This week we take a break from reminiscing about my college days to talk about my lifelong obsession with motorsports.
Links of Interest
- Indianapolis Motor Speedway: https://www.indianapolismotorspeedway.com/
- Indianapolis 500 on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indianapolis_500
- Documentary by Michael Moore “Roger & Me” (1989) which has nothing to do with this podcast except I parodied the title: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098213/
- Comedian Steven Wright’s first appearance on the Tonight Show: https://youtu.be/4GGyQNMPDkk?si=4qn4WLN035iHO7G7&t=300
- My first VCR RCA Selectavision VFP-170: https://www.ebay.com/itm/255996314377
- Another article about that model VCR: https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/rca_selectavision_vfp170.html
- My Uncle Keith’s VCR that I used for editing: https://www.ebay.com/itm/156244252376
- Roger Penske on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penske
- 2024 Indy 500 winner Josef Newgarden Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Newgarden
- Mario Andretti on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Andretti
- Paul Newman on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Newman
- Richard Petty on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Petty
- Darrell Waltrip on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darrell_Waltrip
- Dale Earnhardt Jr.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Earnhardt_Jr.
- Michael Schumacher on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Schumacher
- Pixar film “Cars” (2006) on IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317219/
- Clip from “Cars” Mario knows me: https://youtu.be/trwQkhe_gCc?si=6D1ASXmUAE7sjiBv
- Shrine Circus on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrine_Circus
Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/contemplatinglife
Where to listen to this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/contemplatinglife
YouTube playlist of this and all other episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFFRYfZfNjHL8bFCmGDOBvEiRbzUiiHpq
YouTube version
Shooting Script
Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 67 of Contemplating Life.
Before I got interrupted by health issues last month, I had planned to do three episodes about my life as a fan of auto racing especially the Indy 500. It was all scheduled to finish up right before this year’s race on Memorial Day weekend. That didn’t work out. So this week we pick up where we left off talking about racing.
By the way, the YouTube version of this episode contains video I shot with a home video camera at the Speedway so you might want to watch this one on YouTube.
After writing our previous episode on the topic, I’ve refreshed my memory about some of the events at the Speedway. I mean we’re talking about things 40 or 50 years ago. My memory isn’t that good. I wasn’t certain how much time I spent at the track during my high school years because I was in school throughout the week. While it was common practice for kids to cut school during May to go to the track, I didn’t have that option. Mom put me on the school bus in the morning and transported me from Roberts special education school to Northwest High School in the middle of the day. So, it wasn’t like I could sneak away and was mom was going to sneak away with me.
I finally recalled definitively that I spent some qualifying weekends at the Speedway. Mom would drop me off at gate 7 early in the afternoon and pick me up around 5 or 6 PM. The track closed at 6. One day as I was going through the tunnel under the main stretch at Gate 7, my right rear tire came off the rim. This had to be the power chair I had gotten from the school starting in fifth grade. I used it from then until halfway through my senior year. We knew that I would have to return the chair once I graduated so we got my dad’s insurance to buy me a new one sometime in December of 1972.
The day the tire fell off had to take place while I still had the power chair that belonged to the school because my new chair had different kinds of tires that didn’t come off the rim so easily. The old chair from the school had solid rubber tires about an inch wide on a rim that was probably 24 inches or so. In the center of the rubber core was a steel cable. When replacing the tire, you would tighten the cable to keep the rubber on the rim. But as the tire wore down, that steel cable started cutting into the rubber. The tire would no longer fit as tightly as it should have. If you turned the chair sharply or hit a bump funny, sometimes it would twist that rubber tire off the rim.
So I was going through the Gate 7 tunnel down the steep hill on one side and starting to drive up the steep hill on the other side. This put a lot of strain on that worn-out tire. It twisted off the rim. If it had fallen outwards onto the ground, I could have limped along on the rim and gotten up the hill to meet my mom. Unfortunately, it fell towards the inside. As I rolled along on the rim, the tire got tangled up in the clutch lever. There was a lever on each rear wheel that you could disengage. It would loosen the belt drive so you could push the chair by hand. When the tire flipped the clutch lever, I was stranded at the lowest point of the tunnel.
I could see my mom pull up on the outside of the tunnel. She looked down the tunnel to try to see me. She was in the bright sunlight and I was in the darkest part of the tunnel. Even though there were lights, she couldn’t see me.
I tried yelling at her, but with racecars going over the top of the tunnel at speeds approaching 180 mph, she couldn’t hear me.
After a few minutes, a stranger walked by and I recruited him to go get my mom. She twisted the tire back on the rim easily because it was so loose and reengaged my clutch. I thanked the stranger profusely.
Years later I told that story to my friend Kathy Breen who served with me on St. Gabriel Church’s Finance Committee. She said, “Yeah, I know that story. The man who helped you was my father. He was a sports journalist covering the race.” I had no idea he was someone connected to the church.
As comedian Stephen Wright says, “It’s a small world… but I wouldn’t want to have to paint it.”
Apart from that story, I later remembered that my second power chair did not have spoked front wheels but the school’s wheelchair did. Therefore the times I got stuck in the mud in “The Snake Pit” had to be in that earlier wheelchair during my high school days.
I also recalled that sometime in my high school years I purchased a mechanical stopwatch to time the cars. I know for a fact I had it during high school because I offered to assist my high school science teacher Mr. Irwin doing time trials for our Little 500 Bicycle Race. He was concerned I might not be very accurate which I suppose was a legitimate concern.
To push the button, I would hold the watch up to my chin. I would brace my elbow on the armrest of my wheelchair and then sharply nod my head down to trigger the watch. I think I was reasonably accurate.
It probably wasn’t until I was in college that I purchased a new stopwatch. One day while in the gift shop at the Speedway, I saw an electronic stopwatch with an LCD display. It would allow you to time 4 consecutive laps. The problem with a mechanical stopwatch is that you need two of them to time consecutive laps. The pit crews would mount two stopwatches on top of a clipboard. When the car came by on the first laugh you would start the first watch. On the next lap, you would stop the first one and start the second one simultaneously. Then you would write down the time from the first watch, and then repeat the process in reverse.
This electronic watch would do that for you. Rather than hitting a “Stop” button, you would press a “Split” button. It would freeze the first lap time but continue timing the next lap. You could see the lap time frozen but continued counting in the background. You would then press a “Continue” button to see the next lap. After 4 laps it would give you your total time. You could also configure it for the size of the track. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway is 2.5 miles. This stopwatch automatically converts the time into mph for each lap and the four-lap average.
It cost $75 which was probably about the equivalent of $150 or more in today’s money. But I absolutely had to have it. The guy in the gift shop let me try it out before I purchased it. It had 4 buttons and they were slightly recessed in the front surface of the device. I couldn’t get my finger to poke down into the hole. But I trusted in my ingenuity and the mechanical skills of my dad. I bought the watch, brought it home, and told Dad we were going to take it apart and wire in some pushbuttons that I could use. There was every possibility that the process would totally destroy my brand-new stopwatch. But I was willing to take the risk.
We did it! We soldered in a small ribbon cable about 18 inches long and on the other end connected 4 micro switches. It worked beautifully.
That wasn’t the only electronic gamble that my dad and I took to enhance my race-watching experience. We performed the same kind of electronic surgery on a video camera.
We had a VHS VCR that was “convertible”. It would convert from a tabletop VCR with a tuner and timer into a portable recorder to which you could connect a camera. It was an RCA Selectavision VFP-170. It was in 2 pieces. One of the pieces was the tuner, power supply, timer, etc. The other piece detached and was the recording mechanism where you put the tape. It had battery power so you could use it on the go with a video camera. This was in the early days of VCRs and home video cameras. It wasn’t a camcorder the likes of which you might’ve been familiar with. It was a camera and recorder separate. I don’t recall exactly when I purchased it but some Google searches reveal it was released in 1981 and I’m certain I got it before the next model came out. So it had to be right around then.
The VCR had cost me about $1200. I purchased that particular model VCR in anticipation of eventually purchasing a camera. The camera cost $650. Again this was in the early 1980s so you can probably double that in today’s dollars.
Most people had to carry the recorder in a shoulder bag or backpack and then hold the camera with a cable connecting to it. I simply put the camera bag on the back of my wheelchair. We mounted the camera on a homemade gimbal on my armrest that would allow me to pan left and right or tilt up and down. The problem was, how do I press the pause/record button and work the zoom?
The trigger mechanism was in the handle of the camera. We took it apart, wired in 3 micro switches on the end of the cable, and it all worked. With the recorder in the bag on the back of my wheelchair my mom would hit the record and pause buttons. Then I could use my remote pause button to start and stop the camera as well as zoom in and out..
I’ve included some video I shot with that camera in the YouTube version of this podcast. You can also see photos I found of the equipment as well as a similar VCR my uncle Keith had. One time I used both VCRs to edit tape. It’s so much easier to edit video now on a computer. I would have had a lot more than editing footage if I had such a PC in those days.
My goal each year was to get at least one brief shot or still frame of every car that qualified in a particular year. I think I only accomplish that one time. But I was very obsessive about it.
I mentioned previously that I purchased a season pass which will allow you entry to the Speedway every day except race day. It also included a garage pass.
One day I was in the Gasoline Alley garage area watching mechanics work on a car owned by Roger Penske. If you ask who my favorite driver is, most of the time I will say, “Whoever is driving for Penske.” Cars owned by Penske have won the Indy 500 a record 20 times with the 20th win coming this year by Josef Newgarden.
One of Penske’s mechanics was admiring my camera setup. I told him how we had to take it apart, rewire it, and put it back together so that I could use it. I also showed him my stopwatch similarly modified. I said, “I like buying high-tech toys and then gambling that I can modify them to do what I want them to do.”
He replied, “That sounds like my job here. But in my case, Roger is footing the bill.” That is Roger Penske.
Maybe that’s why I’m such a huge Roger Penske fan. We aren’t afraid to gamble with money to get the enjoyment we want.
In November 2019, Penske purchased the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the rights to the Indy 500 race itself, and ownership of the IndyCar series from the Hulman Family for an undisclosed amount.
When I heard about the purchase I was very happy knowing that the facility was in good hands. I was never a big fan of the management of the Hulman Family who had owned the Speedway since 1945.
Penske put millions of dollars into upgrading the fan experience including new restrooms, new video screens, better concession stands, and other amenities. Unfortunately, Covid hit and the 2020 race was postponed from May to August and was run without fans in attendance. The fans would not get to use those new improvements until the following year. I sort of felt sorry for Roger Penske who put all that money into upgrading the fan experience and there was no one there to enjoy it.
Back in the day, touring the garage area with my video camera gave me great opportunities to talk to mechanics and some very famous race drivers. My most memorable encounter was the day I got to talk to raising legend Mario Andretti. Although he only won the Indy 500 once in 1964, he has amassed massive accomplishments not only in IndyCar but NASCAR, Formula One, and sports car endurance racing at Le Mans.
He was in front of his garage sitting in a golf cart with his feet propped up. He was waiting for the crew to make some changes to his car. There was no one around so I rolled up and said, “Hi.”
We had a very friendly conversation. Along the way, I asked, “I heard on the radio you’re going to go to Formula One for return next year and will not be back here.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear,” he replied.
Maybe I should have been a sports journalist. It sounds like I had a scoop straight from the source himself. Although he was very gracious and I didn’t feel like I was intruding, I didn’t want to bother him for long so I moved along and said goodbye.
A day or two later, I was watching some Penske mechanics work on a car and someone worked up behind me and started leaning on my wheelchair. The person said, “How ya doin’ pal?”
My reaction was who the hell is calling me “pal” and why the fuck are they leaning on my wheelchair? That’s a big invasion of my space. My wheelchair is part of me and I’m not a piece of furniture you can lean on. I thought about just taking off hoping they would fall flat on their face. That would teach and not to lean on wheelchairs. Instead, I just mumbled, “I’m okay”.
After maybe 20 seconds, I could feel them let go and walk away. I turned around quickly to see who it was. It was Mario Andretti! Suddenly I was elated. Mario called me his pal. Mario called me his pal. Wow! If I could have jumped up and down I would have. Mario can lean on my wheelchair anytime.
By the way, my cousin Nancy who is also disabled and in a wheelchair was also a huge fan of Mario and we have many photos and videos of her with the famous driver. He was always very gracious towards her.
Anyway, fast-forward to 2006. I’m at the movies watching the Disney/Pixar feature “Cars” because of course I’m a fan of not only racing but CGI computer graphics. It was a movie seemingly made just for me.
The film stars voice talent from Paul Newman who was an accomplished race driver himself as well as a substantial part for seven-time NASCAR champ Richard Petty playing essentially himself even though in the film they just referred to him as “The King.” Additionally, there are cameos by Darrell Waltrip, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Michael Schumacher, and none other than my pal–Mario Andretti.
Mario’s brief scene is 95 minutes into the film. A minor character named “Fred” is trying to get into the race track to watch his friend Lightning McQueen in the final race. Andretti is there and greets him saying, “Good morning to you… Fred.” The Andretti car character is looking down at Fred’s bumper and sees his name on the license plate. That’s the only reason he knew the character’s name was Fred.
Fred is delighted and amazed that Mario knows his name. He jumps up and down joyously shouting, “Mario knows who I am. Mario knows who I am!” I started laughing hysterically in the theater because he was exuding the same enthusiasm I got when the real Mario called me “pal.” People in the theater looked at me like, “Okay, it was funny but not that funny.”
It was doubly funny for me because when I was about six years old all of the kids at Roberts school got to go to the Shine Circus for a free matinee. Before the show began, a bunch of clowns came around to entertain all of us young handicapped kids. I’ve never been afraid of clowns nor am I impressed by clowns. Even at a young age, I thought a clown was just some schmuck with goofy makeup on doing cheap magic tricks and pratfalls. One clown came up to me and did some sort of bad sleight-of-hand but he called me by my name. That freaked me out. When I got home I asked my mom, “How could he have known my name?”
Mom said, “You idjit… You have a name tag on.”
So that’s what really happened. But I have a confession to make. That’s not the story I’ve been telling for the past 18 years. The way I’ve been telling the story for years was that in the movie, Mario was talking to one of those little tire-changing forklift characters and said, “How ya doin’ pal.” I thought in the next sentence he referred to the character by name after reading his license plate with the name on it. I then went on to tell the story about the clown and my name tag. When recounting the tale I added, “My guess is that Mario calls everyone ‘pal’ and that’s why they wrote that into the story.”
In preparing this podcast, I logged into DisneyPlus, found the film “Cars”, and looked for the scene. Much to my surprise, Mario never calls the guy “pal”. The story I’ve been telling for years isn’t true.
I seriously thought about telling my legendary version rather than the true version. However, I decided that for once I would tell the true story first instead of using the old adage, “When the legend becomes fact… Print the legend.” Then I would explain that I’ve been telling an embellished version all these years. I would have bet good money that the Mario character in the film used the word “pal” but I would have lost.
Next week we will tell more stories about my history as a race fan including the first time I ever attended the race in person. I will share with you a magazine article I wrote about the experience – my second published article in Indianapolis Monthly Magazine.
As I mentioned in a previous episode, I’m cutting back on my weekly schedule of podcasts. So I can’t say for certain when I next episode will be. I’m going to try to go every other week but I can’t guarantee that My life is pretty complicated right now.
So, if you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and other exclusive content. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.
As always, my deepest thanks to my financial supporters. Your support means more to me than words can express.
Even if you cannot provide financial support. Please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience. I just want more people to be able to hear my stories.
All of my back episodes are available and I encourage you to check them out if you’re new to this podcast. If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you found this podcast.
I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.
Contemplating Life – Episode 66 – “I Was Nearly Murdered”
In this episode, I talk about a harrowing experience I just had in the hospital that nearly cost me my life. We will return to my regular topics soon.
Links of Interest
- Ascension St. Vincent Hospital Indianapolis W. 86th St.: https://healthcare.ascension.org/locations/indiana/ineva/indianapolis-ascension-st-vincent-hospital-indianapolis
- Bishop Chatrad of Indianapolis on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silas_Chatard
- History of St. Vincent Hospital: https://historicindianapolis.com/history-of-st-vincent-hospitals-fall-creek-building/
- Prusa i3 MK3 3D printer: https://blog.prusa3d.com/original-prusa-i3-mk3-bloody-smart_7201/
- Micro Center retail computer store Indianapolis: https://www.microcenter.com/site/stores/indianapolis.aspx
- Creality Ender S1 3D printer: https://store.creality.com/products/ender-3-s1-3d-printer-aa7d
- IU Health Methodist Hospital: https://iuhealth.org/find-locations/iu-health-methodist-hospital
- Explanation of ENFit connectors: https://www.coramhc.com/patients/enfit
- Portex Cuffed Trach like I use: https://www.healthproductsforyou.com/p-smiths-medical-portex-blue-line-ultra-cuffed-tracheostomy-tube.html
- Ascension Healthcare Cyber Security Event: https://about.ascension.org/en/cybersecurity-event
- Passy Muir Speaking Valve: https://www.passy-muir.com/
Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/contemplatinglife
Where to listen to this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/contemplatinglife
YouTube playlist of this and all other episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFFRYfZfNjHL8bFCmGDOBvEiRbzUiiHpq
YouTube Version
Shooting Script
Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to a very special episode of Contemplating Life. Episode 66.
You might have noticed this episode is extremely late. I’ve been busy trying not to die. The title of this episode is “I Was Nearly Murdered.” That is only a slight exaggeration. It was more like negligent homicide but my life was still at risk. That doesn’t include the health challenges that I’ve had recently. In the past 45 days, I’ve been in 2 different hospitals 4 different times and that doesn’t include an in-and-out trip to the ER to get my G-tube replaced on May 5.
Let’s start at the beginning… Let’s see…The earth formed, the dinosaurs came and went… No, We are not going to do that again. We will have a flashback to the day I was born but let’s start this story with Saturday, April 13, 2024. I had been having some respiratory issues for a couple of days and by Saturday it was bad enough that I thought I needed to get checked out at the hospital. I took an ambulance to St. Vincent Hospital on W. 86th St. here in Indianapolis. St. Vincent is the only hospital I’ve ever been to. Well, actually it’s been 2 different St. Vincent hospitals.
There have been four locations for St. Vincent Hospital over its history. It was founded in 1881 by Indianapolis Bishop Silas Francis Chatard and a religious order called The Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul. I highly encourage you to read the article I linked in the description chronicling its history. For our purposes, my story starts with the third incarnation of St. Vincent Hospital on Fall Creek Blvd. between Capital Avenue and Illinois Street. That was the hospital where I was born as were 50% of all children born in Indianapolis between 1913 and 1974. The St. Vincent Hospital on W. 86th St. is the only other hospital I had ever been in. It was opened in 1974 and I believe my first visit would have been in the spring of 1979.
Anyway, back to April 13, 2024… A chest x-ray confirmed what I suspected. I had some mild pneumonia in my lower left lung. I was admitted to the hospital and put on IV antibiotics. Anytime I am admitted to the hospital, I have to go to the ICU because I use a ventilator to help me sleep at night. It’s not that I’m ventilator-dependent. It’s more like an overblown CPAP machine. You can’t use a CPAP when you have a trach. Sometimes I feel guilty about being in the ICU when I’m not really very sick but that’s their policy and I like the extra attention. The nurses enjoy taking care of a patient who isn’t critically ill. It was an uneventful stay and I was out two days later on Monday the 15th. I was confident I was fully recovered. They sent me home with oral antibiotics which I completed. Everything was okay after that.
The next significant event was Tuesday, May 7 when my friend Rich came over to help me repair my 3D printer. I have a Prusa MK3 that I purchased about six years ago and it has given me wonderful service up until recently. A failed print resulted in a huge glob of melted plastic spread all over the extruder. It has taken me several attempts to recover from his failure.
Several months ago, when I still didn’t have the printer working properly, it was going to cost me at least $100 just to get someone to look at it. A new Micro Center store opened on the northeast side of town. They had a Creality Ender S1 printer that usually lists for $450 on sale for $150. I desperately needed a 3D printer and it was just too good a deal to pass up.
I have regretted the decision ever since. The machine works but it just doesn’t work as well as my good old Prusa. You get what you pay for. I still didn’t have the money to pay for someone to look at the old machine. I thought perhaps Rich and I might be able to do something with it ourselves since I didn’t like the new printer.
I was pretty sure all I needed was to reinstall the nozzle in the extruder. It was leaking plastic around the edges. When we got the old nozzle out, it was in pretty bad shape so we decided to replace it completely. Fortunately, I had several in stock.
The normal operating temperature for a 3D printer is between 210° C and 230° C depending on the plastic you use. The instructions for replacing a nozzle say that you should crank up the temperature to about 270°C. From my previous misadventures with the printer, there was melted plastic all over the heat block. At that temperature, PLA plastic will vaporize into smoke. It’s possible that the PETG plastic that the printer is made from could also melt although I don’t think it did.
Vaporized PLA plastic doesn’t smell very bad, but it does tend to stick in your sinuses and you continue to smell it for a day or so. At one point we opened the window and turned on my ceiling fan. Part of the problem was that neither Rich nor I knew what we were doing. So we had to have the thing overheated longer than should have been necessary.
On a previous occasion when I tried to remove that big blob of plastic from the failed print, my roommate Josh helped me clear it by melting the plastic away with a soldering iron. That had also created vapors that stuck in my sinuses. A few days after that, I noticed that I had a lot of secretions in my lungs and I had to do more trach suctioning than usual. It was more than a week until things got back to normal. Still, it was manageable.
While Rich and I were working, we should have opened the window sooner but we didn’t. I kept thinking, “We’re almost done.” It’s harder than you think to screw in a tiny nozzle that is 270° C. When we had done this before, I didn’t have very good tools. It was still difficult even with the right size metric socket wrench.
The following day, I could still smell burnt plastic but I did not notice anything wrong with my lungs.
By the second day, Thursday, May 9, I had to begin doing excessive amounts of trach suctioning. This continued throughout the weekend. I figured this was the same thing that happened when I inhaled fumes when Josh was helping me.
My roommate Barb had been having recurring intestinal issues but woke up Monday morning May 13 with severe breathing difficulty. As my home health aide was getting me dressed, Barb’s son Josh told me that Barb needed to go to the hospital. I told him no problem. I would get someone to come stay with me. As soon as I was up in my wheelchair I began calling friends and quickly found someone who could be here in about a half-hour.
