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I am a big believer in always following procedures when engaged in certain dangerous (or potentially dangerous) activities. That way you train yourself – your body and your mind – to act and think in a certain way, even if you are scared, tired, in danger, or otherwise in distress.

The military trains its people that way; law enforcement as well; and pilots also. Follow standard operating procedures – and never deviating from them – means that you can focus your mental energies on pressing matters, without wasting time or thought on things that you don’t need to.

So you should always follow standard procedures and never deviate from them.

But the real genius in life – knowing when not to follow those procedures.

During the Battle of the Philippine Sea in World War II, US carriers launched a late-day strike on the Japanese forces. The US strike force was low on fuel and returning to their carriers as night fell. One of the biggest challenges in WWII carrier operations was just finding the launching carriers on the featureless sea, which could have moved 30 miles or more – and whose aircraft were generally using inertial navigation and nothing better.

Standard procedures for US ships in WWII were to be blacked out at night – really, that went back for hundreds of years for naval ships. This protected ships from being sighted by the enemy – and the enemy in WWII for carriers were enemy aircraft and enemy submarines. Two US fleet carriers were sunk by Japanese submarines during WWII, for instance, and two Japanese fleet carriers were sunk by US submarines during this battle.

So what did the US fleet do when faced with the prospect of a bunch of lost – and crashing – US aircraft returning from their strike? Ignoring the threat of Japanese subs and night-flying aircraft, and contrary to all policies, procedures, and doctrines, they turned on every floodlight they could in the fleet, shining their searchlights up into the sky so that the returning US aircraft could find the fleet at night. US aircraft landed on the nearest carrier, regardless of their home carrier, and many pilots ditched safely within the perimeter of the US fleet.

Of over 200 US aircraft launched, 115 US aircraft returned; 20 were lost to enemy action in the attack, and 80 ditched because they ran out of fuel. Of those 80 that ditched, about 3/4 of the pilots were rescued.

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I’ve gone down some YouTube-holes lately watching videos about private pilots. My son recently got his private pilots license and there are some really good YouTube channels out there. Many of the videos highlight aircraft mishaps or near mishaps with a discussion of the mistakes made and lessons learned. Other videos simply play the recorded communications along with a good map showing the location of the flights. Some of the funnier videos include pilots getting ornery with each other or, less often, air traffic control.

One of the most important things when flying is communication. The mantra for a pilot is to 1) aviate, 2) navigate, and 3) communicate.

Communication is key around airports – around controlled airports, a pilot’s course is controlled by air traffic control. And with many aircraft in the air, communication must be precise, intentional, and brief. There are a limited number of commands that can be given, and the pilot should acknowledge them all by rule and regulation.

Part of that communication is the use of callsigns – which are either the tail number for general aviation or the flight number for commercial aviation.

I stumbled on this video last week about a pilot-in-training on her third solo flight. She loses her nosewheel on takeoff. When notified about the loss of the nosewheel she is noticeably frightened and nervous, but she is able to fall back on radio procedures to make it easier for her and ATC to communicate. It’s certainly a scary situation, as she knows that, at best, she will have a very rough landing. A few other nearby pilots come up onto the net and help talk her through the landing procedures, since she’ll need to stay nose-up as long as she can upon touchdown.

But maybe the most subtly brilliant actions that another pilot takes to help her: instead of sticking to impersonal callsigns when talking to her, sticking with tried-and-true procedures, he asks her name. And for the rest of the flight, they humanize her and her situation, relate to her, and even talk about her plans for lunch and her future piloting plans.

Taylor safely landed the plane (with some damage) – and even commented on the video, thanking Chris and the ATC for their help!

This is the excellent video with the ATC map and audio that really tells the story:

And this is a news report that includes footage of Taylor’s landing:

The TV show MTV Unplugged was a big hit during the 1990s, back when the “M” still actually stood for “Music.”

MTV Unplugged featured major music artists playing acoustic sets in a small, intimate setting. Many of the sessions were then released as CDs.

Here, Eric Clapton debuted his revised version of “Layla” – a version that was a major departure from the original. 

I’ve got two versions here because apparently the actual MTV Unplugged video of Eric Clapton’s appearance isn’t available. So here is the rehearsal version video and an audio-only clip of the actual live performance, which starts with a mocking challenge: “See if you can spot this one.”

The rehearsal version:

“See if you can spot this one.”

Nirvana‘s Unplugged: an iconic performance during the brief Nirvana heyday – before Kurt Cobain’s death.

The 10,000 Maniacs had a huge hit with their cover of “Because the Night.”

Tony Bennett

a-Ha with a haunting rendition of “Take on Me.“

Page & Plant singing “Gallow’s Pole.” It’s not an original take like “Layla” or “Take On Me,” but it’s a great performance nonetheless.

