Time Warp

There's a guy on Style*Dash that I just can't get enough of - Jonathon Morgan. Here's a snippet of one of his columns; below it is the link to the whole article.

Porn star moustache: New trend alert?
Posted Dec 20th 2007 1:27PM by Jonathon Morgan
Filed under: Men, Celebrity Style

Starting last spring, I noticed the hipster guys around town were shaping their facial fuzz like...well...porn stars. It was a rough time for the fashion-forward set -- we'd been stuck in a seemingly endless 80s revival, and the obsessively stylish were trying anything to break out of the mold. I figured it was a brief, ill-advised foray into alternative grooming that'd quickly be forgotten.Until today. Word on the street is Pete Wentz, bassist for Fall Out Boy and boyfriend to Ashlee Simpson is sporting an adult movie star motif above his upper lip. Gross!

http://www.styledash.com/2007/12/20/porn-star-moustache-new-trend-alert/

Reading this kind of breathless hokum is kind of like picking scabs off my arms - it's uncomfortable and unpleasant, but somehow I can't stop. There's also a curiosity angle: how many times in a row can this guy make me actually snort and shake my head with disbelief? So far, all of them.

I guess it goes without saying that I'm not a "hipster" or a member of the "fashion-forward set", let alone "obsessively stylish".

But who really decided that this sort of moustache should be known as the "porn star moustache?" In fact, it was in Jonathon's column that I first heard it described as such, so what sort of Freudian admission is he really making here? The first time I saw it was on my grampa's cowboy associates back in the 1960s, and the most memorable time I saw it was on the face of a six-foot-five Rhodesian commando with arms like banded steel. In fact, I've always called it a "cowboy moustache", which suggests to me that the only cowboy Jonathon sees is the one in old Village People videos.

But just to slake my twisted curiosity, am I to understand that last spring was a rough time to be a fashion-forward type but now, apparently, it is not? I'm curious what changed in the interim. The rediscovery of chaps, perhaps?

Iowa

You know what? If Iowa gets together and "caucuses" Mike Huckabee into an early lead, I say the rest of us should declare him President of Iowa and make him their problem in perpetuity.

S-300 Missiles

I was sitting in the car the other day shoving a cheeseburger down my well-muscled throat and listening to the news when someone (I want to say it was the BBC) announced that the Russians had agreed to sell some unspecified number of Russian-made S-300 surface to air missile systems to Iran. This, the BBC said, would fundamentally alter the balance of power and cause all of us in the west to suffer from nasal hair. Later the story was retracted, but who knows if it's really true or not.

So I looked up the S-300 to get an idea of what it's all about. What it amounts to is a Russian version of the Patriot - the individual missile round looks a bit like a Patriot, and the whole missile battery has a Patriot-like feel. Not that the Russians necessarily pirated the Patriot hardware, but I suppose it's possible. Did we leave Patriots lying around somewhere were the KGB could examine them?

The system is better known to the West as the SA-10 "Grumble", once again pointing out the difference between what NATO calls Russian weapons and what the Russians call Russian weapons. The Soviets deployed a largish number of them in the late 1980s in what looks like a terminal defense of Moscow against ALCMs, and was later sold to China and India, where the Chinese use it for the same basic anti-ALCM terminal defense business around Beijing and the Indians, apparently, are more interested in the SA-10's THAAD-like ability to intercept ballistic missiles (not that the SA-10 comes anywhere near the performance of THAAD, but you get the point).

The missile system is awash in what amounts to advertising copy. Track-while-scan, ability to engage multiple targets simultaneously, a single Flap Lid fire control radar able to provide solutions to umpteen mobile launchers, missiles containerized as discrete rounds in tubes that look suspiciously like drainage culverts... Is all of the copy true? Probably, but just casting a quick glance over the specificiations, I see two things.

The first is that the warhead is estimated at between 70 and 100 kilograms for an earlier version and as much as 145 kilograms for a later verison, probably the same "ball bearing" frag/HE warhead type. Why such a big warhead? Normally missile engineers compensate for poor missile accuracy by putting bigger warheads on the missile. This is why missiles that are truly inaccurate are usually nuclear-armed. It doesn't matter how badly you miss when you've got a nuke on board. But gee whiz, 145 kilograms of frag/HE? A PAC-3 Patriot is only about 70 kilograms. Why does the SA-10 have a warhead twice as big? Because it's twice as inaccurate? Just a thought.

The second is that the SA-10 uses the same "two missiles in one engagement" technique common to Soviet doctrine since the 1960s. Does this mean the missile's Ph is that poor that they need to expend two rounds on each non-maneuvering ALCM, or is this just an old Soviet habit that they haven't quite gotten rid of yet?

The bottom line is that this system is reasonably impressive (an engagement envelope from about 50 feet to 100,000 feet is pretty good) but it's been around since the 1980s, its large warhead and ripple-fire requirement make me doubt its accuracy, and I rather doubt we've forgotten how to jam the search, designation and fire control radars in question.

I say, no destabilization threat; the Russians are probably just looking to sell some older stuff cluttering up their warehouses.

Indie Jones

It seems like every damn day I have to listen to Bob Mondello (however you spell his name) reviewing some "indie" music on NPR. Here's some horrible simplistic plinkity-plink of someone playing a toy piano, and here's some breathy overproduced vocals by a woman who claims to "enyoy" it, and then right on cue there's Bob Mondello. I'm paraphrasing him, of course, but what he seems to say with every review is "Though this sounds like simple, annoying crap, the mere fact that it's indie makes me gush like a Texas oil well about its wonderfulosity." I can't offhand think of a single music group that he's reviewed that left anything more than a lukewarm "well, that didn't suck too badly" impression on me. Most of the time I sink to the level of shouting at the radio "take that horrible music off before I listen to a CD!" Nasal, whiny post-grunge; nasal, whiny post-Bob Dylan; breathy ethereality accompanied by toy pianos; it's disgusting. But because it's indie, it's somehow automatically good - the assertion being, I suppose, that individuals don't make terrible music, big record labels make terrible music.

Not that big record labels don't end up producing a lot of terrible music. I think we can all agree (or at least I think I can all agree) that modern "power pop" is a product of major record labels and that it's an unrelieved desolation of crap. But to argue that only big record labels produce crap is to take the point too far. Witness the endless restless hordes of would-be Bob Dylans out there in Indie-land who warble and strum their guitars and whine about dad-gummed soulful they are.

You'd think extreme metal would be right up Mondello's alley, it being largely free of the shackles of major music labels and, for that matter, largely free of commercial success period. But I'm sure he thinks he's too good for metal. It doesn't "deconstruct" musical forms into "head-spinning" new forms or whatever. Everyone's too good for metal, and that's fine. I don't feel the need to apologize for what I like. I just wish I didn't have to listen to what Mondello and everyone else likes every day on the radio. Hey, how about talking about something I like for a change??

But what can one expect of me? I'd rather drive toothpicks into my gums than listen to Bob Dylan or go to a Dashboard Confessional concert, and despite thirty years of trying, the music industry has yet to make a jazz fan out of me (is it really just me? I mean, am I the only person on the planet who finds jazz music painful and grating?).

(And yes, if you must know, I'm crabby tonight.)

Will Smith and Adolf Hitler

I don't often step up to the plate to defend celebrities. Most of the time that's because I think celebrities are wrong, or at least not deserving of my attention. Besides, they pay people to defend them on a professional basis, and who am I to cut into some guy's rice bowl?

But this thing with Will Smith and his comments about Adolf Hitler, yeah, I'll stand with him. I read what Will Smith said, and he's right. Here's what he said:

http://news.aol.com/entertainment/movies/movie-news-story/ar/_a/smiths-hitler-comment-sparks-anger/20071223190709990001

In case the link goes dead, here's the paragraph in question:

In a story published Saturday in the Daily Record, Smith was quoted saying: "Even Hitler didn't wake up going, 'let me do the most evil thing I can do today.' I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was 'good.'"
[The newspaper then went on to essentially accuse Will Smith of at the very least tolerating Hitler by adding "Remarkably, Will believes everyone is basically good."]

Now, please to show me where in that statement Will Smith made an error. Hitler did think he was doing the right thing. The fact that the "right thing" in this case was monumentally evil and required a World War and the sacrifice of millions of battlefield casualties, not to mention the brutal slaughter of millions of civilians, to curtail doesn't change for an instant the fact that Hitler thought he was doing the right thing. And I don't see in that statement the slighest whiff of the notion that Will Smith admired, defended or even tolerated Adolf Hitler.

It's too bad I don't have a subscription to the Daily Record, because I'd love to cancel it on the basis of poor editorial standards.

Now, just one more note to the bloggers and commentators out there. It's Adolf Hitler, not Adolph Hitler. One's a notorious evil dictator; the other is a meat tenderizer.

Gloomyguses

Today we made the rounds of the neighborhood to drop off jars of hot cocoa mix, cookies and Christmas cards, and about half of the neighbors acted as though they were right on the verge of playing the most intensely bad-assed Scrabble words in the history of civilization and we were merely getting in the way of their triumph. I didn't expect them to tumble from their houses and do handstands and cartwheels out of sheer joy just because we had shown up on their doorsteps. But I didn't think so many of them would have acted quite so pained about the whole thing either.

One guy in particular wouldn't even accept the gift. There's common decency for you. Oh, I'm sure he'd like to cite "difficult circumstances" as the reason for his assholititis, but I remember spending the summer being unemployed and recovering from a heart attack and coping with open heart surgery and paying for medical insurance out of my own pocket, all of which add up to pretty goddamned difficult circumstances, and I don't remember being nasty to anyone. Not on purpose, anyway. I'm sure I was depressed a lot, but not nasty.

I don't know. I just found the outing kind of disappointing. Last year was better. I guess we know which houses not to visit next year.

Now That's Inappropriate

I have the odd habit of buying things for myself when I'm out buying things for other people. Not big things, mind you, but I come home with, say, ten items, the odds are good that one or two of them will be for me.

