Well Drat!

We heard today that the company I work for (which shall remain nameless) was awarded the NASA contract for the Crew Exploration Vehicle. Actually, it wasn't my company. Lockheed-Martin got the contract, but my company was part of the Lockheed-Martin bid.

Yippee?

Well, yes and no. The CEV is an Apollo-like spacecraft designed to replace the Space Shuttle starting in 2010 (hold the laughs down, please). The first manned flight of the CEV is supposed to happen in 2012 (stop that snickering). On the one hand, the CEV makes a certain amount of sense to me. The Shuttle, whatever its other strengths and weaknesses, isn't very efficient. Having to heave a double-delta wing with a cross-range capability of about 1200 miles is good if you need a 1200-mile cross-range capability, but kind of a bummer if all you're doing is delivering crews to the ISS. (Litte did we realize at the time how much we would pay for the one-orbit return-to-launch-site capability!)

The CEV makes sense to me - I'm a product of the Apollo years, so of course it would make sense to me. Spacecraft are supposed to look like bells, not dang airplanes! So I'm pleased that the L-M CEV won, and I'm glad my company is a part of it.

But I've never been a fan of the "stick" booster, which has lately been given the name Ares I in an apparent attempt to distance it from its Shuttle provenance. Take a Shuttle SRB, plop another segment atop it, plop a J-2X powered second stage atop that, and you have an Ares I. My beef is with the SRB portion of the undertaking. I seem to have some kind of visceral problem with man-rating a booster that is entirely solid fuel.

Am I just being a wet blanket? Is my deep-seated preference for Apollo-like hardware forcing me to remain an outspoken proponent of the F-1 engine? Do I have a touch of von Braun-itis, the pathological aversion to anything not liquid-fueled?

I don't know. But I'd feel a lot better if the Ares I had a proper liquid fuel engine, like an F-1 derivative, or an RD-180, or if the Ares I amounted to nothing more than fancy paint on an Atlas V or a Delta IV Heavy. Say "liquid fuel" to me and I think Saturn V. Say "solid fuel" to me and I think Honest John. It's just that simple.

Or is it?

Future Wax!

Now and then I watch a TV show on the Military Channel called Futureweapons. I do this not because I think the show is very good; mainly I'm just amused by the gap between hype and reality. Mostly the show seems to feature weapons that are either irrelevant in the post-Cold War context or technological dead ends in any context, but the host of the show gives it to us with both barrels: weapon X will blow you away, wipe you off the face of the earth, obliterate you, annihilate you, and give you bad breath.

They usually end up being nothing more than 15-minute advertisements for various defense contractors, and they seem to be stuck in some alternate reality where the Soviet Union never fell and the primary threat to security is ten thousand or so Russian tanks in East Germany. One show focused on a standoff anti-tank weapon known variously as Skeet, SADARM or ERAM, depending on the defense contractor in question. I was astonished to see that we're still spending money on this thing - its utility in wars like we those face in Iraq and Afghanistan is zero and its fundamental purpose simply doesn't exist any more. (I won't go into the fact that they miss most of the time anyway.)

Another episode talked about how modern sensors on the battlefield give the enemy "nowhere to hide." Osama seems to have been able to hide. The Taliban seems able to hide. The Iraqi insurgency seems to be able to hide. But there's this silly TV show, suggesting that all we need are enough high-tech toys and victory will surely be ours through some hazy process they don't actually define. It's probably the same hazy process by which Pentagon hawks concluded that Iraqis would greet our troops with flowers and bottles of wine.

I read something once in a professional military magazine that's stuck with me over the years. It was in an issue of Proceedings, the official journal of the US Naval Institute, and it ran something like this:

Nuclear forces can obliterate, air forces can destroy, naval forces can blockade, but only men on the ground can seize and hold meaningful political control.

In other words, you can blow up as much stuff as you want, using the fanciest acronym-laden weapons you wish, and you won't win if you don't have enough soldiers on the ground to seize and hold political control. What Futureweapons and Pentagon "transformationalists" don't seem to understand is that wars like those we face in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't won by airstrikes, ICM artillery missions, cruise missiles or Skeet anti-armor submunitions. They're won by having enough men on the ground so that the insurgency can't survive.

Military theorists spend a lot of time talking about "centers of gravity". A central military principle is that one should attack the enemy's center of gravity, and should attack it to the exclusion of everything else. What is a center of gravity? It is something that allows the enemy to maintain the fight. In a lot of European wars, the obvious center of gravity was the enemy's capital city - take it, and suddenly you control the apparatus of government. In the American Civil War, US Grant realized that the South's center of gravity was the Army of Northern Virginia - trap and defeat it, and the war will end because the ANV was the only thing holding the Confederacy together. In the Pacific in World War Two, oil was seen as one of Japan's centers of gravity - deny the Japanese access to oil and suddenly everything else gets a lot easier. And thus were US submarines sent on dangerous patrols, and thus did they wipe out Japan's merchant fleet and cut off the flow of oil.

In a war like Afghanistan or Iraq, what is the center of gravity? It isn't the capital city, because we hold the capital cities. It isn't the organized enemy army, because there is no organized enemy army, just decentralized groups of highly motivated men. It isn't the flow of supplies from abroad, because both countries are awash in the tools of the insurgent trade: Kalashnikovs, RPG-7s, and explosives. What allows the insurgencies to continue?

It is the pe0ple of Aghanistan and Iraq. In an insurgency, the population as a whole is the center of gravity, not some city or some notable insurgent leader. Control the people, and gain their trust, and you've won the battle for the enemy's center of gravity. All that remains is the task of rounding up the diehards, which is more a police operation than a military operation.

And how do you control the people and win their trust? I'll give you a hint: it doesn't involve anything you'll see on Futureweapons.

Ugh

A bag of used cat litter: $5.50
Half of a Sonic chili dog: $3.25
A banana peel: $1.50 per pound
Wet Trader Joe's coffee grounds: $8.00 a can
A gooey thing wrapped in foil: $5.00
Even gooier remains of a salad: $6.75
Helpless retching: Priceless

Yep, it's that time of year, the annual trash can diving expedition because I've somehow managed to mislay my work badge again. I do this about once a year, apparently because subconsciously I sense that there isn't enough drama in my life.

If you'll pardon me, I need to go take a shower now.

Model Madness

I've been building models for about four decades. My first model was a tiny Revell Fokker Dr.1 triplane, the light blue Werner Voss one with the amused face on the cowling.

My worst failing as a modeler is my inability to restrict myself to one genre so I get really good at one thing. I build pretty much everything, so I end up being sort of amateurish across a broad spectrum rather than really good at one thing. If the goal is to have fun, then I succeed, but if the goal is to demonstrate master craftsmanship, I have work to do.

But having said that, I now append a few pictures of some of my work.

54mm Andreas miniatures of two Roman soldiers. This was a very nice kit, though the sheet of instructions held up in the background to hide the clutter on my workbench is a decidedly lowbrow touch. (Trivia question: can you identify the instruction sheet? It's from a Heller 1/35th scale AMX-13 tank model, and it wasn't nearly as nice as the Roman figures.)

A Russian T-72 tank by Tamiya and a bunch of motor rifle troops by DML. Both kits were truly excellent. The shaggy grass on the base is some of that "hair" grass sold by Woodland Scenics. I find it troublesome and would revert to my usual standby, flax fibers, if flax fibers didn't look so much like flax fibers.

