I feel the need, the need to talk about Top Gun.

If you didn’t know, stupendous things are happening in the Indian Ocean, and they are happening right now. Every time you watch Top Gun, naval aviators are getting into wacky engagements with MiGs at that moment. This is called living in the best of all possible universes. I highly recommend it.

I should start by saying that fighter planes are friggin’ cool. Planes in general are sweet (probably just flight in general), but when you use those planes to fly around at Mach speeds and shoot missiles (or machine guns!) at each other it becomes the greatest sport ever. This brings me to my first point. Top Gun is an 80’s sports movie (no war movie would have this many locker room scenes), and I mean that as a compliment. Instead of High School we get Fighter Weapon School, and instead of basketball or karate we get dogfighting. Clear improvements.

All the necessary characters for a sports movie are present. First you need some jocks who antagonize the main characters for no real reason. Iceman is a prefect jock bully. He’s clearly skilled but abrasive, so you will respect him but not trust him. Slider is the classic crony. Even more of a jerk than Iceman, he also lacks the talent to back it up. Iceman’s arrogance is somewhat justified, but Slider just stinks.

            The stereotypical support characters are all there. Sundown in the token black guy necessary to 80’s sports movies. He and his facewear will be covered in greater detail later on. Viper plays the part of the wise mentor. He gives the hero advice and encouragement when he needs it most, as is his role. Jester is the harsh teacher, there to show that nobody’s getting coddled. Michael Ironside's voice is also so gravely that you could use it for road base. That’s a civil engineering joke (no regrets).

            All that’s missing at this point is a forbidden love interest. Cue Charlie. It might be a little out of type that she hasn’t dated Iceman at some point, but the teacher dating a student angle works just fine. The whole stealing the bad guy’s girlfriend trope never makes much sense anyway. If she is such a smart, sensitive girl, then why would she be going out with such a jerk?

            Don’t forget the protagonists, who are obviously a pair of dorky underdogs. The dorky part may not be obvious at first, well it’s pretty clear in Goose’s case, but Maverick’s dorkiness requires closer inspection. Being a misunderstood unpopular kid is a classic dork trait, but this is offset by his official status as a loose cannon.

            Dork determination is going to require looking deeper into some of Mavericks other character attributes. His reputation as a ladies man isn’t dorky; but how much is actually known about this reputation? His only confirmed relationship is with one Penny Benjamin. For all we know she could be some maneating admirals daughter who was taking advantage of Maverick. She could also be smelly and gross. Either way, Mav didn’t even tell his best friend about her, so he probably wasn’t proud about it.

           

Penny Benjamin?

            That whole bet about carnal knowledge on the premises also seems more like a running joke than an actual possibility. Just the fact that they talk about Goose getting laid shows that they both expect to be going home alone. I really hope they aren’t implying that Goose cheats on Carole anyway. Plus, when Charlie says that Mav was wonderful Goose is clearly shocked.

  

            Seriously, Maverick’s two moves are a dorky stunt (singing You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling is pretty dorky), and following her into a bathroom. I don’t know anything about picking up girls, but these don’t seem like solid strategies to me. Then he tells her she’s making a mistake with her current date. This seems like a terrible idea. Especially when she clearly isn’t on a date. On the other hand, “If the government trusts me, maybe you could” is a good line.

  

Paperwork = not a date

            Carole telling Charlie about all of Mav’s women is the biggest flaw in this theory. It’s also when the movie misses it’s opportunity to pass the Bechdel Test. The way I see it, Goose, Carole, and Mav have known each other for a long time. Carole and Goose just have a childhood sweetheart feel. Maverick has a self-confidence problem (plot point), and his friends embellish his dealings with women to help him out. He got Penny Benjamin, but most of his status is just exaggeration. They could also be prostitutes.

  

            In the end, no matter how much I argue, Maverick will always be first and foremost, a maverick. It may be the rebel on the wrong side of authority that makes the character exciting, but the undercurrent of dorky underdog is always there to keep the character accessible. I mean Maverick and Goose weren’t even good enough to get into Top Gun until Cougar had his accident. This brings us to the plot, so let’s talk about it.

