Welcome. We have a remarkable program for you today. The Department of Defense must interact with civil aviation, and we have some remarkable stories to tell about air defense identification zones and TFRs. Our presenter today, Major Ty Piersfield, is among other things, a Delta Airlines pilot. He's a major pilot in the Air Force, and he's also a hurricane hunter during the hurricane season. Today he'll be talking about how you can understand how the air defense zones work, how TFRs work, what to do when it won't happen to you, but jets are scrambled for some other pilot, and you can bring that story to your friends. Please welcome Major Ty Piersfield. Hi, thanks for coming out today. My name is Major Ty Piersfield. I'm going to be giving a little talk today on behalf of AFNW and the military. Just a quick background brief about myself. I grew up just down the road here in Tampa, Florida. Fell in love with aviation when I was growing up. Decided I need to be a pilot. Graduated from the Air Force Academy and learned how to fly while I was there in the late 80s. I was active duty Air Force for nine years. I flew T-37s as an instructor, C-130s an airlift, and then search and rescue C-130s before I got out. I got over in the traditional reserve slot of the Air Force reserve where I'm still flying hurricane hunters, a WC version of the 130. I got hired at Delta Airlines in 2000, so I've flown a little bit of all of it, whether it's civilian aviation, military, or commercial airlines. Right now, I'm working on behalf of Major General, well, see, we just got a new general come in. Major General Morrow, that's what it is. And on behalf of AFNW, first Air Force that's in up in Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida. What I'm going to talk to you today is I work in the Combat Plans Division of the Air Operations Center at Tyndall. We have a multi-faceted mission where we are integrating with the FAA and doing a multi-layer defense, discussing exactly what Northcom does and how it affects the general aviation pilots in specific. This is what I'm going to talk about today. The NORAD mission, Air Defense Identification Zone Operations, a little bit about, because that's kind of specific to Florida aviation and joint aviation in specifics. Temporary flight restrictions, what to do if those procedures get violated, what the military, you might expect for intercept procedures, what we kind of do from a fighter air defense perspective, and then find a little bit on disaster relief and operations that we might do as a part of a joint ops area or in conjunction with FEMA for natural disaster type scenario. A little bit about the command and control. Conor or Continental US NORAD region is a vision of NORAD. NORAD, most everybody's familiar with, it started in the late 40s as a joint venture between the US and Canada and the Cold War era talking about external threats. Specifically, the Conor region, which is the Continental US region, is split up currently into two sectors. We have the Western Air Defense Sector out of McCord Air Force Base and the Eastern Air Defense Sector out of Rome, New York. The AFNORTH AOC, which is where I work, is a Tyndall Air Force Base and it runs kind of a conjunction and integrates the two sectors. The NORAD region itself is the headquarters of NORAD and NORTHCOM now are up at Cheyenne Mountain. Conor is the Continental US region, it's integrated with CANAR and the Alaska region is specifically dealing with Alaska. The NORAD agreement and how NORAD interacts with NORTHCOM. The primary mission of NORAD is airspace warning and airspace control. We're really talking about airspace sovereignty of the United States when you're talking about the DOD portion of North American Air Defense. We want to be able to take the appropriate actions, identify all the aircraft flying in the Continental US and be able to protect the airspace around North America. Obviously, this is a continuously evolving threat. Before 9-11, we were concentrating on external threats, a strategic-type mission looking at the former Soviet republics and being attacked from outside our borders. We learned from September 11th in a very sharp way that today's threat is a little bit different. It's complex, it's less deterrable, you've got more fanatical type of people that are trying to attack us and this is what we have to try to posture and defend against. Pre-9-11, like I said, here's what the NORAD or the Conor posture was. Our sensors and our fighters all were looking outward. We were looking out on the US against airborne threats and we were not monitoring any interior threats. There was no intel that we had immediate threats against the Conus. Airline hijackings are specifically in the domain of the FAA and DOD assistance was only going to come in for an internal type of event like the September 11th scenario through coordination from the FAA and with the Secretary of Defense approval. Everybody especially involved in aviation knows exactly where they were on the morning of September 11th. This is where the Conus alert posture was as far as for North American air defense. You had seven alert sites with combat ready aircraft, 14, you know, two aircraft at each of those alert sites and again the posture is looking outwards. If any of you have seen the September 11th movies that have come out, United 93, that type of scenarios, you know there was a lot of coordination communication problems going on between the civilian agencies, the FAA and the military that didn't help in the reaction time to it. However, 18 hours later after the attacks we had stood up pretty significantly, you know, between aircraft on the land, aircraft on in the sea in the Navy base, all the Coast Guard assets and we had obviously, you know, the most significant alert posture we've had making sure that it wasn't a wave type of attack thing coming at us. Our current posture, we have, we don't talk in specifics obviously about it for security reasons, but we do have multiple alert aircraft at multiple alert sites as well as a overlapping number of tankers which will provide airborne refueling for the fighters once they're airborne in case they need to respond to an alert stand up there a little bit longer. Not just the fighter aircraft and tankers, but the sensors, the joint surveillance system that is now integrated in is much more robust than it was before. A couple of the mechanical parts that go into the joint surveillance system, the air route surveillance radar, is anybody studying flying around, you notice the golf ball looking things, either right around the airports or at air traffic control centers around the U.S. These are the latest generation of the ARSR4 radars. They have a search range of about 250 miles. They're capable of pinging the aircraft for all the different mode codes, whether you're talking about your Mode 3 or Mode C, which is your altitude encoding, or the classified codes are just military aircraft in Mode 4s. Along with that, you have an airborne, a tethered aerostat radar system. Anybody that does a lot of flying down in the Florida Keys is probably familiar with what's actually been nicknamed Fat Albert. That's one of these tethered aircraft balloons. They go up to 15,000 feet. Search range is comparable to the ground-based systems 200 miles, and this gives you a look down capability, which, especially when you're talking about the air sovereignty of the U.S., we're very concerned about. They're mostly along the coastlines. There will be a restricted airspace bubble around them. They're tethered aircraft. These are not free flying, so you've got a cable winch system that can take them up and down, whether for maintenance or whether they're up there, and you definitely don't want to be flying into one of those with a civilian-type aircraft. Who runs these? These tethered aircraft balloons started out in the 1980s, mostly operated by the Customs and Border Patrol. They were used for anti-drug surveillance for the drug smugglers that used to come in, and much greater numbers from South and Central America. Now it's a kind of a combination. Since post-September 11th, the DOD has a tasking ability on that, too, to be able to tap into those radars on the tethered balloon. So it's kind of a shared responsibility between the Customs Border Patrol and the DOD. Improving this command and control, we integrate these systems in, and as you can see, they're mostly on the perimeter prior to September 11th. This is what we were looking at, external. Since September 11th, we've added this many internal radars into the DOD system. What this means is that those air defense sectors, whether you're talking about McCord up in Washington for the Western Air Defense Sector or the Eastern Air Defense Sector out of Rome, New York, they are able to integrate in all the local approach control radars, all the center air traffic control radars, and get an actual picture of every aircraft that's flying in our airspace. So we have a much more robust and all-encompassing radar system. There's not very many dead spots at all where you could have a plane airborne and have the FAA and the military together not know that you're up there. How about the air-to-ground and ground-to-air communications? Again, what we could tap into before was external. We've added all the internal sites in there, and we also have the ability for contingency operation, like we saw during Katrina, where you have mass power allergies over a Y geographical area, where we can go add temporary sites. These can be on the back of a truck, big mobile radar communications SACCOM systems, or there's some future communication capabilities coming on where you have much more portable, kind of man-sized systems. You can hike it in a Rucksack and actually have SACCOM and these C2 communications going. So for contingency operation, you're going to be able to talk with the aircraft that are up there with responding aircraft and have a much more broad-based ability to communicate. Okay, we'll talk a little bit about the air defense identification zone and the temporary flight restrictions. I put this slide in here. It's just kind of a historical backup to show you that we think the words getting out that we're getting a lot better, general aviation pilots in specific, about understanding the flight restrictions that have been imposed by the FAA post September 11th and is generally reducing the need for us to actually scramble fighters to identify aircraft. For this period of two years ago, September 04 to 05, the entire continental United States, we had 640 tracks as a for example. This includes any unknowns for coming in over the coastal aida zones, TFR violators that get your attention really quick, any FAA request for assistance or suspect tracks that we're going to actually tap into the military system and have NORAD, NORTHCOM and the AFNORTH forces identify and be interested in a specific, we call it a target of interest, resulted in 377 scrambles. An enormous amount of money when you talk about actually getting down, it's getting through our layer defense where you're concerned enough about an aircraft to launch an alert fighter to go out and ID or check out an aircraft. So that was 04 to 05. 