Overflow Valve

I didn't really send it. I wrote that last blog post right after completing the form, and I really wrote that on the form, but in the sober light of the next dawn, before the Purolator truck arrived, I was hit by a fit of sanity and reprinted the pages on which I had expressed my personality and frustration, replacing them with blandness.

In the same vein, when today I received the form letter telling me "Good afternoon Mr. Aviatrix, Your submission has been received and will be sent to a regional TDG Inspector for review. The inspector will contact you if they require more information or corrections to your documentation," I didn't write back asking, "Is it your department policy to address all persons in authority by male honorifics, or is that an individual initiative on your part?"

Also I went for a nice little flight today. We brief an emergency procedure before every flight, and today it was an engine failure before rotation. "Okay," I said, "so we're rolling down the runway at full power and for some reason we need to stop."

I paused for breath and my co-worker said, "Coyote on the runway," at the same time as I added, "Maybe there's a coyote." Great minds think alike. "So, clearly there's a psychic coyote on the runway." The runway here is long enough to stop after reaching rotation speed, so I brief that I pull power idle, brake as required, tell ATC, and get off the runway to try that again, once the brakes have cooled. I also brief the full procedure for if an emergency stop were made on a runway too short to accommodate it, necessitating magnetos off, fuel off, inform ATC and electrical off, then evacuate when the aircraft is done crashing into whatever is past the end of the runway. If the day starts somewhere that an engine failure on the roll could leave me without braking room, I brief to the specifics of the environment.

After run-up I was held short of the long taxiway because the controller said, "there are a couple headed your way." I hear other people call for taxi and also get held short, so I move up a bit so there is room for whomever is behind me, but not so much that there isn't room for whatever the couple I'm waiting for are. Not a couple of coyotes, though. Turns out to be a Navajo and a Beech 1900. Once they pass I am given clearance to taxi, and discover I'm catching up to the aircraft ahead of me. Kind of unusual for me. I taxi slowly. They turn a corner and I see that the slowpoke has a foreign registration. That makes sense. Tourist. The locals and the people who come here often enough to know the coyotes by name taxi fast.

I get my clearance and depart. There are no literal coyotes. Today.

Incognito

I'm at my desk checking NOTAMs while my co-worker pops out for a quick Tim Horton's run before boarding. Seconds after he leaves, I hear footsteps on the stairs again. Thinking he has forgotten his keys or something, I start to say, "That was the quickest Tim Horton's run ever," but it's not someone I recognize. He works for the company next door.

He says, "Oh, not one of your pilots. Do you know where he has gone?"

It takes me a moment to parse this. The first sentence makes perfect sense, because I'm the chief pilot here, so a pilot working for this company is in some sense "my" pilot. But why does he want to know where my non-pilot co-worker has gone, or even know that he exists? Then he continues with why he's here, and my understanding cuts in. In his eyes I am not a pilot. I am a woman working at a desk. The possibility that I am the pilot he seeks has not even crossed his mind.

The guy who is now on his way to Timmy's towed the aircraft out to an inappropriate position, and it is blocking the egress of another airplane that is ready to depart. I apologize and leap up to help move it, but he says that's okay, he has a co-pilot. With my permission they will push it back a few metres. About a minute later their assistant chief pilot comes in with the same complaint, but he knows who I am. I grab a reflective vest and go out to the ramp even though I know it's handled.

I suppose I could choose to be offended or outraged that some twenty-something (who is inexplicably wearing a toque even though it's about twenty degrees now and will go up to thirty by the afternoon) has a concept of "pilot" that does not include people who look like me. On the broader scale, there are huge problems in a society when people's concept of "law-abiding citizen," "person suitable for employment," "person worthy of respect as a human being," and "potential friend" arbitrarily exclude huge swathes of the population, but today I will just be amused by my own power of invisibility.

Female Problems

Don't worry, this post isn't about instrument air filters or the lack thereof. But for the "problems men don't have" category I submit:

Attend aviation conference before work. Bring flight clothes to change into. Forget shoes. Do six hour flight wearing really cute little ankle boots, colour coordinated with your camisole.

Could have been worse. At least I wasn't wearing stiletto heels. I might have punctured the aircraft.

New Definition of Number One

Overheard on the radio today: You're number one, behind a Pilatus. The pilot didn't seem to have a problem with that kind of counting.

Also overheard, as I was walking into an FBO, a discussion of hiring a new pilot, they were discussing how much to offer. "Ah," said one, "We'll just get them to write up the requirements and see if we can get a guy." "Or a woman," I said, my trajectory through the room such that I was right beside them right at the moment this needed to be said. They agreed completely, and then asked me how much I thought they should pay a Pilatus captain. "It depends on so many things..." I waffled.

"Like whether we hire a woman or not," joked the guy, and I raised a boot as if to kick him the head and then passed by. A pilot doesn't pause long on the route from cockpit to washroom after a flight. The sad thing is that he's right. It's harder for women to get jobs in aviation, so when one is available we'll accept it at lower pay than a man would, and stay longer, because it's harder for us to get the next job too. Men know this, and it's one of the reasons men protest the hiring of women and minorities. We lower the wages. One we do it just by existing: people added to the existing number of white men being available in the labour pool means that there is more supply of labour, so wages go down purely by supply and demand. And then we do it by being hungry. We'll take that lowball job offer. Men can't keep us out of the labour force, so the only way you can fix this and be sure that we and you are hired on merit is to make sure we're paid the same for the same experience and duties.

'Cause apparently in aviation you can be number one right behind someone else.

Fireproof Clothing One Can Pee Out Of

Fireproof clothing that doesn't need to be removed before urinating: is that too much to ask? I have asked this question before on this blog, but then it was more rhetorical, Now I'm actually in the market for Nomex flightsuits compatible with in-flight urination. Preferably in company colours. (Protip: if you want to save money on flightsuits in company colours, make your company colours navy blue or khaki). So I turn to the first resort of anyone in the 21st century looking for anything: Google (because my phone isn't new enough to have Siri).

Try and guess what the entire first page of Google returns for "flight suit reviews" consists of. Just try.

Unless you guessed diapers for pet birds, you guessed wrong. You'd be close if you guessed Halloween costumes, like this one, that comes complete with Top Gun patches and aviator sunglasses. Or the kid-sized replica of the NASA Advanced Crew Escape Suit the author of this blog entry started out reviewing, before she got distracted by thinking about what it would really be like to be an astronaut's mother. And then there are the ones that don't seem to be costumes, but marketed like costumes, as though their primary customer just wants to look like a pilot. They sell a women's flight suit, at about a hundred and fifty dollars more than the typical men's price I've seen, but I'm not sure whether the mark-up is for the smaller woman's market, or because this is for people who want "genuine, authentic flight suits like real pilots wear," as opposed to those who want to put genuine fireproof clothing on real pilots. I'm also wary of ordering a "women's flight suit" that is only available in men's sizes, and is sold on a page with the html title "MENS POLYCOTTON FLIGHTSUIT".

