ideals in you. These people aren’t necessarily operating with ill intent. Many actually believe in these ideals themselves. Of course some others could just be flaunting these ideals for money or power or ratings and they really are bad people.

I grew up in an overly conservative, authoritarian and religious environment where it was almost forbidden to think for yourself, so these kinds of realizations may happen to me more than to most of you. What the pastor said was the way it was and that was that, because he heard directly from God. So questioning or disagreeing with the pastor was like disagreeing with God himself, making it kind of tough to get into heaven. And if you don’t tithe your 10% BEFORE taxes, then forget about it. You’ve got no chance.

I still have occasional contact with some people from this time in my life, and I can tell by speaking to a few of them, that things haven’t changed much. They’re not bad people. Quite the contrary. A vast majority of them are great, family oriented folks. They have just never seen a need to think much for themselves. Someone has always told them what to believe, feel or do. Everything is black and white, and they’re done learning. Unfortunately, I’ve found that not knowing much about anything makes it easier to be absolutely certain about everything. Ignorance truly is bliss.

If they read this, they would no doubt be offended. “How dare he say I’ve never thought for myself!” Yet when you ask them a question about how they feel about a certain topic, it’s pretty much word for word what they’ve been told for years by their parents, pastor or politician, with no thought given by them whatsoever.

Example: I believe higher taxes will hurt small business.

Me: How? What about the huge amount of debt our country has racked up in the last eight years? You think it’s wise to keep borrowing money from China just to fund our federal government’s day to day operations?

Example: To be honest, I don’t really understand economics enough to debate it with you.

Me: Yeah, I figured as much.

Example: Obama is gonna take away your guns.

Me: Where’d you hear that?

Example: I got a postcard in the mail that says so.

Me: I’ve never heard Obama say that. If fact, he’s said the opposite. What about the Constitution? We are guaranteed gun rights by the Constitution.

Example: Well, I don’t know about that, but the mailer said he’d take away our guns if he gets elected.

It’s remarkable how effective this stuff is at inciting people’s fear. I guess this way of life is fine for some. If it’s all the same, I’d rather have my own ideas and come to know things for myself. Not because someone told me this is how it is, but because I took the time and effort to think about it with an open mind, and process it for myself to best of my cognitive ability. Even just for the sake of sheer curiosity.

My political outlook is another area of my life that has seen some changes lately. I’m currently registered as a libertarian. Libertarians believe in free will, personal responsibility and that the answer to every financial problem is to let the free market work without government interference. This is fine as long as when mega-corporations like AIG and GM are run into the ground by greedy and inept CEOs, they can’t take the entire US economy down with them. The libertarian in me says they failed. Let them go out of business. But if them going out of business can screw up the whole economy as badly as it has, then that’s not really fair to the rest of us who didn’t get into crazy, unconventional mortgages that we can’t afford, and those of us who know enough not to build H2s that get 8 miles to the gallon at a time when a gallon of gas costs $4.00. I just figure if we gotta bail them out now, we might as well have been regulating them from the get go, possibly saving us this whole headache in the first place. (I’m talking primarily about regulating the banking/mortgage industry here.) And while we’re at it, I might as well not be a libertarian anymore.

I used to be convinced that global warming was a myth. Conservative talk radio hosts swear this is true. In the name of intellectual curiosity, and the fact that I needed another meteorology class to complete my minor, I took a research class on the topic while I was studying at Embry-Riddle. Needless to say, global warming is real and all indications are that the causes are anthropogenic in nature. You can debate the effects of global warming, or whether or not the planet will be able to somehow naturally cope with the massive amounts of carbon that we’ve pumped from the ground and into our machines and then into the atmosphere. But if you still want to believe that it’s just some secret trojan horse plan left over from the commies bent on destroying our economy, you owe it to the population to remove yourself from the gene pool posthaste. As if humans producing less carbon emissions somehow automatically translates to our economy being destroyed. And as if the aforementioned CEOs need any help destroying it. The fact that it has even become a financial issue at all should tell you something about why some people would want us all to pretend it isn’t happening. There’s still money to be made.

Dog and Pony Show

This is a little late, but I already had it typed up.

Steps Proposed to Ease Air Travel Congestion

President George W. Bush announced Tuesday [11/18/2008] that he’s expanding the Thanksgiving express lanes this year to include military air corridors in the Midwest, the Southwest and the West Coast. That’s in addition to the East Coast corridors, which were also freed up for holiday traffic last year.