This week I saw a 20-episode DVD of Metalocalypse at Target, and being a fan of metal generally, I bought it.

My goodness.

It's gross, violent, coarse, disturbing, bloody, disgusting and filthy. It is in some places very disturbing, like the electric wheelchair and the screenful of KILL_ME messages. That was genuinely horrific, not just schoolboy horrific like the chain-reaction puking. The show has no redeeming value whatsoever. But holy cow is it ever funny, often in extremely disturbing ways. The music is pretty good too. I especially liked "Sewn Back Together Wrong". There's a part of me that doesn't think I should find material like that funny - but how can I not?

Now, if you'll pardon me, I'm off to Burzum's for the Filosofem Special. Snort.

I do wish, however, that the show had less of William Murderface, who annoys me, and more of Toki and Skwisgaar, who amuse me. And I do wish to formally lodge a protest that at least half of the time, the vocals sound more like metalcore or even nu-metal than death metal.

Master Control

"This is Master Control, awaiting instructions."

That line comes from the classic science fiction masterpiece This Island Earth, and is heard just as Exeter, Brac and the lads are about to reach Metaluna in a spaceship that bears a striking resemblance to my hat, especially since it got rained on and flattened out like some kind of kopf-flounder.

Wait a second. Why is Master Control awaiting instructions? Wouldn't Master Control be the source of instructions? That's always bothered me - it seems to represent a complete failure of the Metalunan C3I system (command, control, communications and intelligence). It would be like, say, Napoleon Bonaparte on the eve of some great battle, say, Austerlitz, sending out a strangely-worded order that read "This is Napoleon, awaiting instructions." Non! You are the instructions, cherie!

But it does sort of make me wonder how many Big Damn Deals in Human History have happened because of, or perhaps in spite of, the human frailties of the Honchos. It is said, for example, that Napoleon was suffering from piles at Waterloo and wasn't his usual energetic self. Julius Caesar was said to be epileptic, as was apparently Alexander the Great (I feel bad for his cousin, Alexander the Quite Commonplace). Saladin supposedly had boils in his groin at Acre, and I require no confirmation or further explanation of any sort on that subject. Ulysses S. Grant's worst defeat, Cold Harbor, is occasionally attributed to the fact that Grant was said to be down with a migraine during the battle and had handed operational control over to Meade, and allegation that I imagine makes the Meade supporters gnash their teeth with outrage.

"This is Saladin, with boils in my groin, awaiting instructions."

Karelian Metal

I was searching Google for a suitable avatar image (which is a sorry tale unto itself). As always happens when I'm presented with a search engine, I started searching for odd things - in this case, images of underpants, cat vomit, Benjamin Disraeli, Ensign Pulver, uranium ("oh, so that's what lethal radiation looks like!")... Soon enough I got around to searching for images of Insomnium, which it turns out abound on the Internet, and one of them was from an apparently German publicity poster that showed the band in a suitable Dethklokian pose with the words (translated out of German) "Karelian Metal" hanging in mid-air over them like a bad omen.

So it's come to that, has it? Karelian metal. Soon we'll have "Western Karelian metal" and "South-Central Karelian metal" and "Occupied karelian metal" (the Russians still hold a goodly chunk of Karelia, but when asked about it, they shrug and say nothing). Or "Armpit of Karelia Karelian metal". To extend the idea a bit, we could have a "Central Arizona metal", and an "Unincorporated Maricopa County metal" and a "annexed by Surprise but not yet given city services metal " or a "fixing to be annexed in a bold end run from the south by Buckeye metal".

Mind you, there is already a precedent for gratuitous invention of labels in metal music. I remember the first time I heard of "Blackened Death Metal" I thought it was something that people pan-fried in New Orleans. Or "Symphonic Black Metal", which sounds like an oxymoron at first and later, when you actually hear the music, still sounds like an oxymoron. So "Karelian metal" isn't the cutting edge of some new fad; it merely represents the latest manifestation of metal's tendency to compartmentalize itself with neat Teutonic labels.

And why Karelia? Are the lads from Insomnium Karelian? Or do the Finns still harbor a deep longing for Karelia? I suspect that, much like the Old West, the lure of Karelia is more symbolic than practical. But a symbolic longing can be even more potent than an actual practical desire - you can buy off someone with merely practical interests, but once you get that hazy emotional heimat-longing stuff going on, things get more complicated and before you know it, you're making albums of highly evolved, most excellent atmospheric metal and calling it Karelian metal. And I wish them good health in so doing.

In Honor of Baseball

In honor of Major League Baseball, the furor over the Mitchell Report, and the amusing naivete of sports fans who honestly believed that relatively few professional athletes would make use of performance (and thus career) enhancing substances, I've decided to blog on something other than baseball.

In other words, I don't care. How many of you know a guy who wears pants that are really too small for him? By the use of cooking oil and comealongs and belts made out of Kevlar, he manages to get the pants hitched up and he says "Yep, I wear the same pants size now as I did in high school." Yeah, except your gut is hanging over so far you can't see your belt buckle any more. That's the position baseball is in - for years "de commish" has been insisting that MLB wears the same pants size it did in high school, but any random observer can see the steroid and HGH gut hanging out...

Enough baseball.

Lately I've have a lot of fun on a website dedicated to board gaming called - logically enough - www.boardgamegeek.com. I even added a gadget (or is it a widget?) that displays some games from BGG (as we snooty insiders refer to it!) on my blog. Now I just need to start playing again! It's one thing to own 200+ games, and quite another to know how to play them.

Zounds, me hearties!

I realize that in the larger scheme of things, this particular blog entry is going to seem awfully pedestrian, but cut me some slack, I had a long day at work, it was cold and rainy, and I've decided to celebrate even the most minor of successes.

But I won an eBay auction today. It was my first eBay win, and I feel all excited about it, almost as though it actually means something. It might be different if I'd won an auction for something useful, like an original copy of the Constitution, or a liver and a bottle of Chianti, or Harry Truman's shoehorn, or a beer with Kurt Russell. All I won was a reissue of an old game that was first published in the 1980s. Eight bucks. That's the extent of my sweeping victory. An eight-buck game.

But you have to start somewhere. I'm one of those people that sees something interesting and pokes in a minor bid, maybe two or three dollars over the existing bid, and am immediately outbid by the other guy. So I say "Well, geez, if you want it so bad, take it then!" It's almost a personal affront - one almost wishes the system would let you pretend to be the high bidder for five or ten seconds before crushing your soul. But this time, I was the only one that bid, so barring a terrible nuclear accident, I was pretty much assured of winning.

Now, the question arises, what do I propose to do with my eight-dollar game?

Space - The Final Frontier

I think I noticed this a long time ago but simply pretended that it wasn't happening, but today I was watching TV shows on the DIY channel - "Watch as our unnaturally perky host replaces a toilet!" - and it struck me that nobody says "room" any more. Everything's a "space". What a lovely space, this a large space, I need a relaxation space, I painted this space white.

Not that it really matters. Compared to the issues that really gnaw at me, like profligate consumption of limited fossil fuel resources with nothing coming along to replace them, or an Administration that seemed bound and determined to invent a reason to go to war with Iran no matter what anyone or anything says otherwise, the overuse of the word space on TV shows that are probably secretly underwritten by Home Depot and Lowe's is really pretty minor.

But it still sounds weird. It makes me wonder what barbecue conversations will sound like in a few years.

"Say, Richard, just how big is this house?"

"Oh, it's four thousand square feet, five bedspaces."

"Cool. Say, Marge wants to know where the bathspace is."

"Ah, you go past the foodspace, and down the narrowspace, and there's the bathspace. Say, who's got gutspace for more burgers, there are more coming off the grill!"

PS: Replacing a toilet never makes me perky. So what am I doing wrong?

Interview with a Candidate

This is what all the interviews with political candidates sound like to me these days.

Hello, and tell us a bit about yourself.

I'm a Christian in a Christian nation and my deep faith informs everything I do.

That's nice. Now, what you do think about health care reform?

I'm a Christian in a Christian nation and my deep faith informs everything I do.

Um, so do you favor some sort of single-payer system, or something more market-oriented?

I'm a Christian in a Christian nation and my deep faith informs everything I do.

Well, let's move on. What about the future of nuclear energy?

I'm a Christian in a Christian nation and my deep faith informs everything I do.

The Bible doesn't really talk about nuclear energy, so what do you think? Do you see it is as a clean carbon-free alternative to fossil fuels, or as an unacceptable accident risk?

I'm a Christian in a Christian nation and my deep faith informs everything I do.

Please, sir, at least try to answer the question. If you were President, would you support or oppose nuclear energy?

I'm a Christian in a Christian nation and my deep faith informs everything I do.

Sir! Do you, or do you not, favor building more nuclear power plants???

I'm a Christian in a Christian nation and my deep faith informs everything I do.


I remember a time when one's religion was a private matter and it wasn't anyone's damn business where one went to church, or if one went to church. Now one's religion is apparently the only thing that matters in elections. Some part of the electorate apparently cares about nothing other than a candidate's confessional habits. Positions on things like energy policy, globalization, the slow nationalist drift in Russian politics, health care reform, war and peace in the Middle East, these things don't matter any more. All that matters is whether a candidate appears to be sufficiently religious to suit the evangelicals, and where they come down on the cultural wars beloved by the evangelicals. We could for all they know be destroying America with a distastrous combination of faulty health care policy, misguided globalization, and steady erosion of the Constitution, but none of that matters - they only care if Spongebob Squarepants is gay or not, and they force politicians to dance to that tune in order to be elected. Well, at least Republican politicians.

I think if I were a mainstream old-line Republican, I'd be pretty unhappy with what's become of my party - once your super-religious party faithful start deciding what can and cannot be taught in school on religious grounds, you're on the road to the Talibanization of America, and does anyone really want that? (Well, sure, some people want that - but everyone else hopes that they're just a tiny but overly vocal minority.)

Not that Democratic candidates are any better. They don't usually have to hew quite so closely to the evangelical line, but that just leaves them with plenty of spare time to do really stupid and annoying things.