Gowron, I think from the Geometrics kit, I don't remember. Either way, it's hollow vinyl. Vinyl kits don't offer much fun in terms of assembly, but they're fun as painting projects. Gowron in particular was mostly an exercise in washes and drybrushing. The most fun was getting the proper pop-eyed look in his right eye while the left one squints.

So what have we got? Some historical miniatures, a tank, and a Klingon. Yep, I think I'm having trouble restricting myself to specific genres...

Und Jetzt: I Vent

I'm currently irritated with my neighbor in a neighborly, good-natured kind of way.

I currently have a rather large heap of crushed granite in front of the house to be spread over the front yard, and my neighbor keeps drifting over to see if I need help spreading said crushed granite.

The problem with that is this: he wants to use his new New Holland tractor to spread it, while I want to use my shovel to spread it. He's not concerned with my gravel per se; he just wants to push stuff around with his tractor.

Don't get me wrong, I don't blame him. If I owned his tractor, I'd probably try to find a way to make it wash windows and vacuum the carpet, so I understand his deep desire to push stuff around.

But here's the deal. I am, by profession, more or less a software engineer. The stuff I produce can't really be seen, touched, felt, heard or tasted. It does what needs to be done, but it's not tangible. I can't point at it and say "Yep, that's what I did." Writing software pays the bills and I take a certain amount of pride in writing good software, but software just doesn't give me any sense of accomplishment. None. Zero. Zip.

So I do things with my hands. I built a bulldozer blade and a box scraper for my lawn tractor out of scrap iron and a roll of welding wire, not because I needed them that much, but because building stuff makes me feel useful in ways that writing software doesn't. I like to collect random rocks out of the dry wash behind the house and landscape with them. I like to dig holes. I like to build walkways. I like to cut wood into pieces, and then nail them back together in new configurations.

I take my software seriously, and it does important stuff. But it doesn't fullfill me the way building some stupid thing with my hands does. Here are two sample conversations:

"This is the software I wrote. You can't see what it does, but it toggles some bits in a register and reads another register and... well... It's not very exciting, is it?"

"This is a walkway I built. Its function is obvious, and its permanence makes me feel that I have contributed something to the world."

So now we come back to my neighbor and his deep need to spread my gravel. To him, it's just something he can do with his tractor, and I don't fault him for that. And in truth he is an extremely nice guy, and if I had his tractor, I'd probably use it to spread the gravel too.

But to me, the pile of gravel isn't just a pile of gravel, a mere task to be discharged and ticked off a list. It represents self-actualization and a sense of self-worth, and I swear to God if he drives his tractor on my self-actualization and sense of self-worth, I'm going to freak!

In a good-natured, neighborly kind of way, of course.

How Revolting!

I don't drive the pickup truck much these days, but I did today. I wanted to go into town and buy a pallet of pavestones so I could make a walkway. I find the process of building walkways almost Romanesque - when I'm done, there is a walkway where there once was nothing. It gives me the same sense of accomplishment I imagine Roman engineers felt when the finished the Via Appia, just before the tax collectors arrived.

I went to my local purveyor of fine home improvement materials and bought a pallet of 90 pavestones. That's right at the edge of what my truck can haul without screaming in pain and breaking a spring shackle, which would be a very bad thing - I have nightmare visions of losing the axle on the highway and ending up in the CAP canal...

So the forklift operator brings the pallet out, and just as he was hoisting it to the level of my truck, the pallet disintegrated and the pavestones, they went a-tumbling. All of them broke on impact. Every last one of them. We dug through this unhappy heap of fractured masonry and I thought I found one that was intact, but it had a crack all the way across it and it came apart in my hands like large Cheez-it with a built-in structural flaw.

So now I'm down to 56 pavestones, which was all that they had in stock. Fine and dandy - I only needed about 42 for what I wanted to accomplish, and hauling 56 pavestones makes my truck scream a good deal less than 90. With 56 on board, it's almost sprightly; with 90 on board, the suspension is bottomed out and the only give is when Important Stuff flexes in ways Important Stuff aint supposed to flex.

But no mind. I got home safety and built my walkway, which happened to include a good deal of shoveling, raking, pitchforking of rocks, hammering, growling, snarling and whimpering. My soil comes in two forms: it's either deep bottomless sandy gravel, which is a joy to shovel, or it's bitterly hard baked clay that they could build Saturn V boosters out of. Fortunately that part of the yard was mostly gravel, but buried in the gravel are occasional rocks about the size of one's head, and the easiest way to shift them it with a pitchfork, oddly enough.

But I digress. Normally I do the earthmoving for walkways before I buy the pavestones, spreading the work out over two days (or weeks, or months...) But this time I did it all in one day, and as I was moving the truck, I grasped the shifter and slammed it into park and fluid suddenly squirted out of the steering column.

Those are words you really don't want to ever have to say. "Sorry, I can't go to dinner tonight, fluid squirted out of my steering column." It sounds at least as shameful as it actually feels.

I believe odd things from time to time. For example, I believe that airlines don't actually put my luggage in the cargo hold of the airplane. I believe they photocopy my luggage and load the photocopy onto the plane, then through some secret airline process they reconstitute my luggage from random molecules when I reach my destination. But I have a hard time believing that fluid would suddenly squirt out of my steering column.

And of course, it didn't. I had developed an immense blister during the day's festivities and the fluids didn't squirt out of the steering column, they squirted out of me. I didn't know whether to be impressed or revolted, and it wasn't until much later when I got soap into the hitherto painless void in my flesh that I decided it was revolting.

The Pile What Grows

The other day I ordered 19.5 tons of crushed granite for the yard. I'm not sure why I insist on adding that probably hypothetical ".5". Whether I got the 0.5 tons or not depended mostly on the loader operator, and who knows what he was thinking as he loaded my gravel. Mostly I think "19 tons" sound arbitrary, like I'm making it up, but "19.5 tons" sounds clinical and precise, spoken the way an Apollo mission controller would say it.

Which would you rather hear?

"Uh, roger, Apollo 11, we'd like you to burn the SPS for about 19 seconds."

"Uh, roger, Apollo 11, burn the SPS for 19.5 seconds."

It's all in what engineers call "significant digits." My point is all but made!

So they deliver my gravel in a dump truck that has more supplemental axles than Carter has pills, and my immediate reaction upon viewing the pile was "Huh. That's a bit of a disappointment." I wasn't expected an Everest-sized heap of gravel, but certainly something a bit more grand that I actually got.

So I fetched hither my square-point shovel and tractor and cart and pitchfork and started shoveling gravel around. I shoveled and shoveled and shoveled. I covered a big chunk of the front yard and realized that the pile hadn't diminished by so much as an iota. It's not a pile of gravel at all - it's a perpetual source of half-minus crushed granite! Dig all you want, the pile will make more!

I guess the moral of the story is don't ask for a big pile of gravel - you might actually get one, and then where will you be?

Nein! Hagel!

I may be a little overly sensitive when it comes to my car. Let me explain. No, in the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, let me sum up.

I had to buy a new car. My old Corsica was quite sound in a mechanical sense, aside from a bit of ticking from the CV joints and an undamped sensation when going over bumps because (I imagine) its struts are shot. But it starts well, runs well, and passes emissions inspection without any problem. It has two main defects. One is an occasional computer malfunction where the computer seems to forget some key piece of data and the car won't idle. Turn it off, turn it all the way off, and try it again, and it works fine. Weird. It's kind of like Windows in that respect. ("Ah, shut'er down and reboot, why doncha!") Oh, and it leaks a bit of oil from the front valve cover, but what's a few drops on the driveway among friends?