           

            In sports movie terms, the plot goes something like this: the plucky underdog protagonist catch a break and get a shot at the big leagues, they then spend the entire “season” proving that they are good enough to belong there, setbacks happen along the way, relationships include a forbidden romance and a father struggling to support a family, a tragedy gets mixed in with some haunted past, and in the end when given a shot in the big game, our hero (singular at this point) saves the day. It sounds boring like that, but I’d like to point out a few examples of why I think this ends up being so effective. I’ll start with the first scene.

   

            All that aircraft carrier footage is getting counted as opening credits. I’m talking about the first scene with dialog. We start with “Great, Maverick and Goose”. Then comes a great shot of the F-14 slowly pulling into frame, and Maverick’s first line is “Talk to me Goose”. Everything you need to know is set up right there. Mav and Goose are loveable rogues, jet fighters are cool, and Maverick is the one in charge but he depends on Goose for support. The rest of the scene also established the danger, sets up Cougar’s (sweaty, blinky) breakdown so they can get into Top Gun, has a heroic rescue, builds the myth of the MiG 28’s, and gives them some special knowledge that comes in handy with Charlie later. It’s just that easy. I’m not sure it fighter pilots will lock missiles on each other during random encounters to establish dominance, but it seems pretty fun (best possible universe).

            The movie moves along steadily from here, and we never go more than 22 minutes without seeing Maverick in a plane. You get all that plot stuff I just mentioned as everything builds up to Hop 31. Danger Zone starts playing, so you know things are going to get intense. The score is tied and graduation is only two weeks away. Maverick and Iceman are forced to work together and the tension is thick. It’s a two on three engagement but two of the enemy planes split off right away leaving Mav and Ice chasing a lone A-4. The enemy planes aren’t important in this scene and we never even see who’s flying them. All the conflict is between Maverick and Iceman. As you would expect, Iceman quickly acts the jerk (or the son of a bitch). Strain builds as Iceman and Maverick are packed in right behind the enemy fighter and Ice refuses to get out of the way. He gets badgered by everyone, including Slider, and finally veers off. Just when you think Maverick and Goose are going to get their big change to prove they’re the best, the plot hits the breaks and we fly right by. Jet wash, flat spin, watch the canopy, and:

            Goose gets his own essay, so the emotional impact will be covered later. What this does to the plot is pretty major. Suddenly Maverick couldn’t care less about winning any trophies and it’s questionable whether he can even be a fighter pilot after this. Viper sends him back up but Mav can’t engage no matter how easy a shot Jester gives him (proving he’s not such a hard ass after all). Now Maverick has multiple encounters of decreasing hostility and increasing effectiveness. First he makes Sundown soil his flight suit.

  

Next Mav packs his locker, has an awkward talk with Iceman, and heads to the airport. Charlie somehow finds him at the bar, and confronts him about quitting with some tough love and their relationship exits the scene in pretty bad shape. Maverick isn’t quite ready to leave yet (he was just dropping off resumes with the commercial airliners), and he heads to Viper’s house for some fatherly advice. We learn that Papa Mitchell wasn’t a disgrace after all, and his heroic actions were covered up for political reasons (wrong line on some map and all that).

That’s one ghost exercised. Maverick skips graduation (even though he had enough points), but shows up for the after party. It’s a good thing he’s there though, because he’s got orders to go back to the Indian Ocean for a crisis situation. The SS MacGuffin has wandered into enemy waters and the rescue needs air support (we never even get to see this boat). Everything comes full circle, and we end up back on the same carrier where the movie started.

  

Iceman and Hollywood end up flying the mission with Maverick backing them up on alert. Six MIGs later, Hollywood and Wolfman get shot down because they’re incompetent (“Where’d who go?”). Maverick is sent in to rescue Iceman and in a nice touch Cougar’s old partner Merlin is his RIO. At 6’5” Tim Robbins seems a little tall for a fighter pilot, but he does some of the best eye acting in this whole movie so I’ll let it slide (You’re gunna do what?). Iceman is struggling to stay alive, but Maverick still has to let go of Goose before he can engage.

He does, because he’s the hero, and then he and Iceman shoot down most of the MiGs and scare off the rest (Mav shoots down the majority, because hero). We also see every lesson that Maverick learned. He recovers after flying through some jet wash, he doesn’t leave his wingman, and he pulls the old “I’m gunna hit the brakes, he’ll fly right by” trick. He also doesn’t crash into the ocean, so you could count that as never going below the hard deck. Everybody flies back to the carrier without a second thought about the boat rescue plot, and throw a party on the deck. Hollywood and Wolfman got pulled out of the ocean before they could row to Sweden. Everyone is happy.