Josh called 911 and paramedics from Fire Station 31 just a few blocks away arrived. I went to the living room and found Barb sitting on the sofa gasping for air. The paramedics put an oximeter on her finger and it registered in the low 80s. It should be well above 90%. Josh had already given her one breathing treatment but the paramedics put her on oxygen and more nebulizer medication. By the time the ambulance arrived a minute or two later, her oxygen was back up to 90.
The entire incident was quite scary for me and everyone involved. It will have long-lasting consequences that we may discuss in future episodes.
My friends Stu and Pat Byrum arrived about 20 minutes later to stay with me. Josh took off to the hospital to be with his mom.
My friends and I picked out a movie to watch but it was interrupted frequently because I needed trach suctioning. Pat has done it many times before but we were having a particularly difficult time getting it cleared. I could tell she was concerned but I kept trying to reassure her that everything was okay.
Somewhere along the way, I developed a low-grade fever of just over 100. Tylenol took care of it easily. My sister arrived at about 6 PM to take over my care. My home health aide also returned to put me back to bed.
Each Tuesday and Thursday, I have a respite nurse who stays with me from 9:30 AM until 4 PM so that my roommates can have time off to go to the doctor, run errands, or just get out of the house for a while. I kept Nurse Toni busy all afternoon Tuesday doing breathing treatments and suctioning. By the time she left at 4 PM, she was worn out and I was in pretty good shape. My friend Judy arrived to stay with me until my sister Carol could relieve her. I think Judy only had to do perhaps one suctioning if at all.
There was a miscommunication with my home health aide (entirely my fault) as to whether or not I needed her for the evening shift. Carol ended up putting me to bed and by then I was needing yet more suctioning. Carol noted that my secretions were extremely thick, had turned yellow, and even looked a bit chunky. My fever had returned.
Carol suggested I needed to go to the hospital and I quickly agreed. This was more than just a little irritation from the 3D printer fumes. It was likely that whatever sent Barb to the hospital the day before was giving me fits as well. Or even if it was just the irritation from the fumes, it was way beyond anything I had experienced previously.
We packed up everything I needed to be prepared to stay in the hospital. We packed up my laptop and got my ventilator ready to transport because I like to use my own vent when I’m in the hospital. I would go by ambulance. Carol would bring my stuff in her car in case I was admitted. I was pretty sure I would be.
Anytime I go to the hospital, we have to clear out my bedroom of my wheelchair, bedside table, and Hoyer patient lift to make room for them to bring a gurney in and drag me over onto it. We also have to move a small sofa table in the living room to make it easier to get the gurney down the hallway. It’s quite a production to get me in an ambulance. It’s a good thing I’ve not had to do it in a dire emergency.
The ambulance arrived and they loaded me up for a trip to St. Vincent. Along the way, I had a pleasant conversation with the medic who rode in the back with me. She had just gotten back from a trip to Disney World. I asked, “Did your kids enjoy it?” She chuckled and said, “Uhh… I don’t have any kids. It was just me and my boyfriend.” She explained that she had family in the area and was visiting them. But the highlight of the trip was still the trip to Disney.
Whenever the ambulance is about five minutes away from the hospital, they get on the radio and ask the dispatcher for a line to the hospital ER. They report a description of the patient, me, my vitals, and what I’m coming in for. The dispatcher notified them that St. Vincent was on full diversion. They were not accepting any EMS patients.
Apparently on May 8 the entire Ascension Healthcare Network of over 140 facilities spread across 20 states was hit by a ransomware cyber attack. They had to shut down their entire network and start using paper record-keeping. They had no access to old patient records from previous visits. Although the ER was open to walk-in patients, they were not accepting EMS patients.
The question now was, “Where do I go?” As I mentioned, I had never been to any other hospital. I asked them, “What is closest?” The choices were Indiana University/Methodist Hospital or Eskenazi Hospital. I didn’t have a coin to flip so I picked Methodist because that’s where they take injured IndyCar drivers. While I had not hit a concrete wall at over 230 mph, I figured if it was good enough for the Indy drivers it was good enough for me.
I had my iPhone with me so I had the medic call Carol who was also just a few minutes from St. Vincent. We both turned around and headed for Methodist.
When I arrived at the ER, at first they were just going to put me behind a curtain but when I explained that I needed suctioning they moved me to a small ER room. I was seen by a resident ER doctor almost immediately which is unusual. Then again, I’m usually in for something minor like a G-tube replacement or a urinary infection. When you come in with breathing difficulty, you get quicker attention.
They started an IV, drew blood, and took me for a chest x-ray. At St. Vincent, they use portable X-ray machines but at Methodist, the X-ray department is right down the hall from the ER so they just roll you down there and roll you back. When I returned from the x-ray, Carol was waiting for me. She had stopped to grab a bite to eat the way. She knew it was going to be a long evening and she was right.
Carol and I passed the time talking about the day’s events and our concerns about Barb who by now had a confirmed diagnosis of pneumonia and was still in the hospital.
Finally, the resident returned to tell me there was a slight fogginess in my chest x-ray that could be pneumonia. He said, “You said you had to do extensive breathing treatments and suctioning. Do you have what you need at home to treat this?” Much to my surprise, I answered, “No.” When I thought about the difficulty that Pat had suctioning me on Monday and the excessive amount of work I put Nurse Toni through earlier that day, as well as the friends I had lined up to be with me on Wednesday, I did not have sufficient backup to deal with this crisis of my own. The doctor replied, “That’s all I need to hear. We will admit you.”
In retrospect, even if Barb had not been in the hospital and I had had all the support i usually have and I needed, I really did need to be admitted. And I don’t think I would’ve had any difficulty convincing them of that. I think it was more of a case of, “If you really really want to go home I guess I can release you but if you want to stay then stay.” I needed to stay.
Unlike St. Vincent which automatically sends me to ICU whether I’m in need of intensive care or not, Methodist Hospital has a Pulmonary Care Unit and they would be sending me there. Unfortunately, it’s a small unit and it took until the following afternoon to get me in a room in the PCU. Carol went home around 2 AM. I did not want to get on the ventilator until I was settled in the room. I didn’t want to be moved when I could not communicate while on the vent. I can sleep a little bit without the vent. I estimate and not have gotten 3 hours of sleep max.
About a year ago, I had my G-tube replaced as I do about every six months. There is a new style of G-tube with a different type of fitting on the top called ENFit. It screws on about one-half twist. It is unique to feeding systems. That is a safety feature so that you can’t accidentally put IV medication into a G-tube or worse yet put feeding formula into an IV.
Unfortunately, Methodist Hospital had never heard of it. They didn’t have any syringes that would connect to my G-tube. That meant that they couldn’t grind up pills in water and give them to me via my G-tube. They had to partially disassemble the G-tube in a way that wasn’t intended to be disassembled to give me medication. It also meant I would not be able to get G-tube feedings. The next morning, Carol brought a half-dozen or so of my ENFit syringes from home.
It wasn’t until about 2 PM Wednesday afternoon that I was finally able to get a G-tube feeding. That was 23 hours since my previous feeding. Being dehydrated and not getting any nutrition or calories is not good for the healing process.
Normally at St. Vincent, they let me use my ventilator from home but at Methodist they wanted me to use their ventilator. That was okay. I was a little bit ambivalent about it but it didn’t give me any difficulty.
A very nice nurse checked me into my room in the PCU on Wednesday afternoon. I don’t recall her name. The shift changed at 6 PM (St. Vincent changes at 7 so that was just another thing that was different about this place.)
The new night nurse seemed quite friendly. She appeared to be in her late 50s or perhaps 60 years old. She said something like, “Sorry you’re going to lose your cute young nurse. You’re stuck with an old battleax like me.” I didn’t mind. She exuded an air of confidence that in her many years of nursing, she had seen and done everything. It turns out she was a “traveling nurse.” These nurses are not employed directly by the hospital but are on contract with them for a few months at a time.
I explained that I needed to get on the vent soon because I had only had three hours of sleep. I explained to her the signals that I use when I cannot talk more on the ventilator. If I wiggle my eyebrows up and down that means “Yes.” If I twitch my mouth left and right it means “No.” If I make a clicking noise with my tongue, it means I want their attention. I was quite explicit, “If you can’t figure out what I want after a couple of yes or no questions, just call the respiratory therapist to take me off of the ventilator temporarily and I will tell you what I want once I can talk.” She seemed to understand. I explained I would not be able to use any of the various types of nurse call buttons they have available. She agreed to check in on me periodically.
Despite my lack of sleep, the tension of everything that was going on kept me awake. Around midnight she checked in and I clicked my tongue to get her attention. I was going to need to get off of the vent so I could direct her on how to comfortably put me on a bedpan. I was hoping that she would ask me a couple of yes/no questions and then call respiratory but she didn’t. She seemed hell-bent on trying to figure out what I wanted. But she was no good at reading lips. All I was saying was, “Call respiratory”. Rather than do as we had agreed, she brought another young nurse in to attempt to read my lips but that nurse had no more luck than did Nurse Battleax.
At one point they asked, “Do you want off of the ventilator?” and I signaled “Yes.”
Before we proceed, I need to explain briefly how a trach works. It’s a simple curved tube 7 mm in diameter which enters my windpipe through a hole in my neck. Normally there is a cap on the outside called a “Passy Muir Speaking Valve”. It is a one-way valve that allows air to be inhaled. But when you try to talk or exhale, it closes the trach allowing the air to come up your windpipe across your vocal cords soon you can speak. When you are on the ventilator, you remove the valve and attach a hose from the vent on the outside of the trach where the valve once was.
Air comes to the hose and into your lungs. However, it could escape back out your mouth and nose which is no good. The bottom end of the trach tube is surrounded by an inflatable cuff. There is a tiny tube extending out from the trach. You inject air into the tube and it blows up the inner cuff. This blocks off your upper airway so that the air coming from the vent doesn’t escape out your nose and mouth but is exhaled through the trach into the vent tubing where there is an exhaust port.
On the end of the tiny tube, there is a small balloon that is an indicator of how much air is in the trach cuff. When the tiny blue balloon on the outside is inflated, you know that the inner cuff is inflated.
When removing me from the vent, you have to connect a syringe to the little blue tube and extract all of the air. When the external balloon is flat, you know that the internal cuff is flat.
If you put on the speaking valve which is one way in, but you do not deflate the cuff, your airway is totally blocked. You can inhale but you cannot exhale.
The nurse removed the hose from my trach and replaced the speaking valve without deflating the cuff. I began signaling no, no, no frantically and clicking my tongue but she proceeded anyway. I was completely unable to breathe. Eventually, she sensed the panic I was experiencing and removed the valve allowing me to breathe. My airway was totally blocked for at least 20 seconds but it seemed like an eternity.
On several occasions, my dad, my roommate Barb, and I believe perhaps even my sister Carol have accidentally forgotten to deflate the cuff before putting on the valve. I just click my tongue a couple of times and they say, “Oh crap! I nearly killed you.” and they quickly remove the valve and we laugh about it. In a future episode tell you about the first time my dad did it.
That’s not what happened here. This wasn’t a, “Oh crap! I forgot.” This nurse was totally clueless about what she was doing. She had no idea that you needed to deflate the cuff first. The other nurse stood there and watched and was similarly unaware that I was unable to breathe at all because of their actions.
It was bad enough that my airway was completely blocked for nearly 20 seconds, but had they chosen to give up, leave the room, and call the respiratory therapist, I would’ve passed out. Fortunately, I was connected to an oximeter and heart monitor but they would’ve had to call the code to resuscitate me. Even if they were able to do so successfully, I probably would’ve ended up with broken ribs at least. Given my overall weak condition and the fact that I was weak from my illness, they might not have been able to resuscitate me at all.
I could have been dead.
Fortunately, they removed the valve, put me back on the vent, and finally called the respiratory therapist to take me off the vent properly. The therapist took me off the vent but I needed my trach suctioned before I could speak clearly. I insisted the nurse not leave the room until I could speak to her. When I could speak and breathe easily, I explained to her in no uncertain terms that she had nearly murdered me. I use those exact words. I described exactly what she did wrong. The respiratory therapist who was standing there was appalled.
After I said my piece, I explained that I wanted to get on the bedpan. She got me on. I did my business. She got me off. I told her I didn’t want to get back on the ventilator. I was too scared to be in that situation again.
I tried to get to sleep but couldn’t. Eventually, she came back in around 3 AM and I told her to call respiratory to put me back on the vent and keep your damned hands off. I told respiratory I wanted to get off around 6 AM when the shift changed. She agreed.
I might have gotten three more hours of sleep but maybe not that much.
The next morning I spoke to the day nurse who was the same one I had before. She was very nice. I explained to her what had happened and she had already heard. News of the incident was spreading fast. I told her I wanted to speak to a supervisor. She sent in a woman named Olivia who was the “Charge Nurse” for the unit.
Olivia had already had a meeting with the supervisor of respiratory therapy. I explained in great detail the series of events. She told me that it wasn’t just my request that the nurse should have called respiratory to take me off, it is their absolute policy that they are not to touch the ventilator and they should call RT.
I said, “That’s even more disturbing that you had one nurse doing something she wasn’t trained to do. It violated not only my instructions but also your policy. The thing that really concerns me is there was another nurse was standing there watching and was just as clueless as to what was going on. You have two nurses in a Pulmonary Care Unit who have no idea how a trach works and who violated policy watching one another. One is a mistake. Two indicates a pattern. You have a systemic problem in this unit. The bottom line is even if you promise me I never get either of those nurses again, I can’t trust this unit. I’m leaving here today and if the doctor will not discharge me I’m leaving AMA.”
By the way, I won’t bother philosophizing about the coincidence that the letters AMA stand for “against medical advice” and “American Medical Association” but there has to be a joke in there somewhere but I haven’t got the time to figure one out.
Anyway… The charge nurse was highly apologetic and very sympathetic. She understood why I felt the way I did. I told her I’m not the kind of guy who’s going to file a lawsuit or call a press conference. In retrospect, I could have called the police and I had the woman arrested. The bottom line was I wasn’t going to stick around and risk my life. Just call it a teachable moment. But I’m not staying.
I was later visited by the unit supervisor who was also appropriately sympathetic and apologetic over the incident. I gave her exactly the same speech I gave the charge nurse.
When my doctor arrived for rounds that morning, I told her what happened. I asked, “Am I okay to leave?” I knew her answer would be no and it was, “no.” Then I told her, “Under the circumstances, I have no choice but to check myself out AMA.” She said she would prescribe oral antibiotics. I explained I would be going to St. Vincent at the earliest opportunity.
Sometime before I spoke to all of these supervisors, I had the day nurse set up my laptop computer on the bedside table. I made a voice call via Facebook Messenger to my sister Carol.
“Carol it’s me. You’ve always said any time I didn’t feel safe that I should call you. Well, I don’t feel safe here. The nurse didn’t know what she was doing and tried to take me off the vent wrong. She put the speaking valve on without deflating the balloon and I couldn’t breathe for nearly 20 seconds. It wasn’t one of those, ‘Whoops I forgot.’ She was totally clueless as to what she was doing. She had no idea she nearly killed me. If she hadn’t removed the valve when she did I could’ve been dead.”
Carol has been babysitting her one-year-old grandson for my niece Alaina. My niece was off work that day because she was going on a field trip with her daughter. I told Carol, “Don’t ruin their field trip. But if you can get someone else to cover for your babysitting, can you come stay with me until we can get the ambulance to bring me home? If not, I will just go home after 6 PM whenever you can get there.”
Of course, Carol was furious at what had happened to me. She said she would get back to me as soon as possible. She contacted her other daughter Heather and Heather agreed to fill in babysitting. Soon after, Carol messaged me back, “Don’t bother with the ambulance. I’m coming up there with your wheelchair and your clothes in the van to get you up, dressed, and out of there.”
I was ecstatic.
I checked with the nurse to see if they had a Hoyer lift. They said yes and I messaged Carol.
It was midafternoon when Carol arrived. Not only had she brought my clothes, back brace, and wheelchair. She also brought our lift from home. She said, “I wasn’t sure I knew how to work their lift so just in case, I brought ours.” It was not easy to get my wheelchair and the Hoyer lift in and out of our van. It reminded me of the kind of thing my mother would’ve done under the circumstances. Carol was in full “Tiger Mom” mode and nothing was going to get in her way of getting me out of the place.
Carol is 60 years old. Although she is capable of getting me dressed and into the wheelchair, we typically have my home health aide do it when Carol is taking care of me. It is very difficult for Carol to do it. I think she did it in record time. One of the male nurses gave her a little assistance positioning me in the wheelchair once she had transferred me using the lift. That is always easier as a two-person job.
We packed up all my belongings and got ready to leave. They had said they were giving me oral antibiotics to take home. I thought they were going to deliver it to my room but I had to pick it up in the public pharmacy in the lobby. Carol, who is my designated medical representative and has power of attorney signed the release for my discharge AMA. I asked if there were other discharge papers or instructions and they said, “No. Not when you go AMA.”
I saw the charge nurse Olivia and I thanked her and my dayshift nurse for understanding. “I don’t want to cast aspersions on the entire facility”, I said. “Everyone else has been quite nice to me but I just can’t stay here.” It looked as though the nurses were all about to have a big meeting. My guess is there were lots of big meetings as a result of this incident although I haven’t talked to any of them since then. I don’t know what the end result was.
When we got to the lobby, the pharmacy where I needed to pick up my antibiotics was at the far end of the building. We had to go already over there and all the way back. We loaded up the lift and me in the van which wasn’t easy and we were finally off
Carol offered to take me directly to St. Vincent as a walk-in patient but I explained I only had at most 6 hours of sleep in the past 48 hours. I wanted desperately to get home in my own bed with my trusty emergency call button and my own ventilator. I knew if we went to St. Vincent it would probably be hours before I could get to sleep. I was so exhausted and stressed I was seriously worried I would have a heart attack or something if I didn’t get directly to sleep.
When we got home, then Carol had to drag me and the Hoyer lift out of the van, reassemble the lift, put me back to bed, get me undressed, give me my afternoon G-tube feeding, and get me on the ventilator. It had to be exhausting for her considering she was up in the middle of the night two nights ago with me in the ER.
Josh was home. He left his mom at the hospital because she needed to rest and wouldn’t do so if he was there. He helped out setting up their lift and he set up my laptop.
I mentioned my own home emergency call button. It’s a little device with pushbuttons I hold in my right hand. It allows me to operate my TV, cable box, iPad, and a buzzer that rings in the living room and master bedroom when I need something. A previous version of the box had a backup battery in case of a power outage. But my latest version plugs into my laptop because I figure it’s got a bigger battery than anything I would put in my little box.
Unfortunately, when we were plugging in the power on the laptop, we didn’t get the power cable plugged in all the way. In the middle of the night, the laptop battery went dead and my pushbuttons became unusable. It was my fault for not double-checking it but I was a zombie at that point.
I had gotten my G-tube feeding, got on the ventilator, and fell asleep at about 6 I woke up around midnight to discover the buttons were not working. I should’ve had another G-tube feeding around 9 PM but she let me sleep.
My only way of getting someone’s attention is by making a clicking noise with my tongue. I could hear that Josh was still awake watching TV or playing games online. When I determined he was no longer using his headphones I tried clicking as loudly as I could from time to time. Around 2 AM he realized what that sound was. He saw it was perhaps Barb’s pet hedgehog making noises. He finally realized it was me and called Carol.
Carol had to do a breathing treatment, massive suctioning, and my G-tube feeding. All of that took about 90 minutes. We finally all got back to sleep around 3:30 AM.
The next morning, Carol had to leave to go babysit her grandson again. Josh would stay with me until about 10 AM when my friend Rich would come. My home health aide Kiara arrived around 9 AM. She gave me a bath, got me dressed, and got me up in the wheelchair. She stuck around a little longer to help me and Rich pack up everything for me to go to St. Vincent in my wheelchair van as a walk-in. She is a real blessing in my life as are all of the people I mentioned. (Except for the ones that tried to kill me.)
Anyway, It was a struggle for Rich to get me and the ventilator into the van. He is only a year younger than me. We had carefully packed in two bags. One contained my suction machine in case we needed to pull over en route to the hospital and suction my trach. The other contained my laptop. Rich would drive up to the ER entrance, unload me, and bring the suction machine bag. There is valet parking at the ER.
If they admitted me, which I presumed they would, Rich would carry the suction machine back out to the van because we would not need it. He would also take my wheelchair to the van. He would come back with my laptop bag and my ventilator.
When you go to the ER with respiratory problems, they see you quickly. It was amazing to see the people at St. Vincent using only paper records and no computers. It had been a few days now and they were getting into a routine but it was clearly difficult for them. It was just amazing to watch them work.
When I told the doctors and nurses what I had been through at Methodist, especially since I had checked myself out against medical advice, they didn’t hesitate to admit me. They warned me that they were not operating at peak efficiency because the computers were down. I told him I was aware of that. I said, “I feel safer with you guys under these difficult conditions on your worst day than I would be at Methodist on their best day.”
They had no difficulty lifting me from my wheelchair onto the gurney. I had Rich hang onto my feet as I was being lifted because in the past I got my feet tangled up beneath me when someone had tried to lift me like that and that had been quite painful. The manual lift went smoothly and they got me undressed. Another chest x-ray confirmed there was still some “opacity” which meant slight pneumonia.
I have spent so much time at St. Vincent ER there that I see familiar faces and they recognized me as well. I felt like this place was my second home. I was really happy to be there.
I was assigned a room at about 4 PM. They always bathe you when you first arrive in the ICU. By the time they finished, Rich was there with my laptop and ventilator. He left around 5 PM. He had tickets to an Indianapolis Indians baseball game that night. There was also a Pacers NBA playoff game on TV that he was recording and I would watch live. I told Rich to just leave my wheelchair and everything in the van and leave it parked in my driveway. He would then go home in his car. Josh said Rich looked pretty tired. Again I am so blessed to have someone like him in my life.
By the time I got to the ICU, they all said, “We heard what happened to you at that other hospital Chris. That must’ve been scary.” News of my misadventures reached the ICU from the ER before I did.
