The Imitation Game

Many years ago I interviewed a woman when I worked at a radio station and she had done some memorable thing, so memorable I can't remember what it was precisely, but she had come out and was talking about being a Lesbian long before it was possible for gays to get married in Florida (imagine that!). Indeed I think she was living with a "roomate" in the years after World War Two, so long ago Frank Sinatra was just becoming noticed. I remember asking her what it was like to have to live a life in secret, me becoming an adult in a progressive California university town, she denied her love in a country terrified of people just like her. Was it a source of intimacy I asked, being required to live in secrecy, a privately shared private life. She looked at me, and then through me, and she seemed to be remembering a place and a time a thousand yards behind my shoulder. Her simple reply to my convoluted and hopeful question: "No."

The Imitation Game is playing at the Tropic and while it may not be entirely accurate in its facts, as though any fictional movie could ever be, it opens a window on a world that seems at long last to be behind us. Alan Turing shown below in a file photo was the Englishman credited with creating binary computing before World War Two. His mathematical genius created the groundwork for everything we think of as computer technology today. His claim to fame and the story of the movie is how he broke an unbreakable code in World War Two by creating a binary computer capable of outsmarting the unbreakable German code called Enigma.

He committed suicide at 41 years of age after being found guilty of "gross indecency" which was the same charge half a century earlier that had brought down Oscar Wilde. It was illegal in those unhappy times for two men to have sex together and Turing faced two years in prison or chemical castration for his appalling crime. Good old days indeed! So it was that the brilliant mathematician took his own life and left unanswered the tantalizing question of what he might have achieved in the second half of his life cut short. There is the school of thought that most geniuses do their best work when young; in this case we can only hope so.

The movie is worth a view, its a story well told and nicely paced even though one goes in knowing the outcome. I came away from the theater into a cool breezy Key West evening and I was thinking more about homosexuality than code breaking. Tuesday saw the first gay marriages celebrated in Florida starting in Key West and the whole crazy civil rights debate seems to be settled, even if the homophobe dinosaurs are still thrashing their tails in an effort to prove they still have life. According to the newspapers 70% of the US population can now enjoy the benefits of gay marriage and presumably the holdouts will have to fold and accept that they have lost. Even Arizona celebrates Martin Luther King's birthday these days.

The movie seemed tailor made to suit the occasion, which is the passage of Florida into the gathering of States that allow everyone to marry. Turing in real life was a strange man, and speaking as one with autism the character portrayed in the film, the fictional mathematician Alan Turing certainly came across as autistic. He was brilliant and socially inept, lonely and confused and punished for the crime of "being different." His mind worked differently. There was one scene in the movie that resonated with me, even if it didn't happen in real life...The young Alan is with his friend Christopher who is reading a book on codes and ciphers. Christopher explains that the ciphers allow people to write one thing when they mean something completely different. "Like language," says the young Turing. "People always say one thing and seem to mean something completely different." Ah yes, I thought to myself as I watched. Just so.

Men and machines was the other theme of the movie which told the Enigma code breaking story in flashback. Turing recounts his life at Bletchly Park to a sympathetic detective in 1951. The detective had hoped he was busting a spy ring and ended up embarrassed to be busting a poof for gross indecency. The detective asks Turing if machines think like people. By way of answer Turing names his binary machine after his unrequited schoolboy crush who died while they were at school together. Just as I find dogs suit my stunted emotions better than people, Turing bonded with machines. Ah yes, but it's a movie and in the end the movie tells a ripping yarn, a couple of hours spent alone in the dark bring stimulated. Over stimulated possibly in my case.

Outdoors in Key West when I'd escaped the old age pensioner crowd at the Tropic life continued on Duval Street. That's a platitude isn't it? But it's true, and it's good, life did go on. Watching people march up and down checking their phones, turning on their turn signals, stepping off the sidewalk as the light turns green, all those simple little computations all thanks in the end to the mind of an extraordinary poof.

Whoever told you to work hard, do good to do well, and thus earn your neighbors' respect was, as it turns out not telling you the whole truth. Be normal even as you work as a genius, don't rock the boat of common custom even as you rock the foundations of civilization itself. Wait a minute, the head of Apple is a poof isn't he? And even Turing got a royal pardon in 2013 for his misguided act of buggery 60 years earlier (!), so I guess now it's okay to be queer, at least for some. A bit late but even today every binary act of computation carries a little piece of the genius, who was the poof, with it. Let the buggers marry and live in peace please. They might end up doing us all some good. Imagine that.

