My brush with Robert McNamara

The recent passing of Robert McNamara, who was the U.S. Defense Secretary during the Vietnam war, brought to mind a brief encounter I had with him a few years ago.

I never got close enough to talk to him, but I was within eight feet as he sat at a banquet table in the hotel where I worked. He was scheduled as the after dinner speaker that evening. As the in-house audio/visual technician on duty that night, I was in charge of the microphone.

I don't remember the purpose of the event, but it was part of a larger multi-day conference. Most of the attendees were much younger than me.

As I was setting up that afternoon one of the meeting organizers in the group told me that the guest speaker would be Robert McNamara. I recognized the name before he proceeded to tell me he was President Johnson's Secretary of Defense. He was quite excited about the prospect of hearing someone of that stature speak at his event.

The fellow was visibly disappointed that I did not share his enthusiasm. It was not the time or place to share my personal views with a client, so I simply acknowledged the information in my best professional manner. What he didn't know was that I grew up watching the grisly details of "McNamara's war" on the news every evening during dinner. Even as a kid I had a pretty good idea of how messed up the Vietnam war was, and as an adult I learned how much McNamara was responsible. Thanks to him I lost my faith in American foreign policy at a very early age.

McNamara did not mention Vietnam that night. He was on a new crusade to frighten everyone about the prospect of loose nuclear weapons getting into the wrong hands. His gravelly punctuated every point by repeating "I'm very concerned, and you should be too!"

I don't think anyone in the room was in a position do do anything about nuclear weapons, but he sounded scared, and he sure scared everyone.

Train vs Tornado

An engineer I know brought this video to my attention. The tornado occurred in Illinois on January 7, 2008. The camera was mounted in the last locomotive, facing the freight cars they were pulling. Watch the trees in the background as the rain starts. Then hold on!!!!

Squeeze Play

Now that the digital television age is underway, an interesting situation has come to my attention. Some people have widescreen (a.k.a. 16x9) TVs and some people, like us, have older TVs in the standard format (4x3). The problem is how do TV stations deliver their new widescreen pictures to people who have standard TVs.

I understand that over the air converter boxes, the kind they were telling everyone to get with their government coupon, have a zoom feature which enables the user to either crop the picture to fit their TV, or display it in widescreen "letterbox" format with black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. All well and good.

But we have digital cable, without that feature. How the system is delivering the images is a mystery to me, but generally it works OK. Sometimes the picture is letterboxed. Other times it is evident that the image is cropped, because people's faces or some text is cut off at the edges.

Whatever the technique, somebody needs to explain it to the people at Monterey's KOTR cable channel 11, "The Otter" as they call themselves.

The Otter occasionally broadcasts Giants Baseball (or as we call it "Giant Spaceball") games and the station is having trouble getting it right. The first two games they broadcast this spring were not cropped or letterboxed. Instead they did the worst possible thing. They took a widescreen image and squeezed it into a standard TV shape. This has the effect of making everyone look tall and skinny. It is a gross distortion of the picture.

The first time this happened was the first game they broadcast this year. I turned it off and left a voice message with the station manager saying they had squeezed a 16x9 picture into a 4x3 frame and it looked horrible.

On the second game they broadcast, they did the same thing. This time I called the station and after finding other voice mail options I left a message with the control room, then turned the TV off in dismay. About 30 minutes later I looked again and saw they finally fixed the problem. It remained fixed for several more games, what few they broadcast.

Until today, when they screwed it up again. This time they started the top of the first inning with the picture letterboxed. That's fine with me, but it looked a little fuzzy. After the first commercial break the picture was no longer letterboxed, but they were back to squeezing the wide picture into the standard TV shape. My complaint this time didn't seem to get noticed, as the picture remained distorted for the entire game.

Fortunately, most Giants games are broadcast on Comcast Sports Network, and not KOTR. Comcast always gets it right, as does every other channel with every other program. KOTR needs some additional technical training.

If anyone from KOTR, or anyone who knows anyone who works at KOTR is reading this, please pass this message on to your control room: Either letterbox the image, or crop the image, but please don't distort my Giant Spaceball!
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Addendum: KOTR got Monday's game right.

UooPS

Wednesday afternon UPS misdirected a package to our door. It was meant for somebody with a similar address. I called UPS to correct the problem and got stuck in a voice recognition phone maze that didn't give me any relevant options.

So I used my usual method of pressing "0" to speak to a real human. Unfortunately, unlike most other systems, it just put me into another maze.

I was not in a good mood to begin with, so in desperation I screamed "GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA" into the phone. The system politely replied "One moment while we connect you to a live agent."

I guess voice recognition software is more sophisticated than I thought. It can now recognize anger.

The story has a happy ending. The agent took down the information and within 30 minutes I got a call from the local UPS office saying the driver would return within the hour. He actually arrived one minute later with an apology and took the box away.

The Grinch who stole gay marriage

The people awakened one morning to hear
That the Grinch of Prop 8 had stolen their cheer

So they marched in the streets to protest the decision
As victims of public discrimination.

But one of them said, in a voice starting low
“Maybe, just maybe, it need not be so.

“Does love need a license from officials of state
To affirm what our hearts know will never abate?

“Perhaps marriage is something that can't be constrained
By a book of religion or a statute ordained.

“Marriage is defined in the hearts of two lovers
And can't be affected by the thoughts of the others.

“So let the Grinch live by his own set of rules.
They need not define us unless we be fools

“Someday he will learn what we already know
That love's unconditional, and that's how we grow.”

The Susan Boyle phenomenon

It's nice to see an average person with talent being newly discovered, and I'm happy for Susan Boyle getting the exposure her voice deserves. What puzzles me, though, is how she got that recognition.

When this frumpy middle aged housewife with a flat nose and a horrible hairdo appeared on stage for the Britain's Got Talent show the audience looked on her with low expectations in their eyes, while the judges were openly dismayed to see someone like that on the stage.

When she opened her mouth and people realized she could actually sing with the best of them, everyone cheered like mad, as if they were watching a handicapped person do a pole vault. When the video circulated on You Tube Boyle became a worldwide sensation overnight.

What is really going on here? She defied expectations, that much is clear. What puzzles me is why expectations were so low in the first place. A pretty face is not a prerequisite for a pretty voice. The most rudimentary layman's knowledge of anatomy should have been enough for the audience and judges to give her the benefit of the doubt. But apparently they didn't see any reason to believe she could sing.

I hate to think that the audience and judges were so shallow minded as to judge a book by its cover, but after watching their rolling eyes when she walked on stage that seems to have been the case.

This story is not about Susan Boyle. It is about us.

In memory of Memorial Day

I remember when holidays were tied to specific calendar dates, so Memorial Day, Labor Day, etc., could fall on any day of the week. In those days holidays were observed with a specific purpose in mind. After certain holidays were shifted to always fall on a Monday, they lost much of their meaning and morphed into three-day commercial extravaganzas. Try to remember the fallen soldiers as you party and shop this weekend.