This was Friday, May 17. By Tuesday, May 21st, both the doctors and I felt I was ready to go home and I was released. The stay at St. Vincent was uneventful. I had wonderful nurses and I could tell lots of stories about them but that’s not important right now. It was a very pleasant visit.
I had to wait until about 6 PM for an ambulance to take me home. I wasn’t going to make Carol come get me dressed and take me home herself again.
By this time, Barb was back home from the hospital and doing well.
Back at home, throughout the day on Wednesday the 22nd, I still needed breathing treatments and significant suctioning. Way more than I had needed the previous day in the hospital. In the late afternoon, we did a breathing treatment and it broke up a bunch of congestion. We had to struggle to suction it all out. I was having serious difficulty breathing. Barb had an oximeter so we checked my oxygen level and it was in the low 80s which is where hers was when she went to the hospital.
Fortunately, after I caught my breath, it got back up to the low 90s which is where it needed to be. We also took my temperature and it was in the high 99s. I made the difficult decision I had to go back to St. Vincent. I called the hospital to see if they were open to ambulance patients and they said no. That was surprising because while I was still there, they said they were reopening completely.
I was up in my wheelchair so I could go by van. Josh agreed to take me. I offered to go by ambulance to Eskenazi Hospital. I wasn’t going to go back to Methodist. That was for sure. Josh said he didn’t mind taking me. That was a wonderful gesture. I asked if he was comfortable with leaving Barb home alone because she was still recovering. Barb had to phone in her vital signs to the hospital periodically so she was still under the care of the people at the hospital even though she was home. Josh was confident she would be okay and so was she.
Again we packed up my suction machine, ventilator, and laptop and loaded all of that and me into the van. We did the same procedure I had done with Rich. When I got to the ER, they lifted me out of my chair onto the gurney. Carol arrived around 6:30 PM. Josh took her car and she would drive the van. We still weren’t sure if I was going to be readmitted. I might have to get back in the wheelchair, back in the van, and go home. But eventually, another chest x-ray still showed some congestion and they decided to admit me again. Carol took the wheelchair to the van and brought back the ventilator and the laptop. Then I told her she could go home. I forget what time I made it back to the ICU. Another bed bath upon arrival and then I got on my ventilator and got to sleep.
The next morning, Thursday, May 23, I had the same pulmonary doctor I had before. I don’t recall his name. We talked about the situation and agreed we both we had done the right thing by sending me home. He said, “I trusted that if you needed to come back you would and in the end you did. So no second guessing our decisions.” I really liked the guy.
I had a peaceful and uneventful stay until Saturday, May 25. I told the doctors I wasn’t going to push them to send me home but I had to go either Saturday or Monday. Sunday would be the Indy 500 and the traffic around my neighborhood would make it impossible for me to get home.
The ambulance picked me up around 6 PM Saturday evening and I was home in bed by 7 PM.
My weekend home health aide Shatoya had to take an Uber to get to my house Sunday morning because she is temporarily without a vehicle. They had to fight through the race day traffic to get to my house. By the time she got me up, most of the traffic had cleared and we gave her a lift home.
The race was delayed by rain but the weather cleared mid-afternoon and they completed all 500 miles. During the opening ceremonies, there was a flyby of the Air Force Thunderbirds. I went outside to watch them but they flew very low and I could not see them because of trees in the neighborhood. Usually, I can see the military flyby but this time I only heard it.
Normally the race is blacked out in the Indianapolis area but I can watch it on streaming using a VPN to mask my vocation. Because of the rain the delay, the Speedway allowed the blackout to be lifted so I could watch it on cable on our big-screen TV instead of my computer monitor.
It was a very exciting race with several crashes. Fortunately, no one was hurt. There were multiple passes for the lead during the final few laps. Josef Newgarden was victorious for the second year in a row. This was the first back-to-back win for any driver since 2000-2001 wins by Hélio Castroneves.
I was glad to be alive to see it.
I’m recording this on Monday, June 3 and I have been doing well ever since I came home. I’m doing breathing treatments in the morning as a preventative measure but my lungs have been doing quite well.
The doctors never decided if I had some sort of respiratory virus like Barb had or if it was just the fumes from the 3D printer. I think it was the printer fumes but we will never know. Also, we discovered that my suction machine at home wasn’t working right. It could have been that Wednesday at home when we were having so much trouble getting me cleared up, that I really didn’t need to go back to the hospital. I thought we were having trouble getting my lungs cleared because they were in bad shape. It might have been that the machine wasn’t working. We called my supplier and they brought out a replacement machine on Memorial Day. That was much better. I’ve been able to get my lungs cleared much more easily. Again, I don’t know if that contributed to the problem but it sure didn’t help.
Before we sign off, I need to explain that my life is getting a bit complicated right now. Some of it involves a very exciting assistive technology project I’m working on. It’s going to take a lot of my time. Some of it involves some major life changes and tough decisions and making.
As a result, I cannot commit to producing a new podcast every week on a regular schedule. I fully intend to continue the podcast but I will not guarantee when new episodes will arrive. This isn’t the end. It’s just a new phase.
I cannot say when the next episode will be but when I return I will continue with more stories about my history as a race fan including the first time I ever attended the race in person. I had intended to get out at least 2 more episodes about racing before the race itself. That didn’t happen. Anyway, after we wrap up the racing series we will go back to more stories about my college days and my mentors Drs. John and Judith Gersting.
If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and other exclusive content. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.
As always, my deepest thanks to my financial supporters. Your support means more to me than words can express. And thanks also to all the people who helped me get through this health crisis.
Even if you cannot provide financial support. Please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience. I just want more people to be able to hear my stories.
All of my back episodes are available and I encourage you to check them out if you’re new to this podcast. If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you found this podcast.
I will see you next week… Oh well, I’ll see you next time as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.
Contemplating Life – Episode 65 – “30 Days in May”
This week we take a break from reminiscing about my college days to talk about my lifelong obsession with motorsports.
Links of Interest
- Indianapolis Motor Speedway: https://www.indianapolismotorspeedway.com/
- Indianapolis 500 on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indianapolis_500
- Map of Eagledale neighborhood: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Eagledale,+Indianapolis,+IN/@39.8072442,-86.2320776,14.5z/data=!4m6!3m5!1s0x886b56409b63859f:0x218d256940b6bfa!8m2!3d39.8096598!4d-86.2206214!16s%2Fm%2F025v_nc?entry=ttu
- 1961 Indianapolis 500 on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Indianapolis_500
- Norm Hall on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_Hall
- Tony Bettenhausen Sr. on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Bettenhausen
- Tony Bettenhausen Sr. Memorial website: https://indymotorspeedway.com/memorial_1961.html
- 1962 Indianapolis 500 on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1962_Indianapolis_500
- Parnelli Jones on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parnelli_Jones
- Indianapolis Star article about televised coverage of the Indy 500: https://www.indystar.com/story/sports/motor/indy-500/2020/08/17/saga-indy-500-tv-blackout-and-its-fascinating-quirky-stronghold/5518869002/
- Indianapolis Motor Speedway Radio Network on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indianapolis_Motor_Speedway_Radio_Network
- 1964 Indianapolis 500 on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_Indianapolis_500
- Eddie Sachs race driver on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Sachs
- Dave MacDonald race driver on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_MacDonald
- Dave MacDonald tribute website: https://www.davemacdonald.net/
- IMS Snake Pit on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indianapolis_500_traditions#The_Snake_Pit
- Streaking on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaking
- Tom Carnegie track announcers on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Carnegie
- Tom Carnegie mini-documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYhDuACW5rI
- Tom Sneva race driver on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Sneva
- Sneva breaks 200 mph on YouTube: https://youtu.be/dAdrD7lbxBg?si=b8Fj4cbFNK9Qc9PZ&t=152
- Arie Luyendyk race driver on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arie_Luyendyk
- Arie Luyendyk 1996 Track Record run: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCRUNrv-QCU
- Warning: these videos show explicit footage of fatal crashes. Viewer discretion is advised.
- Tony Bettenhausen’s Fatal Crash on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi7gTTQtJjI
- Eddie Sachs and Dave MacDonald fatal crash on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqUv-_hPuhs
- Alternate views of Sachs MacDonald crash on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w62fgBiXz1E
Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/contemplatinglife
Where to listen to this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/contemplatinglife
YouTube playlist of this and all other episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFFRYfZfNjHL8bFCmGDOBvEiRbzUiiHpq
YouTube version
Shooting Script
Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 65 of Contemplating Life.
This week we take a break from reminiscing about my college days to talk about my lifelong obsession with motorsports. In May 1959, just two months short of my fourth birthday, my family moved into a newly built house in the Eagledale neighborhood on the northwest side of Indianapolis. 65 years later I still live in the same house located about a quarter-mile northwest of the fourth turn of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. IMS is the site of the annual Indianapolis 500 race. You can hear the cars practicing throughout the month of May in preparation for the big race. My parents are natives of Indianapolis and have been race fans for most of their life and living so close to the track it’s only natural that I caught the bug as well.
The title of this episode is “30 Days in May” which may seem strange because obviously there are 31. But in Indianapolis, we talk about 30 days in May and that is often the title of several TV shows about the Indy 500. That’s because traditionally, practice for the Indy 500 opened on May 1 and culminated on May 30 with the race. When I was growing up, May 30 was the fixed date to celebrate Memorial Day. In 1971, Memorial Day and other federal holidays were made into Monday holidays. Practice sessions for the race still began on May 1 but the race was moved to the Sunday before Memorial Day giving Monday as a potential rain date. Practice for the race now starts even later in May but people still talk about racing in Indianapolis as occupying “the month of May” as if it was still taking up 30 of the 31 days of the month.
As I mentioned before, my parents were both lifelong race fans. I heard many stories about their visits to the track when they were young. My dad’s favorite story was from his teenage years. He and a bunch of his buddies got in a car and lined up extremely early in the morning to get a good parking spot in the infield. It was probably at the north end of the track inside the third or fourth turns. He was designated to walk the entire length of the infield to Gate 2 on 16th St. at the south end of the track to meet my mom and the other gals. This was before they were married. He then escorted them to where the guys had already been hitting the beer pretty heavily. As he walked the length of the infield escorting a half dozen attractive women, other guys kept calling to him saying, “Hey buddy… That’s not fair! You got to share some of that with us.” Dad said he just kept smiling and walking and enjoying all the attention being surrounded by all these pretty women.
In May 1961, my parents took me to the track for the first time. I was a couple of months short of my sixth birthday. There are photos of me that day in the YouTube version of this podcast.
It was on a Saturday or Sunday when qualifications were underway. Only the fastest 33 qualifiers would make the race and in those days there were many more than 33 entries so you’re not guaranteed a spot unless you were in the top 33 speeds. According to Wikipedia, 26 drivers failed to qualify for the 1961 race. Qualifications consisted of running four consecutive fast laps. Your average speed for those four laps was your qualifying time. Qualifying took place on the two weekends prior to the race. I don’t know which of the four qualifying days we attended back in ‘61.
We sat in the grandstands on the outside of the main straight. My dad carried me and my wheelchair up a few steps, removed a folding chair, and put my wheelchair in its place. I had been hearing racecars from my house since I was three years old and had seen them on TV but seeing it in person and hearing the roar of the engines up close was a phenomenal experience.
On the other side of the track were the pits where the cars were serviced. There was another grandstand beyond that facing us. I could see people in the top row of that far grandstand turning around to look at the cars as they went down the backstretch. I thought that the backstretch was just beyond those grandstands. I didn’t realize that they were almost a quarter mile away but with something to block the view, you could see the cars going down the backstretch from high atop the stands.
Later in the day, my dad took me through the Gate 7 tunnel under the track into the infield. As we walked along a paved walkway behind the infield grandstands, I thought we were walking on the backstretch of the track itself. I kept saying to my dad, “Don’t we need to get out of the way?” He explained the backstretch was way over that way as he pointed east.
While we had been sitting in the front stretch grandstands, driver Norm Hall spun out in the first turn beyond where I could see. The PA announcer said, “Norm Hall hit the wall.”
I said, “Hey, that rhymes.” And I begin singing, “Norm Hall hit the wall. Norm Hall hit the wall.” Although the driver wasn’t injured, Dad stopped me and explained that hitting a wall at over 140 mph was not something to sing about.
When we went into the infield, Dad took me to the fence around the famous Gasoline Alley garage area. Looking through the fence I could see the damaged car that had been driven by Norm Hall. I realized how right my dad was.
I’ve told that story many times over the years but as I was looking up details about that era while preparing this episode, I just learned something new about the 1961 Indianapolis 500 season. According to Wikipedia, Tony Bettenhausen, Sr. was killed in a crash during a practice run on May 12, 1961. That was the Friday before the first weekend of qualifying. Wikipedia says, “He was testing a car for Paul Russo. It was determined that an anchor bolt fell off the front radius rod support, permitting the front axle to twist and misalign the front wheels when the brakes were applied. The car plunged into the outside wall, then rode along the top, snapping fence poles and tearing segments of the catch fence. The car came to rest upside-down on top of the outside wall, and Bettenhausen was killed instantly. Before the time trials Bettenhausen had been the favorite to become the first driver to break the 150 mph barrier at the Speedway.”
I’m certain that my dad must’ve known the driver had been killed just a few days before. Although he didn’t tell me about that fatal crash, I’m sure that’s why he made sure I understood that racing is a dangerous sport.
The following year, driver Parnelli Jones became the first to break the 150 mph barrier at the track during qualifying. His first lap speed was a track record at 150.729 mph. All four laps of his qualifying attempt were above 150 with a four-lap average of 150.370 mph. I have vague recollections of this milestone. They made a big deal about breaking the 150 barrier
As I researched the 1962 race to see when the 150 barrier was broken, I also read that Norm Hall crashed twice in 1962. He was uninjured the first time but he had another crash in a backup car. He hit the first turn wall backwards and was severely injured, including a fractured left leg and possible skull fracture. He eventually recovered and went on to race in the 1964 and 1965 raising seasons. He died in 1992 at the age of 66.
I don’t recall returning to the track for many years but I remained a race fan. There was extensive news coverage of the race each year. The three major TV stations had film crews at the track every day and there would be a 15-minute segment of the local evening news dedicated to track coverage. If you had occurred there was an accident that day, you were always anxious to see if they had film of it. There would be driver interviews and each station had their own driver expert to comment on the day’s events.
The race itself typically was not televised in those days. According to an article in the Indianapolis Star from August 2020, the race was first televised in 1949 in an attempt to sell televisions. TVs first went on sale in Indianapolis early that year. The Speedway permitted local station WFBM Channel 6 to televise the race live locally. They had three cameras along the front stretch and covered the entire race. It’s estimated that 3000 households tuned in. The race was televised again locally in 1950 and there was talk of a nationally syndicated broadcast but the Speedway decided it would hurt ticket sales and refused to let the race be televised for many years.
Since 1951, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Radio Network has provided live coverage of the race each year and that was my primary way of following the event for many years. We would typically have some sort of cookout or other festivities for Memorial Day and we would sit and wasn’t to the radio intently. My mom would take notes as they would give a rundown of the position of each car about every 20 laps so. She wanted to see where her favorite drivers were. I took up the practice for a while myself.
The 1964 race was memorable for all the wrong reasons. My dad and I were in the backyard listening to the race on the radio. My mom went with some friends to see the race. They had good seats in the infield grandstand of the main stretch. My next-door neighbor Mike Tillery who would’ve been around 11 years old by my estimate had climbed up onto a storage shed in his backyard. Each year at the start of the race, they would release thousands of helium balloons from a tent and he wanted to see the balloons flying through the air. Just a couple laps into the race he shouted, “There must’ve been a big wreck! I can see black smoke.”
Indeed, reports came over the radio that there had been a massive fiery crash in the fourth turn which was the turn closest to my house. The race was stopped while the track was cleaned. We eventually got word that popular veteran driver Eddie Sachs and rookie driver Dave MacDonald were killed in the incident.
My mom could not see the wreck clearly from where she was sitting but she could see the flames and the plume of black smoke. It sickened her when she realized that there had to be drivers burning alive in those flames. She said that when the PA announcer revealed to the crowd that two drivers had been fatally injured, a creepy silence came over the crowd. All you could hear was transistor radios that people had that were listening to the race coverage while they were there. The radios were still on the air because they did not release the news until it was released to the crowd at the Speedway.
My mom did not return to the Speedway for many years. She had been a big fan of Eddie Sachs who was one of the most personable and popular drivers of that era.
I’ve linked a Wikipedia article about the incident. There was controversy because MacDonald’s car was a radical new design. Other drivers had refused to drive it and some drivers who saw it race in practice and in the opening wraps felt that it was a dangerous design and should not have been on the track.
Normally when I talk about historical events, I try to put YouTube clips into my YouTube version of this podcast but I will not be doing that for these fatal crashes. They are quite gruesome. I will provide links to such videos but viewer discretion is highly recommended.
I have a few more stories of fatal accidents at the Speedway that occurred when I was present but I will save those stories for later.
I believe that my next visit to the Speedway must’ve been when I was eight or nine years old and my mom was the den mother of my Boy Scout troop. It was a troop consisting of all handicapped kids from my Roberts School. I don’t remember many details of the visit but I know she or one of the other troop leaders persuaded a few drivers to come over and sign autographs for us.
As I mentioned previously, practice for the race typically opened May 1 and there was qualifying during the two weekends prior to the race itself. In the week between the last day of qualifying and race day, there was only one short day of practice on Thursday. Traditionally this has been called “Carburetion Day”. It was a day in which drivers could have a final practice session to adjust their carburetors. Although IndyCars have not had carburetors for decades, the name Carb Day still persists. It was a great tradition in Indianapolis for kids to cut school that day. That is kids of all ages. Adults are also known to take a personal day off on the Thursday before race day.
I don’t recall specifically any other trips to the Speedway although I might have gone to qualifying days when I was a teenager.
After graduating high school and entering college, my final exams were always the first week of May. I was on summer vacation the entire rest of the month and until late August. In high school, school was not let out until the first week of June. When I realized I was going to be free for much of May, I was ecstatic. I would have my mom drop me off in the early afternoon and I would roam around the infield all day. She would then pick me around dinner time perhaps a little before 5 PM. The track would close at 6 PM.
We discovered that there was something called a “season pass” available. It would give you admission to the grounds for all the practice and qualifying days but not for race day itself. You need a separate ticket for that. Included with the package was a garage pass that would give you access to the Gasoline Alley garage area. Technically you’re supposed to be age 21. However, at age 18 if I had a garage pass no one was going to question me for further ID.
I had a Kodak model 20 Pocket Instamatic camera that I could use to take still pictures. Together my dad and I designed a gadget that was attached to the camera. It included a lever about 3 inches long that would help me to push the shutter button. I had to hold the camera upside down but that was no problem. I recently discovered a large stack of old photos in a box and I have scanned many of them and included them in the YouTube version of this podcast.
In many ways, I enjoyed hanging out in Gasoline Alley watching them work on the cars more than I enjoyed watching the cars themselves. Part of that was because there was not a good place to see the track in a wheelchair. You could roam up and down the fence along the pits but it was difficult to see the track itself from ground level.
The infield area of the first turn was a fun place to hang out. Somehow it was given the nickname “The Snake Pit”. Young people would gather there to party and drink. The girl-watching opportunities were phenomenal. Lots of women would run around in bikini bathing suits or skimpy halter tops. If they were drunk enough, sometimes the guys would persuade them to flash their tits. Now that I think about it, I think that was the first place I ever saw bare breasts in real life that wasn’t in a magazine.
Sometimes, the Snake Pit was a treacherous place for a wheelchair because it was often quite muddy. I recall one time venturing there after a heavy rain and the front wheels of my wheelchair sank into the mud all the way up to my footrests. I had to rely on help from strangers to get out of the mess. My front wheels were about 6 inches in diameter, very narrow, and had spoked wheels. I came home with them caked solid with mud as well as a considerable amount of mud on my real wheels. My mother was not very happy. We had to turn the hose on the wheelchair before I went in the house.
I remember one rainy qualifying day that I spent at the track with my cousin J.R. I was probably 18 or 19 and he would’ve been about 12 or 13. My Aunt Jody was volunteering at a concessions stand as a fundraiser for some organization. She was counting on me to keep J.R. out of trouble. Naturally, we went straight to the Snake Pit to party. I don’t believe we saw any naked women there that day but unfortunately, we did see a naked man. This was the time when the practice of “streaking” had become popular. Someone stripped down, ran across the track which was closed because it was still drying out from a rainstorm, and tried to climb over the fence. He got various tender parts of his body hung up on the wire along the top of the fence. He was arrested after he managed to get entangled and down off of the fence.
I mentioned that during my first visit to the track, the cars were going over 140 mph. The following year the track record broke 150 mph. Throughout my years growing up as a race fan, the records fell on a regular basis. The first day of qualifying each year is known as “pole day” because it establishes the pole position for the start of the race – that is the number one position. Massive crowds would attend pole day qualifying in anticipation of seeing track records fall.
Famous track announcer Tom Carnegie had a unique way of announcing it. He would say “It’s a new track record!.” The crowd would cheer wildly.
I was in attendance on May 14, 1977, when driver Tom Sneva was the first to turn an official lap at over 200 mph. I don’t recall if I was there for earlier track records but I know I was there for many more after that. Some of them were in attendance with my friends Rich and Kathy Logan.
I know for a fact that I was there on May 11, 1996, when the track record fell 4 times. When it was all over with, the record was held by Arie Luyendyk with a single-lap speed of 237.489 mph and a 4-lap average of 236.986 mph. Those records still stand today because the following year rule changes to slow the cars down. Last year’s 4-lap average speed for the pole position was 233.947 mph. I don’t think we will ever see a new track record again because if the cars go much faster, they will make additional rule changes for the sake of safety. They have tried to modify the qualifying procedures to make pole day more exciting but they will never recapture the excitement of seeing those records fall. And it just wouldn’t be the same without the late Tom Carnegie announcing… “It’s a new track record!”
Next week we will tell more stories about my history as a race fan including the first time I ever attended the race in person.
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Contemplating Life – Episode 64 – “Young’s Theorem”
This week we continue with my reminiscence of my college days at IUPUI studying computer science especially stories surrounding my mentor Dr. John Gersting and his wife Dr. Judith Gersting.