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Je Suis Charlie

"Keep Them Trembling:"

"I'm threatened by a pencil. What should I do?"

 

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A Gift

I read with some horror of the temperatures Up North.

Rest assured, there are places on the planet where all is not reduced to single digit temperatures.

Indeed, lounging in the living room, contemplating going to work tonight, a wild windy chilly scooter ride...

Cool enough and windy enough I don't want to open everything up. I'd have to put on a shirt or something equally drastic if I slid the deck access open and let the afternoon all the way in.

The front door wide open, listening to the breeze in the palm fronds outside... 65 degrees and sunny.

I started this as a gift to those laboring under gray skies, in gray frost, but it ended up as a gift to me. The Florida Keys keep on giving.

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Hung Over

The threat of a cold front hangs over the Keys, which is a bit of a joke when the northern half of the entire country is being snowed under this week...However the possibility of rain under cloudy skies and a chance that night time lows today might reach 63 degrees requires some thought. We got sprinkled on yesterday morning as Cheyenne and I admired the ultra low tide at the Ramrod Key pool.

The moon was full when we arrived in the dark but clouds were busy flying across the sky covering the light source and plunging us into darkness. The moon affects the tides to maximum effect when the moon is full or new, roughly (spring tides) and the full moon here drained the bath water from the pool.

I find my life defined by my endless amounts of overtime, my work preparing the podcasts, sleep and lines of traffic clogging the highway. Winter is in full swing yet Key West seems to have priced itself out of the youth market, the winter visitors, lots of them, are older, wealthier as they need to be, and less inclined to be rowdy.

Winter weather in South a Florida has hot weird and I am not the only one to notice. True cold fronts no longer seen to occur, and I can't remember the last time a true cold snap produced 50 daytime degrees. Rain seems year round now, lighter and less frequent in winter but we now get random unpredictable showers in winter where previously rain fell only before the arrival of a cold north wind. Now winter is humid and wet, similar to summer only less so.

I am not sure how I feel about these changes. I don't like the cold but some winter chill seems right and proper. The issue of how much our leaders ignore climate change and pretend it isn't there gets progressively more interesting as the effects become less and less deniable. If I had children I'd be getting worried and vocal.

As it is I have a dog and she reminds me that the here and now is what matters most. It's not raining right now so a walk is possible and the hunt for interesting smells is possible.

Perhaps my judgement is impaired, perhaps I spend too much time at work but sometimes it feels like the whole world is hung over.

Everywhere the trash cans are full, the New Year's celebrations are a memory, represented by empty bottles and cans, bulging plastic bags and a scene something like this:

Cheap gas, another sign of what..? Demand destruction, geo political chess games or some other strange need of the powerful which will only become clear later when the dust has settled and prices go back up to normal peak production levels. Still it's good to be alive in the Keys, even if the planet really should stop over indulging.

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The Sarcastic Conch Diary

I am not averse to giving space on my page to other people's internet efforts but there is one Key West Blog I find obnoxious not least because of it's rather unsubtle attempt to piggyback on my web page. Key West- The Conch Diary may not be plagiarism but it sure is close as a blog title and the author is no Conch. Those quibbles aside it is not a sterling literary effort ("to revisit a passion we have done") and the author has not yet apparently made the acquaintance of any photographic device to make those white pages more interesting. I like pictures, even of boring old Florida.

Cattle pen, Seminole Reservation, Everglades.

 Koreshan State Park. You want characters? Check out the former Koreshans of Bonita Springs. 

Roadside taco stand, Homestead. No strip malls in sight:

Thus I'd like to imagine that the two Web pages will not ever be confused. Not least because I find the tone of the Conch Diary to be decidedly off putting. It is a page that gleans its sarcasm from putting people down and not in a warmly empathetic way or a self  deprecating way. Let their words speak for themselves and decide for yourself if they sound as entitled  to you as they sound to me, in both content and tone:

An essay titled, obscurely, The Impossible Dream: 

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, we took a road trip from Key West (KW) to Charleston, SC. The idea sounded romantic– to revisit a passion we have done in New England and Europe. The plan was to leave KW and pause in Melbourne, FL, where we have a friend who keeps his boat in a cozy marina. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Florida geography, it takes approximately 10-11 hours to drive from KW to the Georgia border. The trip from Key West to Melbourne took 6 hours. Not too bad. We stayed two days and left for Savannah, GA, on the third day. It began to rain just inside the Georgia border (prophetic) and increased in volume as we drove north. Thirty miles from Savannah a tire blew out on the interstate.

