Luftschiffe

One thing that one of the regular commentors here noticed that I hadn't - at least consciously - was the regular appearance of the image of a rigid airship, a zeppelin, in the cartoon doodlings from the past week.He asked if I'd been reading steampunk fiction lately, and while I enjoy the genre the answer is no; I've always been a sort of zeppelin crank.They just seem sort of dangerously cool to me, and I love the idea of this massive thing floating along nearly silently, like a cloud only with several tons of bombs inside, over an enemy landscape as a sort of aerial assassin. Scary cool, if you will.Mind you, if I was on the ground the scary would have it all over the cool.

And even in the air - the rigid airships seem to have been fiendishly dangerous for their crew and passengers. Certainly the German zeps got hammered by constantly improving antiaircraft and fighter defenses. The statistics tell the story; 53 destroyed and 24 damaged to the point of being non-mission capable out of an total of 115 airships. Crew loss rate of 40%. Cost about five times the total damage inflicted.Still. Call the zeppelins a personal quirk, an indulgence, one of my hidden passions, an odd devotion to a vestigial past.Airships are still just freaking cool.

Anybody else out there have one of these odd, trivial passions?

Indistinguishable from magic

Spent an irritating half-hour or so today at work fiddling with a piece of software that was having some sort of personal problem.

Eventually I closed the application, reopened it and it worked fine again.

Imagine if we accepted that as a standard of design functionality for the other things we use on a daily basis. The car suddenly stops turning right; to repair it we have to stop the car, shut off the engine, get out, get back in, start the engine and drive away. We don't understand why it went wrong, why it stopped working wrong, and how we fixed it.

We'd junk the bastard in a heartbeat.

And yet, we - those of us not part of Macintosh World - accept this level of computer hardware and software malfunction as normal and expected.

Honestly, sometimes I think we're a tiny bit afraid of our digital masters, like the thunder-worshiping monkeys we were. We tinker cluelessly with powers we don't understand...