Yes, It's Fall

     Cold and wet, as Indiana sometimes is at this time of year, but I can at least hope the pollen and other allergy-inducing this will be greatly reduced.  The amaryllis has come inside for the year, to spend the cold months in the basement (and will need to be trimmed back) and if things dry up again by the weekend, it will be time to return to gathering up the leaves.

     And I still need to buy Halloween candy! Time not only flies, it's supersonic.

Autumn Is Here

     Overnight, it turned chilly, rainy and gray outside.  Well, not quite gray yet; that will have to wait on the sunrise in a half-hour or so.

     I'm still kind of yeechy with back pain and on tenterhooks for worse.  Still, I will take this constant and relatively low-level pain (along with waking frequently because of drinking a lot of fluids) over the far worse alternative.  Back to the doctor later today and I'll see what she has to say.

     The weather is probably going to interfere with the outside work I have been supervising (for very low levels of supervision).  Where to report today -- the main facility or the usually unstaffed North Campus -- remains an open question and probably will until I hear from the workers.

Well, That Went Well

     Wait, it didn't.  A lot of hurting and drinking of water and so on.  But I have stuff to do that I didn't get done yesterday  and it needs to be done today.

Ouchesday

     My back hurts (kidney stones).  My head hurts.  I had big plans but I'm going back to bed.

     --I have figured out that "classic" Far Edge starships (1950 through 1980 or so) look like a cross between submarines and Rocky Jones spaceships on the inside.

"Gentlemen Do Not Read One Another's Mail:" A Biography

     Like hell they don't, when the "gentlemen" involved are the governments of countries--

     But they didn't use to, or not much, for the very simple reason that they were rarely able to get at one another's mail.  Letters in a courier's pouch, slips of paper carried by a pigeon: needles in a haystack and worse, they're extraordinarily difficult to intercept without revealing that they have been intercepted.  Technology began to change that.  Wired telegraphy is difficult (but not impossible) to tap with 19th-Century technology but it is inherently insecure; operators can be bribed, trash rifled through for carelessly discarded messages, sharp eyes and ears in the office can read messages from the wire as easily as reading over someone's shoulder....  And then came radio, nearly as open as shouting from the rooftops: suddenly, the "gentlemen" might as well be throwing their letters through each other's transoms!* 

     They were not, however, writing them in plain text.  Codes and ciphers were the thing, and so was decoding them, or trying to.

     In the First World War, the United States barely had a cryptological effort.  The military did what they could, eventually resulting in Herbert O.Yardley's "Black Chamber," MI-8, but well before he was up and running, they had to turn to civilian help.  (I will note Yardley was a Hoosier.  This may be significant.)

     Enter Riverbank Laboratories (still around today: same location, but they pursued another of the lab's interests.  And the original building would hardly be out of place in a spy film!).  Enter eccentric millionaire George Fabyan, his eccentric (but by no means unshared) belief that Francis Bacon was the real author of Shakespeare's works, and the eccentric theory that this information was somehow encrypted in the earliest printed versions of Shakespeare.  And to decode that, a millionaire needs a staff of cryptologists working in his private labs on his private estate.

     It's a story right out of a--  I was going to write, "pulp magazine," but it's too wild for that.   It's straight out a dime novel.  Picture an estate sprawling along and across the Fox River near Geneva, Illinois, complete with a home remodeled by Frank Lloyd Wright, a Dutch windmill grinding grain, a private zoo, a Japanese garden, a Roman swimming pool on a island in the river; picture over a hundred people working on various projects that had struck Fabyan's fancy, from acoustical levitation to improved grains, from trench design to cast-concrete art.  Picture it not in a book or film, but in real life.

     Bacon having written Shakespeare was a bust; the "biliteral code" theorist on Fabyan's payroll was, it seems, self-deceived.  But the cryptology effort had attracted other talented people and among them were geneticist William F. Friedman and Elizebeth (yes, with three e's) Smith, the latter of Huntington, Indiana.†  When WW I --The Great War -- began roaring through Europe, the government turned to Colonel Fabyan.  Fabyan turned to his staff; specifically, to Smith and Friedman.

     Smith was the scholar of language, Friedman the analyst -- but between them, technique and skills developed rapidly; before the war was over, they had not only decoded huge numbers of messages but written a series of booklets that still comprise an introductory course to cryptanalysis, a science they named and were instrumental in developing.