05 to 06 dropped down to 392 tracks, only 37 scrambles. So words getting out, we're getting a little bit better at, or general aviation, the pilots out there are getting better at following the procedures and doing what they're supposed to so that we don't have to spend that type of money. Now 0 and a little bit more on this local area, since we're in Lakeland, Florida, trying to tailor it for the local area in the Southeast USA in the last year of those 392 unknown tracks, that accounts for 61% of them down here. Now why is that? We have more TFRs, you got a lot of special events that have occurred down here, the Super Bowl down in Miami, and like we'll show here in a second, the whole Bahamian corridor is responsible for much of these because we have so much light traffic going back and forth to the Bahamas. Of the unknown tracks that were identified on the Southeast, the Bahamian corridor from 05 to 06 was responsible for 41% of those. So we're talking about either flying IFR or VFR flight plans for the short distances to and from the Bahamas. This is where the procedures probably need a little bit more emphasis so that we can cut down on the number of scrambles and intercepts that we have done on those aircraft. $114,000, that's just an average for what a cost dollar figure when you're talking about scrambling F-16, F-15 in their flight hour. So that's of course on top of all the layered costs that it occurs for just encompassing this whole system. Okay, what is the Air Defense Identification Zone? There's been a continuous aid is in effect around the continental U.S. Canada since back in the 40s, 50s. This is a military defense identification zone where we want to be, we want to know of all aircraft or otherwise air-breathing vehicles that are coming in to the U.S., anything off the surface of the water. It is a varying zone. The inner aid is actually goes out to the territorial limits, about a 12-mile limit, and we have an outer aid is where that varies depending on it, goes out into international waters, varies the distance off the coastline, depending on the actual location. This is a graphic representation here showing you the distance of those points to the closest points off the Florida coast and the requirements that you have to report yourself to the aid is or prior to entering the aid is to fulfill the requirements of the coded flight ride 99 that we'll talk about the specifics of that here in a moment. When you follow those regulations, it's basically a non, it's a non-issue because with the overlapping air traffic control systems and the radars, and if you're following the procedures correctly, you're identified and this happens hundreds, thousands of times a day. It's only the few people that are not following the rules that become what we're concerned about. So how can you help? Well, as general aviation, the pilot compliance with CFR 99, it's not a suggested reg, it's a regulation that you have to follow when you're going to fly out in through the aid is. There's multiple things in that regulation. It's very easy to access on the web or at your local FBO if you're going to go in and out of the continental US. You have to file and activate your flight plan. You have to have an operational transponder. You have to have a functioning two-way radio and provide your position reports. This is the one that probably gets violated the most. People will go out and they'll have the required equipment on board, but for one reason or another, they're lazy about actually doing the procedure to come back in the aid is. So this following the position report is you have to be talking to one of those centers, Miami Center or Jacksonville Center, talking specifically about the Bahamian Corridor prior to penetrating that aid is line. If there's no appropriate reporting point or if you're taking off at a field that's inside like Bemony that's inside that aid is already, then you have procedures for that to where you reported immediately after takeoff. If you can't do it 15 minutes out. Aid is violations to be prepared. Let's say we're going to go, for instance, all the way down to the worst case scenario. Oak Grove is a military radio station that will broadcast on UHF and VHF Guard mostly for general aviation pilots. What you can expect from them is an unknown rider call. Anybody that's flown in Florida, you're probably have heard unknown rider calls and you might wonder, what is that guy talking about? They'll talk, unknown rider, unknown rider. They'll give a persistent reference off a nav aid and then tell you whatever, amplify an information where they're identifying a specific target of interest or an aircraft that's not following the procedures for no reason. They're not squawking, they're not talking to anybody yet. Obviously, you have to know if that's you or not or the system is of no use.  What are you going to do if you think it possibly is you? Answer the call. If you're talking on an air traffic control facility and they're not talking to you, then it might be just as simple as making sure that you're not talking to them. You can turn a broadcast on 121.5 if you're doing that. They have the ground-based repeater stations to where they can hear that and make sure that it's not you. If you identify yourself, if you're in that area and you're not sure if it's you or not, the best thing to do is just talk to them. They'll come right back and go, you know, with your call sign and say, no, it's not you, we're talking to somebody else and then you're in the clear again. To identify whether it's you or not, they're going to ask you the following questions through point of origin, where you're going, identify who you are. And then that's it. You've done the right procedures and now you're identified and you come on in. Okay, moving from air defense identification zone to temporary flight restrictions. This is, I'm a general aviation pilot. These things pop up. They come down. Some of them are fixed like the one over Disney World. This one over Gainesville Regional was up there last weekend for the Gainesville Air Show just north of here. Temporary flight restrictions are what I think of as a necessary evil. People don't like them because what are they doing? They're restricting where you can fly. If you're used to flying back and forth from Jacksonville to go down to Cedar Key and have lunch and you normally fly right over Gainesville, that's fine 364 days a year. But the day they had that TFR, if you don't check the NOTAMs and know that it's there, then you could be in violation of that FAA airspace and could be getting phone calls about it. So the period 05 to 06, 63 TFR violations. What were they for? There's generally a TFR popped up over the president whenever he travels outside the National Command Region. And you know, he might be going somewhere short notice that wasn't planned. For instance, today he's in Virginia, Virginia Tech because of the massacre they had there yesterday. That TFR was obviously a very short notice. I don't know that for a fact, but there was probably a TFR over Blacksburg, Virginia today because he was going to go there and give a speech at the ceremony. He might be going out on the road for a campaign a lot next year in support. Sometimes he travels more. Sometimes he doesn't travel as often, so it's just something to be heads up on if you're going to fly out there. Anything others that are concerned national special security events or NSSEs, when those are identified by the Secretary of Defense in conjunction with the FAA, like a space shuttle launch, the Super Bowl, large events like that, maybe a NASCAR race, anywhere where they think there's either a potential for a threat or they actually have noticed of a threat, they could throw up a TFR over that area and you would need to be aware of that. What can you do to avoid them? It's as simple as a call to a 1-800-WEATHERbrief or getting on any of the commercially available sites out there like this aeroplaner.com site, which is going to graphically show the TFRs and it's very easy to show it. I know especially in Florida, Arizona, we have a lot of general aviation pilots, the weather is beautiful. We'd like to get out there, not file a flight plan and just drive up the Ocala for lunch or we're going to go over to Cocoa Beach and fly up and down the beach once and come home. I don't really need to file a flight plan. Again, that may work most every day, but even if you don't want to file a flight plan, it's pretty much irresponsible if you're not at least going to make that call and make sure that the TFRs are out there and check the notums of where you're going to and from. It's very easy to do. There's numerous websites or a simple phone call can have that done. Contact the ATC facility once you're in the air and query them on any TFRs that are up there. If you request a full brief from Flight Service, they're always going to include any appropriate notums and TFRs for your route of flight. Air defense scrambles and diverts. Why would the military actually, with this integrated layer of defense that I've been talking about, actually scramble a fighter? Well, there's multiple reasons. Aida's violations and TFRs, the two things we just talked about, a threat to a high value asset. If you had a suspicious aircraft, a September 11 scenario that's not doing, following the procedures, it's a flight plan like it's supposed to or just stops talking to air traffic control where you have a potential hijacking, the FAA thinks there might be a hijacking. Again, the command and control between the FAA and the military is much improved since September 11. If they request that kind of information or that kind of assistance from DOD, that's when we would scramble some fighter aircraft. Again, North Com, NORAD's primary mission is air sovereignty, so that's why we would do it. What is going to happen if this happened? The fighter procedures without going in the actual operational specifics of what they're going to do. The fighters are trained and they practice these scenarios constantly with practice scramble alerts and exercising the air spaces to run their procedures. They are going to have contact by radar by three nautical miles or stay a thousand feet off the altitude of what air traffic control knows that they're at. They will not get any closer than one mile without having an actual radar lock or a thousand feet. Then, if needed, they might just stay off that far. The person in that general aviation aircraft may not even know they're ever there. If they can identify them or otherwise, the pilot starts all of a sudden, starts communicating. At any point in this, obviously, the alert fighter could be told to knock off the engagement, go home, and it would be referred back to the FAA or law enforcement for whatever action would need to be taken. They're going to go no closer than required for mission accomplishment. The pain steward type of scenario where they had a decompression of the cockpit and everybody who's knocked out in the cockpit and you just have a lear jet flying across the continental U.S. not talking to anybody. That's an episode where if that kind of scenario happens now, we may scramble fires. The fighters may get clearance all the way in to go up to the cockpit and actually visually see is the pilot there. Is there a pilot in the cockpit? Is the pilot slumped over the controls? Because you're trying to determine exactly what's going on in that aircraft. The fighters will actually be talking to air traffic control obviously during the whole time de-conflicting and how close they get kind of depends on exactly the threat where it's headed, what they think the scenario is. Again, how can you help? Okay, is this me again? If a fighter comes flying by, this is what I think of as the big oops. If that's happened and something bad has happened, you've either flown through a TFR, you've flown too close or you've not identified yourself through an aid as any of these multiples of things. You can expect the following questions. The fighter itself may be trying to contact you on VHF guards. Some of the fighters have capability to broadcast on VHF, some of them don't. They're going to be asking the same type of things that air traffic control or the Oak Grove would be asking you over the guard position to try to identify who you are, where you're going, where you're filed and if you're going to be followed by the aircraft itself. If the fighter actually intercepts you, like I said, they may try to contact you on 121.5. That's the time where if you haven't been talking on the radios, now it's time to do it and get in control of the air traffic control facility immediately. That engagement of the fighter in your aircraft is going to be broken off if you notify the intentions and they have contact with you now. Otherwise, you want to watch for the appropriate IKO visual signals of what to do with an intercepted aircraft, which is in the IKO procedures, rules of the air, and I'm going to go over it here in a minute. Of course, immediate compliance of that fighter aircraft instruction is mandatory via the federal regulations. What can you expect? Pretty much the response, if you look to this grid, I'm not going to go step by step through it, but rocking your aircraft wings basically means that you understand that you have been intercepted and you're going to comply with the instructions. By a simple wing rock to the fighter aircraft, you're telling them that you understand and will comply. That's the meaning for your intercepted aircraft. The actual intercepting aircraft, what's he going to do?  