Hypocrites!

I was driving home today. Well, let me rephrase that, I was rolling slowly home in the rain, and was forced to listen to yet another in the endless series of "Random Voter Explains Proposed Vote" interviews. It happened to be a woman, and she said "Well, if a woman runs for President, I'd have to vote for her; I couldn't possibly vote for a white male." Substitute ethnic label of your choice for "white" and gender of your choice for "male" and see if it sounds like what Ms. Feminist thought it was, cheeky snark, or what it really is, blatant racism.

Not that I'm demanding an apology. I frankly couldn't care less what she actually thinks or says about white males. I'm just amused to note that hypocrisy is universal.

Iowa Blockages

Why do Iowa and New Hampshire always get to pick the next President? And why do I have to listen to coffee shop conversations with Iowa caucus members and New Hampshire primary voters on the radio every damn morning?? Can't we please let some other state pick the President?

Not that I want Arizona to be that state. Frankly, the less time those yokels spend in Arizona, the happier I am. But why shouldn't, say, Nevada pick the President? Or Hawaii? Or - and here's a thought - a state with a large population and a large economy, something that neither New Hampshire nor Iowa have? A state like, oh, I don't know, California, or Texas, or New York? What's New Hampshire going to do if we let Texas pick the President, cut off our supply of maple syrup?

I'm told that New Hampshire has a law on its books requiring it to hold its primary before any other state. So what's to prevent, say, Idaho, from passing the same law? What happens then? New Hampshire and Idaho take turns moving their primaries up until we're voting for the 2012 primary at 9 AM today and the 2016 primary at 10 AM? If nothing else, it would spare me from having to mute a bunch of politicians giving dubious speeches on TV, and that would be a Godsend.

Despair at Lincoln-Mercury

I'm afraid my local Lincoln-Mercury dealer is going to have to hit the anti-depressants again this year because, once again, I'm not buying anyone I know a Lincoln Marinator or whatever that thing is. Even if I had the money I don't think I'd buy anyone a Lincoln Marinator. I think if I were in a position to hand out cars for Christmas, they'd be Mini-Coopers. Bright red, blue or green ones.

Actually, if I had the money, I'd probably give out MAZ-537 heavy trucks for Christmas. Have a look: http://www.military-today.com/trucks/maz_537.htm I could see my friend Barbara in one of these, I think.

I hate the music the Lincoln people use on their "spend a bazillion bucks at Christmas" commercials, by the way. It's swingy poppy Christmas music, the kind of thing that Mr. I'm Going To Be CEO In Five Years rocks out to when nobody's watching. Well, at least it isn't the Black-Eyed Peas...

More Gazelle

I still can't figure out how the thumb-pressure heart monitor works. Fortunately, I don't have to - I have a perfectly acceptable Polar P6 monitor that I can use. But I'm vaguely bugged by the Gazelle's strange heart rate monitor because it's the only part of the machine that doesn't work well. I've used it for a few days now, and it remains rock-solid and almost completely dead silent - the only noise I hear is a very faint swishing sound from the shock absorbers/power rods. And exercise-wise, it produces the desired effect - heavy breathing and sweating and thumping heart rates, oh my! - with no impact on my knees or ankles. So I wish I could figure out the heart rate monitor thing so I could give it a perfect score...

But for now, it remains slightly imperfect.

RPGs

One of my stranger quirks is that no old hobby of mine ever really dies. It just becomes quiescent and waits, like Cthulhu, for the stars to come back into the correct alignment so it can awaken and do I don't know what all.

A week or so ago I was looking around on old backups of my computer files, looking for an essay I'd written on one subject or another (look long enough and you'll find that I've written something on just about everything, just not particularly well). I never did find the essay and instead found a strange opus I'd written that was partly a history of wargaming, partly a review of a lot of wargames, and partly a strange rumination on the subject of RPGs - Role Playing Games.

And reading it rekinkled my interest in the old RPGs I used to play, and soon I found myself out in the garage grubbing around in plastic storage bins looking for my old RPGs.

And I found them too. Or most of them, anyway.

I enjoyed playing a number of different RPGs, but in general I tended to concentrate on four of them.

The first was, of course, Dungeons and Dragons, which I started playing in 1975 long before it was the least bit cool. Over the years I accumulated quite a lot of D&D stuff, but I ended up losing it all in what amounts to a custody dispute. I was involved with a girl who was herself a fairly intense D&D geek, and when we broke up, she somehow ended up with possession of the vast majority of my D&D stuff, including my Chainmail rules, my Arduin Grimoire, and my orginal "tan booklet" D&D rules. But ah, there's always that memory of her and the AD&D Monster Manual...

Then there was Traveler, which is sort of a science-fiction equivalent of D&D, though it drives both sets of players nuts when I say that. I had great difficulty convincing any of my rowdy D&D posse to play Traveler. Okay, I never convinced any of my rowdy D&D posse to play Traveler. But oh my did I ever love tinkering with that game. If I had an hour to kill, I'd go ahead and design a few planets on my ever-multiplying subsector maps, and I spent about a year trying to design a workable starship combat system. It ended up looking a bit like Delta Vee, which was unfortunate, but at least it didn't end up looking a bit like High Guard, which would have been tragic. Since there is something fundamentally pathetic about playing a role-playing game solitaire, I tended to do a lot of design work rather than actually play. I still have all my old Traveler stuff, including Mega-Traveler (blech) and Traveler: The New Era (double blech).

I was a big fan of Dragonquest, though again I tended to do more design and character generation work than actual playing. (Actually, after the D&D scene largely folded, most of my role-playing gaming was when my brother and I played dozens of fights in Melee just because it was such a great game.) But I always liked the structure and feeling of Dragonquest, and since I didn't lose my DQ components in a custody fight, I have hopes of someday being able to actually play it.

And perhaps my favorite was Boot Hill, which is a role-playing game in the Old West. The game focuses almost exclusively on the mechanics of shootouts, akin to but somewhat less complicated than Gunslinger, and most of the real role-playing stuff had to be added by the players. Or player, in my case. The only time I ever got anyone interested in playing Boot Hill was one summer when we decided to have a big battle in the town on the reverse side of the map. The big battle started, I emerged from a doorway and started to cross the street, I took a lead pill in the hat from a rifleman on a rooftop, and that was that. Damn.

A partial list of RPGs in my possession includes Tunnels & Trolls, The Morrow Project, Twilight 2000, ShadowRun, The Klingons, Traveler, Dragonquest, Boot Hill and Gunslinger. And over the years, I've owned but somehow lost Dungeons & Dragons, Gamma World, Arduin, The Fantasy Trip, Car Wars (not technically an RPG, but close), Gladiator, 2300 AD, and Traveler-GURPS. I'm not sure if my point is that I'm a geek or not.

Mein Gazelle!

I decided to order a Gazelle Power Plus Glider (I'm not great with product names, but I think that's right). I graduated from rehab and had to do something to remain active during the week. It's too dark when I get home to ride my bike or walk the dogs, so... Actually, truth be told, I was going to buy a treadmill but was shocked back to reality by treadmill prices, so what attracted me to the Gazelle was its low cost.

Now, there's low, and then there's low. My mom and sister in law both have similar machines, but they're much lighter and probably cheaper, though I can't prove that. But since I weigh as much as my mom and sister in law put together, I was afraid I'd mangle one of the lightweight machines, so I went to Fitnessquest and found a beefier alternative.

http://www.fitnessquest.com/scripts/cgiip.exe/WService=fq/itemdetl.html?item=4-GPP422&src=FQ1474%20

It finally arrived yesterday. I was out on the tractor pulling a berm in the "west forty" and never saw the truck; the first inkling I had that it had arrived was when I walked into the garage and saw a sadly abused box lying on the floor. Fitnessquest seems completely mum on shipping method and I never saw the truck, so for all I know it was delivered by a team of storks.

But whoever delivered it put it in the garage instead of dumping it out on the rain, so I thank them for that, whoever (or whatever) they are.

The box was rough. It looked like something the Marines might have used to ship an amphibious Sherman tank to Okinawa in 1945, or maybe Mike Tyson and the box had gone twelve rounds during his brief stay in Tent City. But the good news was that once the sadly abused cardboard was removed, the machine proved to be undamaged and complete.

It was fairly easy to assemble. I'm not a fan of the stamped steel wrenches provided in the box, but they work well enough for Gazelle assembly purposes. But otherwise, the machine seemed sturdy and robust. The welds looked good - I had to subject them to detailed scrutiny because some of them looked too good, like they might have smeared a little Bondo on them, but no, I think they're just decent welds done by someone who welds professionally. (Oh, what do I know, though the thing was made in China, it was probably machine-welded.)

I didn't have to remove any burrs, ream out any holes, clean out any threaded lugs or anything. Assembly was straightforward and not complicated by crappy workmanship. So other than the uncertainty in how it actually arrived, I was pleased with the delivery and assembly process. Now it was time to use it.

It didn't squeak, nor did it want to creep across the floor. I couldn't feel that the arms were bending under my not inconsiderable load, and throughout my first (and so far only) workout, its moving parts moved without squeaking, complaining or binding. It has delivered what its advertising promised, at least so far.

And it's HARD. I tried the zero-resistance settling and found it a little unnerving. My first fear was that I was going to over-do the splits and suffer catastrophic damage to a testicle; my second fear was that somehow I'd get both legs going in the same direction as the same time and suffer catastrophic damage to the back of my head. So I moved the "power rods" (or whatever they're called) to the first resistance setting. They quell the nervous looseness of the machine and give me greater confidence as I stand on it, but Level 2 is a major jump up in effort from Level 1. After a relatively brief while I could definitely sense that I was being subjected to a workout - though I wasn't breathing all that heavily, my heart rate was well up, my abdominal muscles were complaining, and my triceps in particular were burning heavily.

I may not be ready, physically, for Level 2. But I'm not sure I'm ready, psychologically, for Level 1, regardless of what the super-fit but rather ominous Sharon Money Twombley says on the accompanying DVD. We'll have to experiment and see.

