"Cars"

I have a deep and abiding nostalgia for what I call the "Eisenhower Epoch", defined roughly as the period of time between VJ-Day in 1945 to 1968, when the Tet Offensive finally put a wooden stake in the heart of Ike's ghost (if you'll pardon the mixed metaphor). If pressed, I will sometimes extend the Eisenhower Epoch till 1973 and the end of the Apollo Program, but only if pressed, and even then only if you use a riding crop.

That era seemed simpler, saner, happier and more sensible than anything that has come afterward, at least to me. Cars looked better, clothes looked better, people didn't seem as cynical and self-absorbed, and the world just seemed to make more sense.

Those who would harsh my buzz are quick to point the Dark Side of the Eisenhower Epoch. Segregation that was tantatmount in many cases to apartheid, discrimination, unsafe cars, unsafe products, poisons in the air and water, a Cold War that featured nuclear bombers in a state of permanent alert, fighting in sub-Saharan Africa and Indochina (as it was called back then), US and Soviet tankers squaring off at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, poverty, hunger...

The Eisenhower Epoch is guilty on every charge.

But here's my counter-argument: we still have discrimination and segregation, we still have arms races, we still have poverty and hunger, we still have unsafe products and unsafe cars, we still have wars, and we still have nuclear bombers. And we have other joys as well that we didn't have back then, like climate change, gross social inequality, religion-based terrorism, exotic chemicals and hormones in our food, drug-resistant bacteria, dishonest news organizations, politicians so corrupt they don't even try to appear to be on the up-and-up, expensive gasoline, cynical TV, an exhausted electorate, the tedious and tiresome "culture wars", violent video games and music, meth, crack, Ecstacy, Britney Spears...

And you still think that the Eisenhower Epoch was somehow worse than the present day?

Which brings me in my meandering way to the movie Cars. I am usually a bit wary of such animated movies because I know they're purposely designed to smear me with schmaltz and saccharine until I crack, and I always do crack. Just because they're positively gooey with saccharine doesn't mean I don't like them. It just means I'm wary of all the saccharine and I know my sentiments are going to be cruelly toyed with.

And Cars was no different. It's saccharine and it uses plot devices that transcend trite and hackeyed by a wide margin, and it toys with my sentiments most cruelly, but it does so extremely well. It is the best animated movie I think I've ever seen, and that includes Toy Story. It spanked the pants clean off Finding Nemo and The Lion King, both of which I thought were oversold by their hype.

Cars is, for lack of a better word, delightful. The tractor-tipping was genius, Luigi and Guido never failed to make me laugh, and I was impressed that they got such luminaries as Michael Schumacher, Mario Andretti and Richard Petty to make cameos (I could complain that they didn't get Don Garlits, John Force or even Shirley Muldowney to do cameos, but I guess I can't have everything). Just splendid. But what really pushed this movie over the top for me was its unabashed nostalgia for the Eisenhower Epoch, a time of chrome and neon signs and meandering highways that passed through towns instead of going around them.

I grew up in northern Arizona just as Interstate 40 was wiping out Route 66 and the towns, gas stations and trading posts along it. I saw places like Two Guns go downhill, close, and ultimately decay into nothing, and Cars exploited my nostalgia for that epoch with brutal and delightful skill.

And "Tow Mater?" Someone deserves an Oscar just for that.

Brown #27

The pool hit 78 degrees today, and we celebrated this by going swimming. Seventy-eight is still just a tad cool, but vurra vurra refreshing. But anyway, we were swimming away (actually, I was throwing a rock and then diving to find it) when we became dimly aware that a storm seemed to be coming in.

I am nearsighted and swim without my glasses, so the best I could tell was that it was getting darkish to the east, on the far side of the house, and that the wind was coming up dust storm fashion. Having had prior run-ins with dust storms, we got out of the pool to batten down the hatches - cover the haystack with a tarp, bring the horses in, close the garage door, bring the lawn furniture in, weight the garbage can with a piece of sawed-off railroad track, that sort of thing.

By the time I had my sandals and shirt on, the dust was upon us, great opaque sheets of it pouring off the land to the east, the well drilling rig off to the east groaning and slapping in the wind. I remind you that I was soaking wet. I further remind you that I'm now standing in air that is quite dense with dust. Within a matter of moments I resembled James Mason in "The Desert Fox", and was far too dusty to go back into the pool after the blow was over. I had a fine coating of mud.

And now I have a headache, so whatever my point was, I no longer care.

Off My Pace

I haven't blogged in almost a week. This is no doubt a cause for celebration in some quarters, and for those who wish to give credit where credit is due, they should thank lawns and 1/48th scale airplanes for the lull.

Many years ago I was (or thought I was) into 1/48th scale airplane models, and bought pretty much every Monogram 1/48th scale kit there was. Then I realized they were too big to easily display, so they went onto the shelf. There they stayed for literally years, decals yellowing and fracturing, parts warping, boxes being slowly consumed by the desert air, box interiors being slowly colonized by spiders of varying sizes, dust, and things that might be insects and might be probes from an alien civilization.

About a week ago I made the conscious decision to build all of these airplanes before they decayed into complete uselessness, and because I was just going to hang them from the garage ceiling with fishing line, I didn't have to worry too much about interiors, and could build them with the gear up. So in the last few days I've started a Ju-87, a Raiden, an A-26, an A-20, a TBD Devastator, an F4U-4, a C-47 Dakota, an Su-7 Fitter, and a Westland Lysander. Some of them I've actually finished already (the Ju-87, the A-26, and the Raiden). So that's kept me pretty busy evenings, even though I'm not fussing with interiors.