The other problem is that it looks like utter hell. It looks like it might have served with Montgomery at El Alamein. Sun-bleached paint, sun-rotted upholstery, no headliner... Both gas struts on the rear hatch quit working, so if I want to get something out of the back, I have to balance the fifty-pound door on the top of my head, further aggravating the tiny knot I contracted in 1988 from the door of an Aeroflot airliner and has never been quite right...

I'm digressing. The point is my car looked terrible, and finally my friends and family brought enough peer pressure to bear on me and I bought a Hyundai Elantra. Nice car, or so I think anyway. At least everything works and my head doesn't hit the roof that often, a problem that nags me in most cars.

I generally go home by exiting the city to the north and going cross-country on a fairly desolate state highway. It's only 25 miles or so, but it feels like the back side of nowhere. Consequently, speed limits are high, and nobody crosses that stretch of highway at less than 70 MPH. So I was zipping along, winding through the hills, and it began to rain. Hard. Big drops the size of goiters, the kind of drops that seem to explode when they hit.

All of a sudden I was gripped by the fear that it was going to hail on my new car. This is not something that one normally fears in Arizona. On the scale of unlikely natural disasters, hail lies just below avalanche, nuclear holocaust and asteroid impact. But such was my anxiety that I slowed down to a modest 40 MPH to lessen the damage any hail might cause.

Here's something about Arizona drivers: rain makes them go faster. They already drive plenty fast as it is, but add a little rain and suddenly they all think they're Dale Jr. or something. So I've slowed down because of the rain, the wet highway and the potential for hail impacts (the sky was green, after all) and all of a sudden here's this bozo in a green Ford perched on my rear bumper, flashing her lights and having a mild conniption fit. While yammering on a cell phone, I might point out. I figure she must have had at least four arms: one to hold the wheel, one to hold the phone, one to flash the headlights, and one for her wild spastic conniption fit.

Nothing on Earth - literally nothing - irritates me as much as being tailgated. I don't much mind what people do so long as they don't endanger me, but tailgating me endangers me, and it drives me nuts. I often wish I had a box of overripe tomatoes in my car for just such occasions...

But I digress. I pull off into the right lane so Ms. Thing can pass me, only she doesn't. She loiters off my left rear quarter panel as though held there by my raw animal magnetism. Only when she sees that my lane is coming to an end in a few hundred feet does she punch the throttle, and by then it's too late. She forces me off onto the paved shoulder while she continues to have a conniption and continues to yammer on her cell phone, and I'm driving on the buzz-strip so my teeth are vibrating and altogether unknown dimensions are opening around me. I'm seeing Roman legions and talking elephants and Chinese funeral processions and God knows what all because of the vibration.

I think what cheesed me about this was its source. I'm used to being tailgated and run off the road by huge Dodge pickups driven by guys who wear their hats backwards and imagine that having a Hemi qualifies them for special treatment. I'm not so used to being driven off the road by tiny women in green sedans.

I seem to have strayed off my original topic, but so what?

Monsoon Madness

A night at the drag strip! Who could ask for more? Well, lots of people, but never mind that for now. It was a good night - only a few mechanical problems and everyone went home in one piece, and that's always the best outcome.

Here's something you don't see every day - two Fuel Altereds in a head-to-head race. The noise at this range defies description. It is more a physical assault than anything so droll as mere noise, as though several burly men are pounding on your ribcage with sledgehammers. I had fashioned earplugs out of pocket debris so I could take the picture. If I hadn't been able to make my own earplugs, well, I wouldn't have dared to try to take the picture.

"Arizona Thunder" at launch, and me with no earplugs! These cars aren't as loud as Fuel Altereds. It feels more like several adolescents beating on your ribcage with pool cues. Alas, Arizona Thunder siezed its engine on the next burnout and that was that.

"Big Al" and the Smoky Burnout. I love the smell of tire smoke and race fuel. It smells like... victory!

Under the body of "Hard To Handle", a bona fide Fuel Altered. You're looking at, what, 5,000 horsepower? Something like that. Enough for the driver to have to pedal the whole way down the strip in the desperate search for traction. One of the most amazing things about drag racing is the relationship between the drivers and the fans. As I was getting ready to take this picture, the car's driver walked by doing some errand, and actually apologized for stepping in front of the camera. I had to tell him not to apologize. "You're the driver, you're the one doing the important work here; I'm just taking a picture. Do what you have to do!" And he smiled and got out of the way of the camera anyway.

And NASCAR charges how much for pit passes again?

The C-Games

I watched a little bit of the X-Games on TV last night. Other than the veritable tidal waves of commercials every ten minutes and the incessant jabbering of the PA announcer, it was pretty fun. The color commentary was the most amusing aspect of the whole thing: "That's a very nice one-foot 540 off-side fade," the color guy says, and everyone nods in sage agreement.

It struck me that we should also have the C-Games, the Cubicle Games, and they should have the same kind of florid, jargon-intensive color commentary as the X-Games. It won't improve productivity, but it would make the day go by faster, and that's definitely good.

So let's work out some terminology. On side = with your dominant hand. Off side = with your non-dominant hand. Diddle = using the mouse. Keyslap = using the keyboard. Valdez = doing something with coffee ("Earl" for the tea-drinkers among us). Slider = getting something out of a file drawer. Flipper = getting something out of a flipper cabinet. Tail-slide = slumping. Rump-riser = sitting up. Alexander = using the phone. Stoned Programmer = staring at the monitor.

So let's imagine what the color commentary might be like:

"He's starting with a Stoned Programmer. Very solid, and then he's adding an on-side diddler. Pretty basic, but you have to have the fundamentals down. Okay, here's a good off-side Valdez, and look at that, he's holding the on-side diddler! Very nice! Oh, he's really busting out the tricks now, that's an off-side slider cellulograb with a no-look on-side keyslapper with a full 180 tail-swerve and a really nice tail-slide! And a diddler! Look at the control! And now straight into a full two-hand no-look keyslapper with a shoulder-pinch Alexander and a sharp, sharp Lindsey Lohan eyeroll! Righteous! Okay, it looks like he's setting up for an off-side Valdez and a rump-riser flipper roulette and - Oh no, he can't stick the flipper and it's a paperwork tsunami! What a disappointment!"

I Ask You, USS Morton Kondrake!

Lately I've been wondering how one gets a weapons system named after one's self. More importantly, can I get one named after myself?*

For example, why was the M-1 main battle tank named the "Abrams" and not, say, the Eisenhower or the Collins? Eisenhower and Collins were more important figures in WWII than Abrams, after all. Maybe it has to do with war reporting. "US troops led by a formation of Eisenhowers stormed Sum Dang Spot today..." It doesn't sound terribly good. The alternative is even worse. "US forces, spearheaded by a battalion of Collinses, attacked Rebel strongholds in..." It sounds more like a bar tab than an order of battle, and the difficulty with pluralization would drive editors to seek solace in said Collinses.

The habit of naming tanks comes to us from the British. When the British were forced to evacuate from Dunkirk, they left most of their tanks behind for the victorious Germans to tinker with. The British then took receipt of a large number of US tanks under Lend-Lease, all of which bore logical but unimaginative names like "Medium Tank M-3" or "Light Tank M-3". The British took one look at this muddle and said "Right, that one there's a Grant" and the names stuck.

But seriously, who picks these names? Now that we've got a USS Ronald Reagan, is a USS Richard M. Nixon likely? Is a USS Hubert Humphrey possible, given political realities? Would the USS Stephen King work, or would it freak out its own crew? What sort of image would the USS Noam Chomsky present, or the USS Patrick Buchanan?

