Sweating before the judge to become who I am, Part 2

[ Read part 1 here ]

"Ok, the clerk said. Here's what you do: you can go home and get those documents, but you'll have to be back here before 2PM."

It was 12:58.  Not going to happen.

"Or?" I said.

"Do you have a bank account?  Well, then, find the nearest branch and ask them to print out your last statement.  With your address.  We'll accept that. NEXT!"

I slinked to the elevators, where the Slavic woman was crying into her cell phone.  I just stood there, ashamed that I had ever thought she should look to me as an example of anything but hubris. 

But enough of that.  I had to find a bank.   Cell phones don't work in the courthouse elevators, so when we got to the lobby I dialed Chase's automated help line.

"HEY!" someone yelled.  I was sure it was Officer Dummkopf.  Years ago I trained myself not to respond when someone says HEY in that arrogant fashion.  I put the phone to my ear and walked toward the door.

"HEY!  No cell phones inna lobby!" Dummkopf screamed. "Take it outside."  Since I was already walking outside, Dummkopf had placed himself in a win-win situation: no matter what I did, I was obeying him.  I reminded myself yet again that if I am ever convicted of a crime I would have to kill myself before sentencing, since with this kind of attitude I would last maybe 15 seconds in prison.

"Chase Customer Service, may I help you?"  The rain had stopped and the air outside consisted of 80% nitrogen, 19% steam, and 1% oxygen.  MTA workers were building an anastamosis linking the nearby subway stations, so the streets around the courthouse were torn up, and multiple jackhammers pounded out of phase.  "BROOKLYN!" I shouted into the phone. "JAY STREET AND LIVINGSTON! NEAREST BRANCH!"  I could just barely hear the operator reply "Eighth street?" "NO!!!!  JAY STREET!  J-A-Y STREET!  AND LIVINGSTON!  BRANCH!"  I started walking down Jay Street to get away from the construction.

An ambulance tried to zoom around the corner, but their on-board navigation system didn't tell them that the street had been torn up.  The driver screeched to a stop and leaned on his siren, making deep "WOCKA-WOCKA-WOCKA" sounds  that in no way harmonized with the jackhammers.   "Avenue J in Brooklyn" the Chase Customer Service operator said faintly. 

"NOOOOOOO!  J-A-Y STREET AND... where am I now?  WILLOUGHBY STREET.  Oh crap! W-I-L-L-O-U-G-H-forget it, thanks!  Never mind!  Bye."  I didn't need her anymore.  I was approaching Metrotech Center.  Metrotech Center is the Brooklyn home of JP Morgan Chase.  There's a huge Chase logo atop 4 Metrotech Center -- you could see it for miles.  Surely they had to have a Chase branch.  Surely.

30 minutes later, "Surely"  had turned into "WHERE THE FUCK IS THE CHASE BRANCH ALREADY?????" There are 28 buildings in Metrotech Center, and I had been to each one, begging for a teller.  Each time, the security guard sent me to a different building, further from the courthouse.  I began to believe that there was no Chase branch, that JP Morgan Chase wasn't headquartered there, and that MetroTech center was merely a metaphor for the first layer of hell.

[more to come]

Sweating before the judge to become who I am

Patrick is not my real name. I actually have an incredibly ethnic name, in the style of Annunziato or Ermenegildo. (But neither of those. But just as bad.) And I've always hated it. I mean no disrespect to the grandfather for whom I was named, it's just that in the 1970s where I grew up, having a name like Zanibuono DiJusto (not my old name, but just as bad) simply wasn't healthy.

About 5 years ago I decided to legally change my name, to the point of getting the forms and obtaining a birth certificate. But back then, you also needed sworn statements from people who had known you as your new name for x number of years, and I got lazy and never collected them.

But since then the rules had changed. According to the website http://www.nycourts.gov/courts/nyc/civil/namechanges.shtml, all you needed now to change your name was to fill out some forms, drop them off at the courthouse, pay $65, and in about three weeks you could be a new person. The forms were on line and there was even an interactive program that assumed you were as intelligent as a third grader and would need a great deal of help and handholding to get everything right. It couldn't be this simple. Could it? I dug out my birth certificate from the aborted 2005 name change attempt, printed out the name change petition forms, and jumped on the subway.

At the Jay Street station, people were clustered at the bottom of the stairs. That means only one thing. New York had been having a horrendous heat wave for the entire month of July; one for the record books. I had spent the past week indoors sitting at the confluence of three fans, hoping for rain. Now I was out and about with places to go and things to do and ... rain! Sweet summer rain, pouring down the subway stairs. I arrived at the courthouse soaked to the skin.

