Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 56

Bazookas go "zook!" "zook!"

(The talk on sff.net somehow got around to bazookas . . . )

I don't know what they call them now, Dave, but when I was in the army (and got to shoot one round from one, at an abandoned car) they called the bazooka a "recoilless rifle," which is pretty uninspired. Accurate, though; you could see the barrel was rifled and it didn't have any recoil. The round I shot didn't have any explosive in it, either, but it bounced off the used car with an impressive "ploink."

("Pretend that car is a tank. Now shoot at it with this pretend high-explosive round. Okay; you're ready for combat.")

We didn't carry bazookas around in the jungle, thank god, because the enemy didn't have any tanks there, but one day we did take delivery, via helicopter, of a disposable one-shot recoilless. Our senior NCO, Royce, carried it around for a couple of days and said "This is ridiculous," and used it to shoot down a tree. A $1500 one-shot axe. But we did need the tree for overhead cover, so it wasn't a total waste.

If you did carry one around for personal protection, Dave, I think you would find that the concept of a "concealed weapon" can be interpreted very broadly.

The reading and talk at the MIT Museum went pretty well. Gay and I got there an hour early and walked around the museum pushing buttons and watching the cool displays – fun to do that every couple of years although the displays don't evolve very fast. The talking-head AI was improved over the last time. I didn't get to the slide-rule/personal calculator room, which is a fun time trip; have to drop by and revisit that. Anybody else here old enough to have had a bamboo Pickett?

(Used to be the mathematical equivalent of a fast-draw weapon. "All right, boy, what's the cube root of 377.933067?" "7.23?" "Close enough; I'll let you live.")

Nowadays my calculations are less precise. What is Jack going to do when the woman on the phone from Homeland Security asks him why he bought a sniper rifle in Des Moines last Thursday, when he was a couple of hundred miles away, even though the store's security camera shows a man who looks like him buying the weapon? I'm not sure what he says, but I guess I'll know tomorrow morning.

Joe

packing and unpacking heat

I haven't been paying much attention to presidential politics, so I missed the exchange a few days ago between a reporter and Rick Perry. The reporter asked him whether he was currently "packing heat," and his response was "I never comment on whether I'm carrying a handgun or not. That's why it's called 'concealed.'"

Actually, that's a pretty clever fast response, but I think a simple 'no' would have been reassuring. I mean, presumably he does travel accompanied by armed guards – it is America, after all – but more to the practical point, if he did have a concealed weapon, under what circumstances could he use it to effectively protect himself or anybody else? In the middle of a crowd of well-wishers and cops.

I stopped carrying a weapon years ago because I got shot. I told this story in the old GEnie days, but it bears repeating.

I was renting a rundown old motel room outside of Ormond Beach, Florida, to use as an office. It was in a bad part of Daytona Beach (which had some truly bad parts), and every day I bicycled there in the dark of the morning, around 4 ayem. I had a lovely old manual typewriter in the office, and carried the novel manuscript back and forth in a big leather bag slung across my body. I also carried a large-frame .22 Magnum revolver in the bag.

In the months I followed this routine, I only twice saw a person on the way; both times he was obviously drunk and presumably harmless.

One afternoon I was out shopping, unarmed, on the same bike, and some berserk yoyo shot me from the passenger side of a passing car. Point-blank in the butt. The bullet went in about four inches, but didn't do much harm. A few inches over and it could have struck my spine or colon.

Anyhow, I stopped the bike and watched the miscreant pull away. The driver made a left turn and screeched off accelerating. I didn't get a glimpse of the license plate. I was busy ascertaining the extent of my injuries.

Fortunately I was close to home, and so was in the hospital in a few minutes. The bullet was too deep to extract, and it's still there. But after a day or so I could sit down again, and there were no long-term consequences.

But of course it did occur to me to wonder what would have happened if it had been a few hours earlier, and I had my handy Magnum. Well, it wouldn't have prevented the guy from shooting me. By the time I'd gotten the weapon out, the car would be turning, and if I kept my cool and got a good sight picture I might have killed the driver, which could have sent the car out of control into a playground. Or I might have missed, and the round or rounds would have gone into the low-income wooden nursing home on the other side of the street.