Links of Interest
- IUPUI website: https://www.iupui.edu/
- Prof. Emeritus Dr. John Gersting on IUPUI website: https://science.iupui.edu/people-directory/people/gersting-john.html
- Prof. Emeritus Dr. Judith Gersting on the IUPUI website: https://science.iupui.edu/people-directory/people/gersting-judith.html
- Dr. Judith Gersting on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Gersting
- The Michelson-Morley experiment on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment
- Lorentz transformations on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation
- The history of string theory on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_string_theory
- “Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Greene Discuss The Problem with String Theory” on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4c9IrYuEm0
- Alan Turing on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing
- “The Imitation Game” (2014) on IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2084970/
- Mathematical concept of a Group on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_(mathematics)
- Proving theory about groups of order 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6LrhjUb_nM
Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/contemplatinglife
Where to listen to this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/contemplatinglife
YouTube playlist of this and all other episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFFRYfZfNjHL8bFCmGDOBvEiRbzUiiHpq
YouTube Version
Shooting Script
Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 64 of Contemplating Life.
This week we continue with my reminiscence of my college days at IUPUI studying computer science especially stories surrounding my mentor Dr. John Gersting and his wife Dr. Judith Gersting. I apologize in advance that this is going to be a long episode.
We now continue with my sixth semester at IUPUI. My transcript says I took MATH 361 “Advanced Calculus and Differential Equations”. By now the math was getting pretty hairy and I never really got a feel for calculus and differential equations. I snuck by with a “D”.
I also took Physics 342 “Modern Physics” which involved Einstein’s special and general relativity as well as quantum mechanics. While I enjoyed the lab portion of the class, I never could wrap my head around quantum mechanics. The more I learned about relativity, the less impressed I became with Einstein. He had such a pop-culture image of being this amazing genius but I learned that as is the case in all scientific pursuits, much of what he did was simply an extension of the work of people before him.
We learned about the famous Michelson-Morley experiment which proved that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant. As a consequence of that experiment, Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz derived the famous Lorenz Transformations which describe how time dilates and length changes as you approach the speed of light. I had always thought these derivations came from Einstein but they actually came from Lorentz as a result of Michelson and Morley.
The problem was, nobody understood the significance of those works. It took Einstein who had the courage to throw out a bunch of preconceived ideas of how physics worked to really understand the significance of these previous discoveries. Then that led him to develop both special and general relativity. So while I give him props for following the data where it led him despite the fact it blew up centuries of science before that, Einstein really didn’t do that much in my opinion.
Furthermore, as a third-year college physics student, I was expected to fully understand relativity. None of us in that class, especially me, could be described as a physics genius. Yet I came away with a pretty good understanding of relativity. Relativity is bizarre and counterintuitive but once someone figured it out, it does not take a genius to understand it. Just a well-educated college physics student.
I didn’t do so well when it came to quantum mechanics. The idea that something could be simultaneously a particle and a wave is something that physicists still can’t explain to this day. The problem I had was if it was a wave, what was the medium? Scientists used to believe there was something called ether. Electromagnetic waves were thought to be vibrations in this invisible medium. But Michelson and Morley proved that there is no ether.
I wanted to bring back the concept of ether. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of vibrating energy without the medium. Not only was I way off base, but in some ways, I was ahead of my time. I think I was on the verge of inventing string theory. String theory is the idea that all matter consists of vibrating strings of energy. String theorists don’t say what the strings are made of. So the problem persists. Whether it’s vibrating strings or electromagnetic waves, what exactly is the medium? What is it that is vibrating? No one can tell me. Although the origins of string theory date back to 1943, it wasn’t until around 1984 that physicists started getting excited when they began to believe that string theory could accurately model all of the elementary particles of the standard model of physics as well as the interaction between them.
Proponents of string theory have yet to produce anything useful. It seems to be the general consensus that there is no experiment you can do to prove string theory so although it had some interesting potential, it hasn’t fulfilled its promise. People who still work on the theory are often ridiculed by mainstream physicists.
Had I been better at math and physics, I might’ve gotten into the field of string theory and spent decades producing nothing useful. Fortunately for me, I was getting Ds in calculus and differential equations and I got so confused in this physics class that I ended up withdrawing from it. It’s the only class that I did not complete in college.
Somewhere along the way, the School of Science changed its basic requirements for a degree. They lowered some of the liberal arts requirements which I had already met. I don’t remember the details, but it was to my advantage to switch to the new curriculum. I think it saved me from a couple of liberal arts classes but I had to take a class in public speaking. I enjoyed it and earned a B. I could tell you more about that class but it wasn’t that interesting for our storytelling purposes.
We want to resume talking about my computer classes under my mentor Dr. John Gersting.
CS 461 “Programming 3” was the class I talked about last week in which Gersting told us we had to teach ourselves the course. The title of the book that he wrote was “Algorithmic Languages” and it was a brief survey of I believe 5 or 6 computer languages. There were a few introductory chapters, and then a chapter on each language. At the end of each chapter, there was a programming assignment, and as I mentioned before quizzes and tests that you had to pass 100% before you could go on.
The only deadline was that we had to complete the course by the end of the semester. He posted a chart outside his office that showed where everyone in the class was. A semester lasted 15 weeks. There was one guy who finished the entire course in about three weeks. We all considered him a show-off or a brown nose. All of the rest of us including me and my friend Rich went through the course at a leisurely rate. We would look at the chart and notice that we were all in approximately the same position. It didn’t occur to us until almost too late that we were not going to finish in time. Comparing ourselves to one another was a really bad idea because we were all doing terribly. More on that in a minute.
The book that Gersting wrote was a phenomenal reference book. We began referring to it as “The Bible” because it had all the answers. Then one day I said, “Actually, it’s not the entire Bible. It’s just ‘The Gospel According to John.’” I wrote that across the top of my book but I don’t know if Dr. John Gersting ever saw it.
There was one programming assignment where I got a D from Gersting. I don’t recall if it was in Programming 2 or Programming 3. I tried to raise a negative number to an exponent that was a floating-point number. For example, if you take 2 to the power of 2 that is just 2 squared which equals 4. Similarly, you can take -2 to the power of 2 and that also equals 4. No problem. Now suppose you take 9 to the power of 0.5. That’s just the square root so the answer is 3. But what if you try to take -9 to the power of 0.5 you can’t do that. Mathematically it’s undefined.
The compiler or the runtime system should’ve created an error but it didn’t. It gave an answer of -3. So essentially it took the square root of +9 and then just tacked on the minus sign.
I complained when he gave me a D. I said, “The compiler and the runtime system let me do it.” His response was, “If the guy who wrote the compiler was in my class I would have flunked him. But instead, you get a D. Are you still going to pass the class with one low grade on one project?”
“Yes.”
“Are you ever going to raise a negative number to a floating-point exponent again?”
“No.”
“Case closed. The D stands.”
The bottom line is, he was very tough but he was fair. I came up with an adage, “The only thing more difficult than a guy who thought he wrote the book on the subject was the guy who did write the book on the subject.”
Rich later amended that theory. He topped it when he went into an advanced math class and on the first day the teacher had them open up the textbook and read the acknowledgments page. The author thanked someone for proofreading the book and catching many errors. The proofreader was Rich’s math professor. So Rich said, “Worse than a guy who thinks he wrote the book on the subject and worse than the guy who did write the book on the subject is the guy who was so smart he could catch the mistakes in the guy who wrote the book on the subject.” He had me there.
One of the most significant events in my relationship with Dr. Gersting occurred one day when I went to his office to give him a progress report on my independent study project. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to report. I was lagging way behind on the project. Anyway, when I offered to fill him in on my progress, such as it was, he said he was on his way to the teachers’ lounge to eat dinner and invited me to sit with him and talk. It’s not like I was being let into some supersecret off-limits area. But it wasn’t somewhere that students normally went. I gave my report, such as it was, and then he started sort of rambling about the students in our class. I don’t remember the name of the student he was talking about. We will call him Joe.
“Did you notice Joe hasn’t been in class lately?” He noted.
“Yeah, now that you mention it. Is he sick?”
“No, he’s dropping out. His wife is expecting their first child. He was offered a position writing COBOL for an insurance company so he felt like he had to take it.” That type of job was considered sort of the bottom of the barrel for computer programmers–especially computer science majors. You could sense how disappointed he was. He stared into space for a moment and then continued. “My worry is he will never come back to complete his education. You’re fortunate that your education is being paid for because of your disability and you don’t have responsibilities distracting you from your education.”
I suddenly saw a completely different side of the man. He was so harsh on us because he wanted the best for us. I suddenly realized how deeply he cared for his students. He cared about their life and their career. And most of all he cared about me. He was thinking about my future.
I was struggling to complete the independent study project to create the operating system for our computer simulator. Furthermore, my Programming 3 class was not going well either. Part of the purpose of the course was to teach us self-discipline. In the real world, you only have one deadline. Finish the entire project on time. We kept looking at the chart thinking we were doing as well as everyone else but when it came down to the wire we were all in trouble.
By the way, Gersting once said, “I don’t think God created the world in six days. I think he thought about it for five days and then pulled an all-nighter.” I think being a procrastinator comes with the mentality of a programmer. We pulled lots of all-nighters to finish on time. That’s why I was so sympathetic to the gal who hired me to help her with her last-minute programming assignments that I talked about a couple of episodes ago.
The computer room was always packed in the final days of the semester and it was hard to find a free teletype machine to log in. I remember sitting there with Rich just a couple of hours before the final deadline. I barely got mine finished. Rich had his program working but he needed to print out a final copy. The teletype he was working on broke down. It would print but at the end of each line, it would not advance the paper. It just kept printing on top of the same text over and over again. You had to guess when it was going to do a carriage return and then crank the knob by hand. The result was a printout that went all over the page but at least you could read it. With just minutes to spare we rushed from the computer room in the A-Building to Gersting’s office in the K-Building. There was a line of students trying to turn things in at the last minute. I remember Gersting looking at Rich’s output and saying, “What the hell happened here?” Rich explained about the broken teletype. I don’t recall what grade he got but I think he did okay. I ended up with a “B”.
This semester was undoubtedly the most difficult semester that I had. In addition to this programming class, I had that independent study project with Dr. Gersting. I was supposed to write the operating system for the computer simulator we had worked on the previous year. I barely got the job done and wrote a ridiculously brief report. He easily could have failed me in class or given me an incomplete but he didn’t.
The pressure of having to drop a physics class, getting a poor grade in calculus, rushing to complete Programming 3, and doing a piss-poor job in my independent study class nearly led me to a nervous breakdown.
When I eventually graduated and got a full-time job, people asked me if it was going to be hard to work full-time. I said, “Hell no. 40 hours per week will be a piece of cake compared to what I’ve been through. College is a 24/7 endeavor. There’s always another chapter you could reread. There’s always another program you could’ve written better. There’s always another test you should cram for. Even if you think you’ve gotten everything done, you haven’t. The pressure is constant. Being able to walk away from a job at 5 PM each day and leave it behind me until the next a and to have my weekends completely free is going to be magnificent compared to what I’ve been through.”
The following semester, I had a class with Dr. John Gersting’s wife Dr. Judith Gersting. It was called “Discrete Computer Structures CS 482.” It wouldn’t be the first day in a class with a Dr. Gersting without me getting shrouded like Mr. Hart did by Prof. Kingsfield in “The Paper Chase.”
Before the first class began, one of my classmates and I were talking. “Hey Chris, how did that independent study project go with Dr. G.?”
“It was a disaster. I barely got any reasonable amount of work done. I ended up throwing together a report at the last minute and turning it in. He GAVE me a C for the course.” I put a strong emphasis on the word “gave”.
Then I heard a voice calmly declare, “It was a gift you know.”
I turned around to notice that Dr. Judith Gersting was standing at the front of the classroom. The comment came from her.
“What?” I said.
“It was a gift that he gave you a C.”
“I know that,” I muttered. “It was a gift.”
I did know it was a gift. He could’ve easily flunked me.
Inside I was freaking out. I had a new version for the worst teacher scenario. It’s not so bad when the teacher writes the book on the subject. It’s not even so bad when your teacher is so smart they can correct the mistakes of the guy who wrote the book on the subject. Worse than all of that is when you have teachers who are married to one another and you are the subject of conversation between them. My reputation was preceeding me and it wasn’t a good one.
In retrospect, it was arguably a positive thing. Mr. Dr. G. had my best interests at heart. He knew I’d done poorly but he wasn’t going to crash my GPA or have me come up short and not graduate on time. I probably deserved a D rather than an F because I did complete the work. But it was seriously substandard. The fact that he was willing to give me a break knowing that I would do better in the future was positive. Furthermore, the fact that he had communicated that to Mrs. Dr. G. was arguably also a positive. But it was hard to see that at the time. At that moment, I just felt like I had been shrouded by Mrs. Kingsfield.
The course was a highly advanced computing theory class in which we discussed things like Turing machines which were a hypothetical computer invented by computing pioneer Alan Turing. His life was chronicled in the 2014 film “The Imitation Game.” Turing was played by Benedict Cumberbatch. He was a mathematician who invented the machine that cracked the German enigma code and saved thousands of lives in World War II. Yet he was stripped of all of his honors for being a homosexual. He ended up killing himself.
I drew a cartoonish image of a Turing machine on the front of my notebook that caught the eye of Mrs. Dr. Gersting. She thought it was cute.
I will never forget the most challenging yet rewarding homework assignment that I had in my 4 and-one-half years of college. It simply said…
“Show that there are only two non-isomorphic groups of order four.”
Unless you had some advanced math and/or computability courses you are probably completely clueless about what that sentence means. At the time, so was I. And so were several of my classmates. Some of them were graduate students taking the class. For me, the course was CS 482 but for graduate students, it was called CS 582. The undergrads and grads took the course together.
Without going into a bunch of mathematics that is unimportant, let me give this summary. There is this mathematical concept called a “group”. It’s a way to take several objects as operators, perform some function upon them, and come out with an answer that is a member of that group. Rather than try to explain it here, I found a YouTube video that solves this exact question in almost precisely the way that I and my fellow students figured it out. It took us hours to do so but there was a phenomenal sense of satisfaction that we a taken such an obscure problem and managed to figure it out.
Given that I found so many web pages and YouTube videos attempting to answer the same question, it must still be a standard question for such courses today.
The question said, “Show that there are only two non-isomorphic groups of order four.”
It didn’t say prove it. Because you don’t prove it. It said “Show it” and we did. It’s not like proving a theorem. It’s something that simply is.
Some things are just true. You can demonstrate that they are true. Some things are false. You can demonstrate that. This led me to create what I called “Young’s Theorem.” The theorem states, “If it is, it is. If it isn’t, it isn’t. The proof is… Is it? Then it is. Is it not? Then it is not.”
It’s silly. I understand that. But it was my expression of my satisfaction that I took a wildly hypothetical, marginally useful, mathematical question and came up with an answer when my initial assessment was I had no idea what the fuck they were asking. And that led me to the understanding that for the most part, you can figure things out. True things are true. False things are false.
Well… Naturally, it’s more complicated than that. Later in the course, we learned that there is an entire class of problems that cannot be solved. It’s called computability theory. Some things simply cannot be solved by a computer. The primary example is you can’t write a computer program that will analyze another computer program to tell you definitively will that program will complete its task and stop. It’s sort of the mathematical equivalent of the question, “If God is all-powerful, can He create an object so massive that He can’t lift it?” If he can create such an object. Then He is not all-powerful because He can’t lift it. If He cannot create such an object, then He is not all-powerful.”
Years later this paradox led me to create a joke.
There are two kinds of people in the world and I can prove it.
There is one group of people that believes that there are two kinds of people in the world. There is another group of people who do not believe that there are two kinds of people in the world. So there. I just proved there are two kinds of people.
But because I proved it, there should no longer be people who do not believe that there are two kinds of people because I’ve given definitive proof that there definitively are two kinds of people. But once I’ve convinced everyone that there are two kinds of people. There are no longer two kinds of people. There are only people who do believe that there are two kinds of people because they accepted my proof.
But now, that is no longer true because everyone now believes that there are two kinds of people which means there’s only one kind of person– namely those that believe. But they are wrong.
And so on with infinite circular reasoning.
So who knows… In an alternate universe. I might have been a pioneer of string theory and solved the ultimate theory of everything. But I didn’t have sufficient math background to prove it and apparently, no one else does either or if they did, string theory would be widely accepted as the theory that explains all of physics.
Or I might have become famous for describing what is the worst kind of teacher to have when you are an insecure college student. (I vote that having 2 teachers married to each other is still the worst.)
Or people could have bought into my ridiculous Young’s Theorem that true is true and false is false no matter how trivial that observation is. That would be particularly useful these days when our political discourse includes ridiculous phrases such as “alternate facts”.
That’s the kind of insanity that arises when you are overwhelmed as a college student. Fortunately, I had the Gerstings guiding me through that insanity and somehow I came out on the other end okay.
We are going to go off-topic next week to celebrate my history as a fan of motorsports because we are coming up on the month of May in Indianapolis which is the time of the Indy 500. After that, we are going to return to my college stories and eventually, the Gerstings will play a big role in those stories as well. I don’t want to skip ahead and tell those stories now. I will tell them in chronological order with the other events of my life at that time.
If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and other exclusive content. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.
As always, my deepest thanks to my financial supporters. Your support means more to me than words can express.
Even if you cannot provide financial support. Please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience. I just want more people to be able to hear my stories.
All of my back episodes are available and I encourage you to check them out if you’re new to this podcast. If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you found this podcast.
I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.
Contemplating Life – Episode 63 – “The Paper Chase”
After taking a brief detour last week for a political rant, this week we return to more stories about my college days as a computer science major at IUPUI. We begin a multi-part series about my mentor and favorite professor Dr. John Gersting.
Links of Interest
- IUPUI website: https://www.iupui.edu/
- Contemplating Life Episode 26 about my friend Dennis: https://contemplating-life.com/?p=164
- Prof. Emeritus Dr. John Gersting on IUPUI website: https://science.iupui.edu/people-directory/people/gersting-john.html
- “Sudden Impact” (1983) starring Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086383/
- “Sudden Impact” clip “make my day”: https://youtu.be/3ishbTwXf1g?si=F06_DoDw5LcXf6yp&t=197
- “The Paper Chase” (1973) on IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070509/
- Clip from “The Paper Chase” film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lE1ImIZpn_w
- “The Paper Chase“ (TV series 1978 -1986) on IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077058/
- Clip from Episode 1 Season 1 “The Paper Chase”: https://youtu.be/NQsO3kpmBXg?si=bhAUT82ToNDoUAnW&t=430
- Prof. Emeritus Dr. Judith Gersting on the IUPUI website: https://science.iupui.edu/people-directory/people/gersting-judith.html
- Dr. Judith Gersting on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Gersting
Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/contemplatinglife
Where to listen to this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/contemplatinglife
YouTube playlist of this and all other episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFFRYfZfNjHL8bFCmGDOBvEiRbzUiiHpq
YouTube Version
https://youtu.be/DXwL7kfxIlw
Shooting Script
Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 63 of Contemplating Life.
After taking a brief detour last week for a political rant, this week we return to more stories about my college days as a computer science major at IUPUI. I want to talk about my mentor and favorite professor Dr. John Gersting.
We will start with my fifth semester. According to my transcript, I took American History H105 to help fill part of my liberal arts requirements for a School of Science degree. In general, I always hated history in grade school and high school because I could never remember dates. You give me an event and I can explain most of its political and sociological significance. On the contrary, if you ask me when it occurred unless it was the War of 1812 I am probably clueless. Even though I was terrible at history, US history was my strongest area and I managed to earn a B for the course. I believe this was the last class I took at the downtown campus. Everything else going forward was on 38th St. for the rest of my college days.
The transcript says, I took Elementary Linear Algebra MATH 351 and earned a C. I took Physics 251 titled Heat, Electricity, and Optics but I remember it mostly having to deal with optics. I don’t recall who taught it but I enjoyed it and earned a B. And most important another programming class. I took CS 320 Programming 2 from Dr. John Gersting.
Before I tell you about that class with Dr. Gersting, I need to tell you of a couple of encounters I had with him before I ever took a class from him.
On the third floor of the K-building, there was a small room about the size of a large supply closet called the “Calculations Lab.” I first spoke about it in episode 43. At one end sat an ASR 33 Teletype that was connected to the university’s DEC-System-10 computer. I’ve talked previously that we used to go in there and play text-based computer games of different types. There were also several very expensive programmable calculators on a table in the room.
One day, I wrote a program in the computer language known as BASIC to see how long it would take to count to 1 million. It had 6 loops that counted from 1 to 10. The loops were nested inside one another so the entire process would eventually count to 1 million. It would print out a message every 100,000 to let me know how it was doing.
While the program was running, someone sat down at one of the tables and began using a programmable calculator. I thought he was a teacher but I wasn’t sure. He was behind me I could only see him out of the corner of my eye. I’m pretty sure I asked if he needed the teletype because I always did that when I was goofing off. I might not have asked this guy because he went straight for the calculator. A few minutes later, one of my friends walked in and asked what I was doing, “What are you up to? Playing Star Trek again?”
“No,” I replied. I wrote a program to count to 1 million and I’m seeing how long it takes to run. Do you need the machine?”
“No. I was just going to goof around myself. Let me know how it turns out.”
“Will do.”
After about 20 or 30 minutes, I gave up. It had not yet even reached 100,000.
Now you might ask, “Aren’t computers faster than that?” Well, this program was written in BASIC which is an interpreted language. That means every time it reads a statement written in the BASIC language, it has to parse each statement every time it is executed and figure out what it means. This is in contrast to programs written in languages like FORTRAN in which the program is read once by a compiler, translated into machine language, and that machine language is what actually executes. In other words, BASIC is ungodly slow. Who knows. Maybe I made a mistake somewhere and the thing was caught in an infinite loop and never was going to finish.
Fast-forward to sometime later… maybe a month or so I don’t recall. I was hanging out with my friend Dennis Adams one day. We introduced you to Dennis back in episode 26. He was my friend from high school who first got me involved in computers by carrying a teletype machine downstairs from the math department at Northwest High School so that I could use a computer for the first time. Dennis is a year older than me so he had already been at IUPUI in the computer science department for a year before I arrived.