I emptied my pockets into a filthy plastic bin, walked through the metal detector and asked the guard where I could drop off the forms for a name change petition. As soon as he heard me say "name" he said "ninth floor", but since I was still saying "change petition" I couldn't understand what he said, with the result that I had to ask him again where I could drop off the forms for a name change petition. Again, he said "ninth floor" as soon as he heard "name", but this time I was expecting it, and even though I still insisted on saying "change petition" I understood what he said. "Sounds like you said 'ninth floor'" I said. As soon as he heard me say "ninth", he said "yeah, ninth" as I was still saying "floor". I probably should have just strode up to him and yelled "NAME!", but Officer Dummkopf would probably have just tazed me.

There was a small line on the ninth floor. One woman with a thick Slavic was in despair as the clerk spoke in a low monotone. "No," the woman said "I didn't know you had to bring that.... No, they didn't say I needed that... Why can't you use this?... I don't have that with me...." and so on. Poor thing. If she had only used the idiot proof interactive website, as I had, she wouldn't be in this mess. The other clerk called my number and I strode up to her window.

"Hi!" I said cheerily. "I'm here to submit the forms for a name change petition. Here are the forms, all properly notarized. Here is my certified birth certificate. Here is my sixty-five dollars." I glanced over at the Slavic woman. Maybe I could serve as an inspiration to her on how to do things right.

"You used that website," the clerk said, looking over the forms with a frown.

"Yes ma'am," I said with a winning smile.

"Did it tell you the other things we need?" the clerk asked.

"N-no," I said. "Like what?"

The clerk sighed. "It never does. We need a photocopy of your government ID, like a drivers license, passport, military ID."

"I didn't know you had to bring that," I said.

"We also need proof of residence in Kings county, like a letter addressed to you. Do you have that?"

"No, they didn't say I needed that. Why can't you use this?" I said, handing over my driver's license.

"We're not permitted," the clerk said. "Did you bring a letter addressed to yourself?"

"I don't have one with me," I said.

"Ok, the clerk said. Here's what you do...."

[continued in Part II]

Ralph 124C41+

Patrick sat down in his chair, which had a back that had been specially designed to curve like a human spine. He flipped a switch and a glass screen before him lit up. It was a Liquefied Crystalline Displayer. Unlike the old fashioned cathode ray tubes which glowed with phosphorescence as an electron beam rapidly played over the inner surface of the glass, this new LCD could paint images as realistic as a colored photograph, using nothing more than energy. Patrick's Computation Machine began to hum and whirr as high voltage electricity flowed through its circuits. This machine could store and manipulate data hundreds of times faster than the human brain. It was the major totem in Patrick's life.

The Computation Machine could, at times, serve as a Communications Machine. During those times, it broadcast a signal on the 12.5cm wavelength to a smaller machine located in the parlor of Patrick's house. This smaller machine, known as a Modulator/Demodulator, converted the wireless signal into electrical impulses that could travel along a high speed cable no bigger than a man's thumb. Such a cable snaked out of Patrick's basement, joining other cables from other buildings, until the mass of cables filled hundreds of conduits buried in the bedrock of New York City.

From there, the communication signals from Patrick's Computation Machine traveled across the country at the speed of light, until they reached a set of Computation Machines near the city of San Francisco. These Computation Machines served as a "meeting place" for the best and the brightest thinkers in the world! Patrick pulled toward him a rectangle of neo-bakelite plastic: it contained 101 electric buttons, each marked with a letter or other typographic symbol, and was based on the layout of ancient printing machines. A skilled operator, which Patrick was, could "compose" as many as twenty words per minute on such a device. He gathered his thoughts, and rapidly began to typewrite:

"I just started the book 'Ralph 124C 41+' for the first time, and I
love it! It's so mindbendingly dorky; how could I not love this
book?! It has no real plot, crepe-paper characters, cinderblock
dialogue, and a tendency to wander. But oh, wow; such
marvels! Especially if you try to put yourself back into a 1911
mindset.

It's the way my science fiction would come out if I wrote science
fiction: as a catalogue of really cool technology, presented in
Aspergerian detail, with ill-defined people walking through it
doing...not much of anything, really.

Has anyone else here actually read this book? What did you
think?"

Patrick hoped his friends enjoyed the message he left for them. They'd see it the next time they connected their personal Computation Machines to the ones near San Francisco, however many hours or days later that be. Patrick looked at a small box on his desk. The figures "1:45 am" glowed in red light on one face of the box. "Getting pretty late," Patrick thought, as he turned off the Computation Machine. He stretched and flipped a wall switch. His office light, a spiral tube of low-pressure gas which ionized and glowed whitely when energized, went dark. Patrick removed his synthetic acetate shirt, manufactured by a process that created a silk-like fabric from nothing more than plant chaff and vinegar, and headed off to his petroleum-based extruded foam mattress, and to sleep.

