Vic Socotra

17 December 2008

Lucky Sevens

(Lucky Seven Logo)

Are you feeling lucky?

I suspect not. The best we can hope for this holiday season seems to be one of caution. I shopped more than I wanted though not for what I wanted. Some of the last items to hit this credit card billing cycle will be an airline ticket to get most of the way home to the little town by the Bay and a copy of Microsoft Office 1997, the oldest version I could find from a reputable dealer on eBay.

Is that an oxymoron? I don’t know anymore. I feel like I am rolling the dice every time I go on-line anymore.

This problem started when my sister got Mom a new computer. The old one was steam-powered and gave up the ghost with a shudder and a puff of moisture. The new machine started a cascade of technical and operational problems when we were back for Thanksgiving. We have discovered that the newest version of the ubiquitous Office word and thought processing system contains enough “improvements” that Mom no longer could use it.

She doesn’t want to be a PowerPoint Ranger, nor manipulate ExCel spreadsheets. She just wants to type letters, something that is impossible without hundreds of dollars worth of expensive software.

Bastards. I have left Microsoft behind in everything that I can. When you are a target that big, it is easy to get hit in the frag pattern of those who seek to exploit its millions of lines of code.

I am feeling particularly vulnerable these short winter days, and each on seems to bring some new vague sense of menace. It is remarkable that the unraveling of $50 Billion dollar ponzi scheme masterminded by former Nasdaq chairman Bernard Madoff has caused only a minor sensation. The revelation of something this monstrous by such a well-respected figure only months ago would have caused rioting in the streets, and perhaps a panic on the market. In apparent response, the Fed slashed the prime rate to nothing.

Zip. Nada.

I shrugged at the news this morning, wondering what might be next on the thrill-meter.

The shortness of the day made me understand the need the light of parties and the warmth of our families against the dark. I took perverse comfort in the solitude, turning on my lights on the balcony and the two modest Christmas displays in the main room. I decorated the throne this year, the gigantic teak chair with the carved lion's heads on the arms and the stern vertical back that soars like a church steeple. Draped with lights of green and white and red it is festive.

I don't sit in it. It would seem presumptuous.

I had unplugged it for the night only hours before, and the chair was just a stark black outline against the glass of the window when I padded by in the early darkness.

It had not been a nightmare. I know those, mostly the ones of the chase, heart pounding, away from something awful. This one was of aircraft carriers, and the feeling of steel all around. There were charts of the uncharitable vastness, long double racks of them in various scales, the water in white and the land in yellow, just as they were back in the day, and memories of ejection seats and careful planning.

In dreamland, I ambled down a steel passageway, headed for Mission Planning- it must have been CV-41, old Ma Midway, since I had to swing feet first through the old World War II hatch. There was a smaller hatch, further back, and it was so narrow that I had to squirm through the steel in a sort of reverse birthing, to a place where there was no way out, no exit at all if it went to shit.

It would end in fire and water. I knew it as well as I know my own name.

By the time the heartbeat came down again, and the world stabilized, I knew that sleep was a goner. I was sipping the first cup of coffee and realizing that things had indeed gone to shit. I was lucky, though. There was a banner announcing an emergency patch on my Firefox browser when I opened it, and I dutifully downloaded it, reading that Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser version 7 had a fatal flaw that could allow criminals to load take control of people's computers and steal passwords.

Internet Explorer is used by the vast majority of computer users- at least all the chumps with Microsoft operating systems like the United States Government, and the flaw could affect all versions of it, though it is apparently targeted at lucky release 7.

According to the smart guys, the exploit has so far been used to steal gaming passwords, but of course bank and credit card information is next on the menu. The chink in the Microsoft armor permits “Trojan horse” programs to be loaded onto our computers remotely, which harvest all that stuff and mail it off to the bad guys.

The ones that know how to do this are recommending that users switch browsers until Internet Explorer is fixed, not that my Mom could benefit from the warning. I am hoping she still considers banking and shopping to be things that are done in person.

So there was that, and then another thing. A well-respected colleague from the shadow world sent a note that must have pained him a great deal. On Monday he had forwarded a remarkable account about the exploits of an American flying squadron that had been seconded to the Soviet Air Force in World War II to fight on the Eastern Front.

It was electrifying, and I made a note to explore this rich seam of history as soon as I had time. The story seemed plausible enough, and the exploits of the squadron- the 777th American Volunteer Group- seemed to mirror the accomplishments of their sister squadrons of the Flying Tigers who flew in China against the Empire of the Sun. The lack of public record was attributed to the fact that the Russians did not want to credit the Yanks with anything involving the Great Patriotic War.

That was true enough. I remember seeing the old hardware in the vehicle park at the Central Red Army Museum in Moscow. The multiple rocket launchers were mounted on sturdy Zil trucks, as Soviet as the lie that they were real. Everyone knew that it was Dodge trucks that had carried the Russians forward.

I clicked on the link to check it out and was mesmerized by a stunning chunk of history. The squadron paint scheme was derived from the lucky winning number displayed on the Las Vegas slot machines the pilots saw in flight training in Nevada. You can see it, too:

http://777avg.com/unithistory/

It is funny. Sometimes the only people you can con are the pros. We have been conditioned to believe the most extraordinary things, and actually done some of them. No one in their right mind would believe us if we told you about them.

The entire story was bogus. The Unit History was made up from whole cloth, based on the very real fact that the US produced a goodly portion of the combat aircraft the Red Air Force used to chew up the Germans. The whole story was invented to provide the back-story for a computer game called "IL2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles." Apparently it had quite a following in its time, but that is a business for the eternally new.

It was a game based on aerial combat between the Reds and the Nazis, and laid on the algorithms of a flight simulation game that had been popular at the turn of the century.

Boy, it is weird to write that and realize it was just eight years ago. We must have made it far enough into terra incognita that the meaning has shifted, and the madness of the 20th century has assumed a quaint sepia tone.

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