Happy 40th birthday to the Whale

One of my favorite airplanes, the Boeing 747, first flew 40 years ago yesterday, when I was all of 28 years old -- and it's still being built. More than 1,400 747s have rolled out of the assembly hangar, and 100 more are on order.

What memories the airplane evokes! Over the decades 747s have carried me to Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Denmark, Norway, Israel, Japan and Malaysia. I once flew one first class (avec champagne et tournedos de la Foret) aboard Air France, thanks to a travel junket for the old Chicago Daily News, and that is the closest I have ever come to heaven.

For coach-class flying, no other airplane in existence brought travel costs down to affordable levels the way the 747 did. We may have complained about the cattle-car ambience of the airplane, but it got us there for low prices, and still does.

Few other airliners have been developed and redeveloped as much as the Whale, as airline pilots affectionally call the beast. This year the 747-8, a lengthened version meant to compete with the even bigger Airbus 380, will enter service.

Happy birthday, Whale.

(There's a nice story about the 747 at the BBC News magazine.)

Slumdog office makeover

John Thain, the morally clueless former Merrill Lynch CEO, famously spent $1.2 million to redecorate his office last year. He shelled out $800,000 for a celebrity designer, $87,000 for an area rug, $28,000 for window curtains, $87,000 for a pair of guest chairs, $25,000 for a mahogany pedestal table, $68,000 for a 19th century credenza, $16,000 for a coffee table, and $1,400 for a parchment wastebasket -- among other things.

Let them eat cake, eh?

Now let me show you, Mr. Thain, how it's done in the grimy realms of lower-middle-class retiree spendthriftiness. I have just thrown around staggering (to me, anyway) sums, and expended many hours of labor, to turn my little home office into the geezer ex-journo version of a plutocratic palace.

It's not exactly boardroom huge, measuring just eight cubits by ten, whatever those are (some people call them "feet"), and it hadn't been redone for 30 years. It took three days of Augean labor to gut it of accumulated crap. Some of it was thrown out but most was consigned to our sumptuous Public Storage warehouse for later sifting and disposal. (Maybe some university somewhere wants to buy my papers? Hello? Anyone?)

Pulling up the worn old carpet was easy enough (although I had to go to the doctor for a tetanus shot owing to a hostile carpet anchor spike) and so was removing the ancient, yellowed fabric-backed wallcovering. Scrubbing off the wallcovering paste cost nothing but buckets of water and hours of sweat.

The three-and-a-half-bedroom suburban mansion containing my home office turned a century old this year. You know what 100 years of foundation settling does to lath-and-plaster walls, and how difficult it is to fix them without their looking like scale models depicting World War I trench warfare.

I should have hired a plasterer, but I did not want to spend more than Mr. Thain did, so performed the task myself, with lots of fiberglass tape, a large bucket of patching plaster and a few dozen sheets of sandpaper. It took a week and a lot of swearing and coughing and itching, but the walls now look as if they had been restored by an expensive Swiss master craftsman, although with the help of a few swigs of schnapps.

At least the walls were smooth enough so that I didn't have to hire another pro to hang new wallcovering that would hide shell craters. That would have added up to at least a thousand bucks. (I'm too old and arthritic to do it myself.)

The plaster job was followed by two coats of primer on the ceiling, walls and me. Next came a quart of white Valspar semigloss latex ($12) on the woodwork (mostly), followed by two applications of Home Depot's most decadently luxurious Behr flat latex ($20 the gallon, but just one gallon) in a light yellow hue called Lemon Souffle.

Then came the wall-to-wall carpet, a sumptuous commercial tweed from the neighborhood Armenian rugman, $550 installed, including shipping. (The pad and the anchor strips were good enough to be reused. Thrift, thrift, thrift.)

This was topped off with a new window shade, a fancy gossamer top-down, bottom-up affair that cost $320 but looks worth half that.

Finally, new furniture: A Craftsman-style oak veneer desk for $500 and a matching six-drawer filing cabinet (I have to store much of that crap where I can get at it) for $600. They came completely unassembled and I had to put them together.

And now for the piece de resistance: An elegant but workmanlike Bed, Bath & Beyond wicker wastebasket, $10.39 after a 20 per cent off coupon.

My labor: 20 hours at a not-quite-master-craftsman $40 per hour, or $800.

The Lady Friend's designer acumen (I have no color sense): priceless.

In all, $2,314.20. (Not including labor.) Henry Thoreau would have been proud.

Let Thain and his fellow banksters eat Twinkies!

And now you know what I have been doing instead of working on Hang Fire.

Just the facts, ma'am. (The correct ones, that is.)

John McPhee, long one of the brightest stars in the New Yorker's firmament, has a reputation for not only writing it right but also getting it right. His long, complex and astonishingly readable articles, which usually make it into book form, are almost always factually impeccable. You just don't catch this guy making mistakes.

That is not entirely because of his own considerable diligence. In the current (February 9 & 16, 2009) issue of the New Yorker, he sings a lovely paean to the doughty fact-checkers of the magazine, editors who closely examine every "a," "and" and "the" of every manuscript that comes under their scrutiny. They spend many hours, even weeks, checking every fact in every article that goes into the magazine. Upon them lies the New Yorker's vaunted credibility.