Another Eric Clapton song, this one an original for Unplugged – a heartbreaking song to his young deceased son.

R.E.M. “Losing My Religion.”

The Eurythmics – “Here Comes the Rain Again”

This one may not be as timeless, but I still remember it vividly. Live – “Lightning Crashes”

I listen to a lot of podcasts. I mean a lot of podcasts. I listen to them when I first get up in the morning; anytime I am driving; when I sit down for lunch; when I go on walks; when I am doing a chore around the house; and usually when I am getting ready for bed. (All at 1.7x or 2x speed, unless the podcaster has a heavy accent, in which case I may slow it down.) I listen to podcasts on my car speakers, through my iPhone speakers, or through ear buds. And they are about a variety of subjects: history, Star Wars, gaming, my favorite TV shows, and even one about the mob.

Based on that, I have some advice that I would like to pass on to all podcasters:

Bumper Music

Turn it down. Some of my podcasts feature bumper music, but they have the volume so loud that it vibrates my car or deafens me through ear buds. Most people, listening to amateur podcasts, turn up the volume in their car or on their phones to listen to the spoken word; but most podcasters

Show length (or “watch your rambling”)

Like I said, I listen to a lot of podcasts — and would listen to more podcasts if I had more time (as well as audiobooks and lots of other audio entertainment). It is a major “barrier to entry” when I see a podcast download that is 2+ hours. (Now, Dan Carlin is a major exception to that, but he only publishes 1-2 major podcasts per year.) A weekly podcast doesn’t need to be longer than 2 hours. Heck, most don’t need to be longer than an hour.

I think that the sweet spot for a podcast is 30-45 minutes. Sometimes you need to go longer, but a 30-45 minute podcast can be listened to in one or two sessions — driving to the store, or across town, or even a short walk.

One of my favorite podcasts is guilty of this. Yes, there are times when there is big news on their subject, or when they dissect a new trailer, when 1 1/2 or 2 hours may be appropriate, but sometimes I feel like they are purposely adding fluff when there isn’t big news to discuss just to lengthen the show. Do you know what that does? If I am halfway through the podcast and hear a lot of fluff, I may just delete it and move on to my next podcast. Or if I read the show synopsis and it doesn’t interest me, I am much more inclined to not even download it if I see it is 2 hours than if it’s a shorter show.

So keep it short and to the point. My time is valuable.

Show length (off-topic segments)

Similarly, many podcasts go off-topic. While that can unnecessarily lengthen the show (keep it short and sweet!), some podcasters actually do it successfully. 

So if you are going to have an off-topic section, still keep it focused and limited. One of my favorite podcast starts off with their off-topic segment — after a couple of years of getting an ever-lengthening “introduction,” they cut back and now each podcaster gets to talk about “one thing.” They usually discuss a new TV show they are watching or maybe something significant happening in their personal life. But they limit it to “one thing.”

Another podcast I listen to ends each podcast with their “Frivolity” segment. The hosts warn you of the subject (often sports or something pop culture in what is an otherwise-serious podcast). With the warning, if you’re not interested you can simply skip the end of the podcast. I greatly appreciate their consideration of my time.

Personal life

Many podcasters like to discuss their personal lives. Some can pull it off better than others, and some obviously believe that they can make a better personal connection with their listeners if they share things from their personal lives. 

My advice is to approach with caution too much discussion of your personal life. I know that podcasters want to bond with their audience, and my innate curiosity makes me interested (sometimes) in what you are telling us about your personal life, but tread lightly. Yes, I may want to hear what new boardgame you played with your family on a boardgaming podcast, but I don’t need to hear an in-depth account about your kid’s illness on a podcast about the law. 

Explain your perspective or background

Always orient your audience to what you are discussing, and remember that we can’t see what you see. (This is especially important for podcasts that are simulcast or originally streamed on YouTube.)

For example, one podcast I listen to semi-regularly covers boardgames, from a fairly academic perspective, usually through interviews with game designers. Sometimes the host will start off by asking, “So what was your motive or intention for designing this game?” And then they will have an in-depth discussion about the history of the game, the underlying assumptions, the challenges, etc. — but they never introduced us to the basics of the game, such as what is it about, what is the gameplay like, etc.!   

Be careful laughing at yourself

Yes, sometimes your jokes are funny. But I’m not interested in listening to minutes of you and your co-host (if you have one) telling mostly inside jokes and just laughing at yourselves. Being genuinely funny and entertaining is great, but don’t get yourself in a laughing tizzy and expect me to spend my valuable time listening to you laugh.

The truth is, I have more podcasts I would like to listen to than I have time to listen to them (even at 2x speed) — just like I have more books to read than time to read them. Podcasters, respect our time, keep your podcast focused and informative, and we’re much more likely to listen to them.