When I do find women's suits listed, and this one looks pretty good, it is sometimes difficult to determine which is the corresponding men's suit. I don't object to the men having a much greater selection of styles nor to the women's ones often being more expensive: I do understand economies of scale. I just want there to be a corresponding men's suit to the one women's suit on offer. These are, after all, intended as a uniform. I want male and female crew members to have the same pocket layout and styling, for the overall look even if what's underneath our zippers is a little different.

Because of the difference under the zipper, I'm looking closely at the styling, trying to work out how I pee in there. If the zipper went far enough down, I could get a portable urinal in there. If there's lots of extra room in the legs, I guess I could get the bag to hang down one leg while I used it. Some of the pictures don't even look like they would make it convenient for the males to engage their equipment with a relief tube. Zippers are men's natural enemies, right? And I'm still not finding reviews of flight suits intended for those without cloacae. If you wear or have worn one, and are not an incontinent bird, let me know what you think of yours, what features you like or wish it has, and whether you can pee in it without, you know, peeing IN it.

I hope I can find a better solution than this style, although I do appreciate the fact that the vendor charges less for the women's version, in light of the reduction in fabric required. I'm seriously tempted to buy that last one and show up in it on Halloween.

International Women's Day

So, as most of the Internet knows, this happened. I wasn't going to grace it with a response, but just the way the Vancouver Canucks took up the white towel as a symbol, instead of a flag of surrender, WestJet has made the inked paper napkin a positive symbol of women in aviation, and that's not as interesting without context.

And then there's this photo of a pilot posing with the mirror shades and the massive watch looks almost as if she's redoubled her efforts to fulfill those stereotypes, to make up for the ones she misses.

I know there are people thinking, "Give it a rest, women are equal now." I hear you, and I actually thought that, coming out of university. But the attitudes like napkin-writing David's are ingrained so deeply in society that being treated as, or assumed to be incompetent becomes part of the background noise. Here's to the day when no one has to second guess whether they are believed, doubted, accepted, rejected, paid or otherwise valued based on anything other than themselves.

Battery of Battery-Related Thoughts

I walked all over town to find a 386/301 battery for my IFR timer and a couple of AAAs for my pulse oximeter. Who knew there could be so many different sorts of small round batteries. When buying devices, it's worth including battery availability in the comparison between brands. Everything in aviation should run off AA batteries. I carry a charger and a little pile of spare rechargeables so that when my headset battery cops out, or my flashlight isn't bright enough, I can swap them out.

Mark that against the Bose A20: the batteries are trickier to change in flight than for LightSPEED. They didn't intend you to change them in flight. They have an elaborate system of green and amber flashing lights designed to tell you your battery health and give you a chance to change them before the flight. These don't work with rechargeables, because of their square power profile: they work fine until they are almost dead then drop off to nothing too fast to give a warning. Bose tells you not to use rechargeable batteries for this reason, but I'm not leaving a trail of mercury all over the country for the convenience of flashing lights.

I keep my spare and used batteries straight in the cockpit using a pair of little plastic boxes, one red and one clear, that hold for AA batteries each. I was using it in the north and my favourite captain asked me where I got it. I didn't remember exactly, but told him I'd get him one, and I didn't, but I had to leave before I gave it to him. I asked for his postal address to send it to him, but then he had to leave, and the e-mail I had for him stopped working, but I kept the box all this time. Last time I was packing, I couldn't find my box, so I 'stole' the one I'd been saving for him, but I tell you, if you're reading this, you who forgave me for ripping the REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT streamer off the engine plug on my first morning at work, send me your address and I will be honoured to send you one.

I have to plug the computer in to use flight simulator programs. The battery runs down too fast otherwise. When I'm flying my toy flight simulator, sometimes the panel lights spontaneously turn off, and I have to cycle the nav lights to put them back on again. Bug or feature to make the whole thing as inscrutably unknowable as a real airplane?

If you thought that last thought was disconnected, how about this one: Originally the forest moon of Endor was supposed to be populated by Wookiees, not Ewoks (wook-ee/ee-wok: original, eh?) but George Lucas decided that since the Wookiee Chewbacca was clearly proficient with advanced technology (i.e. he was pilot and mechanic of the spaceship the Millennium Falcon and also repaired the damaged android C3PO), it would be confusing to show the Wookiees with a primitive, "stone age" culture on Endor.

That's stupid. That's stupid enough to make me angry. That's racist 'logic'. That's the logic that didn't let women run marathons, because they never had. You don't have to be a whiny white moisture farmer with exceptional midichlorians to study and learn things, and it is perfectly possible to learn things that your parents didn't know. You'd have to be keen, and have some aptitude for the subject to make up for the not having the experience of growing up with technology, like Anakin building his own robots and podracers, but there's no reason Kashyyyk couldn't produce competent pilots and mechanics.

You may think this post has gone entirely into deep space, but I'll bring it home by examining Star Wars stored power technology. The Death Star had a massive generator, and no fuel tanks, but the society had batteries, power converters, power couplers and other means of transferring, transforming and transporting energy. I wonder if Han Solo ever had to walk all over Mos Eisley looking for the right sort of power cell for his blaster.

Everybody Counts

It's a Census year in Canada, all the ones ending in 1 are, I believe. June was the census month, and my household received two copies of the official form, one addressed to the basement. There's no basement, not even a crawl space you could hide a body in. Normal people just throw out an extra form like that. But me, I'm not normal people. It says it has to be filled out, by law. I can't just throw it in the recycling. I call the number on the form. The woman says I only have to do one.

"So I can do two for fun?" I ask, because that's what sort of idiot I am.

"If you want to." Good grief. How the heck are we going to count who lives here, if that's the advice they give? But I do do two, but by the electronic method. I log into the website and enter the code from the form, and then enter an accurate count of who actually lives here. For the second form I enter zero in the number field. No one lives in the non-existent basement. Why do I do this? I expect it to reject it, and I enjoy feeling superior to computers, and being stupidly accurate. To my surprise the site has a page ready for my response, with half a dozen reasonable suggestions for why there might be zero people at an address. I pick "does not exist or apartment has been merged with main dwelling," which perfectly describes the situation.

I'm impressed. Now you can see I'm not cranky about all questionnaires. Just the vast majority of poorly written ones. My only complaint is that they required every person in the household to be classified as either male or female, no other option. Requiring one or the other has caused pain and persecution for a lot of people. Biology isn't always binary, but boxes on forms and societal pressure cause people to be physically forced into one box or the other shortly after birth, even when they aren't. The expectation and the forced compliance are so pervasive that a lot of people don't even know that not everyone is born into one of the boxes. Everyone wants to know if it's a boy or a girl, but for one in every 1500 to 2000 births in North America, a specialist is called in to decide which box the baby goes into, often via surgical alteration. And although most people have little difficulty identifying with one sex or the other, one in a hundred people has a body that differs from the standard minimum equipment list for their placarded gender. If people are equally represented in the blogosphere as in the delivery room, that's about ten pageviews a day on this blog. Hello ten people, who possibly don't all even know that your bits don't match the spec! You count too.

