The Man Who Saved the World Has Died

I had never heard of Stanislav Petrov before reading his obituary in my Sunday LA Times, nor had I heard of the Danish documentary that bares his international nickname as the title: "The Man Who Saved the World."

Stanislav was a Soviet military intelligence agent working at a super secret base when, on September 26th, 1983, his alarms starting going off. The sirens were blaring as they announced that the US had fired a nuclear missile at the Soviet Union. Stanislav was incredulous.

His superiors arrived quickly and inquired just WTF was going on. Another alarm sounded, saying a second launch had taken place. Petrov and his superiors had about three minutes to decide if their machines were working properly or if they were malfunctioning and sending incorrect notices.

They needed to send to Moscow immediately whether or not the counter-strikes needed to be launched. This, obviously, would have been catastrophic and, obviously, didn't happen.

What did happen?

Well, with such trigger-happy sets of leaders in the two antagonist states multiple checks and balances had been set up to gain as much information in the three minutes as possible as to hopefully ward off false-positives.

Petrov noticed that while one set of alarms were going off, his ground data---seismic sensors in the general vicinity of supposed launch sites---were showing no such changes expected to be seen during launches. He told his superiors that no counter-strikes were needed, the machines were giving false positives.

He used the data at hand and made a judgement. If wrong, he would have been dead, either by nuclear strike, nuclear fallout, or bullet to the head before either of the first two claimed him. If right, catastrophe would have been diverted.

The event was never made public and was basically forgotten until after the fall of the USSR when that same unsupportive superior made the story public. Stanislav himself claimed he had mostly forgotten the tense moments until the story was told to the world-at-large.

Eventually he was feted as a hero and given the nickname that was used as the title of that Danish documentary: The Man Who Saved the World.

He passed away May 19th at his home in Moscow and the news of it went unrecognized until just recently.

What I didn't know about was the immediate and exact history of the tension of Fall '83: On 9/1, just over three weeks earlier, the Soviet Union had shot down a Korean Airlines plane that drifted too close to their airspace, killing all of the over 200 passengers, including a US congressperson.

Can you imagine that same scenario today?

Pi 9am

1y I have a a 7great of the day  uhh I have a 4.g ulli r65 h6ull 88plu55 ,,

***

I got an email on my phone the other day from Corrie with "Pi 9am" in the subject and the above text in the body.

Below that odd string of words, letters, numbers and punctuation marks Corrie added:

Cassius's first email. Auto correct to the rescue sometimes.

***

I just thought it was cool...

Blog Name Update

In the beginning of this blog I changed the background picture every few weeks. The title was something like "A California Child Back East" with the URL mainstay being "caliboyinbrooklyn."

I thought it was fitting enough, a place to report on weirdness I'd witness with the eyes of a west coast kid unfamiliar with the normal way of things in NYC.

When we moved from Brooklyn to Texas, I changed the title to something like "A California Child Deep in Texas," but only because "...Deep in the Heart of Texas" wouldn't fit. "Deep in the Heart of Texas" is a famous song and I thought that the title could be a play on that.

Again, the motivation was basically the same: west coast eyes witnessing things taken for granted by locals, except now those locals were Texans instead of New Yorkers.

In April of 2011, once we finally settled in Long Beach, I changed it again, this time to "A California Child Makes it Home." It seemed fitting, but the original motivation was now obsolete. Maybe I felt like my eyes had become world-weary.

In any case, the blog itself turned into a forum for me to post content of a non-fiction sort, with an occasional anecdotal philosophy piece thrown in.

I think by summer of 2011 I had changed the name again, the fourth time in three years. I changed it "In Los Diez Sur," or maybe even "Los Diez Sur." Of course the italics didn't show up.

The philosophical background to that was that now I was going to do the similar thing as in Brooklyn and the east coast, as well as in Texas, but here my point-of-view was as a Northern California boy in Los Diez Sur, the Spanish phrasing of "The Southern Ten," as in "the ten counties of the state of California that comprise 'SoCal'".

That lasted for a while, but I changed it a fifth time to "On the Pacific Plate." I don't think I ever mentioned the change, what it means or why I decided to emphasize something as obscure as plate tectonics. See? That's the reference. Here in the Southland, the LA basin exists west of the San Andreas Fault, and this spit of land we all live on is technically on the Pacific Plate and not the North American Plate, which I found fascinating.

Despite the length of time that I had it titled "On the Pacific Plate", I never felt like I made a big enough deal about it, or even mentioned it in the slightest. So there you go.

