xxmikexx

I'm going back to the Aircraft Customization forum where, for the most part, peace and harmony reign. A year ago I promised myself not to get involved in other parts of this site, or any of the other usual sites. While this thread has been peaceful so far, I can see the controversy from here and I want to avoid it.

tellis,

 

I know what the glory days were like. I don't need to check because I've been simming since the days of Bruce Artwick's ATP. So all along we've had both payware and freeware. While the coimponents of my favorite aircraft are mostly freeware, the fact is that these days the aircraft I acquire are almost exclusively payware.

 

I go to the file library for gauges and utilities, and sometimes I'll download an aircraft just to get at its gauges, but for me the glory days of freeware have been replaced by the current glory days of payware.

I purchase a lot of payware. However, my favorite aircraft, which is a frequent topic of discussion at the FlightSim.Com Aircraft Customization forum, is a fusion of a $10 payware aircraft with I-haven't-counted-how-many freeware aircraft and utility components -- gauges, an airframe. I would not -- could not -- have my favorite aircraft without the work of so many dedicated developers who offer their work for free to the rest of us.

 

That said, when someone decides to give huge chunks of their life to the hobby, why should anyone expect them to work for nothing? If it weren't for the payware aspect of the hobby there are many excellent FS-related products that simply would not exist in anything but rudimentary form, if at all.

 

Mike McCarthy

P.S.

 

I in fact do own some pirated MP3 tracks -- maybe ten in all. But would I have bought these absent their having been given to me on request by a friend? (An attorney no less!)

 

No, I would not have. I cite as evidence the fact that I haven't purchased any music at all in the past ten or so years.

 

Furthermore, not only is what I did fair or close to it, or at least did not harm the music industry, it's probably effective advertising. You see, now that I have high quality copies of "Pick Up The Pieces" and "Cut The Cake", I may very well go get "The Best Of Average White Band", and so on.

 

Is there complete 100% total justification for what I've done regarding these ten or so MP3 tracks? No. Certainly not. But then I'm not the music industry equivalent of an axe murderer either.

 

Even though I may have spat into the street while I had a serious case of the flu, in contravention of City Of Lakewood ordinances, and even though I got a traffic ticket in Wheat Ridge to which I pled guilty, I'm a law abiding citizen who stands proud in front of family, community, and the readers of this thread of tig's.

 

On rare occasions I'm a misdemeanent as discussed above, as are we all. But I've never been a felon, convicted or otherwise.

Thank you. In a parallel universe I'm a well respected and widely feared prosecuting attorney.

 

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Let me clarify what I mean by unenforceable clause ...

 

Let's suppose that you release a payware utility, WhizBang. You include a statement in your license to the effect "If you plan to run WhizBang you must stop breathing. If are not willing to stop breathing, do not accept this license agreement."

 

What would I do? I would accept the agreement because, while the rest of the agreement might be legal and moral and enforceable, the requirement to stop breathing is absurd on its face, and to continue to breathe while having accepted the license agreement is both legal and ethical even though it runs completely counter to the developer's stated demands ...

 

... And I did not have to go to law school to make that determination.

 

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The fact is, I don't even read license agreements anymore. I don't care what they say. I know the difference between Right and Wrong, Fair To The Developer and Unfair, and so on, and I will always Do The Right Thing regardless of what a license agreement does or does not say.

 

This is reasonable, for the same reasons that my not walking around with a copy of the Ten Commandments to be consulted everytime I do something also is reasonable. That is, in neither case do I need An Agreement From On High to tell me what I may and may not do.

 

Now you might say "Wait a minute. Not every culture accepts the Ten Commandments." That's true but irrelevant. The culture I grew up in, the culture I operate in, and the culture in which I made the purchase of WhizBang, DOES recognize the validity of the Ten Commandments, albeit implicitly. (Well, eight of them I suppose.)

 

It's like the Social Contract. Nobody gave it to you in writing to sign. By virtue of your having been born into your society and not having left it, you have agreed to be bound by its terms. You have also agreed not to commit Crimes Against Humanity, and even if somebody shoved a paper in front of you and demanded that you agree in writing to kill ten Rastafarians, you not only are not required to do it, the unwritten and unsigned Social Contract forbids you to do it.

tig,

 

I'm guilty as charged. Over the years I've committed numerous acts in violation of written license agreements. But have I broken any laws? Absolutely not -- I'm a law-abiding citizen.

