Monthly Archives: December 2016

Godspeed, John Glenn

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project_mercury_astronauts_-_gpn-2000-000651Occasionally, a public domain picture from NASA is just the thing. I opened up Google News at about 3 this afternoon to take a look at the latest outrages worldwide, and the page informed me of John Glenn’s passing. I knew he was still alive, but I wasn’t sure whether any of the other Mercury 7 astronauts were, so I checked.

The answer is no. He was the last one.

I don’t remember any of their flights, of course. I barely remember any of the Gemini missions. It wasn’t until Apollo that I started paying attention, but when I did, I made a point of learning about Mercury and Gemini too. I well remember my excitement at finding the July 1962 edition of National Geographic, which covered Glenn’s flight, about 10 years after it came out (because we saved them, like everyone). I read every word of the article. Early space flight was covered in other editions, too, and I read them as well.

Like all editions of NG, it was well illustrated. One in particular stuck with me: how John Glenn might have died in 1962 and not 2016. Reading that also meant that I knew how the dramatization of his flight in The Right Stuff movie would turn out (also, I’d read the book). Astronaut not incinerated.

The news set me wondering about how many of the Moon walkers are still around. Seven of 12, as it turns out, but every jack man of them are in their 80s. Buzz Aldrin’s the oldest, nearly 87, while Charles Duke is the youngest, at 81. Wonder if Aldrin would even have the energy these days to offer up a punch to a Moon landing denier who clearly deserved one (officialdom agreed; Aldrin wasn’t charged).

The Global Fastener News Calendar (Or, More Calendar Oddities)

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Strangely enough, this morning another calendar crossed my desk, but not a cheapo publication. Rather, it’s the four-color, glossy-paper Global Fastener News Calendar for 2017. Published by Global Fastener News, or to be exact, Global Fastener News.com, based in Portland, Ore. If you want to know nuts and bolts, that’s your place.

Not to mock such a trade publication, as people sometimes do. I remember, for example, seeing clueless amusement in print that fire chiefs had their own magazine, as if managing a fire service operation weren’t a complicated task best done by informed management. Besides, I’ve made my living largely among trade publications. If there’s a trade, there’s a publication, because there are people who care deeply about their trade.

As for fasteners, you could almost say, literally, that the world would fall apart without them.

The Global Fastener News Calendar is an excellent calendar. It includes many standard religious and secular holidays — and not just American ones — as well as dates for fastener industry events, major sporting events, and dates you might not otherwise expect.

For instance: Save the Eagles Day (Jan. 10), National Freedom Day (Feb. 1), Candlemas (Feb. 2), World Cancer Day (Feb. 4), Pi Day (March 14), National Health Care Decision Day (April 16), Earth Day (April 22), World Press Freedom Day (May 3), National Day of Prayer (May 4), National Defense Transportation Day and then Armed Forces Day (May 19 and 20), National Donut Day (June 2), World Environment Day (June 5), World Accreditation Day (June 9), Juneteenth (June 19), Take Your Dog to Work Day (June 23), Stonewall Rebellion (June 28), World Population Day (July 11), System Administrators’ Appreciation Day (July 29), Friendship Day (Aug. 6), Left Hander’s Day (Aug. 13), UN International Day of Peace (Sept. 21), World Heart Day (Sept. 29), National Manufacturing Day (Oct.6), World Standards Day (Oct. 14), American Indian Heritage Day (Nov. 24), AIDS Awareness Day (Dec. 1), and Pan American Aviation Day and Wright Brothers Day (Dec. 17).

A few of these I hadn’t heard of and couldn’t quite guess by context. National Health Care Decision Day is for “emphasizing the spotlight on the importance of advance directives,” and World Accreditation Day as a “global initiative, jointly established by the International Accreditation Forum (IAF) and the International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation (ILAC), to raise awareness of the importance of accreditation,” according to the IAF itself.

National Defense Transportation Day goes back further than you’d think. According to timeanddate.com: “On May 16, 1957, Congress approved for the third Friday of May each year to be designated as National Defense Transportation Day. In 1962 Congress updated their request to include the whole week within which the Friday falls as National Transportation Week.”

So I guess if you want to honor half-tracks or troop carriers or the original jeeps, that would be your day.

You’d think American Indian Heritage Day (aka Native American Heritage Day) would take the place of Columbus Day, but apparently not. That’s Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which isn’t on this particular calendar. To complicate matters, according to Wiki, “[Besides Berkeley], several other California cities, including Richmond, Santa Cruz, and Sebastopol, now celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

“At least four states do not celebrate Columbus Day (Alaska, Hawaii, Oregon, and South Dakota); South Dakota officially celebrates Native American Day instead. Various tribal governments in Oklahoma designate the day as “Native American Day,” or have renamed the day after their own tribes. In 2013, the California state legislature considered a bill, AB55, to formally replace Columbus Day with Native American Day but did not pass it.” Ah, well. People’s Front of Judea, Judean People’s Front.

I’m also amused by, but not mocking, some of the industry events on the calendar. Such as Comedy Night, North Coast Fastener Association; Hydrogen Embrittlement in Fasteners, FTI, Detroit; Fastener Fair India, Mumbai; Xmas in July, North Coast Fastener Association; ASME B1 Committee on Screw Threads, Scottsdale, AZ; Wire Russia, Moscow; Indo Fastener, Jakarta; Young Fastener Professionals, Las Vegas; and Screw Open, North Coast Fastener Association (sounds like a fun bunch of guys, that North Coast).

