Apparently the little brat has completed a milestone, at a time roughly appropriate for his protohuman development timetable. He performed his first 180-degree roll today.

What else would one expect from Calvin Klein advertisements, now that even Barbie is risque. After decades if skirting the gray fuzzy border between innocence, erotica, and indecency, here is another new poster selling with young flesh.

I had the pleasure to use The Better Way, as Toronto’s mass transit system calls itself, a few times lately to commute. Advice: if one keeps one’s senses turned strictly inward, it’s not so bad.

But if you turn on your senses, beware:

• your skin will tell you how close you are to a cattlecar or station filled with rush hour travelers, how you are part of the mass in “mass transit”
• your nose will want to go numb with the odorific movement of thickly recycled air
• your eyes will fill you with propaganda: ordinary advertisements (“street people need your credit card”, “psychic expo this weekend”), unsold space filled with TTC self-promotion (“you riders are so gosh darned intelligent for not driving”, “drivers are idiots for spending so much money”, seriously), free mini-newspapers filled with lefty articles (“gun bust in Scarborough”, “mothers should breastfeed more”, “wipe out racism with Black History Week”, “brave students march on the Bastille”)
• your ears will be mellowed by the constant murmur
• your throat will pass sickness into your system if you inhale or ingest the aerosol cloud of everpresent caugh droplets

• your brain will notice how, unless your trip is very fortunately routed, time passes so much slower

It still beats walking and suicide biking, I guess.

I’ve made a little breakthrough in safety-oriented thinking.

The key? Leaving one’s brain on.

Use that little imperative as a warning, your own internal peril-sensitive sunglasses. When you feel your mind not actively challenged, watch out. Sound an alarm during any activity performed in a risky environment, if ever it turns routine, easy, if you can “go on auto-pilot”, if you can let your attention wander.

This happens countless times. Cutting vegetables. Driving in nasty traffic. Landing an airplane (ok, that usually happens to us lucky few licensed pilots). Writing email at work. Garden work. Just walking around the house!

When I feel my mind become comfortable with the situation, I start making mistakes. Often just little ones (barely noticing some road hazard, screwing up grammar, miscalculating movements, knocking into things, misspeaking, cutting myself); sometimes more serious ones. When I put my consciousness to rest, I relinquish full responsibility for my actions and pass it to the lizard brain. And he, frankly, is just not as good as I am — even if he doesn’t get us into trouble most of the time.

Sure, it’s tiring to try to stay conscious of every little thing one does. But, like exercise, it should get easier over time. Maybe this simple analysis can be reformulated for consumption by youngsters, and help motivate the concept of paying attention. Let them contemplate the immediate antecedent of an error, see whether they felt excessively relaxed. Let them try to detect those moments when their attention diverts. Let them imagine what might happen after that moment. Maybe they’ll turn into an overly self-conscious little monster like I have been.

Having put in a few extra hours of work on my new project over the weekend, I gave myself a morning off today to refresh those flying skills that atrophy after 12 days' break. It turned into a real workout that ended with an unexpected landing at Pearson International.

IFR training flights are generally scheduled in weather such that a budding student pilot gets exposed to as bad conditions as they can handle at the intermediate approach airports, and yet need an almost certain return to home base. Luckily for students in the Toronto area, one can generally fly toward the higher terrain to the west, such as Hamilton, London, Kitchener/Waterloo, and toy with some bad weather, where the bad weather can be localized. This way, the flight can end on a relatively relaxed note, and the airplane (if a rental) can be available for the next guy.

With real purposeful cross-country flights, one decides whether to go or not primarily based on the destination weather. Conditions at one’s point of origin are not too important, except as an emergency-return consideration.

My personal training flights are somewhere in between. With a private airplane, the precise point where the airplane eventually ends up is not going to inconvenience others, only myself. Operating out of the Island Airport is complicated by the fact that the only bad-weather instrument approaches are relatively conservative (one is not permitted to fly too low or close to the airport, before having to catch sight of it), so anything worse than “medium-bad” signals bad news for landing here.

So, in order to conduct a comfortable training flight out of the island, weather by the Toronto lakeshore has to be no worse than “medium-bad”; but not too far to the west or north, “bad” weather should be available for training purposes. Such conditions occur dozens of days a year.

And then there are days like today. A frontal system was sweeping through Ohio / Ontario, and detailed forecasts estimated its snow’s arrival into Toronto around 1:30PM, just late enough to let me sneak back home in time. Its intensity (visibility obscuration) was forecast as being only “medium-bad”, in the sense that landing back home in such conditions is possible, just barely.