I am also attempting to get a lawn to grow. I was going to landscape the back yard primarily with rocks and gravel, but I changed my mind. The dogs kick rocks and gravel into the swimming pool, walking on rocks and gravel with bare feet is no picnic, and grass would solve both problems. So I've been weeding and removing what rocks I put in and talking nice to my little clumps of Bermuda grass, trying to convince them to take over the whole back yard. Which they will, soon enough.

In a way my Bermuda-coaxing is a statement. Most of our neighbors had sod installed (they have "people" for that, I guess) which in most cases appears to have been an expensive failure. I intend to grow a full head of Bermuda, so to speak, without spending a cent on anything but water. And when they ask me where I got my sod, I'll say I grew it myself because I don't have "people" for that.

Ayup.

I'm Dumber Than My Email

My email system is smarter than I am. I rarely think to check my spam folder, and even when I do, I rarely get past the button my email system provides that reads "Delete Contents Of Spam Folder And Nuke Visigoths Who Sent It."

So I usually click that button and never actually read any of my spam, but tonight I leafed through some 289 emails looking for commonalities. It's the same kind of aberrant mentality that occasionally makes me keep a notebook and a pencil handy so I can keep track of what sorts of commercials appear on which TV channels.

What is the plural of spam? "Spams" is a verb meaning "to spam". "Spam emails" sounds redundant. We could give spam a nice cutesy Schwabische nickname like "spaemle" and refer to it collectively. But my point is that I had 289 spamen, as reported by my selfless email system. Of them, all but 17 had to do with penile enhancement in one way or another. Of the other 17, about five I could not classify without actually opening them, and I'm not *that* stupid.

So I had 272 inquiries from total strangers who were not just solicitous as to the state of my manhood, but positively giddy with excitement about the whole thing. And that's just thirty days of spam! Imagine if my email system didn't automatically dud-jett old spam. The number of people eager to know more about my genitalia could number in the thousands!

But let's confine ourselves to the 272 confirmed examples. For the sake of discussion, let's also assume I've been with ten women in my life, though the number varies up or down depending on one's exact definition of "been with". And let's start the timer of my life at age 17, not that that was when my timer actually started - it just makes the math easier. That's ten women in thirty years, or 0.33 women per year. At this rate, it would take me about 824.24 years to meet 272 women who were interested in my anatomy. Factor in traffic accidents, meteorites and other hitches in my getalong and it probably rounds up to a full millennium.

So I guess what I'm saying is that I appreciate the sudden surge in interest in my nether regions.

Some of the subject lines were pretty amusing. Most are unprintable. There are those who would probably say that this whole post is unprintable. But my favorite was the set of spamen that proposed to arrange for me to "have a visit from the big dick fairy." I can't help but think that this entity would look like a smaller version of Ron Jeremy with wings. He would flutter into my bedroom like the Lunesta moth and light on me, and I would wake up in the morning foul-mouthed, covered with body hair, and prone to wearing sleeveless t-shirts and disco medallions.

Then there is the product known as "MegaDik". Is it just me, or does that sound like an Indonesian dictator to you too? Sukarno, Suharto, Megawati, Megadik. Would it be wise to send the Secretary of State to meet with Megadik? Or should she stay in Washington and snigger from a safe distance? And does the use of the prefix "mega" simply beg for comeuppance?

And then there is "DickHelp 911", which is apparently a branch of EMS with special training in urology. The only time I can think I would ever call upon such a service is when I take a heavy impact in what might be tactfully described as the "upper thigh", though I have heard of people getting themselves wedged in swimming pool intakes, vacuum cleaners and toilet paper rolls. Would this version of EMS have a suitably downsized set of the Jaws of Life?

Then there was the oddly worded "How do women see you?" The short answer, one imagines, is with their eyes. The somewhat longer answer would be with their eyes, optic chiasms and striate visual cortexes. But I did once know a woman who claimed she could sense energy fields, sort of like Kirlian Photography without the apparatus. My energy field, for those who are curious, was described as yellow with blue speckles. Or was it blue with yellow speckles? I don't honestly remember. When pressed to explain if this was good or bad, she merely raised one eyebrow and and wordlessly hoisted her Coors Silver Bullet to her lips. So I am forced to admit the possibility that some women see me with ESP or their pineal glands or something.

But my favorite was the cryptic "Wow..Mens love this". Mens love lots of things. S&K socket sets, carbon-steel barbecue tongs, sleeping in on a Saturday morning, 24-hour marathons of MXC on Spike, triple Whoppers with cheese, the smell of napalm in the morning... So what is the sender really offering? The author of said spam was one "Antoinette Hutchinson", and all of a sudden all I could really think of was cake and guillotines, neither of which this particular mens loves all that much (though if faced with the choice, I'd prefer to eat cake than go to the guillotine).

Illumination, I fear, will never come. But I still thank them for their interest.

Great Advertisement

I recently saw an odd commercial on TV. I think I was watching bull riding, but I don't remember for certain. The commercial starts by listing a whole laundry list of reasons why people shouldn't take certain NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-imflammatory drugs), including bleeding ulcers, heart problems, sudden death and presumably even bad vibes.

It then went on to recommend an NSAID. I think it was Celebrex, but don't quote me on that, because I was laughing too hard when they got around to actually saying the name of the drug.

Why was I laughing? Because, and I am not making this up, one of the reasons the commercial cited for why we should take their drug is because "it hasn't been taken off the market." Is that the best thing this drug has going for it? Jeez. It's like advertising a car by saying "So far we haven't had to recall it because of some embarrassing design flaw."

The Hard Questions

I've been accused of not dealing with big issues on my blog - of spending all my time fretting about scale modeling or tractors. Well, okay, I haven't actually been accused of that. But it can't be long before it happens.