Trans-Atlantic Passenger Aircraft

While I was trying to find out what was included in the interwar aerodynamics term "wing resistance" I found this 1927 Popular Science article which uses the term in passing while stating that the Germans are building passenger transport planes with passenger seating inside the wings, and speculating that by 1950 there will be two tiers of passenger decks inside the wings of trans-Atlantic aircraft. The article added nothing to the discussion of wing drag, but I grew up seeing the artwork on magazine covers like these and expecting to really see the things manifest.

There is an excellent article on page twelve about Lindbergh's airplane, including the instruments, and then more on another trans-Atlantic flight, by Charles Chamberlain. I could write half a dozen blog articles just researching them, and I may just do that later, but at the moment I'm distracted by all the other tidbits in the old magazine. This must have been an aviation special edition, but it's startling how many things I take for granted are discussed there as cutting edge or future possibilities. I think I'm not visionary enough to be an engineer, to conceive of something being possible based on a particular scientific principle and then chase it down until it is a concrete, beneficial technology. That may be the difference between a science and a belief to me: if you're explaining an observable phenomenon by science, you can use that science to build a technology that works for someone who knows nothing of the science.

There are lots of suggested applications of technology that I haven't seen manifested. Page 56 describes a device for testing a pilot's vision, but I've never been subjected to that test, so I guess it didn't catch on. On page 43 there is an artist's conception of a system of giant deck fans on a ship, allowing aircraft to land in a short distance for refuelling or emergencies. The arrestor cable is probably a better technology for that, but it was a cute idea. Page 32 documents the first known glider tow launch, and predicts that this could lead to 'aerotrains.' But the secret to invention may be not to laugh at the ridiculous ideas, but to try them.

Some of the ideas have taken off. Page 47 suggests that apes might be able to use basic sign language, and there has been a lot of research on that since. The newly-invented breathalyser is introduced on page 56. Radio was still a cool new technology, and page 56 also describes the discovery of a "radio roof." I learned about high frequency radio "sky waves" bouncing off the ionosphere during my first aviation class on radio theory, but I'd never before wondered when we started doing that. Wikipedia dates the discovery of long distance HF propagation to 1923, and the confirmation of the existence of the ionosphere (for which Edward V. Appleton was later awarded a Nobel Prize!) to 1927. Which two-column-inch silly idea in this week's news will be standard knowledge in fifty years?

There's a description of Paul Edwards' experiments with a radio guidance system, and while I can't find him named in any history of the ILS, I'm suspect that his was some of the earliest research that led to its development. There's a tiny bit more on page 253 of this Popular Mechanics.

The ads are great too. A Gillette ad says "every face is different" yet is illustrated with three faces that make the Führerbunker look diverse. Correspondence schools urge you to earn more money by taking courses on electrical refrigeration, radios, accounting or plumbing. Or "$39 in one day!" selling can openers. And then there's aviation:

Are you hungry for ...
Adventure ..
Popularity .
Big Pay?

Apparently you have to be "a red-blooded daring he-man" for that kind of career. But "the fortunes that came out of the automobile industry and out of motion pictures will be nothing compared to the fortunes that will come out of Aviation." If they mean "come out of" in the sense that the stuffing comes out of a well-used toy, they might be close.

An enthusiastic editorial on public utilities (this must be before they were hated corporations) extols the virtues of electrical power, and this time they do include the ladies.

"How about an electric vibrator? You can massage with it one hour a day, if it takes that much time, getting the kinks out of your system for 2 cents a week."

An hour a day is pretty kinky, but I guess if you weren't offered the opportunity to participate in the exciting worlds of aviation, refrigeration or plumbing, you might have a lot of spare time for your vibrator.

Personality Analysis: Suspicious

Someone e-mailed me to ask for my participation in a Pilot Personality Survey and I said bring it on, but the survey was ... weird. The cover letter requested that I forward it to other pilots, but later in the letter stated that the link was for me only, and not to forward it. I took that to be an issue with the survey software. The survey itself started all the right ways with the notification of approval from the ethics board, contact information for the research supervisor and so on, but if it was a real survey it was either done with poor preparation or it was researching something completely different.

It started with some unnecessary personal questions, like salary and the actual names of the airlines you have worked for. Then it asked me to "Indicate the endorsement obtained from the federal agency National Transportation Safety Board." Now the survey was based in a US possession, and not being an American commercial pilot I know I don't know every wrinkle in their licensing and endorsements, but I've never heard of an NTSB endorsement, and couldn't find anything out about it at the FAA or NTSB sites. Neither organization is a paragon of user accessibility, so that still doesn't mean an NTSB endorsement isn't a thing. I know that the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) investigates accidents and that the FAA grants licences and endorsements. The Canadian equivalent of the NTSB, the TSB, is completely and deliberately separate from Transport Canada, and I thought the same relationship existed between the NTSB and the FAA. The FAA sets and enforces regulations and licensing standards and the NTSB investigates why people crash anyway. What kind of endorsement could a pilot get from the NTSB? Options are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and above, not very descriptive. And they are check boxes not radio buttons. You can choose as many as you like. Anyone know what this is? I move on to the personality survey.

There's a question asking how many children I have and it has the same answer options as the NTSB endorsement question, only this one is with radio buttons. So I can't have simultaneously four and five children, but I can't have zero children, either.

Many of the questions are too transparently like generic statements about CRM to separate pilot personality from pilot knowledge of what research shows good CRM engenders. It's like filling out the CRM awareness annual exam. What can they possibly learn from such a thing? The obvious answer CRM questions are interspersed with "most people have done ... even if just once in their life" questions, for various bad things like stealing and lying. Often those types of questions are honesty markers on a survey, catching people who are putting what they think they should, instead of the truth. Or they are really asking if I have done these things, using the psychology that people imagine that that they are better than most people, so if they have done a bad thing, then most people have done it. I'm not sure it necessarily follows that if someone believes that most people have done a thing that it's an indication that the person himself has done it.

Why yes, I am overthinking the questions on this little survey. I seem to be thinking more about them than the person who wrote it, anyway. After about eighty questions they start repeating. And I don't mean that they ask a similar question again with different words. That's normal on a survey to test for honesty and attention span. No, the last twenty questions are all repeats of earlier questions, or almost repeats with trivial editorial differences. At the end I didn't hit the DONE key, just abandoned the survey, left wondering if this was some kind of strange phishing attack.

I e-mailed the researcher to ask, but received only a form letter thanking me for my participation. I think that e-mail was triggered by my visiting the link, or starting the survey. I notice that the NTSB question now includes the words "only applies for USA pilots," and the children question now has an option for none, so perhaps she updated the survey but didn't get around to acknowledging me. I also e-mailed the purported supervisor, in case it's a phishing attack using her name.

Here's the survey link, purportedly uniquely tied to my e-mail address, so if you want to put nonsense in and click through to see if I'm more likely an ignorant paranoid bitch ragging on some well-meaning researcher's Master's project or a savvy scam-spotter, go ahead. And if you're a statistician or psychologist and would like a platform for an educational rant on survey methodology, send it here.

Meanwhile other things that people have sent here, lately include an article on why there are so few female airline pilots. It omits to mention, as do most such analyses, that the state of the industry reflects not the role of women today, but the role of women fifty to sixty years ago, when today's senior captains were making their career choices. Ten years ago, when today's junior airline FO was making her career choices, it's quite possible her parents told her women weren't allowed to become pilots. That's what I was told ten years ago on the bus, by one of my fellow citizens.