I ask you, USS Morton Kondrake!

*The ideal weapons system to be named after me are our anti-missile missiles. They almost never have to do anything, and on those rare occasions when they are launched, hardly anybody expects them to work anyway.

Kerosene Won't Melt Steel

Normally I don't spend a lot of time refuting conspiracy theories, mainly because most conspiracy theories have no impact on public policy or debate. What difference does it make to me if you believe that UFOs are abducting people, or if you think there is something in the Bermuda Triangle that eats ships and airplanes, or if you think the spirit of Lucille Ball is occupying your toaster? These theories simply don't matter. They don't impact me or my government, and thus are entirely harmless and frankly irrelevant.

But there's a new conspiracy theory going around that argues that the World Trade Center towers were brought down by "controlled demolition"and not by the airplane impacts. This theory does impact me, because it has the possibility of radically altering the nature of the national security debate going on in the United States. The real debate should be how we deal with the attack, and trying to turn it into a general-purpose anti-government conspiracy theory is a waste of time and effort.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not here to argue that we should implicitly trust the government, or any government. I've always believed that the press's role should be that of professional doubter, and the new habit of certain news networks to shill for certain political points of view strikes me as a pretty fundamental dereliction of duty.

But let's be honest with ourselves and admit that the airplane crashes were what brought down the Twin Towers. Let's just settle that factual matter up front and move on with the rest of the security debate. My personal belief is that Osama bin Laden carried out the attack to goad the United States into an asymmetrical and reflexive military reaction. I could be wrong, but we can't even have that debate until we finally accept that it was the airplane crashes that did the damage, not government agents in the employ of some shadowy Neocon elite.

The main argument of the conspiracy theorists seems to be that burning kerosene can't melt steel. Let's look at some numbers.

Jet-B, the kerosene-based fuel in airliners, burns at a temperature of 260 to 315 C in open air, and up to 980 C under ideal conditions. Generic steel melts at about 1370 C, and I imagine that the ASTM-36 structural steel used in the Twin Towers melts at about the same temperature.

So they're right in this respect: a kerosene-fueled fire can't melt steel. But they're massively wrong in this respect: you don't have to melt steel to bring down a steel building. All you have to do is soften the steel, and it turns out that steel softens at a much, much lower temperature - some engineering handbooks cite 350 C at the magic temperature at which steel becomes incompetent as a structural element.

When I was a kid, my dad took my brother and I on a camping trip to Lake Meade. The adults (read "men") had a big campfire where they could drink, talk about adult stuff, and tell extravagant fishing lies. My brother and I had a smaller campfire of our own, and we made an interesting discovery. If we left large nails in the coals for a while and then took them out with a pair of pliers, we could twist them into wild pretzel shapes with no difficulty whatsoever.

Not that this a new discovery. Blacksmiths have known since the dawn of the Iron Age that iron and steel, when heated, become soft and workable. Get a piece of steel red hot and you can bend it quite readily. But how hot is red hot? A campfire burns between about 400 C and 600 C, and will bring steel to a red heat where it has the structural strength of butter. (All objects that are red hot are at about the same temperature. A coal in a campfire that is red hot is at about the same temperature as a piece of red-hot steel.)

This is why farriers heat up horseshoes before bending them to shape. This is why the X-15 was built out of an exotic high-temperature alloy called Inconel-X - normal steel wasn't strong enough at the temperatures the X-15 was likely to encounter.

Now let's look at the Twin Towers for a moment. To increase available floor space, most of the steel columns in the Twin Towers were either in the central elevator shaft core, or on the outside walls. The floors were supported on long steel trusses that were attached to the outer walls and the central core. The trusses supported the floors and also kept the outer walls from buckling either inward or outward.

Now let's imagine a fire in the building, originally ignited by Jet-B from the airplanes and then going on to consume paper, furniture, carpet and other items. I don't know how hot the fire was, but it's reasonable to assume it was at least as hot as a campfire, and that in time the steel in the vicinity of the fire began to approach a red heat. The first damage would be where the trusses are bolted to the outer walls and the central core. The trusses there are mostly under tension, and under a lot of tension. They heat up and sag, increasing the tension on the upper sets of bolts. Soon the bolts on one or two trusses pull through the soft steel and that truss collapses, transferring its load to other trusses. A cacase failure of trusses ensues, leaving a section of the building without trusses and thus with nothing to keep the heat-softened outer wall from buckling outward.

Soon the outer wall buckles, and once that happens, impact loading of the upper part of the building falling onto the lower part dooms the whole thing to come down.

You don't have to melt the steel. All you have to do is heat up the trusses enough for the bolts to pull through the softened steel. And a campfire will do that, if it's big enough and is allowed to burn long enough. So can we please stop wasting time and energy on this silly argument?

I don't know why the conspiracy theorists like this particular theory so much, but I suspect the motivation is largely political. The Bush Administration has done some pretty high-handed things with complete ideological aplomb, and it perhaps suits the conspiracy theorists to imagine that the Bush Administration is sufficiently evil it would destroy the Twin Towers on purpose.

But this theory is clearly based on politics, not science, and at some point we have to let science, engineering and common sense override politically motivated conspiracy theories.

Who Moved My Disk?

Here's an important lesson: make sure there's a disk in the camera before leaving the house.

I wanted to ride out to a particularly deep wash south of my house and take a picture of my bicycle, not because I'm inordinately proud of my bike but because I felt my blog needed a picture, and I'm reasonably certain nobody wanted to see a picture of me, in or out of biking garb. The spot I picked is 17 minutes away by my watch, mostly uphill and on dirt trails that look like they've witnessed the Last Roundup. So many horses have gone through the trails have been ground into something approaching the consistency of dry pancake mix. It looked like the whole 7th Cavalry had ridden through, complete with piles of road apples left here and there to make it even more fun.

So I toiled uphill (not much of an uphill, but it's still uphill) through this glutinous dust, dodging road apples and trying to estimate the number of horses by the number of hoofprints ("Hmm, thirty horses, headed southeast, and they'll get to Dodge City before us!") and I get to the spot where I wanted to take the picture.

I pulled the camera out of my shirt and turned it on, and there were the lovely words "No Disk". It didn't even say "I'm sorry, no disk." Just No Disk. As in No Sale. No Cigar. No Joy. No Soup For You.

So I rode back to the house, through the same Cavalry-churned dust only slightly downhill this time, and ended taking a picture of my bike in my back yard, in my shallower and less photogenic wash. Someday I'll get back to the deep wash and take a better picture, but only after I tattoo Do You Have A Disk on my forehead.

The view out the door of my workshop. I didn't intend to capture the top of my car in the picture, but, well, there it is. The mountains are the White Tank Mountains, so-named because (or so I'm told) the rock tends to be light in color and water running down the washes scoops out light-colored hollows in the bedrock. Such hollows are often referred to as "tanks" in Arizona, probably because of Arizona's long ranching history. The wash in the immediate background actually had running water in it last winter, which was rather interesting. For those of a botanical bent, the drab olive-colored bushes in the background are creosote bushes; the brighter green things in the foreground are a mixure of young mesquites and desert broom.

Space Museum

A part of my space museum. About a third of these models are actually made out of paper, and one of them is a flying model rocket I never actually flew. Note the Major Matt Mason "Satellite Locker" in the top left corner. Note the air of juvenile dissipation throughout.