Good ole’ President Bush, doing his part to ease the travel crunch that inevitably delays your flights every year. Opening up military air space to civilian traffic sounds like a great idea, doesn’t it? Sure, maybe if you’re completely lacking in critical thinking skills.

It’s a dog and pony show.

First, and most basically, the military doesn’t own the airspace above your heads. It belongs to the people. The military is allowed to use small portions of it like Military Operation Areas or MOAs. This is in stark contrast to many other countries, mostly communist countries or dictatorships, where the military owns all the airspace and the people are allowed to use it.

Furthermore, non essential military personnel are home with their families just like you during the holidays. The military isn’t out doing training missions or practicing maneuvers on Thanksgiving or Christmas. In other words, all of the airspace President Bush is “expanding” isn’t being used by the military anyway, and air traffic controllers were already planning on using it as needed. Thanks anyway, Mr President.

Here’s an important point that I want everyone to understand. Merely getting airplanes to their destination faster does nothing to get them on the ground faster. Airports can only handle a finite number if operations (take-offs and landings) an hour. For our purposes, the number of airplanes an airport can handle depends on the amount of concrete available for airplanes to use to takeoff, land, taxi and park.

Think of it like this… You have a highway that is normally four lanes wide. El Presidenté snaps his fingers and makes the highway five lanes wide. The problem is that the number of exits to get off this highway are the same, so you have all these cars moving along nicely until they all try to get off the highway at the same places at the same time.

In other words, when you have 50 flights show up at LaGuardia during the same 60 minute span, and the airport only has enough concrete to accommodate 30 of them, the other 20 are going to have to hold and wait their turn to land because the airport is already at full capacity.

You see, delays don’t really happen during the en route phase of flight (excluding reroutes for weather.) We have plenty of airspace already. Delays happen at airports. The only real way to increase capacity without simultaneously increasing delays is to build more runways.

This same concept also applies to the pie in the sky technologies (see NextGen and ADS-B) that the current FAA administration has been touting as being the magic bullet to increasing capacity. You can fly airplanes closer together all day long, but where are you going to put them all when they want to land at JFK?

So you may ask why we are even pursuing these technologies. It’s simple. Money.

I’d like to introduce you to Marion Blakey. She ran a public relations firm and has no real aviation experience whatsoever, but was a political appointee to the office of administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration by none other than George W. Bush. She also has one of the worst fake southern accents I’ve ever heard. Anyways, she was instrumental in awarding contracts worth tens of billions (conservatively) of tax payer dollars to tech companies like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin in an “effort to increase system capacity.” Immediately after her term as FAA administrator was over, she was given the job of president and CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association, or AIA, at a multi-million dollar salary. You guessed it. The AIA is a trade group that represents the very same companies that she awarded all those billions in contracts to as FAA administrator.

Just another favor from the Decider.

Saxby Chambliss is a moron.

So I turn on CNN today, and I’m told that Saxby Chambliss has solicited the help of Caribou Barbie to help him win the run-off election to keep his senate seat for Georgia. She’s already lost one old man an election. Let’s shoot for back to back rejections of this stupidity.

If you live in Georgia, this should be cause enough for you to vote for Jim Martin in your state’s run-off election tomorrow. Go. Do it.

It’s Official

Jimmy Herring is one of my favorite guitarists. I always admired his playing and tone, but when I saw him with Widespread Panic in St. Augustine last month, he totally blew me away. (Listen to the aforementioned show for free right here) Sick, sick playing. Thank God I ordered the show in mp3 format. He even looks cool, like some wise old father-christmas tone sage.

Here he his doing amazing things to his PRS hollowbody.

If you’re even remotely into bluesy, jazzy, virtuosic guitar playing, check out his newest release on iTunes.

Or get it at the Rhapsody Music Store for $8.99 with no DRM encryption.

Blah, it’s Monday…

Life has been kinda slow since my last post.  Still waiting on the FAA, blah blah blah.