  

All the problems have been resolved. In what could be considered a twist, Iceman isn’t disgraced and becomes Maverick’s friend (they do a flyby together, because buzzing the tower is what friends do), Maverick throws Goose’s dogtags into the ocean (Goose had a wife and kid who might have wanted those!), and when offered his choice of assignments he decides he wants to be a Top Gun instructor. This doesn’t make a ton of sense since he didn’t win the trophy, or even graduate, but you’ve got to set up the sequel somehow.  This isn’t a joke. There actually was a sequel planned where Maverick was an instructor and a spunky female pilot comes to the school. This could still happen. Oh, Maverick and Charlie get back together too, but I’m probably more concerned about whether or not he’ll find another RIO to fly with again (is Merlin his RIO now, what’s he like, does he play volleyball?). Then in the best of 80’s traditions, we play credits to the sounds of a corny power ballad.

Not bad for a plot whose main purpose is to move things from one dog fight to the next. I think that’s enough Top Gun for one serving, but I still have a lot more to talk about. Up next, I’ll talk about what really makes this movie great. The elemental excellence that is naval aviators. 

Top Ten (Twenty Seven) Top Gun Quotes

You know them, you love them. If not, study this list. I’ve added tips on how to use them in everyday life.

1.  /Thumb up, salute/ - I’m not sure if a hand gesture can technically be a quote, but this one deserves it. All purpose, it can be used to signal “You’re looking good”, “Everything’s fine with me”, “See you later”, or “Good job”, along with any other positive messages.

2.  “Talk to me Goose.” - The ultimate conversation starter.

3.  “Negative Ghost Rider, the pattern is full.” - Say this any and every time you reply in the negative.

4.  “Below the hard deck does not count.” - Can be used any time you don’t agree with a decision or outcome. The only possible rebutle is “hard deck my ass”. Feel free to experiment with where you put the emphasis.

5.  “Maverick’s supersonic; I’ll be there in 30 seconds.” - The obligatory response any time someone asks for your ETA.

6.  “God damn it Maverick!” - A general use rebuke.

7.  “Up there we gotta push it. That’s our job.” - Function as a motivational line or a reason for why things got carried away. It can also make your employment sound interesting. You’ve got options.

8.  “I’m holding on too tight. I’ve lost the edge.” - Use this any time you make a mistake in a clutch situation. The more absurd or bathos inspiring the better.

9.  “That son of a bitch cut me off.” - Works equally well for traffic or conversations or any time anybody cuts you off.

10.  “We went like this, he went like that. I said to Hollywood, 'Where'd he go?' Hollywood says, 'Where'd who go?' " – Use it to explain anything that gets lost, screwed up, or confused.

11.  “Bogeys like fireflies all over the sky.” - It’s the paprika of similes. It’ll spice up any story.

12.  “It’s not good, it doesn’t look good.” - For when things don’t look good.

13.  “Come on Mav, do some of that pilot shit.” - Nobody will fail you if you implore them with that line.

14.  “Your ego is writing checks your body can’t cash.” - If you’re worried someone is about to be overcome by their own hubris, use this to rein them in.

15.  “Great Mav, real slick.” - Say it too yourself after a blunder. Referring to yourself as Mav can only help to raise your spirits back up.

16.  “They were abused children.” - Add it any time people walk away from a group conversation.

17.  “Gutsiest move I ever saw.” - A compliment that works in any situation.

18.  “No man, it was a really great move. He was inverted.” - Bust this out if someone questions the actions of a friend, regardless of whether inversion was involved or not. Can also be used as a defense of number 17.

19.  “That’s right Ice… man, I am dangerous.” - In case your loose cannon status is ever in questions.

20.  “There’s two O’s in Goose.” - Slip it in if anyone asks you to correct their spelling

21.  “You can be my wingman any time.” - for when you want to establish a new best friend. If they reply “Bullshit, you can be mine” then you know it’s for real.

22.  “Hollywood, you’re looking good. I’m going after Viper.” - If you ever want to leave a situation early, use this as your excuse. That or “I need to take a shower”.

23.  “Maverick has the ball.” - Works for any time you assume control or authority.

24.  “I want some butts!” - All-purpose angry outburst, or possibly sex proposition.