 

Everything that I've done in violation of license agreements has been, in my opinion, fair use. I, me, moi, Mikey will decide what is fair use. A court will either sustain me, or it will not, but I don't view myself as legally bound by unreasonable or unenforceable contract provisions simply because the licensor says that I should be.

 

It's like when a restaurant check room has a sign up saying "Not responsible for stolen articles". Well, it depends. Usually they ARE responsible.

 

But whether or not they're responsible, their SAYING they're not is completely irrelevant. It has no bearing whatsoever on the legal issues.

 

I'll stop here and then re-read your blog entry to see if I want to add more comments.

 

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Changed my mind. Before I do that re-read I want to give an example from my professional life ...

 

We are either honest people or we are not ... or so we like to think. Am I guilty of even a moral traffic violation when I tell you the following true situation?

 

I'm the owner of a Y2000 suite of Microsoft software purchased for $3,000 as a consultant's package. Never mind what privileges accompany the package, the main feature of interest is Visual Studio 6, which I use every day for work on my AirBoss utility.

 

One day last year I broke the CD containing the base VS6 installation. Regrettably VS6 had been out of print for a couple of years and Microsoft was unable to supply a replacement CD. They had stopped supporting VS6 and therefore stopped reproducing the master disk when VS8 was released.

 

So I poked around on the internet and found a download package containing exactly what I needed -- a no-key-required download of the VS6 CD that would otherwise have cost me $1,000 (or whatever the seller might have chosen to charge) to purchase on eBay etc.

 

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Does that make me a pirate? Technically yes. Morally no, just as you are not a pirate for selling your licensed software CD at a garage sale. Morally I'm entitled to a replacement CD provided by Microsoft. They are unable to give me what I need (and it would have been "free plus postage") so I simply have engaged in what attorneys call self help.

 

Would a jury convict me of piracy? No way. What I did is obviously fair use, and if somebody from Microsoft happens to read this and wants to make a court case out of it, be advised that I would engage the ACLU and take it all the way to the Supreme Court.

 

Even attorneys can't tell you what the law is. All attorneys can do is make predictions about how judges are likely to rule on various points of law. The law is what judges say it is, not what attorneys say it is, and certainly not what software developers say it is.

 

Those things said, I am 100% opposed to piracy yet 100% in favor of common sense and fair use.

 

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So, for example, when I buy a software utility that is not copy protected -- one that simply uses a registration key to be entered at installation time, I have zero compunctions about installing it on every machine on my LAN. Unless the developer specifically tells me that I may not, I will do it for sure. And even if he tells me that I may not, I just might do it anyway.

 

The reason is that I have the option of deinstalling the utility from machine A and reinstalling it to machine B, so the real issues are convenience, of multiple copies (and what about backups, hm-m-m-m?), and simulataneous use.

 

And I don't use them simultaneously. If I'm scrubbing my development system I'm not simultaneously scrubbing my flight system, though I might very well be defragging it, a capability that I have also installed to the development machine.

 

And so on. I'm exercising self help, common sense, and fair use. And I have no moral qualms about this whatsoever.

 

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And I'm not going to be bothered by Microsoft unless they want to go through the motions just for the sake of formality -- in which case I'll have a lot of fun advising my attorneys. :D

 

I'm a brand-loyal Microsoft fanboy -- I've been using their software development tools since 1981, and their operating systems since 1984. I would never do anything to violate the spirit of being a fair customer -- I want Microsoft to prosper. (Because I want them to keep laying golden eggs.)

 

But a license agreement is not a suicide pact. I'm going to do whatever I need to do provided that it's ethical and legal, decisions that I will make for myself unless and until a judge corrects me.

 

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EDIT of 26sep-08 ...

 

I should have said that I'm not an attorney and I am not giving legal advice in either this post or my posts below to this same thread. Anybody who is concerned about matters like these should consult a suitably qualified attorney.

Paxx,

 

You thought this thread was disrespectful but you are oh so very wrong. It is you who have trashed the victims and their families -- by disturbing the peace of this cemetery of words.