But on the whole, I'm pleased. The machine is as advertised, it feels sturdy and robust, and it goes through its range of motion without any kind of complaint. If I have any complaint with the machine at all, it is that the thumb-press heart rate monitor takes a while to come up with a reading, and even then it seems to jump around a lot. It works better if I use my index finger.

"You're From The Sixties!"

There's a scene in the movie Field of Dreams that I just love. It's where Kevin Kostner invades James Earl Jones's house and belabors him until finally James Earl Jones beams, says "You're from the Sixties!" and starts to fog him with bug spray from a Flit gun. I think that scene is just pure genius, if only because I also have to occasionally fog emanations from the Sixties with a Flit gun.

The Sixties, I'm sad to say, died and got dumped in the dry wash behind my house. Every so often coyotes and other scavengers perturb the moldering carcass of the Sixties, and every time, great clouds of Sixties Insects rise up, fluttering and flapping and buzzing in clouds around my ears and forcing me to reach for my Flit gun.

There are, for example, the Dylan Flies that whine around my ears in flat, nasal tones and say "Man, Dylan totally spoke for the dreams and aspirations of an entire generation, man!" And there I am with my Flit gun, psht-psht-psht, drying to drive them away. Every now and then one gets the King Dylan Flies, which announce weird ideas like having Cate Blanchett star as Dylan in a movie about Dylan starring five other people as Dylan. Psht-psht-psht.

Then there are the Woodstock beetles, big green-tinted things that buzz around in wild loops and suffer from bad navigation, ricocheting off porch lights and bouncing off foreheads and saying things like "Man, Woodstock totally spoke for the dreams and aspirations of an entire generation, man! And I should know, man, 'cuz I was there!" Let's see. You were seven years old and you spent that summer on your uncle's farm outside Needles, California, but you went to Woodstock. Righteous.

But my least favorite Sixties Insects are the Alice Bugs that suddenly appear in your hair and crawl up and down your arms and buzzing out with their hind legs the message "Man, Alice's Restaurant totally spoke for the dreams and aspirations of an entire generation, man, and no Thanksgiving is complete without listening to it on FM radio at least twice, man." They say you can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant. Can I get this tediously long novelty song off the air, please? Thank you. The only thing good I can say about it is that it must certainly make Jim Stafford feel better about his work.

And now we've got the Dennis Hopper Sapsucker who is here to tell us, I guess, that people who think they were hippies in the Sixties still have their dreams, man. Along with their anuses, no doubt, and it's anyone's guess which are less savory. Aging Hipster Couple has a dream to "build an eco-friendly house in the desert." You want to build an eco-friendly house in the desert? Go build it in British Columbia and leave the desert alone because the desert never recovers. But how sad and bourgeoise is that? Mr. Hipster had dreams of peace'n'love in the Sixties, but now his dream is to build a house in the desert. That's just totally sad.

Psht-psht-psht.

Mayhem

Lately my steady diet of death metal has begun to pale somewhat. Not even the old chestnuts like "Corporeal Jigsore Quandary" (not "Corporal") or "Incarnated Solvent Abuse" seem to get the job done. You wouldn't think something as energetic and brutal as Corporeal Jigsore Quandary would ever trigger ennui, but by gum, it did. And let's not even talk about my substantial collection of melodic death metal. If Morbid Angel and Carcass aint cutting it, what chance does, say, At The Gates or In Flames have?

But the other day my iPod shuffled up out of its depths the old Darkthrone "Transilvanian Hunger" followed immediately by that Carpathian Forest deal whose name I can never remember but which involves a lot of crying and shouting and someone whispering something I can never make out but which nevertheless sounds exceedingly evil and ominous (I think it's "Black Shining Leather").

Black metal, in other words, and it was just what I needed, at least for this week. Next week I'll probably think differently, but this week, it's the black metal playlist end-to-end (consisting chiefly of Carpathian Forest, Darkthrone, Burzum, Satyricon, Enslaved and Ulver - I own but so far haven't developed much of a taste for Emperor or its descendants, Dimmu Borgir and Cradle of Filth). Owning albums like Nemesis Divina, Filosofem, Bergtatt and Transilvanian Hunger gives one a pretty good claim to having benchmarked black metal, but it struck me that there was one classic album I'd never bought - Mayhem's De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. So I bought it, and I like it musically even though the vocals still make me chuckle. They're as goofily over the top in the black metal style as, say, Morbid Angel's are in the death metal style (but having said that, I still prefer them to that guy in Carpathian Forest - he sounds so much like he has his testicles snarled in a sausage grinder he makes me wince and cringe).

But I like Mayhem's riffitude, though "riff" isn't a word normally associated with black metal. It's a good compromise between various styles. The sound isn't as minimalistic as Darkthrone, but it's not as lush and overdone as Dimmu Borgir. It's fast in the same way that Darkthrone is fast, but it doesn't sound so thoroughly tremolo-picked and hashed-up; sometimes it reminds me strongly of Carpathian Forest (though without that weird galloping bass) or even Burzum, though not nearly as meditative (or as narcoleptic). And it avoids the most common failing with a lot of black metal, the fact every song sounds alike (I remain convinced that Darkthrone only wrote one song and everything we've heard from them since amounts to nothing more than process variation.)

The Blame List

I was driving home tonight and somehow started thinking about all the various groups - not individuals, but groups - that I've heard the right wing blame for the current state of world affairs. So I started listing them in my head, and presently realized that I couldn't keep track of that many blameworthy groups without some sort of visual aid.

So here's my visual aid.

Lessee. I've heard them blame Hollywood elites, liberal elites, and intellectual elites. They hate elites, I guess, unless they're financial elites. Homosexuals, it goes without saying! Tree-hugging environmentalists (I presume because they get in a way of the orderly amassment of large sums of money by the financial elites). PETA, though I'm with them on that one. The ACLU, which seems to combine several subsets of blame in one - lawyers and - though they never come out and say so in as many words, but let's just say that I don't think anti-Semitism is as dead as they say - Jews. Public schools, those hotbeds of political correctness. Political Correctness. Eggheaded college professors. The Media. Movies. Pop music. Swivelling hips (if not Elvis's, then someone else's). The French! (remember "Liberty Fries"? Ugh.) The British! The Belgians! The Iraqis! Iran! North Korea! Wall Street. Actors. Writers. More homosexuals. Probably transvestites, but I wouldn't know. Muslims, of course. Zoroastrians too, if they knew there were still Zoroastrians in the world. Towel-heads. Imported cars. The United Nations. NATO. Bill Clinton. Oh, I wasn't supposed to list individuals. A C T I V I S T J U D G E S. Blackwater, when convenient. Sex, great masses of oily lubricious sex. Video games. Teenagers. Gen-Xers. "Hooligans". Loofahs - sorry, I couldn't resist. Dang uppity feminists. The NAACP. Government watchdog groups. The Constitution, that "goddamned piece of paper." Religious leaders who don't establish mega-churches in Texas or Colorado Springs. Athiests! Darwinists! Scientists! Rationalists! And those right proper bastards, secular humanists!!! Formula-One car racing. Foreigners. Mexicans. Illegal immigrants. VENEZUELA! Uppity human rights attorneys. The Clean Air Act. The Clean Water Act. The fact that there isn't a Cleaning Out Your Pocket Act, but that doesn't stop them from trying. Doctors. Liability lawyers. Handicapped people - why, it costs money to put in ramps; why don't they stay home and eat TV dinners like they used to?? Conservation groups. People who have the gall to ask their own questions without being carefully coached by political handlers (and here, Hillary Clinton loses big juju with me - you claim to be such an upright and honest breath of fresh air, but there you are running a play right out of the Karl Rove playbook. Have you no shame at all?) HMOs. HBO. The First Amendment. Flag-burners! Pot-smokers. The Politburo. The CPUSA. Manhattan intellectuals! Sports figures who prove to be crappy role models.

Anyway, that's quite a list. I'm sure there are more people to blame, but I find it ironic that the one group of people who will NEVER end up on this list are the right-wingers themselves (except to the extent that they can blame it all on them uppity neo-cons).

NATO Reporting Names

In the days of the Cold War, we (meaning "The West") often had no idea what the Soviets called this or that piece of military hardware. Sometimes the hardware was so widespread and common that the name leaked out, like the AK-47 and the T55 and the MiG-21. But for tanks, artillery, and guided missiles in particular, we often had no idea what the Soviets called anything because of their obsession for secrecy. They wouldn't even confirm that the T62 was really called the T62 until years after we figured it out.

This made for certain difficulties. For one thing, there were difficulties between NATO countries. "We're worried about this new missile." "Which one, the one with the bulbous nose?" "No, the one with that grating thing about halfway down." "This is ridiculous. They all have gratings about halfway down."

Then there were difficulties between NATO and the Soviet Union. I remember that during the SALT-2 (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) negotiations, we wanted the Soviets to restrict how many medium bombers of a type we called the "Tu-26 Backfire" they had. And they were happy to, because as far as they knew, they didn't have any Tu-26s at all; they referred to that same aircraft as the Tu-22M and thus, by strict letter of the agreement, could have as many of them as they liked.

NATO set up a committee to assign all Soviet weapons a "reporting name". No matter what the Soviets called their stuff, WE would use the NATO reporting name (though if we knew the actual Soviet name, we could add it parenthetically, though the clumsy Soviet nomenclatures often grew clunky).

The system made a certain sense. All surface-to-surface missiles got an SS-x designation, and a reporting name that started with the letter "S". SS-13 Savage, SS-11 Sego, SS-18 Satan, SS-1 Scud. Major variants would be treated as "mods", like SS-18 Mod 4. All air-to-air missiles got an AA-x designation, and a reporting name that started with the letter "A". AA-1 Alkali, AA-5 Ash, AA-6 Acrid, AA-7 Apex, AA-8 Aphid and so forth. All surface-to-air missiles got an SA-x designation and a reporting name starting with the letter "G", such as SA-2 Guideline, SA-6 Gainful, SA-7 Grail, SA-5 Gammon and SA-8 Gecko. Air to surface missiles, which were scarce in the Soviet inventory for long decades, got AS-x designations and reporting names that started with the letter "K", like AS-4 Kitchen and AS-6 Kingfisher.