Throughout the history of warfare, the balance of power between the offensive and the defensive oscillated back and forth, as technology and tactics have each advanced to make one more powerful than the other. The Greek hoplites were an excellent defensive tactical formation, difficult to defeat until the Roman legion, with its superior mobility and command and control, allowed them to outmaneuver the clumsy phalanxes. Eastern horse-borne archers swept into Europe and couldn’t be stopped for generations. Fortified walls forced medieval armies to settle for raids, destroying the land instead of taking the cities. Most notably, the superiority of defensive firepower (machineguns, artillery, and trenchworks) led to the bloody stalemate that was WWI, while armor, mobility, and airpower (all products of WWI) gave the offensive supremacy in WWII.

We may be back to a WWI-like situation, with defensive firepower reigning supreme over the offensive. The mantra “If you can see it, you can kill it” may be truer than ever, and thanks to drones, the combatants can see a lot more of the battlefield. Anti-tank guided missiles are powerful and accurate enough now that tanks can no longer dominate the battlefield. Drones are giving artillery near-instantaneous intelligence on the location of enemy forces — especially their own artillery — and destructive fire missions can be called in seconds.

Maneuver and mobile attacks were somewhat successful in the first couple weeks of the war, but once the Ukrainian forces were able to blunt the attacks (sometimes with as few as two men and an anti-tank missile), the war has regressed into a battle of attrition.

I really don’t know what the future holds for this war. The Russians have been fighting for a month to take Bakhmut, a relatively unimportant city, but the focus of the current fighting. But even if the Russians take Bakhmut, they will have achieved very little, as they do not have the forces or ability to exploit any victories into anything more than an attack on the next town in the Donbas.

Western countries have pledged lots of aid to Ukraine, including a lot of relatively modern tanks. It will take months and months to get these forces to Ukraine, the crews trained, and the logistical tail in place. The Western tanks may prove decisive if this is a 3-year war, but this is really a war of attrition and a war of will. Neither side seems to be making real inroads into either.

If I could give one, just one, piece of parenting advice, it is this:

Give your children music lessons.

Granted, in some ways this advice is very selfish, because I am writing this about the pleasure I get from it.

Piano lessons are the gateway. Both of our children received piano lessons at an early age, teaching them the very basics of music: how to read and listen to music. From that foundation of piano lessons, our children branched out into violin, clarinet, and a host of stringed instruments (various guitars, mandolin, and ukulele). We even have a drumset in our house now.

Now, the sound of music fills our house – and not from the radio, or TV, or Pandora, but from our children sitting in their room. Sometimes they are practicing for band at school, playing scales and exercises and rehearing songs. Sometimes they are just sitting at their computer, watching a show or working on homework, and the lovely sounds of a classical guitar or ukulele or clarinet solo form the background music of our day.

While I don’t expect either of my children to make a career in music, selfishly I am glad that, for a period of our life, the sounds of their instruments fill our home.

Luthen Rael bared his soul in Episode 10 of Andor. And his recitation of his sacrifices, his intentional distancing of himself from morality and even humanity, is in line with my view of the pre-Luke Rebel Alliance: they are amoral and driven by their opposition to, maybe even hatred of, the Empire.

Luthen knows that his sacrifices are necessary to stop the Empire. But he recognizes his lost humanity in doing so.

And what do you sacrifice?

Luthen: Calm. Kindness. Kinship. Love.

I’ve given up all chance at inner peace. I’ve made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there’s only one conclusion, I’m damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost and by the time I looked down there was no longer any ground beneath my feet.

What is my sacrifice? I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude.

So what do I sacrifice? Everything!

Rogue One is definitely my favorite of the Disney-era Star Wars products. I love it much more than the other four Disney-era movies, and as good as The Mandalorian is, I still think that Rogue One has the perfect blend of harsh action and traditional Original Trilogy Star Wars vibes.

And while I won’t go so far as to blaspheme the OT and say that Rogue One is my favorite, on any given day I would probably prefer to watch Rogue One to almost any other Star Wars movie or show.

(I am writing this the week before Andor is released on Disney+, because I want to get these thoughts out now, before they may be superseded by – or reinforced by – the new look at the early days of the Rebellion.

One thing that I love about Rogue One is how it portrays the Rebellion – gritty and rough, probably even lost in its ways, and certainly without direction. We see the Rebellion in a different light than the OT Rebellion, even though Rogue One occurs just hours or days before A New Hope.