I started feeling like it was time for a change again, as the Pacific Plate idea was always meant to be temporary.

Coupled that with my time commitments being pretty taxing, my own sense of knowing who I am better at this time, caring for a child I helped create, I finally reached a sense of owning that URL title.

Throughout all of the name changes and spatial location changes, the URL of caliboyinbrooklyn never changed, and now I'm comfortable with owning it. Yes, I don't live in Brooklyn anymore, but that experience has colored every decision I've made in the past 10 or 11 years, and I stopped worrying about any potential confusion over the title for this forum.

Anyway, why shouldn't the title of the website and the URL be the same? Makes sense, right? Why was I so resistant? Well...plenty of reasons, but I'm over it.

I'm too tired and busy to care anymore. There it is.

Taking the Boy to the LB Nerd Fest

In my continuing attempts to get the Boy out of the house so Corrie can grow her business in peace and quite, I attended the 2017 Long Beach Comic Convention.

Back in 2012 I attended the same convention. (And by finding that link I was reminded of a blog that I had completely forgotten about.) And again, in 2016, I attended the Convention in DTLA, only this one was big enough to have it's own name, Wondercon.

This experience was unlike the others. Here I had a 14-month old boy instead of a flask and some gummies a thirst to get twisted and have a good time. This time I was introducing my son to all the sights and sounds that accompany attending a festival for comic books and other detritus from the world of the nerd.

Having a little flirty boy in tow meant that I pretty much couldn't go and pay attention to any of the panels, or wait in line for anything, or really browse things at a leisurely pace.

In reality only a few panels ever really pique my interest, and browsing always had a very serious limit called "the budget". 

Turns out: looking after, chasing after, and paying near full attention to my kid proved way more fun than I anticipated, or would have guessed. It was a total blast. Not even for one measly second did I miss anything that beforehand I was anxious about not getting to do because of having the Boy with me.

Being there with him, settling in a corner, chilling in a loosely populated hallway, chasing after him as he chased after the next Harley Quinn iteration, or Poison Ivy, or some other scantily clad and very bold young lady, was absolutely the most fun it could have ever been.

Anyway, like 2012, there were some cool cars parked outside, and I snapped a picture of the machine-gun-adorned Joker/Cop car:

Because of the stroller we got to skip the line and go in the handicap ramp lane. That was both unexpected and appreciated. Inside, looking around at some of the other guests in costume, Cass shot me a look of mild curiosity:

We went down to the main floor (elevator), walked around, stopped to eat, chased after cosplaying girls, laughed... Cassius whined occasionally as I perused boxes for what he deemed to be too long.

At one point, for a laugh, and because it wasn't crowded, I took the stroller up an escalator to the upper floor. There was surprisingly little going on up there, but Cass got some good views of the entrance foyer:

At a different point in the hallway, the Boy waved as I was trying to film him. This is right after he ran up onto a Wonder Woman and Poison Ivy pair, two girls checking their phones at a table by the large bank of windows to the left. Once there, they Awwed and he turned bashful. I can't tell you how much I love this little boy...

On top of all this, all this fun-time-with-Cass, I was walking around the main floor and noticed a comic prominently placed and for sale (for far more than I was willing to pay, had I been that interested). What was cool was that this was not a Marvel or DC book, as those two companies accounted for a far higher percentage of the content here than at Wondercon 2016. This prominently displayed comic was a Valiant book, one of the OG ones from the early '90s.

It was the only shown-off book from the Valiant brand I'd seen the entire time, and the folks noticed me noticing it, started asking me about my reading preferences, and invited me and the stroller around back to peruse the box of old Valiant books.

I knew that I wasn't really in a position to make any real purchases, nor did I particularly want to, but I humored them because of their graciousness and our shared love and respect for this publisher. They had some awesome stuff.

I mention all this because it was during my time looking through their Valiant box and talking with the guy, than none other than Dinesh Shamdasani arrived.

Dinesh is the current CEO and Chief Creative Officer of Valiant Entertainment; he's one of the two men who bought and fought for the rights to resurrect the company and stable of characters, and remains the driving force behind the quality and commitment to both The Story and diversity of content. This company usually doesn't produce more than eight or nine titles at any given time, and they range across sci-fi, action, espionage, super-hero, horror, teams, humor, and philosophical topics, all in a shared and cohesive universe.

It's astounding, and here's their Stan Lee, talking to the dude I was just chatting with. I could hear the guy saying, "This guy right here like's Valiant..." and he turned to me, "Hey man, do you want to meet Dinesh Shamdasani?"

I smiled and said, "That sounds pretty cool."

