Category: Ramble

Just writing stuff about things, and things about stuff.

Fail-Safe

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Fail-safe does not mean what you think it means.

I mean, okay, sure, language is fluid, meanings are not fixed, words mean what we agree they mean. But origins of words can be instructive. So: fail-safe.

I thought it meant some kind of device (or in a more informal, metaphorical sense, a procedure) that would keep another device from failing. Kinda like anti-lock brakes. It’s raining out, you slam on the brakes, which makes you skid, which makes you crash — the anti-lock brakes kick in, keep you from skidding, help you avoid the crash. Fail-safe.

Wrong!

Fail-safe was a term they invented for nuclear weapons. (I learned this reading Command and Control by Eric Schlosser, which is fantastic for exploring the limits of just how wide you can open your eyes in disbelief.) In their early days, especially, there was a great deal of unease that the warheads could be detonated by accident. (Spoiler alert: this fear has not been alleviated.) This was owing to the tremendous number of moving parts and interconnected systems (electrical impulses created by piezoelectric crystals crushed on impact powering explosive lenses which cause an implosion forcing the nuclei of radioactive atoms to fuse). Bombs have been accidentally dropped from airplanes more than once. Missiles have exploded on the launchpad or underground in their silos. Airplanes have crashed while carrying nukes. The fact that we haven’t had a self-inflicted nuclear explosion looks more and more miraculous after reading this book.

But it’s owing to these fail-safes. To really understand the concept, you have to think about what “failure” means. With a nuclear bomb, that’s easy. The bomb is designed to explode, and in the process of its explosion, to set off a nuclear reaction, leading to an even bigger explosion. How could that go wrong? Well, there’s the time factor: go off too early and you set the bomb off in your own backyard or in somebody else’s  backyard (which is not the kind of thing you can apologize for with a casserole and a check), go off too late and you have the same set of problems. Or, maybe it doesn’t go off at all, and you’ve deposited a radioactive paperweight in the countryside or the bottom of the ocean. Then there’s targeting: say the missile gets carried off course or the thrusters don’t fire or maybe you’re just dropping the bomb from a plane but it’s cloudy and you drop it on the wrong thing. Then there’s human error. Maybe some general gets crazy and hits the big red button out of turn. Or maybe some pilot performing maintenance on the plane mid-flight accidentally grabs the manual release lever and drops the bomb over North Carolina. (NOT THAT THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED OR ANYTHING seriously this book is horrifying.)

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That’s a lot of ways to fail. And you simply can’t prevent all of those things — especially the human error component. So what you can do is design your bombs

The fail-safes don’t stop the bombs from failing. Failure of a nuclear bomb would mean a crater miles across centered on some poor pig farmer’s backyard. The fail-safes ensure that, in the event of a failure, the bomb doesn’t do what it’s designed to do — in other words, in failing, the device remains safe.

Drop or launch the bomb by mistake, and it doesn’t arm, so maybe you put a hole in the aforementioned pig farmer’s backyard, but you don’t put a hole in Kansas. It fails, safely. In some cases, the bomb (which is to say the business end, the warhead) can even be repackaged, tuned up, and used once more.

Which is sort of a fascinating metaphor for the writer’s life, as it turns out. Because failure is EVERYWHERE, and it’s nothing short of miraculous that writers aren’t leaving radioactive craters in their wake everyday.

How, then, does the writer fail safe?

By having other things to focus on. Something — ANYthing — to take your mind off the fact that you just received ANOTHER rejection letter (or, worse, no letter at all!). The next project. The next query letter. Your next run or workout. Some dedicated family time. That book you’ve been meaning to read. Heck, just a walk around the block. SOMETHING. (May I recommend, if you’re the high-strung type, NOT reading Command and Control.)

How do you fail safe when it feels like you’re not getting anywhere?

Your Thoughts

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I was listening to Sam Harris on a podcast this morning, and he said something that shook me: “You don’t think your thoughts. You are your thoughts.”

Which is empowering in that you-choose-the-way-you-view-the-world kind of way. Think positively and you’ll view the world positively; think negatively and negativity will seem to find you. I’m pretty sure I buy that.