There was no actually good outcome.

Turning the question around, into a geometry the NRA doesn't care for – under what conditions might I have used my possession of the weapon to prevent violence?

None, actually. Maybe if I were carrying it in my hand, or exposed in a holster, the guy would have thought twice before shooting me. Or maybe he would've tried a head shot, so I couldn't shoot back.

Further extrapolating, under what set of conditions would carrying a concealed weapon increase my probability of survival, against an armed lunatic? He's always going to get the first shot. Maybe the second and third.

Maybe if this were the old west . . . but it's not. In 68 years of active life, traveling all over the place, I've had exactly one encounter with an armed criminal. He won, but I survived. (And of course there never was an actual "old West" like the movies. In many ways it was just a lower-technology version of today. Except, it's amusing to note, my own weapon – a single-action Colt like the one that tamed the West . . . . )

Anyhow, I stopped carrying a gun. People stopped shooting me, too.

Joe

EMP / NK

It's pretty scary to Google around "North Korea" and "EMP," not to mention "nuclear weapons." A suborbital EMP burst over America's grain belt would make for a hungry winter, for a lot of countries, and although the people who did it would not be very popular afterwards, that fact may not loom large to them.

It might be simplistic to generalize about national behavior by observing individual behavior – especially loony individuals. But what if the nation is led by a loony megalomaniac with few checks on his behavior?

There's no question that North Korea is testing electromagnetic weapons. I suppose the actual question is "Is this in pursuit of actual development of EMP weapons, or is it a feint, just for negotiating position?" Or a combination of the two, most likely. Once they have the technical chops to use the stuff, they can put it away temporarily, to pass inspection criteria.

We live in interesting times.

Joe

EMP and I-N-K

(Talking in sff.net about electromagnetic pulse . . . )


I remember the first big EMP scare in the mid-seventies, Dave. I don't suppose anything has changed except that people got tired of hearing about it and it became non-news.

Since my personal industry can keep going indefinitely on fountain pen ink, I'm in danger of feeling smug. Of course if civilization were reduced to a shambles, fewer people would buy my books. And I'd have to hand-carry my manuscripts to New York.

I wonder how weak an EMP would have to be before everyday design began to protect some products. My hard drive appears to be virtually a Faraday cage, and perhaps my computer is as well – it's a Mac Air, the body made of some lightweight alloy that I assume conducts electricity well enough to function that way.

First actual school day today. I have office hours from 1400-1600, and then class from seven to ten. Think I'll mosey downtown first, though, through the cool rain. Want to go to the Bromfield Pen Shop and get some Noodler's ink – I'm out of my favorite color, a bluish gray-black. Can't remember the exact name, and it's not on Noodler's website. Hope they still make it. My only bottle got disappeared by some hospital staff when I was indisposed last year.

Even if they don't have it anymore, that shop is one of my favorites to wander around. People who don't care about pens and inks are free to wonder why anyone would go our of their way to examine bottle after bottle of slightly different blue inks, and gaze longingly at pens they'll never be able to afford.

Joe

pink pepper chocolate?

We had a fun indulgent day Sunday. Went on a "Chocolate Tour of Boston," which was a pretty girl taking us on a stroll around Back Bay to four or five places that sell chocolate, where other pretty girls offered interesting varieties. I wound up with enough chocolate of various kinds to last all semester. And I didn't even get the bacon-flavored kind.

Right now I'm eating Teuscher's "Pink Pepper" variety, mildly flavored with a laid-back variety of capsicum. Reminiscent of the penetrating but not hot flavor of green peppers, interesting along with strong dark chocolate.

Joe

Public Health Service

(In response to an sff.net conversation about movies and doctoring and nursing in the south -- )


It wasn't simple back then, roaming – I was sort of there, like the littlest kid in the movie. I had black nurses in San Juan and New Orleans from my birth in 1943 to about the age of three – I was three and a half months' premature, and required a lot of care, and our [white] family had at least part-time [black] help come in until we moved to Anchorage when I started kindergarten. (Anchorage was pretty primitive in those pre-statehood days, and I suspect there wasn't a lot of domestic help mushing around.)

