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?"

What Stays In Vegas

What stays in Vegas stays in Vegas, I guess. I left some portions of me behind in Vegas and I imagine they're still there. Some carbon dioxide. Some water vapor. Skin flakes. Some of my tame eyebrow hairs...

I have two sorts of eyebrow hairs, tame and wild. The tame ones are thin, blonde, straight, well-behaved, entirely happy to rest closely against my skin, and so placid they can be convinced to fall out without much effort. The wild ones are just that - long, kinky, twisting, oddly-colored, and often so curvy they bend down and poke me in my own eye. And they won't fall out no matter what.

But that's not why I'm here.

I'm here to say a few words about Vegas. I think, upon due reflection, that those words include "noise", "crowds", "secondhand smoke", and "no free lunch". Not that Vegas was a bad time. The purpose was to travel to Vegas to get my nephew hitched, and that mission was achieved in fine fashion. But I guess I'm just not the Vegas sort. If given the choice between going to Puerto Penasco and Las Vegas, I have to side with Puerto Penasco - the rooms are at least as nice, and the ocean is free. If Las Vegas had an ocean, I'm sure they'd figure out a way to charge for it - and find a way to make a not-so-subtle status display out of it. "I'm sorry, sir, but only Platinum Club members are allowed to wade in past their kneecaps. You, being a member of the Sheet Metal Club, are only entitled to get your ankles wet." Meanwhile, members of the Einsteinium Club are faintly visible on the horizon, dodging plastic sharks and shouting "Feed them another homeless person!"

I saw a lot of doors in Vegas marked "Platinum Club Only" but with no idea of what lay beyond them. Roman-style orgies? Fire-lit abysses? Watercress sandwiches?

As most of my regular readers know, I used to smoke until fairly recently, and I'm still at that fairly delicate state of quitting where cigarette smoke bothers me. No, let me rephrase that. It tempts me. It doesn't make me cough or make my eyes water or make liquidy rales come rasping up from the depths of my lungs. It makes me want to light up, man, and drag deep. I didn't. I survived the secondhand smoke and the roaming cigarette girls without wrapping myself in the blue miasma of the tobacconist's art. But it was hard.

Vegas is about the only place left in America where one can smoke in public. As a consequence, people seem to smoke in public in Vegas with a kind of joyous abandon. "I can smoke, therefore I'm going to really smoke!" You almost expect the occasionally overzealous security guards to force hookahs and cigars on you at the entrances to the casinos. In some places the casinos smelled like Rod Serling's ash trays.

Nothing is free in Vegas. You don't even have the option of making a cup of instant coffee in your own room, presumably so you'll buy four-dollar cups of coffee from the faux French bakery down in the shopping district (the zone d'shoppage, fully gridlocked by hommes du cigarettes and shoppeurs). I found this rather annoying and cite it as one of the reasons I'm not likely to return to Vegas any time soon. Between the relentlessly grasping nature of the hotels (six bucks to print out an airline boarding pass! Four bucks for a tiny bottle of Diet Pepsi!), the cheesitude of the faux culture, and the ever-present clouds of cigarette smoke, I believe I'll pass.

By The Numbers

The crew of Expedition 17 is currently in Earth orbit, going through the usual two-day rendezvous sequence before they can dock at the Internation Space Station. Cool enough on its own, but as I was inhaling coffee through my nose and reading press releases, I was struck by the fact that the importance of a person's job in any given spaceflight is inversely proportional to the number of letters in the job description.

For example, let's look at "Pilot". Five letters, short and crisp, and pretty dang important. Even though modern spacecraft are typically under computer control all of the time, someone's got to make sure the computer is running properly and that all the million-and-one checklist steps have been completed. And, in the worst case, someone has to take manual control when the computer burps up a hairball and land or dock the sucker.

How about "Commander"? Nine letters by my count, and thus according to my schema the pilot is more important than the commander, but not twice as important. And what, really, does the commander do except dominate air-to-ground communications? I suppose it's good to have someone who is unequivocally in charge. Heaven knows what sort of Haight-Ashbury chaos might ensue if there was no commander, after all. But I'm comfortable with the idea that the commander isn't as important as the pilot.

Now we have that staple of the ISS, the "Flight Engineer". That's fifteen letters plus the whitespace, and exactly one third as important as the pilot. What does the Flight Engineer really do? Lots of technical stuff that doesn't involve piloting or commanding. The Flight Engineer is usually seen on NASA TV wrassling with veritable Sargassos of plastic tubing, though I'm not sure why.