Toying With The Camera

My heart rate monitor, my glove, and, as it happens, my hand

My bike and, as it happens, my back yard

On Occasional Sundays

My first motorcycle was a wretched Hodaka Dirt Squirt, a 100cc thing with a red frame, chromed steel gas tank, and a heart of pure malice. It had been pretty heavily modified (ported, new pipe, enormous carburetor so forth) and barely ran below about 5000 RPM. It started to gain potency at 6000, and turned on like a light switch at about 7000. All the power was way up high, and I, being totally new to dirt bikes and uncoached in their ways, never realized that there was power to be had up high. I’d putt along, the thing loading up and gagging and sputtering, and on those rare occasions when I did let the thing build RPMs and it started to come alive, I frantically closed the throttle imagining that the sudden spurt of power and acceleration was
a sign that the world was ending.

Eventually it developed some bizarre ignition problem that prevented it from running at all. My parents bought me a whole new ignition system for the thing, and it still wouldn’t run. We towed it around the block repeatedly, fiddling and twiddling, and other than a few random pops, it never did anything. In retrospect, it seems obvious that we had it dramatically out of time. If I had another chance, I could probably get it running in an hour. C'est la vie.

Then I got a Suzuki TC-100 trail bike. My dad was working for a company that modified heavy trucks for extreme-duty service, and I used to go down on Saturdays with him. Somehow we ended up at a bizarre chopper shop that had been set up in a disused Circle-K. I lusted for the Suzuki, which seemed sleek and modern compared to the wretched Hodaka, and my dad eventually bought it for me. It was more suitable for me than the Hodaka because it was a rotary valve thing, not a piston-skirt thing, and it wasn’t as dreadfully peaky as the Hodaka. On the other hand, it wasn’t as dreadfully peaky because there was no power to be had anywhere, high or low. It came with trials tires ("Paw Action", as I dubbed it), a dual-range four-speed transmission, and a swoopy and curvy downpipe complete with chrome heat shield. Stylish, si, but a major pain when it came time to balance the thing on a crate. (It wouldn't balance on a crate, so when I had to work on it, I hung it from the barn roof with a block and tackle.)

I rode the crap out of that thing. I was forever replacing tires with scabby and worn-out knobbies I found at the dump. I replaced the grips. I read The Boonie Book and spent hours lubing my cables, adjusting chain tension, moving the bars forward and back, that sort of thing. I even fiddled with the spokes until they all dinged at exactly the same pitch when struck with a tiny Crescent wrench. In my constant adjusting of the chain, I stripped out the axle nut. In my constant fiddling with the ignition timing, I advanced the timing so much that it eventually broke its piston. I installed a forged aluminum Wiseco number for a TM-100 and was off again (single-ring forged piston, I said to myself, in contrast to the earlier twin-ring cast piston… ooh la la). I took to switching between high and low range by giving the selector a sound thump with my boot (old MX boots I bought at Park-n-Swap or found at the dump, can’t remember). In do doing I broke the range selector arm and had to replace that.

Oh, I botched no end of things. Some kind of actuating rod went all the way through the transmission, and when I was farting around with the clutch, I lost the snap ring on one end. The rod would slowly work its way out and the transmission would stick, so I’d have to take off the side cover and tap the rod back in again. I replaced the brakes when they got so worn out the rear brake cam actually got stuck in the fully-engaged position between the shoes, causing a reasonably spectacular wipe-out right in front of house during one of those phases when my mom was toying with the idea of forbidding dirt bikes because I always seemed to be nursing an injury of some sort. The chain and sprockets wore out and all the teeth wore off the countershaft sprocket, so I tightened the chain until it twanged and kept riding. Every now and then the throttle would stick wide-open. The bike was, as previously mentioned, rotary induction. Its carburetor was in a little compartment low on the right side of the engine, with the fuel line and throttle cable going down through a large rubber grommet. But so did the choke cable. Yes, it theoretically had a choke lever on the handlebars, but the handle was gone and one actuated the choke by simply yanking the choke cable out of the grommet. This worked pretty well until you accidentally yanked the throttle cable through the grommet by mistake…

The countershaft sprocket wore out. I mean it wore out, all the way down to vague scalloped nubs, and the only way it would actually roll under its own power was if I tightened the chain down to the point that it twanged. Even then, under load it would slip six or eight or ten teeth with a horrible shuddering vibration and a machine gun sound, rat-a-tat-a-tat. So I saved up the money I made mowing lawns and sprung for a new countershaft sprocket. Unfortunately, chains and sprockets wear out together, and by mating a new countershaft sprocket with a worn chain, all I did was rapidly ruin the second countershaft sprocket. It lasted maybe a month, if that, and then I was back to the twanging chain and machine gun rattle all over again. After saving even more money, I then did the right thing and replaced both sprockets and the chain (but only after carefully weighing the relative merits of various chain manufacturers, as though it matters when you don’t produce enough power to warrant 428 chain, let alone 520). And whilst I was at it, I replaced the rubber blocks in cushion hub as I was suddenly and strangely obsessed by the fear that my hub was too cushy.

But I learned a lot from that thing. I learned that crashing hurts. I learned humility, because it seemed that I was always pushing the thing home, or being towed home behind someone else while cheerfully enduring the requisite indignities. It got so bad that I strapped a rope to the handlebars since every ride had a roughly 25% chance of ending with a non-running Suzuki. Once I crashed so hard on a long, rocky downhill that the footpeg assembly was ripped clean off the bike. I rode so often and with such pretensions of being a real motocrosser that my furious stirring of the transmission caused me to strip out the splines on the shift lever. I fought that problem seemingly forever. I cut shims out of beer cans and sheet metal. I drilled out the threaded portion of the shift lever so I could use a larger bolt and external nut to gain more clamping force. I hammered pieces of baling wire flat and tried to get them to act as keys. One day I was all set to try to braze the damn thing when my dad suggested that the seal might not like being heated up that much. Finally, after it stripped out for the final time and I had to ride home ten or fifteen miles in second gear, I bought a new shift lever. Geez.

Everyone I knew owned faster bikes. One guy had a YZ-250 that simply ate my Suzuki’s lunch. Another's Yamaha 125 wasn’t all that much nicer than mine, and was arguably as cheesy, but it developed just enough more power to seem in a different league. A third had an off-brand 80 that, being a lot newer, was a lot more reliable though no faster. Another guy had a truly bizarre Yamaha 90 that, like my old Hodaka, had a lot of power but had it all up on top. I was always last. Everyone had faster machinery, and more reliable machinery. But I think my frantic attempts to keep up with my inferior machine were good for developing a certain amount of skill, and the fact that I was towed home about every fourth ride was good for my ego.

But in the end, the Suzuki wasn’t worth repairing. The shift lever was still marginal. Years of fanning the clutch in third gear in the vain attempt to induce wheelspin (the "Semics Technique") left me with a clutch that slipped all the time. The ignition timing wasn’t right and it occasionally belched fireballs out of the exhaust. It rattled, it shook, and it still had its original problem – it produced no power at all. I sold it at a little swap meet outside Avondale for the breathtaking sum of seventy bucks.

Then came a Yamaha 175. It started out as one of those on/off-road “enduro” things, but by the time I got it, the lights and street refinements were long gone. What I remember most was the bike’s bizarre brownish gas tank, kind of like (but not exactly like) raw fiberglass. It ran pretty well, and by the time it came along, I had developed a modicum of skill and was, not necessarily fast, but at least not the slowest kid on the block. This bike’s chief claim to fame was the time I sank it in a patch of quicksand and had to come back several hours later with a shovel and dig it up like a tulip bulb.