Iraq

I can't see any good way out of this mess, frankly. To reduce chaos and violence to a low background level, we would need to radically increase the size of our garrison, doubling it at least and preferably multiplying it by ten. Of course, this isn't going to happen, and even if it did happen, we'd have to stay there forever, keeping the lid on ethnic and religious conflicts with a vast icecap of military force. And that's not a particularly appealing road to the future - and we saw how well that worked for the Soviets.

Honestly, I can't see any way Iraq can avoid breaking up into three separate countries, perhaps linked in a confederation and perhaps not. The Kurdish region is practically autonomous already, and I don't see much hope for a Sunni minority electing to live under the rule of a Shiite majority.

So - what? Maintain force levels for a while to give the central Iraqi government at least some chance of success, a phased pullout throughout 2008 with no Americans left on the ground by the end of 2008, and begin a foreign policy now that acknowledges the likelihood of a partition. In the end I suspect Iran would become the natural sponsor of the Shiite state; Syria, Jordan and the other Arab countries the natural sponsor of the Sunni state; and NATO the sponsor of the Kurdish state because nobody else will do it. Certainly not Turkey or Iran.

I don't see a partition of Iraq as a defeat, any more than the partition of India was necessarily a defeat for anyone. One would prefer that it didn't happen, but for now it may be the least violent of all the options. It seems preferable to turning Iraq into a failed state in the fashion of Somalia, and who knows, in the end US troops might be called upon to disentangle the contestants when Iraq does partition.

Iran

I don't necessarily believe Iranian claims that their nuclear program is strictly peaceful - but I don't live in shuddering fear of a nuclear-capable Iran either, any more than a nuclear Israel makes me shudder. To me, the Iranians closely resemble the Soviets in terms of statecraft - they occasionally trot out politicians who spout wide-eyed lunacy, but the people who really make the decisions are not fools and are in no hurry to get into a showdown with the West. I am more worried about Pakistan, mainly because Pakistan already has nukes and is one successful assassination attempt away from turning into a hard-line Wahhabist state, something that Iran will never do.

I would open relations with Iran. The easiest and cheapest way to undermine the authority of the ayatollahs would be to foster open trade with Iran. Eventually its middle class population would come to see the ayatollahs as a retrograde element and the problem would resolve itself. (But this is my answer to most of our problems with other countries, or at least those with reasonably organized economies - it worked like a charm with the Soviets, and though it did take fifty years for the system to collapse from its own internal contradictions, it was a good deal better than resolving the matter by an exchange of strategic nuclear weapons.)

Israel

Well, this one is a toughie, because I happen to believe that the Holocaust entitles the Israelis to a certain amount of special consideration. But on the other hand, I happen to believe that there will never be anything remotely resembling long-term peace in the Middle East until there is a long-term, viable, two-state agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. As long as the Palestinians continue to elect Hamas officials, and as long as the Israelis treat the Palestinians as a conquered people in all but name, nothing good will happen.

Global Warming

I think it's happening, and I think it is being accelerated by human activity. It doesn't look like junk science to me, no matter how many times Rush Limbaugh says it. (In fact, the phrase "junk science" is turning into the mating call of the far right.)

Swimsuits

I'm in favor of them.

Potatoes

I prefer mine baked, with sour cream and chives.

Model-Building Tasks Me No Like

1. Masking splinter camouflage, such as that found on the Ju-87D I'm currently working on. I end up with tiny strips of blue and yellow tape stuck to my entire person. I once masked and painted a Swedish AJ-37 Viggen in that funky 1970s Swedish take on splinter, and it drove me quite, quite mad.

2. Masking canopies, and for much the same reason as masking splinter camouflage, only I use Bare-Metal Foil on canopies and end up with tiny bits of silver foil stuck to my entire person.

3. Scribing panel lines. I dislike this so much I just don't do it unless I absolutely have to, and since Western Civilization doesn't depend on me scribing panel lines, I never have to. Some people seem to really enjoy this kind of thing, but to me it's like grinding sand between my teeth.

4. Zimmerit. I don't like painting it, I don't like applying it, I don't like trying to decal over it, and I don't like spelling it. Needless to say, I don't build a lot of German armor from the grand era of Zimmerit.

5. Photo-etched parts. Yeah, they look good once they're on and painted, but I find the process of cutting out, filing, bending and attaching photo-etched parts irksome, to say the least. If a model comes with photo-etched parts, I use them, but I don't go very far out of my way to find extra photo-etched parts.

6. Pre-shading. I see this as an expression of technical skill and artistic talent and not something that a model needs for the sake of realism. I appreciate the skill of the people who do it, and do it well, but I can't say that it produces a model that is any more accurate or realistic than one that isn't preshaded.

7. Accenting panel lines. This is closely related to #6. A while back FSM featured an AC-130 on its cover that was a particularly well-executed example of accented panel lines. It was truly magnificent work viewed as an artistic technique, but grossly unrealistic in the real world. Look at photographs of real airplanes taken from a reasonable viewing distance and try to see panel lines at all. Chances are that you can't.

8. Heavy Face Shading. Figure painters paint heavy shadows on their figure's faces to compensate for the fact that light sources aren't scaled, but it's an easy effect to overdo. The modern style (again, mostly because it demonstrates technical skill) is to have extremely heavy shadowing and highlighting so that the figure's face starts to look really weird and stark. Judges at contests like heavy shading because it gives them lots of good brushwork to evaluate, but I don't think it's very realistic.

9. Aftermarket tracks. Seems like a lot of effort to go through for a tank model, to me anyway. If a model has really bad tracks, it usually has other problems, and fixing the tracks isn't going to really fix the model. If the model already has reasonably good tracks, I don't see the need to replace them.

10. Flattened aircraft tires. I think they look strange, personally, and if I were the crew chief of that particular aircraft, my first act would be to send someone out to properly inflate the tires. I can see sanding a small flat spot on the bottoms of the tires, because they aren't completely inflexible, but heavily squished tires just look weird to me.

