Looking on the Bright Side

05-21 is a significant date in my family. It's my birthday. But rather than get all bummed out thinking about which birthday this latest addition to a great teetering pile of them it was, I decided to look on the bright side.

05-21-2005 was the day these two dear friends officially plighted their troth in front of God and everybody. So instead of thinking of an already large number that seems to fourple before my very eyes, I'll think about a nice round little number --3-- that's been quietly growing into what I hope will be a nice round big number.

As in

Happy Third Anniversary, John and Sally!

And you thought I forgot, didn't you . . . . !

Tempelhof Kaput? -- say it isn't so!

I read an article (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/arts/design/20tempelhof.html?pagewanted=1) in the New York Times the other day that made me very sad -- The Berliners are trying to close Tempelhof Airport -- the Berlin Airlift airport, the turf of the immortal Candy Bomber. A big chunk of history stands to be lost here -- not just world history, but my own personal history. I lived at Tempelhof -- in the actual Hitler-built airport building -- for the three and a half years (1973-1977) that I was stationed with the 6912th Security Squadron, USAF, in what was then West Berlin.

Imagine spending almost 20 hours in the air flying from Lubbock to Dallas, to New York, to Gatwick-London, to Frankfurt, (west) Germany and FINALLY to reach your destination -- the famous Divided City. I still vividly remember the landing. As you can see, Tempelhof is literally right smack dab in the middle of the city -- As you descend and make the turn that puts you on final approach, you can't even see the runway out your window -- it's so teeny -- all you can see is streets and streets of buildings. It looks like you are going to land right in the middle of a bunch of apartment blocks. The landing lights that mark the end of the runway are indeed just outside the walls of a cemetary -- the plane is about 30 feet off the ground and you look out your window and there's all these gravestones right underneath you!!! You can't even see the runway until you are only seconds from touchdown. I was still in the throes of quite a hefty adrenalin rush as we were taxiing up to the terminal, when I looked out my window and there in the grass between the runway and the taxi way was a guy, a dog and about 40 head of quietly grazing sheep -- not only right in the middle of downtown Berlin, but in the middle of a working airport! I thought, Lord have mercy! What have I gotten myself into now?

It was actually a piece of cake to land those blue and white Pan Am 727's on that postage stamp of a runway (The 727's were referred to as "tricycles" because of their three jet engines -- one on each wing and one on the tail). What was mindblowing was watching a C5A land on that little postage stamp of a runway -- those things are gy-normous! -- Their manufacturer designation was C-5A Galaxy -- "big gals" - Their wings were so wide (200+feet) about 15 feet of wing was hanging off the runway on each side.The difference in height between the wingtip and the ground when it is empty of fuel and when it is fully fueled is 16 feet!! (The pix to the left was not taken at Tempelhof -- I chose it because it has people for scale to show how big those "gals" were!) We could always tell when one had landed. The whole building would vibrate because they just taxied them around to the hangar aprons -- right next door, actually -- parked them, popped the nose open and unloaded them without even shutting the engines off. We'd get off the (Mercedes Benz!) bus from work, walk into the building, feel the floor vibrating, and invariably somebody would say "Mama's home. . ." -- It was more cost/fuel efficient to just throttle those huge jet engines back and let them idle rather than turn them off and then have to restart them and warm them back up again -- because while they were unloading our stuff, they were refueling the plane, and once they were done, they'd just shut the nose doors, taxi them back around onto the runway and off they went. The C5's would get onto the runway, get lined up, hit full throttle and about 3/4 of the way down the runway, those jet jocks would yank the nose up and they would just lift off the runway and climb with this incredible, jaw-dropping slowness up into the air -- Watching the C5-s doing their slow-mo climb used to remind me of a family vacation we had once when my family and our church friends the Turner family went camping in the mountains of northeastern New Mexico-- and it took two tries to get our fully loaded little four-seater Triumph Herald Sedan (AKA "The Little Red Car" ) up this one particularly steep grade on this dirt road way the heck out in the middle of the inutterable boonies and my dad kept rocking forward in his seat as if he could add some extra momentum to help us up the hill. . . .it was hysterical.

My favorite, though, were the C130's (Hercules) They were turbo props. They have four engines, but the airframe is so airworthy, I've heard it said you can take it off with two engines, fly it with one, but it takes all four to land it, because it's harder to get them OUT of the air than it is to get them airborne in the first place. They'd get just over the end of the runway, hit full reverse on their engines to kill as much forward momentum as they could then cut the throttles back all the way so that they would literally fall out of the air for that last 10 feet ("the Herky-jerk") before their tires would whump down onto the runway -- then they'd have to speed the engines up so they could taxi! There were two black stripes on that runway, one of them that started about 50 feet from the landing lights by the cemetary wall and extended for about 150 feet, which was rubber from the plane tires slamming on the brakes and another about 200 feet long at the other end of the airway that was soot from the jet engines -- that was where they'd pull the nose up to about 45 degrees and pedal like crazy to get those big mommas airborne!

