Author Archives: Maria Langer

On the Road Again

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Traveling again.

If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard from me here in a while, it’s because I’ve been traveling. I’m doing one of my Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventures in northern Arizona, accompanied by a video crew and staff writer for a respected travel magazine.

The goal of this trip is to gather about 90% of the video needed to create three individual broadcast-length videos, each of which will be made available on DVD. It’s a huge project and, so far, we have at least 20 hours of raw video footage to wade through.

I’m flying with a door off and a video guy on board taking glare-free video images of what we fly over. He also has at least two POV.1 cameras mounted inside the helicopter at all times. The other video on the ground is “chasing” us — actually, he’s getting a big head start each day to drive to the airport where we’ll land before we arrive — and taking video of us landing. Then there are cameras whirring all over the place on the ground.

Wild HorsesThe writer is sitting up front beside me, taking notes and using my Nikon D80 to shoot images of what she sees. Although a good portion of the shots have some unfortunate glare — not much you can do about that when shooting through Plexiglas — many of them are really good. Like this shot she took of a herd of wild horses we overflew on the Navajo Reservation two days ago.

It’s been a busy week so far. Although I’m trying to demonstrate to the writer what my Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventure is all about, I’m also working with the video crew to make sure we capture all of the footage we need for our three videos. I’m hoping she understands that my usual clients won’t be rushing around like nuts all day.

Antelpe CanyonI’m treating myself to a few of the activities my excursion guests get to enjoy. For example, on Tuesday, I joined the crew for a boat ride on Lake Powell that visited the “business side” of the Glen Canyon Dam before squeezing about a mile up Antelope Canyon (see photo) and gliding up Navajo Canyon for a look at the “tapestry” of desert varnish on some cliff walls. I skipped the Sedona Jeep tour and Monument Valley tour to work with one of the video guys or just rest up. Normally, while my guest are touring, I’m scrambling to get the luggage into their hotel room and confirming reservations for the next day. You might imagine how tired I am after 6 days of playing pilot and baggage handler.

At this moment, however, I’m sitting at the dining table of a double-wide mobile home near Goulding’s Lodge in Monument Valley. (Long story; believe it or not, the only lodging we cold get here in MV was in a pair of mobile homes that are part of the lodge.) I have the front drapes drawn aside so I can watch the eastern sky brighten for what promises to be a classic silhouetted butte sunrise. I always enjoy my dawns here at MV. Seeing the famous buttes outside my window is always surreal.

Today, we were scheduled to fly down to Winslow for lunch, then tour Meteor Crater and the Grand Falls of the Little Colorado River. Normally, the Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventure takes this route on the way to its last overnight stop at Flagstaff. But today we’ll probably go straight back to Page. I have four aerial photo shoots at Page starting on Friday morning; the money I make doing them will pay for this video excursion. We’ll do more video between those flights. Then we’ll hit the Crater, Falls, and Flagstaff on our way back to the Phoenix area on Sunday.

It’s a big trip and a bunch of huge projects. Just the kind of thing to keep me busy between flights for the winter season. But if all works well and as planned, I might be flying this route weekly in the coming spring and fall — with real paying passengers to take care of along the way.

For the last time: NO, Obama is NOT a Muslim

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Evidently, even a few folks with functioning brains believe this.

Yesterday, I was shocked and awed when someone I do business with admitted that she thinks Obama might be a Muslim.

I can’t make this stuff up.

This person, who occasionally reads this blog, might be offended by my “How Stupid Are We?” post, where I pretty much said that anyone who believes lies like this is stupid. I hate to offend people I like, so I’m writing this post. I don’t think she’s stupid. I think she’s just fallen into the Web of lies and innuendo woven by the conservatives who want to keep Republicans — even if it means John McCain — in power.

So I’ll say something here that I never thought I’d have to say. (Frankly, I thought my readers were smart and well-informed enough for me to skip a statement of the obvious.)

Obama is not a Muslim.

The whole “Obama is a Muslim” rumor can be traced back to Andy Martin. You can read all about it in — dare I suggest it? — the New York Times: “The Man Behind the Whispers About Obama.” Here’s an excerpt:

An examination of legal documents and election filings, along with interviews with his acquaintances, revealed Mr. Martin, 62, to be a man with a history of scintillating if not always factual claims. He has left a trail of animosity — some of it provoked by anti-Jewish comments — among political leaders, lawyers and judges in three states over more than 30 years.

Is this the kind of guy you want to believe?

Of course, he appeared on FoxNews, which “…allowed Mr. Martin to assert falsely and without challenge that Mr. Obama had once trained to overthrow the government. ” I guess if it’s on FoxNews, it must be gospel (pun intended).