So what do I like?

1. I like finishing stuff. Having long-term projects hanging around on the bench for more than a couple of months makes me mildly crazy.

2. I like basic assembly. I like gluing stuff together and making a structure out of a bunch of parts.

3. I like filling and sanding seams, gaps and other flaws.

4. I like airbrushing. I don't like cleaning my long-suffering airbrush, but I like using it.

5. I like decaling. The more decals a kit uses, the more I like it.

6. I like building unique figures out of piles of arms, legs, torsos and heads. It's an easy way to produce figures that are reasonably suited to their situation without having to do a lot of surgery.

7. I like painting figures. I'm not very good at it, but I like it.

8. I like scratchbuilding stuff out of whatever comes to hand.

9. I like making dioramas, though the larger they get the less enjoyment they give me.

Virginia Tech

I wanted to say something about what happened at Virginia Tech, but try as I might, I find that there's simply nothing I can say that would be of the slighest use to anyone. So I won't try.

But once again the media hacks are crawling out of the woodwork, smelling blood in the air. They race up to some student, jam a microphone in her face, and demand "How do you feel??"

How the hell do they think she feels? I wouldn't be at all surprised if there is a professional ranking system where reporters who can wring tears from over-wrought eyewitnesses rank higher than reporters who just report the stories. A few years back I watched some local reporter trying to wring tears from evacuees in a shelter when most of northern Arizona was in the process of burning down. He tried so hard to get the people in the shelter to squirt a few that I found myself hoping and praying that someone would physically slap the moron to the ground.

And do I really need Dr. Phil on TV telling me how I should handle this tragedy? Pfft.

Unconvincing News

I usually turn on Headline News in the morning when I wake up so I don't fall right back to sleep. Sometimes I do anyway, but most of the time HLN is able to keep me awake, if only from the physical effort of rolling my eyes when celebrity-groupie Adriana Costa starts blithering about (pick one) Angelina, Tom, Brad, Britney, Paris, or Madonna. She even refers to Madonna as "Mad", a slice of gushy faux familiarity that makes my flesh crawl. (Since when "entertainment reporting" become synonymous with "celebrity reporting"? And why is Paris famous in the first place?)

But the less I say about her the better. This morning they had news of the big storm that is attacking the Northeast, and I don't doubt that it's a bad storm. But their coverage made it seem like some kind of giant cover-up.

They kept cutting to reporters in the field in Hyannis, who carried on at some length about the power and ferocity of the storm. But where they were, it wasn't raining, there was hardly any wind at all, and the harbor was quite calm. They kept saying "Yes, the flags are flapping here, as you can see." Well, the flags flap pretty much everywhere!

You want to make a point about the power of the storm? Send someone to where the storm is! Don't prop some flunkie up in front of a calm, placid harbor and have them point to waving flags as evidence of the storm's wrath. You might as well not cut away from the studio at all, because it just makes me think the storm has been trumped up.

Salt Water

Here be dragons!

Our pool is a salt water pool, meaning that some computerized dingus makes chlorine out of salt dissoved in the water (salt is just sodium and chlorine anyway). The computer does a self-test every so often and reports, among other things, the level of salt in the pool. It's supposed to be 2000 parts per million (PPM). About a month ago I reviewed the computer's control panel and saw that the "extremely low salt" light was on, and that the salt concentration had fallen to about 700 PPM.

So what did I do? Instead of wondering where the salt might have gone, I stopped at the store and bought a hefty bag of water conditioner salt and heaved it into the pool. An hour later I retested the water and it was still about 700 PPM.

Hmm. Now, salt doesn't evaporate from a pool. Water does, but salt doesn't. The only way you can lose salt from a pool is to A) pump out a lot of the water, or B) have it overflow from rainwater, or C) have a substantial leak. I hadn't pumped out any water, it hadn't rained that much, and I didn't think it had a leak. So where had the salt gone??

It was still there. What happened is that a fragment of a leaf somehow got into the chlorine dingus and caused the system to make wildly inaccurate guesses about the salt level. Once I cleaned the leafy matter out of the chlorine thing, the salt concentration suddenly shot up to 3700 PPM.

Doh.

Fortunately there's no such thing as "too much salt", though at around 4500 PPM it starts to get somewhat corrosive. Below that level, it's strictly a matter of taste - some people apparently don't like the slightly salty taste, but I find that I don't mind the taste, and I like the way it makes me float like a cork. It also doesn't burn my eyes and doesn't do a number on my hair the way regular chlorine pools do.

Now if it would only warm up so I can swim!

We're already starting to buy pool toys. We have a couple of things that are doomed to be called "floaty things" and I'm already starting to look for radio-controlled boats. I really want a radio-controlled submarine, and I'm not sure why. Maybe I'll sink a 1/350th scale battleship in the pool and send the submarine down, Ballard-like, and explore the wreck.

Mixed Feelings

Normally I'm in no big hurry for it to get hot in Arizona. It gets hot soon, and it stays hot late, and I try to enjoy the cool weather as long as it sticks around, and I usually beg it to stay longer than it really wants to. But around the middle of April the cool weather says "Man, it's going to get hot soon, so I'm outta here." And then it does get hot, and at that point the only saving grace is that it is a dry heat (or a dry heave) for most of the summer. That's not much to hang your hat on, but when it's 115 degrees out and your face starts to stretch and split like a hot dog, well, you take comfort from what you can.

But over the winter we had a swimming pool put in. It was a rather amusing procedure, with most of the amusement deriving from the fact that the guy who marked the pool's location on the ground with spray paint couldn't read his own blueprint and put the pool in the wrong spot. That was no big deal to me - one advantage of having a two and a half acre lot is that it doesn't make much difference if they put the pool three feet further out in the yard than they were supposed to.

