AdamSmith

In the mode of Sonnet 18... To a Houseboy Kept Too Long Shall I compare thee to my monthly pay? Thou art cheaper and more desperate. Rough times do come our way, And we shall part ways at any rate. Sometime too hot the oven bakes our dine, And often is the pie’s gold complexion burn’d; Your cooking, looks and smell continually decline, Through chance or time, you’ve never learn’d. But thy idiotic comments are never late, Nor lose their place as the lowest; Nor shall I brag thou know me, or that you’ve ever been near my shade, When in reality I see everyday those facial wrinkles growest. So long as you can breathe and I can see, So long my mission is never over till I take life from thee.

P.S. What a tiresome post. I will now revert to witless one-liners.

Agree Amtrak is slipping (if such were possible). My recent trip Raleigh-to-Charlotte was on a nice clean set of Acela cars with a cafe car. But the return train, although badged Acela, was inexplicably a string of third-world rattle traps such as those that used to link the northern terminus of the Harlem & Hudson line to the far wilds of Poughkeepsie and above.

Excellent! I have something a little similar -- an annual-subscription market research service that's pay-up-front. Only drawback is I actually have to deliver something useful to get any renewals. A colleague once said, "My ideal business would have just 2 components: a web site and a bank account!"

Poetry nigh to rival that of lookin! I am eclipsed yet again.

That's the new term for it.

Good. One time I actually got paid 100% up front. Client had to get the $ off its books before its financial year closed. Been looking for more work like that ever since. Alas to no avail!

Advice: Collect 50% up front. Balance due immediately on completion, before he finds out it doesn't do what he hoped. In parallel find other clients.

Well, just a couple of thoughts. (1) Re Boeing and its new baby: The problems are a mess, to be sure, and grounding was absolutely right until they get fixed. But so far they all look fairly expected given all the (avoidable, but that's water under the bridge) risks Boeing took in, as I've said, changing both product and process so radically at the same time. But none of the problems so far look particularly gnarly to fix. Even if they have to swallow their rhetoric on the batteries and drop back to older technology. Airbus with the 380 weathered big messes in its electrical system early on, including if memory serves large amounts of rework of already-installed wiring harnesses etc. in large numbers of completed or nearly completed craft. My worry has always been the composite airframe. If that were found to have recurrent systemic defects, it could be a threat to the whole 787 program orders of magnitude worse than shortsighted battery decisions or a poor-quality valve supplier. (2) Now, the FAA (we will not even bother to rip into poor old hapless LaHood) and the certification process. These are stuck in the 19th century and, reliant on certain manufacturer-supplied design and test data, can be a bit like Victorian doctors listening to their female patients through a long tube muffled by layers of nightgown and bed hangings. One challenge is that FAA-mandated ways of submitting this data have not kept pace with the vastly increased complexity of latest-generation aircraft and all their interdependent subsystems. Indeed the manufacturers and their suppliers are themselves trying to get the FAA to accept all kinds of live digital data generated in their engineering, simulation and test activities -- one of the terms of art is 'model-based engineering' -- which would be much more revealing than the currently required static drawings, 3D images, and written reports. But thus far the FAA largely resists. Unsure, I think, of its own competence in utilizing these potentially far more effective means of carrying out its mission here. (The DOD in sharp contrast is pushing contractors as hard as it can to get on the stick with these new engineering tools and methods -- Google 'Systems 2020' if interested.) If the 787 mess can bring some real long-term good, in my view, it will be to drag official certification and oversight procedures and techniques into the 21st century.

Translation: So if he is closeted he will be grateful for all kinds of favors behind closed doors.

So glad I am not the only one who thinks this. When it first appeared, I think every female of my acquaintance of an age to know what the Internet was transferred her entire DNA into Pinterest.

Having myself beaten Boeing about the neck and ears over the 787 numerous times here and There over the past years, suffer me respectfully to ask: How do you have the least rat's ass of a notion whether what you say above is so? The problem, or indeed problems, could range anywhere from one bad production run of batteries caused by a traceable, readily correctable manufacturing defect, all the way to a series of subtle but profound engineering misjudgments cascading throughout the fundamental design of the craft's multiple, deeply interlaced and interacting electrical, electronics and mechatronic systems. And at least a dozen scenarios I can think of that in severity lie somewhere in between. You will notice, as has been remarked here, that the popular press is enjoying sounding the alarm bells without much if any notion what they are talking about, as that sells papers. By contrast the engineering trade press, which I read and happen to be part of, is almost entirely keeping its collective yap shut until there is enough data to make some speculations worth the trouble of our and our readers' time. It would be interesting to hear from knowledgeable posters what the professional aviation press has found worth commenting on so far, and in what areas it is refraining from mouthing off until there is more to go on from the investigators.

That is to say: Ip! Ip! Array!

Would one not want to read a book about a bad or sad situation? That would encompass a good deal of great literature. If a different criterion for film, why?

Right! (You know Bob Silverberg made an ass of himself by publishing an essay arguing, before the truth was known, that Tiptree's writing had to be that of a man.)And then some other female SF writers used initials instead of full first names to hide their sex. Catherine Lucille Moore published as C.L. Moore. She also frequently collaborated with her husband, most of their work being published at the time under the pseudonyms of Lewis Padgett or Lawrence O'Donnell. Wikipedia says one reason they published together so often, even in some instances where the work was hers alone, was that his page rate of pay was higher. And of course Dorothy Catherine Fontana, longtime story editor and scriptwriter for Star Trek original series, always shown in the opening credits as D.C. Fontana. She also wrote some scripts under the pseudonym Michael Richards.

I swear this is Oscar Wilde but can't find it anywhere. On being introduced to some dowager: "What a splendid ruin of what must once have been a quite magnificent ugliness!"

LOL. What were those popular backward-arm-thrust movements advertised in the '70s to help young women develop their busts? Von Ribbentrop exercises? Van Helsing maneuvers? Something like that. (Clearly my memory has been contaminated by the article above.)

Ah, memories. The mens'-undies section of the Sears and J.C. Penney's catalogs was our veritable Playgirl.

Don't try to kid a kidder.

ROFL

So let it be written; so let it be done!

Maybe a bit like Clark Gable looks TODAY...

The day cannot come too soon for me when North (and Central!) America are crisscrossed by maglev bullet trains. (As many know, rail travel anywhere between DC and Boston is already such a mercy compared with stuffing oneself through the commercial air travel system. Even some short-haul routes elsewhere. Recently I took Amtrak Raleigh-Charlotte for $62 round trip. 3 hours each way. So blessedly easier than driving; far less expensive and frazzling than flying.) Regrettably I will be lying lower than the railbed ties long before.

One-person-one-vote is the generic functioning of the voting software BEFORE Oz adds his PayPal button to this particular ballot issue. Pretending you don' know nothin bout poll taxes...!

"Mobile home"! MsGuy is putting on airs again. If you actually live in one, you call it a house trailer. (P.S. In industry parlance that menacing-looking metal thing sticking out the front is called a tongue. Adding to the rather Dennis Hopper feel all around.)