Anyway, all this upsets me to the extreme. I don’t mind people voting for the candidate I don’t support. But I do mind them making their decision based on vicious lies and innuendo — especially those made by a man with a history of lying and accepted by a news organization with a track record of bias.

I want people to know the truth and make decisions based on that.

Kids Ask a Lot of Questions

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A quick note from a recent flight.

I recently flew a dad and his two kids on a 50-minute flight in the Wickenburg area. The kids were aged maybe 8 (the boy) and 10 (the girl). These are estimates. I didn’t ask and since I’m not a parent myself, I could be way off.

My helicopter has a voice-activated intercom system. That means that anything anyone says into their headset microphone can be heard by anyone else in the aircraft wearing a headset. (And yes, I do have an isolation switch I can use to “turn off” my passengers, but I rarely use it.) I narrated the flight, as I usually do, and pointed out interesting things.

Now I’ve flown kids before, but these kids were different. They asked a lot of questions. A lot. In fact, they pretty much never stopped asking questions.

I have no problem with this. It’s great to see kids who are interested in what’s going on around them. And it sure beats the kid who almost fell asleep on one of my Grand Canyon flights years ago.

Since I don’t have kids, however, it was a bit startling to me. It made me realize the limits of a young kid’s knowledge. For example, they repeatedly asked me to define words I’d used — irrigation and skeleton crew come to mind. They asked a lot of “why” and “how” questions. It was a real eye-opening experience for me. It was also a pleasure to be in the position where I could share some of my knowledge with them.

But the part I liked most was defining those terms I’d used without a second thought, bringing my vocabulary down to a level they’d understand and perhaps teaching them a few new words and concepts.

Five Years Blogging

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How time flies.

Yesterday, while I was busy working — yes, I do work, too — I missed a major milestone in my writing life: my fifth anniversary as a blogger.

I latched on to blogging very early. I saw it for how it was originally intended, as a “Web log” or journal. I’d been wanting to keep a journal of my life and thoughts but could never stick with it. By blogging these things, I put it out there for feedback from others. With an audience, I felt a good reason to write these journal entries. I kept it up.

For five years.

I started blogging on October 15, 2003 with an offline blogging tool called iBlog. I’d use it to compose blog entries offline. When it was time to publish, iBlog would generate all the HTML necessary to create all of the pages for the blog. Publishing was time-consuming, especially as the blog grew in size. It was published to my .Mac disk space and co-existed with my Web site.

In 2004, when I went up to the Grand Canyon to fly helicopter tours, I found it necessary to start a new blog so I could blog from my laptop. This was a shortcoming of iBlog and it soon drove me nuts. Later the same year, I found a way to synchronize my two blogs back into one.

In December 2005, I finally saw the light and switched to WordPress. While I was brave enough to install it on my own Mac OS X Server — and even got it to work! — server problems convinced me to move it to a hosting service. It’s been there, running smoothly, ever since.

All this time, I’d been blogging about whatever I felt like. This included the kinds of “days in my life” posts you find here, as well as how-to articles I wrote for the readers of my computer books. But in November 2007, I decided to split off all the computer articles into their own blog-based site called Maria’s Guides. There was a lot of technical tasks required to pull that off without 404 errors, but I think I did a good job. Sadly, I’ve been neglecting Maria’s Guides a bit lately. I’d rather think — and write — about other things.

That brings us pretty close to today. My blog continues to chug along on the Internet, with me at the helm. I enjoy the ability to say what I want in a forum where others can read and comment on it. I enjoy the interaction with most (but admittedly not all) readers. I find it amazing when certain posts become extremely popular. For example, “Flying At Lake Powell” has been read nearly 19,000 times since it was written in April 2006 and “Cynical Humor” — which is based on content sent to me by a friend — was read more than 2,000 times just the other day. Other blog posts have resulted in a chain of comments which add valuable information to the original post. “The Helicopter Job Market,” which has been read over 18,000 times and has collected 75 comments so far, is a good example.

So yesterday, with no fanfare at all, the fifth anniversary of my first blog post came and went. If it weren’t for a recent reader comment that my blog is “as big as the Grand Canyon,” I would have forgotten this milestone completely. But the comment made me think.

It should be big. I’ve been at it for five years.

The Sidewalk to Nowhere

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A truly distressing video.

A Twitter member (@genias) tweeted a link to this video to me today. I think it’s probably one of the most upsetting videos I’ve ever seen. It features a long line of my fellow countrymen and women acting like complete assholes, abusing otherwise peaceful protesters and reporters.

Freedom of speech is an important freedom, but when it’s used to hurl hate messages and lies, it’s better not to listen.

I had enough of this video halfway through. Can you watch the whole thing without worrying about the future of our country?