But in spite of the surveying shenanigans, they managed to get the pool built and we had it filled by a water truck company, which conveniently enough managed to import a few water beetles with said water. But I think they're now all dead - at least I haven't seen any for a while, and that's okay with me.

The point is, the pool is in, and now I can't wait for it to get hot so I can use it thoroughly. I've been in it five or six times, but it's still just a tad too cool for it to be fully comfortable, and this sudden cold front that we're experiencing will probably cool it off another five degrees. It's not quite as cold as the North Atlantic, but it's still no fun to be in.

There a bunch of reasons for wanting to swim. Making maximum use of a $20,000 investment is one. Health is another. Just the sheer joy of splashing around in water is a powerful one. The ability to have pool parties is a factor. But the one that most nags at me today is that I realized what a profound farmer tan I have.

I feel like a strange, mismatched action figure, with a tanned head and tanned arms attached to a fish belly white torso and legs. I noticed it when I saw a photograph of myself wearing shorts. So there's another reason I can't wait for it to warm up enough to go swimming a lot.

Random Pronouncements

1. Vertigo Isn't Free

I got my new eyeglasses today. My prescription didn't change all that much, but I still feel like I'm wearing a prism from a high school science class taped to my head. It'll take me a few days to get used to these glasses, but in the meantime I feel like I'm constantly standing on a pitcher's mound. I feel like I'm standing about a foot off the ground, and the world seems to be tilting about five degrees to the left. If I turn my head suddenly my stomach gets all unhappy and makes a rumpus. And all this fun for $250! I shouldn't complain, though - they look a lot nicer than my old ones. All of a sudden I look much more refined and dignified, and I could use the help.

2. Imus Don't Care

I never listened to Don Imus, and I really don't care that he got fired. If the comments about the Rutgers basketball team weren't enough to get him fired, there are plenty of other things in his archive that are. Nor do I think it's really a free speech issue. If he was imprisoned for saying that, then sure, it would be a free speech issue. But as far as I can tell, it was a standard employer-employee relationship between him and CBS, and if his employment contract looks anything like mine, his employer is under no obligation to offer any particular reason for canning him.

But having said that, I do think the sudden profusion of press conferences is a little odd. Back when I played basketball, people said a lot of rude things to me, like "Sweet Jesus, you've got hands like pitchforks!" or "Move your feet, you lard-ass!" or "Your jump shot is so ugly it puts me right off my lunch!" And this was from my team-mates. It never occurred to me to hold a press conference and demand an apology. Instead, in practice I simply set picks with my elbow cocked.

I don't care about Don Imus. My method for dealing with media I don't like is to turn it off, change the channel, or put my fingers in my ears and hum The Girl from Ipanema very loudly. And that's the last thing I'm going to say about it.

Sunday Night

Well, fudge, another three-day weekend shot to hell.

Sunday nights are my least favorite part of the week. I whine about my job a fair amount, but truth be told, once I get there and actually get started working, it isn't (usually) so bad. I wouldn't do it if they didn't pay me, but I've had worse jobs and getting up on Monday morning and going to work isn't the end of the world.

But it sure feels like it on Sunday night. Starting around sundown on Sunday night the dread starts to build, and by bedtime I'm usually a bit bummed about the prospect of having to go to work. Monday evening seems so far away, and Friday evening? Pfft. It might as well never arrive. It's especially bad after a three-day weekend, because I know there won't be another one of those coming up for a while.

I've always had this mild Sunday night dread, whether in regard to school or any of the jobs I've had. I wish I wouldn't do that - it pretty much ruins half of Sunday - but as long as I'm wishing for stuff, I'd like a bulldozer too.

Good luck to Barbara, whose new job starts tomorrow. It'll be fun, I'm sure - at least until next Sunday night.

The Dust Storm Story

And now, by lack of popular demand, I present the dust storm story.

For many years we lived in a small house in Peoria, a suburb of Phoenix. Over those years I collected a lot of unbuilt kits, and when it came time to move, I packed all those kits into various boxes and put them in storage. Due to various scheduling problems, we had to be out of our old house before our new house was ready. In fact, we were out of our old house about a full year before our new house was ready. Two of those months were spent living in a long-term hotel near a Cajun restaurant, so all my stuff (along with pretty much everything else we owned except soap and clothes) had to go into storage. We rented a house and eventually moved there, but we knew that we would only be staying there for six months or so, just long enough for our new house to be finished.

To save money, I emptied out the storage lockers, but there didn't seem to be any point in unboxing everything in the rental house, because we would only be boxing it all right back up again. So the house was full of boxes, and the carport (no garage) was also full of boxes, many of them my boxes full of unbuilt kits.

In the late summer in central Arizona, a weather pattern known somewhat inaccurately as "the monsoon" starts. It gets humid, thunderstorms percolate all day, and by late afternoon storms of considerable power are common. Thunderstorms in central Arizona follow a certain pattern. First comes the dust, then the lightning, and then, if you're lucky, actual rain. Dust and lightning are guaranteed; rain is not.

So anyway, a storm came up, and it appeared to be pretty bad. You can usually gauge the power of a storm by the density and size of the wall of dust that precedes it, and this one looked bad. And there were all my boxes of kits on the carport, completely exposed to the oncoming wall of dust. We started to try to weight the boxes with rocks, but we were too late - soon the visibility had dropped to about twenty feet and the wind was starting to blow boxes around.

Then it got bad. I went out into the storm to try to corral a couple of model boxes that had blown off the carport, just in time for a whole box of kits to blow over and disgorge its contents in a particularly powerful gust of wind. The dust was so thick I couldn't see more than three or four feet in any direction. That is literally true and not hyperbole - at times I couldn't see my own feet for the dust. Model boxes, instruction sheets, decals, sprues and whatnot flew by me in the wind, and I grabbed randomly at what I could, stuffing the rescued bits and pieces into my shirt. In a way it was like netting fish - I didn't catch things, I just held my hands out in the stream of model parts and things blew into my hands.