Dec. 6 — just missed it — is the anniversary of the implementation of the U.S. Fastener Quality Act of 1999, a fact that’s duly noted on the calendar. A signal achievement of the Clinton administration, no doubt, but I’m not going to do anything more than glance at “10 of the Most Frequently Asked Questions About the Final FQA.”

Such as: Are inch hex socket products really exempt from the FQA?

Answer: Yes. Even though all inch alloy steel socket products are through hardened as required by consensus standards, they are not required by those same standards to be grade marked and are therefore, NOT COVERED.

The next day, a year from today, is called Pearl Harbor Day and not some other formulation. Fitting.

One more thing, a fine detail. Phases of the moon are marked, new and full, as on many calendars, though not halves. But there are also two special symbols for the annular eclipse of Feb. 26, 2017 and the full eclipse of Aug. 21, 2017. Cool.

Calendar Oddities Are Back

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A cheap calendar crossed my desk the other day, and I thought, that looks familiar. For a good reason: it’s the 2017 version of a cheap calendar I got four years ago. I don’t remember getting one last year or the year before that. I didn’t keep the ’14 version because, after all, it’s a cheap calendar. I expect I’ll throw away the new one soon enough. Got enough stuff around here without it.

I did check, and the parade of U.S. presidential birthdays is exactly the same oddball procession as on the earlier calendar: McKinley, FDR, Lincoln, Washington, Jackson, Madison, Jefferson, Grant, Kennedy, J.Q. Adams, Hoover, Benjamin Harrison, Eisenhower, TR, and Wilson.

Perhaps the other birthdays are the same, too, but I didn’t take notes on them: Alexander Hamilton, MLK, Ben Franklin, Stonewall Jackson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Jefferson Davis. Interesting selection, that. The other events noted on the calendar are exactly the same as before.

One thing that might be different this time, besides the normal shifting of dates, is that Memorial Day is marked twice. Once, May 29, is simply marked Memorial Day; May 30 is marked Memorial Day (True). Also, Columbus Day is likewise two different days, one True (Oct. 12) and the other presumably false. Or fake. Or bogus. (Oct. 9 next year, as it happens.)

An aside: the day the President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed to be the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ landing in the Americas was Oct. 21, 1892. He had his reasons. Oct. 12, 1492 was reckoned using the Julian calendar. To correct for the Gregorian, nine days were added. Presumably now we’d need to add 10 — or 11, I’m not sure how the fact that 2000 was a leap year affects things — to be mathematically correct. So arguably, if you really wanted to argue such a ridiculous thing, neither Oct. 9th or 12th would be the true Columbus Day.

Anyway, Memorial Day and Decoration Day might be worth distinguishing, but Columbus Day? The day we barely honor a sea captain from Genoa in the pay of Spain traveling to the Bahamas half a millennium ago. I might not live to see the change, but I suspect that holiday isn’t long for the calendar.

Ordinary Snow

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Sunday’s snow would have been an unremarkable event, a few inches quickly brushed from streets and walking paths, and partly melted by Monday anyway. But it was the season’s first. Winter doesn’t wait for the solstice. Winter is here.
 Dec 4, 2016 SnowNot the prettiest snow, but it does make the bushes and trees look better.

Dog in Snow Dec 5, 2016The dog doesn’t mind taking a romp in the snow. In fact she positively seems to enjoy it.

Christmas Card Photo Shoot ’98

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Eighteen years ago, I got a notion to send out personalized Christmas cards, the kind using a picture of your own that’s printed by a professional service. I’m sure I didn’t do it online, since I had no Internet connection at my house until 2000. I must have taken the negative to a photo shop, but I don’t remember the details.

Of course Lilly, then not quite a year old, was going to be the star of the card. There were a lot of existing pictures of her — first children tend to be the subject of a lot of pictures — but nothing I really wanted to use. I wanted something with a holiday theme. So I took her to the front yard, along with the gold-colored plastic star that we topped the Christmas tree with (still do), for a photo shoot.

I didn’t get anything I liked for the card that way, either. They tended to be fuzzy. But not completely without charm. They’ve been tucked away these years while she grew into a college student.
img335A few days later, without planning to, I took the picture we did use, a longstanding favorite image of toddler Lilly.

The Full Griswold

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Someone’s already thought of the Full Griswold. Maybe I’d heard of it before, but I don’t know where. I thought of it this evening driving along, noting the proliferation of Christmas lights in this part of the suburbs. Some displays, of course, are more elaborate than others, but I haven’t seen any Full Griswolds just yet.

Once the concept of the Full Griswold comes to mind, one’s mind naturally turns to gradations of it. That’s what I think about, anyway. The Half Griswold, the Quarter Griswold, that sort of thing. I believe fractional Griswolds would have more charms than decimal Griswolds, such as 0.5 Griswolds or 0.1 Griswolds or the like. Too metric for such a nebulous concept.

Then again, the millihelen’s a metric sort of nebulous measurement, so what do I know?

I’d say that I’ve seen a fair number of Eighth Griswolds and a few Quarters and maybe something approaching a Half this year. But the season’s early. My own house decoration would be somewhere in the hundredths of Griswolds.

The odd thing is, I’ve never actually seen National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation all the way through, not when it was new (1989) and not since then. I’ve seen bits and pieces over the years. Probably because Chevy Chase is best taken in small doses (which can be quite funny).