 

This being my blog and not the forums, I will say that you are clearly part of a huge problem called Political Correctness. You are unable to analyze (I already knew that) but you are also unable to read. When you see a red flag word you can only play the tape that you have been taught to play.

 

Who gave you an exclusive on the use of the term 9/11? Is it because you know someone who has a friend whose brother died in WTC2? What makes those families more special than the family of the army sergeant out of Fort Carson who recently threw himself on a grenade so that his buddies might live? Where are the foundations raising millions of dollars to put up a skyscraper museum in memory of this man?

 

Well, I have news for you. Most of my family died in the Nazi death camps, and there are people in the Middle East, and in Chechnya, and in Indonesia, and in a number of other places all around the world -- who want to wipe out the rest of my genetic heritage. It is in honor not just of we Americans but also of the people with whom I share a set of genes that I have these nightmares.

 

That's why I called the Israeli embassy, because I'm a very good shot and was all set to become a paramilitary sniper in the conflict that may still lie in our collective future. You see, Paxx, after they come for me they will be coming for you, again, even though you aren't Jewish. That's what I was writing about.

 

In relative terms the people of Israel, including the Arab citizens, face a 9/11 every week, sometimes every day.

 

How dare you come into this thread.

I guess alexm doesn't want to come out and play. That's fine, I'll just have a conversation with myself ...

 

Is the work of Andy Warhol art? You bet it is. Is the work of the lead animator who oversees the Erin E-surance commercials art? Absolutely.

 

But these things are not traditional art. To understand them does not require a PhD in fine art, not that any art really does. I'm getting tounge-tied here. What I mean is, art critics and gallery owners get to decide what will sell for high prices and what won't, but pop art doesn't need any high priests, it only needs good artists.

 

(to be continued)

FOJ,

 

There is a long tradition in blues-rooted music of playing whole songs without ever getting out of D or whatever -- no chord progressions at all. So while I might have a different opinion were I familiar with the particular piece you guys had been playing, I have no problem with the one-key concept in principle.

 

I'll cite as an example a funk oldies number I was listening to just last night, Play That Funky Music. The (very long) verses are all in ... what ... D sharp? Similarly the (long) second halves of the (very long) choruses are all in ... been so long ... what's the IV of D sharp ... B flat?

 

This kind of thing works when the emphasis is on rhythm and melody rather than on harmony and melody.

 

Over to you ...

 

No ... One more thing. If musically speaking it sounds good and feels good, do it. As you must know by now there's a joy in playing that transcends simply listening. I'm also very familiar with hypnotic long songs. In fact, I have a James Brown track, 14 minutes of Rapp Payback, entirely in E I think -- and they simply faded it out. The actual recording could well have gone on another 14 minutes.

The Coal Mine Road store -- The Train Wreck -- was what Radio Shack calls a Z store. This is the smallest kind of store that the chain operates. Villa Italia was a Y store. Southwest Plaza was an X store, the largest kind operated by the chain.

 

The terms X, Y and Z have something to do with square footage, X having the most floor space and Z having the least. But there is no predictable size for a given class of store, and certainly no standard layout.

 

At Tandy headquarters in Fort Worth, TX the Radio Shack division maintains a "model store". This is an idealized X store with optimal square footage, and an optimal layout, and with the shelves, bracket racks and piers being fully stocked so that the model store displays at least one of everything in the catalog, which contains about 7,000 items. (!)

 

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But Coal Mine was small even by Z store standards. It had only a small stockroom in the back, and the front of the store had no more square feet than a large apartment bedroom. The store was laid out as a narrowish rectangle so its length made it seem larger than it actually was.

 

Space was tight at Coal Mine. As a result only a modest subset of all the stock could be held in the front, and it required constant maintenance to keep the front stocked with the fast-moving items. Everything put out up front meant that five other things were not being put out. Furthermore, the store normally was staffed only by the manager plus a part timer (me!) from some other store, and normally only one of those people was on duty at any given moment.