     As inevitably as in, well, a dime novel, the two fell in love and married--  And after the Great War ended, they fled Riverbank: Fabyan was still an eccentric millionaire, with all that entails, and had been intercepting Washington's job offers to the two of them for quite some time.

     The two of them went from strength to strength and adventure to adventure after that -- helping to catch rumrunners, aiding in the efforts to crack Japanese codes, and so on.  I'm in the midst of reading a fascinating biography of Elizebeth Smith Friedman, and it's still the stuff of spy novels -- only better.  It happened; she and William really did these things.
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* I'm not going to explain what a "transom" is.  I have lived in a building that had transoms, and they can be a very great relief in summer's heat and winter's stuffiness, a lost grace note. Unless you have neighbors who frequently cook cabbage.

† I keep running into Hoosier cryptologists and spies. Are we a state of geeky romantics?  And is it related to why are there so many Hoosier comedians, as well?

Putting A Name To Discomfort

     So, I have had some symptoms recently that didn't entirely add up -- pain here, discomfort there, fatigue (Imagine!  After a week of shift work) and so on and so forth.  It seemed vaguely familiar, but what...?  Went to the doctor, who called for a few tests, and she suspects I have another kidney stone.

     Imaging this afternoon (insurance permitting) to make sure. In the meantime--

     In the meantime, it's like walking around with a ticking time bomb.  These things can produce excruciating pain, depending on where they land in your plumbing, and they do so with little warning.  I figure I might as well go to work, where there's a good chance the floor I curl up on will be carpeted and there are plenty of people around who know the number for 911.  The long drive between downtown and the imaging place is a worry, but there are places to stop all along the way.

     We'll see.  I slept fifteen hours, which may've helped with the fatigue.

When You Wake In The Night

     Or when I wake in the night, at least, there's a pretty good chance it's because a calf cramp is coming on.

     I'm usually a bit fuzzy and I lay there, trying to remember: which way should I move my foot?  One direction will forestall or at least reduce the pain; the other will make it far worse, and the clock is ticking.  Any second, the cramp will spasm and then it will be too late.

     This week, I have been walking considerably more than usual, since I don't want to park my car where globs of thick, dark-colored grease will fall on it from a great height. Yesterday evening, feeling spry, I added to the total with a brisk walk down the Monon for a snack.  Three times last night, incipient cramps woke me.  Each time, I was just a little late remembering to move my foot so as to stretch the muscles of my calf ahead of the cramp.  After the second one, I put the heating pad under my calves and went back to sleep.

     Gentle stretching exercises are the order of the day. 

In The Country Of The Hearing-Impaired, The Tone-Deaf Man Is...?

     I don't know.  He's certainly not king.  He's not the court jester, either, though you've got to read carefully to find out:

     Indiana Representative Jim Lucas figures if you're okay with licensing the public practice of one Constitutionally-protected right, you can't really argue against doing the same for the rest of them.  Irresponsible journalism can cause great harm, he points out, so why not start there?

     It's heavy-handed satire.  Rep. Lucas has long been a proponent of bringing "Vermont carry" to Indiana, but the hit dog yelps, especially in a news cycle dominated by President Trump's ill-informed* Twitter-fight with network news.  So of course, the Press bit.  And of course, the Press missed the point.

     Rep Lucas, never one to mind wrestling a pig, seems to have tried to use even more satire to clear things up.  It is working about as well as you might expect.

     Meanwhile, I'm sitting over here remembering that Mussolini was a journalist long before he became a fascist dictator, and that Mein Kampf and Das Kapital have, between them, prompted the murder of tens if not hundreds of millions of people. Guns are indeed dangerous -- but so are ideas and the ready promulgation of them.

     And so, too, is dangling temptation before the foolish and short-sighted.  Today, it's satire.  Who will the laugh be on tomorrow?  Personally, I support the unlicensed carry of journalists; they're only as dangerous as the person wielding them.
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* Networks don't have licenses; individual stations do.  Only a tiny fraction of U.S. TV stations are actually owned by the network they carry.  Most people don't know that and assume that the station they watch ABNBCBS on must, in fact, be that network.  So when a President Tweets, "Network news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked. Not fair to public!" he is channeling H. L. Mencken's Everyman, and threatening his waiter for the misdeeds of the cook.

