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The Wagon, the Blackbird, and the Saab
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"Go for the gusto. Borrow my vehicle! First, you can fuel up at home, as any fuel that had been in your tank is now a slippery puddle underneath the vehicle you wish you had. Then start the vehicle. You'll have something to deal with later, after the hot exhaust sets your trees on fire. And maybe a building or two. Then lurch around, and try to taxi along the streets. (Let's assume you don't set any trees on fire, which is not likely.) Now you're used to be able to see most of the things on the road, at least the ones you don't want to hit? And--"
"Ok, ok, I get the idea! The SR-71 Blackbird is the worst, most pitiable--"
"Perhaps I have misspoken. Or at least wasn't clear enough. I wasn't trying to say that it's simple torture flying an SR-71 Blackbird. There are few things as joyful as flying. And do you know what kind of possibilities exist (in everything from friendship to work to hobbies) when the list of things you can easily make a day trip to the other side of the globe? When--"
"Then why the big deal you just made before?"
"An SR-71 Blackbird is many things, but it is not what you imagine if you fantasize about everything you imagine my vehicle to be, and assume almost everything you take for granted in yours. There are a great many nice things that go without saying in your vehicle, that aren't part of mine. You know, a boring old station wagon with its dull room for a driver plus a few passengers and some cargo, that runs on the most mundane petroleum-based fuel you can get, and of course is familiar to most mechanics and can be maintained by almost any real automotive shop, and--if this is even worth mentioning--can be driven safely across a major network of roads, and--of course this can be taken for granted in any real vehicle--has a frame that gives you a fighting chance of surviving a full-speed collision with--"
"Ok, ok, I get the picture. But wouldn't it have helped matters if you would tell people these things up front? You know, maybe something about avoiding these confrontations, or maybe something about 'Honesty is the best policy'?"
He said, "Ok. So when I meet people, I should say, 'Hi. My vehicle leaves Formula One racecars in the dust. It also flies, can slip through radar, and does several things you can't even imagine. But don't worry, I haven't let any of this go to my head. I'm not full of myself. I promise I won't look down on you or whatever car you drive. And you can promise not to feel the least bit envious, inferior, or intimated. Deal?' It seems to come across that way no matter how I try to make that point. And really, why shouldn't it?"
I paused. "Do our vehicles have anything in common at all?"
"Yes--more than either of us can understand."
"But what on earth, if we're so different? My vehicle is a 1965 model; your vehicle sounds so new you'd need a time machine to get one--"
"My vehicle is a 1965 model too."
"If you want to lie and make me feel better, you could have told me that your vehicle was years older than mine."
"I meant it. There is something about our vehicles that is cut from the same cloth."
"How can you say that? I mean, without stretching? Is what they have in common that they're both in the same universe? Or that they're both bigger than an atom but smaller than a galaxy? Or some other way of really stretching?"
"If you want to dig deeper, have you read, 'I, Pencil'? Where an economist speaks on behalf of a common, humble pencil?"
"A speech from a pencil? What does that have to do with our vehicles? Are you going to compare our vehicles to a pencil?"
"Yes."
"So you're stretching."
"No."
"In I, Pencil, a cheap wooden pencil explains what it took to make it. It talks about how a diamond in the rough--I mean, graphite in the rough--crosses land and sea and is combined with clay, and a bit of this and that to make the exquisite slender shaft we call pencil 'lead'. The wood comes from the majestic cedar--do you know what it takes to make a successful logging operation--and then a mind-boggling number of steps transform a hundred feet of tree into something that's a little hard to explain, but machined to very precise specifications, and snapped together before six coats of laquer--oh, I forgot, before the cedar wraps around the slender graphite wand, it's also adorned by being tinted a darker color, 'for the same reason women put rouge on their faces' or something like that. Its parts come through a transportation network from all over the world, and the rubber eraser--which wouldn't erase at all well if were just rubber; it needs to be a cocktail of ingredients that perform at least three major tasks if it will work as an eraser. Try erasing pencil with a rubber ball sometime; it will erase terribly if it erases at all. Your erases is not mere rubber, but a rubber alloy, the way airplanes are made, not with mere aluminum, but with an aluminum alloy, and--"
"So the parts of a pencil have an interesting story?"