 

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The manager of that store, Tony, had run into some problems in his personal life and had begun leaving the store unattended, locking it up during the day while he was absent. Also, he had mostly stopped maintaining the retail aspects of the store. Unpacked boxes of small parts were everywhere, the large item stock was dusty, the floor un-vacuumed, the items not priced, and so on. It was a mess not just to the trained eye but also to the customer eye, and that's why I called it The Train Wreck.

 

Before I was transferred to Southwest Plaza the Coal Mine manager was being backed up by one of Big John's employees. However, shortly after my transfer this person was let go and the job of supporting Coal Mine fell to me.

 

So there I was, working full time at Southwest Plaza, but usually the late shift because my early shifts mainly were spent at one of my other regular stores, Villa, 6th & Federal, or Coal Mine. Because the managers of those other stores were willing to repay Big John for my extra hours and my overtime pay, I was actually working more nearly 60 hours a week than the normal limit of 35.

 

I almost never got a day off. This was fine with me because I was getting exactly the attention and training that I had hoped for when I first walked into Big John's store back in November.

 

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EDIT 18sep-08 ...

 

You know what folks? I'll finish the story some other time and go directly to the ending. To make a long story short ...

 

Little John and I saved Big John's job one evening. To do it we had to break the rules Big Time. By then I had been offered a high paying job with MCI, a job that found me rather than the other way 'round.

 

So I had already given notice when the Tandy security people came into the store and started asking a bunch of hard questions regarding what Little John and I had done while doing the financial close during the evening of Big John's screwup. Therefore I had nothing to lose ...

 

I told Security that the whole thing had been my idea, that Little John did not know what I had done, and that their quarrel was with me and not him.

 

I don't know whether the security people took me at my word. I do know that they asked me why I had done it, and I told them that Big John was a terrific store manager, and that Tandy would be shooting themselves in the foot if they gave this big store turnaround artist and ultimately good guy the boot -- for what amounted to taking the bank deposit home with him.

 

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I've no idea whether Tandy would ever hire me back. I don't know what happened to Little John. I don't know what happened to Big John. I don't know any of these things because a day later I started work at MCI in Colorado Springs -- a commute that took me south instead of north.

 

I do know this: When I told Security that it had been my idea, in a way this was true. Little John and I were doing the financial close together with me operating the corporate network computer. When I spotted the discrepancy I immediately called it to Little John's attention. "Oh God" he said.

 

I looked at him, he looked at me, and we both nodded our heads meaning that we each understood what had to be done. I cooked the books that evening, unwinding the fraudulent transaction the first thing the next day. It never occured to me that HQ might monitor each store for exactly this kind of transaction, debooking a sale the night before and then rebooking it the next day.

 

You see, if you were to keep doing that you could walk off with the proceeds of the initial sale transaction and nobody would ever be the wiser -- unless The Great Computer In The Sky spotted the activity. In my case it was spotted the next day, and the Security people were in the store the day after that.

 

I don't regret what I did. It was the Right Thing regardless of company rules. And I thank both Pete and Big John, and the other store managers in the district, for giving me the opportunity to earn back my self respect, and for trusting me with their jobs.

 

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I see that the back story needs to be closed out. When I told big John that I would be moving on to MCI, he told me "Gee, that's really too bad. We [the district] were thinking about giving you the Z store."

 

By which he meant Coal Mine.

No posts to this thread, please.

Don't be afraid, Amy, it's not going to hurt. Not like the fire hurts. And we'll be able to breathe again.

 

Just pretend it's a dream, okay? Hold my hand, it'll be just like flying. Time to go now.

 

See? Just like flying. Keep your eyes closed. I'm squeezing your hand as hard as I can and I'm not going to let go. Just enjoy the wind. Take a deep breath. Just enjoy the wind. Listen to the wind. It's such a nice

How about those Mets, Joe. Did you catch the game last night? By the way, hit 76 for me, will you? Thanks. As I was saying ... ...

 

... ... What just happened? Did you feel that? Did you hear that? Geez, I think the building's going to fall over. And the automatic car retarders took hold. Did you feel that?

 

Why is the ceiling on fire? Why is somebody trying to put the fire out with kerosene? I'm soaking wet with that smelly stuff. What's going to happen if the flames

This being NYC, when I get to my desk at 9AM I'm arriving a full hour before most other people. And we'll all leave an hour early too, at 4PM, because that's the way things work around here in the Big Apple.