The Rebellion we see in the OT portrayed as representing good. It appears to us as a moral force, representing the “good guys.” The contrast between the Rebellion and the Empire in the OT is stark – the Rebellion clearly stands for good, while the Empire stands for evil. We see the evil of the Empire in the first scene, as the Executor Star Destroyer runs down the Tantive IV. Even ignoring the visual and musical cues that tell us that the Empire are the “bad guys,” all we see of the Empire are evil acts: After killing a bunch of overmatched Rebels, Darth Vader saunters in and murders the Rebel officer with his own bare hands; we see the threatened (and presumed) torture of Princess Leia; and we see the destruction of Alderaan, both through Leia’s eyes and through Ben Kenobi’s sensing. Watching A New Hope more closely, we hear that the Emperor has taken the un-democratic step of dissolving the Senate; we see that the destruction of Alderaan was done solely to coerce Leia into divulging the location of the Rebel base; we see that Luke’s aunt and uncle, along with a few dozen Jawas, were killed in cold blood by Stormtroopers; and we see the Empire blockading and harassing the residents of Mos Eisley.  

The Rebellion, on the other hand, is shown by its opposition to the evil of the Empire. We don’t see the Rebellion necessarily as good; what we see is a group of people standing in opposition to the evil of the Galactic Empire. Their morality is implied, but all we see are a group of people being hunted by the Empire.

Probably the only ambiguity displayed by the Rebellion, the only glimpse into its amorality, is when Leah tried to use the cover of being on a “diplomatic ship” to cover what is an act of treason or rebellion against the Empire, and when Leia lies about the location of the Rebel base. (Even the latter isn’t an act of amorality, when facing the pure evilness of the Death Star.)

The Rebellion we see in Rogue One, however, is very different. Even ignoring the extremism of Saw Gerrara, who was no longer part of the Rebellion, the movie opens with Andor shockingly killing his informant on the space station in the Rings of Kafrene. While his action may be justified by mercy and by the need for operational security, Andor’s murder of the informant stands in stark contrast to the actions of the Jedi in the Prequel Trilogy or Luke in the OT.

In one emotion scene in Rogue One, Andor tells Jyn that many of the Rebels “have done terrible things on behalf of the Rebellion. We’re spies. Saboteurs. Assasins. And every time I wanted to forget I told myself it was for a cause that I believed in. A cause that was worth it.”

And why did Andor confess this to Jyn? The Rebellion had been using Jyn to find Galen Erso, using her to find her father to kill him, as General Draven quietly ordered Andor: “You find him, you kill him.”

So essentially, the Rebellion we see in Rogue One is a rebellion focused on fighting the evil of the Empire, but one that is not necessarily fighting for good. They are not driven by morality, by their desire to spread good throughout the galaxy, but by opposition to immorality.

Enter Luke Skywalker.

Young Luke is driven by wanderlust and a desire for adventure, essentially imprisoned (as was Anakin) on Tatooine, a place where his natural talents for flying and his spirit of the Force cannot be realized.

But he is also driven by a moral concern for other people, an innate sense of goodness. From his first glimpse of hologram-Leia, he sees someone in need and wants to help her. When he resists leaving Tatooine, Ben Kenobi can sense that that’s not Luke’s real feelings: “That’s your uncle talking,” he chides Luke. Ben knows the real Luke.

After that, at every opportunity, Luke takes the selfless path: he chooses to go save Leia, someone he does not know, at great risk to himself; then, at the end, he chooses to stay with the Rebellion on Yavin IV and fight, even though he had just joined the group, had no loyalty to them, and could have easily left with Han. Han serves as the perfect foil for these two decisions Luke makes: Luke has to convince Han to go save Leia by promising money and rewards, and Luke shows real disappointment in Han when Han leaves Yavin IV ahead of the Battle of Yavin (“You know what’s about to happen, what they’re up against.” “Take care of yourself—I guess that’s what you’re best at, isn’t it?”

Luke is driven by an inner morality, by selfless care and concern for others.  The Rebellion that we see in Rogue One isn’t.

Luke’s devotion to what we later learn is the Light Side continues in the Empire Strikes Back when Luke foregoes his continued Jedi training to save his friends, and then in Return of the Jedi when Luke, alone, goes to face Darth Vader. “There is still good in him,” Luke insists. But Luke also knows that, if he is wrong, his confronting of Darth Vader is still a worthy sacrifice, because his presence with the Endor team endangers them. He is willing to make that sacrifice to save his friends, to save the Rebellion, and to save the Galaxy.

Luke is a beacon of light, a redemptive figure who is driven by a selfless belief in helping others. While he does hate the Empire, when faced with choices during the OT, he always chooses to take the path that can help others and spread goodness, even at great risk to himself. (Oh, let’s not contrast this with the Luke of Episode VIII. We just won’t go there.)

The Rebellion, just before the Battles of Scarif and Endor, is full of spies, saboteurs, and assassins—people whose sole driving principle is the destruction of the Empire. Enter Luke Skywalker—not only does he save the Rebellion at the Battle of Yavin, he saves the very soul of the Rebellion.