Hamlet

A couple of weeks ago, we all watched the excellent Royal Shakespeare Company Hamlet that aired locally on PBS (some while before). You know: David Tennant (as Hamlet), Patrick Stewart (as Claudius). No production is ever flawless, and this was no exception: though I felt the CCTV gimmick worked surprisingly well to provide a constant haunting sense of being observed, Hamlet’s own use of a camcorder seemed a bit much.

But the production was uniformly gripping and absorbing; I found myself chewing over aspects of both the play and its performance for days.

Not surprisingly, both Clara and Timothy were transfixed. We paused a number of times to explain details (or to look them up in the (Jenkins) Arden edition), of course, but by and large the video was wholly comprehensible and entertaining for both of them.

On its own, this was a great experience, and I’d planned to write here about it anyway, but over the last two nights, we watched the 1990 film version of Tom Stoppard’s

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead

with Richard Dreyfuss (as chief player) and Tim Roth & Gary Oldman (as the title characters, either respectively or not). Karen and I had seen the stage play once or twice – but never Stoppard’s film.

We both like Stoppard, but even so were unprepared for the brilliance of this film. The kids, I think, were particularly captivated by some of the dialogue hooks linking the show to Hamlet, as well as Stoppard’s absurdity (especially some of the logic puzzles) and Roth & Oldman’s bumbling, of course.

The bumbling and some of the facial expressions and mannerisms (especially Oldman’s) seemed such an homage to Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy that I just now googled to see whether anyone else had already seen the connection. Oldman himself had, of course; Glenn Collins quotes him in “Oldman onscreen: The psychopath in perfect accent” in the New York Times (1 October, 1990):

I play this buffoonish Stan Laurel to Tim Roth’s Oliver Hardy.

And in a 2003 Amazon customer review of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, Mark Steyn writes:

Gary Oldman and Tim Roth make a great pairing, with Oldman expressing a rarely seen gift for comedy – his performance here is almost reminiscent of Stan Laurel.

So that answers that question!

Anyway, a most excellent time was had by all, and I’m ever so grateful (and almost amazed) that I’m part of a family that enjoys such fare.

In yesterday’s mail, I found an envelope addressed simply to “Praxisworks.” Inside, I found a snapshot that I’d never seen before from my dad’s Harvard days. A brief enclosing note said only

Erick [sic],

This was taken during Jon’s freshman year. Thought you might like to have it.

C.

I don’t know who you are, C., but thank you so much! We don’t have very much from dad’s college days, so this means quite a lot. Naturally, I’ll share this with my brother as well.

Since I hope over time to construct an historical family journal here, I’m also retroactively posting the photo in 1957 “as” my dad.

Slate has now published three sets of excerpts from Karen’s father (John Mueller, Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University)’s new book, Terror, Security, and Money: Balancing the Risks, Benefits, and Costs of Homeland Security. Oxford University Press plans to release the book on October 7th, but Amazon started selling and shipping it yesterday.

Slate

September 7: “Does the United States Spend Too Much on Homeland Security?”: The government refuses to subject homeland security to a cost-benefit analysis.

September 8: “Probability Neglect”: Why the government massively overestimates the risks of terrorism.

September 9: “1,667 Times Square-Style Attacks Every Year”: That’s how many terrorism plots we would have to foil to justify our current spending on homeland security.

Bibliography

I’ve published a comprehensive list of John’s books from 2004 through present (six of them!), complete with descriptions, blurbs, book covers, and everything. I’ll extend it back to the Dawn of Time soon.

Also, here’s a link to my September 8th post, “John Mueller in Slate, NYT, Aljazeera”.

TIOBE Programming Community Index for Objective C 2002 – 2011

I first started learning Objective C in the autumn of 1989 – which would be three years to the left of the chart to the left of this one!

Shoulda stuck with it….

So, in another interesting small-world story, we heard independently from Karen’s dad (John Mueller, Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University) and from our friend David Plotz (editor, Slate) that Slate would be publishing excerpts from John’s forthcoming book, Terror, Security, and Money: Balancing the Risks, Benefits, and Costs of Homeland Security, which Oxford University Press plans to release on October 7th.

John’s sensible thesis that US$3.3 trillion has been just a teeny bit more than we needed to spend (considering that “at present rates (and including 9/11 in the count), the likelihood a resident of the United States will perish at the hands of a terrorist is 1 in 3.5 million per year”) is finally beginning to be talked about, now that we’re coming up on the 10th anniversary of 11 September 2001.

John’s been quoted or featured in at least the following stories over the past 24 hours:

Slate

• Does the United States Spend Too Much on Homeland Security? (7 September 2011)

New York Times

• Al Qaeda’s Outsize Shadow (8 September 2011):

  The brazenness and sheer luck of the 9/11 plot have stood for a decade as an argument that anything is possible.