Heck, you want to know what life advice I was give, by a well-meaning relative born in the 20th century?

• Don't compete with a man, but if you have to, let him win.
• Always wear a bra to bed.
• Muscles on a woman are unattractive.
• Only ride your bicycle on the sidewalk.
• Treat frostbite by rubbing snow on it.

Let me tell you, she was not pleased when she saw the big muscles I had from riding my bike up steep hills, on the road, in order to win races, against men. But that's how slow change is. Those ludicrous ideas were held by a person who influenced me growing up.

People are so impatient about change. There are a number of children growing up in my extended family who believe that flying is for girls, and kids making career decisions now have seen female astronauts their whole lives. I don't think there is any great need to see the sexes, races, religions, and sports team fans proportionately distributed in the professions of the world, so long as people have the opportunity to do what they have the capacity to and want to do.

Fair Play

I sometimes skip posting on April Fool's Day altogether because I feel obliged to perpetrate some stunt. I'm a horrible liar and I don't like tricking people. Then I came across a stunt too stupid to live, and decided it deserves this occasion to be outed. Just remember, if you think this is a really stupid blog entry, you're getting it instead of no blog entry, not instead of a dissertation on the inlet anti icing of the CRJ-200.

If you use Facebook you might remember a meme a while ago where women posted just a colour to their status, without indicating that it was the colour of their bra. The purpose of this was to promote breast cancer awareness. I suppose the theory is that some man would say "why do all the women have colours as their Facebook status?" and the woman would reply, "Do you know that regular mammograms over age forty used to be promoted as a crucial tool in reducing breast cancer mortality, but recent research shows that the technique finds fewer cancers than expected, that ten times as many women are subjected to the stress of unnecessary biopsies as are helped by the screening, and that its possible some cancers are actually caused by the screening radiation?" And then the guy says, Yeah, they really thought that through. But that's not the stupid part yet.

The next phase in women's stupid Facebook status required the poster to use a prepositional phrase to fill in the blank on her status of "I like it _____," and the "secret" was that the women were revealing not their kinky sexual preferences, but where they routinely leave their purses inside their homes. I don't know if this one was to promote breast cancer awareness or just to facilitate life for burglars, but some women were really into this whole, "We have a secret that men don't know," thing. I don't support arbitrary secrets just because, so when the latest one hit my inbox, now no longer in support of anything except annoying men, I decided to turn double agent.

In the next few days, if you see a bizarre female statuses, it's because your Facebook friends have constructed it according to the following formula.

Pick the month you were born:
January-------I kicked
February------I loved
March----------I karate chopped
April------------I licked
May------------I jumped on
June-----------I smelled
July------------I did the macarena with
August--------I had lunch with
September----I danced with
October-------I sang to
November-----I yelled at
December-----I ran over

Pick the day (number) you were born on:
1-------a birdbath
2-------a monster
3-------a phone
4-------a fork
5-------a snowman
6-------a gangster
7-------my mobile phone
8-------my dog
9-------my best friend's boyfriend
10-------my neighbour
11-------my science teacher
12-------a banana
13-------a fireman
14-------a stuffed animal
15-------a goat
16-------a pickle
17-------your mom
18-------a spoon
19------- a smurf
20-------a baseball bat
21-------a ninja
22-------Chuck Norris
23-------a noodle
24-------a squirrel
25-------a football player
26-------my sister
27-------my brother
28-------an iPod
29-------a surfer
30-------a homeless guy
31-------a llama

What is the last number of the year you were born:
1--------- in my car
2 --------- on your car
3 --------- in a hole
4 --------- under your bed
5 --------- riding a motorcycle
6 --------- sliding down a hill
7 --------- in an elevator
8---------- at the dinner table
9 -------- in line at the bank
0 -------- in your bathroom

Pick the colour of shirt you are wearing:
White---------because I'm cool like that.
Black---------because that's how I roll.
Pink-----------because I'm NOT crazy.
Red-----------because the voices told me to.
Blue-----------because I'm sexy and I do what I want.
Green---------because I think I need some serious help.
Purple---------because I'm AWESOME!
Gray----------because Big Bird said to and he's my leader.
Yellow---------because someone offered me 1,000,000 dollars.
Orange---------because my family thinks I'm stupid anyway.
Brown---------because I can.
Other----------because I'm a Ninja!
None----------because I can't control myself!

Do with this knowledge what you will. Happy April Fish.

Mad Woman

I call back about the job, after waiting a day. I get voice mail and leave a message. I wonder if we're going to enter a passive-aggressive battle over this.

I look through what is available on Netflix. The Canadian selection is really terrible, because we have different copyright laws than the US, and the content providers are afraid to let Netflix licence their shows in Canada. Most of the "movies I'd like to see" list is not available, and it suggests some laughable substitutes when I search for them. It does turn up some suggestions I like, but they are movies I already own. I start watching the TV series Mad Men, because I've heard some good things about it.

It's a meticulously crafted period piece about the 1960s, and not the Vietnam War or the flower children, but the buttoned down conservatives of the era, at an ad agency. They have a lot of fun with establishing identifiable, fairly timeless situations and then smashing the viewer upside the head with anachronisms we weren't expecting, like when they get up from a picnic and just leave all their trash behind. I keep wondering whether it's a clever social commentary or just an an excuse to produce misogynist, racist television, glorifying old fashioned attitudes. Its redeeming feature is perhaps that it will remind some people that the good old days never really were, and by removing the role of advertising to another era, perhaps show people how easy it is to be manipulated.

But the weird thing about psychological manipulation is that it often works even when you're aware it's happening. Just watching this darn show makes me want to mix an old-fashioned martini. If I watch another season I may get the urge to vacuum in pearls and high heels and bake a meatloaf for some man. If you watch people doing something, even if it's only fiction, even if you don't approve, it makes it more likely that you'll accept that behaviour as normal. That's why the conservative right objects to gay couples being treated unblinkingly as normal human beings on television, why my wacky relative (please tell me everyone has one) believes that shows about friendly space aliens are Hollywood grooming us for when the aliens come to help us, and why some parents don't let their kids play violent video games. Or maybe those parents just want their kids to stop playing video games and help make dinner.

Those of you who read comments will remember the calorie counter discussion from a couple of weeks ago, but I wanted to tell the non-comment-reading people about this too. If you like to keep an eye on weight, fitness and nutrition all in one little app, I recommend myfitnesspal. You don't even need an iPhone/iPad Touch to use it, because it has a web interface too. You may not be into counting calories, or eat weird stuff that is never in calorie look up tables, but this app has almost everything I've eaten in a month, and allows me to specify the ingredients in a recipe or just tell it the caloric value, if I know. It lets you log exercise, and automatically adjusts your remaining calories for the day. It didn't have "plumbing" as an exercise, but it had automobile maintenance, which was about the same level of physical activity. Its strength is that it is completely effortless to use. You just have to resist the temptation to round out your caloric allocation for the day with a few tablespoons of chocolate chips. They're high in iron, I justify.