The same system was applied in modified form to Soviet aircraft. Fighters always had odd numbers; bombers and transports always had even numbers. Fighters had "F" reporting names; bombers "B" reporting names; cargo planes "C" reporting names. That's the origin of all those goofy Russian aircraft names like Bear, Bison, Badger, Backfire, Flogger, Flanker, Fulcrum, Fishbed (?) and Fresco.

Note that the Russians never called their stuff by these NATO reporting names. Their system of nomenclature was much, much more complicated, a monstrous alphabet soup whose Byzantine complexity is even worse than that other great mishmash, the Japanese pre-WWII system.

Why do I bring this up? Because, contrary to what Trumpeter says, there's no such thing as a "SAM-6" missile system. It's an "SA-6" missile system. And it piques me when they get it wrong. It's like when people say "It's a mute point." No, it's not a mute point, it's a moot point.

I think I've had too much coffee today.

PS: Where the NATO reporting name business got really creepy was in the field of electronic warfare systems. Instead of relying on the old designation/reporting name procedure they used for everything else, the NATO committee assigned Soviet EW systems a two-word name that often sounded like something out of Doctor Seuss. Spoon Rest, Pop Group, Knife Rest, Straight Flush, Fan Song, Drum Tilt, Owl Screech, Jay Bird, Fox Fire, Gun Dish, Big Eye, Flat Flace. Some of them actually made just a bit of sense if you knew a little bit about the system. The Fox Fire radar, for example, was found in the Foxbat interceptor. The Gun Dish was a fire control radar on the ZSU-23/4 self-propelled anti-aircraft gun. The Straight Flush was a fire control system that seemed include five separate radiators. Pop Group, I think, was the fire control system associated with the SA-N-4 pop-up missile system. Head Light was a set of twin side-by-side radars that looked like huge headlights fitted to the upper works of Soviet cruisers. The Big Bulge radar lived in the big bulge beneath the belly of the Tu-20 Bear-D maritime reconnaissance and standoff ASM "master of ceremonies" aircraft. Owl Screech was said to sound a bit like an owl screeching if you listened to it with the proper ELINT system, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if Drum Tilt didn't sound like a snare drum over an ELINT receiver.

But now I'm boring me...

Please To Understand!

Yesterday I bought a new model, a 1/35th scale "SAM-6 Antiaircraft missile" from Trumpeter. I don't really like Trumpeter very much, for reasons I may go into later, but for now I'm mostly going to hoot at the instruction sheet.

It says it right up front: Study and understand these instructions thoroughly before beginning assembly. And that's certainly good advice. But what, exactly, are we to try to understand?

Foist off, we find the parts list, where we find that the kit includes two "pastern ducts". What's a pastern duct? The material itself looks like small-diameter vinyl or rubber tubing. Okay, I understand, but my confidence has been strained.

Moving on, we encounter "Track Costruction". There goes a bit more of my confidence, but we move along for a few pages without any issues and I start to feel better about things.

And then, Step 12, we have "Guided Bomb Assembly". I think that should be "guided missile assembly", but what do I know? And then in step 13, we have a requirement to install some of the pastern duct and step 14 instructs us on "attaching lunch pad".

In step 15 the wheels really fall off the cart, for we are "attaching guided bomb" and installing "pastern duck" (NOT pastern duct, but apparently a whole new order of creation). The next step builds up the "Immobility Rack", something better known as a travel lock. And the penultimate step, 19, has us "Attaching stanspont state hand rail".

How's the model look? It looks okay. But the documentation is a shambles. The decal sheet clearly shows markings for a Soviet, an East German, a Polish and a Czech example. But the color painting and decal sheet only shows the East German and Czech examples. The instructions were clearly proofread by Inspector Clouseau.

People get angry at me for scolding instructions for being badly translated, poorly edited, and incompetently proofread. "You're being too hard on them," the cognoscenti tell me. "They're trying really hard and you're faulting them for things that don't matter."

Things that don't matter... Writing, one of mankind's most precious talents, doesn't matter. Hmm. One would think that a company that clearly intends to become a major force in the model industry would have enough pride and professionalism to have just one English-speaking person scan the instructions, but I guess not. Hell, I'll do it for them - it'd take me, what, five minutes to correct the goofy mistakes in the instruction sheet and tell their art department to document the other two marking options on the decal sheet. (And while I'm at it, who decided on East German and Polish versions when the two most glaringly obvious versions should have been Syrian and Egyptian?)

And I think it does matter. If they can't get basic grammar and spelling on the instruction sheet right, or even close to right, what else can't they get right? Is this the same sort of thinking that, um, leads to propylene glycol in toothpaste, by chance?

But Trumpeter is big news. The model shop nerds positively wet themselves in their ardor for Trumpeter kits, but I'm not impressed. It's not xenophobia. I like a great many foreign kit manufacturers, including the equally Chinese company Dragon. But Trumpeter? It leaves me about as cold as bubble-gum-flavored Jell-O.

Not Responsible

Aggregate companies are joining the new American habit of dodging responsibility for their actions. Most of the dump trucks that I see in my local area, which is target-rich from the point of view of dump trucks, sport little stickers that read "Not Responsible For Broken Windshields."

And those stickers strike me as being a lot like big red-painted middle fingers, because the bastards keep breaking my windshield. Repeatedly. Often. I cringe when dump trucks pass me going the other way, I genuinely do, especially on Highway 74 or 203rd Avenue, because I just know I'm going to get a barrage of gravel and rocks. And the dump truck will roar into the distance flying its little flag of defiance, its little "Not Responsible" sign, and leave me with another long crack or impact star in my fricking windshield. I don't even bother having the damn thing fixed any more. What's the point? In a week a speeding transfer truck is just going to break it anyway; I'll save myself the emotional roller coaster.

My windshield wasn't broken when I bought my car. I didn't take a hammer to it and break it. It was broken by rocks flying off or kicked up by dump trucks. How are they not responsible for that? Oh, I'm sure in the legal sense they aren't responsible; the lobbyists always find ways to craft legislation that permits big business to skip out on its responsibilities. But how can they not be responsible in a scientific sense? Truck throws up rock. Rock hits my windshield. Windshield breaks. "Not Responsible" sticker proved to be false. They may not be liable, but they're still responsible.

It makes me so mad. I want to do something, but all I can do is helplessly roar STOP BREAKING MY #$&*@ WINDSHIELD as the dump truck vanishes into the heat shimmer.

I don't tailgate dump trucks. I don't tailgate in general. I've never been hit by a rock while following a dump truck (curiously, I think I take fewer rock strikes when I follow a dump truck; I think the leading truck sweeps out the airspace for me). Only when the dump truck is going the other way, which by my math means that rocks raised by the dump truck could be hitting my windshield at a combined speed of about 140 miles per hour out on the open highway. Even on days when I'd like to drive with the windows down, I don't, because I've taken rock strikes on the side windows and can't begin to imagine what a rock strike in the middle of my forehead would feel like (though I don't doubt that the dump truck operators would lose no time putting "Not Responsible For Head Wounds" stickers on their trucks).

I hope, I really hope, that every now and then a dump truck loses a headlight to a rock thrown up by my car. But I know they don't.

I think I'm going to make a sticker that reads "Not Responsible For Sudden Gouts of Hellish Flame" and leave them to wonder what I'm up to.

Chilling

I don't rememeber driving home this evening. I remember leaving work, and I remember stopping at Circle-K to buy a less than fully acceptable cup of coffee, but that's about all I remember about the drive home.

It was a pretty good day at work, all things considered - the last bugs were ironed out of what I was working on, and now it's just a matter of the "due diligence" part of the operation where I confirm, line item by line item, that the published CRC values for various bits of software are actually right (how I yearn for a CRC of 0xDEADBEEF).

But around three PM I started to develop a caffiene withdrawal headache, which is all the proof required that I spent too much of my three-day weekend guzzling cup after cup of coffee ranked "extra-bold" on the Keurig scale. (And have I said lately what a boon this Keurig coffee maker is? Yikes! I can't imagine living without it, frankly.)

By the time I left work my head hurt so bad I don't even really remember driving home. Granted, longish parts of the drive are, at that hour, quite deserted and I could drive on the wrong side of the road for miles without anyone knowing or caring, but it's still kind of alarming to realize that I can't account for about 45 minutes of my day, and even more alarming to know that I was operating heavy equipment (to the extent that a Hyundai is heavy equipment) during the gap.

Time to back off on the coffee, I think, before this turns into a daily thing.

State of the Art for 1978

Yikes, who remembers this stuff? This was the state of the art in gaming excitement in the mid-1970s. Not these two games in particular, though the top one had a higher claim to that title than the bottom one, but these sorts of games. Paper wargames. Manual simulations. Consims. Heuristic Intensive Manual Simulations (and I am not making that up). Whatever. The top one is the old SPI solitaire classic Deathmaze, which could be played with equipment no more advanced than a coffee cup and a TV tray. The bottom one is the relatively unlamented SPI non-classic Mechwar '77, a tactical armor offering drawn from the lineage of Kampfpanzer and Desert War. I always liked the "T70" counter on the lower right corner; at the time nobody knew what the Soviets were going to call their replacement for the T-62 MBT. At least they tried with "T70", which was better than the "XMBT" thing they tried in Firefight. But to this day I can't decide if I think the T70 is really the T64 or the T72 - or if it really matters. Of course it does - doesn't it?

.