Dennis was working on an independent study project with one of the professors and he needed to stop by his office to drop something off. Dennis said, “I’m working with Dr. John Gersting. You will eventually get lots of classes with him. I really like him a lot and I think you’ll like him too.” An endorsement from Dennis was high praise so I was anxious to meet the guy but I waited outside his office while Dennis went in. The professor was either talking to another professor or was on the phone talking to them – I couldn’t tell. He was speaking in a loud and gruff voice saying, “Yeah it’s no wonder the system runs so damn slow. We’ve got all these idiots in there playing games and running programs to count to 1 million just to see how long it takes!”
Oh, shit! He was the guy using the programmable calculator the day I was in there trying to run 1 million loops. I was going to have this guy for many of my programming classes and he already had a terrible opinion of me. I was doomed.
That was sometime during my first or second year. But now it was time to actually take a class with Dr. Gersting and I wasn’t looking forward to it.
On the first day, it was a slight relief to note that his loud voice and somewhat gruff manner were his normal state. He was a tall slim man with sandy brown hair. He wore a bolo tie with a turquoise clasp. I believe he was also wearing boots. With this Southwestern attire, he reminded me a little bit of Clint Eastwood perhaps as his iconic character Dirty Harry. I later learned that Gersting studied at Arizona State University but I don’t know if that’s where he’s from originally. But that explains his Southwest attire.
The first day of class he gave a big speech about how demanding he was going to be. I could imagine him saying, “Go ahead make my day. Fail my class.”
Although he looked like Clint Eastwood, that opening speech was also reminiscent of another iconic grumpy character from one of my favorite films. The 1973 movie “The Paper Chase” was about a first-year Harvard law student named Mr. Hart. In that film, John Hausman portrayed a harish and demanding contract law professor named Charles W. Kingsfield Jr. Hausman won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the role. Much-deserved. On the first day of class, Kingsfield famously delivers a monologue in which he says, “You teach yourselves the law but I train your mind. You come in here with a skull full of mush and you leave thinking like a lawyer.”
Gersting’s speech was quite similar, especially in a similar speech he gave the following semester for my Programming 3 class. In that class, he handed us a textbook that he had written. It wasn’t a professionally published textbook rather it was of stack of Xeroxed pages bound together with a paper fastener.
He declared, “I’m not going to teach you this course. You are going to teach it to yourself. I wrote this book. Everything you need to know is in this book. I’m not going to read it to you. I’m not going to lecture from it. Some teachers supplement the book with their lectures but everything you need is in the book. If there was something else you needed to know I would’ve put it there.
“When you complete a chapter, you come into class and take a quiz. You must pass the quiz with a 100% score. If you do not pass 100% you cannot continue. Why would I let you go on to the next topic when you have not yet mastered the previous topic? There are three versions of each quiz. If you fail all three of them, then we will sit down and have a long talk about whether or not you should be in this class.
“One of the reasons you are going to teach yourselves this course is that that’s what will happen in the real world. The minute you leave this institution with your degree, most of what we taught you will be obsolete because the computer industry is evolving so quickly. And even if it doesn’t change, every computer facility has its own standards and procedures. You will have to deal with existing programs that have been written by other people and you will have to learn what that code does. The first day when you walk into a job they’re going to hand you a pile of computer manuals about 2 feet thick and they are going to say, ‘Here… learn this.’ I’m not going to teach you programming. I’m going to teach you to teach yourselves programming.”
In other words, he was saying just what Kingsfield said in that film. “You teach yourselves to write code but I train your mind. You come in here with a skull full of mush and you leave thinking like a programmer.”
John Hausman reprised his role as Prof. Kingsfield in a TV series also called “The Paper Chase.” In the opening episode, Mr. Hart was unprepared for the first day of class. He was expecting a lecture but didn’t realize that a reading assignment had been posted on the bulletin boards in the dormitories and he was expected to have read material before the first class. When Kingsfield discovered that Mr. Hart was unprepared he placed over him an imaginary burial shroud.
Kingsfield: You see this.This is a shroud, Mr. Hart. A shroud. A burial garment. A winding sheet. For the dead. This is for you, Mr. Hart. The late Mr. Hart.
After that, Kingsfield refused to engage Mr. Hart in any of the Socratic dialogue sessions in the class.
Even though I didn’t make any giant mistakes the first day of class like Mr. Hart did, I felt like I already had a strike against me after Kingsfield… Whoops I mean… after Gersting had already branded me as an idiot who just wanted to play games and run a million loops to see how long it would take.
I linked a scene from the movie version of “The Paper Chase” as well as the entire first episode of the TV series which I found on YouTube. You will find the links in the description.
The first programming class I had with Dr. Gersting was CS 320 Programming 2. It taught us additional programming skills in FORTRAN. The primary purpose however was to show how to work in a group setting. We had a massive programming project that would take us the entire semester to complete.
Each year, Gersting came up with a different programming project for his class to work on. One previous year they wrote a piece of software to do the scoring for a car collectors show. Gersting had a collection of a couple of classic Ford Thunderbirds. He had restored the cars in his spare time and would show them off at classic car meets. The scoring system for these competitions was quite complex so he had his class write the software to handle the task. It was free labor. He probably could’ve written the program himself in a few days but it was a good project for the class.
This year, however, we had a completely different project. We were going to create a simulated computer. The project was called IPICS which stood for Indiana Purdue at Indianapolis Computer Simulator.
Gersting had invented an imaginary computer that used its own machine language that he also invented. The set of machine language instructions illustrated the variety of types of machine instructions that you would find in a real computer. It was designed to teach computer hardware architecture to future generations of computer science students. Our job was to bring this imaginary machine to life not with actual circuits but as a simulation.
The project was divided up into different tasks and we worked in groups of 2-4 students each. We had to create and test our portion of the code and write it to an overall standard that he established. Then, near the end of the semester, one representative from each team met with him on a Saturday afternoon as he took all of our different pieces of code written independently and tried to link them together into one massive program. It was an excellent example of how large programming projects work in the real world.
As I refer, my team which I think consisted of only two people was the smallest group with one of the smallest tasks. We had to simulate input and output processes. We had to translate numbers and letters from an internal system to standard ASCII characters and output them to the terminal. For input, we had to take ASCII text and translate it into the internal format used by the computer.
Throughout the semester, Gersting lightened up and you could joke around with him. He was a much nicer guy than he appeared that day. I remember the day we all gathered to integrate all of our pieces of the program. Someone in the computer room was showing off something they had produced on the computer’s plotter. A plotter was a computer-controlled device that had a pen mounted in it and a roll of tracing paper. The computer would move the paper forward and backward and move the pen side-to-side while lifting it up and down. You could use it to draw anything. It was sort of like a computer-controlled Etch-a-Sketch. It was mostly used for graphing mathematical functions. I had played around with it a little bit just for fun and not as a part of any assignment. I was already interested in computer graphics that early in my career.
I joked with the other students, “One of these days I’m going to use the computer plotter to draw an image of a Russian flag. Then I’m going to smear it with dirt. I will frame it and label it, ‘This is a dirty commie plot’” Gersting let out a loud groan at my terrible pun. It proved to me he did have a sense of humor after all.
After an hour or so, he got the program to compile and link as a single module. It wouldn’t do very much but it worked. The next step of the process was to write an operating system. There was a method to partition the memory into different areas. The operating system would run in protected memory and the application program would run in general memory.
I went to Gersting and asked him if he would take me on in an independent study course where my goal would be to write the operating system for IPICS. He agreed.
So, for my sixth semester, I had CS 490 ”Topics in CS for Undergrads” as well as CS 461 “Programming 3” both with Dr. John Gersting. We will talk about that in next week’s episode. In fact it’s probably going to take a couple of more episodes to tell the entire story of my relationship with this amazing man and his wife Dr. Judith Gersting who was also a CS professor and eventually appointed chairman of the department.
The Gerstings moved to Hawaii and taught there for a while but then returned to Indianapolis and are currently still serving as professor emeritus in the computer and information sciences program.
So stay tuned for more of the Gersting Chronicles.
If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and other exclusive content. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.
As always, my deepest thanks to my financial supporters. Your support means more to me than words can express.
Even if you cannot provide financial support. Please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience. I just want more people to be able to hear my stories.
All of my back episodes are available and I encourage you to check them out if you’re new to this podcast. If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you found this podcast.
I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.
Contemplating Life – Episode 62 – “I’m a Coward”
In this special episode, I’m going to depart briefly from my regularly scheduled episodes for a political rant and a confession. This is an open letter to the judicial system of the United States of America at all levels federal through local.
Links of Interest
- Prosecution of Donald Trump In New York on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecution_of_Donald_Trump_in_New_York
- Indictments against Donald Trump on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indictments_against_Donald_Trump
- Rudy Giuliani and Georgia election workers on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Giuliani#Judgment_for_defaming_Georgia_election_workers
Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/contemplatinglife
Where to listen to this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/contemplatinglife
YouTube playlist of this and all other episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFFRYfZfNjHL8bFCmGDOBvEiRbzUiiHpq
YouTube Version
Shooting Script
Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 62, a very special episode of Contemplating Life.
I’m going to depart briefly from my regularly scheduled episodes for a political rant and a confession. The title of this episode is “I’m a Coward.”
This is an open letter to the judicial system of the United States of America at all levels federal through local.
I was raised to appreciate our government deeply and am proud of our justice system in this country–especially the right to a trial by jury. I have always considered it an honor, a privilege, and part of our sacred civic duty to serve on a jury. Unfortunately, the severity of my disability decreases my stamina to the extent that whenever I have been called for jury duty I have had to decline to accept that honor. It has been a great disappointment not to have been able to participate in our government in such a capacity.
I’m writing the script on Monday, April 15, 2024, the day when jury selection began in a criminal trial of our former president. While I don’t live in that jurisdiction, I wondered what my response would be should I ever be called to serve as a juror in that case or any of the other civil or criminal cases or as a potential grand jury member in a case involving that particular defendant.
As I fantasized about what would happen if I were in voir dire in such a case, I discovered something quite disturbing about myself. I would have to address the court in a statement somewhat similar to this…
– – – – – –
Your Honor, I am sorry to report that I cannot be an impartial juror in this case or any other case involving this defendant.
I love my country. I am a patriot. I consider it a solemn civic duty as well as an honor and a privilege to be a member of any jury. I have always believed I could be impartial in any conceivable case despite any possible bias I might have. I see myself as a logical, critical thinker who can separate emotions and biases from decision-making.
I am staunchly opposed to the political policies of the defendant. Yet I am confident I can put those feelings aside and render an impartial verdict.
I abhor the public conduct of the defendant including but not limited to his disrespect for the military and the brave veterans who serve in it as well as their families, his disrespect for disabled people, his disrespect for women, and his disrespect for immigrants or potential immigrants. Yet I am confident I can put those feelings aside and render an impartial verdict.
I abhor the defendant’s blatant disrespect for our public institutions including but not limited to his disrespect for the FBI, our intelligence services, our free press, and his disrespectful abuse of Christian theology. Yet I am confident I could still put all of those feelings aside and render an impartial verdict.
Given all of those biases against the defendant, if the prosecution fails to make its case against him, I would sadly have to render an acquittal no matter how personally disappointing I might find it.
The problem comes if the prosecution makes its case and I would have to give a guilty verdict. With all due respect to the court, I do not trust that my identity could remain anonymous should I serve on this jury. I believe that inevitably somehow, my identity would become public knowledge.
I have credible fear that the defendant himself would attack me on social media. This would bring about more attacks from his supporters including other politicians, lawyers, and his cult of personality followers.
The defendant has shown repeatedly that he will show no restraint whatsoever in ruining the lives of people who stand in the way of his quest to lead this country into fascism with him as its supreme leader for life.
It is a matter of public record that many people including those who had former political ties to him and have been in the past his supporters as well as ordinary innocent citizens simply serving their country dutifully as election workers and other government activities… these people have fallen victim to the defendant’s attacks and attacks from use supporters.
Should I serve on this jury and render a guilty verdict, I would be risking my life and my way of life as well as putting at risk my friends and my family.
I’ve never been eligible for military service because of my disability. While I abhor war, I would like to think that were I able, I could sacrifice my life for my country. But apparently, that belief in myself is ill-founded. I am not willing to risk my life to bring to justice this despicable human being who represents an existential threat to our democracy as serious or more serious than any foreign enemy we have ever faced. I would more likely testify against a Mafia boss than I would cross this dangerous defendant and become his target.
Should the prosecution make its case, I would feel undue pressure to vote for acquittal to protect my life and livelihood from the onslaught of attacks I would receive should I be complicit in his conviction. Therefore I am incapable of being an impartial juror in this case or any other case involving this defendant.
I am deeply ashamed but I am a coward. And I realize in admitting that, and knowing that there are probably other people who feel exactly the way I do, that the defendant has already done significant harm to the country I love.
May God help us all.
– – – – – –
So that’s it. That’s what I would say if I were sitting in a New York courtroom today under voir dire to serve on a jury in the case titled “The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump” submitted March 30, 2023. Charge: First-degree falsifying business records (34 counts). Citation IND-71543-23.
A brief update… Although I wrote the script on Monday the 15th, the day that jury selection began, I’m recording it on Thursday the 18th. Initially, on Tuesday they had selected 7 jurors. But one of those jurors has already backed out and another one is likely to. Even the people who initially said they could be impartial in this case are having second thoughts about whether or not they want to be involved at all. The personal cost to them may be too just as it would be for me.
If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and other exclusive content. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.
As always, my deepest thanks to my financial supporters. Your support means more to me than words can express.
Even if you cannot provide financial support. Please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience. I just want more people to be able to hear my stories.
All of my back episodes are available and I encourage you to check them out if you’re new to this podcast. If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you found this podcast.
I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.
Contemplating Life – Episode 61 – “Logan’s Run”
This week we continue my nostalgic look back at my college days and discuss the great friendships I had some of which continue to this day.
Links of Interest
- IUPUI website: https://www.iupui.edu/
- Euchre card game on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euchre
- Billy Joel on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Joel
- Keith Emerson on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Emerson
- Frank Williams and his band 05/20/2023 at Church Festival: https://www.facebook.com/cyborg5/videos/3016532481824222
- “Logan’s Run” (1976) on IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074812/
- “Logan’s Run” trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USADM5Gk9Gs
- Fan-made modern trailer for “Logan’s Run”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVoggwNwvf8
- “Fantasia” (1940) on IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032455/
- Article about Colts versus Broncos on Halloween 1988: https://fox59.com/sports/colts/colts-time-machine-halloween-1988/
- Colts versus Broncos video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAbK3vWRXyM
Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/contemplatinglife
Where to listen to this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/contemplatinglife
YouTube playlist of this and all other episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFFRYfZfNjHL8bFCmGDOBvEiRbzUiiHpq
YouTube Version
Shooting Script
Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 61 of Contemplating Life.
This week I want to talk about some of the great friendships I had in my college days. As I mentioned last episode, this is a difficult one to write because it’s about people who are still an active part of my life. While I like these stories to be “tell all”, especially when it gives me a chance to confess some of my stupid behavior, some stories are better left private.
As I’ve mentioned in previous episodes, we didn’t have a regular cafeteria in the K-Building at the 38th St. campus of IUPUI. It was just a big lunch room with lots of tables and chairs. Adjacent to it was a vending machine room where you could get stale ham and cheese sandwiches, horrible pizza, snack food, and soft drinks. There was a microwave oven you could use to heat up whatever you purchased.
The room also became a hangout for a group of friends to socialize. Early in the morning someone would break out a deck of cards and start a euchre game. Sometimes the game would last until dinnertime. People would come and go and take your place if you had to go study or go to class.
There was a crazy guy named Mark who was a tall blonde-haired guy who talked way too loud and often said very embarrassing and misogynistic things that occasionally made you embarrassed to be at the same table with him. But except for his unfortunate lack of a filter, he was a really great guy and the life of the party.
There was another guy named Kevin who was fortunately much more restrained than Mark but still a fun guy. Very smart. I don’t recall what his major was.
There was a guy named Gilley who would come to school with a cup of coffee from White Castle that he had spiked with some sort of alcohol. Even at 10 AM, you could smell alcohol on his breath. Extremely intelligent and very fun to be around. A talented card player. My guess is he probably dropped out at some point because of his drinking but I don’t know that for a fact.
There were a few women in the group. Sadly I don’t remember most of their names. There was a friendly gal named Cindy who had short red hair and rode a motorcycle. We went out to the movies and to dinner a couple of times but it never got serious.
I’ve lost touch with all of these people. I’ve tried doing Google searches and Facebook searches but most of their names are just too common. You get lots of people with the same name.
We’ve already talked at length about my late friend Mike Gregory who was part of this motley crew.
There was a computer technology major named Frank Williams who was a good buddy. Computer technology is slightly different than computer science which was my major. The details aren’t important right now. Frank is an excellent keyboard player. He had his own band in college or shortly thereafter. I went with my friends Rich and Kathy to hear him play at some bar on the east side when time. I think Frank sees himself as a Billy Joel-type person. He played lots of Billy Joel’s songs and also could play a few Keith Emerson pieces from the band Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. Keith Emerson is my favorite rock ‘n’ roll keyboard player.
Frank liked to call me Christopher even though I repeatedly told him that my actual name is just Chris. To retaliate, I decided to start calling him Frankfurter. I told him, “If you can put a ‘topher’ on the end of my name I can put a ‘furter’ on the end of your name.” The nickname was especially appropriate for him because frequently he would bring a bag lunch of hot dogs. He would take two hot dogs, slice them lengthwise, and put them between two slices of white bread. He would then microwave the sandwich and load it up with copious amounts of ketchup and mustard. When he would bite into the sandwich, the ketchup and mustard would drip all over the place. It was a sight to behold.
After graduation, I kept in touch with him briefly. We had a little reunion at my house a few years after college one day when Mike Gregory was back in town for a visit. But then I lost touch with him for many years. Finally, a few years ago, we reconnected on Facebook. With a common name like Frank Williams, I didn’t think I’d ever find him but I finally did
He is still playing in a band. Last summer, they were playing at a church festival on the south side and I went to hear him. It was the first I’d seen him in probably 30 years. He is not the lead in the band. He just plays keyboards but he does sing lead vocals on some songs. The guitar player is the lead.
Frank sounded fine. The lead singer sounded okay. But for some reason, I don’t think their voices mix very well. I think I liked his band better but this one isn’t half bad. Anyway, it was still great to hear him and to talk to him for a few minutes after the performance. It’s great to be in touch with him via Facebook after all these years.
Frank had a girlfriend named Kay who also attended IUPUI. They had been dating since high school. Somewhere along the way in college, they broke up even though everyone thought they would be together forever. I was also able to connect to Kay on Facebook recently.
As I alluded to last episode, the most important and long-lasting friendship from my college days is with my dear friend Rich Logan. I met Rich in the CS 300 Assembly Language Programming class I talked about last week. We hit it off as friends immediately and it has lasted almost 50 years.
By the way, speaking of that assembly language class, I finally found my little green card. You can see an image of it in the YouTube version.
There was a rec room across the hall from the lunch room. It had about a half-dozen pinball machines, a foosball table, and several pool tables along with other tables for playing chess or other board games. Rich and I played pinball but I could only work one of the buttons so I would get on the left side of the machine and work the left flipper. Rich would fire the pinball on the right side and work the right flipper. I was never any good at it but we had lots of fun.
In the summer of 1976, there was a sci-fi movie named “Logan’s Run”. Because Rich’s last name is Logan, a bunch of us decided we needed to go see the movie together with him. Rich recalls that he was the only one of the group who had not yet seen the movie but I don’t think I had seen it either. As best as either of us can recall, it must have been in late August or early September 1976.
The problem was, how to get me to the movie. I called my mom using a payphone (no cell phones in those days) and told her a bunch of us wanted to go to a movie one afternoon. I asked her if Rich could come by, pick up my van, bring it back to IUPUI, and drive me to the movie. He would then return the van to my house then get back in his car and leave. My mom quickly agreed.
Rich loves telling the story about the first time he ever met my mom. He couldn’t believe that he could walk up there being a total stranger and say, “I’m here to get your van,” and she just handed him the keys and let him drive it away. He said, “I thought what kind of crazy lady is this that would trust me with her car and trust me to drive her disabled son to the movies when she had never met me before?”
I explained to Rich, “It probably wasn’t easy for her. She was probably really worried. But she trusted me and I trusted you and that was good enough. It’s also a testament to how far my mom would go to attempt to give me a life that was as normal as possible. It’s normal for a guy to want to go see a movie with his college friends. If that’s what it took to make that possible, she was going to do it.”
The movie was about a guy named Logan in a future where people were not allowed to live past the age of 30. At birth, they had a small glowing crystal embedded in the palm of their hand. As they aged, it would change colors. When you turned 30, your crystal began blinking red. You then had to participate in some ritual ceremony called “Carousel” in which people would be exploded in a grand spectacle. But they were told that a small percentage would be “renewed”. People in the audience would shout “Renew, Renew” as the victims exploded. But it seemed like no one ever knew anyone who actually was renewed. People who realized that the “Carousel” was actually a death sentence, would refuse to participate in the ceremony. They became so-called “runners”. Logan was a type of police officer known as a “Sandman”. It was his job to chase down runners and terminate them.
Logan was sent on an undercover mission. They turned his crystal blinking red to make him a runner even though he was still only in his mid-20s. He was supposed to track down an underground movement that would lead runners to a legendary place called “Sanctuary”. When Logan inquired, “When my mission is over, do I get my years back?” The computer that gave him the assignment refused to answer. So now Logan really was a runner.
After watching the movie, our buddy Mark decided to start calling Rich by the nickname “Runner” and he went by that nickname for quite a time. I don’t think I used it very much if at all except perhaps when we were all in the group.
There was a woman and a group named Kathy Willaert. At first, it was hard to get to know her. Rich described her as “the quiet, shy girl who was always reading a book.” Many in the group never bothered to try to get to know her. Fortunately one day Kathy and I set down together and had a very long heart-to-heart talk where I did get to know her well. Once you got to know her, she was an amazing person. But few people bothered to take the time to really listen to her and to get to know her. They just sort of wrote her off which was quite unfair.