By this point I had had my great falling out with my former friend and his pack of bootlicking sycophants. The origins of this falling out need not detain us here, simply suffice it to say that I no longer rode with him or his cronies. They got matching YZ-250s and spent most of their time trying to impress girls, while I spent my time riding endless practice laps around one of two or three motocross tracks I had set up out in the desert. The tracks were tricky, and for good reason. They had very tight corners, abrupt jumps, off-camber stuff, sandy patches, anything I could find that I thought would improve me as a rider. Now and then they invaded my tracks, and invariably found them too tight and technical; they always ruined them by widening all the corners and avoiding the steep and in some cases gut-wrenching jumps. All the informal tracks they rode on trended invariably toward being flat jumpless ovals.

Then we moved out of the country and back to the city, and the Yamaha 175 went the way of the dodo. Once I was in college and was working, I had money, and elected to get into dirt bikes again after a hiatus of about a year. I developed a buying hair-trigger and bought the first bike I looked at, an elderly but not beaten-up Suzuki TM-250. At the time RMs had already come out and were considered race-winners, while the elderly TM was considered something of a joke. No, not something of a joke, just a joke. But I rode it, and I liked it, and I bought it.

I rode less often that before. Back in the country, I rode essentially every day. But now, living in the city and faced with having to lug the bike out to the desert, riding became a Saturday thing, and not every Saturday either. But to compensate for not riding every day, I rode harder. When we went out to ride on Saturdays, I went out with the serious of a knight suiting up for battle. This wasn’t a pleasant Saturday trail ride, this was work. And the TM just wasn’t up to it. Though it was significantly more powerful than my old Yamaha 175, it had Stone Age suspension and was almost lethal to ride at high speed. It was particularly prone to a savage head-shake, which at speed could be fairly disconcerting, to say the least.

I started to collect bikes. Another guy at work, Buzz, had a Penton 175 and I bought it from him cheap, mainly because it had serious transmission problems and wouldn’t shift. I tore it apart and split the cases, lost parts, broke screws, and generally muddled my way through a major rebuilding, and eventually got the thing to run and shift. And it was okay. It wasn’t any great shakes as a dirt bike, but it had a certain stylish élan that derived entirely from its brand name. In those days, KTM didn’t export dirt bikes to America. The main European imports to the US were Husqvarna from Sweden and Maico from Germany. But an American, John Penton, set up a company that specialized in importing KTM engines and assembling the rest of the motorcycles around them. The resulting Pentons were popular enduro machines (which, considering that John Penton was something of a force in enduro circles, should come as no surprise). My Penton was quirky and European, and I liked it – up to a point.

In talking to an associate at work, I found that he knew a guy who was selling a fairly new Suzuki RM-250. I went out to test-ride the thing and was immediately entranced. This machine was everything my old TM wasn’t. It was fast and powerful. It was nimble and responsive to control. It had first-rate suspension. It was, in fact, a bike that could win races.

It didn’t win any for me, but not for lack of trying. One weekend me and what I euphemistically called my “hearties” decided to try our hand at organized motocross. So we all went out as a group and raced in the 250 Beginner class at a local motocross track. I remember it being scary, thrilling, and bloody hard work. Halfway through the first moto I was just totally trashed, so exhausted I couldn’t stand up any more, and every time I faced that long downhill jump I was gripped by fear so thick and heavy I could taste it. I finished the moto in the sense that I crossed the finish line and was flagged off the track. But from halfway on, I had stopped racing and was simply struggling to survive. I don’t even remember where I placed. Certainly nowhere near the top. Some of us – myself included – raced the second moto, but none of us reported for duty in the third. I was just too tired.

So now I had three bikes, my RM, my TM, and my Penton. A fourth was soon to be added. My dad worked for the county and maintained landfills, and one day he went up to the New River landfill and found a shiny red Honda CR-125 in the trash. He dug it out and brought it home, and I was astonished.

It wasn’t just a factory-stock CR-125. Someone had spent money on it. A lot. Aftermarket FMF pipe and swing arm, fancy Fox gas shocks, gas forks, huge Mikuni carburetor, the works. The only problems with the bike were A) the boot had come off the carb, and B) the countershaft sprocket was missing. I went to Apache Honda West and bought a replacement countershaft sprocket, and the thing ran. Like all highly modified 125s, it produced a lot of power, but only in a very narrow range near maximum RPM. As long as you kept it on the pipe and altered speed by changing gears instead of closing the throttle, it went like a bat out of hell.

So I had my choice of bikes. If I felt retro, I’d ride the TM. If I wanted to be eclectic, I rode the Penton. If I was interested in serious riding, I took the RM. And there was always the CR-125 for play-time. I had a three-rail trailer, and often took three with me, switching from bike to bike as my whim dictated.

I got rid of the Penton. I don’t even remember where or how. The TM started to piss me off. I didn’t ride it often and the less I rode it, the worse it ran. It wasn’t a spark issue, or even a fuel issue; it just didn’t seem to be breathing. So I took it apart and discovered the case was full of some weird fluid that resembled phlegm. Oil residue? Water? Snot? I had no idea. And I had no idea where it had come from, though my private theory was that the Suzuki was having an allergic reaction to the Yamalube-R oil I used after Blendzall became unavailable in my area. I drained the fluid and it ran better, though it was never the same. It remained hard to start and never seemed to develop the same power. I eventually got rid of it too, and I have no memory of where it went.

My brother-in-law knew someone who was selling a big KTM 420 motocrosser, and we went out and rode it. This was a serious machine. It had suspension every bit as good as my Suzuki RM-250, but it had mountains of power. It was scary at times - the way it tried to peel one off under full throttle was simultaneously thrilling and horrifying. It went so fast that the first time I rode it the wind popped the visor off my helmet. It couldn’t be operated anywhere near top speed without goggles because the wind burned one’s eyes. And, having been sensitized by exposure to my old Penton, I found the KTM brand interesting, Amal carburetor and all. So I bought it, and not long thereafter, I liquidated my prized RM-250. (The Amal carburetor was great. How many times did I get a private laugh out of saying "You guys go on ahead and I'll catch up, I have to tickle my Amal.")

Thus began a long association with a particular KTM dealer. My KTM leaked quite a bit of oil from the shift lever and kickstart lever shaft seals, and I went to said dealer to acquire said seals. In the process of yakking (KTM dealers aren’t terribly busy in America) he mentioned that he “sponsored” a desert racing team. And having found out first-hand just how bloody fast my KTM 420 was, I conceived the notion of desert racing. His sponsorship amounted mainly to providing a stake truck and gas; after that, you were on your own. I ended up riding my KTM in a desert race that took the form of three 25-mile loops with a central pit area. My memories are mainly of dust and exhaustion. On the third loop I once hallucinated that a saguaro cactus was waving at me; my friend crashed when he thought he saw a burro and a Mexican bandit in the middle of the trail. (He rode a Honda XR-250, but the KTM dealer “sponsored” him as well. Sponsorship, at least for us, didn’t amount to much. The best part of sponsorship was having a couple of relatively fresh guys at the end to help heave the bike back up into the truck.)

