J.R.R Tolkien was born a hundred and eleven years ago today.

How cool is that?

At least according to Lileks. I don’t know whether the movie rox or not, but Lileks’ movie reviews sure do.

Or maybe just the garden variety.

I was driving through Santa Barbara (and Yes, Barbara, the proposal is done (I can’t say “Yes, Virginia” because it makes Virginia Postrel upset, and that’s the last thing that I like to do)), and the traffic was kind of…horrid. There’s a two-lane bottleneck at the south end of town that I don’t know what they’re going to do about, because you’d have to tear up a lot of valuable real estate to expand it. I suppose I should be glad that at least the freeway goes through all the way, as it didn’t in the eighties, when I used to have several traffic lights through that stretch.

But I digress, as is my wont.

Anyway, I got stuck behind a vehicle. With bumper stickers. It had a Wisconsin plate. From a dealer in Madison.

Can you guess what the car-ass adornments said?

I knew you could.

Here they are, to the best of my recollection.

On the upper right window, there was one that said “Iraq War, NO!” Below it was another, even dumber, that said, “End Iraq Sanctions.” To its left was one that said, “I’d rather be smashing imperialism.” (Is there a market for a bumper sticker that says “I’d rather be smashing bumper-sticker idiotarianism”?). And of course, in the upper left, the eye scanned the obligatory “Free Mumia.”

Did you guess correctly? Good.

Now here’s the tough part. Guess the make and model of the auto.

Oh, what the heck, I’ll give points for just the make.

[Cue, quiz show theme song]

Dum dee dum dum dum dee dum.

Dum dee dum dum DUM…de da da da da

Dum dee dum dum dum dee dum.

DUM de dum dee dum dum dum.

[/end game song]

Anyone guess?

I know, Volvo, right?

Nope.

Then, it must have been an older Japanese econobug. Right?

Nope.

It was an Infiniti.

And not just any Infiniti. It was an Infinity QX4.

That’s right. It wasn’t just the brand of the Evil White Imperialist Patriarchal Capitalist (TM). It was [gasp] an SUV!

Never before have I seen such a politically-incorrect vehicle fraught with such politically-correct bumper stickerage. I almost felt sorry for it. I wanted to pull the owner over and lecture them, but who knows, they might have been totally deranged and pulled a gun on me…

Jay Manifold calls this blatant sucking up.

I’d like to think of it as perspicacious prescience, myself. Anyway, it beats trolling for links.

Someone is building a seventeenth century blog out of Samuel Pepy’s diary. Excellent idea.

And no, thanks for asking, but the proposal isn’t done. It is, however, in the final stages of gestation, and it may not even be a breach birth. I’m just taking a little break waiting for a printout of the latest draft.

While New Year’s resolutions seldom survive the first week of January, it’s still traditional, if not actually useful, to make a self assessment and at least attempt corrective action this time of year.

Being someone who’s either already perfect, or hopelessly and laughably imperfectible (people who know me will be pleased to tell you which, sometimes in unpleasant language), I don’t really do it myself in the beginning of January. A few days after the boreal winter solstice seems like kind of an arbitrary date to make life changes, and I figure that when it comes time for change, there’s no time like the present, regardless of whether it’s the first day of the year or the last.

But I have been wondering if NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe has made any for this coming year. If not, I have some modest suggestions for him (and thanks to Mitchell Burnside Clapp of Pioneer Rocketplane for suggesting the topic).

Number one: Stop asking people whose job it is to spend lots of money developing technology if we need more technology to reduce the cost of getting stuff into space. Or at least, don’t be surprised at the answer, and please don’t repeat it for public consumption. If you can’t manage that, then at least get some balancing opinions from people who don’t have a vested interest in technology development, but do have a deep desire (and good ideas about how) to actually reduce launch costs.

Number two: Abolish the NASA “Centers of Excellence.”

This was a Dan Goldin innovation that was actually an implementation of the oldest trick in the socialist bureaucrats’ book. The theory, you see, is that duplication of government functions is wasteful, and an example of inefficiency of government that can, and must, be stomped out. So if there were two, or three NASA centers doing similar things, they would all be consolidated at a single center, thus promoting more efficiency.