Had I written her off as unapproachable, I would have lost out on an amazing friendship.
As I previously explained, my approach towards women was that anyone who showed any kindness was immediately categorized as a potential girlfriend. And once I got to know Kathy, she could have fallen into that category very easily except for one thing. Even though I think she was about 19 years old at the time, she did not have a driver’s license. I’m sad to say, that was a dealbreaker for me. So although I was quite fond of her, I never really considered her a potential girlfriend.
One of the people who took the time to get to know Kathy and to truly appreciate her was Rich. I’m pretty sure that Kathy went with all of us to see “Logan’s Run” and somehow I had speculated years later that that was the beginning of their relationship – their first sort of unofficial first date. But according to them, their first real date was to see a rerelease of Disney’s “Fantasia.” According to Wikipedia, that rerelease was in April 1977 but I have no idea when they actually saw it.
When the gang learned that the two were dating, there was lots of gossiping about it. At one point, the gang witnessed Rich and Kathy disagreeing about something. After they left the room, someone said (well I’m embarrassed to say it might’ve been me that said it), they speculated that it wouldn’t last two weeks. Anyway, whoever said it first, me or somebody else, everyone agreed. Well, when that statement got back to them, they didn’t appreciate it. Over 45 years later they are still together and they still argue. When I reminded Rich of that recently, he said, “Yes we just stayed married to spite everyone. We are still waiting on our pool winnings.” Although we never did wager any money, if we had, Rich and Kathy would’ve taken the lot.
There was a bit of tension between the three of us. I grew jealous of the time they spent together. I think they thought I was jealous because Rich had stolen Kathy away from me or we were competing for her attention. But that wasn’t the case. As I explained before, Kathy’s inability to drive made her ineligible even though I really liked her. What really happened was Kathy got between me and my best buddy. I was jealous that she was stealing Rich away from me – not that Rich was keeping Kathy from me. But we worked it all out and we have been friends for decades now. There have been good times and bad times and we have shared them all together.
Sometime in March or April 1979, my disability got worse. I developed congestive heart failure and landed in the hospital for two weeks. Rich and Kathy visited me frequently and continue to visit me nearly every time I’m in the hospital. Rich also came to visit as I was recovering at home.
I remember one day we tried to hook up my Atari 2600 game system to my bedroom TV so I could play video games with him while I was in bed. We finally got it all hooked up and working and then I realized I couldn’t work the controller while in bed. My hands were too weak. So he played for a while and I watched. About 30 minutes later I realized I had fallen asleep. When I woke up, he was just quietly sitting by my bedside keeping me company.
When I was finally able to get out of bed briefly, he came by for a visit and we sat in my family room. He said he had a favor to ask. He wanted me to be the Best Man at his wedding to Kathy. I was honored of course. I explained I wasn’t sure I would be well enough in time for the wedding. At the time I could only be out of bed a couple of hours a day. He told me he had a plan B. Frank would be his backup best man.
My mom took me to the rehearsal the day before the wedding. It was in a Protestant church used by Rich’s family. Kathy, her sister who was maid of honor, and I were all nonpracticing Catholics in a Protestant wedding. Rich and Kathy’s parents, my mom, and perhaps some other family members were there for the rehearsal. There couldn’t have been more than 8 people in the church. Rich and I were at the altar. Kathy’s father led her up the aisle. The preacher said, “Wait a minute. Don’t you people know you’re supposed to stand up when the bride comes down the aisle? This is your rehearsal too. You need to rehearse your part as the audience.” So everybody stood up.
I turned to Rich and said, “That’s the way it is with these religious people. You never know if you’re supposed to stand up, sit down, kneel, cross yourself, or whatever.” We both cracked up. It was especially funny because that’s what Protestants often say when they come to a Catholic Church. Here we had three former Catholics in a Protestant wedding and I was feeding the same lines that the Protestants always say about Catholics.
My only official duty as the best man was to hand Rich the ring. We practiced many many times. He would hold out his hand palm up beneath my hand and I would drop the ring into his hand. I did not want to embarrass myself by dropping the ring.
On June 23, 1979, Rich Logan and Kathy Willaert were married and I was fortunate enough to be there as the best man. Frank was on standby. I successfully dropped the ring into Rich’s hand as we had practiced. Kathy’s sister handed her the ring and they dropped it. It rolled all over the floor. I’m not generally the kind of person who takes pleasure in someone else’s misfortune. But I was so happy that if a ring was going to get dropped, it wasn’t me who dropped it.
They had a small reception at Rich’s parents’ house and in his backyard. Frank got them a particularly nice wedding present. He knew they didn’t have a honeymoon planned so he rented a fancy suite in a downtown hotel. He ordered a steak and egg breakfast for them even though it wasn’t on the menu. Together we chipped in some cash so that they could have some spending money in addition to whatever other gift I got for them. I don’t recall what my wedding present was.
That day, I spent a total of five hours out of bed between the wedding and the reception afterward. It was the longest I had been out of bed in nearly 3 months.
As mentioned in other episodes, I went to see the original Star Wars with the Logans. We went back a year later to see it again. We saw all of the other Star Wars films except for “Rogue One”. We couldn’t go to that one because I was in the hospital getting my trach installed in 2016. A little over a year ago they released “Rogue One” in theaters and so we went back and saw it together even though we had all seen it on streaming or DVD. That completed the set. We’ve seen every Star Wars movie in the theater together – some of them more than once.
The three of us frequently went to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on qualifying days and had a wonderful time there together. We saw many track records broken on several of those days.
Another fond memory… Rich and I went to a very memorable Colts game on Halloween night in 1988 against the Denver Broncos. It was carried on Monday Night Football. The Colts clobbered Denver 55-23. Our fans began taunting John Elway every time he made a mistake shouting “El-way, El-way” to mock him. Longtime Colts fans will tell you it was one of the greatest games we ever played and Rich and I were there to see it in person. It was a great event and a fond memory.
In those days, my family owned a cabin on a lake in Brown County. Rich and Kathy were frequent guests there. The YouTube version of this podcast shows some of the fun times we had at the lake. The video is from 1984.
We have seen countless movies and been to many sporting events – way more than I can remember. I have lots of other stories that I will save for appropriate times.
Rich is the brother I never had. Kathy is a very dear friend. I could not ask for more loyal caring and loving people in my life. They really are extraordinary.
It hasn’t always been smooth sailing. We’ve had our ups and downs. Our misunderstandings and disagreements. Even the production of this episode has been a challenge that we had to work through together.
When I used to teach Catholic inquiry classes at my church, there was a lesson about Old Testament prophets. While we normally think of a prophet as someone who predicts the future, a big part of the job is to be a spokesperson for God. Sort of like a Press Secretary. Typically a prophet’s message is to call you back to God when you go astray. Most of the prophets spoke to the entire chosen people but occasionally a prophet’s guidance is personal as in the case of the prophet Nathan who is best buddies with King David. Nathan didn’t hesitate to tell David what an ass he was being for having an affair with Bathsheba. I teach that sometimes we are called to be prophets to our friends or to have them be prophets to us and call us back when we go astray.
That’s the kind of relationship I have with the Logans. They love me enough to let me know when I screw up and they know that because I respect them and cherish our friendship I will listen to them and try to do better. There are lots of examples. One day I told a horrendously sexist joke in a computer class and later Rich called me out saying simply, “I thought your comments in class today were out of character.” I will never forget those exact words. The phrase “out of character” never had more meaning than it did that day. What he was saying with those three simple words is, “The Chris that I know and love isn’t the kind of person who would say such a thing. The Chris I know and love is better than that.” He was right. That may have been who I was in that moment but it’s not who I normally am and it’s not who I aspire to be. True friends see the best in us and motivate us to be the person they know we can be.
The occasions when the Logans have been a prophet who called me to be my better self far outnumber the occasions when I’ve returned the favor.
Scripture says “A faithful friend is a life-saving elixir…” Sirach 6:16. I’ve been blessed by many such friends.
I’ve been running with Logan for nearly 50 years and look forward to many more years of Logan’s Run and a blessed friendship.
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I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.
Contemplating Life – Episode 60 – “Ghost Writer in the Machine Language”
This week we continue my nostalgic look back at my college days starting with my fourth semester at IUPUI and the paid programming jobs I ever had.
Links of Interest
- IUPUI website: https://www.iupui.edu/
- IBM System 360 on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360
- IBM Assembly Language on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Basic_assembly_language_and_successors
- FORTRAN IV on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran#FORTRAN_IV
- Intel 8080 on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8080
- Zilog Z80 on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_Z80
- MOS Technology 6502 on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6502
- Timex Sinclair 1000 computer on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_1000
- RadioShack Model 1 computer on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80
- Apple ][ computer on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II
- Intel 4004 on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_4004
- Intel 4040 on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_4040
- Star Trek: The Next Generation S06E20 “The Chase”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)
- “Digital Fortress” novel by Dan Brown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Fortress
- “Independence Day” (1996) on IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116629/
- HP 21 Scientific Pocket Calculator on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-21
- HP 25c Scientific Pocket Calculator on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-25
Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/contemplatinglife
Where to listen to this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/contemplatinglife
YouTube playlist of this and all other episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFFRYfZfNjHL8bFCmGDOBvEiRbzUiiHpq
YouTube Version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxfDHzcy1KU
Shooting Script
Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 60 of Contemplating Life.
We took a couple of weeks off after my office reviews and now we return to my nostalgic look back at my college days starting with my fourth semester at IUPUI and the first paid programming jobs I ever had.
My transcript for the spring semester of 1975 shows that I took “Psychology as a Biological Science PSY 105” which I discussed in a previous episode. I earned a B for that class. Next, we have “Physics 152 Mechanics” which I also discussed in my episode about my friend Mike Gregory. Another B with four credit hours. I also had “MATH 261 Multivariate Calculus“ which was my first calculus class. I never was very good at calculus or differential equations but I managed to sneak through with a C.
Finally, we get to my second-ever programming class – “Assembly Language Programming CSCI 300.” It was very frustrating that this was my fourth semester trying to earn a BS degree in Computer Science And I was just now getting to my second class in my major. I explained previously that they had me mistakenly identified as a Math major rather than a Computer Science major and that got me off sequence.
Let’s talk For a little bit about what we mean by Assembly Language Programming. We are going to get a bit technical for a minute or two but I will try to explain some programming concepts in layman’s terms.
There are a variety of ways to program a computer. Computers don’t understand English-like languages or algebraic formulas to do calculations. Most of the time we write programs in what’s called a “higher-level language.” My previous programming class CS 220 taught programming in a now obsolete language called FORTRAN IV.
Suppose you wanted to calculate the area of a Rectangle. In FORTRAN, you might have statements such as…
Width = 5
Height = 7
Area = Width * Height
(Where an * is a symbol used for multiplication).
That’s a very simple formula but you could have much longer calculations on one computer statement. For example, the volume of a sphere might be
Radius = 5
Volume = 4/3 * Pi * Radius * Radius * Radius
Because the volume of a sphere is 4/3 pi times the radius cubed.
Computers cannot directly understand any of this. You have to use a specialized program called a “Compiler” which translates a high-level language like FORTRAN into something called “Machine Language”.
Machine Language is nothing but a series of numbers that the computer interprets as commands to do various things. Computers have a section of circuitry called an Arithmetic Logic Unit. The ALU consists of some registers to store temporary numbers. Some commands load data from the computer memory into a register. There it can be added, subtracted, multiplied, or divided by a number in a different register or perhaps a number stored in memory. Once a number is in a register you can also compare it to the number in a different register. Based on how that comparison went, you can conditionally jump to a different part of the program. Or you can remember where you were, jump to something called a subroutine, and then when the subroutine is finished, you jump back to where you left off.
There is a special register called the Program Counter which points to the next instruction in memory to be executed. When it completes that command, it increments the counter to the next instruction. Your program instructions and the data it works on are all stored in the same memory. If you’re not careful, you can jump to a location that contains data rather than instructions. The computer will try to interpret that data as an instruction to do something when it really wasn’t meant to be. The program goes haywire doing God knows what.
Machine language consists solely of binary numbers (a series of ones and zeros) which is hard for humans to read. We can group the ones and zeros into groups of four and use base 16 numbers also known as hexadecimal numbers. But that still doesn’t tell you what the instruction does unless you memorize the codes. For example,3c 12 67 means that you should take the value at memory location “6712” and load it into the A register. That’s not a mistake, it stores the lower order two digits first. So you specify the address as 1267 but it means location 6712.
Assembly language, which is what I studied in CS 300, is one step above machine language. In machine language, the previous command we talked about would be…
LDA MyValue
The command LDA means you’re going to load something into the A register. That’s relatively easy to remember that LDA means “Load Register A”. But where are we going to get what we want to load? We could remember a memory address like 6712 but it’s easier if we just make up a name for that location. In this case, we called it “MyValue”. A program called an Assembler translates this command into machine language. Assembly language is just a human-readable form of machine language. Somewhere in the program prior to this, you had to tell the assembler to send side a memory location and that we would in the future refer to it as “MyValue”. The assembler sets up something called a “symbol table” so that you don’t have to deal with numbered locations. You can just refer to it by a name you made up. You don’t have to remember it was location 6712 and you don’t have to remember that the opcode for loading register a was the hexadecimal value 3c. The Assembler takes care of that for you.
So there is a one-to-one correspondence between assembly language and machine language. Every time you write an assembly language line of code, the assembler translates it into a single machine language instruction. The advantage of assembly language is that you are talking to the computer in its native language. You can make the code run very efficiently because you are telling it exactly what to do in exactly what order. When you program in a higher-level language like FORTRAN, you are counting on the compiler to translate what you wrote in FORTRAN into something efficient in machine language.
The advantage of high-level languages is, they are easy for humans to write and read. The disadvantage is, that they might produce a sequence of commands that is not fully optimized. At least in theory. Today’s compilers can probably optimize code better than most programmers can. This is especially true now that computer processors have multiple CPUs that can execute multiple threads of instructions simultaneously. Modern compilers can figure out how to do that efficiently.
Back in the early 70s, people still used assembly language when they wanted the most efficient code. Sometimes today, you might still use assembly language if you are concerned about code that ran with exact timing because of hardware constraints. But these days, people very rarely write assembly code.
Even though assembly language commands tried to use mnemonic codes that were allegedly easy for humans to remember like LDA means load into register A, there were hundreds of commands with variations and we could never keep track of them all. We had something called an IBM System 360 Reference Card. It was a fan-folded card about 8 inches tall and perhaps 3 inches wide with about four panels printed front and back on green card stock. I’ve included an image of one in the YouTube version of the podcast. I found a PDF of one online. Somewhere along the way, the campus bookstore quit selling the famous “little green card”. They replaced it with a version for the IBM System 370 that was printed on white card stock. One day, someone said, “Can I borrow your little green card?” The sarcastic reply was, “They don’t make them anymore.” So then we grabbed the little white card and wrote across the top of it “This is a little green card.” So even though they were white, we still called them “the little green card.”
These quick reference cards were very valuable tools.
Years later, I met a guy named Paul Nanos. We were both members of the Speedway RadioShack Computer Users Club. Paul created a series of quick reference cards for a variety of personal computers. I helped him create one for the Timex/Sinclair 1000 computer. I sold the quick reference cards through my business although I never made much money from them. But that’s another story for another day.
By the way, in the examples above, I’m using codes for the Intel 8080 processor used in early personal computers even though the CS 300 class I took years ago was for the IBM 360. That’s another problem. Every type of hardware has its own unique set of machine instructions. It has a different set of registers and different commands to move numbers in and out of those registers and to manipulate them. So assembly language written for the IBM 360 that we had at IUPUI would not run on the Digital Equipment DEC-System 10 that we also had. Nor would it run on the IBM 1620 that we had. And none of those assembly languages would work on the new Intel 8080 or Zilog Z80 or MOS Technology 6502 processors that were used in the early personal computers.
However, if you wrote a program in FORTRAN and you had a FORTRAN compiler on your IBM 360, DEC 10, RadioShack Model 1, or Apple ] [ computer it would compile your FORTRAN program into the machine language of your particular machine, as long as you didn’t try to use any hardware-specific or operating system-specific features, it would work.
But when using machine language, a program written for one type of computer will do nothing on a different type of computer. A program intended to run on an Intel-based processor in machine language running Windows would do absolutely nothing on your iPhone which uses a completely different kind of processor.
That’s what bothers me about sci-fi stories where we can hack into alien computers or they can hack into ours and upload viruses.
Probably the worst offender was the 1996 film “Independence Day”. Jeff Goldblum was able to hack into the alien computer and upload a virus to disable the shields.
If I gave you a memory dump of a program written for IBM 360, unless you understood the internal workings of the machine and the exact function of every operational code, there is no way you could tell what the program did and there is no way you could write a program for that machine without that basic knowledge. When looking at the memory dump, there would be no way you could tell which of the numbers were program codes and which numbers were data that the program operated upon.
Machine language programs are nothing but strings of numbers in memory. There’s nothing inherent about them that tells you it’s from an IBM 360, Intel 8080, or a modern Intel series CPU. Oh, perhaps if you understood machine language for those types of machines you could try to reverse engineer it and see if it corresponded to machine language instructions for one of those machines. But if it was alien hardware, and you had no idea how the internal workings of their computers worked, you couldn’t make heads or tails out of it let alone write a program that would run on their hardware.
Anytime you see someone in a movie look at a string of numbers and suddenly declare, “It’s an algorithm that does… Whatever” that’s nothing but BS. I have seen that in a number of movies and TV shows. The worst offender of this scenario is the Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 6 Episode 20 “The Chase”. Captain Picard reunites with an old friend who is an archaeologist. Prof.Galin is killed by pirates who are trying to steal information from him. Picard discovers the professor is collecting a series of numbers but they have difficulty deciphering the pattern. They finally realized the numbers corresponded to sequences of DNA that had been found on planets all over the galaxy. They also determine that there is a secret message in DNA. There is nothing scientifically impossible about that. We can already produce DNA strands of a particular sequence so it’s not impossible to think that you could encode a message in someone creature’s DNA. The problem comes when Lieut. LaForge suddenly declares that there is more to this DNA than appears.
LaForge: This is not part of a natural design Captain. This is part of an algorithm coded at the molecular level.
Picard: An algorithm. Are you saying that these DNA fragments are elements in some kind of computer program?
LaForge: I know how this sounds but there is no way this could be a random formation. This is definitely part of a program.
That’s just ridiculous. So we got a string of numbers and they are encoded in DNA and we link them up to get a certain pattern but there’s no way to know that that string of numbers is actually a computer program. Because the way you turn numbers into programs is totally dependent upon what kind of hardware you are using. The number 3c in hexadecimal means something in register A on an Intel 8080, but that number could mean anything on a different kind of computer. A string of numbers that represents a program on one machine would be nothing but random noise for a different type of computer processor. Whoever it was that encoded this DNA allegedly billions of years ago would have no idea what kind of hardware we would be using today.
Later in the episode when they finally connect all of the pieces of DNA, somehow their tricorder device magically starts running the program and projecting a hologram of the recorded message. First of all the idea that this program could magically reconfigure the tricorder to project a hologram which is something we’ve never seen the device do before and that somehow decode the video and audio in 3D to project the message is totally ridiculous but we will them that one. The message was two minutes and 10 seconds long. I timed it. I downloaded that episode, clipped out the two-minute 10-second scene, and it was over 68 MB long. That must’ve been some lengthy sequence of DNA. Much longer than it appeared in the episode.
There are also stories where someone creates a computer virus and the simple act of looking at the file causes your computer to get infected. That’s a load of crap as well.
Probably the worst offender in this category was Dan Brown’s 1996 novel “Digital Fortress”. There was a computer virus that was so dangerous, they couldn’t open it to see what was inside it. That’s ridiculous.
A computer file is nothing but a string of numbers. If those numbers are in the proper form and you name the file “something.txt” then you can open it using the Notepad application and theoretically, it would have plain text in it. Or it would look like garbage. But opening a file with Notepad is not going to infect your computer.
Or if it had an extension like .docx then maybe it’s a Microsoft Word Document file. And if you use Microsoft Word to open the file, there might be some macro codes or program extensions embedded in it. That could possibly be dangerous but only because Microsoft Word allows you to embed programs in what should otherwise be a text file.
The most dangerous type of file is one with the extension .exe which means “executable”. If you try to “open” that file, your operating system will execute it as if it is a program. All you have to do to examine that file safely is to rename it as “whatever.dat” which means it’s nothing but a data file. Then you open it with a safely created program that doesn’t try to execute any code but just looks at the string of numbers inside the file and displays them for you. That is 100% safe. The only way a file can infect your computer is if you load the file into memory and somehow cause the program counter to start executing it like a program.
You don’t need anything special to look at a file safely. You don’t need an antivirus program. You don’t need an air-gapped machine (which means it is not connected to the internet). Computer programs are just strings of numbers no different than data. It’s only what you do with those numbers.
Okay, time to get off my soapbox and get back to my story…
When I got my first personal computer using a Zilog Z80 processor, I did have to write some assembly language. Sometimes I had to translate that assembly language into machine language myself because I didn’t have a suitable assembler program. One time I taught a class in Z80 assembly language for members of that computer club I talked about. The concepts I learned in writing IBM 360 Assembly carried forward when I had to write assembly language for other types of hardware. However, for the most part, I never had any practical use for the IBM 360 Assembly Language Programming that I learned in CS 300.
I said “for the most part” because although I never had a legitimate use for IBM Assembly, my first paid programming job was writing IBM Assembly Language– Illegitimately.
Anyway, I think it was perhaps my third year at IUPUI that a Computer Technology student came up to me and asked me if I would write some programs for her. She had to write about 15 very simple programs in IBM 360 Assembly. It was one of those situations where she had all semester to write these programs and waited until the last minute to do it. I was sympathetic towards her because I had been through the same scenario which I will tell you about in a later episode. Anyway, she needed to write about 15 programs in 10 days. She said, “I can write all of these programs but I just don’t have the time to do it by the end of the semester. Look at the list, pick 4 or 5 of them, and I will pay you $20 per program.”