What killed this sort of gaming? It's kind of like asking "What brought low the Roman Empire?" It depends on what haunts you in the wee hours of the morning. Many blamed Dungeons & Dragons, as though the mere sight of the game would turn a formerly-virile Eastfronter into a sebaceous sunken-chested "DM" unless he beat a saving roll of 18 or had the Panzergruppe Guderian Charm-Shield. Many blamed computer games, but the truth is that most wargames and most wargame companies were one with the dust of history long before PCs and PC games became even remotely feasible (though it can be fairly said that computer sports games did wipe out the old manual sports games like "Statis-Pro Basketball"). I think, in the end, all of us guys that used to play a lot of wargames and, more importantly, bought a lot of wargames (I still have 100+ of the beggars in storage in my garage) simply woke up during a gaming session and said "You know, these things are expensive and time-consuming, they contribute nothing toward my career prospects, and when's the last time any of us actually saw a girl?" So the next guy over said "What say we adjourn the gaming session in perpetuity and go get lives?" And thus it happened.

.

But sometimes it's fun to leaf through them and see what the world looked like to geeks before the computer revolution happened. Lotsa paper, lotsa complicated rules, and lotsa little cerebral bleeds when it was 2 AM and you suddenly couldn't remember what the procedure was for deciding how many warp packs got blown off your pseudo-fighter in Star Fleet Battles.

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But if you're even remotely interested, permit me to recommend http://www.grognard.com/, the best wargaming website that I know of, and one that covers the nostalic games of yesteryear as well as the new releases that occasionally crop up like cold sores on the lower lip of human progress.

It's Official

It's official, it's been decided that I know "diddley-doo-wah" about pop culture. I was reading the "Ten Unsexiest Male Stars" list on AOL and I hardly know any of them. Eric Dane? No idea. Ditto for Phillippe Whomever or Whomever Hartnett, Pete Wentz, James "Is that your real beard" Blunt, Kevin Connolly, Brandon Davis and Pete Doherty. I have absolutely no idea who any of those prancers are. Wilmer Valderrama sounds a bit like a bull rider from Brazil, but I suspect he's a pop singer. Simon Cowell has something to do with the American Idol snore-fest. And Howard Stern is "that guy that curses on the radio". So that really leaves only one star, Ben Stiller, that I've actually heard of and could spot in a crowd!

I was going to scream bloody murder about how this was a waste of perfectly good time and bandwidth and all that, until it struck me that the time and bandwidth being wasted were my own, and voluntarily at that. So I decided to scale my snarling counter-cultural assault to a bland assertion of ignorance. James Blunt??? Eric Dane???? I'm sorry, were you talking to me?

In truth I don't want to know very much about pop culture. There are things that I like - Finnish death metal, for example - but I don't feel inadequate because I know diddley-doo-wah about R&B or obscure 1990s TV shows or the works of indie (pick one) rockers, directors, actors, writers, poseurs. Rather than feeling inadequate because I don't know who these allegedly unsexy stars are or can't seem to catch the wave of indie coffee-house kultur, I can gleefully devote my time and attention to other things entirely.

Such as?

Such as this: how come, when I was a kid, the country was known as "The Ukraine" but today it is known simply as "Ukraine"? When did that happen? Why wasn't I copied in the memo? If the Ukrainians are happier without the "the", I'm happy too, but someone's not keeping me informed. At least when I learned that Upper Volta had become Burkina Faso I learned it by flipping through an updated world atlas, but the "the Ukraine/Ukraine" business rankles because I think I learned it while reading a brief biography of Milla Jovovich, not the proper venue for a major geopolitical shift like that at all. Not that it was the esteemed Ms. Jovovich's fault in any way. Careful with those guns, ma'am.

(I blame the Germans for this - I spent most of my "formative years" reading books about the Eastern Front in World War Two, and most of those seemed to have been written by Germans like Paul "Einsatzgruppen B Vas Chust Followink Orders" Carrell and F.W. "Der Fuehrer Screwed Us All" von Mellenthin. They always seemed to say things like "On the 13th, our victorious panzer columns passed into the Ukraine as the schwerpunkt moved relentlessly east, carried on the clattering tracks of von Manteuffel's panzers." Given this sort of hyperbole, maybe I should blame the Germans. And I can't help but reflect when I read such things that in a very few years, the schwerpunkt is gonna haul ass to the west, carried on the clattering tracks of Rokossovskii's T-34s and IS-2s.)

I don't even want to be a member of the counter-culture. I think I'm generally happy inhabiting a strange cultural space all my own, as the preceding paragraph probably demonstrates all too well.

(And for heaven's sake don't get me started on the whole Belarus-Byelorussia-White Russia business, especially since I can't, right off the top of my head, remember whether Belarus went back in with Russia or not.)

The World According To Jon Garp

Jon Kyl jumps up and down and protests that asking Mukasey for an opinion on waterboarding is "unfair". Unfair in what way? Asking the nominee for the nation's top lawyer job a question on how detained suspects should treated is unfair? What the hell are we supposed to ask such nominees then? Blade or shaver? Foam or Edge? Pastrami or corned beef?? It's like someone jumping up and down and screaming that asking the Surgeon-General for an opinion on obesity is unfair.

Nothing John Kyl says really surprises me. He's a shill for the Republican establishment and I'm okay with that, mostly because I never voted for him and never in my wildest fever dreams imagined voting for him. I wasn't even remotely convinced by his first campaign TV commercials that showed his RV breaking down in Arizona and leaving him with no option but to run for the Senate. Uh huh. Sure. Excuse me, I have to sneeze - ah-Carpetbagger-choo! So what he says, and what he always claims he says on my behalf (snort), goes in one ear and out the other.

But Kyl's histrionics in Mukasey's defense seem weird and partisan even by Kyl's sturdily partisan standards. If you don't mind shutting your cake-hole for a minute, Jon, I think the people who are going to be paying Mr. Mukasey's paycheck (that would be the taxpayers) might be interested, one way or the other, in what Mr. Mukasey has to say regarding what he thinks the limits should be on the treatment of of detained suspects, and have a right to know, since frankly a great deal hinges on his answer.

Maybe since J.D. Hayworth is no longer in the House and Arizona has lost its perennial candidate for gasbag of the year, Jon Kyl sees yet another opportunity... Nah, he wouldn't do that twice, would he?

Democratic Bobbleheads

I wasn't in Michael Mukasey's hearing, so I really can't offer any opinion on how he stacks up compared to the unlamented Alberto Gonzalez, or how sound his professional qualifications are, or for that matter where he stands on the character-o-meter. But I can say I wasn't awfully surprised that he tap-danced around the question of whether waterboarding is torture or not, considering who nominated him, and I bet he wastes no time at all in studying the matter and deciding - hey presto! - that waterboarding isn't torture and thus isn't unconstitutional.

And now I see that Shumer and Feinstein are signed up to vote for him, even though Patrick Leahy himself declined to board the Waterboarding Express. Isn't that nice? We elect a majority of Democrats in Congress hoping for change, and the only change we get is the names on the office doors. Everything else remains status quo. The next time the Democratic Party calls me and asks for a donation, I'm going to suggest that they go pound sand because as far as I'm concerned they've wasted every vote and every cent I've given them.

But back to what I was talking about. What was I talking about? Oh yeah, waterboarding. Is it torture, or is it not? Let's discuss what waterboarding is first. In its most basic form, it amounts to pouring water on a person's face which for some reason seems to very readily invoke terror of drowning. In its more advanced version (one might say "institutional waterboarding" as opposed to "field waterboarding") the prisoner is strapped to a heavy inclined board, with his feet higher than his head. His face is covered with a cloth or a piece of cellophane, and water is poured over his face. Somehow this triggers terror of death in almost everyone - it is said that the average person will break under 14 seconds of waterboarding and that resisting for more than a minute or two requires almost superhuman willpower.

Is this torture? By the carefully honed and very exclusive definition offered by the Bush Administration, no, it isn't torture. But to anyone who lives in the real world, it is torture, absolutely. Maybe not physical torture, but psychological torture of the highest rank. It actually strikes me as being a form of mock execution, and I believe mock executions have already been defined as torture. I know I sure as Shinola wouldn't want to be waterboarded, and I wouldn't want anyone waterboarded in my name either. Even John McCain believes waterboarding is torture, and as he has first-hand experience in such matters, I'll accept his word without question.

But don't ask the Democrats in Congress, who as a group are slowly turning into a bunch of Bobble-heads who simply nod assent to anything the Bush Administration says. Hey, you bozos, the reason we elected you is because we became uneasy with the growth of Executive power and privilege, and what exactly have you done about it? What's the word? Squat? Yep, that's the word.

So now you're going to go off and vote to recommend confirmation of Mukasey even though he won't offer you a hard opinion on whether waterboarding is torture or not. I hope you guys still respect yourselves in the morning, because I sure as hell won't.

Historical Nugget

And now, a dash of Arizona history.

We live in Wittmann, which is a somewhat amorphous geographical region that lies, roughly, between Surprise and Circle City. The area is becoming more popularly known as Surprise, thanks to the Professional Urban Planners (read "ambitious bastards") in Surprise who decided that the whole area should eventually join their city.

But for now, it's unincorporated, and it's called Wittmann, and Surprise can go fish. Upon touring Our Fair Wide Spot In The Road, one will note that the school is called not Wittmann, but Nadaburg. What up with that??

The only thing here, originally, was a railroad siding that the railroad named Nada, the Spanish word nothing. They named it that because there was probably nothing there - maybe the cemetary and some free-floating dread, but not much else. As people started to live around the railroad siding, which for some reason they often seem to end up doing, the resulting pocket of habitation became known as Nadaburg, or almost literally "Nothing-town". Later the siding (and habitation pocket) was renamed Wittmann, but the school at least remembers the really old days and the original name of the place.

Nothing-town. I prefer that over Surprise, which I can't really think about without hearing the Gomer Pyle USMC theme music.

The Fruits

Been known to complain, have I, during these last two weeks, about those nine-hour days killing me, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. And, truth be told, those nine-hour days haven't been a wonderland of joy, because sitting at a desk in "action pose" for that long does make my chest hurt. Actually, it's about 80% chest incision pain and about 20% flaccid back muscle pain, brought on by the fact that I haven't really sat at a proper desk in a while (my sitting posture at home, as I type this, is radically different than how I sit at work. At home, I recline such that I can and occasionally do nod off when the mood strikes me, but at work that's kind of a bad idea).