Here is an arial plan of the airport. The USAF had the left-hand side of that great curve of hangar (c). That whole shaded area under "c" on that side was "barracks" -- I lived in the stretch between the second and third "bump" from the "wingtip." for a while and had windows that looked out on Columbiadamm, the street that goes down that side of the airport. Then I moved down into that little "hook" at the very tip. My room's windows looked down onto the inside of a hanger that was about 4 stories tall. All of the building to the left of "b" -- which was actually the Pan Am terminal, was a USAF base. I had to walk the whole length of that "wing" to get anywhere on base -- to the mess hall, to the AAFES store, to the AAFES bank, to the enlisted club, to the main gate to get on the base bus to go to work or to go off base, quite a hike! It was another block and a half to the nearest U-Bahn (subway) station!

What a bummer that they want to doze the grand old pile. Granted, it does occupy a great deal of down-town real estate, but still . . . it's a piece of world history. . . not to mention my own personal history. . . . sigh! It was another time, (35 years ago -- ye gods!) another place (a whole 'nother world, in fact!), and I was another person then -- Sgt. Zelda Zombie of the Zoomies, in fact -- a World War III (Cold War) Flying Ace -- I even had a "secret identity" -- Natasha of the Steppes. Right at the entrance to Tempelhof (a) is the Luftbrücke (the "air bridge" -- the memorial to the Berlin Airlift) -- It's circular and several streets radiated off it like wheel spokes. One of those streets was Manfred von Richthofen Strasse (Manfred von Richthofen was the Red Baron), and on the corner of that street was a bar called "Snoopy's" -- no joke. I doubt it's there any more. . . . like so much else that isn't there any more, including me. . . . So here I am mooning over things that happend half a world a way, and 35 years ago, and on my way home from visiting my folks, I'm stopping off at Sutherlands to get potting soil so I can repot my pet tree Phred, who turned 27 last Christmas, BTW, and the kid who checks me out was born in 1990 -- now that's downright depressing. . . . . .

FINALLY -- technology that I can use!

I'm talking MP3 player. An easily portable gizmo that allows me to listen to the music I want to hear any time I want to, any place I want to, without having to have an electric outlet to plug it into and without having to schlep a ton of crap around, and without annoying/offending anybody with my music. God! It's something I've dreamed of since the days of records -- (Remember them? If you are younger than 40, chances are you have no clue.) The hero of all of us like-minded folks is Masaru Ibuka, the Sony executive who lit a fire under their R&D department that resulted in the Walkman. Yep. I had a Walkman and they gobbled down a set of AA batteries in an hour or less. However, Sony had sense enough to realize they were definitely on the right track and eventually portable cassette tape players came out that were cheap, played 15-20 hours on a set of AAs, and also had auto reverse. I bet I've gone through about 10 of them over the years. Literally played them to death. Portable CD players were the next step. I've had several of those, too. But the technology was simply not as robust as those old cassette players, and they weren't as small either -- a tight fit in a fanny pack. And you don't want to be handling one with muddy/dirty/greasy hands, so at the end of the CD, you had to stop what you were doing and go wash your hands. And they still had the same major drawback that cassette players had. You could only listen to the contents of one cassette or CD at any one time.

Then they came out with the MP3 player. You talk about a soft sell. I already had music downloaded to my computer so I could burn my own CDs and used Windows Media Player for music while I computed (I do creative writing as well as blogging). The first one I got was an Olympus. (Cheaper than an Ipod, but still pricey). It was still worth every penny, though. It held 8 gigs worth of music, which is a whole heck of a lot more than the 10-15 songs that fit on a cassette or CD and was smaller than the cassette tape, never mind the player. The only problem with it was that it didn't play as long on a charge as a cassette player would play on a set of AAs. Still, it was a good little gadget, and although it wasn't quite there yet, it had significantly narrowed the gap.
I was quite happy with it and made very good use of it until I replaced it with the Creative Zen Sleek Photo I have now (see pix to left) which I got because it has 18 gigs of usable hard drive and plays up to 17 hours on a charge.

They don't make this particular model any more. (Figures.) Don't know why, though. It's a sweet little baby. Oh, you can put pix and text files on it, and it has all kinds of features, but the only feature I'm interested in is its ability to play whatever music I load onto that sucker by album, artist or playlist.

It came with a little velveteen drawstring bag that you could use to hang it around your neck, but I like to listen while I'm working out in the yard, or cleaning house, or working with power tools and a drawstring bag stuffed down the front of your shirt doesn't provide much impact protection.

Then one day while I was in my friendly, neighborhood Wal-Mart, I saw their display of digital camera cases and the light bulb went off in my head. I got this Samsonite one for like $4 bucks that was exactly the right size and that had a belt loop as well as a carry strap for around your neck. It has a little partition that holds the camera so you can completely unzip the case while its hanging round your neck without risking dumping your camera out onto the floor/ground, and on the side of the partition, it's got a little webbing pocket for like an extra memory chip or two, or your USB cord or whatever. Not a bad deal at all for the bucks, and exactly what I wanted.