• One 9/11 Tally: $3.3 Trillion (8 September 2011)

Aljazeera

• American fears: a decade after 9/11 (8 September 2011):

  Ten years after 9/11, nearly half of New Yorkers polled say they worry that their city will be attacked again.

Cincinnati Enquirer

• Region reaps $70M in homeland security funds: Could money allocated after 9/11 have been better used elsewhere? (8 September 2011)

Dayton Daily News

• A decade later, terrorists have not employed nuclear weapons (8 September 2011)

As I mentioned 23 days ago, I’m combining posts from various different journals and blogs that I’ve tried keeping over the past few years. The mess has been due partly to my failure to fall in love with any pre-packaged solution (Drupal, SquareOne, Posterous, WordPress, Tumblr, … I’ve tried them all) and partly to my own decades-long frustration at my apparent inability to write in anything like a consistent manner.

I gave myself 10 days to accomplish this, and 23 days later it’s still not done. Of course, I have actually written entries for nine of those 23 days, which is probably better than I’ve ever managed.

And, I have in fact been somewhat successful on the journal integration front, too. All unique entries (mostly from late last year and early this year) from my Tumblr blog have been integrated, as have all the entries from the Mueller-Harder’s Posterous pages (also from early this year). I’ve moved in other entries from several other sources, too, but they’re not completed yet.

This shall continue as I have time, as will the tweaking of various aspects of this site:

• First up will be cleaning up and normalizing the various tags and categories so that entries will be more easily findable (in the meantime, however, do note that the search facility is actually really good).
• Next up will be convincing more Mueller-Harders to write entries.
• Finally, I want to add more current and historical posts with photographs; we have thousands, and they’re good, and there’s no reason everyone shouldn’t be able to see them.

Those of you who have been looking in on my site since 1994, thank you for your patience. I think we’re finally beginning to get there.

If it seemed we Mueller-Harders disappeared off the face of the map for a couple of days, it’s because of our last-minute two-day trip to Washington, D.C., to help some friends out. That’s right: 585 miles down on Saturday, 585 miles back on Sunday.

It was a bit of a lark, really. It would have sufficed for just one of us to go, but both Karen and I thought it’d be kind of fun. And Clara wanted to go. And so did Timothy – although he ended up jumping ship in Manhattan to spend the evening with some friends. And so we went….

It would’ve been nice to spend an extra day – we and our hosts would have loved that! The forecast up here, though, was for several more inches of rain between Sunday night and Monday night – and driving all day Monday through rain and arriving Monday night to find more flooded roads and power outages sounded decidedly un-fun. So, despite wanting to see a museum or two and to spend some time with our friends (and despite my nasty cold which, when combined with allergies, made me really long for a day’s rest in Washington), we returned on Sunday – picking Timothy up along the Saw Mill Parkway (well, at his friend’s house near the parkway, that is).

The forecast was nearly right: it rained almost constantly from Sunday night through Tuesday early morning. Fortunately for our foundations and roads and bridges and trees, however, the quantity was less than originally thought – so all was fine. We all slept in, and in the afternoon we played my family’s old Flinch game.

Most of the dramatic headlines and pictures are from the southern half of Vermont, where a number of towns are cut off and where thousands of people are facing days or weeks without power before road crews will be able to rebuild roads and bridges sufficiently for electricity crews to restore power (often requiring entirely new runs of power lines, apparently).

We had a narrow brush here: though we actually had about the same amount of rain as we had had during last May’s flooding (5” – 8”), the ground was somewhat less saturated at the outset, so somewhat less water ended up running off into our streams and rivers.

Cabot village was fine (barely) and Montpelier sustained flooding as bad as last May’s (described then as a once-in-70-years flood), but people were better prepared for it.

The winds were nothing special: 30 mph with gusts to 40 Sunday morning, 30 mph with gusts to 55 Sunday night. Unfortunately, we did lose our best-looking plum tree – but that was the worst of our damage. Other than that, only some tree limbs were lost.

The nightmare situation I was imagining had been an extended power outage during which our sump pump continually drew large currents from our batteries: fine during sunny days (as Monday and Tuesday were), but untenable during the nights – we just don’t have that big a system. We would have had to move a lot of things out of our basement.

Miraculously, though, though the power blinked off many times, it never stayed out. And despite the huge quantities of rain (we’ve never seen our swale carry so much water!), only a few inches ended up in our sump: I don’t think the pump ran even once!

And, not surprisingly, our new standing-seam metal roof survived beautifully and passed the rainwater off and out from the house like nobody’s business.

So, in short, we feel very fortunate. The storm forced us to clean up the remains of the roofing project (now 99% done), piles of kindling, and other things from the yard and gardens, so actually things now look quite nice. Also, the four of us attacked the basement tooth and tong on Sunday morning – so it’s much neater and we could survive a couple of inches of standing water without it being too much of an inconvenience.