Unfortunately, the forecasts were optimistic. Barely 30 minutes into my 2-hour refresher flight, conditions back home turned lousy. I did not know that at the time, because I kept myself fully occupied just doing the practice approaches and didn’t make time to receive updated weather. To avoid trouble, I would have had to hear about the sudden arrival of the bad stuff well before I did even my first exercise, and turned back real fast.

As it happened, I completed ¾ of what I intended to cover, cut the trip short, and headed home. During the leg of the trip from St. Catharines to Toronto, passing over this corner of Lake Ontario, I heard three other airplanes on frequency, about to arrive into the Island. Alarmingly, the automated weather broadcast said “conditions are changing rapidly, contact [the control] tower”. That’s an indication of sudden bad stuff. Sure enough, I heard each of those airplanes make an attempt at the approach, and each of them had to “miss” and go somewhere else.

I was in a holding pattern at the time, waiting for my turn. I kept busy by flipping through the maps and charts to find a good alternative plan. While I had filed what was once a legal alternate (backup airport, with acceptable weather then forecast), the early arrival of worse weather rendered that a moot point: it was not a safe bet any more. I was not going to piss around and give it a try, just in case the snow stops for ninety crucial seconds, nor let hopeful cockiness go beyond the legal bounds set by the approach charts. Instead I asked the controllers to send me straight to Pearson International, the best chance to land anywhere in the province. This airport has five separate runways, good precision navigation equipment and ground support machinery, that makes it a good last resort.

The controllers were great, squeezing several of us little guys into the queue of jets coming and going. This was challenging because it suddenly impacted multiple airplanes concurrently, and because they had their own problems on the ground. Runway lights were going on and off, snow plows were dispatched then undispatched; inbound airplanes were told to switch several times between different runways. This is a big deal for big jets, as they usually line up with their assigned runway twenty miles away, and don’t like to change anything in the last few minutes.

By some coincidence, Charlie Rampulla was in one of the other island-bound airplanes, and goofed around with his old controller buddies on the radio, like he always does. Hm, he called me “green” to one particular controller, to explain my few clumsily worded transmissions. I will have to spank him next time we fly together.

Anyway, once on the ground on Pearson, and once I could meander off of the very slippery runway, the rest went smoothly. The snow made it hard to see anything but taxiway signs, but eventually I found the place we used for that Hope Air mission a few weeks ago. With any luck, I’ll fly GXRP back home tomorrow, that is, unless the weather beats forecasts all black and blue (but mostly white) again.

UPDATE: It took an extra day, but GXRP is home. The Pearson detour cost a handsome bundle (48 hours’ hangarage charged as “3 days”, two hours’ fuel, ramp fee) was $700, and I’m expecting another bill yet. On the other hand, I had a spectacular take-off during Pearson’s busy period this morning. The controllers asked me to stay low and turn after my westbound take-off, directly crossing over the airport north to south. I flew just barely above and between the airport towers, terminals, and got a look at a dozen slumbering jets moving to or fro. I landed at the island ten minutes later.

Having put in a few extra hours of work on my new project over the weekend, I gave myself a morning off today to refresh those flying skills that atrophy after 12 days’ break. It turned into a real workout that ended with an unexpected landing at Pearson International.

IFR training flights are generally scheduled in weather such that a budding student pilot gets exposed to as bad conditions as they can handle at the intermediate approach airports, and yet need an almost certain return to home base. Luckily for students in the Toronto area, one can generally fly toward the higher terrain to the west, such as Hamilton, London, Kitchener/Waterloo, and toy with some bad weather, where the bad weather can be localized. This way, the flight can end on a relatively relaxed note, and the airplane (if a rental) can be available for the next guy.

With real purposeful cross-country flights, one decides whether to go or not primarily based on the destination weather. Conditions at one’s point of origin are not too important, except as an emergency-return consideration.

My personal training flights are somewhere in between. With a private airplane, the precise point where the airplane eventually ends up is not going to inconvenience others, only myself. Operating out of the Island Airport is complicated by the fact that the only bad-weather instrument approaches are relatively conservative (one is not permitted to fly too low or close to the airport, before having to catch sight of it), so anything worse than “medium-bad” signals bad news for landing here.

So, in order to conduct a comfortable training flight out of the island, weather by the Toronto lakeshore has to be no worse than “medium-bad”; but not too far to the west or north, “bad” weather should be available for training purposes. Such conditions occur dozens of days a year.

And then there are days like today. A frontal system was sweeping through Ohio / Ontario, and detailed forecasts estimated its snow’s arrival into Toronto around 1:30PM, just late enough to let me sneak back home in time. Its intensity (visibility obscuration) was forecast as being only “medium-bad”, in the sense that landing back home in such conditions is possible, just barely.