If he does a slow turn, that means follow me. So follow him, rock your wings, follow them. If he does an abrupt breakaway, it means he's coming off and you can proceed. That means you're talking to your traffic control or he's breaking off the engagement. If he actually is in front of you, lowers the landing gear and overflies a suitable runway, then the intention is that you need to land there. You can do that by the same thing. If you're not a fixed gear aircraft, lower your landing gear and comply with those instructions. Same type of thing on this, just the backwards, how you can tell the intercepting aircraft exactly what you plan on doing. If he's trying to make you land somewhere that's not suitable for your type of aircraft by raising the gear, you're saying you can't fly there, he's going to take you somewhere else. If you just flash your lights, you're telling him that you can't comply. If you're not rocking the aircraft, he'll rock back and say you understand it. Irregular flashing means you're in distress, you're going where you're going to go and you know the scenario will go from there.  It's going to be go back to the FAA or law enforcement for appropriate action, which you get on the ground. Let's talk about what AF North or Conor can do for the Air Operations Center directly in support of the civil support for some type of disaster type relief. General guidelines, what does the military do? The military, you know, before Katrina was kind of like September 11th. When you're talking about disaster relief, we are only kind of a passive observer into a scenario. We would only, we have assets for search and rescue. The Civil Air Patrol is kind of a branch wing, you know, not directly under control of the DOD unless they're doing a DOD type mission. And they would not be specifically planning on working in missions. Since Katrina and since we saw the how a federal response can greatly improve our indoor situation depending on how you want to look at it, our guidelines have changed a little bit now and our Air Ops Center at Tyndall Air Force Base specifically is going to be in a much more active mode as far as planning of how we can help civilian agencies respond to some type of disaster scenario. FEMA or the state's going to determine through the FAA if any temporary flight restrictions are actually going to go into effect over a specific area. They'll request that to the FAA. The FAA is going to always control that airspace internally. It's kind of a misconception amongst a lot in the general community and general aviation that the military is going to come in and seize control of the airspace. We do not do that. The airspace is always going to be under the FAA's purveille and they're the ones that are going to control that. What kind of capabilities can we do? If it's a enormously bad scenario like Katrina where all your ground-based radars and communication systems are out, we have Airborne AWACS which is the Airborne Warning and Control System. They can actually come in and from the air take over and control airspace as far as making the communications, run the air traffic control radar from an airborne platform. So we have that capability. We have the Combined Forces Air Combined Commander who is the commander of AFNWR that General Morrow that is going to be the airspace control authority but he's only the airspace control authority for the actual DOD assets. Again the FAA runs the airspace, the civilian aviation is never controlled by the military. Even the what we call the Title 32 assets of the Florida Air Guard, the Mississippi Air Guard, the South Colombian Air Guard, those entities are all controlled and under the command and control structure of the governor of those states. The Title 32 assets are encouraged to participate but if that governor doesn't specifically request that DOD come in and take control of it that's going to remain under the control of that of that governor. The Title 10, the federal assets will always be the help of last resort kind of think of it will be the last ones to come in. And of course the FAA is always going to be the control authority of the modems for the airspace. This is an example of our web page that's out on the internet to open domain that will be able to be accessible by anybody in the general aviation community that's flying in. It's under www.afnorth.us and what you can expect to find there that's going to be of some use is under the air domain execution documents the main the top four the top three up there the ones that are going to be of give some useful information if you're going to be flying in and around a disaster relief type area. The airspace control orders, airspace control plan and what we call the contingency response air support schedule or the CRAS will be posted here will show you what the military assets the DOD assets that will be flying in the area what their schedule is so you can kind of de-conflict with that. The contingency response air support schedule like I just mentioned this is we will post this from the combat plans division only as good as the information that we're getting back from the units. What it basically is is what would be under military operations an air tasking order it's not an actual tasking order for a contingency operation like that because we don't necessarily control these assets we don't control these assets. This is we're going to put on there any aircraft that want to come in and and tell us what they're doing in this disaster relief area so that everybody can get an overall picture of what's flying in that area. We don't actually take control of our tactical control or optical control or operational control of the of the assets they are just this air support schedule is really out there so that everybody can show everybody can see what other organizations are flying. The airspace control order depending on what type of software you have access to Falcon view maps or the text the airspace control order that will post up on that web page is going to show both in graphic depiction and in just the verbal the word depiction exactly what's going on with that with the supposed airspace. Temporary flight restrictions that again are imposed by the FAA those will be shown on there as well as specific tracks for the air refueling aircraft a search and rescue aircraft or anything else that's flying in the local area. Here's an example what it might look like I know it's it would take a long time to plot all that from a verbal method if you have one of the graphical programs makes it a lot easier. The airspace control plan this is in conjunction with that control orders this is going to show exactly what type of overlaid airspace is in the in that joint operations area. The joint operations area that is that is layered down over a specific area we will have entry exit procedures to de-conflict all like type aircraft title 10 aircraft that might be going in and out of an area. Take a hurricane Wilma that attack that attack I like to say attack on Florida for the hurricanes. When it struck South Florida the military overlaid a grid overlay and we came up with procedures for the multiple numbers of state relief aircraft the National Guard helicopters are flying in and out to de-conflict them so that you know we don't want to compound tragedy on tragedy by having a midair up there. This is just some of the an example of the kind of planning that the DoD will do for a joint operations area. Spider points these are all control points that we discussed in this joint ops area where the search and rescue responding aircraft would fly between we overlay a grid on it so that we know let's say you know rescue aircraft from Patrick Air Force Base over in Cape Canaveral they're going to be operating in sector 174 we grid out like this this way everybody that has access to their airspace control plan which again is public domain would be able to tell where those assets were operating. We'll de-conflict altitudes and air speeds for the different type of aircraft the real thing to remember is it's VFR flight rules out there and the airspace control authority is always going to stay the FAA. There's nothing the military doesn't even want to restrict the airspace over disaster relief area anything that's beyond that which is what required for the immediate response and the safety and security of that area. It's really the domain of the FAA to determine we need to get commerce going back in here we need to get the relief flights going in general aviation aircraft are going to want to get back in and check on their own specific property or start getting stuff flying around around there again they're the ones that are going to control the temporary flight restrictions and get the general aviation aircraft moving back and forth in that joint ops area. All right just reviewing what we went over today talk a little bit about the NORAD mission I'll take some questioning answers anything you want to talk about after this talked about our AIDAS operations how critical it is to specifically follow those procedures in the CFR 99 temporary flight restrictions that's probably the biggest gotcha for general aviation aircraft to know those procedures and do them right so that you don't get the fighter intercept coming up on you if it does what are the intercept procedures and what you should do for general aviation. Thanks for following the procedures that's really the main point when I get across what we do up there and the combat plan division in the AEROP center is try to accentuate the proper procedures that general aviation aircraft can follow so that the air sovereignty of the US is maintained which is the number one mission. Lastly I want to brief or leave you with the AFFNORTH web page again at www.affnorth.us that's where you can find the information whenever we have a actual disaster response operation we have going on and that's it. I need any questions. Major General Morrow anybody want to know that one he's my commander it's gonna get on me when he hears from all that. The corridor that you were talking about in the AIDAS out of the 12 mile corridor and then sometimes it could be an overlap a little bit. Right. How do you know I mean can you distinguish that a little bit the difference? Yes the the outer AIDAS is something the milk the the air traffic control system of the US is designed to try to identify the aircraft in this outer outer area of the AIDAS. There's no that's over international waters and we don't control the FAA and the air traffic control system the US does not control aircraft that are outside that are in the outer AIDAS that is a really more for our use in determining hey how far out do we really want to look at who's flying and try to get an ID on them. We're going to try to see them an IDM before they actually get to that line so that we're already calling them by the time you hit that 12 mile line because with the type and speed of the aircraft really if they have hostile intent or they are you know have no intention of following the procedure they're not just somebody that's messed up their flight planning that 12 miles is really not that far giving the the altitude and speed so if you have a you know a lear jet or something that has hostile intent that's flying at a high rate of speed we're going to be trying to identify that in our outer AIDAS region even though we're not actually controlling it or the air sovereignty only extends out for the actual inner AIDAS or the 12 miles. Is that answer? Okay. Anyone else? We have a microphone in the back if anybody wants it we can share it around. Absolutely. And Ty's here to answer questions after the show is over as well. Thank you.