I’ve been doing some research on new speakers for my Avatar 2×12 cabinet. I opted for a couple of Tone Tubby speakers – both with hemp cones, but one with a ceramic magnet and one with an alnico magnet. I was totally second guessing this decision this weekend while playing at Beachside (really fun weekend BTW), because the Greenback and G12H 70th Anniversary that are currently in the cabinet were really sounding pretty good. I’ve never played hemp coned speakers before, so I’m not quite sure what to expect other than that they’ll take a relatively long time to break in and sound their best. Oh well, they’ll be here tomorrow. Might as well try ‘em out.

I’m playing a big Assemblies of God youth convention this weekend in Orlando with Mr. Jones and a few other friends, and of course I gotta try out the new speakers, so the race will be on to install them and log some significant hours (at least 10?) on them before the conference.

I’m also considering running a two amp setup via A/B/Y switch this weekend. Perhaps the Goodsell into the Avatar cab along with the Budda Superdrive, as I really like the Goodsell for clean to low gain rhythm and chord work and the Budda for higher gain stuff. I’ve never played through them simultaneously, and it might be a while before I have another opportunity to try it. Plus, it just sounds like good, clean fun.

The Lake of Death

Saturday was my wife’s, grandfather’s birthday. He lives on a beautiful lake, in a cabin he built himself, in the small town of Paisley. It’s pretty much in the middle of nowhere, Florida. To give you an idea of what I mean, they have a sign on a tree next to the lake in their backyard that reads “Bear Crossing.” The sign is factual. Occasionally, black bears do wander into their yard and cross it. I like to fish for largemouth bass and bream from their dock, and just enjoy nature when we get over there for a visit. While we were their this past Saturday, I was standing on their dock with my wife, her sister and their cousin, looking for critters on the lake shore. Lo and behold, I looked down and saw a beautiful little diamondback rattlesnake peacefully coiled up about a foot and half down from the dock and six inches from the waterline. I said, “Hey check that out. There’s a little rattlesnake!” Everyone came over to get a look at it. My wife’s mom and grandma got their cameras and started clicking pictures of it while it remained perfectly still.

I don’t remember who said it, but I heard, “Oh my god, kill it!” To which I replied, “Don’t kill it! Just let me get a stick or something and I’ll move it away from the house.” As I stood there waiting for everyone to get their picture, Grandpa walks up with a shovel, a pitchfork, and a hoe. I’m thinking, either he’s gonna do some impromptu gardening, or he’s actually gonna kill this beautiful snake. Again I said, “Don’t kill it! Just get me a bucket and I’ll move it off the property. It’s no big deal.” He sort of pretended like he didn’t hear me and proceeded to bludgeon that poor snake with a shovel while he mumbled about how it could bite their cat. I was shocked. When he finished killing it, there in front of God and everybody, he asked me to move it to the water. Still in shock from what I had just witnessed, and afraid that if I refused, he’d just ask one of the girls to do it, I regrettably complied. As I moved the tattered remains, he proceeded to tell me how he had seen a large rattlesnake on the road once and ran it over 7 or 8 times to make sure it was dead, and how whenever he finds water moccasins near the house, he pins them underwater to drown them. As we walked to the house, he continued telling me that he’s killed a lot of animals around their house, including an otter, alligators and probably dozens of snakes. To his credit, he said he felt bad, and even cried after he killed the otter. Again I’m in shock. But now with a side order of horror.

Dinner wasn’t really that great for me on Saturday.

I consider myself a normal, reasonable person. I think animals are delicious and I try to eat at least one a day. In other words, you won’t see me holding a PETA sign at a demonstration for animal rights any time soon. I just like seeing wildlife, and I have a healthy appreciation for all things nature. What I witnessed on Saturday was one of the most cold hearted and vacuous displays I’ve seen in a long time. And I have seen some shit.

What the hell is the point of living close to nature like that if you’re just gonna kill it whenever it gets in your way?

Anyone?

Anyone?

Bueller?

I’m not sure why this affected me as much as it did, but I couldn’t wait to leave, and I had tears in my eyes for most of the hour and a half drive home. Maybe it was the guilt I felt, and still feel, about being the one that pointed the snake out to everyone who otherwise wouldn’t have noticed it, thus contributing to it’s unjust death. Or maybe it was the feeling of being betrayed by someone I trusted who came along and callously destroyed something that I just wanted everyone to be able to appreciate. I do know this… In the span of about fifteen minutes, a man I admired reduced my level of respect and trust for him to near zero. And I promise you, that’s the last time I go to the lake to look for wildlife.