When asked about the leaders of the movement, they were expected to say "I Know Nothing"

1. Severe limits on immigration, especially from non-Protestant Christian countries.
2. Restricting political office to native-born Americans.
3. Mandating a wait of 21 years before an immigrant could gain citizenship.
4. Restricting public school teacher positions to Protestants.
5. Mandating daily Bible readings in public schools.
6. Restricting the use of languages other than English.

The 2010 Tea Party platform? No, this is the platform of the Know Nothing American Party of the 1840s and 1850s. They had the same kind of distrust of government, and fear/hatred of immigrants and non-Christians as the current day Tea Partiers do.

The good news: their political movement petered out after a few years, with most of the Know Nothings joining the Republican party.

The bad news: their political rallies frequently turned into political riots, which left over 50 people dead.

The Know-Nothing Party

Know Nothing Riot of 1856

More Know Nothing Riots

Catholic take on the anti-catholicism of the Know Nothings

A Know Nothing Pamphlet from the 1850s

Apophis and the Russians

ANDY ASKS: "Just read that the Russians are going to shoot a rocket at this thing. They say that in 2029 Apophis has a 1-37 chance of hitting earth and that is too close for comfort for them. Ok now my questions...Near earth orbit people say that in 2029 Apophis will pass us by by 18,000 miles, a little close yes I know, could or will we be able to see it with the naked eye?...Finally, they all agree it is not a planet killer, but what will a 1,000 foot long meteor do to us upon impact? e.g: take out Ardsley? or Yonkers? or NYC? or NY state?"



Some background: yes indeed, the asteroid 9942 Apophis (uh-PO-fis) is going to pass by the Earth on April 13, 2029. Yes, it will pass about 18,000 miles above the surface, and should be visible through binoculars from Asia, Africa, and Europe; at its nearest point it should be moving across the sky about 80 times faster than the Moon! Apophis absolutely will not strike the Earth in 2029.

But the flyby in 2029 will be so close that the Earth's gravitational pull will definitely change the asteroid's orbit. And that's the problem: we don't yet know precisely how much the orbit will be changed. As things stand right now, there is a tiny, 1-in-250,000 chance that the flyby in 2029 will change the asteroid's orbit in such a way that leads to Apophis impacting the Earth in 2036.

The 1-in-37 chance that Apophis would hit the Earth was based on early calculations, when we didn't know exactly where the asteroid was. As more images came in, we were able to better calculate Apophis's orbit, and the odds of impact got less and less.

But how could we not know where an asteroid is? Can't we see it with telescopes?

Yes we can -- but not clearly. When you take a picture of your face, you can do it in such a way that each dot of the photograph is "life size" -- one inch on the photo corresponds to one inch of your face. Things change when you take pictures of distant objects. When photographing a field, one inch on the photo might correspond to 100 feet in real life. For a far off mountain range, one inch might correspond to 10 miles. And when photographing space, one dot might represent 10000 miles.

When photographing an asteroid from Earth, you almost never actually see the asteroid's surface. What you see is a dot of light, meaning that somewhere in a 10000 mile region of space, there is an asteroid. By examining multiple photos of space, you can narrow down where an asteroid is, but there will almost always be some uncertainty.

Former Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart started the B612 foundation to come up with plans for what to do about Apophis. The first thing he suggests (which the European Space Agency wants to try) is to fly a lander to the asteroid the next time it comes into the Earth's neighborhood in 2013. The lander will have a radio beacon on it, allowing radiotelescopes on Earth to triangulate the asteroid's position precisely down to a few _feet_. With that information, we should be able to calculate precisely where Apophis will be from now to the year 2070. More than likely, we're going to find that Apophis poses no threat to the Earth, even taking the 2029 gravitational shift into account.

But suppose we get unlucky with our 1-in-250,000 chance, and we find that the 2029 flyby puts Apophis smack into the Earth in 2036. What then?

The smartest thing to do is probably the simplest. NASA astronaut Ed Lu came up with the idea of launching a massive 20-ton spacecraft to fly next to the asteroid without touching it. The gravitational field of the spacecraft will gently tug at the asteroid for years, eventually pulling the asteroid out of the danger zone for striking the Earth. To get faster results, you can add an ion engine to the spacecraft so that it can more effectively tug the asteroid-- this can change the asteroid's speed by 0.02 mph, which is all that you need to save the Earth.

