Longtime readers know that UD has a little house in the wilds of upstate New York. (Here’s the area of the house, in all its glorious back of beyondness.) Not much you’d call an event ever happens there. On the evening of July 4, you can sit in the front field and watch silent fireworks pop over the Catskill range. On other evenings, you can watch galaxies and satellites and shooting stars in a true dark sky.
Soon, maybe, you’ll be able to see and hear drones.
The new central NY drone test area doesn’t yet reach as far south as our place; but it’s not that far, as the drone flies.
UD understands that “all the pieces appear to be lining up for the eventual introduction of routine aerial surveillance in American life, a development that would profoundly change the character of public life in the United States.” She is in fact very interested (as is her hero, Don DeLillo) in the fate of privacy generally in postmodern America. She’s old-fashioned enough to find it strange, thinking of herself stepping onto the side deck of her country house of a morning and looking up at a little whirlygig that might be transmitting to Fort Drum the number of chips in her chocolate chip scone.
God knows I’m a good target. There’s nobody else around – just Les UDs on the top of their hill, in their house at the end of a driveway edged by evergreens planted by our long-ago neighbor Wojciech Fangor. (“At the beginning of the ’50s, he started to work with architects such as Stanislaw Zamecznik, Oskar Hansen, Zbigniew Ichnatowicz and Jerzy Sołtan.”)
Les UDs hope to be there in August. Maybe it’ll be The Summer of the Drones.
January 5th, 2014 at 6:58PM
Perhaps you and your family have done this or are doing this. But, if this were my place, I’d revisit my childhood hobby and buy a telescope with a computer-driven equatorial mount and enjoy the skies, largely unpolluted by man-made light. Jupiter and Saturn, with stripped planetary discs, moons and — in the latter case — rings, are sublime in the earlier literary sense, as opposed to the delicious gelato sense. My first glimpse of Saturn through a 12″ reflecting telescope, remains a chillingly beautiful memory. Perhaps a 127mm Celestron cassegrin. But, if you are interested do some, looking and computer research first.
I have no idea what to do about the drones.
January 5th, 2014 at 7:00PM
Greg: Those are all excellent ideas! Thank you for them. We’ll look into them as the summer approaches. UD
January 5th, 2014 at 7:54PM
Perhaps some inventor will start marketing a large electro-magnetic variant on the midwestern bug catcher and instead of the buzz and splat of cicadas the warm summer evening can be punctuated with the metalic clatter of downed drones.
January 5th, 2014 at 8:09PM
you need one of these:
http://www.newmuseumstore.org/browse.cfm/anti-drone-burqa/4,6059.html
January 5th, 2014 at 8:31PM
dmf: Yes – combines my love of the burqa with my paranoia about drones… But it’s expensive!
January 5th, 2014 at 8:31PM
Jeremy: The Drone Swatter!
January 5th, 2014 at 11:57PM
High in the sky the drone is alone.
If it were hit, ‘twould fall like a stone,
With no one to guide it
And no one to ride it,
Nose cone all wrecked by UD’s flung scone.
January 6th, 2014 at 2:07AM
adam: Good one. I’ve been playing, off and on, with drone rhymes (there are too many!) for a few days. I too smell a limerick.