PLANE TO SEE

  ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (09-12-24)

     This year we attended an air show over the beach in Ocean City, Maryland. I'd never been to one before, and it was quite spectacular. The hardest thing to get used to at an air show is looking up and noticing a huge A-18 Growler silently flying disturbingly close to you. A second or two later an Earth-shattering noise rolls through, unaccompanied. 

     There were stunts, intricate formations, aviatrics (I made that word up) and a lot of really cool hardware. The dedication and precision of man coming together with machine was awe-inspiring. It's a demonstration, a symbol of and a tribute to the brave men and women working to support us in the air as well as on the ground. Present were aircraft like the F-22 Raptor, a supersonic fighter that went straight up into the air and let out an array of glowing, smoking flares. An A-10C Thunderbolt is a twin-engine jet designed to support ground missions. It can fly with high maneuverability at low speeds and low altitudes. For this particular operation it caused a high degree of anxiety as it buzzed about 200 boats viewing the proceedings from off shore.

     The C-17 Globemaster transport plane is a behemoth that looks like it just came from the all-you-can-eat smorgasbord at Shady Maple, then ate the Shady Maple. It's made to carry people and materiel during combat flights as well as humanitarian missions. The highlight of the event was a performance by the Frecce Tricolori demonstration team of the Italian Air Force. Painting the sky with plumes of red, white and green smoke, they performed tight maneuvers in crowd-pleasing patterns.

     Who exactly is in charge of discovering just how far you can push these nimble giants? I'm glad it's not me. "We tested out some great new stunts at the lab, and I have some good news and some bad news about how it went. First, the good news: There's free coffee at the commissary until 1400 hours. The bad news is we've lost a couple of planes. Fourteen, to be exact. They were flying in formation, but the formation they were flying in was the 'infinity' symbol, which we've never actually tried before. We're pretty sure they're still out there somewhere. They're solar-powered, and it's taking forever to find them."

     I couldn't help fantasizing that I was a stunt pilot in the air show. I'm not sure why I was chosen for this fantasy, someone who is as vehicularly-challenged as I am: when I was younger, in my parents car, I thought we would get in trouble for passing a sign that said, "No Passing." I also suffer from motion sickness. Even if I'm watching a courtroom drama on television and somebody files a motion I get a little queasy. But in a fantasy, you can do a lot of stuff that common sense, law, and the rules and regulations of the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleading squad would normally prevent you from doing.

     In the wild blue yonder I perform a perfect "barrel roll." The plane goes up and continues upside down, before righting itself in its original direction. Picture the path of a corkscrew, but don't forget to take the cork out before I do this thing. Next I do an aileron roll, which turns the plane 360-degrees on its lengthwise axis. Then I fly straight up about a thousand feet and go into a stall. That's because the keys fall out of my ignition and land somewhere in the back of the plane, and I have to dig around and find them in the rear. Some of my internal organs are also back there so I collect those, too. I can almost hear the cheers on the ground. Wait until they find out that I did all of this by mistake, trying to land.

     Soon it becomes apparent to Air Control that I don't know how to fly a plane. I should have received at least the bare minimum of training for this fantasy. The boys in the tower are going to have to "talk me down," like they do in the movies. An Air Force colonel grabs the microphone and calls into my earpiece. I had taken off the headphones to listen to my iPod, but now that I hear him chattering away I put them back on. The Colonel yells, "MELÉN: You're too high." I reply, "It only seems that way." "Back off the throttle. NOW." I grab the only two things that move and pull them back. One of them is my knee, so that does nothing. The other, luckily, is the throttle. The Colonel yells, "I don't like the  attitude of your fuselage." "Me neither," I reply, "I'm grounding it for a WEEK if I ever get it on the ground." "Bring your nose up, NOW." "You're right, that's better- now all I can see is the ceiling." 