One example: In a 2005 piece on coal trains, McPhee wrote that the extremely long air brake system of a train "was like the air sac of an American eel."

The New Yorker fact-checkers phoned a bunch of ichthyologists and discovered that the eel's air sac actually is shorter than that of most ordinary fish. The simile just would not work. A new one was needed.

McPhee called a noted ichthyologist he knew, but the fellow just could not come up with a species having a long enough air sac. In desperation the scientist called Harvard, which came through. "The train's very long integral air tube was like the air sac of a rope fish."

McPhee takes great pride in getting his facts right before submitting an article, but knows the fact-checkers will (almost!) always save his ass if he's wrong. And so he sometimes submits a piece containing a few "TKs" ("TK" is journalese for "to come"), denoting mostly minor facts, usually names or numbers, he hasn't yet checked thoroughly but knows the professionals will, saving time for everybody.

I used to be a fact-checker of sorts, as a copy editor for the old Chicago Daily News and as a book editor for the Chicago Sun-Times. The chief difference, however, lay in the deadlines. When I was working, newspaper copy editors had only minutes, let alone hours or days or weeks, to check the accuracy of the stories they edited. Time is of the essence in creating the first draft of history.

These days, overworked newspaper copy editors barely have a chance to "railroad" the copy they edit into print. They've also got to design pages and scare up art and write captions as well as headlines. There's just no time to check more than a fact or two in this era of downsized newspaper staffs.

As we move from daily print journalism to instant digital news, the problem grows more acute. Getting it online first trumps getting it online right.

And so it falls upon the reporter and his first line of defense, the city desk, to fix the facts before the stories are shoveled at the copy editor/page designers. It's a miracle that more mistakes aren't made.

Is it any wonder that we newsies are jealous of magazine writers who enjoy the luxury of having their stuff fact-checked? (Not all magazines employ fact checkers. Besides the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly does, and McPhee also cites Time and the National Geographic.)

Book publishers don't do fact-checking, which helps explain why so much bullshit gets enshrined between covers. The authors are responsible for that job. On the rare occasion that the New Yorker rejects a McPhee piece and he still gets it out as a book, he has to do all his own fact-checking. This, McPhee writes, risks "analogy with the attorney who defends himself and has a fool for a client."

It's happened to me, too. Every now and then I get a letter from a reader of one of my novels pointing out a factual error. So far the mistakes have been minor, but I live in dread of getting caught the way the New Yorker did when it described a reader in a nursing home as "the late" although he was very much alive. He wrote in and complained.

Quickly, McPhee writes, the New Yorker got into print a note regretting the error. Unfortunately, during the weekend while the magazine was going to press, the formerly late reader died, compounding the magazine's original mistake.

(You need a subscription to the New Yorker (or a newsstand copy) to read the entire piece, but an abstract of the article is here.)

Living with birds (and other critters) at airports

Yesterday the National Transportation Safety Board released preliminary findings that pieces of birds indeed had been found in the engines of Cactus 1549, the Airbus that landed in the Hudson last month. But this should not drive timorous passengers to conclude that birds are winning the battle for the skies.

In an interesting piece in Salon.com today, Katharine Mieszowski interviews the wildlife agent in charge of keeping critters off the runway at San Francisco International Airport. He uses devices like the "Phoenix wailer," a solar-powered electronic noisemaker that "periodically emits the predatory call of a red-tailed hawk, along with other alarming sounds, such as a helicopter followed by machine-gun fire."

In the very last paragraph, the bird shooer concludes that right now birds may be getting a bad rap, but they don't present a terrible danger to aviation so long as airports keep on shooing.

That's been my experience as a private pilot at airports too small to afford wildlife control. Many times I've sat on the runway waiting for formations of geese or clouds of starlings to clear the area. They go away eventually. All we grassroots pilots need is patience and a sharp eye, and sometimes quick reflexes.

We have to share our airports with four-footed critters, too. I once nearly had to do a go-round at a Wisconsin airport when a family of coyotes trotted across the runway just before my Cessna touched down, and I had to tap the brakes briskly. The airport manager said he used to send riflemen out to dispatch the animals, but coyotes are smarter than hunters and easily eluded them in the tall grass. "We just live with 'em," he said with a shrug.

Same thing at a northern Arizona airstrip while I tried to will an enormous bull elk that weighed more than my little airplane off the runway where he was preventing my takeoff with a belligerent glare. Finally I taxied back to the office and consulted with the manager, who hopped in his Jeep and charged the elk, honking all the way, while I followed at a close but safe distance, lifting off just after elk and jeep departed the blacktop.

A northern Illinois airfield tried to solve its deer problem by building a fence with a single electrified wire around the runway perimeter. It slathered the wire with peanut butter, reasoning that the deer, once shocked in the tasting, would depart. They found the peanut butter worth the zapping and kept coming back, bringing all their friends with them.

Yes, we just live with 'em. We have to.

Captain Sully's missing library book

Sometimes cable television smarm stories carry genuine punch.