Why do you do what you do? Why do you wake up every day? And what's your purpose? My mom always used to say Cane o tideboris Do what you can't I'm 13 years old And it's a Monday night We're in Greece My mom says we're moving to the United States And my heart drops And I can still hear her voice shaking when she said You will have a better future there How did she know? I had no idea what that meant Or what was going to happen next All I knew was that it's go time Four years later I joined the New Jersey Army National Guard I became a soldier I flew here chasing the American dream And now I live to protect it The National Guard gave me the tools to become successful And the biggest challenge I faced while serving in the U.S. Is that I'm away from family But I know that my parents Are going to be my family And they're going to be my family But I know that my parents support me They were once skeptical of me joining But now have completely embraced the idea Of having a soldier as a daughter Here's the thing In order to succeed We must first believe that we can You don't have to be the fastest Or the strongest, the smartest Or the most capable And I've never been the best at anything really But I've always been stubborn And driven by the fact that We only have one life And our dreams come true No matter the circumstances You've got to cut off the excuses Get off the sidelines and come into the field It's go time


I'm Rachel Harkness. I'm the programming manager here at the library. And we're thrilled that Brock Clark is here to talk about his new book, The Price of the Haircut, with Ron Curry today. Longfellow Books is here selling copies of both Ron's and Brock's books. And a percentage of those sales go to the library, so you're supporting both of us at the same time. And help yourself to coffee in the back. It's donated by Coffee by Design. I wanted to say something at the outset about how I first encountered Brock's work in this, your very first book, correct, his first collection. That's my second book, and third book, and second collection. Second collection? That's how well the first one did. So anyway, this is the first book of yours that I read, Caring the Torch, which was published in? Five, I think. Yeah. Was that big? So I published a story of Ron's in a magazine that he used to edit called The Set Review. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's all about you now. Which might have been around the same time, right? I think it was a little bit before that. A little before that? Yeah, Brock was actually one of the first people to ever publish any of my work, believe it or not. God is dead. This is straight from God is Dead. It eventually ended up in my first book, but at the time it was just to stand alone. He had also, just with a record, had rejected a story of mine before that that also went into God is dead. Oh, really? Which one was that? I don't remember that. I don't even remember that. But so anyway, I first encountered Brock in Carrying the Torch. And what I noted then and what I note now, all these years later, is that more than anything what makes your work distinctive to me is something ephemeral, which is often the case with the best writers, I think. You can't really put your finger on what it is that's so good about it or what it is that makes it distinctive, but it's there. And I was thinking about the best word that I could come up with to describe it is sensibility. Your stories often appear to be about something mundane and work a day but then suddenly expand into surrealism, fantasy, or comic overstatement. So I want to ask a question, but I want to illustrate that question first by offering a little anecdote of my own. When my first book came out, my mother, of course, because mothers keep everything, my mother had kept a story of mine that I wrote in first grade. And when my book came out, she had it framed up and gave it to me as a Christmas gift, much to my chagrin. But what was interesting about the story was that it was actually called the story. So it was very post-modern in first grade. But there were so many hallmarks to that story that I could read it and I realized there were so many basic elements of that story that were present and accounted for in what I do today. And I wonder, this sensibility that I'm talking about, is it something that, for you, that's inborn and sort of indelible? Or is it something you've cultivated? Or is it something that continues to change as your career goes on? Yeah, that's a really good question. And I guess I don't know how early, can y'all hear me OK? I don't know how early whatever my sensibility is. And I think about this some. But I'm not sure how early it started. I have a really foggy memory of what that might have been when I was a kid. I guess it comes to my, yeah, I was constantly writing stories and constantly reading. For me, reading was a way to get away from other people so that they would leave me alone. They would not ask me to do the things that they really wanted me to do. I came from a really bookish family. My dad was an English teacher. My grandfather was an English teacher. My little brother ended up being one, I am one too. And they respected books even if they hated laziness. So it was a real quandary for them. So I would just stop and hide in the book and they would leave me alone because it seemed like something productive. And I think they also sensed that I wasn't going to be good at anything else. That was going to be it for me. Yeah, I would either do something with books or I would just live in their basement for the rest of their lives in my life, whichever I did first. I think my sensibility, though, I've read books, the books I gravitated towards. For me, it's much more of a readerly sensibility than a person's sensibility, I think, as a young person. So when I've read books like Huck Finn, I gravitated toward that. I gravitated toward books that had something important to say, but would say it in a way that made it sometimes difficult to figure out why it was important or how it was important. So a writer like Twain believes in he's saying something important, but wants to make it difficult on the reader, whether because of humor or because of voice or because of a number of different things. It's scary with humor more often. Yeah, and that's something I must have internalized. Because I don't come from a family of joke crackers at all, actually. I come from a really sardonic family, but the never-cracking jokes. And I think that sardonic quality sort of dripped into my work and into me, that's a nasty image, the dripping of it into my work. I have a leaky roof right now, so maybe I'm obsessed with this drippiness. I think for me, also, self-deprecation is the key. So I write about a lot of, I write about race in this book and I write about the war in Iraq and some other weighty things. And for me, humor and self-deprecation is a way to hedge against my own pretentiousness. I think that's something I thought about really early on. While simultaneously allowing yourself to be a little pretentious. Yeah, right, yeah, I want it both ways, yeah. Yeah, that's that. I do the same thing. Yeah, and you make fun of yourself for being pretentious, but that does not necessarily mean you're really not pretentious. Yeah, yeah, it's just a hedge. So sort of a nuts and bolts question. I always find myself curious with story collections, particularly those from older and more established writers, what the time frame is that those stories represent, right? Like what, so what are we looking at for a time frame here? Like over the course of how long a period of time were they written? I wrote the title story, which is the oldest story in the collection, about the price of the haircut I wrote in 2003. I was in Cincinnati. I think I wrote half of these in Cincinnati. I moved here from Cincinnati in 2010. I think I wrote half of them in Cincinnati and half of them here. Most recent one. There are really several really short stories in this collection, and those are ones I wrote in Maine. I'm not sure why the brevity has anything to do, if it has anything to do with anything, but they just happens to be that they were the ones I wrote in Maine. I think in part because I was working on novels when I moved here, and so when I wasn't working on novels, I didn't want to work on stories that were where length was a problem. I wanted them to be done, and then to move on to something else, usually back to a novel. So the most recent one, maybe a year and a half ago, two years ago I finished. Do you see anything that's different in what you're doing, what you're aiming at over the course of that period of time, or is it all? The shorter ones seem to me to be a little less surreal than the longer ones, which is not the way it's supposed to work, and that's not the way I've been preaching about it for the last 15 years. But I just ended up being that way, and I think often when I'm writing something, it's in reaction to something that I've already written. And there's a story in here, it's one of my two favorite stories in the collection, it's called The Pity Palace, and it's set in Florence, Italy, and it's like a 45-page long story about a guy living in an apartment in Florence whose wife, who may or may not exist, and may or may not have been stolen from him by Mario Puzo, the writer of The Godfather, who may or may not be dead, and may or may not be sitting in the piazza outside the apartment. So I exhausted myself, even myself writing this thing, and I think the shorter stories were a reaction to that. I wanted them to seem autobiographical, even if they weren't, I wanted them to be short. I wanted to have an emotional quality, and then I wanted to get out of there and do something else. I feel like the idea, you're saying this is in the case, but I sort of like the idea that you're having gravitated toward much shorter pieces and more realist pieces, it sounds like, you view them that way. It has more to do with place than circumstance. Probably a little both, maybe. Do you mean place, what do you mean by place? You're supposed to sit there. Yeah, that's a good question. I'm loathed to say, I mean, so many, I'm not from Maine, obviously, and I'm loathed to say too much about it because so many people have a lot to say about it, and it's just not part of my, not the way I think of myself now. I thought of myself, I thought about place a lot when I lived in Cincinnati, because it's a place that no one really ever likes, which made me like it a great deal. Yeah, and I like places like that. You have to places you can stick up for. I think Maine's like that. I think Maine also has a lot of people for sticking up for it, and a lot of writers sticking up for it, and it means I don't have to, I have nothing else to contribute in that way. Yes, right, I can shoulder other burdens that probably don't really want to be shouldered. You said something earlier, though, about them. Oh, yeah, so about whether they're realist or not. Yeah, the shorter ones are, but then this morning, so do you know who Paul Bremer is? The, basically the architect of post-war Iraq. He's the, he was being ambassador. Anyways, he was in charge of the coalition government. He's the guy who always wore Timberland work boots and a suit. He's kind of Kennedy-esque. He walks around Iraq. He just totally fucked Iraq, among other people, and then he left after a year. I hadn't thought about this guy since he left, but then I heard from someone that he's a ski