Walking on the Moon

I thought I’d written about flying to Hesperia Airport before, but it seems like I didn’t.  I flew there again today, so I’ll write about it now.

Hesperia is the airport in a fairly small desert town north of the Inland Empire.  The town is north of Lake Arrowhead and sort of along the way to Barstow.  It was growing pretty rapidly during the housing boom.  The airport is used primarily by the Mercy Air air ambulance folks, but there are hangars and some based planes there as well.  There is also an inexpensive fuel pit and a restaurant.  The restaurant is what drew me in there, of course.

I’d been out to Hesperia once many years ago looking for a restaurant that I’d heard of, but it was closed.  The fellow working the local FBO offered to share his sandwich with me, which was kind, but I didn’t take him up on it.  I saw from our friends at AirNav that there was indeed a new restaurant there, and tried it out.

The restaurant itself is a classic airport cafe: sandwiches, burgers, and breakfasts.  Everything I’ve had there is really tasty and the staff is very friendly and helpful.  It’s a good fly-in joint.

The field itself is kind of small.  There’s ample runway length, but it’s kind of tucked away and there’s not a lot around the airport.  It feels very close to the houses and highway nearby. It’s also in the high desert, so it can be windy and is higher than it might seem.  When I was there today, the density altitude was in the 6000′ range, and it was very noticeable on takeoff.  The wind was gusty though only 10 knots or so.

I took a few pictures.  I love the airport restaurant sign, and found a Cessna labeled with “Realtor.”  I have no idea why you’d need to label a plane with that, but there must be a reason.  For someone.

I seriously need to get all my news from these guys.  Via Boing Boing.

The new Tron trailer is up, courtesy of Boing Boing.  We love our CS actives.

Many people are concerned about the liberties that social media, especially facebook, take with their information.  Recently Warren Ellis mentioned that the likeness of a friend of his had been used without her permission in the theatrical trailer for a social media movie.  Her response is awesome, both in that it is simply more speech rather than some sort of suit, and in its content.

Brenda’s in the other room watching The Old Spice Guy.  That’s cool; he’s pretty awesome. But, me, I prefer to kick it old school.

Then again, you knew that.

The June gloom in LA has extended itself to July, and I was hoping to take advantage of it and get some time in the clouds today.  As usual, as soon as I went up, the clouds began their retreat, but I did get a tiny touch of actual in and grab lunch at Riverside Municipal.  The flight out was a good refresher for IFR procedures even though I didn’t spend more than a minute or two in the clouds climbing out.  Juggling the radios, GPS, and other navigation aids is always good practice, even when I’ve cleared the layer.

The flight out wasn’t very eventful for me, but a Delta flight crew was having a pretty tough time of it, to the point where they managed to tick off an Approach Controller.  Everyone’s had a bad day, but when you hear someone having theirs, it makes you determined not to have one of yours at the same time.  Fortunately, my number wasn’t up; my flight was routine.

Riverside Municipal is a nice little towered airport with an old school diner on the premises.  I enjoyed a patty melt with my Pacific Flyer. I took a couple pictures of the airport and the planes, including the apparent Texan who’s modified the Bible verse on his horizontal stabilizer.

After lunch and pictures, it was back to Santa Monica under instrument rules, but without any clouds.

After my recent good experience with Chandler, it seemed like another noir classic was worth a look.  And so we come to Hammett.

You can’t mistake Hammett for Chandler.  Hammett’s prose is more pedestrian and not inclined to the poetic – even the poetry of a tough guy in the rough city.  After the joy of finding Chandler, it was something of a disappointment to find that Hammett was something else entirely.  The disappointment wore off pretty quickly as I discovered the joys of Hammett.

Hammett is more grounded in the characters than in the literature.  His Sam Spade is a much more flawed character than Chandler’s Marlowe.  One gets the impression that at his core Marlowe’s a Boy Scout; no one gets that impression about Spade.  Spade’s a tough guy to get along with, and not always because there’s some principle at stake.  Sometimes Spade is just ornery.  You get the impression people are surprised when Spade does the right thing; you also get the impression that they’re surprised often.

It doesn’t help his likeability that my 21st century eyes see a pretty chauvinist guy.  I understand the differences of the times, but even accounting for that, Spade views women mostly as sex objects, and not often ones he enjoys being around.  He’s a well enough drawn character that one can dislike him honestly.  I don’t think I’d enjoy hanging out with him, but I believe him.

Some of the other characters are somewhat broad, but never overly so.  No one’s completely what they seem, and the plot twists a great deal more than The Big Sleep.  I definitely had to pay more attention to who was doing what to whom in Falcon.

Overall I enjoyed The Maltese Falcon quite a bit, but it was much less of a transcendent experience than The Big Sleep. An awful lot of this discussion has been comparing Falcon to Sleep, and that’s not particularly fair.  They’re different in focus and perhaps in goals.  I obviously incline toward Sleep‘s rich language and sense of place, but Falcon‘s unflinchingly real lead character and attention to plot is also rewarding.  Both are worth one’s time.

Recommended.

My sister was in town last week, and she and her family invited us up to see a practice round of the US Open up in Pebble Beach.  I was in Berkeley on Monday for a work commitment and flew down to Salinas to meet them as they drove up from LA.  It was a nice flight, and I got to spend a few minutes bumming around the ramp at Salinas before they caught up with me.  Imagine my surprise to see Arnold Palmer’s Citation on the ramp next to me.  (Palmer’s registration – N1AP – is well known among pilots for some reason).

Anyway I took a few pictures, including one with N32169 in the same frame.

Yep, back to the Napoleonic Wars, with Bernard Cornwell.  It’s been a while since I’ve checked in with Sharpe and the boys, and honestly, they seem to have gotten a little whinier than I remember.  Sharpe’s always been worried about his fate and his love life, but I seem to recall more of this having been resolved last time.  This all felt more like a replay than new worries.

Overall this was much more like a Twilight book than I was expecting. Both of our leading men spend a lot of time weighing their motives in trying to join a Forlorn Hope, and primary meaning aside, it was rather more introspective than I wanted, and their concerns had been played before.

As much as I liked the Twilight series, I prefer my men of action to brood less and fight more.  Hopefully this was just a brief slacking of the action.  We did learn a bunch about siege warfare, though.

I’ve read a bunch of these, and I’ll probably keep doing so, even if a fair number of the stories in each are somewhat predictable formula bits, or somewhat over-engineered literary writing.  There’s always a gem or two in here.

I rather liked Galgut’s “The Lover,” which starts without soul and slowly won me over, and Rash’s “Into The Gorge,” which was solid and moving.  Alice Monroe and Annie Proulx are here again, turning in solid work, though I found Proulx’s “Them Old Country Songs” covered ground she’d covered better before.  Monroe’s “Some Women” was a really nice bit of work.  Probably my favorite was Ladsun’s “Oh, Death,” which manages to be elegiac without being overly sad.

Others will find different gold, I’m sure, but there is something to like in here if you’re interested in looking.

Recommended.