The water still comes out of my tap really straight, and that potential employer doesn't return my call. Plus it's apparently open season on B737s in North Carolina. Would you have found it on your preflight walkaround? If they hadn't found the bullet on board I might have believed it had been there a while. The airplane would probably have pressurized without a problem. The Screaming Whippet groundschool instructor described an incident where he did a flight, warm and happy up in the flight levels, only to discover after landing at destination that an entire window had blown out right after take-off. It had accidentally been left unsecured after routine maintenance.

Variable Authority

Up to now in my career, I have flown airplanes that I steered on the ground through pure mechanical linkages powered by my own muscles. I was using levers to physically shove the nosewheel into pointing the way I wanted to turn the airplane. The Screaming Whippet one is too big for me to kick around by myself, or they don't want to make levers that big, so it uses electrically controlled, hydraulically activated, variable authority nosewheel steering. I have to remember that description in case I'm asked about it on the ride. (Ride is pilotspeak for flight test). I also have to remember a whole lot more about how it works.

First pass, what I remember and understand from the class and the reading without looking anything more up:

Nosewheel steering is on the non-essential DC electrical bus. It must be armed and activated to be used. You arm it with a toggle switch, the location and position of which I can't picture now and it becomes activated when the squat switch indicates that you are on the ground and one of the following things happens. Either a) the right speed lever is moved into the low position or b) a button on the side of the left power lever is pressed and held. (Yes, I have both speed and power levers: resolving units, you'd think you'd get a power lever by forcing the speed lever, but that would be a geeky joke and not the reality of this airplane). Once the system is activated, you steer with the rudder pedals, just like old times.

Moving a rudder pedal sends a signal to a potentiometer. There's a pile of potentiometers, I think it was four. One of them represents the input you gave to the rudder pedal, one the position of the nosewheel, one the target position and one for good luck. So maybe it was three. The difference between the target and the position is sent to a selector valve which shuttles the appropriate way to send hydraulic fluid to a piston operating rack and pinion steering to pivot the nose gear in the appropriate direction. The channels in the shuttle valve go straight through for left turns and criss-cross to reverse the pressure for right turns. When the commanded steering meets the actual steering, the system holds that input until a new input is received or the system is disarmed. In the later case it smoothly recentres. The maximum steering in this mode is ten degrees either side of centre, but you can get up to sixty-three degrees deflection in park mode, by pressing and holding the park button. This is for manoeuvring into a tight parking spot. I really hope I don't often have to parallel park this airplane.

There's an annunciator for the system being armed, an annunciator for it activated and a flashing one if it fails. Because it's an electrical system, there is a chance of transient weirdness, and transient weirdness is not something you want to see in large vehicle steering If there's a three degree disagreement between two of the potentiometers, representing some form of where it's requested to be and where it thinks it is going, the system disconnects. You can still steer with braking and power.

Now let me see if by re-reading the chapter I can fix that up, and add things I forgot.

There is a command potentiometer (my "input you gave the rudder pedal") on the left side of the rudder pedal linkage, and a fault protection monitor potentiometer (my "target position") on the right side. There are two more potentiometers on top of the steering actuator, a control follow-up potentiometer (my "position of the nosewheel") and another one for the fault protection monitor circuit. So I was right, there are four, and if monitoring faults is good luck, I got them all right. Well, let's see.

There is a "Nose Steer Computer/Amplifier" which "contains Servo Valve Solenoid drive circuitry to initiate steering based on Rudder Pedal Potentiometer and Nose Gear Follow-up Potentiometer Position." (Why yes, this training manual is apparently so old that it predates the late eighteenth century English move to distance itself from its Germanic roots and not capitalize all nouns).

Okay, reading the quasi-incunabulum more closely, I surmise that the follow-up potentiometer simply turns with the nosewheel steering column, and has the same type of electrical connections as the rudder pedal potentiometer. When the "wiper resistance," a term I am not familiar with, but which I'll read as "the combined effect of the electrical connection and the turning," of the two is the same, the steering is deemed to have turned as far as commanded. The hydraulic supply ports close, so the wheel is locked in the position it was steered to.

I think the Rudder Pedal Monitor Potentiometer must be at the same wiper resistance as the Rudder Pedal Potentiometer--perhaps one potentiometer can only be compares with one other potentiometer, so the latter needs the former to shadow it. My manual names former, and the fourth potentiometer, the Hydraulic Actuator Monitor Potentiometer only once, in the sentence, "In either case, if a difference greater than approximately 3 degrees exists between the Rudder Pedal Monitor Potentiometer and the Hydraulic Actuator Monitor Potentiometer, the protective circuitry within the computer will shut down the system." I can't quite follow that all the way, but I know it means that if the monitor circuit thinks that the commands sent to the hydraulic system are incorrect, it will disconnect the steering to avoid having an electrical irregularity steer an airplane off a runway.

Absent positive steering, you still have directional control of an airplane through braking and differential power, so this is better than definitive by incorrect steering inputs. The "in either case" above refers to the case of a wheel being locked in place despite commanded steering versus uncommanded steering occurring.

The arming switch is located on the left hand console.

I also need to remember the fault test switch and that the system acts as a shimmy damper when not activated, but left in what is known as castoring mode, and that on retraction it automatically centres because the centre position is the low point in the race ... ah I guess I don't understand that well enough to explain it clearly. Also variable authority. I'll say that again to make sure I remember it.

Today is, I believe, International Women's Day. There is one male on our course and the rest are females, who happened to all be connected. The man had a eureka moment when the women all had connections to one another, either having previously met, knowing people in common, or just the familiarity of being females in aviation. We were all talking about then and catching up. He suddenly realized what it must feel like to not be part of the "old boys' network," and the girls saw it at about the same time. We promised not to exclude him from our network, and of course had no intention to do so, but through the week I noticed that our conversations would drift into discussions of female interest topics like clothing, or career planning in the context of postponing or forgoing pregnancy and he would be unintentionally excluded by dint of not having experience or opinions. It must have been for him exactly as it is for me when my usually all male colleagues start discussing football, or someone getting drunk while hunting and rolling his truck. It's hard to get into a conversation when you can't identify with the decisions being made or discussed. I can sort of feel for the men who feel threatened about women in traditionally male-dominated fields, but I don't think it will hurt them to learn to say "aww" when they hear about strangers' babies any more than it has hurt the women to feign interest in football for social purposes.

Responsibility

The thing about looking for a job is that you have to convince people of your value, right when your self esteem may be at its lowest. I agonize over self-assessment and skills evaluation. I never measure up to what I want for myself, and awareness of the fact that people are incompetent to assess themselves doesn't help at all. The worse I am the lower my ability to actually determine if I'm any good. It holds all the potential for a spiral of despair.

I have a friend who is looking for a job at the same time. We ended up in one of those romantic comedy type moments where it turned out we each thought the other had it all together and wished that we could be that way. She has more IFR command experience than I do. We both have atypical employment histories, in different ways. We're both female, which of itself is another characteristic separating us from the stereotypical candidate. Most employers these days should be able to picture a pilot who isn't a twenty-something white male aviation college grad in their uniform. It's just something else for us to stress about. We're trying to be job search buddies.

