Pilot's Log

It's only a couple inches across.

Why?

1) Grayson is one of the major car dealers in Knoxville. They used to be the main Pontiac dealer, and in past years, their sticker included the arrowhead of the Pontiac logo. Now that Pontiac is gone, they just have the checkerboard that evokes both BMW (which is their main business now) and the University of Tennessee (which often has checkerboard motifs for their sports teams).

2) In David Weber's Honorverse, Grayson is a star nation, centered in the Yeltsin system, which is important to the saga and one of my favorite factions, so I just had to have one of these. Mine will go on my tool chest, not Moonshine's tail.

3) Grayson is the name of the toddler child of my high school classmate Chuck Oppermann, so I had to get one for him as well.

FP

Got a piece of junk e-mail tonight with some nebulous claims about some personage named Mack Michaels and the prospect of getting work or making money through his methods.

When I get something like this, it usually helps to check out at least the underlying facts.

The only facts that I could see from a cursory search, are that this Michaels character exploits the diverse structure of the Internet so as to stuff the ballot box of public opinion and inflate his reputation. Which, on the surface, isn't fraud--but just the same, is a Red Flag the size of the Empire State Building.

The "drawback about the internet" here is that anybody willing to make the effort, writing up boilerplate press releases and "fact sheets" and posting them every which way on the web, can do this. A nobody can pretend to respectability and at first glance, fool the world. But there might not be a cowboy under that hat.

As for me, honesty is the best policy. Painful as it is.

1. Comment on this post.
2. I will give you a letter.
3. Think of 5 fictional characters and post their names and your comments on these characters in your LJ.

lurkerwithout gave me the letter "K".

1. Shin Kazama (Area 88) and Shin Kudo (Macross Zero). Is the latter partial tribute to the former? Could be. They both have similar backgrounds, identical professions, and fight for causes that initially weren't their choice but turn out to be the right ones. And they both wind up paying very high prices for victory.

2. Katerina Soyuz [the elder] and Katerina Soyuz [the younger] (Families of Altered Wars). Of course, explaining Ted Nomura's universe would take far too long for LJ's comfort. The elder Katerina is one of the central characters of Luftwaffe 1946; she's the Soviet twin sister of the German Dora Oberlicht...fate forces the two to be combat archrivals, but then they meet at war's end and there is a measure of reconciliation. The younger one is more enigmatic and a relative minor character in Tigers of Terra. Is the younger Katerina a clone of the elder? Only Ted knows...and he hasn't told me.

3) Kou Uraki (Mobile Suit Gundam: 0083 Stardust Memory). I guess I consider Kou to be the most sympathetic of the Gundam-pilot heroes. He isn't a superpowered Newtype. He isn't a wisecracking kid or a cold-blooded assassin. He's a soldier with just enough drive and ability and luck to put him in the Gundam's cockpit--and good enough to survive--but still is about as prone to getting his butt kicked as anybody. Which is why we root for him when he kicks some Zeon butt of his own.

4) Karin Kikuhara (Stratos4). I have all the Bandai English-language DVDs of this series and it isn't enough, because there's more episodes out there. Karin is a strange girl. So strange that it's endearing. How strange is she? Rumors are, she's from another star system...and she acts in such a way that it seems plausible. And strange things happen to her as well...and to say anything more would spoil too much.

5) Kevin Usher (the Honor Harrington series). When we first meet Kevin, he's a hired assassin, who kills off a major official in the People's Republic of Haven. That event and others spur the Haven/Manticore war that dominates the series. By the end of Ashes of Victory, he's at the top of the totem pole in Haven--Director of the Federal Investigation Agency and right-hand man for head-of-state Eloise Pritchart. And the commander and good buddy of a man I would never want to meet in a million years, Victor Cachat. Kevin himself is that kind of man that you are never actually sure if he's a hero or a villain, because he's played both roles.

Finished my sojourn with War of Honor (a re-read from the hardcover hardcopy) this evening. I may read the anthologies but I don't feel so much of an urgency for that.

I have serious creator's envy for David Weber. Many moons ago, I got the hardbound print of War of Honor; with it came a CD-ROM that included all the Honor Harrington novels and collections on it as ebooks, plus several other sci-fi ebooks. I've finally gotten around to reading them.

I read Flag in Exile on Saturday and Honor Among Enemies overnight (spurred on a little because of glitches with my local phone service). In Enemy Hands is the next one on the list. Guess I'll start that one tonight.