It was dark, so it was difficult to give the road service “good old boy” precise directions. After two tries and threatening to give up, he found us, towed the car to a covered location and changed the tire. It poured the rest of the next day, so a walking tour of Savannah was impossible. While there we had to buy a new tire ($450.000) and then struck out for Thanksgiving in Charleston. The four days we spent there were fabulous. We left on the fifth day, with the plan to visit St. Augustine, and then go across to the west coast of Florida to explore Cedar Key and then work our way home.

A few miles from Cedar Key lights began to flash on the instrument panel, the cumulative message for which is “stop the car, call a tow truck and find a dealer.” We were in central Florida and finally found a mechanic in New Port Richie that could work on the car. He recommend we rent a car and stay at a little town named Safety Harbor for the three days it would take to repair the car. We did. It was mildly quaint, friendly and a one trick pony. A few bars and restuarants, but little else—except another fountain of youth finally found by another Spaniard. Yawn.

Three days later the horror began. We decided to take the “scenic route” to Alligator Alley (US 75), a road that crosses the Everglades and positions one to aim for Key West. To get to Alligator Alley, we took US Route 41 South—which was obscene.  Imagine 100 miles of continuous strip malls, traffic lights, traffic jams and kitchy retail outlets. We could have been in any state but Vermont. Forget character–just BBQ joints, strip clubs (full nudity), pawn shops and “no credit required” used car lots. Zero interesting or scenic drive. Then it edged up on rush hour and we found ourselves on US 75S in Miami with no movement because we encountered a major accident that had turned it into a parking lot. It took 1 hour to travel 2 miles. As a result, we arrived in KW 5 hours after our ETA. Tired and exasperated.

The largest lesson learned is that much of Florida is so tacky and congested that people from other states should be thankful you lost the idiots who moved there.

But here’s the point—there are so few quaint, small towns left in Florida, Key West should be granted secession—or at least “possession” status.

Here’s why:

• Our strip mall is only 1.5 miles long.
• The restuarants are diverse, not chain and they are highly rated.
• Key West is quaint because we have the largest collection of authentic Victorian wood houses.
• Characters are many, alive and well.
• A traffic jam is 2 minutes.
• It is easy to make friends with active, interesting people.
• People are so friendly in stark contrast to the constipated cruise ship people and tourists from the NE.
• The weather is not just good, it’s spectacular.
• And finally, while there a few precious gem cities, Florida became like every place else in the US.

And by the way the car was an antique Jaguar convertible. Our bad. NEVER AGAIN!

It seems to me if you are enough of a big shot to drive a car which needs $450 tires you are also big enough to change them when they go flat. But apparently these charmers not only can't do the basics they put down the "good old boy" truck driver who came out in the rain to help them. Then they put down the rest of Florida. Now I'm not going to say Highway 41 is a great scenic highway but if you are stupid enough to drive it without researching it first don't publish your snotty attitude where anyone who has traveled the back roads of Florida will read it. Apparently the classic Jaguar snobs have never heard of the Florida where cowboys roam, where the coolest freshwater springs bubble up and where small town America is alive and well. You won't find Labelle on Highway 41.

I'm not saying I want to live in Arcadia or Brooksville but I'm not ready to say everyone that lives there is an idiot. I like living in the Keys, anyone who reads my blog knows how grateful I am for my life here, warts and all, but I don't think Key West has any special dispensation when it comes to idiots. And some of them publish blogs...

I like the back roads of Florida and I enjoy exploring them. Sure, they are flat and tend to be straight but if that comes as a surprise to you, the idiocy is on you. Florida is a large state and with a population well above 22 million there are bound to be societal short comings. The weather is the glue that binds us together here and sunshine attracts scam artists as well as arthritics, scientists and low functioning adults. 

That we seem to manage to elect public leaders with no respect for public policy doesn't help but despite that Florida has an astonishing network of state parks, thriving agriculture and enough eccentrics with money that the state is dotted with monuments to human ingenuity. But you have to know where they are and go looking for them. Cruising the strip malls will garner you a view of ...strip malls. Duh!