"Yes. And the quite impressive way they are put together--pencils don't assemble themselves, and a good machine--for some steps--costs a king's ransom. And the way they're distributed, and any number of things necessary for business to run the whole process, and--"
"Then should I start offering my daughter's pencils to a museum?"
"I wouldn't exactly offer one of her pencils to a museum. Museums do not have room for every wonder this world has. But I will say this. The next pencil you forget somewhere wouldn't have been yours to lose without more work, talent, skill, knowledge, venture capital, and a thousand other things than it took to make a wonder like the Rosetta Stone or the Mona Lisa."
As usual, she was dressed to kill. Her outfit was modest--I can almost say, ostentatiously modest--but, somehow, demurely made the point that she might be a model.
I had a bad feeling about something. During our conversation on the way over, I said, "You have an issue with Saab drivers." He replied, "No. Or yes, but it's beside the point. Saab drivers tend to have issues with me." I was caught off-guard: "That sounds as arrogant as anything I've--"
He asked me to forget what he had said. For the rest of the conversation, he seemed to be trying to change the subject.
She greeted us, shook his hand warmly, and turned back. "--absolutely brilliant. Not, in any way, like the British Comet, which never should have been flown in the first place, and was part of why jumbo jetliners were dangerous in the public's eye. The training for people who were going to be in that jumbo jetliner--the Comet--included being in a vacuum so that soldiers would know what to do if they were flying in a sparse layer of the atmosphere and the airplane simply disintegrated around them and left them in what might as well have been a vacuum. This sort of thing happened with enough jumbo jetliners that the public was very leery of them. For good reason, they were considered a disaster looking for a place to happen.
"And so, when Boeing effectively bet the company on the Boeing 707--like they did with every new airplane; it wasn't just one product among others that could be a flop without killing the company--they gave the test pilot very careful instructions about what to do when he demonstrated their new jumbo jetliner.
"At the airshow, he was flying along, and after a little while, people began to notice that one of the airplane's wings was lower, and the other was higher...
"The Boeing 707 test pilot was doing a barrel roll, which is extremely rough on an airplane. It's like... something like, instead of saying that a computer is tough, throwing it across the room. This stunt was a surprise to the other people at Boeing, almost as much as to the other, and it wasn't long before Boeing got on the radio and asked the pilot, 'What the §±¤¶ do you think you're doing?' The pilot's reply was short, and to the point:
"'Why, selling airplanes, sir.'
"He told a reporter afterwards, 'And when I got done with that barrel roll, I realized that the people weren't going to believe what they just saw... so I turned around and I did another one!'"
A moment later, someone else said, "What does 'Saab' mean again? You've told me, but--"
She smiled. "It took me a while to remember, too. 'SAAB' stands for 'Svenska aeroplan Aktiebolaget,' literally 'Swedish Aeroplane Limited.' It's a European aerospace company that decided that besides making fighter jets and military aircraft, they would run a side business of selling cars, or at least the kind of car you get when you combine a muscle car, a luxury vehicle, and more than a touch of a military jet. It's like an airplane in big and small ways--everything from, if you unbuckle your seatbelt, a 'Fasten seatbelts' light just like an airliners', to the rush of power you feel when you hit the gas and might as well be lifting off... I'm not sure how you would describe it... It's almost what Lockheed-Martin would sell if they were Scandinavian and wanted to sell something you could drive on the street."
He said, "It sounds like a delight to drive."
She said, "It is. Would you two like me to take you out for a spin? I'd be delighted to show it to you. What kind of car do you drive?"
He paused for a split second and said, "I needed to get a ride with him; I have nothing that I could use to get over here."
I told her, "He's being modest."
She looked at me quizzically. "How?"
"He flies an SR-71 Blackbird... um... sorry, I shouldn't have said that just as you were taking a drink."
He seemed suddenly silent. For that matter, the room suddenly seemed a whole lot quieter.
She said, "You're joking, right?"
No one said a word.
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The Wagon, the Blackbird, and the Saab
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