J.T. McDaniel's blog

Calendar Reform?

It's leap day again. Every four years we add an extra day to the end of February. About the same time various people start pushing their particular calendar reform ideas. I figured I might as well throw mine into the mix.

I came up with this as a calendar for an ancient civilization when I was writing a swords and sorcery book back in the middle 1970s. I think it was a fairly good book. Good enough, at least, to make it most of the way through the traditional publishing process before the accountants decided it was too long. I wish I still had it, I'd bring it out now. No chance, though, the manuscript was lost a long time ago.

The calendar is very simple. Instead of 12 months there are 13, each month exactly 28 days long. The weeks start on Monday instead of Sunday, which means that the 13th will always fall on Saturday. In the original novel, the days of the week were numbered (Firstday, Secondday, etc.), but we're used to them having names, so we'll use those instead.

Now we still have the same problem with the earth's orbit that gives us leap years now. With this calendar we have an extra issue. The year is 365-1/4 days long, and a 13 month, 28 day month calendar has 364 days. This is solved by adding a New Years Holiday after the end of what the fictional Guhunite civilization called Thirteenmonth. The NYH stands alone, and is not part of a week, so after the old year ends on Sunday, the 28th, you have NYH, and then start the next year on Monday the first.

That takes care of the one day indexing in the current calendar. As for leap years, we follow the same rule as now, but add a Leap Day, also not part of the week, at the end of a designated month. Think of it as a guarantee of at least two three-day weekends a year.

Okay, there's a potential problem for some people, who need weeks to match their mythology to insure a seven-day rest day cycle. The Gehunites didn't worry about this, as their religious system imposed the calendar in the first place and took it into account (the extra days were holidays).  And I think our own system could adapt as well.

Reading on Camera

When you write a new book, one of the problems is always getting people to buy it. The most difficult part of this is letting potential buyers know that the book exists. Small publishing companies don't have budgets that allow them to buy network television time for the author to ponder killing off his most popular character, thus giving the readers an incentive to buy the book to discover if he did. Thirty seconds of James Patterson on CBS costs more than my publisher spends on their entire operation during a year.

So the only way I'm getting on CBS is if I do something newsworthy. Writing another book isn't, so I don't think I'm likely to need to skip work some morning to talk to Charlie Rose.

One thing I can do is get on YouTube. I did some acting when I was younger. I also worked in radio for quite a few years. The combination provides sufficient confidence for me to figure I can sit in a comfortable chair reading a story from my new book, This and That, without making a complete fool of myself. So I took my camera, which has a video setting, put in on the tripod, and gave it a shot.

Pretty awful. The image, that is. The reading wasn't bad, but there wasn't enough light on my face and there was a blue reflective bar running vertically through the scene.

Now I needed to make two purchases instead of one. The first was MoviePlus X3, which Serif has on sale at a steep discount now that a newer version has been released. My editing needs are extremely simple. I need to be able to create title cards at the beginning and end of the video, and I need to be able to cut the shots together. The hope was that I'd be able to read an entire story or essay right through without any fluffs. If I couldn't, I needed to be able to pause for a few seconds, then start over with the paragraph where I'd screwed up. Then, during the editing, I'd be able to cut out the fluff and pick up where I'd started over.

The second thing I needed was a better camera. So instead of shooting the reading on my old Kodak Z1015IS, I went over to BestBuy and picked up a Sony HDR-CX160. Instant jump in quality, with a 1080 x 1440 image area (full HD, in other words). Converting the finished image for YouTube results in a reduction in quality, but it's still reasonably good. An additional advantage of the Handycam is that you can turn the display around 180 degrees, so you can see it as it films you. Makes for a lot more confidence that you haven't accidentally moved out of frame.

So last night I set up the camera, turned on some extra lights, picked up my Kindle Fire, and started reading A Patient Man, one of the stories in This and That. As expected, there were a couple of fluffs, which were cut out with only a minimum of fuss. I picked that particular story for various reasons. It's fairly short. It's written in first person form, with only a few lines of dialogue. And it's suitably creepy. I grew up reading Poe, so I like creepy.