But the point is that sitting at the desk causes me pain. By the end of the day it's pretty bad, but at least the drive home allows me to lean back just enough that the "direction of stress" in my chest changes and the pain goes away. (This is going to sound odd, but leaning back makes my chest feel like it is pulling apart; sitting up makes it feel like it is being pressed together.) So I was known to whine about the level of pain, and last Friday it was so bad I starting to question the wisdom of this "going back to work" idea in the first place.

But now it pays off, because today was my day off, and payday at the same time! Could it possibly get any better?? So what did I do on my day off?

I mustered out of rehab. That's over, or at least Phase II part of it. Now I have the option of continuing with Phase III rehab, at $16 a week, or pretending to do rehab at home, which has the characteristic aroma of wishful thinking clinging to it. I don't know if $16 is a bargain or not, but I'm tempted to go that route anyway. It's across the street, in a larger facility, and features a much wider selection of machinery, but it's still semi-supervised (meaning, I guess, that if I fall over face-first, someone will at least call 911).

I got my prescriptions filled, replenished my supply of arcane supplements, and reloaded mein pillschlepper, a plastic deal that holds a weeks' worth of pills and which greatly simplifies the process of taking pills at 5:45 AM. It looks pretty ominous - the compartments are full of big gnarly-looking gel-caps and capsules and spacecraft (a wan The Right Stuff joke, if you'll indulge me), but the actual drugs are tiny pink and white tablets and the big gnarly things are mostly fish oil, red something-or-the-other and niacin.

I went to the grocery store, which was fun, and the book store, which was funner. I found that my lawn tractor is continuing to malfunction and is once again full to the gills with errant gasoline, but the large tractor runs like a top since I carried out the Great Obscure Spark Plug Search and adjusted the carburetor properly (all I can imagine is that the last owner misread "one and a half turns" as "six and a half turns").

So was it worth the pain in my chest to have today off? Well, yeah, to have today off and a paycheck to go along with it, sure!

Can't Do Anything

Something I heard on the radio tonight really struck a nerve with me. It wasn't anything particular to the BBC, which I happened to be listening to, nor was it anything really that the BBC said. They were simply discussing various forms of alternative power generation, and they had an "expert" on who basically couldn't stand the thought of any kind of alternative power generation. He only rained on a few alternative power schemes, but that's probably only because they didn't have time to talk about all of them.

The ability of special interest advocates to paralyze public debate in this country is truly appalling. Nothing can ever be done because it always offends some exceedingly small constituency that remains adamantly opposed to whatever is being discussed.

We take it as a given that oil won't last forever. It's a finite resource, and sooner or later it's going to run out. Experts and ideologues can argue about when that day will come, but the bottom line is that oil isn't forever. And neither are the other great power generation fuels currently in use, coal and gas, and all of them have the undesirable side-effect of pumping carbon dioxide, among other things, into the air. So we should take it as given that eventually fossil fuels will run out, and when that happens, we'd best have some alternative power sources ready to roll or face a sudden collapse in our standard of living back to roughly the Neolithic Age.

Okay. So what about hydroelectric power? It's clean, it's reliable, it... Oh, wait, it causes widespread environmental damage and in any event there are few rivers left in America that could be gainfully dammed anyway. Okay, scratch that.

What about wind power? It's clean, and though it doesn't generate much power per installation, the plants can be quite widespread and maybe there's some hidden advantage in having a decentralized generation grid. Oh, wait, the blades make "whooshing" sounds that the neighbors object to, and bird lovers complain that birds are occasionally clubbed to death by the blades. Scratch that.

Okay, what about biofuels? Not clean, really, but at least more neutral with regard to CO2 than fossil fuels, and they reduce dependence on politically unreliable foreign oil. Oh, wait, it's immoral to take food out of someone's mouth and make it into fuel and in any event it's inefficient, and pay no attention to that Brazil behind the curtain!

Hmm. How are we on solar power? It's clean, quiet, non-polluting... Oh, wait, it's expensive and inefficient, it only works during the daytime so environmentally damaging batteries are required, and the panels themselves may pose toxic chemical risks when disposed of. Scratch that.

Cripes. This is getting hard! What about, uh, nuclear power? Huge generation capacity per plant, and zero contribution toward global warming! Oh, wait, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and the groovitude of being in the avant garde of the nuclear protest movement. Scratch that.

Maybe conservation will help. Maybe we can require that cars get some minimum fuel mileage, or that some percentage of cars be hybrids or entirely electric. Oh, wait, that's government intrusion on the workings of a free market and we wouldn't want to raise Adam Smith from his grave, would we?

What about improved mass transit? Dedesign our cities to make better use of mass transit, and encourage people to use it! Oh, wait, mass transit is a socialist experiment in social engineering. Scratch that.

So, ultimately, nothing can be done. All we can do is sit in our SUVs in traffic jams, burn Middle Eastern and Venezuelan oil, and wait for the end. That seems to be the only thing the "experts" can agree on. It's too bad we can't develop some technology that uses special-interest experts as a fuel source; I'd personally love to see an oil industry lawyer masquerading as a expert on the pitfalls of biofuels or a pop singer turned nuclear protester being forced to generate a few thousand watts. I'd love that a lot.

Put The Hammer To It

Who here remembers Tom Schoendienst, a Phoenix-area TV sportscaster back in the 1970s who used to come on the Friday news and give the results of all the local high school football games? This was back before fancy graphics and remote locations were common in local news, so mostly it was a matter of the somewhat spooky-looking Schoendienst reading results. Not scores, just results. The scores were shown on-screen; all he did was say who beat who. And he'd try to spice it up a little in a primitive and unsuccessful stab at what would later come to be known as the ESPN style. His favorite was "put the hammer to". McClintock put the hammer to St. Mary's, St. Mary's put the hammer to Peoria, Peoria put the hammer to Velveeta Vocational, Velveeta Vocational put the hammer to some amoebae found in a puddle outside the Reflective Cheese Performin' Arts and Fondue Center.

I was sitting here at about 5:30 AM with my nose in a cup of coffee, bleating softly and trying to determine how many Tylenol I should take, when I suddenly heard the ghostly voice of Tom Schoendienst saying "These nine-and-a-half-hour days are putting the hammer to him."

Boy howdy.

Hydraulic-ed

We haven't been using the lawn tractor much lately, mostly because it had four tires with various species of slow leaks and it's sort of a pain in the butt to have to drag the compressor or the hand pump out to air up yon tires every time you want to do something. So it sat, and sat, and sat, until finally I ordered four replacement tires from Northern Tool for it. So the tires duly arrived, and I duly went out to move the tractor to the carport so I could work on it on concrete rather than on dirt.

It wouldn't start. The starter would spin the engine to the compression stoke, then the starter would stall. I figured the battery was simply a little weak and wouldn't power the starter past the compression stroke, so I clapped the battery charger on it and proceeded to pull of the wheels where it sat. Now, I don't have a jack that really works on the tractor, so jacking it up consists mainly of grabbing one end of the tractor, grunting extravagantly, and trying to kick something like a milk crate or stool under the tractor while holding it aloft by brute strength. It works, sort of.

So I got the wheels off, and proceeded to try to get the tires off the rims. They'd had so much flat tire sealer pumped into them over the years the insides of the tires were full of an orange-green slime that coated everything, including me and my garage floor, with joyous abandon. It was so slippery I assumed it would help me get the tubeless tires off the rims, but no sale. It also made holding on to tools difficult. I broke the beads on one of the rims and managed to get the tire half-off, but I just couldn't get the inside bead off the outside rim. It was awful. There was no way to get any leverage on the thing at all with the tools I had, so I cut the bead with bolt cutters. Cheating, I know, but you do what you have to do.

Now it was time to put the new tire on the rim, which I'd scrubbed to rid it of the slimy green substance. I replaced the slimy green substance with a slimy blue substance, laundry detergent, used to try to lubricate the beads over the rims. I managed to get one tire on a rim, and even then only by kneeling on the tire with both knees and taking tiny eighth-inch bites with a screwdriver. This experience left me with double vision, a whooping cough, and bubbles of nitrogen in my bloodstream brought on by too much screaming, but worse was in store.

Now I couldn't get the beads to set. The tire had been squashed flattish for shipment and there was just no way of compressing it circumferentially enough to get the beads to come out far enough to seal on the rims. No way. I used my usual standby compression straps - a leather belt and a piece of strap - and nothing worked. Still, I wasn't about to admit defeat. I was about to start to cobble up a compression strap using my four-ton cable come-along when my wife said "Why don't I just take all this stuff down to Discount Tire and let them mount the tires?"

Why indeed? Frankly, I'd never even considered the possibility that Discount Tire would deal with lawn tractor tires. Even now I'm a little astonished that they not only claimed they could handle them, but that they did indeed handle them, and for four dollars per rim. By that afternoon the four shiny black tires were mounted on the rims, though I notice one of the rims still has a smear of greenish slime...

I mounted the rims on the tractor yesterday and decided I'd just drive it around to see how it felt. I turned the key, and the starter spun the engine through about a half a revolution, and again it stalled against the compression stroke. Now, remember that it had been on the charger all day, so I knew it wasn't a weak battery. So what was it? I backed the engine off by hand so the starter could get a "running start" at the compression stroke, and again it stalled. And it stalled hard, like there was something in the cylinder. Hmm. I tried to pull the engine past the compression stroke by hand, but no sale - it locked up hard at a certain point and simply wouldn't go any further.

Fiddling with this led me to ponder why the engine was making so many strange liquid gurgling and slurping sounds when the crankshaft was slowly revolved by hand. I took out the spark plug (thank heaven for small spark plug sockets) and there was a sudden gush of raw gasoline from the spark plug hole. And not a little raw gas either, we're talking a cup or so. Clearly the engine had hydraulicked on gasoline, meaning that there was so much gasoline in the cylinder that the piston couldn't complete its up-and-down motion because liquids can't be compressed. Engines normally hydraulic when they fill up with water, and are usually severely damaged in the process. But in this case, the engine had hydraulicked on gasoline, not water, and because it wasn't running when it happened, it wasn't damaged, it just wouldn't start.

