Space Force HQ in Huntsville? What about Anniston?
Opinion Column - Published 02/10/2021
Alakazam!
Hey look, y’all—a recent publication lets me push analysis of my ancient writings farther down in the blog schedule. In the above picture, the “Space Force” headline three up from the bottom left is the front page link to my commentary from AL.com of February 10, 2021 (click the link). I include the above image for two reasons: 1) to show off; and 2) while not related to my commentary at all, the picture of the guy is now my mental image of a Huntsville-based rocket scientist reacting to my article.
For you see, my article is not kind to Huntsville and the rocket scientists who live there. In the article, I imply that they are only smart and successful because the Feds moved the Nazi V-works team to their town instead of shipping them off to Nuremberg to discuss concepts such as indiscriminate long-range bombing of civilian population centers. I don’t use the words “Nazi” or “Nuremberg” or “bombing of civilian” or “just following orders” but history buffs will sense them lurking behind my points like unexploded ordnance. I didn’t go all the way there because I was playing it for laughs, and besides, there is no need to pick at old scabs. Huntsville is in fact a fine town full of fine people, who I hope can take a joke and who don’t have actual fingers on actual launch buttons for any actual missiles that might accidentally wend their way south to my actual house.
On the Opinion page, a reader would have seen the following, with my humble article right up there alongside more mature commentary:
One thing about AL.com that doesn’t happen with smaller, print-oriented publications is they attach nifty graphics to most letters and columns. I was hoping for some Photo-Shopped action combining Anniston’s big chair, a bicycle, an artillery shell, and the Space Command logo, but that would have been a lot of time and expense to go to for a little old opinion piece. Never mind. The image they chose perfectly conveys the heroic image of Anniston that I paint in my article. Though you know, it just occurred to me that while that photo is 100% legit, you could get the same effect with a normal-size chair and a Matchbox Car and a clever camera angle. But I have seen that chair in person, and it really is that big. Mighty Vulcan could sit in it if he ever decided to take a load off, though I would hope he would put down a towel first, or don some trousers for once.
I did not tout Anniston’s big chair without first verifying that Huntsville does not have some gargantuan piece of furniture up their Federally-funded sleeve. The Feds abandoned Fort McClellan, pulling the rug out from under Anniston’s economy, over 20 years ago. Meanwhile, they continue to rain sweet sweet manna down upon Huntsville, and it is quite possible that the wily Huntsvillians, sensing the threat posed by Anniston’s chair, have a skunkworks devoted entirely to the development of big furniture. Taking nothing for granted, I got busy doing intensive research. A Google search on “what is the largest piece of furniture in Huntsville AL” turned up this:
Impressive, but nothing about which to dispatch a written communiqué to your domicile of birth. Furthermore, the titanic chair in Anniston excites and unites a diverse populous. Huntsville’s big sofa does the opposite. Unlike a loveseat, which seats two in close, intimacy-inducing proximity, the Huntsville sofa encourages separation. I see footrests and built-in cup holders; does it include an intercom system for communicating between opposite ends of the thing, or do you just have to shout? It is an anti-loveseat, with copious room for a divorce lawyer next to each member of the couple, a stenographer, and a judge seated squarely in the middle. You might could even squeeze in a slim bailiff or two if warranted by circumstance. It is no match for Anniston’s chair, but it is no slouch of a couch.
This couple clearly has problems. Besides having purchased a sofa from the Touch Me Not Collection, please notice their treatment of their books. On both end tables we see stacks of books with delicate objects placed on them. You see this kind of thing on Zillow.com all the time: books that will always and only be decorative elements. So: they contrive to imprison their unread books, and they contrive to sit as far apart as can be done on a single piece of indoor furniture. At least the guy has a glass of tea and a tablet to read. But Miss Thang just sits there grinning at him, waiting to be entertained. Every time he glances up from his e-book, yep, there she is with her face hanging out. It was cute when they first met, but all day every day? What ever are they smiling about? Maybe the doorbell just rang and the courtroom crew is finally here to dissolve their cursed union.