But it reminded us how kind Mother Nature usually is to us here, and how we live amongst people who will do anything to help out if you need it.

Wow! And I thought things had been getting exciting before! Read on, dear reader, right to the end….

Drove in to Montpelier to pick up a few things before the weekend. No lines. No hoarding.

Got most everything put away, and the power went out. No, no Irene yet: beautiful blue sky, high barometric pressure; gorgeous, in fact. And besides, our power doesn’t go out. If there’s a power outage, our battery backup switches on a literal microsecond later – and even if our batteries had been depleted (inconceivable!), we ought to have been producing at least two or three kilowatts more than we were using (a perfectly clear noontime).

So WTH? [I was taught that “WTF” was rude.] One of our charge controllers had overheated, that much I could tell. Billions of error messages on the console (battery voltage too high; battery voltage too low; can’t communicate with inverter; etc.). Hmph. I’d actually planned to top off the electrolyte in each cell (before the upcoming storm), so I brought the distilled water downstairs, shut everything off, cleaned up the batteries, and checked the levels: all were A-OK. I checked the voltage, and each battery was right at 6.96 ±0.03 volts. Turned everything back on.

Everything was OK, mostly – except that there kept being some missing power. Bright sun, a couple hours past solar noon, say each set of panels should have been generating about 800 watts DC. They were, for a total of 3.2Kw DC. The batteries were full, so all power should have been inverted to AC, which can lose as much as 20%, so that would be about 2.5 or 2.6Kw AC. We were using about 500 watts. So we should have been “selling” about 2Kw out to the grid. Only 1Kw was going out.

Unresolved.

Later, after the sun went down, I found that I was “buying” back about 1Kw from the grid in order to charge the batteries, which were 100% full. Something squirrelly here lies. The good news for the upcoming storm is that the batteries are full and that we can use that power in the house, if the grid power goes out (I tested this). The bad news is that I’m not entirely sure that recharging the batteries will work properly – either from the solar panels or from the grids. I don’t want to test this in case it doesn’t work properly and I end up with less power stored before the storm.

And our solar electricity expert – and good friend – had the temerity to unexpectedly die last spring. [We and hundreds or maybe thousands of others mourn his loss for infinitely more important and personal reasons. But still, there you go.]

In the midst of all this, I heard from our summer neighbors that they had not left yesterday for their winter home; that, in fact, one of them had been to the emergency room at the local hospital twice in the last two days, and was even then en route to Fletcher Allen Hospital in Burlington. So I’m keeping an extra eye out on their house and of course let them know that we’d be here for them if there was anything we could do.

Lots of outdoor cleanup: pieces of clapboarding and carpentry refuse that usually gets entirely cleaned up only right at the end of a job suddenly represent potentially lethal objects. This is entirely done, but the rest of my list for tomorrow’s outdoor cleanup is very long.

But by the end of the day, I know I’ll have Karen and Timothy and Clara back here, and that’s going to be great.

Finally, I think I’ll leave you with film footage from the 1927 flood in Vermont. The forecast for this weekend is for slightly less rainfall than that year, and our ground is somewhat less saturated. Hopefully, this time, we won’t lose more than 1200 bridges:

I wish people were more even-keeled about this kind of thing: we should not panic, but neither should we shrug and say that everything is over-hyped. A big storm is coming: make sure you have supplies on hand and that your yard is picked up and that you have a plan for what to do if you’re flooded out or a tree lands on your roof or you have no power for a few days (remembering that sump pumps require electricity!). Then gather your friends or family and play Settlers of Catan.

Our up-to-date forecast.

• Implemented tasteful “sponsor me” plea on the praxisworks.org site header, q.v.. Contact me privately if you’re interested in my secret project.
• Recovered and posted Christmas Letter 2000, as well as some other old journal entries.
• Continued research into the iPhoto vs. Aperture question.
• Repaired lawn mower.
• Mowed lawn.
• Broke lawn mower (well, actually Matt has suggested that this latest problem is due to too much ethanol in the fuel; I’ll buy some fuel stabilizer & see whether that’ll do the trick).
• Was saddened by Steve Jobs’s resignation. I think John Gruber’s single sentence sums everything up the best, though: “Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is Apple itself.” Apple users and shareholders rejoice, for good times are still ahead.
• Harvested three bushels of apples (½ eating grade, 2½ for cider).
• “Harvested” two wheel barrows full of unusable apples (yes, we’d even plucked many, many blossoms this year – I’ve never seen the trees so laden, despite that work!)
• Harvested similar ratios – but far smaller quantities – of three different varieties of plums (no time to check on names now; I’ll try to revisit this soon).
• Cleaned up far more of the remains of the Florescent Light Incident as well as much of the unavoidable dirt and debris left from the roofers’ use of the garage for their metal cutting.
• Downloaded and installed fully twenty updates and upgrades for Timothy’s computer (with more still to come – man, did every piece of software get updated for Lion?)