But then I realized that this sentiment — you are your thoughts — is not a particularly pleasant one when I consider the kind of messed-up thoughts I have during the day.

I don’t dwell on them, of course. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t occasionally think the horribly morbid thought. “What if I just drove the car off the road right now? Right into that ditch? Or into oncoming traffic?” Every time somebody on a bicycle comes anywhere near me, I think of that scene from Indiana Jones where he jams a flagpole into a Nazi’s motorbike spokes and sends the guy pinwheeling through the air. Not that I actually want to hurt somebody, just that I could take a tiny action like that and seriously mess up somebody’s day.

Troubling. To say nothing of the dream I had this morning where my wife was holding a handful of baby snakes which subsequently started to eat each other from the inside out (don’t ask, it was a dream, who cares about logic), filling the room with a cloud of black flies. (Interpret that one for me, if you can.)

If you are your thoughts, then what do those thoughts make me?

Pardon me while I try to avoid thinking at all for the rest of the day.

NINE NINE

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So Brooklyn 99 got canceled. And the internet threw a spontaneous collective hissy fit.

And then, in virtually no time at all, it got picked up again, on a different network. And the internet rejoiced.

But why the outcry over a relatively mundane comedy? And why the rapturous happiness at its immediate renewal? And why, for that matter, did NBC scoop it up so immediately, when Fox was ready to cut it loose? People feel strongly about the show. Exceptionally strong. Why? (And yeah, in the Internet of Things, all kinds of people love all kinds of things and everybody gets rabid about the things they love, so outspoken fans are not exactly unique. But fans of Brooklyn 99 seem more rabid than most.)

I don’t think it’s the humor, though the show is very funny; it blends deadpan snark with brick-to-the-face slapstick and the simple, tried-and-true formula of putting ridiculous characters in ridiculous situations for maximum comic effect. But B99 is not the only show doing this.

More likely, it’s the show’s subtle message of inclusion, its all-are-welcome and all-play-by-the-same-rules ethos that you really don’t find on other shows right now. Consider:

Captain Holt is the leader of the precinct. He’s black, and gay, and super-intimidating and exceedingly protocol-driven. But he’s also overtly willing to learn from his subordinates, and becomes more father figure than boss to most of them. He also has frequent moments of badass and hilarity.

Sergeant Jeffords is the second-in-command. He’s black, and ridiculously muscular, but rather than making him the “heavy” or the “bruiser”, he’s first and foremost a family man. Always driven by his wife and kids, he often ends up dropping wisdom on the others in the show. He also has frequent moments of badass and hilarity.

Rosa Diaz is Latina and bisexual, and she’s also the most feared person in the precinct. Not because of her differences, but just because her entire demeanor is terrifying. Of course, under that demeanor, she’s got a gooey center, but she’ll still throttle you for pointing it out. She also has frequent moments of badass and hilarity.

Then there’s Hitchcock and Scully, the stereotypical donut-chomping desk jockeys, usually played for laughs but still given the occasional moment of badassery. Amy Santiago is insufferable and brown-nosing, but still gets regular moments of badassery. Charles Boyle and Jake Peralta are the awkward cop buddies who seem to subvert every cop buddy trope, but they still feature in the show’s moments of badassery.

The show is an equal-opportunity feature machine, in other words, giving every character — regardless of what you may think you know about what makes them who they are — a chance to show out and, ultimately, just be a cop. Everybody gets to save the day. Everybody has others depending on them and actually follows through.

And that, I think, is what makes the show work so well. The character differences serve the comedy — yes, of course — but they also tell you only so much about the characters: what really tells you about the characters is watching how they cover for each other, how they get each other’s backs, and how little they care about their differences. What makes the show work with all its diversity* is the fact that the diversity is basically never addressed, and it’s never played for cheap laughs.

Point is, B99 isn’t all in-your-face with its inclusion — the inclusion is just part of the fabric of the show, which means you basically don’t even notice it.

