"You're From The Sixties!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Psht-psht-psht.

Mayhem

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

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

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

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

The Blame List

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

So here's my visual aid.

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

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

NATO Reporting Names

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think I've had too much coffee today.

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

But now I'm boring me...

Please To Understand!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not Responsible

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chilling

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

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

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

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

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

State of the Art for 1978

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

.

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

.

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

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

It's Official

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

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

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

Such as?

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

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

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

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

The World According To Jon Garp

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

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

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

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

Democratic Bobbleheads

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

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

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

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

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

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

Historical Nugget

And now, a dash of Arizona history.

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

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

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

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

The Fruits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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