(You wouldn't say "black" in those days, incidentally; that adjective was an insult implying slavery. "Colored" was respectful. Funny how things change.)

We weren't rich. My father had both an M.D. and a Ph.D., but he had gotten those degrees in a spirit of public service, and he spent that part of his life as a uniformed officer in the Public Health Service. My family was never poor, at least after he got his doctorate, but we were never more than middle class, which I think annoyed me when I was a teenager – other doctors' kids were rolling in money! – but I later realized that in his quiet way he was a man of principle. (Not so quiet in the fifties, when as Assistant Surgeon General he put his job on the line and censured Joe McCarthy in the Senate anti-Communist hearings. When I heard him do that my hair stood up with pride, though I was too young to really know what was going on.)

Joe

The Help is on its way

We went to kind of a feel-good movie yesterday, The Help, mostly about race relations in the American South in the fifties and sixties. Good writing and acting, but there was a kind of distance that may have been subjective – I mean, I was there; I lived it, and a lot of the details seemed slightly off. But maybe that's just because I _was_ there, and they weren't filming my particular story.


It was told partly from the black characters' point of view (the "help" of the title), and throughout the movie you had the feeling that the narrative was being shadowed by another movie, which was the same incidents, but as viewed by the white characters. I'm pretty sure that was part of the creators' intent, and it was effective. Because the white characters were just as human, and many of them at least as helpless as the black characters, caught up in the social machinery that moved them from event to event.


The focal point is a well-meaning young white woman who's collecting material from the servants' lives for a book, an exposé, and the dynamic between her innocence and the world-weariness of the older black women she grew up with (as help) is well played. The black actors were especially subtle and good, even though the roles must have been troubling for some of them. I mean, their grandmothers played the same roles, but they weren't acting.

Joe

dickless wonders

On the Opinion page of the Boston Globe this morning there was a good essay by a woman recently returned from India. She notes about how in Boston a little old lady narked her out for having a kid in her car without a children's seat. The kid recently had to deal with avoiding huge snakes and jumping over a five-foot deep drainage ditch to get to school.

What was really odd, though, was her testimony about hijiras: gangs of eunuchs. They will barge into a new mother's apartment and threaten to lay a curse on her boy child unless they're paid off – typically about a hundred bucks. (The author was safe, with her three girls . . . the eunuchs will "leave me alone out of pity.")

The last time a gang of eunuchs threatened me, I told them to go fuck themselves. They left in confusion.

Joe

computer pens!

(On sff.net, we're talking about pens that have wiring to automatically enter graphic or alphanumeric input into a home computer . . . )


David, the timing of your Wacom link was an interesting coincidence -- I just got back from the MIT Coop bookstore, where I'd been captured by a display for their rival, the Livescribe "Echo."

The Livescribe costs about half as much but has real drawbacks, no pun intended. You have to use special paper, which is what has kept me away from the devices in the past. I like to write and draw in nice bound books, which I can put up on the shelf with their pals. The Wacom can do this, which makes it really interesting, even at $200.

The other big drawback, both the pens share -- nobody who writes or draws with a fountain pen is going to like being restricted to a ball-point. That might seem like a small thing, but it isn't, if you spend a large fraction of your day writing and drawing.

I ought to write them and ask whether they want a testimonial. Of course if I like the machine I'll endorse it even if I have to pay for it. May have to wait for Christmas, though.

Wrote for a couple of hours this morning in a pleasant coffee house, and then went off on a sad sort of mission. Ottone Riccio, Ricky, my old friend and mentor, has moved from nursing home into hospice. (Same room, actually, just different care and intent.) He's a little confused but was not in as bad shape as I'd feared. Bad kidney problems, not simplified by turning 90. Mutual friend Mary Zoll picked us up at the end of the Green Line, Riverside, and drove us another fifty miles or so to his hospice place.

Sad business, but it was good to see him. Perhaps not for the last time.

Joe

from sff.net

Dave, I have to say, someone who can snore loudly whilst having sex in a tree has an assortment of abilities for which there must be a market somewhere.

Perhaps he could help the people in this remarkable video –

(Well, nertz. sff.net won't take it. I'll try LiveJournal.)

Joe