This same KTM dealer invited me out to go ride some new KTMs from the factory. KTM’s theory was that if they took affluent single guys out and let them ride fancy new motorcycles, they’d end up selling a bunch of them. I went and rode, among other things, the newest 495 two-stroke and the 504 four-stroke, a machine that quickly earned the nickname “Katoom” in honor of its name (KTM) and its exhaust noise (loud, deep and booming). This was up near Riata Pass, now entirely claimed by subdivisions, but on that day, it was out in the middle of nowhere, on a crisp winter morning with just enough rain the day before to lay the dust. The 495 was explosively fast, much faster than my 420 and with better suspension to boot (it had KTM’s version of the Pro-Lever rear suspension, unlike my 420 which had a pair of conventional cantilevered gas shocks). The Katoom produced oodles of torque from idle on up and it was a gas to ride, especially since the powerband was so wide you only had to shift two or three times an hour. But this was before true lightweight four strokes had arrived, and the Katoom felt top-heavy and somewhat awkward, especially at low speeds or when leaned into tight corners. I could dive my 420 pretty hard with complete confidence, but diving the Katoom always left me with the sinking sensation that it was never going to straighten back up. I never felt comfortable sliding the Katoom either and always found myself over-revving the engine looking for a two-stroke peak that just wasn't there. The 495 wasn’t all that pleasant to ride either. It was, if anything, too fast. A quick twist on the grip and suddenly the front wheel is off the ground and Einsteinian blue-shifting caused me to misjudge corners. It threw up such a profound roost one had to actually be conscious of it and not accidentally frag bystanders.

But I didn’t buy. I’d bought a house and didn’t have that kind of spare cash laying around any more, so I soldiered on with my aging 420. It was still bloody fast, but it was no longer state of the art. This was evidenced when I took it and myself to the motocross track and raced in the Open Beginner class. There were only about four of us in Open Beginner, so they mixed us in with (I kid you not) the 80cc Expert class. I mainly remember being passed over and over by those freaking kids on their 80s. I had way more horsepower and could eat them alive in acceleration, but I lacked suspension and lacked courage (that horrible long downhill jump was still there, plus a new feature, the pedestrian overpass that scared the crap out of me every time). I entered two motos, finished the first one, and DNF’ed the second when I fouled a plug. Just in time too, because just like the first time, I was physically beaten. I didn’t bother starting the third, because I just didn’t have the strength.

I bought a second, identical KTM 420, but I never rode it. I imagined it would be a good parts bike for the first one, but my interests were starting to stray elsewhere. I had in the meantime discovered computers, and went into the intense period of nonstop programming that is usually referred to as “larva stage” in programming circles. I didn’t exactly stop riding, but I most definitely stopped racing. The KTM dealer went out of business so my easy entrée into desert racing was lost, and long days of doing nothing but sitting in front of the computer resulted in me lacking the endurance to race motocross.

I sold both KTMs and my trailer to a guy at work, and thus liquidated the last of my dirt bikes. It was sad, but it was time.

Every now and then I think about getting a dirt bike again. I'd like to try vintage motocross, or at least I think I'd like to try vintage motocross. If I could have any bike, it would be a Maico MC490 Mega Two, which means that my wife would collect life insurance in about a week. A less-lethal choice would be a Yamaha YZ360B. With that one, my wife would have to wait three weeks to collect my life insurance.

Disfigurement of Speech

One of my more annoying tendencies (among a great many, I suppose) is that I am rapidly fatigued to the point of screaming by mangled English, especially when people repeat mangled English in an attempt to be fashionable.

About ten years ago the word "coffer" was big on the local news. "County coffers are nearly empty..." the reporter says. Coffers were said to be overstuffed, empty, depleted, draining, filling, holding their own, and even in some cases absconded with. And every time some TV reporter said "coffer" I had a mental image of a pirate standing with one booted foot on a coffer full of looted Spanish doubloons and holding a matchlock pistol in each hand.

Another one that drives me bonkers is the word "hottie" when used to describe a MOTAS (Member of the Appropriate Sex) who possesses a high degree of physical beauty. My distaste for the word isn't based on any consideration of the feelings of the hottie thus described, though. Mainly the word reminds me of a time in my life when a certain guy (one hesitates to employ the term loser)used to come over to my house about once a week, get massively hammered on the cheapest booze he could find, whine about "them hotties" for a while, and then pass out with his head in the litter box. Not a part of my life I'm keen to remember very clearly.

But my current least favorite figure of speech is hone in, as in "Let’s hone in on that issue for a moment…” One does not hone in on anything. One can home in, and that’s really what they mean, but everyone says hone in and so everyone keeps saying it (I even saw it in a book written by an honest-to-gosh Ph.D!). To hone is to polish, strop or otherwise put a final finish on a metal object, usually the working edge of a tool or a cylinder bore in an engine. So you could hone an issue, but you can’t hone in on an issue. So I think for now I'll home in on the fact that honing in doesn't exist and can't happen.

And people say I am difficult and unapproachable!

I'm pretty adamant in my refusal to wear T-shirts with slogans on them, especially the cutesy sports/macho slogans like "If you can't run with the big dogs, stay on the porch." I don't mean to seem overly combative, but the big dogs can't run with the medium-size dogs - it's why people race greyhounds and whippets, not Great Danes. But leaving that entirely aside, what does the phrase "if you can't run with the big dogs, stay on the porch" really mean? It implies, of course, that the wearer of the shirt is one of the big dogs in question, though exactly what that means is open to question. Does it mean he drools, rolls in dust and compulsively urinates on the houseplants? And why would I want to run with such a thing? Where are they running to? Why does there seem to be such a moral stigma associated with staying on the porch? One could argue "if you don't run with the big dogs, you stand less chance of being splattered by a delivery truck", but every time you do, the big dogs make disparaging remarks about your package.

Yes, yes, I know that they’re referring not to real dogs, but to attitudes or mindsets. But what’s so special about big dogs that makes them uniquely qualified to be used as tokens of attitudes and mindsets? (I have a friend who argues that men make a fetish of the “big dog attitude” because dogs can lick their own testicles, and the scary thing is that I can’t see any particular flaw in her logic.) I don’t think there’s a big dog alive that could last twenty seconds against a big Bengal tiger or a polar bear, but you don’t see T-shirts that read Crush sea-lion skulls with the big polar bears, or stay on the ice floe. Or, Bring down Cape buffalo with the big lions, or stay around the carcass. Or, Gore foolhardy Spaniards in tight pants with the big bulls, or stay in the pasture. Or Burn two million pounds of propellant in three and a half minutes with the big space boosters, or stay on the launch pad. I’m sure you get the point.

The other day I was minding my own business when someone assaulted my sensibilities with a shirt whose slogan was “If you can’t drive with the big dogs, stay on the range.” This self-professed bon mot makes no sense at all on first inspection, and it’s only when you realize that the shirt is referring to golf that the pictures comes into focus. It helpfully provided a picture to help one grasp the meaning of the slogan, in this case showing an enormous bipedal dog with the build of Superman hitting a golf ball so hard it had exploded. Again, I don’t mean to seem anal-retentive, but dogs aren’t bipedal, dogs aren’t really known for their skill at golf, and I don’t think making the ball explode really helps your score very much. “What did you score, Ed?” “Oh, I shot a 8,342 because the balls kept exploding on me. I curse the day I was given super-human strength.”

When human history finally comes to a close and some cool dispassionate alien intelligence gets around to writing a one-volume history of the human race, there’s going to be a chapter called “Golf -- Loud Pants and Clubs, What’s the Deal?” I don’t mind golf as a game, mind you. It gets you outdoors, it lets you walk around on grass, and I suppose as leisure pursuits go, it’s not as dangerous as skydiving or as socially isolating as trying to beat Super Mario Brothers on your old Nintendo. My concerns aren’t about golf the game, but golf hysteria. What would compell someone to wear a shirt that suggested that he was a big dog capable of making golf balls explode?