I applied to a really low-paying job, just because it was in an area, an aircraft and a type of operation where I'd like to work. I confessed my sin to my buddy and she admitted that she almost applied too. It made me feel better, and I told her authoritatively not to apply. Why do pilots do this to ourselves. We are worth more. I hope.

Amelia Earhart: The Turbulent Life of an American Icon

When a publisher's representative asked me if I was interested in reviewing a new biography of Amelia Earhart I rolled my eyes and gritted my teeth a little. She gets so much press, and I'm constantly expected to revere her as a role model, despite the fact that her self-aggrandizing, poorly planned stunt flying eventually got her killed. My own mother refuses to understand that do not find it endearing when she calls me "Amelia." I look a little warily even at the record setting flights by Louis Bleriot and Charles Lindbergh but forgive them as necessary proof-of-concept achievements in the evolution of aviation. I grant no such dispensation to Ms. Earhart. There were a few words in the publisher's blurb, words like "reckless" and "lacked basic navigation skills" that told me this wasn't going to be an "Our Hero, Amelia" book so I asked to take a look.

The biography is Amelia Earhart: The Turbulent Life of an American Icon by Kathleen C. Winters and is published by Palgrave Macmillan. It's a well-researched, fair account of documented aspects of Amelia Earhart's life. It neither glorifies nor vilifies Earhart. Winters gives background information on the time, bases for comparison, footnoted facts, and quotations from people who worked with Earhart, and for the most part leaves the reader to identify patterns, speculate, and draw conclusions.

Winters was herself a record-setting glider pilot, but I don't know how much powered flight experience she had. In one passage she describes airframe icing as a familiar hazard to Earhart, referring to an earlier incident of carburettor icing. The two are completely different hazards, and it seems odd to link them. It's possible that Earhart's description of the first situation as "water in the engine" was more accurate, as carburettor icing both chokes the air intake as it forms and causes sputtering and a temporary further loss of power as it melts. I would have liked more information on contemporary knowledge of aviation hazards and techniques, especially more details on the instrumentation, navigation techniques and ground-based navigation facilities of the time, but Winter's choice to concentrate on the woman rather than the flights is not a flaw in her work.

Winters is careful to document her sources, not to restate the legend, and not to take people's word for what they said or wrote. For example Earhart wrote in a letter that the cost to learn to fly would be about $1000, and Winters researched contemporary flight training to determine that $250 to $500 was more typical. Earhart kept poor records, so Winters crosschecked her training claims with flights recorded in her flight instructors' logbooks.

Winters tells Earhart's story in an easy-to-follow linear fashion, and the balance of documentary evidence to narrative is good for this type of work, but it's not riveting, I suppose exactly because she is telling the whole story and not simply summarizing Earhart's dropping out of multiple schools and endeavours, and trying all manner of ways to raise the money she needed to keep flying.

I would recommend this title for both fans and detractors of Earhart, and for those interested in either aviation history or the history of the feminist movement. It is not excessively technical, and certainly requires no previous aviation knowledge. It has few details that would interest people primarily interested in Earhart's disappearance, unless they care to look at the evidence that she was poor on details like checking the fuel level during her preflight inspection, did not know Morse code nor how to operate the direction finding radio navigation equipment, was a poor navigator, did not plan ahead for how she would coordinate with ships to find the destination she never reached, and probably jettisoned some of her survival gear to save weight.

I did find some things to admire about Earhart. For example she tried to organize students to oust an incompetent teacher who held a position through nepotism, and worked to disband secret societies at her school. She really did work to parlay her achievements into not only money for herself, but for real opportunities for women.

"Women will gain economic justice by proving themselves in all lines of endeavour, not by having laws passed for them."

I think my favourite parts of the book are those where her path intersects with other aviatrices of her era: Jean Batten, Laura Ingalls, Edna Gardner Whyte, Louise Thaden, Blanche Noyes, Jackie Cochran, Mary Heath, Mary Bailey and other women whose aviation achievements are largely forgotten. I hate that Earhart, through the skill of her husband and publicist George Palmer Putnam, and because of her disappearance, is the one remembered. It's not so much that she is remembered is that it leaves people with the idea that she was the only aviatrix of her time. There were hundreds, and many of them lived long productive lives.

Ms. Winters wrote a previous biography on Anne Lindbergh and I would look forward to more from her on the history of women in aviation, but unfortunately she died of a brain hemorrhage shortly before the book was published. Oh and Kathleen Winters was born in the same city where Amelia Earhart first became interested in aviation--Toronto!

Elephants and Temples

The next day's adventures started early again, to catch the cool of the morning and avoid crowds. We visited a number of temples, including the one that was used as for some exterior shots of the Tomb Raider movie with Angelina Jolie. It's a very popular movie here, because just as Canadians all get excited when we're mentioned on US TV shows, even though it's usually just to mock us, or make us the bad guys, people from countries many Americans have never even heard of are delighted to be recognized by the steamroller cultures of rich countries. The temple is overgrown with trees, right up on top of the walls and buildings, their roots simultaneously pulling the stones apart and holding them together. A busload of Japanese tourists was taking turns posing in front of one of the root-framed doorways, all miming shimmying up ropes or dual wielding pistols. As we leave we pass more tourists from all over the world. Listening carefully I could hear the name "Lara Croft" in a dozen different languages.

The terrace below was just a walkway, probably one of hundreds in the old metropolis, but this one happened to be a stone terrace all decorated with bas reliefs of elephants. As we said in more than one temple, bas relief isn't the right word, as many of the frescoes almost amounted to half-sculptures. Look at those elephant trunks! Many of them had been repaired over the years. One of the most interesting things about the elephant terrace was that it wasn't just a raised walkway with one side holding up an embankment, but for some reason it was a series of closely-spaced walls with staircases that allowed you to go down into the little spaces between them, and then wind your way around corners. It made no sense that they were built that way, and you could barely look at the sculpted walls because they were all so close together. It felt like being in a secret passage.

My second favourite temple in the whole of the park was Bayon. It had lots of interesting climbable structures and instead of being topped by towers or pyramids, it depicted huge faces with amazing personality. It so happens that I took my favourite photograph of the trip here, too. Right inside the walls of the temple was a structure with steep steps, probably one of those not-really-a-library libraries. I climbed up it to take pictures of apsara carvings on the walls, to see what was at the top inside and just because it is fun to climb things. There wasn't much inside, but it was a terrific vantage point to look at the layout of the rest of the temple and to take pictures. While I was there a group of monks came in and took turns taking pictures of themselves in front of it, then all filed along the side to go into the main temple. I love the colour of their robes against the stone, and their forms as scale for the giant faces.