Which I think is why people lost their minds when it got canceled. (And likewise rejoiced when it was saved.) It’s nice to have stories where people who are different don’t just have to talk about their differences all the time. The cops on B99 are cops first, human co-workers second, and, somewhere way down the line, they’re also ethnically diverse.

And let’s be honest: the show is funny as hell, too. That doesn’t hurt.

Nine Nine
Image is owned by Fox. For now.

*note that a show that includes a non-white individual or two just for the sake of having a diverse cast kind of misses the point. Have them, yes, by all means. But make them part of the storyline, and better yet, make the stories about them without making the stories about their differences.

Meta-Meta-Analysis on Journaling

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Is journaling wrecking my creativity?

I’m in another creative slump lately (I know, when am I not) and I haven’t been able to put my finger on why. There’s been the show and the end of school drawing closer, but that doesn’t feel like it — for the last few weeks I’ve had as much time to myself at work as ever. And the slump started before I got really keyed up over that stuff. It started right around the time I started takign time out each morning when I first got to work to write a page-a-day.

Why should that be? I’ve read about journaling dozens of times over the years, and virtually everything I read about seemed to suggest that a bit of unstructured morning writing would be a great way to prime the pump, creatively speaking, to clear out the lines for the juices to flow later in the day. But here I am, flagging on my novel, and — well — just look at the dearth of posts around the blarg of late. Pitiful!

For that matter, I’m not really sure what the journal is doing for me, if anything. Most of what goes into it is irredeemably trite, absolutely worthless, and not fit to be read by anybody but myself, and even then, only at my most masochistic. It’s just me driveling on about any old thing and, a lot of the time, I end up boring myself until I don’t know what to write about. Which, I thought, was why I was journaling in the first place — to kickstart my ideas!

I dunno. It’s only five minutes, after all, and it seems hasty to scrap the practice; with writing, I’ve learned, things sometimes take time to take root, and you don’t always see the benefits right away.

The funny thing is, I wrote most of this post as part of my five minutes yesterday morning. Which is to say that when I turned my attention to my frustration with my creativity and my process, suddenly the thing I was doing to help my creativity and my process actually worked, and I scribbled out a pretty good rant in those five minutes.

So maybe instead of reflecting, I just need to use my morning pages to tear myself a new one each morning.

That seems like a practice I could get behind.

Go Evolve Yourself

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There’s a church near me —

No, wait.

At one of the churches near me —

Nope, that doesn’t help either.

Look, there are a lot of churches near me. Living in semi-suburban, semi-rural Georgia. I pass by no less than five on my way to work, and my commute is only about fifteen minutes. (That’s a church every three minutes; way more common than any golden arches ever dreamed of.)

And some of them get pretty clever with their marquee. Credit where it’s due, I’ve gotten more than a couple of chuckles driving past this one particular church.

But this is not chuckle-worthy.

It’s not even smirk-and-drive-on-worthy.

This is veins-popping-from-the-forehead-worthy.

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I get it, it’s a joke. Haw haw, evolution thinks it has all the answers. (It doesn’t, actually, only lots of answers.) Moms are overworked. (On that one, preach on.)

But it’s a joke that critically fails to understand the thing it’s poking fun at in addition to being just idiotically wrong. Because that isn’t the way evolution works. And evolution *is* true.

Does that make me triggered? Does that make me a snowflake? Well, break out the flannel caps and snowshoes, because I have no patience for this.

Claiming that evolution isn’t true — for laughs or for real — is freaking harmful to society. Empowering people who don’t know any better, who base their arguments off archaic books rather than science you can see with your own eyes, to disagree with the fundamental understanding of the way the world works is bloody anathema to the forward progress of our culture. (And sweet fancy Moses, we need some freaking forward progress right now.)

Claiming that evolution isn’t true is the sort of thing that really should carry a sociological cost, in this day and age. Like stepping into an NRA meeting and suggesting a government buyback on guns, or crashing an LGBTQIA support group and crowing that about Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.

Claiming that evolution isn’t true, and telling kids to resist it in schools (I’ve encountered this myself actually, it really does happen), is holding us back.

I’m not saying it should be illegal.

I’m saying anybody seriously representing the idea should be embarrassed.