Walking on the Moon

32169 finished its annual inspection this week, which is always a good excuse to go flying and make sure everything’s working. The flight right after inspection is always a good one for keeping you on your toes. If someone accidentally left something in the wrong state while the plane was taken apart, the pilot often finds out on that first flight. The pre-flight inspection was more thorough than usual.

Just to make it interesting, I decided to take a long-ish trip up to Porterville. It’s an uncontrolled field up past Bakersfield in the central valley where I’ve had good luck with food before. It’s an hour and 15 minutes or so in the air, which is a nice part of an afternoon to spend.

The trip out was pretty straightforward. I did get a good look at Poso Kern County – an airport I once judged the wind at by watching smoke from a trash fire. Overall, though it was a nice clear flight without too much going on.

Porterville’s the kind of small town airport where you might get to wave to a father and his child out airplane watching as you pull up to the parking area. And I did.

The former Michael’s restaurant at Porterville has closed, replaced by the Airway Café. The food’s still good, though the menu seems less varied than it used to. The little bar area was also closed today, but that may be because it was Sunday.

I decided to look around a bit in the area after I took off before going back to SMO. The central valley is where I go to pretend I fly in the midwest. It’s flat and usually clear with a bunch of farmland. It’s nice to zip around a couple thousand feet off the ground checking out the little towns and knowing you’ve got choices if you need to land suddenly. To me, that’s relaxing.

There’s a little airport on the sectional near Pixley but that the airport facility directory has listed as closed indefinitely. Pixley’s not far west of Porterville, so I overflew the airport at about 2500′. It’s closed and it ain’t opening any time soon. I really don’t know why it isn’t coming off the sectional; the airport’s clearly suffered significant neglect if not outright damage. There’s certainly a story here that I’m curious about.

From Pixley I turned south to get a landing in at Delano. I’ve always had a soft spot for Delano, but it’s become sort of a joke between Brenda and me. I convinced her to come out with me flying one day and we went there for lunch. It was hot, the food wasn’t stellar, and the staff spent a lot of time watching telenovellas rather than helping us out. It’s the placeholder for an unpleasant destination for a non-pilot. She wasn’t with me today, so I stopped off to make sure the runway was still there and the restaurant was still open. I didn’t eat, but all was well.

Coming out of Delano through the Gorman pass for home, I discovered an interesting problem. I hadn’t planned to be doing any instrument flying today, but there was a thick billow of smoke from the big fire outside Santa Barbara. I expected that I’d be able to go around it, but that didn’t look feasible – I heard pilots up near 12,000′ reporting IMC. I could go under it, but the plan was to cross the Gorman pass, which is pretty high; I don’t like to go through there much below 7000′, and the thought of going through there lower with poor visibility didn’t sound attractive. I wound up requesting and receiving a pop-up IFR clearance from a very busy Bakersfield Approach controller. I was in solid IMC for 10 minutes or so, then popped out the other side and cancelled before I actually reached the pass. Perhaps the clearance was overkill, but as Ron Post says, “I like overkill.”

Perhaps only a pilot can love an unexpected opportunity to fly in actual instrument conditions, but I did enjoy it.

On the way in to Santa Monica I got to pass over a Southwest jet inbound to Burbank by a little more than 500′. We both saw each other and the controller cleared me to do so, but it’s still kind of cool to pass right over a landing jet. Well, it is for me, your mileage may vary.

It was a day of unexpected pleasures.

I finished The Vintage Bradbury. A review is up on Bell Book, and Candle.

I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.2.2.  Holler if anything looks weird.

I mentioned a while ago that I’d bought but not read Warren Ellis’s and Raulo Caceres’s Crécy. Leaving it unread didn’t last very long, but I haven’t written anything about it.

It’s quite phenomenal, actually. Scott McCloud is fond of talking about the uses of comics beyond entertainment, and Crécy is an example he should point at. Exactly what it’s an example of is hard to describe pithily, but it’s certainly excellent.

Crécy is a little bit of historical fiction, a little bit of dramatic sociology, some military history, a discourse on the longbow, and a lot of Warren Ellis ranting. The focal point of all this is the 1346 Battle of Crécy. You can read all about that battle on Wikipedia some time, but frankly, unless you’re a big fan of 14th century history, you’ll be hard pressed to finish the article. I guarantee that if you sink the seven bucks to buy this comic, you’ll be able to describe the battle, its technology, and its implications for weeks afterward. You may just corner random people and start ranting about it. It may be difficult to shut you up about it.

Ellis tells the story from the perspective of a fictional archer in the battle, but one who is aware he’s talking to 21st century readers and is cognizant of the intervening history. It’s more effective than it sounds. He deftly manages to keep the reader in the 14th century slogging through the mud to what any contemporary would assume will be a slaughter and connecting the dots between that world and ours with humor and insight. Humor and insight are only two of the techniques, actually, but they’re the strongest.

