R44 Pilot Finds Missing Family

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Another example of how private helicopter pilots can help their communities.

A friend of mine e-mailed me this story from the San Francisco Chronicle last night: “PILOT HAD HUNCH: It led him to wife, kids.”

The short version: James Kim and his wife and two children went missing in the mountains. John Rachor, a private helicopter pilot and owner of an R44 helicopter (like mine), decided to follow up on a hunch he had about where they may have made a wrong turn. He found the wife and kids alive and safe. Sadly the husband was later found dead, having died while trying to walk for help.

Wickenburg is lucky to have not one but three privately owned helicopters. The three pilots — Ray, Dave, and I — know the immediate area better than 95% of Wickenburg’s population. We know about canyons and trails and hidden ruins that most people couldn’t imagine. Certainly better than the APS or Sheriff’s office helicopter pilots — after all, we fly around here all the time.

Although I hope we’re never needed to help out with a search, I also hope that the local authorities wouldn’t hesitate to ask us to help out if they needed a few more eyes in the sky. After all, since we can each take four pairs, that’s twelve more people that can help save a life.

National Do Not Call Registry

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Get your phone numbers off their lists!

Are you sick and tired of telemarketers ruining your dinner hour? Do unwanted phone calls from strangers bother you while you’re watching Boston Legal? Are your cell phone minutes being used up by auto glass repair company representatives and insurance salesmen?

If so, you really need to get your phone numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry. It’s quick and easy to do and, after 31 days, if you still get unwanted marketing calls, you can register a complaint that’ll get the marketer in hot water with the FCC.

Start by going to https://www.donotcall.gov/. Click the Register Now button and use the form that appears to enter up to three telephone numbers and your e-mail address:

Do Not Call Registry

Click Submit. Then check your e-mail In box. You should get one e-mail message per phone number you entered. Click the link in the e-mail message to complete the registration.

It takes 31 days for your number(s) to be fully registered. After that, you should not receive any marketing calls, although you may still receive calls for charity fund raising, political campaigns, and surveys.

If you do get a marketing call after the 31-day period has elapsed, go back to the Do Not Call Registry home page and follow the links to file a complaint. You’ll need to provide the marketer’s company or phone number, so be sure to get that information when the call comes.

Your phone number will stay in the Registry for five years.

What are you waiting for? Do it now!

Three More Movies

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And three more movie reviews.

Over the past week or so, Mike and I have seen three movies: one in theaters and two on DVD.

Casino Royale

Casino Royale Movie PosterWell, it’s about time. Finally, a James Bond who is believable. I’m not just talking about the actor, I’m talking about the characterization. This bond is not perfect in almost every way. He’s vulnerable and makes more than a few mistakes.

Unlike all other Bond films, this one seems dark and real, a more accurate (but still probably quite far from truly realistic) dramatization of the spy business. It wasn’t a fun movie, like all the others are. It was a spy thriller with plenty of twists and turns.

I had a little trouble believing the love interest part of the story — too much emotion, too fast — but I believe it was included to develop the character. After all, Casino Royale was the first Bond adventure, the one that takes place right after he gets his “double-0” rank. One can argue that the events of this story are what make the character what he is in later stories.

I have never read Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, but would like to. It would be interesting to see how closely this movie follows the book.

WordPlay

WordPlay Movie PosterIf you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that I’m particularly fond of words. It probably has a lot to do with writing for a living. The way I see it, words are my tools and the more tools I’m comfortable using, the better I can get my job done.

That said, I’ve been wanting to see WordPlay, the documentary about the annual crossword puzzle championship, since it was released to theaters. It didn’t come to Wickenburg — I didn’t really expect it to — so I waited until it was available on Netflix and moved it to the top of my queue.

The movie was relatively entertaining and provided lots of insight into the creation and solving of crossword puzzles. I used to do crossword puzzles daily when I worked for the New York City Comptroller’s Office. In those days, there was so little work to do, I had to do something to stay awake. So I did the puzzles in Newsday, the New York Times, and the Daily News every single day. I got pretty good at it, but not anywhere near as good as the competitors in WordPlay. These are people who can finish the New York Times crossword puzzle in less than 5 minutes with no errors. Egads!

The movie included interviews with puzzle creators and solvers, as well as with Will Shortz, the New York Times Puzzlemaster. Some of the solvers are people we all know: Bill Clinton, Jon Stewart, and Ken Burns, to name a few. It was interesting to get their insight.

My husband watched the movie with me and didn’t seem terribly interested throughout. I think his take on the puzzle solvers in the competition was that they were a bunch of geeks who needed to get lives. In some cases, I think that may be true. But it was interesting to see that some people have taken this skill to such extremes.

The Ladykillers

The Ladykillers Movie PosterThis is a 2004 remake of the 1955 movie of the same name starring Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers (among others). This newer version starred Tom Hanks. Like the Da Vinci Code, this was a complete waste of Mr. Hanks’s acting talent. But in this case, the acting wasn’t the problem — he did quite a job acting out the character of a rather wacky and over-educated caper mastermind. The problem was the movie. It was so bad that it wasn’t worth his efforts. In fact, his acting was probably the best thing about it.