Then there's the equivalent in the Shuttle world, the "Mission Specialist", which is 18 letters and presumably somewhat less important than the ISS Flight Engineer position. Is this fair? In the shuttle program, the title "Mission Specialist" is usually given to people who are neither commanding nor piloting, and who have no specific technical training for a given payload. The mission specialists are the EVA guys, the flying schoolteachers, and the "guest astronauts" flown as part of a patronage program, so yeah, in general I'd say they're a little less important than the ISS Flight Engineers who keep the hardware ticking over for months and months at a time.

Then what about the "Payload Specialist"? This is another Shuttle-only job title, in this case referring to someone who has specific training in and responsibility for a specific payload. Still 18 letters, and thus on par with the Mission Specialist. Fair? I guess so. I would personally tend to think that the Payload Specialist should be one rung lower on the totem pole than the guys who, say, repaired Hubble or tacked another truss segment onto the ISS, so maybe I'll lobby to have them redesignated "Payload Specialiste".

And then there's is the bottom of the rung, the "Spaceflight Participant", which is 22 or 23 letters or so (it's so long I ran out of fingers). What's a Spaceflight Participant's main function? Making a very large deposit of cash into the nearly derelict Russian space program. Past that, they might vacuum out the air filters and change the CO2 scrubber cartridges, but don't count on them making dinner. I'm also told that a major part of the Spaceflight Participant job involves being spacesick on a grand scale (consult the book Riding Rockets and its discussion of the "Garn" as a unit of spacesickness).

Thus we again see how Apollo was superior to everything else. All the crew members had crisp three-letter acronyms for their job titles - CDR, LMP, CMP - and thus nobody had to feel insecure for having a clumsy job title. Those were the days! Now it's a seething minefield of jealousy and hatred.

Baxter!

We have a little orange cat named Baxter, but it's hard to prove that he exists. Nobody ever sees him. He sleeps in the closet all day and only comes out at night when nobody is around. He's about as easy for guests to see as the Tooth Fairy, and when I talk about Baxter the Imaginary Cat I'm sure my friends are all silently gritting their teeth and thinking "Oh crap, please don't let him to totally crazy till we're outta here!"

So here's proof that Baxter really exists. You'll just have to take my word that it really is Baxter, though the underexposed, poorly-framed nature of the photograph is in keeping with all the rest of the photographs I've taken, so even if you adopt the viewpoint that I'm faking it in a despairing attempt to appear "normal", you have to admit that at least my photographic evidence is consistent. My, wasn't that a long and somewhat tortured sentence?

Diet

I can't decide which event was the most traumatic for me, my heart attack or my bypass surgery. But either way, ever since the heart attack, I've been fairly conscious of my diet. Perhaps not as conscious as I should be, but I've tried to eat in a relatively sane way that would simultaneously cause me to lose weight and cause my cholesterol levels to move toward healthier levels (my numbers are 190 total cholesterol and 117 LDL, which were better than I expected. Still, the targets for people in my boat are pretty aggressive, so I started taking simvastatin and Zetia to get them to <170 and <70 respectively).

But as powerful and effective as modern drugs are, diet still plays an important role (one imagines, anyway). So my wife and I went on the South Beach diet on Monday. We happened to see a book called The South Beach Heart Program that contained a lot of useful and interesting information on coronary artery disease. It made its case so convincingly that after reading it and The South Beach Diet we went on the diet.

We're about at the end of the first week of Phase 1, the strictest part of it. A great many things are permissible on the diet, but a great many things are also banned, including anything that would make for a convenient breakfast. No cereal, no muffins, no bagels, no instant oatmeal, no flavored yogurt, no fruit juice, no fruit. Breakfast options generally come down to two things: eggs, or meat. Or eggs and meat, I guess. Not that this is a problem with my taste buds, but it suddenly turns breakfast into an undertaking. That's my only real complaint with the diet so far, that breakfast preparation has become time-consuming and messy. And one could argue that that's not a problem with the diet but with my own faulty application of cooking science.

Still, the diet works. I don't weigh myself every day because my bathroom scale is a notorious liar. It seems to delight in being wrong, and it's often wrong by quite large amounts. As much as I'd like to believe I really weigh seven pounds, I'm pretty sure it's just the scale messing with my head. I gauge my weight by sensing the tightness of my belt, and the belt's testimony is clear: I'm shrinking.