 

The coffee I brought up from Starbucks smells really good. I'll just set it down on my desk here while I sit down in my chair and ... ... That's odd, from here on the 85th floor I can see all the way uptown and into Connecticut ... ... And I can see a big airplane out there ... and I've never seen one there before -- not up around Yankee Stadium -- not a big one headed south, not at such a low altitude. Oh well. ...

 

I'll just read the newspaper while I'm having my coffee ... Story about the Mets ... Another one about civil war in Afghanistan. ... Something about a scandal involving an intern in the mayor's office ... Something ... ... ...

 

Something catches my eye and I look up. It's really odd. That airplane looks exactly like an airliner, and it looks like it's coming down right about where Fifth Avenue would be. Wait till I tell the kids about this one. Half a mile to the west and it would be flying directly toward me. Oh well, I'll just watch. You don't get to see something like this very often.

 

Wait. Wait a minute. Something's wrong. Something's terribly wrong. The airliner is making all kinds of crazy manuevers ... ... And now it really is heading right toward me ... ... And I can hear the engines ... ...

 

And I can see the pilot's face for a moment, but only very briefly because the enormous nose of the aircraft is blocking my view of him and the nose is fifty feet away and the bow wave is blowing the windows in and I'm being riddled with glass shrapnel and here comes the nose and it's going to

I will do that, Luis. As you've already sensed, this is exactly a story about making a comeback. I wasn't going to say so but this is the kind of comeback that is within everybody's power to make happen.

Hi Luis,

 

Glad you made it down here. With you having set an example, I'm now going to have to finish this piece about the Z Store. :) See above.

Thanks to the TV program "American Chopper", and others like it, I know what an English Wheel is.

 

I think that in another life I would have been happy as a machinist. The idea of sculpting metal with high precision has a strange appeal to me.

Luis,

 

I thought I knew music but I've never heard lando. In fact, I had to look it up -- Afro-Peruvian, sounds wonderful. I'll look around YouTube to see if I can find any.

Luis,

 

What a remarkable toy. I would have died to have it because like you I was aviation minded even as a kid. (But I go back further than you -- I was born in 1944 and I remember when Orville Wright died, in 1948.)

 

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I know what you mean about the sound of a Viscount. During the late 50s we lived near La Guardia airport in NYC, right under the curving approach path to runway 31, I believe it is.

 

Anyway, the aircraft on this curving approach came right over our apartment building, maybe 700? 800? feet feet up. When Capitol Airways started operating Viscounts, the shrill screech of the engines always got me very excited.

 

My bedroom window faced the airport, which was perhaps 3-4 miles away. I could follow the aircraft almost all the way to touchdown, when a bunch of buildings would intervene. But after that I would see the tips of the vertical stabilizers as the aircraft completed their rollouts.

P.S. While I praise Denny's corporate, I can't praise the local franchisee. I never heard a word from them. What the local franchisee doesn't understand is that people talk, just as I'm doing now and just as I will whenever the opportunity arises for me to express my opinion about the unit in question.

 

But that's fine, we've switched our business to the cafe I was talking about, the Westwood Inn, a family restaurant that serves delicious fresh-cooked meals at prices lower than Denny's, many of whose entrees are flash-frozen meals that get microwaved in the kitchen.

 

By the way, I was eating at that Denny's the morning that a new manager walked in, announced that the franchise had just changed hands, that he was in charge, but that nobody was going to be let go.

 

That was a lie, in my opinion. What he should have said was what in my opinion was the truth: "I don't want you all leaving the restaurant unstaffed on short notice so I'll tell you that your jobs are safe. However, I don't mean this. What I really mean is that I want you to continue to work while I decide whether to keep you on or kick your ungrateful butt out the door. If the latter, I want you to continue to work until your replacement has been interviewed, hired and has walked into the restaurant."

 

I would say that there was 50% turnover in the morning shift between that day and the day a month or so later of the screaming kid incident. One of the departed waitresses now works at the Westwood Inn. She doesn't remember me because my wife and I didn't usually sit in her section. But I remember her, and she's giving the same great customer service at the Westwood Inn that she did at Denny's.