25.  “This gives me a hard on.” - Don’t be afraid to share your feelings.

26.  “Slider *sniff* you stink.” - If you ever need to insult someone but nothing specific comes to mind. You don’t have to call them Slider, but it helps.

27.  “The simple fact is that you feel responsible for Goose, and you have a confidence problem.” - If a friend is worrying about a past mistake, use this to straighten them out.

2015 Pictures Dump

            So I spent another summer working construction observation. As always, I was sure to keep my camera handy. Same as last year, I think got enough interesting shots to deserve a picture dump.

            I was on a project in the Bakken Oil Patch. They say work has slowed down, but it still looked plenty busy to me.

There were always a couple drilling rigs nearby

Work didn't stop after the drilling was done either

            The work I was observing was the rebuilding of about nine miles of county road. There was plenty of earth moving and paving to provide photo opportunities.

Lots of Caterpillar equipment

Scrapper high jinks

Hours were generally long

            The project ran from May to November. I was up there long enough for this:

Brand new box culvert

            to go to this:

Frozen box culvert

            Such is life on the road. Everything take on a special perspective.

Special mileage milestones

Cooking pizza in the testing shack

Pink paint got on everything

One day the wind blew at least a thousand tumble weeds through site in about an hour

This was my hotel receipt at the end of the year

             I also took plenty of pictures of little things that happened to catch my eye.

I didn't paint this

The fact that this single pylon had a complete covering of mud intrigued me

Something about the symmetry

North Dakota still has it's old timey charm

It's like Chinese New Year

Textbook mud spatter

Work rarely stopped

  

I had to take some more flare pictures

            And of course I had to photograph all the wildlife I saw.

Cow of both the Red and Black Angus varieties

Plenty of seagull, just not a lot of sea

The Birds

Pheasant and Fiber Rolls

I learned this year that they're ground squirrels, not gophers

They don't have the teeth to be gophers

My pet, snakey

Muddy turtle

A little green frog

Crawfish crawling back to the water

 

The clam couldn't crawl

Fuzzy Caterpillar

Bug on my clipboard

            Sometimes I didn’t actually see the animals.

This isn't even a barn

Sinister raccoon tracks

  

            And the animals weren’t always alive when I found them.

This is not snakey

Didn't smell as bad as it looks.

Not all baby birds learn to fly

Not wiley enough

This one was still pretty fresh

            And that does it for this year’s work pictures. I only made it snorkeling once over the summer. Pictures were sub-par compared to last year, but I guess I can throw the best one in just for continuity.

High fish count, low visibility

            No ducks this year. I was upset too.

More Duck Facts

Needs more duck facts.

1. Ducks have five stomachs and they can convert matter directly into energy.
2. When dropped in a vacuum, a duck feather will fall faster than a bowling ball.
3. Ducks have this thing called a cloaca that serves as an all-purpose orifice for their urinary tract, intestines, and reproductive organs. This isn’t all that special, but I think it’s neat. Also, they defecate and micturate at the same time in one semi-solid blob.
4. Duck sneezes are a powerful stimulant that can be dangerously habit forming. Be sure to call your doctor if symptoms persist more than four hours.
5. Ducks are terrible drivers.
6. The brain waves of a duck are mathematically perfect.
7. A lone duck singlehandedly held off over 500 men at the battle of the Daisy Park Bridge.
8. They can smell if you’re not having fun.
9. Jeff Goldblum is friends with several ducks.
10. Ducks exist across six spatial dimensions. 
11. According to classical mechanics, duck flight shouldn’t be possible. It only occurs due to the cumulative effects of quantum tunneling. 
12. I’ve seen a duck punch through a concrete wall.
13. Duck bills are a 14 on the Mohs Hardness Scale.
14. That creaking sound that you hear at night; that’s a duck in your walls. It’s checking for bad wiring, because only ducks can prevent house fires.
15. Duck feathers are a fractal pattern down to the atomic level, and have near infinite surface area.
16. Nervous tissue from ducks is a room temperature superconductor.
17. Ducks are allergic to ska music.
18. The morality of ducks is based around if actions will make someone smile.
19. The nose that fell off the sphinx was actually a duck bill.
20. The universe only exists within the mind of a duck.
21. Life started on Earth when a duck traveled back in time and pooped in the primordial ooze. We evolved from duck poop is what I’m saying. Also, the duck came first, not the egg.
22. The English unit, foot, is actually based on the Welsh word for duck, “fwtl” (also the origin of the word “fowl”), and not the anatomical feature. The distance was originally based on the length of a prototype duck, which is mummified and kept in the basement of the Tower of London. Now it’s based on how far light travels within a specific fraction of a second, which is lame.
23. Your dragon style is no match for my duck style kung fu.