In the end I guess it's foolish of me to take offense when someone who clearly has no sense of adventure, no ability to look after themselves on the road and no ability to see the subtle beauties of an easily stereotyped state speaks up. Let me say this in defense of Florida, if you need rocks and mountains and sweeping panoramas presented in front of you to be able to see beauty, stay away from Florida, including Key West where, believe me, idiocy is not hard to find if you are allergic to idiots. 

I don't think snobbery does Key West any honor either. Rant over. I like Florida. So sue me.

January Is Almost Over

Every night at work we change over the call out board which lists all the agency personnel that are on call for assorted potential emergencies. The list of detectives on call, Internet support staff and fire investigators and the like are posted on the wall so we know who to call out  at a moment's notice. It's a comforting routine that marks the half way point of our twelve hour night shift and on Sunday nights all the shifts change so it takes a few extra minutes to sort out the letters and numbers of new names and new phones for the week ahead.

Last night Kristi announced in a world weary voice: "The year is going by so fast, we're almost through January already." Which I thought was anticipating a bit as January is hardly over but I did agree that New Year's felt like it was long since history, all the fuss and crowds forgotten, our eyes now on the rest of the month, three weeks of the dead of winter at 80 daily degrees. As Kristi is half my age I pointed out to her that the older you get the faster it goes which gave her pause. But she's right, before we know it April will be here, winter residents will be packing up, my wife will be anticipating the end of the school year and swimming season will be back.

I had Friday night off, one night away from the endless overtime so my wife and I abandoned Cheyenne at home (snoring heavily) as you do, and we went to the Waterfront Playhouse to see "Noises Off" a comedy that I had never got to see in all the years it has been around. For me it was two and a half hours of endless laughter; I was the guy you don't want to sit next to, wheezing and crying as the slapstick, jokes and absurd situations piled up on each other. The story is simple enough: a provincial English theater troupe is putting on a play and we the audience get to see a rehearsal and two performances, one from the back of the stage as the cast attack each other in between appearances on stage and the final act from the front as the performance falls totally apart in mid performance. I loved it, a perfect break from endless work. My wife is not a devotee of slapstick and farce so her enjoyment was rather more restrained but she put up with me collapsing with mirth for two hours so she gets the good sport award.

Yesterday morning Cheyenne treated me  to some comedy when she went for a drink in the mangroves and got stuck. She has done this before so this time I took a moment to take her picture sticking out of a muddy Gambusia ditch pawing ineffectually and noisily while determined to not bark to alert me to her plight. The ditches were built as mosquito control devices as they were stocked with gambusia, little fish that eat mosquito larvae. Nowadays they are a nuisance if you are an elderly Labrador who prefers to drink muddy water as opposed to the fresh clean, filtered water at home. She got  a thorough bath when she got home, too, and she knew she needed it. 

Winter seems to have abandoned the Keys forever. We have had one brief spell of weather in the mid 50s and the forecast for the foreseeable future is 80 degrees by day and 70 by night, give or take. Perfect motorcycling weather and there are lots of SUV drivers riding bikes this winter. Like this charming person who used a perfectly good out-of-the-way free parking spot in Old Town to park his motorcycle which could have been parked at any number of official free motorcycle spots nearby. Why use a car spot? Because you are thinking like a car driver. Sigh. Plus he parked it all the way forward making it appear empty in a crowded lot so a distracted car driver might swing rapidly into the spot and tap your expensive toy. People who ride and are forced to use car spaces park their motorcycles at the entrance to the space to make sure passing cars know the space is occupied.

I parked my modern scooter in a car space momentarily. Playing scooter tag I needed to park next to an antique vehicle on my way to work. I knew I would find one in the Southard Street and Fleming Street corridor and here it was. Some elderly truck with an antique tag. Good enough.

Then I was left to puzzle what should I set as the next tag. I was recently stymied by a northern rider who wanted a scooter parked next to a frozen body of water and when I complained I couldn't get my Vespa next to the freezer I got no sympathy. Eventually someone broke the tag free of course but it was not me. So I decided to park next to a tree with greenery and this potted palm near Solares Hill did the trick. One northern rider promised to go out and look for a pine tree when conditions moderate but I'm hearing massive snow storms are on track to ravish the lovers of seasons Up North. 

Seasons? I've got two seasons, warm and muggy and warm and dry and that's plenty. Soon it will be summer and Kristi will be a year older. Bummer.