I also do it well. My favorite part as an actor was probably Jonathan Brewster, and the resemblance to Boris Karloff was likely brought across most strongly by the voice, rather than the makeup. I didn't quite go full Karloff for this story, but I think I managed the proper genially sinister effect.

Don't take my word for it, though. The upload went smoothly, so please feel free to pop over to YouTube and take a look. J.T. McDaniel reading A Patient Man

Some Planning Tips for Towns

At the present time, I live in a medium size townhouse in what the Post Office says is Dublin, Ohio, but actually turns out to be Columbus. That's really only confusing at tax time; Columbus' income tax is higher than Dublin's, so I get to make up the difference.

I've noticed a few things about city/town planning over the last few years. Little gems of wisdom that the professional planners have either missed, or couldn't convince municipalities and developers to pay for. The sort of thing I'd like to make mandatory. For example:

• Any new roads built should be required to have a sidewalk on both sides. This would include perimeter roads around shopping malls and office parks, and the entrance roads to apartment complexes.
• Apartment or townhouse developers should be required to fill the space between the inter-unit firewalls and the finish wall with rock wool or something similar. Whatever insulation is used should have two qualities: it should be fireproof, and it should prevent sound from getting through. Done properly you'd have four inches of insulation on each side with a proper firewall between, and your neighbors could play their music as loud as they like without bothering you.
• Multi-unit buildings should have minimum four hour firewalls completely separating each unit from its neighbors. In an apartment building, this would include a four hour fire rating on the floors. Any building with more than two units should be masonry, not wood. It's entirely possible to build an apartment building where any unit could be completely gutted without any neighboring unit catching fire, but it costs significantly more so hardly anyone is actually doing it. Maybe if the owners were required to live in their own buildings?
• It has been discovered that living in a city that's unfriendly to automobiles results in an increase in the average lifespan. It turns out people living in Manhattan tend to live longer, and remain healthy longer, than people living in much of the midwest. This may have something to do with the fact that most Manhattanites don't own cars, and often walk several  miles a day just getting around their neighborhoods. There are places in New York you can't easily go by car; there is nowhere in New York you can't go by foot.
• Apartment developers generally try to avoid providing adequate parking. City codes usually specify a minimum number of spaces per unit, but more often than not this will be fewer than the renters actually own. I doubt we can ever get anything passed that would require the number of spaces to be based on the  number of cars, but I can't see any reason why there can't be a requirement that landlords have to provide at least one reserved space per unit. Then maybe I could go to a Clippers game in the evening and have a place to put my car when I get home.

I don't expect to see many of these suggestions enacted into law. The fireproofing ideas, masonry construction, stronger firewalls, are the sort of thing you'd think developers would do anyway just to protect their investments. Rarely a week went by when I was living in Atlanta that a kitchen fire in a newer luxury apartment didn't result in burning down the entire building. Most apartment buildings in the Atlanta suburbs are wood frame construction. Masonry buildings, with masonry firewalls between sections, could eliminate a lot of these big fires. Apartment fires in newer buildings in New York rarely burn out more than one family. If you look behind the drywall on the walls separating the individual apartments you find concrete.

Soundproofing is just common sense. Landlords generally prefer that tenants stay for extended terms (presuming there are no rent control laws). They're more likely to stay if they don't have to listen to the neighbors. Once, when I was in Georgia, the apartment above mine was rented to a hooker. A very loud hooker. It's not easy trying to sleep with someone screaming, moaning, and generally encouraging the customers directly above you.

This is making me miss my house. There's a lot to say for living on a quiet street, on a one-acre wooded lot (I actually had only a quarter acre, but the three lots around me were unbuildable, so I got the benefit without having to pay the taxes). If I look out my front window here I see cars. If I looked out my front window there I saw a bird feeder, usually with plenty of customers.

Well, another three or four years and I get to retire.

On the First Amendment

Why does the Bill of Rights begin with the First Amendment? It has to, of course, but why is this particular amendment first and not one of the others? It's first because the men who created the  Constitution and Bill of Rights--in particular, James Madison--recognized that it was the most important.