 

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Anyway, those of you who live in the Denver area, if you ever find yourself out in Lakewood, be sure to stop at the Westwood Inn, southwest corner of 6th and Wadsworth, exactly where the eastbound off-ramp exits onto Wadsworth.

 

Tell 'em Mike sent you.

N2056,

 

You write really well, thanks for posting. (And now I understand your avatar.)

 

Question: Your dad elected to make out of sheet metal parts that might otherwise be fiberglass -- what's the benefit?

Now I got to see the other side of the business -- the quiet time after Christmas. By now, to run the Villa store we only needed a small number of people, and I was asked to transfer to Big John's store, where even a non-seasonal employee had quit due to exhaustion.

 

So ... In two months I had gone from knowing nothing about the business to being asked to work full time in what I later came to realize was the highest-grossing Radio Shack store between Saint Louis (800 miles to the east) and Salt Lake City (700 miles to the west).

 

During this quiet time I began working at still other stores. I never said no, and whenever Big John would call me at home to ask if I would once again go over to some other store, my answer was the same as always: "Whatever the district needs, John. I'll be there." I even did what many other employees refused to do which was to cover the store at the intersection of 6th and Federal, the high-crime neighborhood at the heart of the main Hispanic section west of Denver.

 

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Aside: Somebody had to work this store, and it was either the manager or me. The manager, who went by the name Ski (Polish), explained that the store had never been robbed during his tenure, which was about 1.5 years by the time I met him. His secret? Treat his customers with dignity. This was a poor neighborhood. People didn't have a lot of money to spend, and quite understandably they were very sensitive to being ripped off, especially by Gringos.

 

Word very soon got around that Ski treated everybody fairly, and that if you bought something from him and it didn't work out, you could bring it back to the store and get a refund even though the normal return privilege period might have expired.

 

So ... Nobody in his right mind was going to rob Ski or his store -- the people of the neighborhood would have exacted swift vigilante justice on their own without involving the police. Similarly, Ski put the word out that nobody was to mess with me either, because if I was in the store but Ski was not, I spoke for Ski and would give the people the same good customer service that Ski did.

 

No wonder I felt comfortable in that neighborhood. People knew my face, and they knew my car. I was left alone which was all that I asked. By the way, Ski's results for his first year of operating 6th & Federal were a 40% increase in sales over the year before, all because a) he was a decent man who worked for a living just like everybody else, and because b) he understood the vital role that his store played in the life of the community.

 

Where else could people get a cheap radio? Where else could they borrow an R/C car to cheer up the life of a sick kid who had to stay home alone because his single mom, who couldn't afford day care, had to go to work? All Ski did was Do The Right Thing, and the people of the community buried him with so much business that he sometimes had to borrow me from Big John.

 

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Most of the times I worked there it was because Ski needed to take off to do personal business. (Unavoidable difficulties in his personal life.) It was either bring me in or close the store. If my coming there happened early in the morning the store would be quiet, but I was never bored. I simply did what I did at every satellite store when I found myself betrween customers -- I put out replacement price tags that I made myself out of index cards. Sometimes the original tags had simply disappeared. Sometimes, in the heat of battle, they had never been put up to begin with. (Prices changed once a year, but they all changed at the same time, so putting up the new price tags -- potentially 7,000 of them in principle -- was something that only big stores like Southwest Plaza tried to stay on top of.)

 

But there was no point in trying to track down authentic price tags because NObody at any store ever knew where they had gotten to. (They were usually thrown out by lazy employees who didn't want to do the repricing work.) So I would see an item that wasn't priced, look it up in the catalog, create a price tag using index card, pocket knife and pen, and then mount my self-made price tag. I would make the tags up in batches of five or so and then mount them in batches. With each batch taking about ten minutes, I could reprice about thirty items an hour. Do this for 3-4 hours every day for a week and we're talking about 100+ repricings, a significant issue since I always concentrated on the items with high sales volume.

 

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Soon I was not only helping open Southwest Plaza, I was made a "keyholder", which meant that I was trusted enough to unlock the store before the arrival of other employees. And on days when I happened to be working second shift there, sometimes I was given another in a series of lessons about how to close a store, which is a much more complex process than opening one.