It was very strange. I've never been in a white-out, but I can say I know what it must feel like, because I was in a tan-out. I couldn't see anything but myself. No houses, no horizon, no sky, nothing but orange-glowing tan dust and fluttering, skittering model parts. For a while I had only the haziest idea of where the house was, and that was only because I knew what general direction the wind had been blowing when the dust storm started.

After the wind let up I went scouting downwind and found sprues, instructions, empty boxes and other model junk in a "strewn field" that extended several hundred yards before the search was cut off because it crossed into private property. To this day I wonder what the owners made of the stuff they must surely have found on their property, stuck in fences or wedged in bushes. To this day I have a boxful of random model stuff I rescued from the dust storm, mostly bagged sprues of parts covered with talc-like dust. One bag of parts survived intact, but there was a hole in the bag and if you hold the bag up, it contains literally an inch of dust in the bottom.

It was terrible. I looked at myself in the mirror and I had turned completely tan from head to toe, except for my lips and eyes, which were ringed with dark mud. The wind had blown so much dust under the doors of the house that we left footprints in the dust on the floor. Dust had gotten into my car through the window seals, turning the grey interior tan.

Oh, those were the days. Sometimes when I look at the sprue bag with the inch of dust in the bottom I can actually remember what the dust tasted like, and it's not a good memory.

Six-Footers

When I start a model, I usually decide at the outset if I want to make a really nice display model, or if I'm just going to make something that will hang from the garage ceiling. I call these latter models "six-footers" because they look pretty good at a range of six feet.

The decision to make a model into a six-footer is usually determined by objective circumstances. Sometimes the kit is missing an important part, usually the canopy. Other times the kit is just really nasty, like the alleged F-84F Thunderstreak that Testors was hawking for a while. Or it's a kit that just doesn't seem to benefit from cockpit work, like the SR-71. You can do all the cockpit work you want, but you won't see any of it, so why bother?

Six-footers usually have their landing gear put away and no cockpit detail at all. I usually paint over the canopy when I paint the model, and later hand-paint the "glass" blue or black and cover it with a few coats of Future to make it glossy. This greatly reduces the amount of work required to finish a model, and I can concentrate on the things I like doing - overall painting and decaling - and avoid the things that I don't much like doing - masking canopies and working with landing gear.

This weekend I finished an MPM P-63 King Cobra, a Dragon Tornado ECR (the 1/144th scale one) and an Emhar F-94C Starfire. They were all six-footers, and all for a reason. I lost the canopy for the King Cobra and the Tornado, and had to carve passable replacements out of Durham's putty. I didn't like the level of detail in the F-94's landing gear or cockpit and decided not to bother.

This probably drives the purists nuts, but that's okay. Purists don't hang their models by fishing line from the ceiling of their garages anyway.

I have an old Arii P-51D Mustang that I was going to make into a six-footer, but as I looked at the parts it struck me that it was actually quite a nice model, and I put it back on the pile. Someday I'll finish it as a nice display model, unless of course I lose the canopy. Then all bets are off.

Also on my workbench is an old Dragon He-219 Uhu night fighter, which is also getting the six-footer treatment. Several parts were missing from this kit - remind me someday to tell the story about the dust storm - and I had to carve a new canopy and belly cannon tray out of Durhams, and tonight I made replacement "stag horn" radar antennae because I also lost the photoetched parts. It won't be as nice as it would have been had I not lost all those parts, but I did lose them, and now it's a case of having a fairly nice six-footer He-219 or throwing it away, because I won't buy aftermarket parts for it.

Lunacy-esta

So you're lying in bed, sleepless and disturbed because you have a "restless mind", whatever that means. Then in through the window flutters some horrid phosphorescent green thing that looks like a cross between a deep sea creature and a paramecium, the kind of horrible thing that seen in the clear light of day would make you reach for a can of Raid or call for a priest. But not to worry - this refulgent thing lights on your head and suddenly you fall sound asleep, leaving yourself entirely at the mercy of the Green Thing.

Where I come from, that's called "nightmare fuel".

We Americans are such pansies. We can't do anything for ourselves any more. Now we can't even sleep. Instead we toss and turn, mentally reviewing our to-do lists, replaying unpleasant phone calls, revisiting awkward social encounters, and driving ourselves mad with our strange combination of heroic self-importance and wilting lack of confidence. So we turn to sleep aids to accomplish what we can apparently no longer accomplish on our own. We invite glowing green fluttery things to enter our bedrooms, light on our foreheads, and do God knows what to our brains.

Where I come from, the only sleep aid I ever needed was Nyquil.

Now, there are certain people who have very good reasons for not being able to sleep very well, such as chronic pain (like my wife) or sleep apnea (like a friend's husband). I don't lump these people into the pansy category, and for them, inviting the glowing green deep-sea moth into the bedroom might be a boon. But I don't accept "a restless mind" as a reason for loss of sleep, and especially when the restless mind is consumed with nonsense like work to-do lists. I can understand being consumed with concern for an absent loved one, a sick friend, or even a pet who isn't doing well. But reliving telephone conversations and to-do lists and social snubs? In the immortal word of Paul von Hindenburg, "Phooey!"

Maybe I shouldn't say I don't accept it as a reason. It's closer to the truth to say that I don't understand it as a reason, because I really don't have that problem. Oh, now and then my mind will start to wrap itself around its own axle as it tries to work out financial issues or worries about this or that issue. But for me, anyway, stopping that kind of useless mental whirling is desperately easy.