We need to remember that the Bill of Rights was never intended to grant rights. Madison and the others worked from the premise that these rights were innate. The Bill of Rights didn't give you these rights, it stated in no uncertain terms that these were rights you already had, and the government was never to be allowed to take them away.

Recently, the First Amendment has come under attack yet again. The most vocal of its enemies are often those who most loudly claim to be defending it, and this time is no different.

When it comes to religion, the First Amendment contains two equally important, but to some minds conflicting clauses. First there is the establishment clause, immediately followed by the free exercise clause. Both are frequently misinterpreted or ignored, but the establishment clause is probably attacked more often.Usually by those who feel that the free exercise clause is the only one that counts (as long as it's their religion being exercised).

The most literal meaning of the establishment clause is that Congress is forbidden to establish an official religion for the United States. A lot of very loud fundamentalist Christians think it should be limited to precisely that and nothing more. They feel that religious involvement in government is just fine, as long as no one is trying to declare the United States as officially Baptist, or Methodist, or Catholic, or whatever. They have no trouble at all with the idea that there should be no official Church of the United States, not least because  you'd never get them to agree on which denomination should get the franchise.

Madison, who would certainly be the expert on original intent, had a much broader idea in mind. His actions as President, as well as his writings when out of office, make it quite clear that the intent of the First Amendment is that there should be no government support of religion, nor of anything that might create the impression of such support. Religion wasn't to be harmed or hindered, but it was to be left to thrive or whither on its own. Madison vetoed measures that would have given government money to churches for the purpose of poor relief (he would certainly have vetoed the current faith base initiatives), and another measure that would have spent government money printing copies of scripture. After leaving the White House, he also expressed the opinion that paying chaplains for the legislature out of government funds was certainly unconstitutional, though he was willing to allow the chaplains as long as the legislators paid them out of their own pockets.

One  could easily say the same for military chaplains. There's no good reason for the government to pay them when they could just as easily be paid by their denominations, or out of the collection plate. There are probably some television evangelists who could provide the entire military chaplaincy budget for a year by donating their take for a couple months. True, the chaplains would no longer be military officers, but most of them don't act like officers anyway, and they've never been allowed to command troops or carry weapons.

Well, that's not going to change. Congress and the military will continue to have chaplains based on nothing more than precedent. Madison himself recognized that the legislative chaplains would probably get to keep their jobs simply because they were already established (and even then you couldn't expect legislators to pay for things themselves).

The real First Amendment battleground is in the schools. In Rhode Island recently a student went to court to remove a prayer banner from the auditorium. The school had an easy compromise offered, simply remove the word "prayer" from the title, the invocation "Our Heavenly Father," and the "amen" at the end. The rest of the prayer was a simple collection of platitudes to which there could be no objection.

But rather than compromise, the school decided to fight it out in court where, predictably, they lost. Official school prayers, whether led by faculty members, or just presented silently to the students, have been illegal since 1962. The result is that the banner remains in the auditorium, covered over pending an appeal, and the student has to be accompanied to school by police to insure her safety. The death threats were probably as predictable as the court decision. The church has always simply killed its enemies whenever it had the power, and many school kids are barely civilized to begin with. Still, much as some would like to limit the scope of the First Amendment, Madison's view continues to prevail. Government cannot be seen as supporting religion.The Founding Fathers had recently fought a war to escape from an oppressive government with an official religion, and they weren't about to allow the same sort of theological tyranny to compromise their vision of a secular nation.

The other area where fundamentalists continue to attack the First Amendment is school biology classes. The Indiana senate yesterday passed a bill that would "allow" teachers to introduce religious explanations whenever they discuss the origins of life. Creationists are as relentless as they are wrong. Despite the minor detail that the development of life, and even the existence of the universe, can now be explained without the requirement of supernatural input, the fundamentalists aren't about to give up the struggle. Particularly, their clergy aren't about to give up. After all, they recognize that reducing the supernatural to coincidence, misapprehension, and myth also means they'll have to go out and start earning an honest living.