But I knew I would. My wife and I did the Adkins diet four or five years ago, and we stayed on it for a couple of years and lost tons of weight. I can't remember what my total weight loss was, but it was close to 100 pounds. Unfortunately, we didn't stay on the diet permanently and the weight came back and invited some of its friends along for the ride. And, though I can't prove anything, I can't help but wonder whether all that bacon had anything to do with my heart attack. I honestly don't know and I didn't have my cholesterol tested often enough to know what direction it was headed in.

The author of the South Beach diet is pretty adamant that it isn't a "low-carb diet". He prefers to call it a "good-carb diet". But if you compare it to the Adkins diet, you'll see that it's in the same general category, with a strong emphasis on eliminating "empty" carbohydrates and little or no emphasis on "counting calories" in the traditional sense - once you eliminate the empty processed carbs and bring your insulin levels under control, portion size will work itself out automatically.

South Beach differs from Adkins in several important respects, however. One is that Adkins turned a blind eye to fat consumption. If you wanted 83 pounds of bacon in one day, good on you! As far as Adkins was concerned, one fat was about as good as any other. But South Beach is more sophisticated in its handling of fats. Some, like olive oil and canola oil, are encouraged. Others, like animal fat, are tolerated but discouraged. Others, like palm oil and triglycerides, are excommunicated entirely. So while you can have bacon on the South Beach diet, you're expected to demonstrate a little mature restraint and call it quits at two or three pieces, not two or three packages.

Another difference is that the South Beach diet has more wiggle room in what it permits. Cereal and milk were pretty much grub non grata on Adkins, but you can eventually start adding cereal and milk back into South Beach, so long as the cereal isn't reinforced with sugar and the milk is low-fat. This is a boon to people like me who aren't necessarily at their most productive first thing in the morning and for whom cooking a breakfast of steak and eggs at 6 AM isn't a major life goal.

But fundamentally they're about the same things and point at the same basic metabolic fact - that "white carbohydrates" are bad. And unfortunately, white carbohydrates are addictive and convenient so you have to give something up to lose weight and improve your health. For me, it was always the convenience angle that was most difficult. I'd be on my way home from work, tired and drained and hungry, and I'd think "We can cook something at home and fight with pots, pans and cutting boards, and have to clean the stove and wash the dishes, or I can just stop at Taco Bell." That was what eventually did in the Adkins Diet for us, we got lazy and started buying food that was easy, and food that's easy is almost always bad. And once you start down that slope, it takes a conscious decision to stop. We didn't.

And so now I have coronary artery bypasses and a patch of damaged heart muscle, but I like to think that I have a more advanced understanding of myself now. And I think South Beach is something I'm going to be able to stick with and turn into a lifestyle. The alternative is another heart attack.

Two Bad Things

I watched a TV show very early Saturday morning that got me to thinking about picking out two bad things that go worse together. Asparasus? Bad. Giblet gravy? Bad. But asparagus with giblet gravy? Two bad things that go worse together. Britney Spears? Bad. Rush Limbaugh? Bad. Britney Spears and Rush Limbaugh making out in the back of a station wagon? Two bad things that go worse together.

The show was about a "dance battle" between a break dancing crew and a loose association of five or six krump dancers. Or were they crump dancers? I confess I don't know. It featured endless torrents of utter bilge from the organizers, hoohah about "keeping it real" and whatnot, and given the context, I can't even begin to guess what "keeping it real" means. What's the alternative? Keeping it unreal? That could be more fun than keeping it real. Keeping it real usually involves income taxes and car insurance; keeping it unreal could involve phasers, transporters and emitting tachyon pulses from the main deflector dish. Which would you prefer?

In the end, the contest was judged a draw, which suited me fine. The crump dancers looked like they were trying to beat up ghosts for the most part, and the break dancers ("b-boys") kept pulling their arms into their sleeves and reminding me unwittingly of the old joke about Nazis. They were also annoyingly obsessed with their overly precious hats. But the draw seemed to perturb the dancers, all of whom assumed that they had won, but since there were no judges and no judging criteria, I'm not sure how anyone could have determined a victor. Maybe one group had snappier costumes, I don't know, or had more energy during the chorus.

So why did I watch this show? Because my sternum is still pretty sore from my bypass surgery and after sleeping for four or five hours, I tend to wake up. Not every day, but often enough to watch dance battles on TV.

Adolf Hitler? Bad. Saddam Hussein? Bad. Saddam Hussein and Hitler scrawling anti-Semitic slogans on the wall of my bathroom? Two bad things that go worse together.

(The old Nazi joke: Where do Nazis keep their armies? In their sleevies. The other old Nazi joke: How to Germans tie their shoesies? In little Nazis.)