The CZen is only about 1/2 inch thick and it fits nicely in the little space behind the partition. I had an old hard plastic carrying case left over from some headphones I bought to use with a portable cassette player, both since defunct. None of the current crop of earphones I have would fit in it, so I broke the "cord spindle" part out and slid the bottom part of it into the little web pocket so I would have a way to neatly secure my earphones when not in use. The headphones that came with the CZen have a straight connector, so the only thing my nifty camera case didn't have was a hole in the top to accommodate the headphone jack. But then, that's why God gave us eXacto knives . . . . .

So now when I'd work in the yard, or be hooting around with my power tools or vrooming about with my vacuum cleaner, I'd have this lump beneath my shirt just south of the twins, and a headphone cord coming out of my shirt neck. And I was just as happy as a clam.

Why no Ipod, you ask? Price is the main drawback, but even if the price was right, I'd still have to contend with the Apple music service. Sure, you can rip your own CDs to your computer and download songs to your Ipod that way, but if you want the convenience of downloading music off the internet, you have to use the Apple downloading service and it'll cost you 99 cents a song, thank you very much -- assuming the music you want is available on their service, that is -- because that's the only music service that the Ipod's software is compatible with. Yeah, sure, you can borrow other people's CDs and rip them to your computer (EEEEK! Piracy! Piracy! ) but you're still basically tied to either CDs or the Apple music service. As far as I'm concerned, Apple is trying to lock in their own little captive audience the same way AOL does. (I don't like AOL either.) -- You either play in their playground with their toys under Nanny's watchful eye, or you don't play at all.

So I was quite content to listen to the music I'd ripped to my computer from my collection of about 350 -400 CDs. But my only sources of new music were tunes I heard at a friend's, or heard on a TV or movie soundtrack, or on the Sirius Satellite Radio channels that come with my Dish Net satellite TV service. I NEVER listen to commercial radio -- not even FM --. It absolutely drives me straight up a wall. Let me tell you, if I was ever hauled in by the CIA, never mind waterboarding. All they'd have to do is just threaten to make me listen to "AM radio" and I'd spill my guts in a New York minute. I've hated commercial radio and that whole commercial radio racket since I was 10 years old and figured out how manipulative it all is. When it isn't the same 20 songs over and over and over and over and over and over again, with some brainless DJ nattering in between each one, it's a big wad of three or four commercials in a row being rammed down your throat every 8 minutes. As far as I'm concerned, commercial radio contravenes the Geneva convention against cruel and unusual punishment. If I had a shotgun, I'd shoot my AM radio with it, -- if I had a AM radio. . . . but I don't have either, and that arrangement has been just james dandy lo, these many years.

So, in the mean time, I start taking ATT DSL and they use Yahoo! for their ISP, which is how I discovered the Yahoo Unlimited Music Service. -- for a subscription fee -- you can RENT music, as much music as you want to! For the basic subscription, you can stream it on your computer. For the premium subscription, you can download music to your computer and to your MP3 player and still listen to it as many times as you want to. All you have to do is periodically connect your MP3 player to the Yahoo "jukebox" software to "refresh" the subscriptions to their music on it -- which happens automatically each time you download something to your MP3 player. You still have to buy the music from them if you want to burn it to CD, but they only charge 79 cents a song.

But it's that RENT thing. IMHO, that's where Apple misses the boat. All you get from Apple is what you buy outright. Being able to "rent" music downloads gives you an unlimited variety of music. It lets you sample new things, try things out and live with them a little while to see if its music you want to own. I hear that Yahoo is in the process of merging its service with Rhapsody, but that's OK. Rhapsody has a larger and more eclectic data base, and I'll still be able to rent as much as I want of whatever I like. And it's very possible that Rhapsody's software might be more bug free than Yahoo's Jukebox software, which can be a pain in the kazoo now and then. And, anyway, they haven't merged me yet.

So now I'm almost in hog heaven -- almost -- 98% -- See, I'm not one of those "I only like (x) kind of music" people, the kind who only listens to a specific genre or subgenre of popular American music, and that's it. Boy, not me. The only criterion I use to define the music I listen to is whether or not I like listening to it. I don't care what kind of music it is, where in the world it's from, who makes it or how old it is. I'll give a listen. And if I like it, I'll listen to it again. . . So what would push me over the line into Seventh Hog Heaven is a music data base that had all kinds of music from all over the world. Like Mongolian nose flute music -- I've never actually heard any Mongolian nose flute music, mind you, but I like sitar, and gamelon, and highland bagpipes, and thumb piano, and oud, and zither, and tablas, and panpipes (as long as somebody besides Zamfir is playing them--!) and xylophones made out of the glass globe part of incandescent light bulbs, and even those thoroughly off the wall instruments featured in P.D. Q. Bach compositions. . . . Who knows ? If I was able to listen to some Mongolian nose flute music, I might like it. . . .