Monday Morning

     I'm fresh out of commentary.  Hollywood is just a creepy as most people feared and California is burning -- though not, for some reason, burning down the people who deserve it, just big, wide swaths of Averageville, and where's the justice in that?

     Here in Indiana, the weather has turned sharply cooler, which is not going to be helpful for the ongoing tower work.  Beggars can't be choosers; this was  a last-minute job and id we get sunshine and no more than the mildest of breezes, I'll be happy.

Well, That Was...

     ...I don't know.  Refreshing?  On the advice of my doctor, I just laid around most of the weekend.  I was working terrible hours all last week and fighting some kind of infection, so by the time I showed up at the doctor's office at 1:30 Friday afternoon, having been awake since 11:00 the previous night, I was kind of exquisitely exhausted.

     After discussing the hours I'd been working and how I was feeling, she looked at me and asked, "Do you work tomorrow?  Because I can write a note right now that you should be off for a couple days..."  This from a practice remarkably unreceptive to malingerers, if the things I have overheard in many years of going there are any guide.

     So I didn't do a whole lot yesterday -- a lovely day, though one that set my allergies tingling -- and today was cold and gray, fine weather for staying indoors and mostly horizontal. 

     Has it helped?  I think so.  Still not a hundred percent, but much better than most of last week.

Lieutenant Who?

     Can you go wrong asking the robot, "Alexa, play Prokofiev?"  Maybe, though I don't know how.  This morning, she dished up the Lieutenant Kijé Suite, which ranks up there with Peter And The Wolf and the March from For the Love Of Three Oranges* as accessible highbrow music -- and those two are by Prokofiev, too.
     Lt. Kijé is The Officer Who Never Was, created by a slip of the pen, but enjoys a brilliant career despite not existing -- or his close associates and wife do, anyway.   And then one day, the Emperor sends for this loyal and clever officer, now a General....

     How is it that SF film makers have overlooked this amusing, twisty plot?  Sure, Hollywood is not too bright collectively, but there are a few with wit here and there.  Bigtime, sweeping space opera is overdue to be sent up and this delightful lampoon of Imperial bureaucracy, connivance and managerial befuddlement both accidental and deliberate would be just the thing.
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* An opera for people dislike opera.  Find all that stagy singing and stomping about in Foreignese too high-toned and stuffy?  Sergi'll fix it!  He was supposedly a good Marxist (or willing to go along) but for this work, it's Groucho, Harpo and Chico, not Karl.  (Perhaps more Chico Marx, as the story comes from an Italian play based on an Italian fairytale, which is at least twice as Italian as Chico.) I can't find a synopsis that does it justice; the cast includes a lonely Prince, an evil witch, giant enchanted oranges, three beautiful Princesses, an over-involved Narrator, and planted audience members who appear to believe the opera is real life and try to "help" the protagonists out of the difficulties the plot puts in the way. Prokofiev being Prokofiev, the opera mixes bittersweet and slapstick -- and gets away with it brilliantly.

Because We're Soooo Unique, That's Why

     Crew Chief for the team greasing the guy wires* on the very tall tower for which I am responsible:

     "I don't know what it is about you people in Indianapolis. Everyplace else in the country where we work, they just toss us the keys and say, 'Let us know when you're done.'  We come here, and we've worked on almost every tall tower in Indy, and every one of 'em, they have to have someone there all the time we're working.  You Indianapolis people don't want us to have keys, or gate codes or anything!"

     Guess it's just that good old Hoosier diligence.  Or paranoia -- random vandalism, from mild to theft of all outdoor air-conditioning equipment, has a long history at towers here.  Me, I just do what my bosses tell me to do along those lines.
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* "But why grease them," you might wonder, "do they squeak?"  They do not, or no more than necessary; what they do is rust.  Unless you do something, the heavy wire rope accumulates water and rusts from the inside out.  That could ruin your whole day, or at least mine. You can't paint them but a nice, thick coat of heavy grease, well packed in, makes a good barrier to the entry of water.  The downside is, it has to be renewed every few years.  This is best done during very hot weather but it doesn't always work out that way.