Unfortunately, the forecasts were optimistic. Barely 30 minutes into my 2-hour refresher flight, conditions back home turned lousy. I did not know that at the time, because I kept myself fully occupied just doing the practice approaches and didn’t make time to receive updated weather. To avoid trouble, I would have had to hear about the sudden arrival of the bad stuff well before I did even my first exercise, and turned back real fast.

As it happened, I completed 3/4 of what I intended to cover, cut the trip short, and headed home. During the leg of the trip from St. Catherines to Toronto, passing over this corner of Lake Ontario, I heard three other airplanes on frequency, about to arrive into the Island. Alarmingly, the automated weather broadcast said “conditions are changing rapidly, contact [the control] tower”. That’s an indication of sudden bad stuff. Sure enough, I heard each of those airplanes make an attempt at the approach, and each of them had to “miss” and go somewhere else.

I was in a holding pattern at the time, waiting for my turn. I kept busy by flipping through the maps and charts to find a good alternative plan. While I had filed what was once a legal alternate (backup airport, with acceptable weather then forecast), the early arrival of worse weather rendered that a moot point: it was not a safe bet any more. I was not going to piss around and give it a try, just in case the snow stops for ninety crucial seconds, nor let hopeful cockiness go beyond the legal bounds set by the approach charts. Instead I asked the controllers to send me straight to Pearson International, the best chance to land anywhere in the province. This airport has five separate runways, good precision navigation equipment and ground support machinery, that makes it a good last resort.

The controllers were great, squeezing several of us little guys into the queue of jets coming and going. This was challenging because it suddenly impacted multiple airplanes concurrently, and because they had their own problems on the ground. Runway lights were going on and off, snow plows were dispatched then undispatched; inbound airplanes were told to switch several times between different runways. This is a big deal for big jets, as they usually line up with their assigned runway twenty miles away, and don’t like to change anything in the last few minutes.

By some coincidence, Charlie Rampulla was in one of the other island-bound airplanes, and goofed around with his old controller buddies on the radio, like he always does. Hm, he called me “green” to one particular controller, to explain my few clumsily worded transmissions. I will have to spank him next time we fly together.

Anyway, once on the ground on Pearson, and once I could meander off of the very slippery runway, the rest went smoothly. The snow made it hard to see anything but taxiway signs, but eventually I found the place we used for that Hope Air mission a few weeks ago. With any luck, I’ll fly GXRP back home tomorrow, that is, unless the weather beats forecasts all black and blue (but mostly white) again.

UPDATE: It took an extra day, but GXRP is home. The Pearson detour cost a handsome bundle (48 hours’ hangarage charged as “3 days”, two hours’ fuel, ramp fee) was $700, and I’m expecting another bill yet. On the other hand, I had a spectacular take-off during Pearson’s busy period this morning. The controllers asked me to stay low and turn after my westbound take-off, directly crossing over the airport north to south. I flew just barely above and between the airport towers, terminals, and got a look at a dozen slumbering jets moving to or fro. I landed at the island ten minutes later.

Yesterday on TV, some old hippie lady, dressed in indian-style garb, belted out some ancient 60s style folk tune about something or another, probably something about how pink people shouldn’t hurt brown people. But was she serious?

Take love songs. Every other popular tune is about losing a girl, getting a girl, getting rid of a girl, loving a girl. Most of the remainder are the same, but about guys. But why? For a person involved in a longish relationship, these songs’ lyrics just go in one ear, travel down the ear canal, impact the tympanic membrane, vibrate parts of the cochlea, and proceed to send spectral signals to the brain. But it stops there: unless the music part is very well done, the lyrics are not paid attention to.

Now consider a broken-hearted teenager with some money in his pocket. Or one who first wishes to get that girl (or guy), then get heart-broken. Seriously, those spectral signals get priority-courier’d right into that foremost part of the brain, saying “listen to me, I know how you feel”. Around a breakup, every bloody stupid girl/boy song somehow takes on some meaning and makes the sufferer want to listen.

And buy those records so he or she can listen to them some more, at a later moping moment.

In other words, I hypothesize that there are all these songs about lovy dovy stuff because (a) they attract lonely people through some weird subliminal “buy-me-now” attraction, and (b) they don’t outright offend those not so lonely. So the records sell.

What this has to do with the hippie anti-war songs should be clear. Not that I was personally there, my fertile imagination tells me that there must have been more than a few “artists” who, talented just beyond the modicum, used the 60s/70s lefty American movements as a captive market. In some cases, not far beyond the modicum: in my opinion, several groups like Peter Paul & Mary actually sound pretty awful, not just now but then.