I picked out 4 of the assignments and told her I would do them. I wrote the programs in FORTRAN but I did it in a very primitive kind of way. I pretended I was writing in assembly language. So I used very simple FORTRAN commands. I made sure that the program ran and produced the proper results. I could run FORTRAN on the DEC-10 by sitting at a computer terminal. If the program didn’t run properly, I could edit and rerun it a dozen times in just a few minutes.
Running programs on the IBM 360 was more difficult. You had to type the code onto punchcards using a keypunch machine. Submit the deck of cards to the computer operator which he/she would put in the pile and run them in the order they were received. Then you had to come back in a half-hour or so, pick up your output, and if it didn’t work, retype some of the cards and resubmit them. That’s why this woman could not get all those programs finished in time.
By getting the basic logic of the program working in FORTRAN, working out all the bugs quickly, and then rewriting them in assembly language code, I’m pretty sure all four of the programs worked the first time I submitted them.
She paid me in brand-new crisp $20 bills fresh out of an ATM. I used the $80 to buy a fancy new HP 21 scientific pocket calculator. It cost $125 but it got me most of the way there.
I know I shouldn’t admit that I helped someone cheat by doing their homework for them, but I looked at the other code she wrote and I am confident she was correct when she said she could have done them all if she had time.
My first legitimate programming job was also in assembly language but it wasn’t for the IBM 360. It was for the Intel 4040. The 4040 was a slightly more advanced version of the Intel 4004 which is widely considered to be the world’s first microprocessor. It was a 4-bit computer. Compare that with computers today that are 64 bits. It wasn’t good for much of anything although the way the computer architecture was designed, it was obvious it was intended to be used for a calculator. I don’t remember the details about it.
It was very primitive in that it would only add or subtract but it could not multiply or divide. Binary multiplication is pretty easy. You just shift the bits left and then add repeatedly. There was a guy who was an electrical engineer who was a friend of a friend. I don’t remember the guy’s name. I don’t remember the friend’s name. But he needed someone to write about 30 or 40 lines of Intel 4040 code for a digital thermometer. All it had to do was read in 6 bits of data from an input port, do some addition and multiplication on it, and store the result in a particular location. He gave me some photocopies of the hardware manuals for the 4004/4040 processor. I had to teach myself 4040 Assembler Language, write the program, and then hand translate it into a hexadecimal code because we didn’t have an assembler.
Along the way, I learned a little bit about digital electronics. For example, the “input” command read data from a pair of 4-bit ports for a total of 8 bits. However, we only needed 6 of the bits. I assumed that the other two bits which we were not going to use would default to zero. But they don’t. A disconnected pin on an input port of a microprocessor in all likelihood defaults to a “one” rather than a “zero”. So you have to mask off only the bits that you want. This was a lesson that I would use regularly decades later when I began programming Arduino-based microprocessors. I never dreamed that someday I would be programming a computer smaller than a deck of cards that had similar computing power to my first PC which was the size of a microwave oven. And that the programming skills I’ve learned on that simple little digital thermometer, would be essential to the microprocessor programming I would do much later in life.
Anyway, I wrote the program out in Intel 4040 Assembly Language on a yellow legal pad. To the left of each Assembly Language instruction, I wrote the hexadecimal codes that I hand-translated into machine language. To the right of the instructions, I wrote comments that explained step-by-step what the program was doing.
The guy paid me $100 and was quite grateful. He said if he ever needed another piece of code written he would be happy to hire me but he never did. But it was my first legitimate job as a computer programmer and I have fond memories of the experience. I spent that money on the more advanced HP 25c scientific pocket calculator that was programmable. I’ve got some funny stories about that gadget for another episode.
With the exception of everything I described above, I had absolutely no use for what I learned in “CS 300 Assembly Language Programming“. I earned 3 credits and an easy A.
I’m not sure who taught the class. I think it was a guy named Dr. Rizo but I’m not sure.
There was a more significant aftereffect of that class that has had a major impact on my life ever since then. One of my classmates in CS 300 was a guy named Rich Logan. You’ve heard me talk about him previously because he and his wife Kathy have been very loyal friends ever since our college days. They frequently take me to movies and occasional sporting events and have been the best friends anyone could ever hope to have. We will talk more about them and some other friends I made at about that time at IUPUI in next week’s episode.
It may be a difficult episode to write. I’ve talked about other people I went to school with in grade school, high school, and other college friends but they are all long gone from my life. We either drifted apart like my girlfriend Ellie or my buddy Dennis who I still keep in touch with but we are not close. Some of them sadly have passed away like my girlfriend Rosie or my good buddy Mike. But, Rich and Kathy are still a very big part of my life nearly 48 years later. I’m not going to be able to tell their entire story in one or two episodes but we will hit the highlights of the early part of our friendship in the next episode.
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I’d like to dedicate this episode to my good friend and caregiver Brandon Drake who tragically passed away from an epileptic seizure on March 9. You were a good friend and a great caregiver and I will miss you always buddy. Rest in peace, my friend.
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I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.
Contemplating Life – Episode 59 – “Oscar 2024: Troubled Geniuses”
In this episode, we wrap up my six-part series on Oscar-nominated films for 2024. Our final category contains my favorite film of the year and the film that is most likely to win significant numbers of awards including Best Picture. I call this category “Troubled Geniuses”
The 96th Annual Academy Awards will be awarded this Sunday, March 10. After this episode, I’m going to take off the rest of the month and will return with new episodes in April. This is been a labor of love but a labor nevertheless.
Links of Interest
Oscar Nominations 2024: https://www.oscars.org/oscars/ceremonies/2024
- “Oppenheimer” (2023): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15398776/
- “Oppenheimer” Trailer 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYPbbksJxIg
- “Oppenheimer” Trailer 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bK6ldnjE3Y0
- “Oppenheimer” Trailer 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kknXNYGF5Ec
- “Oppenheimer” Anatomy of a Scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_GPSEVEasE
- “Oppenheimer” Cast Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzLm2e0Fztw
- “Oppenheimer” Blu-ray features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmSP8Sgc088
- “Oppenheimer” Assembling IMAX Print: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5XqqylBW7M
- “Maestro” (2023): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5535276/
- “Maestro” Trailer 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJP2QblqLA0
- “Maestro” Trailer 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU6GbM5c9aE
- “Maestro” Behind-the-scenes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kjd8PMO2jU
- “Maestro” Spielberg interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_1qma3SrAI
- Leonard Bernstein conducts Mahler 2nd at the Ely Cathedral: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZEusNJLoRw
- Documentary Bernstein conducts “West Side Story” in 1984: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXya18-28yI
- Making of documentary about Bernstein conducting “West Side Story” (highly recommended as well as the documentary itself): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbF5zB8-oE4
Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/contemplatinglife
Where to listen to this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/contemplatinglife
YouTube playlist of this and all other episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFFRYfZfNjHL8bFCmGDOBvEiRbzUiiHpq
YouTube Version
Shooting Script
Hi, This is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 59 of Contemplating Life – Oscar edition.
The 96th Annual Academy Awards will be awarded this Sunday, March 10. This is the last of my series on the Oscar-nominated films for 2024. After this episode, I’m going to take off the rest of the month and will return with new episodes in April. This has been a labor of love but a labor nevertheless.
Our final category contains my favorite film of the year and the film and the film that is most likely to win significant numbers of awards including Best Picture. So, we have saved the best for last. I call this category “Troubled Geniuses”
We begin with Christopher Nolan’s epic movie “Oppenheimer”. It’s the story of J Robert Oppenheimer who led the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb.
The film is actually two interconnected stories told in parallel. We have the story of Oppenheimer beginning with his career as a young physics student through his development of the atomic bomb and eventually his activism to promote nuclear disarmament. This story is described by a title card as “Fission” which is the term for the splitting of an atom which releases tremendous amounts of energy. This portion of the film is shot in color 70mm IMAX film.
The parallel story is that of Louis Strauss who was a trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and who later led the Atomic Energy Commission. This portion of the story is described by a title card of “Fusion” which is the process of combining hydrogen atoms into helium also releasing tremendous amounts of energy. It is a process that powers the sun and all of the stars and is the process of the hydrogen bomb that Strauss promoted. This portion of the film told from Strauss’ perspective is shot in black-and-white 70mm IMAX film which was specially produced for this project because no one had ever used black-and-white IMAX before.
The framework of these two stories surrounds hearings regarding the careers of these two men. Oppenheimer appeared for several weeks before a special committee of the Atomic Energy Commission in April and May 1954 as he appealed the revocation of his security clearance.
At the time he was a highly popular public figure for his role in developing the atomic bomb which was credited for ending World War II. Oppenheimer had hoped the development of a weapon as powerful as an atomic bomb would make war unthinkable in the future and would essentially end all wars. He imposed the development of the more powerful hydrogen bomb and was a strong advocate for negotiated arms treaties. This opposition to further atomic weapon development as well as past affiliations with known Communists led to the revocation of his security clearance. The story opens with Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy, testifying before this committee. He chooses to tell his life story so that his work can be understood in proper context. So his portion of the film is told as a flashback as he testifies before the AEC committee.
Strauss is played by Robert Downey, Jr. His portion of the film also centers around a hearing. He is being considered for a position in the Eisenhower administration as Secretary of Commerce in 1958. Strauss testifies before the Senate committee approving his appointment and recounts the story of his feud with Oppenheimer over the development of the hydrogen bomb. His story is told in flashbacks from that hearing.
Although these two stories are told in parallel, clearly this is primarily Oppenheimer’s story. It begins with him as a graduate student in Cambridge where he proved to be clumsy and inapt in the laboratory. At one point, so frustrated with his scientific advisor at Cambridge that he tried to poison him with a poisoned apple. A fictionalized version of this true incident is shown in the film. Fortunately, he’d stopped the man from being poisoned.
Oppenheimer left Cambridge for the University of Göttingen in Germany to study under Max Born; Göttingen was one of the world’s leading centers for theoretical physics. Freed from his inability to perform in the lab, Oppenheimer prospered in theoretical physics. He became an expert in the new field of quantum mechanics and returned to the US to teach quantum theory at Caltech.
His brother Frank, also a physicist, was active in the American Communist Party. Oppenheimer never joined the party but was intrigued by the support of everyday workers and he contributed to programs to help refugees in the Spanish Civil War. Those funds were distributed through the Communist Party. One must understand that the early communist movement in the US was about workers’ rights and other liberal causes but was not yet associated with the kind of dictatorships that developed in Russia, China, and other Communist countries. So, there wasn’t quite the stigma of the Communist Party early on.
Oppenheimer had a relationship with Berkeley activist Jean Tatlock who was active in communist politics. He eventually married Kitty Puening who had also been involved in Communist politics at Berkeley but had renounced communism before she met Oppenheimer. They had an affair and she became pregnant. Kitty’s husband gave her a divorce and she and Oppenheimer were married. They eventually had three children together.
Oppenheimer was recruited by General Leslie Grove to lead a top-secret project to develop an atomic weapon. Grove is brilliantly played by Matt Damon. Grove was well aware of the communist skeletons in Oppenheimer’s closet. In the film, Oppenheimer figures out that Grove was not ignoring his previous communist entanglements but had specifically recruited him in hopes that he could hold those entanglements over his head and control him.
Oppenheimer and his brother Frank loved to roam the deserts of New Mexico and he had always dreamed of finding a way of combining his around of New Mexico with his love for physics. He recommended a location called Los Alamos where the Army would build an entire city complete with homes, schools, churches, and entertainment. Oppenheimer knew that he could not recruit the best scientists in the country unless they could bring their families with them.
The film chronicles some of the difficulties faced in this groundbreaking endeavor of creating a nuclear weapon. There were competing theories on how it should be done and there were early moves to create a hydrogen bomb although to detonate a hydrogen bomb one must use a uranium or plutonium atomic bomb. So they had to build the atomic bomb first anyway.
It’s not a spoiler to say that they did build an atomic bomb.
Oppenheimer then began actively working towards nuclear disarmament and that caused great controversy.
The committee reviewing his security clearance was stacked against him and he never had a chance at winning. During the testimony, it was revealed that he continued to have an affair with Jean Tatlock after he was married to Kitty. Kitty was aware of the affair but the way it was depicted in the hearing is quite explicit. I won’t spoil that for you.
The latter half of the film focuses on Strauss and his Senate hearings as he tries to explain his feud with the popular physicist.
Christopher Nolan is known for his extensive use of IMAX sequences in his previous films such as the Dark Knight Batman trilogy, Inception, Tenet, and Dunkirk. This film was shot almost entirely in IMAX or other 65mm film formats where IMAX would have been impractical.
There was great hype that the film would be shown in IMAX 70mm film in only 30 locations around the world and only 19 of them were in the US. With a three-hour run time, most of these theaters had to install special film platters to hold the 11 miles of film which weighed 600 pounds. The print was shipped to theaters packaged in 53 smaller reels which then had to be carefully spliced together by trained projectionists to produce the giant continuous three-hour print.
There were other digital IMAX and 70mm showings but not in full IMAX. One of those theaters was the IMAX Theatre at the Indiana State Museum at White River Park here in Indianapolis. I was able to see the film in that format at that location.
If you have heard recent episodes of this podcast you know what a huge fan I am of IMAX. You also know that I’m quite a science nerd. You would think that this was the ultimate viewing experience for a geek like me.
While it was an amazing film with a compelling story well written, well acted, well shot, and certainly worthy of its 13 Oscar nominations, overall for me it was no big deal. I go to IMAX or any other theater because I want to get my eyes maxed. I want to see something spectacular and immersive. I want to be taken to places real or fantasy that I could not otherwise go. Except for the actual detonation sequence during the test at Los Alamos, which wasn’t that spectacular by the way, there was nothing about this film that needed to be seen in the theater let alone an IMAX.
The vast majority of the film is people arguing about physics, politics, communism, and extramarital affairs, and none of that needs to be experienced 60 feet tall with state-of-the-art digital surround.
While I am eternally grateful that we have filmmakers like Christopher Nolan, James Cameron, and others who are keeping IMAX alive, this particular film was not a great showcase for the format.
Don’t get me wrong. This is an amazing film. I liked it a lot. It is my third favorite of the year. It deserves all of its nominations. It will likely win a bunch. It’s just not why I spend premium prices and risk my health to see something in IMAX. I quite enjoyed a second viewing streaming on my 23-inch desktop computer monitor. Even viewing it on my roommate’s 55-inch 4k TV wasn’t necessary.
In addition to its Best Picture nomination, Christopher Nolan is nominated as Best Director and has a good shot at winning. He has cleverly crafted a compelling story that dives deep into the minds of two amazing people Oppenheimer and Strauss. These are complex characters with complex motivations who shaped history.
The attention to detail is phenomenal. There are dozens of minor things that only physicists would appreciate. For example, at a social gathering, there is someone in the background playing bongo drums. Only physics nerds know that physicist Richard Feynman was famous for playing those drums. He is never mentioned in the film or identified as Richard Feynman but he is there in the background. Nolan already won directing BAFTA and DGA awards.
Cillian Murphy completely transforms into the character. Anyone who has seen video or photographs of the actual man can appreciate how much he has embodied Oppenheimer and from what I’ve read about the man it’s not just his appearance that he has re-created. He is nominated as Best Lead Actor and is likely to win. It is my second favorite actor performance of the year.
Robert Downey, Jr. gives a chilling performance as the manipulative, conniving Strauss. His nomination for Supporting Actor is well-deserved.
Emily Blunt is consistently interesting as Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty. She is someone who has devoted her life to supporting her husband at great cost and has forgiven him for his extramarital affair. She is constantly encouraging him to fight the forces against him yet when she is called to testify before the committee she struggles to maintain composure in the face of attacks against her. Fighting isn’t as easy as she thought it would be. She is deservedly nominated for a Supporting Actress Oscar and is my third favorite pick in that category.
Is also nominated for the adapted screenplay by Christopher Nolan, Photography, Production Design, and Sound all of which are richly deserved. I have no opinion about the nominations for Musical Score, Makeup and Hair, Costume Design, or Film Editing except to say that the hair and costumes looked period-authentic and the score seemed to heighten the tension in the film.
Its 13 BAFTA nominations included wins for Best Picture, Best Director for Nolan, Lead Actor Murphy, Supporting Actor Downey, Cinematography, Editing, and Musical Score.
Its 8 Golden Globe nominations included wins for Best Drama, Best Director Nolan, Best Actor Murphy, Supporting Actor Downey, and Musical Score.
The Musical Score also won a Grammy for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media.
There were 4 SAG nominations including wins for Murphy, Downey, and Ensemble Cast.
IMDb lists 305 wins and 381 other nominations.
Released in the US in July and produced on an estimated budget of $100 million. It has earned nearly $330 million in the US and Canada and $957 million worldwide.
It is currently still being shown in some theaters although not IMAX. It is available for streaming on Peacock, for rent or purchase on Amazon and YouTube, and for purchase on DVD, Blu-ray, and 4k Blu-ray.
I highly recommend the film although you already have heard my thoughts about seeing it in a theater or on IMAX or 4k.
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Our final film of the year is my favorite of the 10 Best Picture Nominated films. “Maestro” stars Bradley Cooper as legendary composer, conductor, and pianist Leonard Bernstein. While I was impressed with Cillian Murphy totally inhabiting the character of Oppenheimer, it is nothing compared to what Bradley Cooper achieves in his portrayal of this musical legend.
The opening scene shows Bernstein late in life sitting at the piano and being interviewed by a camera crew. He talks nostalgically about his late wife actress Felicia Montealegre who was his inspiration and muse. I had to remind myself that I was watching Bradley Cooper. I’m familiar with Leonard Bernstein from many TV programs and YouTube videos I’ve seen about the great man. It was as if he was brought back to life before my eyes. The hair, makeup, voice, mannerisms, body language, and everything about the man became incarnate in this film.
After seeing the film, I became obsessed with Bernstein and began watching hours and hours of YouTube videos and documentaries about the great genius. With every minute that I watched, I became more and more impressed with Bradley Cooper’s performance.
He is nominated as Best Lead Actor and is by far my favorite performance of the year by anyone male or female.
In addition to the lead role, Cooper also produced, directed, and co-wrote the screenplay all of which were nominated. Consider that he also starred in, produced, directed, and co-wrote the screenplay for his previous film “A Star is Born” which earned nine Oscar nominations. He is proving to be an amazing filmmaker. If he does not win any Oscars this year, it is just a matter of time before he is finally recognized as the top of his craft.
After the opening scene with Bernstein in his late years, it jumps back to the earliest days of his career. He had to fill in as conductor at the last minute without any rehearsal to conduct the New York Philharmonic in Carnegie Hall when guest conductor Bruno Walter fell ill. The next day, a rave review was published on the front page of the New York Times and was picked up by multiple other newspapers. The performance also aired on CBS radio around the country. This rocketed him to instant fame.
Although the film follows his career from that famous debut through his works late in life, it’s not your typical biopic about the career of a genius. The film instead focuses primarily on his relationship with his wife Felicia who is brilliantly played by Carey Mulligan who has earned a Lead Actress Oscar Nomination for the role.
The film is a love story about two extremely passionate people. Like some of the other films we have reviewed, it shows us the price that is paid by those close to driven people. Bernstein had multiple affairs with both women and men. This naturally put great strain on his marriage. He remained totally closeted about his sexuality and when rumors arose about his relationships with men, he flatly denied everything. There was an especially poignant conversation with his daughter in an attempt to spare her feelings.
Cooper uses a variety of cinematic styles to establish the time period being depicted. Early in Bernstein’s career, it was filmed in black-and-white in a traditional 4 x 3 nearly square aspect ratio used by early films. Later in the story, it switches to color but still in that narrow 4 x 3 aspect ratio. These scenes re-create the era much in the same way that “The Holdovers” established its era by its cinematic choices. Only later does the film switch to a widescreen format in full color. While the switch between color and black-and-white was occasionally distracting in Oppenheimer, this progression of film styles in Maestro greatly enhanced the experience and helped set the time frame and the mood of each scene. Except for that opening scene late in his life, the rest of the story is told, chronologically so the shift in cinematic style feels like a natural part of that progression. It is a very effective filmmaking technique.
Bernstein separated from Felicia in 1976 but reunited with her the next year when she developed lung cancer. He put his career on hold canceling many appearances so that he could care for her until her death in June 1978.
The film concludes with a re-creation of Bernstein conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in a famous performance of Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony “Resurrection” Himat Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire, England. Words cannot describe what a magnificent piece of filmmaking and acting appears in this single scene. It is an achievement beyond belief. I’ve seen a video of the actual performance and to say that Cooper has channeled the great maestro is a huge understatement.
The film has been criticized because it glosses over some of Bernstein’s greatest works. For example, the beloved musical “West Side Story” is barely mentioned at all. But as I said at the beginning, this is not your typical biopic. It is the love story between Bernstein and his wife and it tells the story beautifully.
In addition to Best Picture, its seven Oscar nominations include Lead Actor Bradley Cooper, Lead Actress Carrie Mulligan, Screenplay Bradley Cooper and Josh Singer, Cinematography, Sound, and Hair and Makeup all of which are greatly deserved. And yes, for once I do have an opinion about hair and makeup. It was essential to the transformation.
It had 7 BAFTA nominations and 4 Golden Globe nominations as well as SAG nominations for Cooper and Mulligan.
IMDb lists 21 wins and 179 nominations.
Released in December on an estimated budget of $80 million this Netflix production has grossed only $383,000 worldwide but as we have mentioned previously, such box office numbers are meaningless for films that are produced for streaming and have only limited theatrical release.
I have insufficient words to describe how magnificent this film is. Please watch it. Also, check out some of the links in the description which include the film’s Executive Producer Steven Spielberg interviewing director Bradley Cooper about the film. Be sure to see the behind-the-scenes feature which includes interviews with Bernstein’s daughters talking about how much they loved Cooper’s performance. The Bernstein family cooperated in the production of the film. Also, check out my side-by-side comparison of Bradley Cooper and Bernstein both conducting the London Symphony Orchestra at Ely Cathedral. I’ve also linked actual footage of Leonard Bernstein, and if there is not sufficient “West Side Story” for you in this film, check out the documentary I linked which shows Bernstein conducting “West Side Story” for a recording featuring operatic singers playing all of the parts.