instructor at Okimo Mountain in Ludlow, Vermont, and I just have this image of Paul Bremer holding five-year-old kids between his legs as he skied down the mountain, so I just finished a 20-page story about that this morning. So I think I've swum back now in the other direction after the short realist. Yeah, I kept telling my students about the idea, and they're just looking at me like, like you're looking at me like, I don't understand, it doesn't seem funny at all. And I was like, well, not yet, it doesn't. As a writer and a human being, I tend to live in that borderland where pathos and humor mingle, sort of like brackish water, you know, which is why Android works so much because you never traffic in one without the other, it seems. There's no Brock Clark story I can think of that I would describe as simply sad or simply funny. What is it about melding pathos and humor that makes each stronger and more affecting than it would be on its own? And this is why I really loved the story we published with Ron's 15 years ago. It's the same quality. I guess for me, it's another hedge. So, I mean, I have this, people often talk, I'm attracted to premises to concepts because of their humor, often at first, because like the ridiculous Paul Bremer idea, there's some kind of superficial ridiculousness to them that makes me want to think about them a little more. But if there's not something sad that creeps in or that I can't tease out, then it's no good for me. And the other is certainly true, too. So if there's a story here about a race riot, it's the first story, and it's this really heavy material. And if I could only write about it in that kind of heavy way, then it wasn't much good to me as a subject either because lots of other writers could do that better. I guess for me, it's often I think, well, what can I do? What can I bring to this that other writers don't bring to it? I don't know that I think about that consciously when I'm writing it, but I think that must be in my head somewhere. And if I can't do something like, you know, Marilyn Robbs is in, to pick a random writer I just like does things one way, then I was like, well, that's fine, that she should do it that way. And I'll try to do something else entirely different. Yeah, yeah. I have the same sense, like sticking to, I feel like at this stage of my career, I understand my limitations. So this is the border within which I can actually work effectively in a way that people might be interested in reading. If I try to stray too far outside of that, chances are it's gonna be serviceable at best and not essential in the way that things should be when you expect people to pick them up and take time out of their day to read. I don't know if that's entirely true of you too. I mean, I can see from the last book, you pushing things in ways you hadn't in the first books. Yeah, right. So this interesting to me is that, this plug I mentioned this in another reading where I have a novel coming out next August. And my earlier iteration of it was, I was writing this first present tense novel about Portland, sort of like I kept thinking about as a kind of white noise, but Dunderlo's white noise set in Portland. And then I just wasn't doing it well. I mean, I could have finished the book, but there was something not right about it, not substantial enough about it. And then not long after I gave up on that version of it, Ron's most recent book came out. And I was like, God, that's why I didn't finish it because that's the book you, that's the much better, much, much better version of the book I was trying to write. So one person was trying to write it. And then I just, you know, changed and went back and did something that seemed, it wasn't more comfortable for me, but it felt like I was doing something that was my own and not someone else's.  Do you then come back to it that repeatedly until it finally works? It's all about feel, as you know. So speaking of the title story, you and I have both in our work weighted into thematic territory that could best be described as dangerous for white male writers. Poor us. Particularly in this moment. In your case with the book's title piece, you present an unnamed, he already references. You present an unnamed city where the black population is just rioted. And the ostensible reason you give the riot is that someone overheard an old white barber say something racist. And one thing led to another, that's a direct quote from the story. And then the black people rioted. In another story, the narrator who is white has had an affair with a black student. A fact which becomes the fulcrum for all kinds of impolite rumination on race.  No. I don't think there is one. But I go into these things knowing that people treat these subjects dumbly all the time. I mean people like me and you. Treat them dumbly all the time because they think, oh, I have a right to write about whatever I want.  So my idea is that if you care about the subjects, so race is one of our big ones. One of the biggest in the United States. You have an obligation.  On the other hand, you should write about it knowing full well that it's not a neutral subject.  You want to bring something new to the conversation. And because that was my idea about the, the title story here. I'll be back today. It's a story I hope that it makes, it ends up making fun of the narrator's ridiculous self-justifications as much as anything else. Yeah. But it also, I think some of the best fiction, part of the reason I write about this sort of thing is because I believe it's a way, you can hide behind this group of fiction and you can have conversations about social issues that you would not be able to have otherwise. Right? And so, this is. Yeah, right, right. How can you do this thing in a new way where everyone says you can't do it in a new way? Well, that's a kind of challenge that I think most writers should take up. Like how, rather than saying you can't do this, the charge should be how can you do this in a way that makes me forget the reasons I think you shouldn't be able to do this. And I think fiction does that, is capable of doing that especially well. Nonfiction, unless so, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Something that's been on my mind lately and I think you're a good writer to ask. There's sort of a similar question. What obligation, if any, does a writer have to his readers and I'll unpack that a little bit because that's a shitty question to ask just on its face. Do you feel any sort of obligation to a theoretical reader while you're writing or put another way, do you see writing novels and stories as being one half of a conversation and do you, in turn, as a good conversationalist, feel it's your responsibility to acknowledge and do well by the person on the other end? A hypothetical person or a person you have in mind. Yeah, I rarely think about the reader. Except insofar as that I'm one and then I think this sounds really narcissistic, like the most narcissistic ever thing ever but I'm like my own ideal reader. That's actually not true. There are writers in particular. Like I don't think about my family. I don't think about what my, I mean I think about them in the world but in my fiction I don't think about my family what they're gonna think about a story or a novel. No, not at all. No, no. And again I think I have a really great sort of trusting family or they'll just avoid it if they think it's gonna be upsetting to them. Which I'm grateful for. I've never gotten any kind of grief from my parents. Yeah, right, it's really essential to me. But there are writers I think about. Like writers who I'm friends with who I trust with to give me their ideas. So I do think about them. I think about not actually when I'm thinking, well a friend named Alex Olin who has said various things to me over the year that then have crept back. Like don't you believe those figures people deserve some sort of grace. And I thought she was wrong about that particular thing whatever story she was talking about. But that kind of thing returns to me when I'm maybe writing too callously about something that deserves a little more slack. My friend Keith Lee Morris will often says you want this to be too important in the story, a forgiving story. Like you want a reader to feel about this the reader can't feel about it. And I might think he's wrong in the story he's talking about but that will come back to me at other moments. Because writers are aware of other writers tendencies and those tendencies don't go away. So it's not like I write to please people but I do have other readers and writers voices in my head when I'm writing especially when I'm taking things too far or not far enough. Does that make sense?  And you know, editors say things because they have to and they want to. And he's considering a book by a writer in the audience I don't wanna say too many bad things about him because I think he's a genius. But he often will say we want this to be a big book. Can you, I want you to think about that when you're doing these revisions. No, I didn't even know what that was possibly mean. If I knew what it meant, I would do it every single time. Yeah, put that in a bottle for me so I can take it home.  I was writing a false one before so now I'll write a true one. Those aren't really helpful. And also readers saying I want this to be a big book doesn't really help either. So I try to keep those voices very much out of my head when I'm writing. Getting a little more specific to the book. Many of the stories in The Price of the Haircut are preoccupied with that most essential of business arrangements marriage. And specifically the dissolution thereof. Sometimes this preoccupation runs in the background as in the title story where it's mentioned that the narrator and all his friends find themselves divorced in part because they all have such awful haircuts which is a detail I really enjoyed. Other times it's in the foreground as in that which we will not give where the, which is what a third from the last in the collection, something like that. Where the first inciting incident is quote, that Thanksgiving when mom asked dad for a divorce and he wouldn't give it to her. Often you have male protagonists who are either literally running into their ex-wives or else searching for them to win them back. Can you say why even in a collection of otherwise unrelated stories this theme seems to run through the book? Is it an ongoing narrative preoccupation of yours? Was it an organizing principle when deciding which stories would go in the book, et cetera? Second, no, except in so far as I kept some stories out of the book because they were repetitive, maybe on this theme, maybe on other themes. The first, I think partly it's a generic concern of me. Like a lot of my work is about men who screw up and then in trying to address their screw ups, they screw up even more because they're addressing their screw ups is remotely honest. You actually have a great line, I forget which story it's in but it's about having to apologize for something so you can move on to the next thing you need to apologize for. Yeah, right. So this is an obsession of mine. I think it's obsession of mine maybe autobiographical and maybe not but it's obsession more than that, it's aesthetically. Like when things go wrong, then good things, when things go wrong to a character, to a protagonist, to a narrator then good things happen to the story and that's one of the ways that things that can go wrong. I mean, if I'm writing about people of a certain age and I don't know that I tag the ages here but my mind, it's always mine. So I wrote many of these stories in my 40s so there you go. That's one of those problems that people are screwing up their lives and then the screw ups then lead to more screw ups or lead to justifications about the screw ups and for me it becomes marriage is one of those, one of the most absurd categories, arrangements because you have to make these big plans and big promises and then you're like, then these people in my stories are constantly betraying them and so betrayal for me is interesting as a subject I guess is what I'm saying.  