In the story, the Hanks character rents a room at an elderly woman’s house. He and his henchmen then proceed to tunnel their way into a nearby casino’s cash counting room from the woman’s root cellar. Their cover story is flimsy — as it was in the first movie, which I also saw — and the whole thing is so far-fetched that the movie makers can’t possibly expect the audience to believe any of it. But rather than allow it to play out as a farce, it’s taken a bit seriously, so there’s really no fun in it. And the frequent use of the f-word in all of its forms (including the all-to-popular mother-f-er) makes it a movie that might make it uncomfortable to view with kids — or your parents.

My advice: avoid this one. It isn’t worth the rental fee.

E-Mail Subscribers

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A report on the subscription count here.

This morning, I took a peek at the Feedburner e-mail subscription count for this site. This service, which works with my RSS feed, automatically generates a daily e-mail message that summarizes the articles posted to the site in the previous day. If there were no articles in a day, there’s no e-mail. If there were 1 or more articles in a day, 1 e-mail message is generated and sent. The message includes links to the full article content. So a subscriber can skim through a new content message, decide he wants to read an article, click the link to the article, and jump right to the article’s page. Easy and an effective way to keep track of what’s new without having to manually browse the site each day.

E-Mail Subscription ConfirmationThe service, which is full automated, works with the E-Mail Notification form that appears on the site’s Home page. A person who wants to subscribe enters his e-mail address and clicks Subscribe. A window opens with a form that prompts him to enter characters in a box. When he clicks Complete Subscription Request, Feedburner generates a confirmation e-mail message and sends it to his e-mail address. That prevents people from subscribing others to this service when they might not want it. He must click the link in that message when he receives it (normally within about a minute) to start the subscription. If he doesn’t click the link, the subscription does not start.

Although this site gets a lot of visitors and many of them are repeat visitors, it only has 12 e-mail subscribers. I think it’s because people are worried that they’ll get a lot of junk mail.

But here’s the truth: subscribers only get the messages as described here. There’s no junk. I know this because I’m a subscriber — I signed on to monitor how this feature works and make sure it doesn’t spam my subscribers. I’m very pleased with the results and highly recommend it to anyone interested in keeping track of content. It’s especially good for people who don’t subscribe to or monitor RSS feeds, which offer another way to keep track of what’s going on here without manually visiting. (I don’t follow RSS feeds because they’re simply not a part of my normal daily routine. E-mail, however, is.)

Anyway, if you’re a regular visitor, I urge you to give this feature a try. I think you’ll like it. And if you don’t, that’s okay. You can always unsubscribe.

Question the Media!

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“Critical thinking” is the antidote for “truthiness” in our public life.

As the quality of our local newspaper here in Wickenburg declines to the point that it’s not worth spending the ten minutes it takes to read each week, I found “Skepticism: The antidote to ‘truthiness’ in American government and media” by Roy Peter Clark on Poytner Online a very interesting read. In preparing for an appearance on Oprah, he made a few notes, including this one:

4. Join with others in your community to analyze how you are being served or disserved by your local news media. As famed editor Gene Roberts said about one newspaper: “You can throw it up in the air and read it before it hits the ground.” What does your community need in the form of coverage that it is not getting? Who owns the news companies in your community? Are they in the news business to serve the public or to maximize their profits?

Or push the agendas of certain special interests?

Okay, so I added that last bit. But the point is, a newspaper should provide the news. All the news that matters to the public. Every side of every issue.

The current situation in Wickenburg’s local newspaper affects me directly: for the past three weeks, I’ve been mentioned in articles in the paper, but I have yet to be interviewed by a “reporter.” Tell me: how can a serious journalist write about a topic without speaking to the people who are making it newsworthy?

I’ll tell you how. When it isn’t in their best interest or the interest of their publication to objectively report all sides of an issue.

(A side note here: Lately, a large number of people in Wickenburg are outraged by the one-sidedness of the local newspaper. It’s gotten to the point that many people have cancelled their subscriptions. (Bravo! My husband and I did this well over a year ago and the only thing I miss is the regular supply of newsprint for the bottom of my parrot’s cage. I especially miss seeing his random bird droppings on photos of particular people here in town.) Some of them have even gone so far as to write letters to the publisher explaining why they are canceling. (I doubt that those letters will appear in the Letters to the Editor pages, which are the most popular pages in the paper.) Others have pledged to let their subscriptions lapse or simply stop picking it up on newsstands. Will this revolt by the people help? Probably not. If their finances begin to feel the pain of lost subscriptions, I’m sure one of the special interests they support will step up with a bailout. Quietly, of course. That’s how most Good Old Boy transactions are handled in this town.)

Mr. Clark adds this little bit of wisdom:

5. Look for role models of candor and accountability, people in public life who have proven to be reliable over time. Look for folks within a movement or political party who have the courage to speak, on occasion, against the interests of their own party.

Or against their government or town?

Frankly, Mr. Clark’s article has a lot of good advice — especially these days, when the media is spending more time manipulating public opinion than objectively reporting what’s important in the world around us. I highly recommend it to anyone.