Baroquem

7 Quick Takes, Take 8

View the Quick-Takes Chieftain’s post at Conversion Diary. She has a new daughter arriving next week! Blessings and prayers.

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Most airplanes offer a rather horrible user interface to their passengers. Among the many issues that need to be rethought:

• Many planes still sport a ‘No Smoking’ indicator light above every seat. Since this light is never, ever going to be extinguished on any plane in flight (at least in the U.S., not sure about elsewhere), its use is redundant. If such an option is in use elsewhere in the world, then make it a generic light whose meaning is selected by the airline by installing a plastic template over the panel with an appropriate cutout shape. Otherwise, chuck it. If we need to be reminded not to smoke, then just stick a larger, single light up in the middle of the aisle somewhere.
• The P.A. systems are horrendous. Announcements are either too loud or too soft, and often the messages themselves are unintelligible.
• Various alert tones are played throughout the flight. Some of these correspond to the ‘Fasten Seatbelts’ indicators going on and off, but others do not. There’s no easy way to distinguish which is which — except that the seatbelt tones are invariably followed by a verbal announcement of the change from the cockpit or flight attendant. This makes the tones themselves redundant.
• Continuing with the theme of redundancy, we come to the safety announcements provided at the beginning of the flight. Anyone who has flown more than once knows this information. Anyone who has flown frequently thinks he knows this information but now tunes out the program whenever it comes on; meanwhile, he has forgotten most of what he thinks he knows. In a real emergency, he will be helpless. The only new information offered in most of these speeches is the location of the emergency exits, which varies from plane to plane.

What am I missing?

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Lent has begun! I was a little disappointed that Ash Wednesday this year fell right in the middle of a conference I was attending, depriving me of a whole day of tasty, excessive, free conference food. I suppose that’s a good thing in the long run, though.

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I’ve spent most of the past week away from home. Coming straight off a weekend retreat at our local Benedictine monastery, I jetted out to a library technology conference. There’s an element of cultural dissonance involved in that shift, of course, but similarities as well. For example, both systems — monasteries and libraries — are struggling, and questioning how, to stay relevant in a changing world that doesn’t always appreciate what they offer.

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There are three songs that the Cornell Chimes play every day: “The Jennie McGraw Rag” in the morning, the Alma Mater at midday, and the Evening Song in, well, the evening. The latter sounds suspiciously like “O Tannenbaum”.

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Wearing ashes Wendesday afternoon generated several conversations around (though not with) me. Mostly along the lines of “Oh, that’s right, it’s Ash Wednesday”, but a couple had more substance to them.

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All the good gardeners have probably planned out their plots and started seedlings already. Not me.

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It was Lewis Carroll who taught me, when I was a boy, that not all poetry had to be dull and serious. Here’s one of his lesser-known works:

Ye Carpette Knyghte

I have a horse - a ryghte good horse -
Ne doe Y envye those
Who scoure ye playne yn headye course
Tyll soddayne on theyre nose
They lyghte wyth unexpected force
Yt ys - a horse of clothes.

I have a saddel - “Say’st thou soe?
Wyth styrruppes, Knyghte, to boote?”
I sayde not that - I answere “Noe” -
Yt lacketh such, I woote:
Yt ys a mutton-saddel, loe!
Parte of ye fleecye brute.

I have a bytte - a ryghte good bytte -
As shall bee seene yn tyme.
Ye jawe of horse yt wyll not fytte;
Yts use ys more sublyme.
Fayre Syr, how deemest thou of yt?
Yt ys - thys bytte of rhyme.

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