Yeah, right. So that's what you're looking for then.  Yeah, there's that great line. I think I mentioned this last time we talked but there's this great line by Donald Barthelmay who says something like, I rather have a wreck than a ship that sails things attach themselves to wrecks and I've always loved that line especially when it comes to writing about family in fiction because well, people are attached to the unit and when it fails then it affects everyone. Again, I try to write about this in the fiction less somberly than I'm doing now but for me that's the other good thing about it is that even if I'm writing about this thing jokely or sarcastically or sardonicly or ironically there's something serious and painful at the heart of it so. There's one thing I wanna make sure that you're gonna read, right? Yeah, sure. That I get to before we go to your reading. There's a beautiful little piece in the book called Good Night clocks in it about what I guess is 400 words or so, maybe 500. In that amount of space it manages to encompass the entire aching mystery of being a father and as such is a first class example of what is usually called flash fiction. This is a term that most of you are probably familiar with, I would imagine. Some people contend that flash fiction is a genre onto itself with different functions and demands than longer, more traditional stories. Can you tell me whether you agree using Good Night as an example of why or why not? And maybe I'll read that. I've never read that before. So, and it's short, so lucky you. I've never thought about flash fiction. I mean I've read a lot of it. I've never, I'm not sure I've written maybe another piece that might qualify as flash fiction. This one seemed, I wrote more of it. And this one seemed, when I wrote more I was just writing the same scene over and over again. And I just felt, well, what would happen if I just lopped it off after a page? And I thought I did them the best it could do. It's a trend, and it was the absolute right choice to make, is it? Well, thank you. I mean it was a weird choice for me to make. I'd usually against it. Like I usually don't, when my students try to write flash fiction, I mean they're young. So I think it's a product often of, they've read flash fiction and they're really into it because they could do it really quickly and then they often end up feeling like unfinished stories. So I was kind of, I don't like to be accused of doing the same thing I accused my students of, but I felt right in this particular time. What is flash fiction, I asked a couple of you. It depends on, I mean it depends on who you ask, but generally it's defined as fiction under 500 words in length. So very, very grief, as this is. I've got one more question I want to ask you and then I'll let you go. And this is really for my own identification, just because I've got you trapped here and I want to ask you something. I've heard you say in answer to a question about whether having a family and a demanding job at your fears of writing, that you can't rightly complain because you waste plenty of time all on your own. And I wonder for myself as well as you, what exactly constitutes wasted time with regard to the act of writing? Because if people watched us work, there's a lot of not working going on, right? There's an unintentionally hilarious live feed of the writer Robert Olin Butler, do you know about this? Or it's just him at a desk for eight hours, like time thing, and it's a camera on his big bald head and it's just excruciating, like it's just so dull. I don't, I can't believe he actually writes that way. I certainly don't. I mean I get up constantly, I'm listening to music, I'm washing dishes, I'm talking on the phone. And in your mind that's all right. Well that's what I tell myself. And I think sometimes it actually is, like I often go for, people get really annoyed, my family gets really annoyed at me because I'll go to a movie and like a, 1130 on a Wednesday morning and I'm like, well it's just part of the process, comma man. And they're like, no it's just you wanted to go see a movie in the middle of the work day. But I think often it actually is part of it. Even if I think it's garbage, I actually, there are moments where it actually seems productive. I cannot tell you the number of problems I've worked out by going for a run at one o'clock on a Thursday. Like it happens the whole time. And on that run, are you actively engaging the problem or are you thinking about anything but? Once in a while what usually happens is I'm so pissed off at something being that my, how terrible I've written, terribly I've written that morning that I'm just there to blow off steam and my mind just is just white. It's just nothing, just buzzing. And then after a while, if I allow my mind, it sounds awfully zen-ish. My mind often returns to the thing that I'm so annoyed by. And then I'm actively thinking about it when I'm running. And that's true when I like do stuff around the house. But it's mostly true for me with exercise. I do a lot of working of things out while exercising. I do even, you can even count my drive to Bowdoin as part of this, because I often write and then try to work out the things I've written, the problems I've written myself into on the drive up there. So yeah, I do think it's, you know, we talk a lot about it and I think it ends up mostly being true that this is all part of the same process. You can sort of beat yourself up for the self-perception that you're wasting time. That happens to me. I didn't really need to be cleaning this toilet right now. And, you know, writers have this reputation of justifying everything. Like, you know, well, this is what a writer does. And a lot of it's ridiculous.  He's wrote this article about how diminished the, how people think so little of writers that writers have begun to internalize it and have begun to think they can't actually do anything. My version of that, I think that's probably true, although I try not to be so, I try not to be self-pitying about it. My version of that is I'm the one who's often belittling it because I don't want to seem too pompous about it or to make two grand claims for fiction that fiction can't then bear. Back to the self-deprecating reflex, right? Right, right. Yeah, and for me, that's vital even if it becomes a problem because the minute I start making grand claims for things I start thinking about all the ways I'm failing it.  I'm not sure how we ended up right there. Yes, it's all part of the writing process for me, yeah. Yeah, yeah, so I'm just gonna read really, this really short story that Ron's talked about if I can find it. I've not been reading from this because it's so short, but I figure at lunchtime it might be good. There it is, and I can talk a little bit about this. Maybe after I'm done reading. How about the, yeah, sure, might not. No, okay, so I actually write fiction that I think to people seems autobiographical because of certain superficial things. Often my protagonists look like me in some way or another or bear some resemblance or have the same name, the same height and weight, same clothes. I'm just being a jackass now. Or they're part of the family unit that seems similar. This one actually is based on my older son. And often for me, fiction is the thing that it's an exaggeration of the thing that you fear becoming. And so if you write it and then you change it, it becomes a kind of talisman. And I think that's the version of this story. It's called Good Night. I had this published in a magazine called The Sun, and I was horrified because they accepted it. And I was like, oh, great, I'm really happy to be in The Sun. They're like, yeah, it's gonna be, and we have really great nonfiction, this issue. And I'm really psyched to you. And I was like, no, no, no, this is fiction. I swear. And they seemed really unconvinced by that. And I understand why. Anyways, good night. And even after all that, even after everything I'd said to him earlier, he still came to say good night before he went to bed, the way he had every night, pretty much, since he was a little boy. He wasn't a little boy anymore, 14 years old and taller than I am. And I say this not by way of bragging because I'm not that tall. Anyways, he knocked on the bathroom door.  I spat into the sink and when I turned around, he was standing there in the doorway. He was bare-chested, wearing the sweatpants he wore to bed every night, which were not much distinguishable from the sweatpants he wore to school every day. This was one of the things we tended to argue about, although I can't remember if that was one of the things we had just argued about or not. We might have argued about the way his armpits or breath stunk, or why he chewed his fingernails so incessantly, or why he put those chewed off fingernails in his shirt and pants and coat pockets, or whether he was planning on saving his chewed fingernails for some special occasion, or whether he was capable of telling me the date and time of that special occasion, or whether he was capable of communicating in something other than one word sentences, or why he didn't look me in the eye, or why he was so weird sometimes, or whether he was actually not weird, but rather living in another universe, not a distant universe, just a universe, say, five seconds behind our own, because why else did it take such an odd amount of time for him to respond to the questions I asked him? Any question, like, do you have any homework?  I just wanted to say good night, he said, looking from the floor, his sky blue eyes trying to meet mine, and I thought, not for the first time, not even for the first time that day or hour, oh God, what is wrong with me? You're such a sweet kid, I love you so much. And I took two quick steps forward and hugged him, and he hugged me back, sort of. I mean, he put his left arm around me, but he kept his right hand up, sort of pushing at my chest with it, making it hard for me to hug him back, even with both arms, which is what I was trying to do. Had he always hugged like that? Would he always hug like that? What kind of person hugs like that? These, I knew, were exactly the things I shouldn't say, and I almost didn't. Yeah, so that's that. Whether or not you knew you were writing flash fiction, the thing that to me indicates that is very much a flash story is that you open in medias race, right? Like, we don't know what was said, we don't need to know what was said. That's a flash piece.  Yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about it that way. And I think, part because I try to begin a lot of stories in scene, and then often page break or white space, and then go into context, and then go back to the scene again. Certainly it's not something exclusive to flash, but I think flash requires it in order to be successful. For me, I just didn't want to go in and further realize because the meanness in that story is incredible. And one, it was self-damning, and I wanted to get out of it. And two, I felt like if I continued on with it, and this is what happened when I kept reading, it had just been more meanness, except diluted meanness. And it was losing its effectiveness, I thought, but yeah. That's what I meant about Tal's men. Like, I've actually never been that mean to my children, but... Have you up here? Well, yeah. Of course, like, what's wrong with you? I think most parents have said that was people. I've thought that. And for me, don't say it in real life, but if you say it in fiction, you can do something productive with it in a way you couldn't do something productive with it in real life. Do you have any questions for Rob? Yeah. Do you ever do any work with young people to encourage them to do? I don't know anything about you, but to encourage them to write or, you know, I just think it's really helpful for young people to meet people who have been accomplished and to have people to learn about. I teach college. So by young people, you mean not of drinking age. I have done things. I did a thing in Lewiston with high school students. They had come in for the day and they were all interested in creative writing. They had written some, and it was the entire day, and the direction was really interesting, and we went through exercises, and then they read what they'd written, and then I asked them to revise it, and they read what they'd revised, and I was scared, because teenagers scare me in general, and I always have, because I was one. And so, I really liked them, though, because they were kind of both cynical and guileless. It was a weird combination. They both felt like, they acted like they knew a ton, but they probably knew in their heart of hearts that they didn't. I kind of liked that combination, and also it was a day, so I knew it was gonna be over no matter how poorly it went. But some of the most really interesting stuff.  I recognized the kind of kids they were, what kind of world they were coming from. I mean, I came from a solidly middle-class background. I don't wanna make any great claims for me being those kids, but I went to school with a lot of kids who resembled them. And then I was really interesting to me, in part because I was always in the impression when I was really like a bookish teenager that I would have to write or read about other places in order to do something meaningful, and only later on when I was at college, and after college I'd be telling stories about my hometown, little falls, that were often exaggerated stories. I was making stuff up, that people were interested in them. I thought, oh, I have something to offer just by writing about this place that no one knows about. And I think that's true in a lot of places in Maine too. So yeah. But I'm a little bit with high school students though, not a ton. Yeah. Yeah, so some of your work is categorized as absurdist, and I was wondering what's your definition of that? Fiction. And then I know exactly what you mean. I kinda resist it. Yeah, I mean, I guess I imply, for me, I resist the label because often absurdity is just thought of as humor writing. I guess I prefer surrealism than absurdity because it suggests a kind of logic, a plan, and not just an inclination. But this is just me thinking way too hard about it. And I think part of it is that my novels, for me at least, are less absurd than the short fiction. I think they're plenty absurd, but I think the absurdity is connected to other things that aren't thought of as part of absurdity. Bigger things. So I guess I try really hard not to define it. I guess I let other people do it. And this is partly my, people have a hard time talking about comedy, about writers who have a sense of humor. They think of it as this freakish thing like you've got a horn growing out of your head. And they try to say, well, he's absurd or he's interested in absurdity, and that's a kind of way of controlling a writer. I actually got some dangerous maelstrom of a person. But I don't know, I don't think it's only that. I don't think Twain's got, he's absurdist in a number of ways, but that's not all he is. And I like to think it's just part of something larger. Yeah, does that help, that answer? Yeah, a lot of us have trouble finding it too, so I'm glad to see that it's not just me. I think for me, I think part of it, what I mentioned earlier, I think it's true of you too, is that I'm inclined toward absurd situations, but this absurd situation, if it's any good, becomes something else, or something in addition to absurdity. It develops a kind of, I'm much more interested in plausibility than I am in absurdity. I like to create situations where there's a kind of logic that takes over. And sometimes the logic is absurd, and sometimes it's really serious, but it's its own thing. Sort of stands behind. Some of the review of this book said, and this has been true of other books, it's been like people in real life would never make the decisions that the characters in this book make. And that's true, more or less. But they're related. It sort of stands behind the real life version. And so the way we feel about the decisions in the book is some ways influenced by the decisions people in real life make, and how close they are. I guess that's absurdity then. Yeah. Yeah. When you mentioned growing up on the Mohawk River, it made me think of Richard Russel, whose first book was Mohawk, and of course moved from that area to Maine too. And of course his novels at least are more realistic, but how would you compare yourself with Russel? Superior. Rick's a friend of both of ours. And I talked about there not being much to live down, being from upstate New York, but he's one of them. And luckily for me, he and I do different things. And I think of Rick as a comic writer, but he's working at a comic tradition that's much more Dickensian than mine. Much more, much more realist tradition. So I don't have to think. The good thing about that is that I love his novels and I also don't have to think about them when I'm writing because they don't resemble mine enough. The inclinations don't, right. Like my books are much shorter than his are. They're less realistic. So it's a great thing.  And I'm really grateful one that Rick's such a generous guy. And two, that his works, his novels and stories aren't close enough to mine that I would have to be pissy and threatened by them. I can just give myself over to them and love them. Wow, that was a weird open hearted moment there. But I've learned a ton though from his novels. And I've learned how you write about a place that you love but you write about it in a way that's unsparing. And that's a really difficult thing to do. And he does that about as well as anyone. And yeah, so that's one thing I still do have a lot to learn from. I think his novels are really big hearted and mine tend to be a little more caustic. And yeah, I could learn to be a little less caustic probably from the novels. But other than Rick, like who else is in Upstate New York that you've heard of? Like John James Van Marcooper? Like no one really writes like James Van Marcooper at, thank God. Possibly. Yeah, right. So there's no one from upstate New York I had to actually ever worry about growing up. But the great thing was when I finally read, it was Mohawk in particular. I read a decade after it was published. I felt so excited. Like wow, someone's writing about this place that everyone else thinks is absolutely unimportant. And that was a real confidence booster at a time where I really needed it. It was for me, him and William Kennedy who wrote these great all-body novels, Iron Weed being the most famous of them. And Frederick Exley who lived in Watertown and wrote a great book called The Fans Notes. And when I found these writers I just hung on to them like grim death. Were there writers like that for you? Central Maine is probably even more hered in that regard. Yeah. Really? No. Short answer, no. By the time I was old enough to be cognizant of it, Rick was actually at Colby. And he, for me, lacking any homegrown sort of inspiration. Just the knowledge that there was a working novelist in close proximity meant something to me. Were you aware of Monica Wood at that time? Yes. He worked. But yeah, not really. There. Yeah, thank you everyone. It's a pleasure. Thanks a lot.


When Devin said, you're not like that. You're not like that. You're not like that. The fear is getting to you. The fear is getting to you. You're not like that. You're not like that. Like, I know you. You know, that was what I got from that. But it was either Ryan, and like I say, with Ryan having the ability to now hydrate up and be a self, and all that, that's the new Ryan, or it was the latter coat. Wow. Yeah, we on boss talk. One on one. One on one. Wow. And I'm going to go back to the Ryan Garcia just for a minute. I want to say, like, with the way that everybody was so, you know, it was tension. When we get to that time when they have to do their weigh-in and everything, man, I'm always looking at those times, man. He turned it into tension, because when he came in, he looked like the Fox from out today. He walked in, he had to join on, he had the black shirt, the leather coat. And I said, damn, let go of Ryan. And then he started up. You started it, and you got it started early. It was early. It was early.  And that's what I'm saying. Like, now you're going to a weigh-in and everything in April and doing all of this stuff. Yeah, we going to cap. The way everything is rolling out is straight focus time, you know.  I wouldn't get it. Yeah, we didn't think that confident Ryan. García, but we knew that because he didn't have any of the weight stipulations, he didn't even that. So he would be a more confident fighter than he was against Tank. But I didn't know how much more confident. I see the cover is blown. Garcia, we going to be ready for 20. Because he came in with a plan. He came in to do that. It seemed like he was ready. He was ready to show out. And that's why I, when Devin said, you're not like that. You're not like that. You're not like that. You're not like that. You're not like that. You're not like that. You're not like that. You're not like that. Like, I know you, you know, that was what I got from that. But it was either Ryan, and like I say with Ryan having the ability to now hydrate up and be a self and all that, that's the new Ryan, or it was the leather coat. Wow. Which one do you think it is? Probably the leather coat. He said Super Power. He said Super Power is in the leather coat. He got Super Power is in the leather coat. You might have Super Power is in the coat. He can't fight in that coat. No, he might have Super Power is in the leather coat. But he can't fight in that coat. That's what I was going to say. He can't fight in that coat, Ryan. He can't fight in that coat, man. For 20, he going to have to come out that coat. He going to have to come out that coat. I'll tell you what he is. We don't want to estimate you, Ryan. Not at all. With that Halibah team over there with Derrick James. Derrick is, Derrick was coach of the year and all kinds of stuff. He's ready. If it's shorts, if it's shorts that he wore that night as leather, then you know he probably took it from the coat so that he could have it. We ain't no getting no idea. We ain't no getting no idea. We ain't no getting no idea. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. You didn't get my idea. You gave my idea.


