Bang the Drum Slowly

Kirk Douglas turned 96. He is the last of a glorious cadre of stars who stoked my imagination as a child in the early 60s. It's true that I've always been "retro:" I enjoyed the stars of the 40s and 50s more than my contemporary actors (with a few exceptions, of course). I was teenager in the 70s, when movies stopped having happy endings--and I love happy endings--so I naturally returned to the stars of my childhood and their predictable, formulaic on-screen adventures. Even much later in the VHS days my sizable collection contained a respectable proportion of movies made before I was born.

I was a percussionist from earliest childhood. Many of my mother's photos show a six year-old who looks uncannily like me in the backyard surrounded by coffee cans with a pair of sticks cut from nearby trees in his hands, gleefully banging away. I am as a result (perhaps I have cause and effect reversed here) acutely sensitive to rhythms, no matter their source or manifestation. The rhythm of motion pictures in those days was a more stately cadence, and it was tightly interwoven with the plot itself. As the sensibilities of directors and the movie-going public evolved during and after the social revolutions of the Vietnam era, the rhythms of movies changed in concert.

The 70s brought more staccato to the movies, but they also introduced profound cacophony. Polyphonic percussion is very effective and stirring, so long as it is carefully orchestrated. Much of the cinematic output of this era was not. It was a hodgepodge of unrelated timbres and percussive motifs that served only to disturb and disorient the audience. This may well have been the effect that the directors were after, but to me it left the movie fragmented and without coherence. I came away from those films, in a word, unsatisfied. The disjointed rhythmic dissonance was unfulfilling and cast whatever point the director was trying to make in a harsh, stuttering light.

There will never be another Kirk Douglas. He and his ilk are relics of a past cinematic era, when good guys and bad guys were easy to tell apart, and the plot lines flowed seamlessly, fluidly, from one predictable scene to the next. Their predictability, as I have said, was not a drawback; rather it was an affirmation of the social contract between studios, actors, and the movie-going public. While I love the flash-bang frenetics of today's films, bipolar and schizophrenic though they are, there was something deeply comforting about the movies of Douglas' time: they were quite simply good for the soul.

Happy birthday, Kirk. If there is an afterlife, you'll have a whale of a tale to tell.

Punching In

My only computer science class in college was Keypunch, and I failed it. It's not that I didn't do the work: in fact, I finished the entire semester's homework in the first two weeks of class. I was working part-time at night and on the weekends as a remote terminal operator and JCL programmer for the Texas Education Agency's Region XVIII Education Service Center in Midland. I had an auto-verifying IBM 129 keypunch machine there and a lot of time on my hands while batch jobs were running in the IBM 370 at the other end.

Of course, once I'd done the entire semester's work, other than turning the cards back in, I had no interest in attending class because who the heck wants to sit in a class when all the work is already finished? I mean, it's not as though there were any lectures beyond the first week. How many ways can you say, "the machine punches little rectangular holes in card stock?" I sort of forgot to show up for the final exam, whatever that was supposed to be, so I failed. Meh. I did get certified as an IBM 029/129 Keypunch Operator, though. That ranks as probably the least useful certification of my career, just below the Certified Novell Engineer 4 that I achieved shortly before I ceased to work on Novell networks forever.

That remote terminal operator job had some great aspects to it. Back in those days printers took up half the room and sounded like some kind of industrial assembly line in operation. Paper came in continuous sheets with perforations every eleven inches, fed from boxes. We had single, double, and triple copy paper, the copies being provided by a layer of carbon paper between sheets. Once a month I had to spend most of my shift printing out a 3,000 page report on triple copy paper. It was an epic waste.

Paper with multiple copies had to be bursted and decollated. The burster separated out the carbon paper, then the decollater split up the copies into individual stacks. One morning I happened to be working late on some project and I saw the TEA accountant come in to examine the report. He looked at maybe three numbers separated by 500 pages or so each, then threw all three copies away. Nine thousand pages of paper for three numbers. It's a wonder we have any trees left at all.

Ironically, or perhaps not so much, less than 40 miles from that building is a tiny West Texas town called "Notrees."

Introduction and Fugue

This is a blog about information technology, with security spread across it like a thick slathering of fresh apple butter. I call it "8baud" because that was the data transmission speed of the remote terminal I used in my first real computer job in 1977. If your math skills are up to snuff you may notice that 2012 - 1977 does not, in fact, equal forty. The five years prior to that (really, seven, but who's counting?) were occupied by my explorations into, um, telephonic architectures and operations. I may explore those years in some depth in a later column. I include them in my forty year span because the skills I learned then formed the foundation for my adventures in 'undocumented computing' that followed.

For those who follow my column /dev/random in ;Login: Magazine (both of you), you will probably notice some overlap in subject matter. That's because I'm a topical sort of guy, at least most of the time, so I will be commenting on whatever gets my goat in every forum available to me. This blog will not be as politically correct or polished to the extent that /dev/random is (stop snorting), for the simple reason that I want someplace to let off steam without worrying about offending editors or some segment of the magazine's readership. That's not to say that I will get vulgar or abusive, however. No, that isn't the way I show my distaste for a subject or person. I use the gentle and ancient art of mockery. If watching doofuses being mocked within an inch of their lives is your bag, you have come to the right blog. There will be mockery in abundance in the coming weeks and months, until someone hides at the end of my driveway and runs over me as I'm taking out the trash. Such are the perils of the mocker, yet I will persevere to the last.

I also have a fascination for UFOs, the paranormal, and other excursions from banal reality. I can't say I "believe" in any of those things, but I have always been intrigued by the psychology of people who do. If they were all nutcases it would be easy to dismiss these sightings as products of derangement, but they aren't. Many of them are highly-respected, well-educated professionals who were quite sober at the time. There must be something going on. I'd like to know what it is, but the chances of attaining that are rather slim.

Oh, and for those who think that the US government is hiding a bunch of things about aliens and so on, forget it. I have one of the highest security clearances that exist and it hasn't helped a bit. Sadly, there's nothing to hide.

So stay tuned, my fine fellows, and watch this space for delicious derision and such wisdom as an old man can conjure. I promise there will be bodies.