I would love to hear someday of some record executive who, during those days, made an explicit effort to pump out those “spontaneous”, “heartfelt”, “important” songs using manufactured bands. Heck, I would love to hear some of these “folk heroes” come out one day, admit that they never gave a leaping lump of fecal figment about the Vietnam War or other cool causes, they just wanted to sell records. All they had to do was to dress up in silly clothes, mix in a few words about the cause-du-jour into some lame songs, and … PROFIT!

Hm, not too different from so-called christian rock.

Being sick sucks rocks. Being sick in a house with an infant and a tired wife flings boulders.

Sometime late last week, perhaps during my brief visit to the office, I must have caught a nasty bug. It started with a headache on Saturday, fatigue Sunday, and absolute crap on Monday. Absolute crap in this case means:

• dull head, barely any ability to perform work
• continuous shivers
• nasty caughs
• loss of appetite
• total inability to sleep, something that hasn’t happened before
• wanting to stay away from the two other humans

• inability to safely help Juimiin out with Eric chores

The only thing worse than being sick is passing to the others.

During the four or five days of my partial demise and subsequent convalescence, it’s been noisy around the house.

There are many sound sources.

My hugely rumbling huge abdomen has been producing a touching background. The loss of appetite has lessened, but the crippled sense of taste hasn’t learned to walk again yet. So I’m hungry, but can’t bear to put down much food. Everything tastes like sponge, the kind produced by a week’s fermentation after wiping down a horse’s backside.

Eric has learned a few new ways to amuse himself: emitting a high-pitched, 20-second screech, signifying a medium degree of delight. Sometimes this is structured as a sweet staccato, whose volume does not reach to the ear-splitting horrors he can emit when he’s mad. That’s the way to know that this is a happy sound. The screech is often accompanied by wild multi-appendagial gesticulation. If he were any older, some silly government might give him an arts grant to develop it.

The other Eric innovation is giggling. He’s again roughtly on schedule in being able to produce the most hilarious giggles, when the situation is just right. He can be tickled, or he can be laughed-at from up close, and if his little mind can think of nothing better to do, he can smile and laugh back. If the stimulation continues, this escalates into a long, drawn-out silly laugh. This is supposed to be one of those reward-oriented development milestones that occur periodically with infants. They reward the parents for putting up with all the crap since the last one. Seems to work on us.

In an article on powerline, the author complains of being called stupid. His crime is real enough: “happening to believe that the theory of evolution is not correct”. But he’s in plenty of company.

It is ironic to what extent otherwise intelligent people can close their minds so completely on certain topics. The powerline guy uses his critical faculties in overdrive when it comes to logical analysis of liberal silliness. But when it comes to articles of religious faith, snap! go the padlocks of the mind, the sense of inquiry. The same person who would advocate putting creationism stickers on biology textbooks would have his head explode if someone were to nail analogous “this book contains only a story, not a fact” stickers onto his treasured bibles.

(By the way, the “it is a theory, not a fact” warning illustrates a serious ignorance of science, bordering on a category error. Of course no theory is a fact – that’s not possible by definition. Science collects facts (observations), and formulates theories (“laws”) that aim to explain and predict them. New facts cause reexamination of prior theories, so as to asymptotically approach the truth.) UPDATE: See also this Bad Astronomy article.

There are other examples everywhere, like the tremendous amount of superstition out there. I know a recent biology Ph.D. graduate who studied breast cancer. This same person is obsessed with oriental nonsense like having lucky mirrors hanging in front of her house, and asking temple gods and astrologers for answers to everyday questions. (Of course these answers correlate better with coin tosses than with intended outcomes.) A person whose profession is logically deducing relationships between sickness and its causes seriously believes in her time off that lucky charms have an effect. And yet her mind doesn’t comprehend the absurdity of believing both those things.

Such selective detachment from reality is probably a mental illness, but afflicts so many people that it is useless to diagnose it.

A working airplane, nice weather, and grandparents eager to visit the little brat, create a pretty flying opportunity.

Yesterday, conditions made possible a trip that I’ve been imagining for a few months: bringing my parents to Toronto from Windsor for a few hours, then returning them back home. By car, two such round trips would take around 15 hours, making it impractical, but with an airplane, it’s far better. (OK, two car round trips would be silly – they could just drive themselves.)

It’s not perfect. We had airport ferry delays, oil top-up delays, and refueling delays. But it’s pretty good: 80 minutes each way in calm air. My normally nervous nellie parents took turns drowsing off in the back, while the other took the controls briefly. They got to experience flying low as we paralleled the 401 highway, flying high, flying in marginal conditions through some surprise snow squalls, and finally flying at night. I logged over six hours, of which the passengers enjoyed half.

While in Toronto, of course they ate up little Eric as he held court. He kindly dispensed noises, movements, laughter, and only a bit of hazardous waste, to the visitors. That last bit was probably a royal put-down due to the absence of presents. Next time they will know better. Just kidding.