Of course, in the real world, duplication of services is called “competition,” and it’s what tends to improve performance, and reduce costs, often brutally and quickly, as anyone whose computer purchase of last week is now obsolete can tell you. It works in government as well as in private enterprise, and in its absence, we don’t get efficiency–we get complacency in the knowledge that there’s no one out there to show you up, so it doesn’t really matter how well you do.

So-called “Centers of Excellence” got us things like the X-33 and X-34 fiascos, at great cost to the taxpayer. Restore competition to the agency.

And speaking of competition, here’s resolution number three: hop on the Metro across the river to the five-sided building, and have a little heart-to-heart with Don Rumsfeld, or whoever’s in charge of technology development and acquisition over there, and jointly toss out that ridiculous Clinton administration policy of NASA doing only reusable launchers and DoD doing only expendable ones.

I’ll bet there are some innovative ideas at NASA about technologies that can reduce the costs of expendable vehicles, which will probably have at least niche roles for some time to come, even with cheap launch from the coming age of space transports. And goodness knows that the military needs fast-response low-cost access, which they’re never going to get with launch-pad queens like the Titan.

Yes, yes, I know, you said last February that the policy needed review, but surely the review must be over by now. Maybe a de facto decision has been made to change the policy, but it would be nice to have it actually formally announced. There have probably been a lot of junior officers keeping interesting things in their desk drawers waiting to see which way the wind formally blows.

Number four: Think about prizes. Think about what really motivates people to accomplish goals, at minimum costs. Hint: it’s not with contracts that pay the contractor’s cost, plus a fixed profit.

Take a mission that the agency has been considering, but isn’t necessarily critical (say, an asteroid sample return). Get an agency estimate of the cost. Then offer a prize of half of that amount to the first company to return the sample, and to make things interesting, a prize of a quarter of that amount to whoever places second. No prize for showing. It would get multiple players interested, it would cost less than the traditional way of doing it, and if no one wins, the taxpayer isn’t out a dime, and it was a mission that likely wouldn’t have gotten funded anyway.

As I said, think about it.

Number five: Issue a mandate to everyone in the agency that the word “Shuttle” will be retired when the present Shuttle is retired. Whatever replaces Shuttle will not be “the next Shuttle” or “Shuttle II” (take a hint from Hollywood–sequels don’t usually do that well), or “Shuttle replacement” or “the launch vehicle previously known as Shuttle.” Purge the word from all memos, Congressional briefings, marketing brochures, industry solicitations, press office handouts to Popular Mechanics, and water-cooler chit-chat unless it refers to the current system.

If some in Houston or Huntsville take umbrage at the notion that you’re implying that there was something just a little wrong with the Shuttle, and that you want to start with a clean slate (which, of course, is in fact the reason you’re doing it), tell them to simply think of it like retiring the number of a star athlete when he himself retires.

Make it your personal crusade. If Dan Goldin could declare war on worms, you can certainly take up the cudgel for symbolism that actually means something.

Number last: Read Transterrestrial Musings every day, and the weekly columns in Fox News, and all of the past columns in the archives.

Thank you for the opportunity.

That is all. For now.

Sorry for the light posting, but I’m deeply immersed in a proposal, and won’t come up for air until later this week.

Have a happy and safe celebration, and a great anno nuevo.

Here’s a good (posthumous) article about an unsung hero in modern military high-tech tactics and strategy–John Boyd.

This is beyond stupid.

An entire terminal at San Jose International airport was evacuated because a man was found there without a ticket.

Seems appropriate somehow. The article neglects to mention that the full name of that airport (named for its former local congressman) is the Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport.

China just launched the fourth test flight in the Shenzhou series.

They claim success, and it’s one more milestone toward their stated goal of establishing a manned space program. I don’t find it of any concern, and actually wish them well, considering that they’re operating in the old paradigm. It will be a program for prestige only (as ours mostly is), not one that will make any great strides in space.