The staircases inside were also very steep, and some had "Warning! Climbing at your own risk!" signs, a rarity for Cambodia where it seems to be understood by most people that no one else takes responsibility for your actions. The terrace at the next level puts you right up eye-to-chin with the giant statues. This is lots of people's favourite temple, and it's quite crowded. I'm standing on a ledge looking at some women costumed as apsara dancers. I think you can pay money to have your photo taken with them, but what I'm trying to do is line up a photograph of a Khmer man such that you can see his face at the same angle as one of the giant heads. A monk is coming by along the same ledge and I get out of the way, pulling my headscarf out of the way so it won't brush him. He doesn't make any effort in the other direction and I'm left wondering how much of this "monks can't touch women" rule is to enforce the monk's celibacy and asceticism, and how much is just asking women to stop what they are doing and throw themselves out of the way when a monk comes by. Women in my culture yield more to other people in a crowd than men do anyway. I didn't think to try out just standing my ground like a man and making the monks go around me, but it might have been interesting. I would have felt rude doing it, though. When in Rome.

Outside the temple there was a quiet side with an amazing fresco wall covered in a story that someone could probably spend a whole PhD thesis studying. You'd have to know the whole history of the wars and military campaigns mounted by the king who built this place, and learn about the equipment and battle strategies, and possibly individual generals. The whole length of that wall in row after row was covered by the pictorial story of soldiers and horses and elephants.

Below is a detail with a war elephant and a horse and some of the fallen soldiers. I think some of the bricks have been repaired or replaced, as they don't look the same as the others. I buy a couple of small pineapples from a vendor. They are pre-peeled and cored, and cut in a kind of spiral pattern so it's still in one piece, but easy to eat. I give one to the driver and eat one myself. It's incredibly sweet, not like the pineapples that come out of cans at home. We go for lunch. The menu offers "hold chicken" but I'm full of pineapple and just order a glass of cane sugar juice and some rice. The cane sugar juice is sweet, tastes like brown sugar, with a hint of of lime and coconut. It could believably be a Starburst candy flavour. I guess it's just not a very complex combination of esters.

While we are eating some French tourists just outside the restaurant are being besieged by child trinket vendors. "Une, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six ..." the kids demonstrate, counting the postcards and waving their coconut shell bracelets. I wonder about the whole economy of the trinket vendors. They all have such similar wooden apsaras, silk scarves and wooden flutes in palm frond cases that it's not plausible that they are the result of independent artisans, even if they are all copying one another. Someone is coordinating the design, manufacture and distribution of these things. They're so cheap even at the tourist end, that the people who make them must get next to nothing for them. It is always more fun to buy things from the actual artist or his or her family. One man is selling rubbings that I do believe he has done himself, and I really like one, so I buy it. He gives me a palm frond tube to keep it in, and it keeps it safe all the way home.

By afternoon we have had enough of temples for a while and ask the tuk tuk driver to take us for a tour of the town. He offered one on the first day, before I asked to go to the temples. He takes us to a market, and we try to explain that we really don't want to go shopping, we'd like to see other sights. He takes us to another market and we struggle to explain. We'd rather see parks, famous buildings, a view of the river? What sights are there to see? He says there is a park and as we approach I see a tourist office and ask him to stop there. It's on the edge of the park, so we will go to the tourist office and then the park. The tourism staff are helpful and give us a map of town and some suggestions. I also ask them if there is a restroom here. That's the sort of thing one expects in a tourism office, but I don't see one. "Yes," he says, "behind my office," and gives me the key.

It's on the outside of the building. The floor and the toilet seat are wet, but not with urine. I assume it's just the humidity, but when I'm done I realize that there is no toilet paper and not that they are out of toilet paper, but that this is not a toilet paper using country. There is no bracket for a toilet paper dispenser, or anything. There is however a sprayer on a flexible hose, just like the one in a shower. I noticed these in the well-equipped toilets near the temples, but there there was also toilet paper and I assumed the sprayers were for cleaning or something. Now it dawns on me that they are cleaning me, and that the sprayed water everywhere is the result of similarly clueless tourists trying to use them. I now understand the prohibition sign that was posted in the temple toilets, and I have great sympathy for people who immigrate to Canada and are forced to figure out how to clean themselves with scraps of flimsy paper. It's not like you can ask, or that anyone will be able to explain it to you. I still have no idea how to do the job with a sprayer without getting water everywhere.

We walk in the park, which is kind of an adjunct to the royal residence in Siem Riep. Workers in the park are mowing the grass with gasoline-powered weed whackers, swinging them in slowly advancing arcs across the huge expanse of lawn. Other workers with rakes are collecting the clippings. They've upgraded from scythes and rakes to powered equipment without changing the job one iota. I can see people working with exactly the same motions a thousand years ago, keeping the royal residence well groomed. The king is not here, in fact he's never here. He spends most of his time in China. "China? Why China?" I ask incredulously. China, it turns out, built a nice home for the King and it's more comfortable and convenient for him to live there. "Aren't you worried about that?" I ask. "Doesn't it seem wrong for a foreign power to have that much influence over your leader?" Suddenly our driver speaks much less English than he did earlier. Oops. Clearly he too sees the same politics in play that the ancient Angkorians tried with their gods. I find something else to talk about.

Later I ask to go to the post office. He finds it and I go in, all ready with the Khmer for "Please I would like stamps," although it should be obvious what a woman with a stack of addressed letters and postcards wants. That's not necessary as the postal worker speaks good English and sorts quickly through my stack going to New Zealand, Canada, the USA, and England, weighing the envelopes and counting the postcards. She gives me a total in riels, which I pay in US dollars and she gives me the correct change, not the street rate change, and then just keeps the letters. She's going to put the stamps on herself. I thank her and walk away. And it seems you all got your letters and postcards, which to me says that there is not much corruption in that part of the civil service. It would be easier to take a foreigner's money and postcards and throw them away, but the system is such that everyone trusts that it will be done correctly, and it was. It was a good sign. Honesty was common in Cambodia. For all the merchants' hustling, they didn't try to cheat us on change or take advantage of us misunderstanding and handing over more bills than necessary.

In the evening I walked up the hill to Banteay Phnom and watched the sunset, then rode an elephant back down the hill. I sat in an upholstered seat strapped to the back of the elephant and the mahout sat on the elephant's neck and directed it by tapping its head with his bare feet. He never stopped texting on his cellphone the whole time.

Now We Become Tourists

I chatted with the hotel desk clerk the morning before we finished the build, about religious education in Cambodia. The vast majority of the population is Buddhist, but, while people attend ceremonies officiated by monks, there isn't a structure whereby people attend regular lectures on how to honour their religion, in the manner of the Christian sermon. During the Khmer Rouge years, religion was banned and monks persecuted, so was there any rebuilding required there? The clerk says that people learn about how to be a Buddhist mainly in the home. Boys may go to live as monks for a while, where they have nothing to do except study. There is some jealousy in his voice as he explains this. Everyone in Cambodia values the opportunity to study. He says guys just join the monastery to get an advantage in marriage. They leave the monastery and then get married. If a man has been a monk, the woman's father will look much more favourably on him, as he is assumed to be more mature and intellectual than the man who has not. That implies that one's father still has a strong role in whom one marries, here. He also says that not as many boys join the monastery now as previously, that 95% of the population may be more Buddhist than another religion, but maybe only 80% are really Buddhists.