Nearly everyone where I work plays golf, which fine with me. I’ve played golf myself, and if people find it a pleasant hobby, more power to them. But there are a few of them at work who cross the threshold, who become obnoxious golf geeks who think that everyone’s impressed with the fact that they play golf. They gather in clumps to practice their swings, writhing and swinging and mumbling things like get up there and sit right down and that’s a beauty. In the afternoons, they start to vocalize. “You gonna go stroke?” “Thinking about it. Might go hit a few balls, then have a margarita at the Pointe.” “That sounds like a good thing.” I’m always tempted to say things like I'm going to go home and do some complicated processing with my liver while I reflect upon the fact that playing golf doesn't make me like you.

The fact is, guys, I don’t care if you’re going golfing or not, or what trendy watering hole you intend to infest after you’re done playing golf. Your practice swings don’t impress me, your twiddling with golf tees doesn’t impress me, and your sudden nonspecific announcements about the state of your clubs don’t impress me. If you were to suddenly burst into flame, or transform yourself into Josef Stalin, or grow antlers, then I might be impressed, but your golf antics really don’t do much for me. Maybe I’d be less jaded if golf balls really did explode – if every golf ball had a 1% chance of exploding. I figure this would produce about 250 golf-related casualties per day in Phoenix alone, and might perk my interest just a bit.

You like golf? By all means, enjoy it in good health. But don’t expect me to be impressed. There’s a commercial I see occasionally on TV for Anthem, where you get to hear close-up the sounds of guys golfing: Swoosh. Get up there. That’s pretty. That’s pretty. And meantime they list places where these sounds might possibly be originating, like A) the Masters, B) Some Fussy And Very Exclusive Golf Course That Wouldn’t Accept You As A Member On A Dare, or C) Anthem. They missed option D), a lesser hell populated by narcissistic materialists in loud pants. But hey, as long as they can run with the big dogs, it must be okay, right? Woof.

I don’t think I’m a big dog. I don’t think I’m a dog at all, actually. If I had to pick a zoological classification for myself, I think I’d have to settle for a lemur, one of those lemurs with the enormously elongated index fingers and eyes the size of Swanson chicken pot pies. Scratch green bugs out of the tree bark with the big lemurs, or stay on the lower branches.

Yes!

What's a "Dimmu Borgir"?

I've always liked metal music, starting from the very earliest days when Black Sabbath first started to define what metal was. This strikes some people as odd. Once I was wearing a white belt (I don't remember why) and my sister exclaimed "You can't like metal if you wear a white belt!"

The mistake most people make is assuming that everyone who likes metal wears black, spikes their hair, and either mopes around in an unbreakable melancholy or aggressively strikes out against the world. One can just as easily be a professional who wears Norm Abrams-style flannel shirts and be a fan of metal. Let's not buy into the stereotype here, please.

I just like the way it sounds. The rhythms and sounds are what appeal to me, not some manufactured "metal worldview". Besides, the vocals of most of the metal I listen to are absolutely indecipherable without a lyric sheet, and sometimes not even then. Case in point: "Corporal Jigsore's Quandary" by Carcass. I have no idea what the guy is saying, and I don't care; I just like the way the song sounds. (And to be honest, when you do figure out the words, they are almost always silly anyway.)

One of my co-workers is a 90-pound woman from Singapore. I let her listen to the song "Sickening Art" by Dismember on my iPod, and she actually screamed when it started. So do I, but not in the same way.

Not surprisingly, there are dozens of metal genres these days, many of which I don't really care for. Here are some genres I don't much like:

Industrial (Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails)
Metalcore (Hatebreed)
Nu-Metal (Slipknot)
Euro Speed Metal (Yngwie Malmsteen)
Grindcore (pick one)
Goth Metal
Gothic Metal (not the same thing as Goth Metal at all)
Hair Metal (Poison, Whitesnake)
Pseudo-Metal (Quiet Riot)

Here are some metal genres I do like:

Melodic Death Metal (Dark Tranquility)
Sunnyside Death Metal (Carcass, Dismember, Entombed)
Viking Metal (Enslaved)
Norwegian Weird Black Metal (Burzum)*
Thrash (Metallica, Sepultura)
American Speed Metal (Racer X)
American Blackish-Thrashish Metal (Slayer)
Norwegian Not-So-Weird Black Metal (Cradle of Filth, Dimmu Borgir)
British Metal (Iron Maiden)
Doom Metal (Black Sabbath)
Doomdeath Metal (Fall of Empyrean)
Power Metal (Saxon, Manowar, Bolt Thrower)

So what is a Dimmu Borgir, other than a Norwegian symphonic black metal band that seems to be consciously trying to out-do Cradle of Filth? I ask you, Morton Kondrake!

*Some bands are tough to defend, even in academic terms. Burzum, for example, has a murder conviction on its discography, and most of Dismember's output is pretty unsettling if you listen to the words. So don't listen to the words!

2001: A Space Melancholy

I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey on TV a few nights ago, and as it always does, it got me to thinking. The more I thought, the more glum I became until in the end I had break out my Major Matt Mason toys for a while.*

I like the movie, but even I admit some of its flaws - glacial pace, an at-best casual attitude toward character development, an almost pornographic fascination with photographing the same spaceship model from twenty different angles, and its main flaw as far as my dad was concerned, sheer incomprehensibility if you haven't already read the book. (Dad came to call the genre "science friction" after trying to watch 2001 at a drive-in theater.)

But the movie isn't what made me melancholy. It's the fact that the future didn't turn out the way the movie suggested that it might that eats at me. The worldview of 2001 was all about rationality. Oh, sure, the hardware was cool, but mostly it was about cool, rational Progress with a capital P. There was a sense that a group of supremely rational people had worked out a plan and were calmly checking off bullet-points year by year. "Pan-Am shuttle, check. Space station, check. Moon base, check. Second Renaissance, check."

The resources and talents of the nation had been harnessed to achieve some great end, and one got the feeling that, if asked, the rational scientists and policymakers could produce charts and graphs that proved that the end in question was both great and achievable. Proved, mind you, because it was all about rationality and provability.

The elite stance today is to hoot at Big Science, especially Big Space Science. Some hoot at Big Space Science on the defensible grounds that Big Space Science is rather expensive and we might find better uses for the money down here on Earth. I happen to disagree with that thesis, but at least it is a reasonable proposition that one can have a reasonable debate about. But others hoot at Big Space Science in the 2001 mode because they have succumbed to consumerist cynicism.

2001 was about rationality, progress, and expending resources on a grand scale to achieve a grand vision. And how did that future turn out? Wars and terrorism. Rampant corporate corruption. An ever-widening gap between the rich and poor. Global warming. The death of courtesy and civility. The transformation of science in pop culture from something noble into a joke. Satellite TV with a 120 channels of crap. People who spend more time selecting their cell ringtone than they do selecting their President. Consumerism and narcissism and partisan bickering. American Idol. If I had known back in 1965 that people would hang plastic testicles on the trailer hitches of their pickup trucks in the 21st Century, I probably would have screamed in horror.

The future turned out to be a lot less cool than I hoped it would be. I'm neither stupid nor naive and I know the future couldn't have turned out as it was shown in 2001. But sometimes the sense of disappointment makes me glum.

*Major Matt Mason was a line of toys that came out in the mid-1960s that fit very neatly into the overall 2001 worldview. They were primitive action figures made out of some kind of rubber with internal wire armatures (I think) and Major Mason his cronies were equipped with no end of hardware - moon rovers, hoppers, tracked moon golf carts, I have no idea what all. Smell an old Major Matt Mason toy and the aroma you detect is the faint memory of what the future looked like to a six-year-old boy.