     But then I land the plane perfectly, and as my fantasy would have it, beautiful actress Catherine Keener is in the tower. I ask her to dinner, and she says, "Thanks anyway, but I have a date tonight with the Colonel. He's quite a man!. OH- also, some other great news! I won your fantasy football pool!" I'm woken out of my daydream by a voice coming over the PA at the Stunt Flight Test Lab- turns out they just invented a new version of the "barrel roll," and this one has poppy seeds AND sesame seeds on it!

THE APPRENTICE

 

 ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (08-24-24)

     I guess that when the television industry has had enough of me, I'll need to find something else to do with myself. Maybe I could work in a trade, since I like to work with my hands. Is acupuncture a trade? I think I could kill at that job. Glass blower? How hard could it be? Even if you blow it, things went pretty well. Yoga instructor, as long as I can just explain what to do rather than showing you. When we discuss the cat pose, I demonstrate by sitting on a newspaper and knocking all your pens off the table. Maybe I'll get into consulting, if there's a business model where I ask the questions. How about horse groomer? "You look fine, but you could do with a little horse-scaping. That will be $40.00."

     I had to hire an electrician to come over and re-wire the ceiling fan that I hooked up using a YouTube video, and I realized that being an electrician would be the perfect job for me. Besides electrocution, what's the worst that could happen? My idea was to apprentice at the craft by having him come back several times after I try to fix things. If you watch enough YouTube videos, you feel like you can do anything.

     I was pretty much relegated to setting up the ladder. Let me pick his brain- I need to know more about the business structure. "So is there a corporate ladder or do you need to provide your own? What's the quickest way to get to the top?" "Well, I work for myself and I slept my way to the top. Could you set up the ladder vertically?" I was learning so much already.

     "Is that a jumper wire?" I asked. "Actually, yes it is." "I thought I saw it move." He says he needs to plug in his cordless drill, and this guy is supposedly the expert. "You have an outlet?" "I have an outlet, but I'm not sure we want to get into that here."

     He had his nose inside the circuit box, so I was basically his eyes and ears to the outside world. He said, "Can you find the ground?" I felt this was a test. I said, "Isn't it right down there?" But he was still looking inside the box. While I was thinking, outside the box, he said, "Yup, you're right. There it is. Good! Hand me those pliers?" He was twisting some wires. I thought this was a good time to bond. I said, "If you want to see the ground, come out drinking with me, and you'll see it at about 1:30, 2:00 on a good night, 12:15 on an even better night." "There's a pair of strippers over there." He was pointing somewhere. "Oh, so you know the place? I'm like a fixture there. That's an electrician joke."

     I think I had his attention. I said, "Listen, I've been writing some television scripts. One involves an electrician and an apprentice, and they are also private detectives. The apprentice is actually the smart one, and the electrician is always getting into trouble, and screwing things up, and the apprentice is always talking them out of a jam, but the electrician stumbles upon the answer to the crime without knowing it, and it's the apprentice who actually puts 2 and 2 together, because the police have already zeroed in on the ex-husband, but he didn't do it." "Mmm-hmmm. But if the apprentice was the smarter one why isn't he the electrician? Make 30 dollars more an hour." "I can set it in a post-apocalyptic world, if that makes you feel any better. Wait- you're paying me $40 dollars less than you?"

     I can explain the basics of electricity to you right now, if you'd like to become my apprentice's aide. It's an unpaid position, but people do a lot worse things for a lot more money. You can think of electricity as if it were water. Pretend a wire is the hose. Amperes, named for physicist André-Marie Ampère, represents the amount of water flowing. Voltage, named for Alessandro Volta, is the water pressure. Ohms, named after Georg Ohm, are like a sprinkler at the end of the hose, causing resistance to the water's flow. 

     The rickster, named after myself, is a unit that measures the amount of water you would need to stand in while working on an open circuit before becoming electrocuted. As you can see, everything is named after the guy who invented it. So to solidify my legacy in the field, I need to discover something. What I've discovered is that it seems like a lot of work to be an electrician.

