Search for AirAsia Flight 8501

On the Java Sea off Pangkalan Bun, Central Borneo, Indonesia, Jan. 6, 2015. Indonesian Armed Forces Chief Gen. Moeldoko arrives on the command ship KRI Banda Aceh for the search for the wreckage of AirAsia Flight 8501.

The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster

Martine Johanna’s “The Grand Illusion of Sanity”

is the most annoying book in the world. It's a great story about love, death and work. It's got great characters, but they do the stupidest things for the stupidest reasons, or for not any reason at all. It starts with the death of a man's family and his subsequent grief. He eventually starts a project which distracts him enough that he can at least pretend to be alive. So far, so good.
    Now we get involved with the character who is central to this project, one Hector Mann, silent film star. The story goes along until we have another death and now the story starts to careen off the rails. If you are going to conceal the death, why disappear? If you are going to disappear, why bother to conceal the death? This death has apparently unhinged this guy, but not completely, just the part of his mind that makes life planning decisions.
    Anyway, the book goes on like this. We have an episode of life and then something happens and Hector takes an inexplicable left turn. This is the continuing pattern of this book, though it isn't always Hector who isn't making any sense. Each time this happens is more aggravating than the last, and each event makes me madder, so by the end I had to force myself to sit down and finish it. I mean, there are only a dozen or so pages left? How mad can they make me?
    I had to finish the book because I borrowed it from my daughter, who borrowed it from a friend and I am leaving in a few days. If I want to see how it turns out, and reassure myself that the book never redeems itself, but continues on this maddening repetition to the very end, the only way is to finish it. I am certainly not going to go to the trouble to locate a copy when I get home just so I can find out.

    People, of course, are infamous for their poor ability to think logically, and it's those lapses of reason that give us our most entertaining stories, be they books, newspapers, movies, what have you. It is an essential element of horror films and comedies, which might explain why I don't particularly care for those.
    People do inexplicable things all the time, but when someone does someone dirt, it's usually ascribed to a character flaw. I think that is the essence of what bugged me: Hector, by all accounts, is a good, upstanding, trustworthy soul, but at critical junctures he is a complete cad. But instead of condemning him, the story just goes on and starts building him up again. Or maybe that's just what happens. Maybe in day-to-day life he is a boy scout. It's only at these rare, critical junctures, that he reveals himself to be a coward. If it was a true story, it would be believable, but it's fiction, so it isn't.

P.S. I tried a new proof reading technique on this post. I had Natural Reader read it to me. It's relatively painless and I caught one typo. But then I wrote some more, so there they be more typos.

Books

The 'correctly oriented' titles are on the left. The 'backwards' ones are on the right. The dozen or so cookbooks have been put in their own section. Anthony's book is the larger, light blue one.

There is a small bookshelf in the place where I am staying that has a couple of dozen books. I sat down to look at it this morning and discovered that there was a film of grit on the covers. Well, that's going to drive me nuts if I have to handle these very much, so I carried them all to the kitchen and wiped off the covers with a damp dishrag. Then I spread them out on the bed to dry.
    The weather here oscillates madly. Some days the weather is like Spring, some days are unbearably hot and humid, and some days we have rainstorms. When the cold front came in the evening before last, the wind struck suddenly, especially twelve floors up in darling daughter's apartment. Boom! goes the door.
    When the weather is warm I like to leave the windows open. There is nothing like a breath of fresh air. Unfortunately in the big city, that fresh air comes with grit, so along with the fresh air you get a coating of dust all over the floors and everything else for that matter. It isn't really obvious, but if you walk around the house in white sox or bare feet you will find that your soles are soon black.
     So I cleaned the covers of the books. When I was picking them up I noticed that the titles on the spines of some of the books were backwards. Could this be a Spanish language indicator? Turns out, no. All the books are Spanish. Some of them have the titles on the spines right side up, and the rest of them are upside down.
    As a bonus I found that Anthony Bourdain writes books. I've caught a couple of episodes of his TV show and they are pretty entertaining.

Rain, Part 2

6 AM Buenos Aires, Argentina

Yesterday, and for several days before that it was hot, hot and humid, and then boom, a cold front blew in last night and now it's 70 odd degrees and pouring down rain. Well, that was this morning. It's settled down now, cool, dry and partly cloudy. Part 1 here.

My Front Door

3671 Lavalle, Buenos Aires, Argentina

I had been here a week before I realized that I was staying in a fancy looking building. When we walked here we came around the corner on the same side of the street, so I was never in a position to actually see the front of the building. I only discovered what it looked like when I started playing around with Google Street View, which is where I got this image.
    The front door (center) is just a plain steel grill. Just inside the grill we have an all glass door with another lock and a modern marble and glass lobby with a stainless steel elevator. To the left of the front door is the electric car door, which opens onto a tunnel which goes back ten meters or so to a garage which holds half a dozen cars. It looks like a tight fit getting into the parking spaces, which are separated by pillars. The sidewalk is typical, made of tiles of some sort. Poured concrete sidewalks are rare.
    Now that I've looked at it, I think the front facade is all that is left of the original building. The rest of it has been replaced by a modern four story condo with a swimming pool in the back.
    The rent is pretty cheap, something like $35 a night, but then rent in general here seems to be very low. In the USA, one month's rent and mortgage is typically about one per-cent of the market value of the property. Using that rule of thumb here won't get you anywhere near the purchase price of an apartment or house.

Update May 2021. Corrected spelling of Buenos. Did spell checker not exist in 2015?

Razzle Dazzle

Dazzle paint, USS Nebraska, April 1918

Posthip Scott sent me this picture of the battleship USS Nebraska wearing a WWI Razzle Dazzle camouflage paint job. It is unfortunate that all such photos are in black and white, because the actual paint jobs were done in a variety of colors. While there don't seem to be any color photos, there are a few color paintings, like this one:

Ocean liner RMS Mauretania in 1918 camouflage.

The object of these eye catching paint schemes wasn't to conceal the vessel, but to make it difficult for U-boat commanders to judge the speed and distance of their target. WW1 torpedoes were a bit primitive, they went where they were told, and if you told them wrong, you missed. For the allies, confusing the enemy might mean making it all the way across the pond to England.

There is also a country called Mauretania, though it also spelled Mauritania.

Silk Road case wanders into trial

by Susie Cagle

Silk Road was busted just 15 months ago and already the case has found it's way to trial. Sarah Jeong tells the story in Forbes, and it is very entertaining. Here is a sample:

But the judge declined to entertain the Fourth Amendment argument—that the seizure of the servers constituted an unreasonable search and seizure—because Ross Ulbricht could not demonstrate a property interest in the Icelandic server. If anyone had a property interest it was the Dread Pirate Roberts, and as long Ross Ulbricht insisted he wasn’t the Dread Pirate Roberts, he couldn’t possibly have standing to contest the government’s search.

Is Ross the Dread Pirate or not? Only his hairdresser knows for sure.