Hi and welcome to Learn WordPress. Today's session is all about themes. Here are the learning objectives for this workshop. To differentiate between the four different types of themes, to find and evaluate themes, to install and update your theme and lastly to access support for your theme. Let's get going. In short, a theme is basically a website template with a certain layout and design. When you use WordPress, your content is completely separated from its presentation. This means that the look and feel of your site can change completely by just using a different theme, while your content will remain the same. Let's look at an example. Here I am using the 2023 default theme. And in the next example, I have installed and activated the bounce theme, which has a very different look and feel to it. But the content remains the same. It is also important to highlight that your site won't look the same as the thumbnail or example pages of the theme you install and activate. It is merely an example of what can be achieved and sometimes requires specific plugins to be installed to achieve the initial appearance. There are thousands of free themes available in WordPress, but there are also premium themes available outside of the theme repository. But please take note, many free versions also offer premium packages. You might be asking, what type of themes are there? There are four types of themes to take note of. Block themes, classic themes, hybrid themes and universal themes. It might be helpful to mention that block themes and classic themes are most commonly used and that block themes are the future of WordPress. Let's then start by looking at block themes. A block theme uses blocks for all parts of a site, including navigation menus, headers, content and footers. Block themes allow you to edit and customize all parts of your site within the site editor. Let's see a block theme in action. I will make my way to appearance and click on themes. I have activated a block based theme called 2023 and in the left sidebar, you will notice we have access to the editor. If we click on editor, we will be taken to the site editor and here you are able to create and edit pages. You can create a draft page or edit one of your existing pages. Next, we can also change the site-wide styles of our site. Or we can customize the appearance of specific blocks for the whole site. The site editor also allows you to set up templates. You can add new templates or edit the templates that come with your theme. And lastly, you can also manage a variety of patterns, patterns that you have created yourself or header and footer template part patterns that we of course add to templates. I realized that some folks might be unfamiliar with terms like styles, templates, etc. So please check out the resources below this video to learn more. There is also a wonderful new feature that allows you to preview a block theme before switching. When you hover over the block theme, you will see a button live preview. When you click on live preview, you will be taken into the site editor. So not only are you able to preview the site but you also get a taste of the site editor. And now you can go ahead and make any changes or customizations as you please. I will for example change the style variation and also change the font of the text. And now we can explore our pages, our templates, etc. And if you like what you see, you even have the option to activate and save the theme and the changes you have made. A classic theme does not use the block editor to manage the site layout beyond posts and pages. These use the customizer, menus and widgets to make changes to theme settings. And since classic themes have been around the longest, there are many more to choose from. Let's take a closer look at an example of a classic theme. When we make our way to appearance and click on themes, you will notice I have activated the 2016 theme. And in the sidebar settings, you will have access to the customizer and more. And when you open the customizer, you will be able to change all your theme settings from year. Please note block themes on the other hand provide great flexibility for designing and customizing your website. A hybrid theme is a classic theme that adopts some features of site editing like the template editor. A hybrid theme such as Excel still uses the customizer to make changes, while also being able to create your own custom templates. So let's make our way to pages, open one of your pages and go to the sidebar settings on the right. Click on templates and here you are able to assign a page to a different template or create a custom template. And lastly, a universal theme is a theme that can be configured completely either way as a block theme or classic theme. In this example, I have installed the universal theme emulsion and as you will notice, you have access to the customizer as well as the editor. Next, let's talk about searching and adding a new theme. To add a new theme, go to appearance and click on themes. And at the top, click on add new. You can search for the most popular themes, the latest themes that's been added and there's even a designated area for block themes. When you click on a theme, you will be able to see more details about the theme as well as a preview. When you click on feature filter, you will be able to search for themes according to subject, features and layout. What makes a good theme? To review a theme, make your way to WordPress.org, hover over download and extend and then click on themes. Here you can search for a variety of themes. Once you find the theme you are looking for, click on more info to find out more about the specific theme. On the right hand side, you will find all the information you need to make an informed decision. When you look at the version updates, active installations and ratings, it will give you a good sense of the overall experience others have had with this theme. How do I install a theme? To install a new theme, make your way to appearance, click on themes and select add new. Once you find the theme you are looking for, click on install and once installed, don't forget to click on activate. If you have a theme in the form of a zip file, you can install it manually. Click on add new and then at the top, select upload theme. And then you can upload it from your computer. What about updates? If there are updates available, you will be notified in the top menu bar as well as the dashboard menu. You can navigate to the updates page and scroll down. And here you will find a single theme or a list of themes that have updates available. And from this page, you can choose to update individual themes or all at once. Remember to back up your site before making any updates or you can consider using a child theme. A child theme is a sub-theme that inherits the look and feel of the main theme and all of its functions. Using a child theme lets you upgrade the parent theme without affecting the customizations you've made to your site. Customizations are kept separate from the main themes files. But I'll add a link to this in the resources below. Another option is to make your way to appearance, click on themes and go to the theme that needs to be updated. And at the top, you will have the option to select update now. Or click on theme details and at the top, you will also be able to update. And lastly, you also have the option to enable auto updates for this specific theme. How do I delete a theme? To delete a theme, select the relevant theme and at the bottom right, you will have the option to delete. And lastly, how do I get support? To get support, make your way to the theme directory, select the relevant theme and scroll down to support. The best way to get help with a theme is by going to the themes related support forum to ask questions over you other tickets. I trust you will find the right theme that meets all your needs. And visit Learn WordPress for more tutorials and training material.


Every day somebody wakes up and says today's not the day to attack America, nuclear weapons have worked. SANS is the School of Advanced Nuclear Deterrence Studies and really what it is is it's an opportunity for us to dive deep into deterrence. Nuclear deterrence is a cornerstone of our national security. It helps us to have a freedom of action, freedom of decision. And if you want to still climb the ladder in the Air Force or in the military in general, you will be an advisor to the senior leader and maybe decision leaders or politicians. So you need to have a good understanding of what nuclear deterrence is in order to communicate in the best way, the best effective way. The neat thing about SANS, at least for a nuclear, someone in the nuclear enterprise, is that dive deep into nuclear deterrence. Success is not turning keys and launching the missiles. Success is every day when we don't have to do that because deterrence is working. That is the purpose of SANS, is to reinvigorate as part of an overall education plan that the Air Force has to reinvigorate some thought and practice into future leaders for nuclear deterrence and deterrence operations.


to accurately verify wireless protocols using a sniffer. I have to be able to address the uncertainty introduced by the sniffer. What do I mean by this? So let's say that the controller sends three packets back to the Xbox base station. P1, P2, and P3. Now, the sniffer does not have a perfect view of the wireless environment. Wireless propagation is always sort of fraught with uncertainties. It's possible that there's interference. It might miss the starter frame delimiter or something. And so it's possible that the sniffer only sees P1 and P3. So already here I have an example of the uncertainty that's introduced by the sniffer. Specifically, the sniffer doesn't actually see the packets that were sent by the controller back to the Xbox. It only sees a subset of them. So in this case, it missed P2. Now, there's another source of uncertainty. So in this case, the sniffer can miss packets that the controller might have received. But there's another source of uncertainty because it's possible that the controller only heard, let me get this too wide, P1 and P2. So in this case, I can observe sort of two types of uncertainty. There is a packet that the controller received that the sniffer did not, P2. There's also a packet that the sniffer received that the controller did not, P3. And so the trace that's provided by the sniffer for verification has these problems. It contains packets that the devices that are under test never received. And it also misses packets that the devices under test did receive. So how do we incorporate this? So the verification process, the Jing Hao came up with, starts with a protocol state machine. I'm going to create the simplest possible protocol state machine. It's not even a real protocol. Where I have two states in my protocol, S1 and S2. And transitions from S1 to S2 happen when the device receives a certain packet of type P1. So if I'm in S1 and I receive packet P1, I transition to S2. And these states could indicate that I'm going to send a particular packet or that I'm waiting to receive some more information or whatever. This is the protocol state machine and this has to be provided by the developer. Now the goal then becomes given the sniffer trace, the trace of packets that have actually been observed by the sniffer, can I determine whether or not the protocol state machine accepts or rejects that trace. Now if I use the state machine as provided, I have this problem where the state machine does not incorporate the uncertainty in the sniffer's measurements. And so what we do is we take the original state machine and we compute something called the augmented state machine. So how do I augment the state machine to incorporate the sniffer uncertainty? I need to do two things. The first thing is I need to create a null transition on this state. And then the second thing is I need to create a null transition from S1 to S2. So this transition indicates that it's possible that the device under test can get to S2 because the sniffer missed P1. So it's possible that the sniffer, sorry this should be P1, not null. So it's possible that the sniffer missed P1 but the device under test received it and so it got from S1 to S2. It's also possible that the sniffer saw P1 but the device under test didn't and so it stayed in S1. And so there is a programmatic and mechanical way that I can take this original state machine and look for various transitions that result from receiving packets and introduce these null transitions and these self transitions that incorporate the uncertainty in the sniffer's measurements. Armed with this augmented state machine I can return to the challenge of determining whether the state machine accepts or rejects a particular trace collected by the sniffer. On the other hand you'll probably notice that I've introduced a bunch of new transitions into the state machine and that makes it possible for the state machine to incorporate, to actually accept a much, much, much larger set of traces. And what I want to do is I want to make sure that the traces that are accepted by the state machine are actually high likelihood traces. And so Jinghao and Chavendu were actually able to prove that the problem of verifying a trace in this augmented state machine is NP complete. But I can prune the search intelligently using a couple of simple heuristics. For example, if the state machine has to drop so many packets that it's not behaving like the sniffer. So if accepting the trace requires that I drop 90% of the packets in the trace whereas the sniffer could be measured to only drop 5% of the packets then that trace ends up being very, very unlikely. And so as we're doing the search in real time in the first version of the system the search algorithm is pruning states once they become highly unlikely. And so rather than branching off in a lot of different directions that I would have to I'm looking at each state that I'm in figuring out what the probability of that state is based on some heuristics that I apply and if that probability gets too low I drop it and I don't continue down that particular path. So the specific heuristics that we used are described in more detail in the paper. But the goal here is to make this search over the augmented state machine feasible and not have it blow up an exponential time. And this can be done and so what's outputted from this is given a particular sniffer trace what is the probability that this trace would be accepted by the augmented state machine. Now there are still cases where the state machine can actually get stuck and can completely reject the trace. So there are certain cases where the trace is wrong and I can show that there's a violation with 100% probability. However I cannot accept the trace with 100% probability because there's always a case that there was actually a violation that it was hidden in some packets that I missed. And so in certain cases I can reject the trace outright. In other cases I have to accept or reject the trace based on the probability of the augmented trace that the search found depending on properties of the sniffer. So this is the overall approach. I take the original state machine. I automatically augment it with these extra transitions that allow me to incorporate uncertainty introduced by the sniffer. And then I can use the sniffer trace to verify the protocol in a probabilistic fashion where the output is the probability that this particular trace would be accepted by the state machine given some heuristics and some information that I know about the sniffer itself.