 

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One evening an incident occurred that made me realize I had "arrived". Working by ourselves, Big John and I had finished counting the cash register drawers, and I had finished composing the bank deposit. "Okay" he said, tossing me the store keys. "I'm going home now and I want YOU to make the bank deposit."

 

He showed me how to conceal the deposit bag in the small of my back, tucked into the waist of my pants, covered by my shirt. This was crucial because the day's funds were not covered by insurance while in transit between the store and an outside bank night depository drop. So if an armed robber came into the store and cleaned out all the cash registers, that was covered by insurance. But if I were robbed on the way to the bank that would be too bad -- Radio Shack would assume that I had actually stolen the money and I would be fired immediately even though robbery was hard to prove and I probably would not be prosecuted.

 

Anyway, I knew where the night depository drop for Big John's store was -- it was right there in the Southwest Plaza mall. So John went home, I made the deposit, and then I went home feeling very pleased at the progress I was making. As it happens, Big John and I never participated in a store closing together again. Given his experienced assistant manager Little John, and given my training, there was no need for Big John to stick around once the stoor doors had been closed for the night on any night that I was working. Big John set up the schedules in such a way that either he and Little John would be on duty at 10PM, or Little John and i would be on duty.

 

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So now I was qualified to both open and close stores, and this was around the end of January as I recall.

 

Now and then during January I had been called upon to work one of Big John's other satellite stores about five miles away, the little store on Coal Mine Road. Other people called this store simply "Coal Mine". I called it "The Train Wreck".

I'm ba-a-a-a-ck.

 

 

I wish I shared your love of good literature, and of philosophy, but I’m unable. In fact, with a very few exceptions I gave up reading fiction forty years ago, and the only branch of philosophy I consider to have any merit is epistemology. But I still want to discuss these things with you because a) you’re so enthusiastic about them, and because b) I might learn something.

 

I loved the Woody Allen line you quoted. As for War And Peace, as a kid I studied Russian for several years and finally reached the point where I was able to tackle that famous work. Regrettably, by 4-5 pages into it I was bored to tears. I could appreciate the quality of his writing in terms of crafting sentence clauses but, Sherm, Tolstoy’s data rate is so low, and his sentences so long, that it makes me want to scream. J He’s just as turgid in Russian as he is in English.

 

Your quotation about the gears and wheels is a perfect example of what I’m talking about, and it makes me react the way Woody Allen did – “This passage is about troop mobilization.”

 

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I agree with you that we are under no obligation to read a book cover to cover just because we started to read it. I also agree that you can judge a book by the first couple of chapters. In fact, in my experience, if a book is well written you will know that from the first sentence of the first paragraph of the first chapter.

 

My son is the well-known science fiction author Wil McCarthy. (Now turned high tech entrepreneur.) He once asked me to review a draft manuscript, something I never did again because he wouldn’t take editorial advice from me. He had an opening scene that was good but the first paragraph beat around the bush, explaining in detail how the main character was nervous that the police were about and watching him.

 

I suggested to Wil that he precede that paragraph with the single very short sentence “Doug smelled cop.” He declined my advice which was too bad – the sentence was a grabber, and it would have set the reader up for the rest of the paragraph, which in turn would have set the reader up for the first chapter, and for the rest of the novel.

 

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A similar thing occurs with pop music. A vital role played by music industry agents is to shield the record companies from the non-stop avalanche of music that would like to come in over their collective transom from would-be new acts.

 

But the agents themselves are overworked in that capacity, so they do the following: They listen to the first few bars of a recording. If the very beginning grabs them they continue to listen. But if the first few bars are not grabbers - - if the musician doesn’t know enough about the music business to lead with his best work - - the recording will be tossed into the circular file.

 

What’s the justification? Because radio listeners will react the same way. You have to get the listener’s attention immediately because, as the old saying goes, you only have one chance to make a first impression.

Correctamundo.

Sherm,

 

I'll reply in some detail sometime tomorrow, but in the meantime there is in fact a way to edit blog posts. If you look in the lower right corner of the post window you'll see the yellow image of a pencil. Click on it and you'll be able to rexaiiiiiiiiiir alll thss typos.