We talked for maybe ten minutes about various topics---comics, education, the power of pictures and words, upcoming projects. It was all very surreal.

Later in the day, after walking all over the Long Beach convention center, I found a different vendor that was selling really nice prints of a Valiant character I really dig, a black Soviet cosmonaut who in the 1960s was sent off into deep space and returned with powers over spacetime (known as Divinity, but usually just referred to by his actual name, Abram):

The colorist, David Baron, was there to sign and number them, and the price was ridiculously inexpensive. I got number 2 of 200. Baron was very cool and appreciative, even mentioning, "Yeah, man, number 2. Dinesh right there got number 1, so that's pretty cool trivia..."

I looked over and saw Dinesh again, this time talking to another fan.

Eventually Cassius fell asleep in the stroller and I did laps in the convention center for a half an hour, maybe more, until he roused and we headed out for a late lunch, off to meet Corrie and her French friend who was visiting from deep in Orange County.

Mistaken for Brothers

This past weekend we attended the baby shower for my cousin Jake and his wife Elif. It was good fun, and the second Saturday in a row we drove to Santa Monica.

Jake and I were born about two weeks apart (he earlier, near the end of March, me after the beginning of April), and while we grew up on separate coasts (he in North Carolina and me in California), I always feel like we're pretty close---but only when we get together, which is criminally rare for two guys who live as close as we do to each other.

And this isn't the first time this exact thing has happened. We even joke about what terrible cousins we are, since this is a recurring theme. Jake's dad, my Uncle Paul, said that it's just not a strength of the Sherwoods---to make sure contact is kept up and vibrant and recent.

For years, Jake and Elif lived in Hoboken while we lived in Brooklyn, separated only by Manhattan and the Hudson River. We got together socially once, and once I went to check out Jake's company in a "professional" setting.

Now, and for a few years yet, Jake and Elif live in Santa Monica and we're down here in Long Beach, and the last time (and, incidentally, the first time) we've seen them in this "era" was at our baby shower at Auntie Peg's in Santa Monica, and Corrie wasn't even there.

This past weekend, hanging out among some of their closest friends, and who are all in the same age bracket and Corrie and I---and mostly in the same baby-having bracket as well---someone came to me with a hint of recognition in their face and said, "So...you're Jake's brother?"

I laughed and said, no, actually, we're cousins, born a few weeks apart back in the day. And, for the rest of the event, people were as shocked as maybe they should be---"Wait, Jake has a cousin living in Long Beach?" and we all shared a laugh about it.

But it reminded me of a moment at our own baby shower back when Cass was only a day old. Someone came to me and nodded towards Jake and said, "So...that's your brother?"

That Sherwood Y-chromosome is something, man, I'm telling you...

Eclipse Shenanigans

There was a time when a full solar eclipse hitting the mainland US would have had me calling in sick, playing hooky, and driving to the path of the cast shadow.

And I'd be lying if I said the thought never occurred to me this year, when an eclipse event just like the description above happened.

But with a one year old who won't remember, and can imagine better times than sitting in a car for fifteen hours only to chill in the sun-less sky for two minutes and then drive home, I'd decided to pass on that experience.

But only this time around...2024, we're all in! And we've got extra eclipse glasses.

I guess there had been a run on those darker-than-welding-glasses especially made for solar events like this, but a colleague had procured hundreds back in May for all of our wards.

Here's a picture another colleague took through the glasses:

Even in LA we had a partial eclipse. Of course the day didn't really change, like, it wasn't dark...maybe like a cloud covered for a second.

My attempts through the glasses were way less successful than this. And in reality it looked way cooler through the glasses than this.

But, I did come prepared.

I brought my Old Reliable camera, my old freebie Digitrex DSC-3000, my first digital camera. I got it as a gift with a gifted computer (it came free with the computer if I remember correctly), and that was back in 2004. We took all of our European pictures with it, and thousands of New York pictures as well. All told, I'm comfortable with an estimate between twelve- and fifteen-thousand pictures over the years.

Anyway, it has issues with the sun, which shows up as a black dot. The solar radiation overwhelms the sensor and renders the white of the sun as a black dot. I remembered that back in 2012 for the annular eclipse visible down here in Long Beach. Back then, I took Old Reliable outside and pointed it right at the sun. The result was a partially obscured black circle. Sweet!

So this past August 21st I loaded up Old Reliable with batteries, and pointed it straight at our partial solar eclipse. The results were pretty nifty:

It was a good day for science.