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Well folks, that wraps up our detailed look at 14 films nominated for Oscars this year. Let’s recap the entire bunch and I will rank my favorites in order and then tell you who I think will actually win. Keep in mind that although “The Zone of Interest” was difficult to watch and “Poor Things” was sufficiently bizarre that it might not appeal to everyone, I have to say I enjoyed all of these films on some level. There is not a stinker in the bunch.
Counting down to my number one favorite in each of these categories…
Let’s start with adapted screenplays. 5 “The Zone of Interest”, 4 “Poor Things”, 3 “Oppenheimer”, 2 “Barbie”, and my favorite adapted screenplay of the year is “American Fiction” for creating a memorable character and deep satire. I love it even though it doesn’t have a chance. “Oppenheimer” is likely to win but part of me hopes that Greta Gerwig wins for “Barbie”.
For original screenplay. 5 “Past Lives”, 4 “May December”, 3 “Maestro”, 2 “The Holdovers” for its witty charm and clever twists on old tropes, and finally my favorite original screenplay is “Anatomy of a Fall” for that amazing scene in which the husband and wife realistically argue as well as for the clever way it seems to resolve the story yet leaves so many doubts lingering. It’s a phenomenal piece of writing.
Supporting Actress 5 Daniel Brooks – “The Color Purple” in one of only 2 nominations with which I disagreed. 4 America Ferrera – “Barbie”, 3 Emily Blunt – “Oppenheimer”, 2 Da’Vine Joy Randolph – “The Holdovers” who is likely to win and I will not be disappointed if she does. And naturally, my number one pick is… you guessed it… Jodie Foster – “Nyad”. It really is a great performance and not just my obsessive bias for Foster.
Lead Actress I enjoyed all of these performances so consider it nearly a five-way tie. If I had to rank them I would say… 5 Carey Mulligan – “Maestro”, Lily Gladstone – “Killers of the Flower Moon” I moved her from 5th to 4th after reconsidering. She is very likely to win and it will be a close call between her and my 3rd pick Emma Stone – “Poor Things”. My two favorite performances haven’t got a chance but I greatly enjoyed 2 Annette Benning – “Nyad” and was totally blown away by my favorite of the group Sandra Huller – “Anatomy of a Fall”. I plan to look up more of her films. Keep your eyes on her in the future. I expect great things.
Supporting Actor – 5 Ryan Gosling – “Barbie” which is the other nomination that I felt was undeserved even though I found it quite amusing. 4 Sterling K Brown – “American Fiction” which was okay but probably forgettable. 3 Mark Ruffalo – “Poor Things” which had me in stitches at several points. 2 Robert De Niro – “Killers of the Flower Moon” who remains at the top of his form and is a very close second to my favorite in the category Robert Downey, Jr.. – “Oppenheimer” which is likely to win. In fact, I think this is the only one of my favorites that is likely to win. I have to pick a winner sometime don’t I? We’ll see.
We are going to take Lead Actors from the top down this time. As you have just seen, Bradley Cooper – “Maestro” blew me away. I could easily cop out and say it is a four-way tie for 2nd place but if forced to make a choice I would pick 2 Paul Giamatti – “The Holdovers”, 3 Cillian Murphy – “Oppenheimer” who is likely to win, 4 Coleman Domingo – “Rustin”, and 5 Jeffrey Wright – “American Fiction”. All five were phenomenal performances.
For Best Director… I’m a bit disappointed that Bradley Cooper was not nominated but it was really his performance that shined the most. I wouldn’t bump anyone from this list to make room for him or Greta Gerwig. I may have rearranged these from comments made in previous episodes but here is where I stand now. All five of them have done an amazing war this year but if I have to pick it is… 5 Jonathan Glazer – “The Zone of Interest”, 4 Yorgos Lanthimos – “Poor Things”, 3 Christopher Nolan – “Oppenheimer” who is likely to win. 2 Justine Triet – “Anatomy of a Fall” for the choices she made in showing the domestic argument and the overall structure of the courtroom scenes. This leaves us with the Grand Master Martin Scorsese – “Killers of the Flower Moon” who at age 81 still keeps topping himself year after year.
Finally, we come to the Best Picture. Although I might put an asterisk next to a recommendation for a couple of these films, as I said before, there is not a stinker in the bunch. Counting down…
10 “The Zone of Interest”, 9 “Past Lives”, 8 “Barbie”, 7 “Poor Things”, 6 “Killers of the Flower Moon”, 5 “American Fiction“, 4 “The Holdovers”, 3 “Oppenheimer” will likely wi figure n but Barbie might be a dark horse. 2 “Anatomy of a Fall” mostly because of the writing, the lead actress performance by Sandra Hüller and the way it kept me guessing even after the film was over. It was a very entertaining experience. And, as you know, my favorite of the bunch was “Maestro” for reasons previously stated.
Last year I covered 10 films in 3 episodes and I wore myself out editing all of the trailers, still photos, and movie clips into the YouTube version of the podcast. When I finished, I said to myself, “I’m not going to do that in such detail next year. It was too much work.”
Well, so much for that resolution…
This year I did 14 films in six episodes in even more detail. The editing was just as extensive as I tried to get the movie clips and still photos to match up with the narration. On top of that, I did so after three other movie-related episodes. That’s nine episodes in a row that were far more difficult than my usual talking head episodes. I had to throw out my usual schedule of releasing episodes on Monday mornings to get everything done in time for the Oscar ceremony.
I’m totally exhausted but I loved every minute of it.
Who knows what I will do next year? Maybe we will throw in animated animated features which I wanted to watch this year but didn’t have time this year.
I will return with a new episode formed by Patreon supporters on April 1st and the episode will be released to the general public on April 8th
Why do I love movies so much? Because they are all about contemplating life.
I find them to be educational, entertaining, enlightening, and even inspiring.
If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and other exclusive content. Although finances are tight, I don’t do this for the money. Still, every little bit helps.
As always my deepest thanks to my financial supporters. It expresses your support for what I’m doing. I will never be able to express how much that means to me.
Even if you cannot provide financial support, please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience. I just want more people to be able to hear my stories.
You can check out any of my back episodes which are all available where you found this episode. If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you find this podcast. Tell me what you liked or did not like about these films. What are your picks to win the Oscar this year?
I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe everyone.
Contemplating Life – Episode 58 – “Oscar 2024: Genocidal Husbands”
In this episode, we review two more films nominated for Best Picture Oscars. I call this grouping “Genocidal Husbands.” Yes, it is strange that we would have two major nominated films on that topic but indeed we do. Check out the episode as we wind down to the end of our list and approach the 96th Annual Academy Awards on March 10.
Links of Interest
Oscar Nominations 2024: https://www.oscars.org/oscars/ceremonies/2024
- “The Zone of Interest” (2023): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7160372/
- “The Zone of Interest” Trailer 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-vfg3KkV54
- “The Zone of Interest” Trailer 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFNtVaAuVYY
- “The Zone of Interest” Featurette: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTh5Nui_jFg
- “The Zone of Interest” Anatomy of a Scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb9HkiNH0bs
- “The Zone of Interest” Interviews: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6cGdfUJw3Y
- Rudolf Höss on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_H%C3%B6ss
- Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum website: https://www.auschwitz.org/en/
- “Anatomy of a Fall“ (2023): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17009710/
- Novelist Sir Martin Amis on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Amis
- “Killers of the Flower Moon” (2023): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5537002/
- “Killers of the Flower Moon” Trailer 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EG0si5bSd6I
- “Killers of the Flower Moon” Trailer 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EP34Yoxs3FQ
- “Killers of the Flower Moon” Trailer 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cx9nCHsemc
- “Killers of the Flower Moon” Interview 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH52elhNxXU
- “Killers of the Flower Moon” Interview 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru1_0tujCzw
- “Poor Things” (2023): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14230458/
- “Barbie” (2023): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1517268/
- “May December” (2023): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13651794/
- Indigenous Insight on “Killers of the Flower Moon”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgN9qf5b1BA
Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/contemplatinglife
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YouTube playlist of this and all other episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFFRYfZfNjHL8bFCmGDOBvEiRbzUiiHpq
YouTube Version
Shooting Script
Hi, This is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 58 of Contemplating Life – Oscar edition.
The 96th Annual Academy Awards are just a few days away as I’m writing this. We still have four more Best Picture Nominees and two episodes to cover them. We have saved some of the best for last.
When I came up with the idea of grouping the Best Picture Nominees into pairs, I didn’t have all 5 pairs figured out. But now that we are down to the end, my little gimmick for grouping the films in twos has worked out much better than I thought it would.
This week’s grouping is called “Genocidal Husbands”. We have two films about marriages in which the husbands engaged in rampant, racist, murder of people based on their ethnic background. It’s strange that we would have two such films in the same year.
The first one is “The Zone of Interest” directed by Jonathan Glaser. It is the story of Rudolf Höss who was the Commandant of the Auschwitz Concentration camps. He and his wife Hedwig live in a spacious villa with a huge garden that includes a swimming pool, a greenhouse, and stables for his horses. The other side of the tall garden wall is the camp where Jewish prisoners are sorted. Those capable of working are sent to local factories as slave labor. Those who are too weak are killed in gas chambers and the bodies burned in furnaces.
Although this is a British production by a British director, the entire film is in German with English subtitles.
The film does not show us the horrors going on in the camp but we hear them quite vividly. From time to time, you can hear screaming and occasional gunfire as unruly prisoners are eliminated. There is only one brief scene at the camp itself and the camera stays focused on the face of Höss as he oversees the unloading of train loads of prisoners. We hear the screaming of men women and children and again occasional gunfire dealing with those who are uncooperative.
The majority of the film simply shows us the day-to-day happy life of this couple who enjoy the benefits of his position. The renovation of their house and the construction of the garden and other outbuildings were all performed by or paid for by local businessmen as a kickback for getting the slave labor from the camp. In one scene, Höss meets with a pair of contractors who have come up with a more efficient design for the furnaces.
Höss and his wife have 5 children ranging from an infant up to a teenager. Their eldest son enjoys playing with his collection of gold teeth that have been extracted from the prisoners. Hedwig enjoys receiving fine fur coats and jewelry stolen from the Jews and she distributes other lesser-quality pieces of clothing to their household servants.
The family enjoys picnicking, fishing, and swimming in the nearby river. However, one day the river is polluted by ash and human remains. Rudolph has to scurry out of the river where he is fishing in hip waders and get his children out of the water quickly to run home and be scrubbed vigorously with hot water.
The movie was filmed using remotely operated hidden cameras placed around the house and grounds so that the actors would not be distracted by them. There are no movie lights used. Everything is shot digitally with natural lighting. They would act out long scenes and would be unaware of what part of the scene the cameras were focused upon. The actors said that it made their performance more natural because they didn’t have to worry about hitting their marks. They just played out the scene.
Except for one scene, I don’t recall seeing any close-ups in the entire film. During conversations, there is little or no back-and-forth editing between the participants. The cameras are static.
In one particular scene, while Rudolph is discussing the new furnaces in his office with the contractors, Hedwig is entertaining her friends, and a Polish servant girl scurries around the house serving drinks and collecting the Commandant’s bloody boots to be cleaned by another servant. The scene was filmed with 10 remotely controlled cameras in fixed locations. It is edited together to follow the servant girl as she wanders between the rooms. It’s as if this is all happening in real-time and we are voyeuristically watching it unfold. I have linked a YouTube video about the filming of that particular scene. It’s really fascinating.
The actual Höss home still exists in Poland adjacent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial. Director Jonathan Glaser visited the museum and spent years researching the film including material from the museum’s archives. This included written testimony and interviews of the actual servants who worked in their home.
The movie was filmed on location in Poland just a hundred yards from the actual home. They found an appropriate abandoned home and renovated it. It took months to re-create the garden which is meticulously identical to the original. The museum was cooperative in the production and there is an epilogue scene filmed in the museum. I have linked the museum/memorial website in the description.
There is very little plot to the film. We are simply a fly on the wall witnessing the normality of these deeply evil people.
The only plot point occurs about halfway through the film is that Rudolph is reassigned to a new position in the Nazi hierarchy. He delays telling his wife about the move for over a week which upsets her greatly. She has worked hard to create the idyllic garden behind the house and to create a luxurious life for herself, her husband, and their children. She begs him to allow her to stay in the home as he travels to his new assignment. He petitions his superiors to allow her to stay behind and they agree. One of the servants whose testimony is in the museum archives was the source for the information that the couple argued over this incident so it is entirely authentic to what it was really like in the Höss household.
Eventually, Hitler approved a new plan to bring 700,000 Jews from Hungary to the camps in Poland for extermination and war production. Höss will be returning home to his wife and family to supervise the massive new importation of Jews. Himmler describes it as “Operation Höss”. Rudolph excitedly calls his wife to share the good news. She is mildly happy but ultimately just complains that he called her so late at night. Couldn’t this have waited?
And that’s basically it. That’s the movie in a nutshell.
I’ve summarized the entire plot. There is no “action” per se. We just our witness to the casual approach that these people have to evil.
Fortunately, the film only lasts one hour 45 minutes and that is more than enough time for it to make its point.
Rudolph is played by German actor Christian Friedel who is unknown to me and his IMDb listing doesn’t show anything I recognize.
Sandra Hüller was similarly unknown to me until I saw this year’s nominated film “Anatomy of a Fall.” Both of them deliver chilling performances although it’s a bit difficult to judge their performance with a lack of close-up shots.
The film has 5 Oscar nominations. In addition to Best Picture, it is also nominated for Best Foreign Film and Best Director Jonathan Glaser. Also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay by Jonathan Glaser very loosely based on the novel of the same name by Sir Martin Amis. Sadly, Amis died on the same day that the film made its debut at the Cannes Film Festival where it was awarded the “Grand Prize of the Festival”.
None of those Oscar nominations are likely to win in the face of stiff competition however it is also nominated for Best Sound and although I’ve not looked up what other films are nominated in that category, it should definitely win. The entire premise of the film is that you hear the horror but do not see it.
By the way, it was easy for the actors to ignore the sound during filming because they did not have any of those sound effects of dying people during the shooting of the film.
It was nominated for 9 BAFTA awards and it won Best British Film of the Year, Best Film Not in the English Language, and of course Best Sound.
It was nominated for three Golden Globe Awards. IMDb lists 158 nominations and 51 wins.
The film has earned just over $7 million in the US and Canada and $16.5 million worldwide.
For the most part, the film is an impossible pain to watch. But then again, that’s the point, isn’t it? Is quite strange that the film can be simultaneously boring and horrifying. It is an amazing piece of filmmaking and I understand why it received its nominations. I think they are all well deserved. But I cannot recommend the film. Although I’m glad I saw it, and I am fascinated by the way it was produced, it is my least favorite of the 10 Best Picture Nominated films.
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In our second film this episode, we get a different look at genocide this time a little closer to home. Martin Scorsese directs “Killers of the Flower Moon.” It is based on the true story of the Osage Native American tribe in Oklahoma in the 1920s who discovered oil on their lands. Then one by one, they are killed off by white people in an attempt to steal their oil rights.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkart, a young man who returns home to Oklahoma after serving as a cook in the Army during World War I. He is taken under the wing of his uncle William Hale played by Robert De Niro. Hale who goes by the nickname “King” is a wealthy rancher in the area who is very powerful in the nearby town of Fairfax.
Ernest is unable to perform manual labor because of a hernia condition but King finds work for him as a driver. The Osage people have become extremely wealthy and Ernest finds employment driving around an Osage woman named Mollie. At Uncle King’s encouragement, Ernest courts and eventually weds Mollie thus making him a partial heir to her oil rights.
King is the leader of a conspiracy to kill off the Osage oil rights holders one by one. Some are simply murdered in cold blood. Some fall victim to accidents. Some are staged suicides. Wherever possible, the powerful white men tried to marry into the Osage families so that their rights would eventually fall to them.
The story jumps in time in several places as we see Ernest and Mollie begin to raise a family. Molly suffers from severe diabetes and King and her doctors arrange for her to be given insulin treatments which are a brand-new therapy during the time the story takes place.
King claims to love the Osage people and befriends many of them. The Osage for the most part believe that he is their friend.
The tribal Council hires private investigators because the local authorities will not investigate the deaths of the oil rights holders. The investigators mysteriously disappear. Eventually, they send a representative to Washington DC to request that the federal government investigate these deaths. For some reason, he never arrives. Then Mollie joins a large Osage delegation who travel to DC themselves and insists on being seen by someone who will investigate the deaths. DC eventually sends investigators.
King insists that Ernest get his wife under control and keep her from being such a troublemaker. They add drugs to her insulin injections and keep her in a drug-induced stupor.
As members of Mollie’s family are killed off, Ernest serves as a go-between between King and the suckers they get to commit the murders. He begins to realize that at some point his wife is going to be next. Even though he is been on board with the plan all along, he truly loves his wife and doesn’t want to lose her or leave his children motherless.
So, what will Ernest do? Does he dare stand up to his powerful uncle and the other powerful white men of the community and testify against them? If he does so, he will naturally have to reveal his role in the conspiracy. While that might save the life of his wife, it will in all likelihood destroy their relationship when his involvement becomes public knowledge.
DiCaprio does a wonderful job portraying this man who participates in such evil acts yet grows a conscience when he realizes the evil is eventually targeting his immediate family. You feel every bit of his struggle with his conscience. You feel he really loves his wife yet he feels bound by loyalty to his powerful uncle. It’s an amazing performance and his Oscar nomination as Lead Actor is very much deserved.
De Niro of course turns in a phenomenal performance as the sly and duplicitous kingpin of the entire plot. He is nominated for an Oscar as Supporting Actor as he should be.
Mollie is played by Native American actress Lily Gladstone. She is the first Native American nominated for a lead role and would make more history should she win. She won the Golden Globe for Lead Actress in a Drama as well as the SAG Award for Lead Actress. I think Emma Stone who won the Golden Globe for Lead Actress in a comedy probably has a lock on the Oscar for Lead Actress but the Academy might not be able to resist the opportunity to make history. This one is pretty much a tossup. I can’t tell you who is going to win
While her performance was probably my least favorite of the five nominees, I will grant that it was worthy of the nomination. I would not bump her to make room for Margo Robbie in “Barbie” or Natalie Portman in “May December” who gave amazing performances but were not nominated.
I don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell you that we do find out what decision Ernest makes and the consequences of that decision. I won’t tell you what that is.
However, how that information is presented is a bit strange. There is sort of an epilogue in the form of a radio drama that we see performed on a theater stage in front of an audience. It’s sort of a 1930s version of a true crime podcast in which actors and a narrator tell the story of what happened. Martin Scorsese himself makes a cameo appearance in the radio play. While it was good to know how the story wrapped up and I was satisfied with how it was wrapped, I found that epilogue in the form of a radio play to be quite bizarre. I might have preferred an ordinary montage sequence with some sort of voiceover narration.
The film has earned 10 Oscar nominations: Best Picture, Best Director for Martin Scorsese, Lead Actress Lily Gladstone, Lead Actor Leonardo DiCaprio, Supporting Actor Robert De Niro, Production Design, Costume Design, and Cinematography all of which are very much deserved. It was also nominated for musical score, a song that I don’t remember, and film editing none of which I have an opinion about.
It received 9 BAFTA nominations and 7 Golden Globe nominations.
As you might expect from a Martin Scorsese epic, the runtime is 3 hours 26 minutes yet the pacing does not feel particularly slow.
Produced on an estimated budget of $200 million it earned nearly $68 million in the US and Canada and over $156 million worldwide yet it was made for Apple TV streaming so it’s difficult to say if it turned a profit depending on how much Apple paid for it. Those numbers don’t show up in the box office figures.
It is my sixth favorite of the 10 Best Pictures. I found it engaging, and well worth my time. It’s everything you expect from people like Scorsese, DiCaprio, and De Niro. You can’t go wrong with a trio like that. I highly recommend it. It is still playing in some theaters and is currently available for streaming on Apple TV+ and for rent or purchase on Amazon and YouTube.
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After doing all the editing on this episode I have a few more thoughts to share.
On a YouTube channel called “Native Media Theory,” Native American Elias Gold gives a review of the film from an indigenous perspective. He has some interesting insights. He talks about the complaints that not enough of the film was told from the Native American perspective. It was all about Ernest and King Hale, and not so much about Mollie and her family.
But he reveals that the book and the original screenplay told the story strictly from the point of view of the FBI agents who came into the town to investigate after all of the killings. So, the film is much more representative of the indigenous you than the book was. Scorsese has really stepped up in that regard to tell a much more interesting and balanced story than he would have if you stuck to the original book.
Gold also supposes that the film was not made for an indigenous population. It was made for white people so that we can take a hard look at our own biases. We need to look at the people in the film who were complacent in what was going on even if they weren’t actively participating.
The same thing could be said for the other film “The Zone of Interest.” Thousands of people knew what was going on in the camps but remained silent and were thus complicit.
So, both Jonathan Glaser in “The Zone of Interest”, and Martin Scorsese in “Killers of the Flower Moon” in what ways are we complacent by our silence about the racism that still exists in the world today?
Some things to think about.
I’ve linked Mr. Gold’s YouTube video in the description. I highly recommend that you watch it. It gives an interesting perspective from an indigenous person.
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So, that wraps up our look at genocidal husbands. It’s bizarre that we even have such a category but I think the phrase is applicable to both of these films.
In our next episode, we present the final two of the 10 films nominated for Best Picture and they are among the best of the best. We have a pair of biopic’s about amazing geniuses. Christopher Nolan gives us a fascinating look at physicist J Robert Oppenheimer who led the efforts to develop the first atomic bomb in “Oppenheimer”. And spoiler… My favorite film of the year is Bradley Cooper directing and starring in “Maestro”. The story of famed composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein.
At the end of our final episode in the series, I will have a brief recap of all 10 Best Picture films, as well as the 20 lead and supporting actors and actresses as well as the 10 nominated screenplays. I will recap my favorites in order and then I will pick who I think will win even though I may or may not agree with the favorites.
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As always my deepest thanks to my financial supporters. It expresses your support for what I’m doing. I will never be able to express how much that means to me.
Even if you cannot provide financial support, please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience. I just want more people to be able to hear my stories.
You can check out any of my back episodes which are all available where you found this episode. If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you find this podcast. Tell me what you liked or did not like about these films.
I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe everyone.