Maths

            I’ve done some math during my life. It was always my favorite subject in school and I eventually ended up studying engineering in college, which was practically all math. My job doesn’t go to quite the same level, but I’m still using a calculator regularly. What I’m setting up is the possibly unexpected idea that I don’t believe math applies directly to the real world. Let me explain.

            Math to me is a conceptual tool that is useful for modeling, predicting, and simplifying real life phenomena, but only after the phenomena has been reduced to an idealized form. Generally the more math you use the less idealization, but even the most basic parts of math are based on idealizations of the real world. Take pi as an example. Pi is the ratio between a circle’s diameter and its circumference, and already we’re dealing with idealization because perfect circles don’t exist in nature. Already one step removed from the real world, pi still doesn’t fit into our math. Pi gets a lot of attention for being an irrational number, meaning that it consists of a never ending and never repeating string of digits. This might seem mysterious and unpredictable, sort of a loose cannon of the number world, but to me this is a glaring example of how our math is flawed (I keep saying “our math” because I don’t believing the math that humans use is the only possible math, but that is a whole other discussion that I don’t want to get into at the moment). Since it’s impossible to write down all the digits of pi, it can only ever be used as an approximation. The true value of pi completely escapes our grasp. Just a heads up, this fact is also true of every single measurement ever taken. That’s a pretty devastating blow to math’s ability to represent the truth of the real world, and it’s also a reason why pi isn’t all that special. Technically, there are a few measurements that define units. When you weigh the International Prototype Kilogram it’s exactly one kilogram, but that’s more a(nother) reason why the IPK is stupendous and less a triumph for mathematics.

The IPK is so great

            Leaving out all that irrational number bullshit, we’re still left with adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, aka doing arithmetic to, discreet objects. For example, take four apples. Add two apples to get six. Double the number of apples to have twelve. Divide out a fourth of the apples to have three. Then subtract two apples and one apple is left. Repeated an infinite number of times, this process should always result in one apple. It’s too bad that the apples have to be completely idealized first. The reason this apple arithmetic works is that it assumes that one apple equals one apple equals one apple, just like how the number one equals the number one equals the number one. In the real world, every single apple is unique, so they can’t be used like numbers. One apple plus another apple is not equal to a different apple plus another different apple, but one plus one always equals one plus one. Numbers are also homogenous in a way the worldly objects aren’t. It is impossible to cut an apple in half and have two identical pieces the same way that the halves left after dividing one in half are identical. The only example of arithmetic that might work in the real world is if you subtract out everything to get zero, because if you have three apples and then take all three away it doesn’t really matter what kind of apples you had to begin with. Only math has to go and ruin this situation too, since if you ask any math major they’ll tell you that subtraction doesn’t exist, it’s only addition of an inverse. Inverse apples definitely aren’t a real thing, so there goes that.

An inverse apple?

            Now it might be possible to do this kind of arithmetic with quantum particles, because as far as physicists can tell all electrons are identical (as far as values for mass, charge, and spin go anyway). Assuming this isn’t just due to a lack of measurement precision; electrons start to look a lot like numbers. An electron can’t be divided into fractions and subtraction is still right out (an anti-electron is kind of like an inverse electron, but an electron plus an anti-electron results in energy, not zero) so it’s not perfect. This leaves addition and multiplication as a sort of fancy way to count. There’s also the fact that the quantum mechanics that describe the behavior of electrons are far removed from experiences of the macroscopic universe and can only be expressed using math, so I’m not ready to except quantum particles as an example of how math existing in the physical world.

            I’m not trying to say that math is bad or doesn’t have value. The measurements, predictions, and models that math can create are absolutely amazing and incredibly useful. Almost none of the aspects of modern civilization would be possible without math. Sure, the Romans build some pretty great stuff without using math as we understand it, but I think we’re doing things better now (the road I help build beat Roman roads any day). I just think it should be acknowledged that math is using abstractions and idealizations, and isn’t some great truth at the heart of the universe. Also pi really isn’t that cool.