Four Books I'm Currently Ignoring

I'm usually reading more books than I can remember at any given time. Right now, with work and the Boy, finding time to read anything is nigh impossible.

So, as summer came to a close, I had acquired four books and was poring over them in the limited time I had. I quickly took a picture of them all at once---I knew the magnitude of the wave of attention-suck that was about to crest and that I wouldn't be getting back to them anytime soon.

I wanted to talk about each one briefly, about what it's about and where I got it, as the location of each's coming into my possession is different and highlights the ways a librophile like myself comes to books.

The picture:

The first, Astro City, is a collection of Kurt Busiek's first comic miniseries of the same name, all six issues and some extras. Here's a link of me praising this book. My brother, having thought I had given it to him and then being corrected, gave it to me. Some books find their way to proper owners through hand to hand. I haven't finished it, but it is excellent.

The second, Half Life, author Shelley Jackson's first novel, is about Nora and Blanche, conjoined twins in a world where the number of "twofers" is a much higher percentage, only here Blanche has been asleep for fifteen years and Nora, running from a dark past of her own, is thinking of having Blanche hacked off. The narrative is told in two timelines; one in the current time where Blanche has been asleep and Nora is thinking of the surgery, and one in the earlier timeline where we see the conjoined twins' parents meet, the birth, and the life of conjoined twins that must lead to the event that causes Blanche go to sleep. I imagine as one timeline ends and Blanche goes to sleep the other comes to a crescendo and Blanche wakes up.

I imagine that, because I haven't finished it. Each section is very short and they alternate like a ping-pong game. It reminds me of something I might write. Another of Shelley Jackson's projects is called "Skin": it's a novel written on hundreds of people's bodies. I took this book from my family's Cabin in the far north of California. Some books need to be liberated by the intellectually needy. 

The third book has printing on the cover that is very difficult to read. It's Islands in the Stream by Hemingway. This is the first book I bought by Hemingway. It was a manuscript found by his wife, and she and his editor prepared it for publication, publishing it posthumously.

I had been having conversations with another writer about Murakami, HST, and while I pushed Pynchon he pushed Hemingway. After seeing Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris", I was inspired to get more Hemingway (I have some that wasn't purchased). I bought this at an indie bookstore in Alameda. You should always support independent bookstores.

Ernest Hemingway had multiple sets of kids with multiple wives; he lived for a time in the Gulf Stream, which is the eponymous Stream from the novel's title. I'm about halfway through the Astro City and about two-thirds through Half Life, but with this book, Hemingway's posthumous finale, I'm only about fifteen pages in. This is where "write what you know" rears it's obnoxious head. Tom Hudson, the main character and always, in those first fifteen pages, referred to as "Tom Hudson" (would Ernie had left that during his re-writes?) is excited because his eldest son, Little Tom, and two of his younger sons from his second marriage will all be spending two months with him at his island home. It looks like it may be based more on real life Mike Strater and Gerald and Sara Murphy, two sets of Bimini Island white folks who fit that criteria a little better maybe than Hemingway himself.

Anyway, the book is pretty good, but didn't make me stop everything to devour it.

The last book in that picture is Peter Godfrey Smith's Other Minds. It is a philosophy book about consciousness masked as a biological sciences book about the way all of us "thinking species" developed. "Thinking Species" is a title that collects many highly developed mammals (primates, elephants, whales and dolphins) and birds (crows, ravens, and jays, among other passerines) and groups them with the cephalopods (octopuses and squid). The evolutionary branching between mammals is geologically recent, and between mammals and the birds is slightly older, but the branch that separates/connects the chordate thinking species (mammals and birds) with the cephalopods is so far back that it boggles the imagination.

And that's the central focus of this book: how did the ability to abstractly think develop in something so alien as an octopus?

Primatologist Frans de Waal suppled a quote for the dust jacket, so you know it has to be good. I'm through the first chapter and I know I will be finishing it before these other ones. This kind of topic seems to come to me out of a dream. I'd been planning on buying it since I heard about it last December, but found it at the gift shop of the Aquarium of the Pacific, our Long Beach walkabout getaway. You should always support public institutions that you love, respect, and frequent often.

Here's a picture from a recent trip to the aquarium, when the Big Guy was out and about and showing off:

It sucks to be emotionally and/or intellectually involved in books and then have to stop working on them. But it is what it is...

Also, it looks like I developed some guidelines for librophiles:

1. Some books find their way to proper owners through hand to hand.
2. Some books need to be liberated by the intellectually needy.
3. You should always support independent bookstores.
4. You should always support public institutions that you love, respect, and frequent often.