Most often, if my mind seems like it wants to act up, I lie in bed and think about disassembling something and putting it back together, visualizing each step in sequence - removing the bolts one by one, cleaning the parts, punching out the new gaskets, and so on. It's boring, and that's really the point - I rarely get past the part where I get all the bolts out before I fall asleep. Common subjects are pulling the heads off a V-8 or pulling the engine out of a tractor, things that are very procedural and involve lots and lots of bolts. This technique is so powerful that if I really do want to lay in bed and reflect upon things for a while (and not infrequently I do) I have to be careful to not think about engines, bolts or wrenches.

But this is America, and we don't do things for ourselves. Why count sheep when you can take a pill that will count sheep, or phosphorescent green deep sea monstrosities, for you?

I'm not sure when it happened - I want to blame the 1990s - but all of a sudden having minor health issues became all the rage. Suddenly everyone had carpal tunnel syndrome, or chronic fatigue syndrome, or allergies to unusual things, or restless minds. This is really more a reflection of affluence than anything else, as working-class people generally can't afford to have carpal tunnel syndrome or neuroses or weird allergies. I'm not saying that allergies, carpal tunnel syndrome and chronic fatigue syndrome don't exist - but I am saying that I think the majority of alleged sufferers are faking it in the same way that they fake cell phone calls. I knew a woman who claimed to be allergic to, among other things, aluminum and "positive ions". Not negative ions, just the positive ones. And the positive ions gave her diarrhea, which only added to my amused puzzlement. And who doesn't have at least one friend who seems perfectly healthy in daily life, able to walk through malls and go bowling and carry new TVs into his house, but who suddenly has a bad back or a trick knee or a thyroid problem when you ask if he can help you move? (I had a friend whose usual excuse for getting out of any kind of physical work was "I hab a sinus infection." To which I once replied "Perhaps so, but you don't lift with your nose, do you?")

I know people who have real health issues - a friend with osteogenesis imperfecta, my wife with a failed hip replacement, a friend's husband with severe sleep apnea, a friend who is in the process of losing her lymphoma remission, a friend who had to have cardiac bypass surgery done at the age of 41, a co-worker who simultaneously got pregnant and was diagnosed with breast cancer* - and it irritates me when I see pansies on TV wrapping themselves in the mantle of wounded suffering as they display sleeplessness, the latest and trendiest malady du jour. Count your blessings, you pansies.

And now, I'm off to disassemble a John Deere 4020 in my mind.

*Knowing me is apparently bad for one's health.

The Shoe Monologue

On my way home from work, I traverse a four-mile stretch of practically deserted county road. It's rare that I see more than one car (other than my own) on this stretch of road, and if I see two, it is traditional to bellow "Holy Moses, where'd all this traffic come from??"

The road is straight and deserted, and I have plenty of time to observe the flora, fauna and footwear along the side of the road. Yes, footwear. I've spotted three shoes along the side of that road, and none of them match (this does not include the pair of shoes hanging from the telephone line).

I could understand seeing a pair of old shoes abandoned along the side of the road, but why three shoes, and mismatched shoes at that? I have visions of a three-legged alien with terrible fashion sense being hit by a dump truck on that road and leaving nothing but its shoes behind. Or maybe three different one-legged men. Or maybe a traveling shoe salesman.

And why shoes? I see no hats, no socks, no shirts, no mittens, no blazers, no trousers. Just shoes. Why do shoes end up abandoned along the road and not turtleneck sweaters or cowboy hats?

I can understand the pair of shoes hung over the telephone pole. What teenager growing up in a rural area hasn't tied the shoelaces of an old pair of sneakers together and tried to toss them over a power line? The fact that I never succeeded does not mean that I never tried to leave my mark on the world in that way.

But who would intentionally abandon a shoe on the side of the road? It just doesn't make sense to me. But maybe it doesn't have to.

Lost

I was quite disappointed with last night's episode of Lost. It wasn't the worst thing I've seen on TV, and even in its wretchedness it was better than American Idol at its best, but that's like saying double pneumonia isn't as bad as leukemia. It is true, but it is also irrelevant (to paraphrase a North Vietnamese official).

It just didn't seem to amount to anything. The whose business of Kate and What's-her-name being handcuffed together was a plot point so easy and artificial they might as well have gotten it out of the Chained Heat script vending machine. The whole thing was... I want to say silly, but that's not really the right word. Easy comes closer to what I'm trying to say. Not easy to film, or easy to act, but easy to write.

Last week's episode was largely irrelevant as a story, but it managed to produce a certain chill horror when they buried Nikki and Paulo alive. But this week's episode? I suppose it was supposed to be a significant advancement in the story, but mostly I found it overly convenient and generally unsatisfactory.

Case in point: Sawyer is a professional con man who made a living by charming women out of large sums of cash, but all of a sudden he turns into a shoe-scuffling dork when it comes time to talk to Claire. In the immortal words of Mike Nelson, "I call no way!"

According To The Amazing Rondo:

"You know a blog is lame when its author accounts for 85% of all its traffic."

- The Amazing Rondo

Losing It

Like most modelers, I buy more models than I finish, and that's saying something because as modelers go, I'm reasonably prolific. I've got about 150 kits heaped up in various piles awaiting their moment in the sun. The problem with this (or, should I say, one of the problems with this) is that I am prone to opening the boxes, reading the instructions, fiddling with the parts and gawking at the decals even though I have no intention of starting the kit any time soon.

This means that I tend to lose things. No, wait a minute, I have to rephrase that. This is America, after all, and America is all about avoiding personal responsibility. So I don't lose things. They are taken from me. Somewhere there's a shadowy team of corporate mercenaries on the government payroll and directed by "intelligences vast and cool" in UFOs that steal my decals, clear parts, instructions and the left front wheel from my dang Boss Nova drag car. It's not my fault I have about fifteen kits that I can no longer complete in the expected fashion because of missing parts.