Ellis is a formidable voice, and an artist could be overwhelmed by him; Caceres is more than up to the challenge. His art is beautifully detailed and cleanly laid out. He gets a fantastic amount of detail on to the page without cramping it. Furthermore, in service to Ellis’s far-reaching goals for the work – part tactical and technological study, part illumination of the human condition – Caceres has to communicate everything from detailed drawings of demonstrations of 14th century armaments, to comprehensible maps of the battlefield, to vivid images of human beings in close combat. He spans these styles with an aplomb that trivializes their difficulties.

The result is an illuminating, entertaining, thought-provoking description of an event that I’d assumed only held interest to the D&D crowd.

Get a copy and enjoy.

I’ve posted reviews of Wealth and Democracy, Babbitt, and Don’t get Too Comfortable on Bell, Book and Candle.  Been a long time coming.

Apparently Graceland will be getting more commercial.  I don’t know if I’m more surprised that they’re fooling with the King’s home, or that Graceland could become more commercial.

Congratulations to the A-B Tech Hot Food Team (OK, apparently they’re officially the A-B Tech culinary team) who won a national championship. As near as I can tell, my sister runs A-B Tech, so I consider it a win for the home team.

So apparently a couple big chunks of ice hit a small town in Iowa.

Note to CNN: there are a lot of weird things in this world, and not all of them are tied to global warming. Just so you know.

What a good week.

• Love and Rockets #20
  • Saying bad things about Love and Rockets is kind of hard to do.  The art’s beautiful and the characters are all familiar and well written.  It’s strange to be writing that nothing happening is the biggest down side of this thing, after just finishing saying how watching nothing happen in Captain America is a good time.  I really should go to the graphic novels.
• Grendel: Behold The Devil #0
  • Another 80’s weakness of mine is Matt Wagner’s Grendel.  This is a preview for a series due out in November featuring the Hunter Rose Grendel – that is the original Grendel – perhaps revealed through the research of the Christine Spar Grendel.  The framer here is as nice an intro to Hunter as one could expect.  I even jumped and I’m a veteran Grendel reader.  Nice lead in.  I’ll look for the series.
• Black Summer #1
  • Warren Ellis’s new superhero project for Avatar gets off to a cracking start.  The preliminaries set the stage nicely for this issue’s confrontation between Tom Noir and the forces stirred up bu John Horus’s assassination of the President.  It’s a fast-paced episode where we hit the ground running with Tom.  There’s also just the right amount of backfill to tease the Seven Guns’ history.  This is a rarity:a first issue that one would have to buy the next issue.  I’m committed already, but I think readers who pick this up will have a hard time putting it down.
• Doktor Sleepless
  • Warren Ellis is touting this as his next effort in the vein of Transmetropolitan, and I’m interested in that.  There’s a lot in here that people who read his blog (guilty as charged) have heard snippets of and his vision for the title is broad and exciting.  He’s aggressively tying the print material to an evolving wiki and other web resources and generally trying to create an example of a new media.  I’ll be sticking around for it, but I’m a little concerned that the first issue wasn’t terribly effective as a narrative.  It’s clear that our man Sleepless is up to something, but it’s very unclear what he’s up to or why I care.  OK, I care because it’s Warren Ellis writing as a futurist, but why someone else cares is open to question.  I’ll be around to find out, though.
  • Sig file fodder: “Electricity can only be replenished by whisky.  This is actual physics.  Do not argue with me.  I am a Doktor.”

And I haven’t even gotten to Crecy yet.

• Shazam The Monster Society of Evil, issue #4 of 4
  • Jeff Smith  has tied up his Captain Marvel series in fine form.  It’s still a little disconcerting to see old CM rendered in Bone style rather than looking like Fred MacMurray as he should.  Overall he captures the whimsy and adventure of the Fawcett Marvels’ universe very well, dropping just enough grit in to keep it from being too dull without marring the place up.  And anything featuring 2 100-story columns of cockroaches is pretty awesome.
• Captain America #28
  • I hate to keep reviewing CA issues by saying that the pot’s cooking, but the pot’s cooking.  It’s a great strength of Brubaker and Epting that this continuing simmer doesn’t feel like a slog.  It’s honestly envoyable to watch this all unfold.  It’ll be nice when something does come to a head, but this kind of stake out isn’t a chore.
• Will Eisner’s The Spirit
  • Still great.  We get a nice bit of characterization of Satin that’s not news to any old Spirit fans, and a continuing slow burn of the Octagon/Octopus plot.  Really the only place this could go is down.  And I’ll be there when it does.