Other ways to move Apophis might entail attaching a solar sail to the rock, so that the pressure of sunlight can gently shift the asteroid -- remember all we need is to change its velocity by 0.02 mph. Other ideas might be spraying ice on one side of the asteroid and/or crushed dust on the other side; the white ice might act like a solar sail, or the dark dust might absorb (and then give off) so much heat that the small thrust should move the asteroid.

The gravitational tug is probably the safest and simplest way to move an asteroid. Unfortunately, the concept wasn't developed until 2005, after the movie Armageddon, so in the popular imagination the only way to destroy an asteroid is to BLOW THE SHIT OUT OF IT WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS, YEAH!!!

This is probably the stupidest thing we could do. This was mentioned in the movie "Independence Day", when General Gray said "the only thing that would accomplish is turn one dangerous falling object into many"; in other words you'll be just as dead if you're hit with a shotgun blast as if you're hit with a howitzer.

Remember, we're discussing "what if" scenarios: Apophis has a 1 in 250,000 chance of hitting the Earth, and I think the odds are going to go more in our favor as we learn more.

But since you asked, suppose everything fails and Apophis is headed directly for Earth. What happens then?

If the asteroid hits a rocky place, the resulting crater will be 2.2 miles across. That's more than twice as large as Ardsley itself, and about 1/10th the size of Yonkers. But that's just the crater! If you were 28 miles away from the impact, the heat would be about 20 times as intense as the Sun; and will set trees and buildings on fire. Nine seconds later, the seismic shaking will arrive; it will be equivalent to a 6.6 Richter earthquake, and will cause consuderable damage to most structures. A minute and a half later, the ejecta will come raining down; molten chunks of lava the size of soccer balls. But that's OK, because the blast wave, which will arrive 40 seconds later, will feel like a wind 140 miles per hour, and will knock down what remains of the buildings and burning trees.

If the asteroid were to impact Ardsley, all of Westchester/Putnam/ Rockland from Harriman to West Point to Brewster would be destroyed. Fairfield County Connecticut, from Ridgefield to Long Island Sound, would be on fire. On Long Island, pretty much all of Nassau County and a chunk of Suffolk County out to Cold Spring, Huntington, and Bethpage would be wiped off the map. The structurally sound buildngs of lower Manhattan might still be standing, but Queens, the Bronx, Harlem, and northern Brooklyn would be rubble, and Central Park would be one giant forest fire. Most of northeastern New Jersey, from Bayonne to West Milford, would be destroyed.

We're lucky this is NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!

Murph the Surf

Jack Murphy was a violin, tennis and chess prodigy who threw it all away to become a Florida surfer dude. He started a surfboard company, became famous as Murph the Surf when his copmany skyrocketed, and then lost it all to bad business dealings. He soon became involved in petty robberies in Florida.

He came to New York in October 1964 to visit the World's Fair, without any plans to rob anything. On the night of October 29, he was staying with a friend on 75th street as a mid-autumn thunderstorm lashed Manhattan. Murph and the friend drunkenly got the idea to steal the jewels from the American Museum of Natural History around the corner.

Nowadays, the jewel exhibit is in a walled off enclosure deep in the center of the museum, but in those days the jewels were kept in a third floor gallery overlooking 77th street. Murph and his friend climbed up the cragged rock wall of the museum and opened the window to the jewel room. Later investigation revealed that the fuse to the window alarm had been accidentally blown by the lightning; as a result, the guards were not alerted.

However, the guards patrolled the building on regular 20 minute rounds, and Murph and his friend happened to climb through the window just as a guard was entering the third floor gallery. They managed to close the window and hide without being detected by the guard. When the coast was clear, Murph walked over to the Star of India sapphire, lifted off its plexiglass cover, and pried the stone out of its setting. Both the cover and the stone sat on pressure sensors tied to separate alarm systems, but these were battery powered, and later investigation revealed that the batteries were dead. The pair pocketed 26 other gems, including the 16.25 carat Eagle Diamond, the Midnight Sapphire, and the de Long Ruby.

Murph and his friend climbed out the window, down the rock wall, and stashed most of the jewels in the 75th street apartment. Badly in need of some more alcohol, they hit a neighborhood bar, where Murph tried to pick up two young women by bragging that he was a jewel thief. He produced the Eagle Diamond as proof, but no one believed his story, or that the gem was real, and he and his pal wound up going home alone.

Of course, the next day the robbery made the afternoon news. The two women remembered their inept lothario from the night before, and alerted the police. Meanwhile Murph, realizing how hot he was, decided to head back to Miami. By all accounts he left the apartment a few minutes before the police arrived.

After a week-long manhunt, Jack Murphy was arrested in Florida. The jewels, except for the Eagle Diamond, were recovered from a locker in a Miami bus depot. Murph the Surf served two years for the robbery.

Jesus, the token booth clerk.