     You need a license, which I already have, with only a few speeding tickets. And you have to be certified in your state. People have often said I am certifiable, so I'm just about ready to go. But I might just become a YouTube electrician instead, and make videos right here at home. I have the camera all set up and ready to go, but I can't get it to play back on the TV, so I'll probably have to call the electrician back.

LEFT OUT TO DRY

 ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (08-01-24)

     I was riding my motorcycle the other day, one hand on the throttle, the other hand on the brake (not at the same time), and it dawned on me that an estimated ten percent of all people in the world have to ride a motorcycle the other way around. I guess this means that left-handed motorcyclists stop when they should go, turn to when they should turn fro, go back when they should go forth. Are there motorcycles for left-handed people? Or are they cast adrift, like left-handed Jimi Hendrix playing the National Anthem upside down on a right-handed guitar, proudly hailing at the twilight's last gleaming from the other side of the fretboard?

     I don't want to imply anything about left-handed people that you don't already know, but the word in Latin for "left" is "sinistra," or sinister. Yes, I took two years of Latin in middle school, and if Latin hadn't already been a dead language I would have killed it right where it stood. But even back then, when people were saying things like, "ubi est agricola," they knew southpaws were different, maybe because they had paws.

     There are so many things a left-handed person has to learn to do backwards that the rest of us take for granted. At every meal at the restaurant, their knives and forks are on the opposite sides. So instead of eating what's right, they're stuck with what's left.

     Using a pair of scissors is a frustrating undertaking for left-handed people, and I can only imagine what it was like before they were sold in pairs. Taking a picture with a traditional camera must be a real pain in the aperture for lefties, who have to reach over the lens to push the button. It makes me shutter every time.

     I made the mistake of buying a jacket once in Europe, where the zipper is on the opposite side. This is also true of the buttons on women's blouses, and that's one of the things that makes cross-dressers so cross. I once read that the reason that women's clothing has the buttons on the left side was because it was easier for their dressers to dress them from the front. But what if their dresser was left-handed? You just can't win.

     A tape measure pulled to the left means whatever you're measuring will be calibrated in the metric scale. Objects may be smaller than they appear, apology accepted.

     These days you can thank goodness that Google was invented, so you can order left-handed versions of many things right-handers take for granted. And while you're thanking goodness, thank it for inventing a keyboard to replace an actual typewriter, where the carriage return is on the right.

     Having "two left feet" is considered an insult. It means you can't dance. But really, dancing is actually one of the few things where it doesn't matter if you're right-handed or left. My dog has two left feet, and she can  do the foxtrot if the music is right and there is romance in the air.

     The idea of two distinct hemispheres of the brain came to light in the 1960s, when Nobel winner Roger W. Sperry's research detailed evidence that the right side of the brain controlled artistic functions, while the left side managed the analytic operations. This led to a belief that there were "right-brained" and "left-brained" people. This theory has since been disproven, but if the scientists who published the study were right-brained, who knows how accurate it was.

      Last year I broke my right foot right after we had bought tickets to "Prairie Home Companion," but nothing was going to keep us from that show. Not even my wife injuring HER right foot. So there we were, driving through New York City traffic. My left foot is usually only used for depressing the clutch pedal in my car, but now on my wife's automatic it was called upon to depress the  accelerator AND the brake. Which was much more depressing. All the while my right foot was making smug and unhelpful comments like how "reckless" driving is a malapropism if you get into a wreck.

     How hard could it be to be left-handed in a right-handed world? I got hold of a left-handed guitar and played it right-handed, through a loud amplifier. And the sounds that came out were surprisingly similar to those made if I played it left-handed. Or if I ran over it with my car. While driving with my left foot. My wife said that if I really wanted the true Jimi Hendrix experience I should burn the guitar like he did at the Monterey Pop Festival. "Great idea!" I said. "Maybe after my next-" "I already burned it," she said. Well, I'm sure it was great. Anyway, here's to you, left-handed warriors of the world, you are modern-day heroes. Although that might be a bit of a left-handed compliment.