So why would the engine be so full of gasoline? There was no time to think about it, because it was time to shower all the gasoline off my person so we could go to a Halloween party.

This morning I returned to the hunt. I had concluded that the most likely explanation was a carburetor malfunction, specifically something with the system that regulates the amount of gasoline in the float bowl. I had viddied that any one of several things might have happened. The float might have filled with gasoline and sunk. The float might have broken off the hinge arm. The needle might have gotten jammed in the needle valve throat. A flake of some wretched foreign material might have gotten wedged between the needle and the seat. All of these would result in the float valve remaining stuck open, which would allow gasoline to overflow the float bowl, trickle down the intake tube, and slowly pool in the cylinder.

So I took the carburetor off and took it apart and found nothing wrong. Nothing. Everything seemed to work. The needle sealed, the float floated, the hinge hinged. So I put it back together and let it sit for a minute with the fuel line hooked up, and presently it gushed fluids like a person chopping onions. Crap! So I took it apart again, and again, and finally did the old blow-in-the-fuel-inlet business while turning the carburetor upside down and right side up, and finally demonstrated that the needle sealed upside down and didn't seal right side up (the expected behavior). So I put it back together and this time it didn't gush fluids. I don't know why. I just went with it.

I put the engine back together and started it. It ran for about five seconds and died, and when I tried to start it again, it was hydraulicked again! Aaaagh! So I took the carburetor off again and found it, the cylinder, the intake tube and pretty much everything (including my shirt) soaked with a strange pale amber fluid that had some of the characteristics of gasoline, and some of the characteristics of motor oil.

You're probably ahead of me. As the thing sat with the carburetor slowly draining into the cylinder, the cylinder itself drained into the crankcase until the whole engine, cylinder and crankcase and all, filled up with gasoline. Instead of a crankcase filled with 1.6 quarts of oil, I had a crankcase filled with a couple of gallons of gasoline mixed with 1.6 quarts of oil, and any movement of the crankshaft caused the crankcase breather to pump this slimy fluid into the engine faster than the engine could get rid of it.

So I drained the engine, which took a long time, and put in new oil, and put the carburetor back on, and wiped as much of the mess off the engine as I could, and started the thing. It ran like a top, it did, just like brand new, so I decided to drive it around for a little while as a reward for all that work.

Consider that the engine was pretty much coated with that oil-and-gas mixture. Consider that the engine had pumped a pint or so of the oil-and-gas mixture into the muffler. Consider that hot oil smokes. Presently I looked like a steam locomotive, my tractor emitting such a thick cloud of smoke it actually left a shadow on the ground. There was smoke everywhere. I was afraid the neighbors were going to call the volunteer fire department, or perhaps report a crashed airplane, or that I would pass out under that incredible pall of smoke and simply die.

Eventually the oil burned off and the tractor stopped smoking, but wow was it a smoky mess for a while.

So that's been my weekend. Tires, a hydraulicked engine, and enough smoke to give Al Gore the cool shivers. And me? I'm covered with several layers of slime, including green tire sealer slime, amber oil-and-gas slime, and black carboniferous-smelling slime that rubs off my tools and probably dates back to the time I had to fix the blown head gasket in my truck.

Meerkat Madness

I see another one of the meerkats on Meerkat Manor died. Mozart, I guess, was the rodent's name, and not long after the demise of Flower, who was apparently the mob's leader.

In the interests of full disclosure, I have to say that I watch the show from time to time and find it fairly interesting if extremely contrived, especially when the narrator presumes to tell us what Some Random Meerkat is thinking. How would he know? I suspect that if you could read the mind of a meerkat, it would sound something like this: "Food! Food! Sex! Sex! Danger! Danger! Food! Food! Sex! Sex! Danger! Danger!" (and, truth be told, that's what MY mind sounds like most of the time too). But aside from the relentless anthropomorphizing that goes on, it's an interesting and fun show except for those parts where the meerkats eat sundry enormous insects. I can live without that. Especially foul tasting sundry enormous insects. I figure that if a millipede is going to go to the effort of secreting a foul-tasting oil, you should honor the millipede's industriousness by leaving it the hell alone and eating the cameraman's pastrami sandwich instead.

Every time a meerkat dies, the viewing community is consumed with grief and soon the Internet abounds with tributes and memorials. Viewers post poems, tracts, illiterate scrawls and God knows what else as they try to articulate their grief because a meerkat got bitten on the head by a cobra. And fair enough - it's not for me to say how someone should express their grief. When my first cat died, I wore a rubber band around my wrist for a few days without really knowing why I was doing it.

But here's my question. Hundreds of people die every day for reasons that are as random and meaningless as the cobra-bitten and jackal-mauled meerkats on the TV show, but nobody seems to be all that concerned about them. Not even me. Don't mistake this for a sermon, because I have the same problem. A meerkat croaks on the TV show, and I think Oh, that's sad! A hundred people are blown to bloody smithereens in a car bomb attack in Iraq and I think Gosh, what a mess. The problem isn't that the death of a scruffy, flea-infested meerkat on the TV shouldn't be sad. The problem is that the deaths of a hundred human beings with their own hopes and aspirations should be sad.

But somehow it doesn't seem to work out that way. How many stupid wars would we fight if we felt the loss of each human being as keenly as we feel the loss of a dusty, bug-eating rodent on a TV show? And how do we get to that point, the point where human beings are as precious as meerkats and penguins? I wish I knew.

Hi Ho, Hi Ho

I'm back to work. After low-key negotiations with an unnamed aerospace company, I'm back at work in the general field of aircraft collision avoidance systems and terrain awareness systems (why do we avoid collisions with other aircraft, but we're only expected to be 'aware' of the ground?).

It's my policy to not blog about work, since that seems to be a fairly efficient means of committing career suicide these days, and I don't need that sort of help.

But oh crap did the drive home yesterday suck! When did Phoenix turn into such a traffic nightmare? Or was it a one-day festival of crappy driving habits staged by the city just to get me back into the swing of things?

The hard part of my drive home is the business between 7th Avenue and I-17. I have to merge to the left four times, and in heavy traffic. One of those merges is fail-passive, meaning that if I fail to merge, I just drive on the shoulder till I can merge. But three are not fail-passive - if I don't merge successfully, I depart the freeway and head for (in order) 19th Avenue, Deer Valley, or Tucson. I'm not complaining about that. I'm a grown-up and I can handle merging on the freeway. But it's all the other BS that goes on in the merging lanes that scares me.

There are three threats. The first, and most serious, is the Professional in the Huge SUV. It's usually but not always a woman, and she's usually blabbing on her cell phone as she mashes the throttle on her Ford Excursion to the floor. The chief threat they pose to me is that they seem entirely oblivious of the existence of other people. They're too important, I guess, so they drive on the shoulders, they bull through merging situations, they go 85 MPH, they tailgate, and the whole time they're carrying on an animated conversation with God Knows Who about God Knows What (I imagine they're complaining about their housekeepers, but what do I know?).

(Closely related to the Professional in the SUV is the Realtor in the SUV, most common out in the sticks where I live. This is a guy in a Hummer who spends half his time yammering over the back of the seat, the other half of his time pawing at his maps and listings, and all of his time going way too fast and swerving violently from shoulder to shoulder. If they find themselves on dirt roads, they cry "Hot dog!" and go as fast as they can since God favors the person who makes the biggest cloud of dust. But then, just when their overly-fast driving reaches a zenith of insanity, they stop dead, half on and half off the road, and then you can see six, eight, sometimes as many as twenty people in the Hummer wildly pointing in various directions.)

The second, and about as serious, is the "Noncomformist Outdoorsman" in the Huge Pickup, usually but not always a Dodge. (Seriously, I heard that eighty-odd percent of the guys who buy Dodge pickups describe themselves as "noncomformist outdoorsmen".) These guys are also usually on their cell phones, but they're probably looking for oversized wheels or trying to order a Coors Party Ball. Unlike the Professionals in the SUVs, they're aware of the traffic around them; they just don't give a shit. Life has done them wrong in some way and they get back at it by being jerks in traffic. Unlike the Professional who doesn't let you merge because she just doesn't realize there are other people in the world, the Nonconformist Outdoorsman won't let you merge because thwarting you transfers some of your penis girth to him, and everything is a matter of subtle penis one-upmanship.

The third threat is people like me, who behave in a sane, patient and cooperative manner in traffic until the stress, the Professionals, and the Nonconformist Outdoorsmen cause us to explode violently, destroying our cars and killing seven other motorists in a tsunami of flaming gasoline and torn metal fragments. We're not IEDs, we're UEDs - Unintentional Explosive Devices.

Apparently, I Have Problems

I fell asleep with the TV on last night, which isn't unusual. I can sleep perfectly well with the TV and reading lamp on, and sometimes even with a cup of coffee balanced on my chest. But last night I went to sleep with the TV tuned to the Ovation channel - Martin Scorcese was holding forth on the subject of movies that influenced him, and while I can't say I really dote on what Martin Scorcese thinks, it was interesting (read harmless) background for what I was really doing, namely, leafing through old magazines.

But sometime after I fell asleep, Martin was replaced by a great surfeit of paid programming, and when I woke up this morning, I imagined myself to have no end of bad vibes. Bad credit, halitosis, insomnia, an inability to use glucosamine, torn this-and-that membranes in my joints, arthritis, type-2 diabetes, tax problems, and who knows what else. About the only things the paid programming didn't insinuate on my behalf were erectile dysfunction, pancreatitis, and involvement in Nigerian get-rich-quick schemes.

Thanks, guys. Now I can't even drink my morning coffee without casting a suspicious glance at my breadbasket and mumbling "Why can't my colon read? Errr, I mean, why can't my colon process glucosamine?"