I thought at first that if every family is interpreting the religion in their own way for their kids that it is subject to a lot of distortion, but that's exactly what happens with every family. They choose the church, mosque or temple they go to according to their personal beliefs, and there regardless of your religion there are all kinds of variants, depending on what has been added, subtracted, emphasized or disregarded along the path that it has taken to you. Plus if many of the men in the village have spent time as monks, that would tend to standardize the teachings, too. I think monks get to travel somewhat, kind of doing exchanges with other temples.

After we completed the build. we were scheduled to eat dinner at a fancy restaurant called Titanic, but were unable to get a reservation for a group as large as ours. Today is the official day of mourning for the deaths on the Diamond Bridge during the Water Festival. Many restaurants are closed, so the ones that are still open are busier. We all went out on our own in small groups for dinner. I can't take credit for the idea, but the group I was in said, "Let's go to the Titanic anyway. They probably have room for five of us." And they did. In fact they probably would have had room for everyone (but perhaps not enough staff to serve us all). They asked us to sit outside, for reasons that weren't clear, but we probably would have requested outside, given the choice. The temperature was perfect, with a breeze off the river and there was a dancer and a musician on a small stage. It was a very fine waterfront restaurant, literally ten times the price of the regular street restaurants I had been going to. Which means that a superb water buffalo dish cost $10.50. That may have included a drink. I can't remember the details of the meal. I think it was stir fried with vegetables, but I've forgotten which ones or how it was spiced. As you would expect, water buffalo is just like lean beef. They are domestic animals here, not the same water buffalo as the very dangerous African mammal. You see them lying in ponds and ditches up to their noses, like moose at home.

Our group of five happened to consist of four women and one man. The waiter showed amusing deference to the one man in the group, starting with him at each round of orders and serving, and literally looking at him for confirmation when we ordered. It was an aspect of Cambodian society that we hadn't noticed up to then: women drive motos, run stores, and had up to that point appeared to be societal equals to men. I figured it was a remnant of communism. Every time the waiter went away we would joke about what else he could do to entrench the role of our lord protector, and every time he played into our expectations we would collapse in hysterics. We all started having so much fun with our lone male's regal position that we got right into the parts; he started granting us permission to do the things we were doing anyway, and at the end when we got the bill, the girls all gave him our cash, so that he could appear to pay the bill for his harem. It continued to be a joke for the rest of the trip.

After the restaurant, we asked our tuk-tuk driver to take us to the Diamond Bridge, where we could pay our respects to the dead on this day of mourning. The bridge was roped off by police and barricades, occupied only by memorial wreaths, it looked like hundreds, probably one for everyone who was known to have died there. There were a lot of people there at the barricades to look. We stood a while then got back in our tuk-tuk. A child who was trying to beg or sell us something we didn't want actually jumped on board the little motorcycle trailer with us as it pulled away. "Where are his parents!" exclaimed one of the group, but we knew the answer was probably, "Over there by the wall, telling him to do it." I suppose that kind of behaviour is deemed cute by some tourists. It was, however, the worst of the unwanted attention we received for the whole trip.

Before bed we went to the Lucky Mart, a large, Western style grocery store that sold lots of imported foods as well as local ones, to buy snacks for the boat ride tomorrow. I paid another visit to my newsstall tutor, to thank her for the effectiveness of the phrases she helped me with, and then packed my dirty work clothes and my souvenirs so far into one suitcase to store at the hotel while we travel. "Keep this with you always," says the desk clerk as he gives me my claim ticket.

The Value of Reality TV

Today is the 109th anniversary of the birth of Beryl Markham. She was the first pilot to fly non-stop from England to North America, worked as a bush pilot in Africa, bred and trained thoroughbred racehorses, hunted with Kenyan tribesmen, and wrote a novel that made Ernest Hemmingway say he felt ashamed of himself as a writer.

By all accounts she would have competed just fine with modern reality TV folk. Gorgeous and manipulative, she persuaded a string of men to finance her aviation adventures, and may have had help from Antoine de Saint Exupéry, one of her many lovers, to write that well-received book. Hemmingway also called her a high-grade bitch. Hmm, I wonder if she ever met Jean Batten. Maybe I need to work it a little more to produce career progress.

Rather than encouraging her, most people in her society would have thought she was out of line for even trying these things. There's a movie and a handful of books about her, and a crater on Venus named for her. She died at the age of eighty-six, and not by getting lost at sea. I think most people would rather compare their accomplishments with those of reality television show competitors than with people like this, because it's intimidating to realize that we haven't achieved what she has in even one field.

Glamour in the Skies

UK airline Virgin Atlantic has a new television ad is sidesplittingly funny, and underscores the cultural difference between North America and the old country. I can't seem to embed it, so you'll have to go here to watch it and then come back.

It's simply clever. James Bond is of course a British product that has worldwide recognition and the whole ad is reminiscent of the title sequence for a James Bond movie, which by association probably makes it seem racier than it is. The ad takes you through a whole airline trip without breaking stride. I especially love the line of passengers going through the airport scanner on their way to the airstairs. It incorporates the airport experience while eliding most of it.

Maybe someone will complain that the women are presented as sex objects, but they need to look around and see all the people in the ad are sexy, including the men going through the scanner and pole dancing on the shrimp forks. And the women are powerful sexy, almost stomping on the tiny men at the beginning. The strongest "where are they going with this?" moment was the FA opening her jacket to produce the scene change. I love the way the standard flight attendant gestures describing the locations of exits and the floor illumination morph into a dance sequence.

I could probably go nuts watching it for symbols of one sort or another. Almost all the shapes and sets are sexy people or airplanes or parts of airplanes. I see a € Euro sign in the moon, and the Statue of Liberty represents both the USA and France.

And then they poke fun at all that surrealism by actually referring to the flying flight attendants in the final lines. I can't hear the response clearly: it sounds like "She's in my ambulance," but I've been assured that it's, "She's in Miami." I don't know where I get the final sibilant.

Also, I have shoes like that, and I love them, but they aren't really practical for air travel. I empathize with the woman taking them off in the last shot. Tiny details of not taking itself entirely seriously, like that one, may be how this ad manages to dance along the line between sexy and sexist without stepping over.

Jean Batten - New Zealand Aviatrix

Here's an old TV movie about Jean Batten, a Golden Age aviatrix who isn't well known--I'd never heard of her before--but has some pioneering achievements to her name. For example, in 1935 she set world records for flying from England to New Zealand and from England to Brazil. She didn't have any money and seems to have financed her flying mainly by being nice to a series of men who hoped to marry her. I should have thought of that, eh? New Zealand On Screen has recently converted the film to a web-viewable format and has been pimping it rather inelegantly to bloggers, so it may have done the rounds of the blogs by now, but I've chosen to hold it until today, which would have been Jean Batten's 101st birthday.

NZ On Screen doesn't seem to be set up to allow me to embed the video, so you'll have to go to their website to view it.

That a pioneer of the technology lived so recently always startles me. Ms. Batten died of infection from a dog bite, of all things. If some Majorcan had a better disciplined canine, she might have been alive today. She was still alive the first time I went up in an airplane. There must be people still living now who were personally acquainted with Orville Wright. What a century that was! If it's any precedent for this one, it's impossible to imagine our society and technology in 2101.