In this one, Captain Chesley Sullenberger called the Fresno State Library to report that he'd lost one of its books in an unanticipated event. The library, according to the story, responded that it not only would forgive the lost book fee but also dedicate the replacement to the pilot.

The kicker, the report declares: The book was about ethics.

But what was the title of the book? If Extra TV went to the trouble to check out the story, why didn't it obtain the title? This raises warning flags in my mind: bogus Internet stories tend to be vague about specific details.

Hmm. Maybe Snopes.com needs to get to the bottom of this tale. I hope it's true.

LATER: A reporter for the New York Daily News did ask about the title, and he says the Fresno State librarian refused to give it, citing privacy issues. (Librarians, said the Lady Friend -- herself a librarian -- do not tell the press, or nosy cops, what books their patrons check out.) That's good enough for me. I believe the story now.

Verlyn Klinkenborg

This is how to look at animal tracks in the snow:

"I never see a truly straight track. There is always a bend in it, as if curiosity was a kind of lateral gravity, always pulling the creature off course. But then I remember that “off course” is a human conceit. Judging by the tracks I see, there is no going so hard that one has to go straight. I can’t begin to guess what was gathered in the meander of a 'foxprint' along the river ice. The fox knows, and that’s enough."

That is Verlyn Klinkenborg at work in the New York Times today, in his periodic "The Rural Life" mini-column that always runs underneath the paper's unsigned lead editorials. Now isn't that a shapely piece of writing as well as a startling insight?

Klinkenborg is celebrated among his fellow writers not only for his singular prose but also his memorable name and enviable lifestyle. He may be a sophisticated Timesman (he's on the paper's editorial board) but he's also a farmer, commuting into Manhattan three times a week from his spread in upper New York State.

There is nothing cracker-barrel or gallus-snapping about his observations from the country. They are remarkably complex and sophisticated, the product of a gifted mind trained both to observe and to contemplate.

In many ways Klinkenborg's literate letters from the country remind me of E. B. White's humane "casuals" in the New Yorker all those years ago. They also remind me of two of Klinkenborg's literary equals, John McPhee at his most observant and Edward Hoagland at his most unsentimental.

I live in the country, too, five months out of the year, and write about it in my mystery novels. If those 300-pagers could show half the talent and skill Verlyn Klinkenborg displays in his 350-worders, I'd be a happy man.

Still more good words and phrases

Here's some more of the Good Stuff of writing, gleaned from the Web in the last week. [Italics are mine.]

"The state-mandated moment of classroom silence the Illinois Legislature inflicted upon us was always idiotic, proof positive that the bowl haircuts down in Springfield would happily add another straw to the crushing burden on the backs of our already overwhelmed teachers if it meant a symbolic victory for their faith."

Neil Steinberg, Chicago Sun-Times, Jan. 23, 2009

"And it's scary that [Chicago Tribune boss] Sam Zell's company bugler [Lee Abrams], assigned to stir legions of old-school journalists out of their sloth, doesn't bother with fact-checking . . . "

Mike Miner, Chicago Reader blog, Jan, 27, 2009

"Watching the Illinois State Senate judge Gov. Nosferatu at his impeachment trial is like watching a swarm of flies condemn a brother fly for having dirty feet."

John Kass, Chicago Tribune, Jan. 28, 2009

" . . .Writing about air travel, especially after the mass media gets hold of an issue, has a way of drawing out one's inner crank."

Patrick Smith, Ask the Pilot, Salon.com, Jan. 30, 2009

"What other writers, young and old, prized most about Mr. Updike was his prose — that amazing instrument, like a jeweler’s loupe; so precise, exquisitely attentive and seemingly effortless. If there were a pill you could take to write like that, who wouldn’t swallow a handful?"

Charles McGrath, New York Times, Feb. 1, 2009

As [Republican congressman Phil] Gingrey abjectly apologized to talk radio’s commandant [Rush Limbaugh] for his “stupid comments” and “foot-in-mouth disease,” he sounded like the inmate in a B-prison-movie cowering before the warden after a failed jailbreak."

Frank Rich, New York Times, Feb. 1, 2009

Meanwhile, the last-minute bonus depredations of John Thain and his ilk spurred Harold Evans in the BBC News online magazine to revive that good old word from the 1930s, "bankster" (banker plus gangster).

Finally, the speustic nature of this blog seems to have spurred a fellow named Anonymous to send in a tip about savethewords.org, a Web site created by the Malaysian subsidiary of Oxford University Press to preserve words that have run low on rubber but deserve retreading for further generations.

What savethewords.org wants us to do is pick a word, any word, from its commodious lexical hat and use it as much as possible online. Webcrawling software will take note of it and keep its parent dictionaries from dumping it from lack of use. Brilliant!

You can "adopt" a word, promising to use it as much as possible, and savethewords will email you a formal certificate like the one below. There is also a T-shirt offer, but enough is enough.

(Speustic, by the way, is not how Inspector Clouseau would describe someone prone to pratfalls. It means half-done, half-baked, incomplete. Look it up on savethewords.org.)



Can you spot the syntactical blooper on the certificate? Chalk it up to speustic proofreading.