I couldn’t include all of that in my article, of course, but if any Huntsvillian reader objects to my point about the significance of our chair, I am ready with counter-counter-arguments against their Separation Settee—that Davenport of Doom. As my commentary in the newspaper points out, Huntsville may win the money and materiel game, but they will lose where it counts: propaganda.
My article makes its points pretty well, so let’s rap about headlines and editing.
As I have stated in other recent posts, I have come around to understanding and accepting that newspaper headlines are designed to deliver the setup and the punchline in abbreviated form. I have yet to do any substantial research to see if it has always been that way, but all it would take is looking at newspaper archives from different decades. I will do that someday and may get a blog post out of it, but for now I’ll just say the editor-written headline for this piece is fine by modern standards.
About that author info at the end of the article. AL.com has published one other opinion piece of mine (click the link), which had author info that I supplied via email, on request. I didn’t think to include such info when submitting the Space Command article. This time, the Opinion editor called me on the phone to chat. Aside from getting a quick 1-line bio, he said something along the lines that his boss had told him to find out who I was and what I was up to. You see, aside from the piece they published before and now this one, I have submitted many a letter and column to them. Basically, everything I submit to The Anniston Star I also submit to AL.com. The Star publishes my stuff more often, but apparently my volume of submissions was enough to raise eyebrows at AL.com. The main thing they wanted to confirm was that I’m an actual person who actually lives in Alabama. I worried that I might have set off the “cranky old fart who thinks he’s funny” alarm, but the AL.com editor said they really like my stuff and that I should submit as much as I want. Which, come to think of it, might be something they say to every cranky old fart who thinks he’s funny. Oh well.
While I did tell him I am a retired computer programmer, and that I spend a lot of time writing, I did not actually say the words “I am a writer.” But I guess if that’s what you do, whether for fun or profit, that’s what you are. Just so you know I don’t go around billing myself that way. I need a longer track record of publication, perhaps with more of the paid variety, before I would feel comfortable saying that a writer is what I am. Or, if I somehow became impoverished but managed to keep writing, paid or not, despite not living a relaxed and comfortable lifestyle, I would feel OK about making such a bold claim. Maybe that feeling is why I recall seeing so many undeniable writers refer to themselves as “scribblers.” It would be supremely irritating to turn all humble in the middle of my ego-stroking project (this blog), so I think what I have right now as regards being a writer is not Impostor Syndrome but Not Just Yet But Working On It Syndrome. I may think of myself as a writer, but I’m not having it printed on business cards, for now.
As for editing, they published it exactly as submitted. I am of two minds about this. Actually I’m of one mind about one thing: minutes after submitting it, I sent along a correction to the year in the date mentioned in the last paragraph, which should be 2021. This correction was not applied. My one mind is embarrassed to see that particular kind of error in print.
The reason I am of two minds is that I also wrote a much shorter version of this article at the behest of The Anniston Star. That version has not been published yet, and they did not guarantee publication when they asked me to shorten it. However, in the process of shortening it I realized that regardless of length, some paragraphs needed to be moved around.
While I enjoy the rambling and wordy phrasing of the long version, I noticed that I had set up for jokes about low initial and recurring costs, only to interrupt with an unrelated paragraph, and then I dragged it back to the low initial and recurring costs. I changed the order of things in the short version, which is now included in the Column Inches post for this article (click the link). The jokes are necessarily much more abrupt in the condensed version, and the overall effect is 37% less humorous. If the short version does get published, I may celebrate with an Alakazam post examining the differences and the relative impact of the two versions—the usual tour of rabbit holes in my brain. I can sense the computer programmers among my subscribers thinking, “Will that wild-eyed genius use a diff program to help with this comparison, thus applying a scientific tool to a soft art form? Tell me!” I’m not telling. Watch and learn.
That is, assuming no stray missiles find me first.
Boing!
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