Time Warp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iowa

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

S-300 Missiles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indie Jones

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

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

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

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

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

Will Smith and Adolf Hitler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gloomyguses

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

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

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

Now That's Inappropriate

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

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

My goodness.

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

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

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

Master Control

"This is Master Control, awaiting instructions."

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

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

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

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

Karelian Metal

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

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

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

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

In Honor of Baseball

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

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

Enough baseball.

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

Zounds, me hearties!

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

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

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

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

Space - The Final Frontier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview with a Candidate

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

Hello, and tell us a bit about yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Hypocrites!

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

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

Iowa Blockages

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

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

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

Despair at Lincoln-Mercury

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

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

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

More Gazelle

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

But for now, it remains slightly imperfect.

RPGs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mein Gazelle!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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