Actually, in a way, it isn't all my fault. Some of this I blame on the roadrunners. Most people think the Roadrunner cartoon was an accurate depiction of roadrunners. They think they're cute, long-legged seed-eaters that go meep-meep and have a penchant for holding up sardonic signs. One hates to be a wet blanket, but the reality is that roadrunners are violent, ugly, menacing dinosaurs that would gladly eat my liver if they were just a tad bigger. They don't make cute sounds, they don't eat seeds, and they like to come into my workshop, get up in the shelves where my unbuilt kits are stored, and scatter them to the four winds as they scrape out places to hunker down. If I go to my workshop and see boxes all over the floor, I know there's a roadrunner in there somewhere; it's just a matter of finding it. They don't intimidate easily. I had to poke at one for a while with a yardstick before he finally left, and the whole time he snapped at me, made a hideous hissing screech, and flashed red cheek patches at me. I'm sure somewhere in his reptilian brain he was thinking "Oh, if only I had thumbs!" (Yes, I know roadrunners are birds and not reptiles, but seen up close, the reptile label seems more accurate.)

Oh, sure, and I suppose it's my fault I leave the door open too, huh? Pfft!

(I also think I have a pack rat. Every now and then I hear the scurrying of little feet and catch momentary glimpses of a small hairy thing darting behind boxes, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was the pack rat that swiped the canopy for my He-219 Owl night fighter right off my workbench. Oooh! Shiny! That's mine! I needs it! Someday I'll find the pack rat's stash, and I'll probably find all sorts of interesting things - the missing valve stem wrench, the missing He-219 canopy, the missing left front wheel from my drag car and - who knows? - maybe even my four-inch Crescent wrench.)

Oh well. Toss the He-219 onto the pile of stuff what can't be finished.

April Madness

Now that it's April, is March Madness over with? I confess I don't know. I am so disconnected from the world of organized sports I don't know who won the Tournament or for that matter if it's still going on or not. I don't know the record of the local NBA basketball team, and if I had to name four players on the team or face a swift and certain demise, it would be wise of me to make sure my affairs were in order.

I'm not anti-sports. I just don't care about sports. I get disoriented when I watch ESPN because they assume I have some minimum level of sports knowledge, and I just don't. They might as well be talking about organic chemistry or obscure topics in Zoroastrian thought for all the sense it makes to me. Sometimes they don't even seem to be speaking English - it's as though they've developed a special language called SportsJabber.

Ach, My Chest Hairs!

There's a part of me that appreciates tacky horror movies, and for the last couple of weeks I've had The Descent and Saw III on my shelf, waiting for the right moment. That moment came today, after I'd done my flood control earthmoving, my haystack moving, and moving of various other things and sorts.

So here's my capsule review: they're both better than trying to peel tape off your bare chest. How do I know this? Because I was... Oh, hell, there's no polite or tasteful way to say this, so I'll just say it. I'd bought a pre-packaged salad, the kind that comes in a clear plastic UFO and is sealed with tape, and I was naked, having just gotten out of the shower. Bat-21 was on TV, not that I like that movie (after a while the Bird Dog, do you read? radio chatter gets pretty tedious)... The point is that I was trying to eat a salad in bed while I was naked (or "taking an air bath" as Someone Famous once said) and I got the strip of tape that formerly held the salad UFO together stuck to the middle of my chest. I'm not particularly hirsute, but I'm even less hirsute now, the tape having removed approximately 33% of my chest hair from a strip an inch wide and six inches long.

So there's a visual you don't need - me eating a salad in bed in my altogether.

But I while I was at it I watched Saw III and The Descent. Goodness! And be warned that spoilers lurk beyond this point.

Neither one qualifies as "supernatural horror" and neither one generates any real horror. Mostly they generate squirming discomfort, though in different ways.

You know going in that Saw III is going to be full of outlandish traps, blood, screaming, ominously hoarse whispers, and protestations to the effect that Jigsaw doesn't murder anyone; his test subjects simply lack the "stuff" required to survive. And the movie delivers in that regard. The traps are suitably diabolical, there's a sufficiency of screaming and bleeding and bone-cracking, there are a few unexpected plot twists, and in the end the viewer comes away saying "Yes, this was very much congruent with the experience of having watched Saw and Saw II." I think my main criticism would be that it is relatively uninvolving - I didn't have any stake in the survival of anyone at all. The characters are all fairly flat and dull except for Amanda, and she's obviously a fruitcake. A buffly attractive fruitcake, but a fruitcake nevertheless. I also didn't think it matched the pinnacle of horror from Saw II, namely the pit full of hypodermic syringes. So, in short, it was dark, full of jerky camera moves, populated by relatively dull characters, and of interest mainly because it's a part of the Saw franchise. There were only two things that really took me by surprise and generated anything approaching real horror, the first being the revelation that Amanda is a cutter, and the second being Amanda taking a slug through the neck.

The Descent is a lot like The Cave only not underwater. It takes place in a cave that six oddly assorted women try to explore. Like The Cave, most of the real horror of The Descent is delivered by the environment, not the antagonist. The scenes of actual spelunking are pretty intense from that point of view - I'm not cut out to crawl through tiny passageways that are only barely shoulder-wide two miles below ground, so those scenes made my toes curl a bit. Most of the movie is frankly pretty confusing, especially once the party gets split up. There's a lot of running and flashlight-waving, and I got confused on who was where. But I guess it doesn't matter, since none of them survive anyway. In some ways I have to salute the ending. It was a novel way to spin the standard "horror movie ending", but having said that, I thought the touch of the blonde woman chopping the other woman through the knee was overdone. Given the circumstances, I'd have delayed retribution until reaching the surface, as two people have a better chance than just one.

So they're not great movies, but they're good movies. Better than peeling tape off your chest while watching Bat-21, and you can take that to the bank.