A Trip to the Oncology Clinic

I had my first chemo treatment this morning.

You show up and sign in, and then you're encouraged to sit wherever you want. There is a large open room with about 25 black leather recliners arranged in it, each one with its own IV stand and portable cabinet of sharp stuff. You can bring in whatever you feel like - blanket, food, book, iPod - but this time I mostly read what they gave me, a set of extremely ominous articles about the drugs in question (one of them, did you know, is chemically related to mustard gas? Two of them were classed as "irritants" and the other two were classed as "vesicants", AKA "blister agents", and all were said to cause gross damage if they got out of the vein...

But not to worry, I guess; it's just more of the boilerplate. They hook up the IV to the port and flush it out with a snog of saline, then they run a little bag of some anti-nausea drug and some steroid that's apparently helpful in a general way. Then comes the first chemo drug, a large bag of toxicity that takes about an hour to run. After that comes another bag of saline, then they push two small syringes of two additional chemo drugs in. Then comes a large syringe of some red fluid; it's plenty toxic and they actually time how long they take to push it in; too fast and it can get nasty.

Then there's more saline, a final hosing-out of the port with heparin, and you're free to go. Total elapsed time, about two hours, not even enough to nibble my caramel popcorn.

I didn't feel a thing the whole time I was there. I didn't know what to expect. Immediate retching? Burning heat in my veins? A sudden desire to belt out songs from Oklahoma!? But really, I didn't feel anything at all. Side-effect-wise, the worst thing was having the tape ripped off my chest when the IV came out.

I went home and took a rather long nap, and when I awakened, I felt for all the world like someone was sitting on me. Someone fairly big and heavy too, Magnus ver Magnussen or someone of that sort. The sensation was very much like waking up and realizing that one has come down with something without knowing what it was. I felt heavy, slow, lethargic and drained, and since that's how I've felt for the last month, well, it's hard to say that I felt any worse.

Now, about 12 hours after the chemo, I detect the first leading edge of nausea. I was watching LSU destroy Georgia Tech in the Whatever-It-Was Bowl (I'm bad at remembering bowl names) when something somehow made me very queasy, and it was obvious that the TV was making it a lot worse. So I downed a nausea pill and got the hell away from the TV, and thus far my nausea is tolerable. I don't think I'll be eating anything for a while though...

Now here's the interesting observation. By far the most bothersome symptom I've had, far and away worse than just "feeling bad", was the agonizing pain my left lower back, left groin, left hip and left groin (left kidney to left knee, roughly). It was for this pain that I was taking Percocet about as fast as the instructions permitted, and it was this pain that made me think "Oh my God, how am I ever going to go back to work? This is impossible! This is going to require either a medical leave or unprecedented quantities of painkillers, and neither one is really good!"

But for whatever reason, that pain is gone. Not reduced, but gone. Did the steroid tamp down some inflammatory process associated with the tumors? Are the tumors themselves shrinking, or "debulking", as they apparently like to say? I don't know. All I do know is that if this is really a lasting consequence of chemotherapy, I'm going to have to put chemotherapy down in my book as a legitimate medical miracle no matter how fiddlesome the process is.

That's the news on this, the last day of the year.

Time to end this year and move on to a new one unfreighted by bad omens, bad luck and bad karma. And what more fitting way to do that than to have the year go out kicking and screaming in my first chemo treatment?

I don't know what to expect. I will be under the drip for roughly three hours. They suggested that I bring a blanket, a book and something to eat. Imagine that! A medical procedure so long you have to pack a lunch! I don't think they really intend for me to bring lunch, necessarily. A few crackers or something. But still, nobody said I couldn't bring a picnic basket with fried chicken and cole slaw, did they? They also said that when (not "if") the nausea started, they would supply me with drugs to control the vomiting. With that in mind, a fried chicken picnic basket maybe isn't the best idea in the world. Maybe just an apricot or something.

Anyway, it sounds like I'll be under the drip for three hours, and from roughly the halfway point on will start to "feel tired". I interpret this to mean that from the halfway point, the chemo drugs are going to work me like an Army mule. Is the blanket for warmth, or to dampen the sobbing and whimpering? :)

Actually, I think the blanket is mostly to mop off my corpus. These lymphoma sweats are truly impressive things and the odds are that if I'm there for three hours, I'm going to have one, and I'll need the blanket so I can exploit its large-scale absorbency and thus (hopefully) not look like I just crawled out of the pool.

Maybe I should take nothing but an apricot, a bucket, my iPod, and a Sham-Wow. Write down another use for that thing!

Portion Size

Dawg in her "I swear I heard potato chips around here somewhere" pose

I find that I eat a lot less these days. Not that I'm complaining - for person who historically could eat most of a medium-sized ham at one sitting, this new dietary restraint is welcome and overdue. It means that we waste a certain amount of food, though the word "waste" may not be entirely accurate, since what I can't eat generally finds its way onto the floor for Dawg to consume. The laws of dog karma say that I should divvy out the excess food evenly between Dawg and Elmo, but Elmo doesn't like most Man-Food and it takes him forever to make up his mind to eat things like dressing or hot dog chunks. Meantime, Dawg has eaten her entire share and is slavering for his, scrabbling and clawing in a desperate attempt to get to his spuds before he makes up his mind.

So the usual process is that I pass the plate to Dawg and say "Don't tell Elmo about this." Within seconds the food is gone, and other than the suspicious hint of brown gravy and Italian dressing on Dawg's breath, nobody is the wiser.


I suppose there's some actual scientific theory to explain this reduction in appetite, just like the theory that explains why Hodgkin's makes you itch like a naked man in a room full of mosquitoes. But I think it's merely that feeling bad as a consequence of overeating is now piled on top of feeling bad as a consequence of cancer, and my body is slowly learning to avoid things that make it feel bad. You'd think that by this age I'd have already figured that one out, but NO.


But we have to get this portion size thing figured out, because the real loser in all of this is Dawg. She's always had a certain tendency to run on the chunky side, but she's starting to show a certain plushness - good for those times when it's three in the morning and hugging the puzzled Dawg is the only thing left that I can do without waking Jean up, who needs sleep worse than I do, but not so good for Dawg's own health.

Holding Pattern

I continue to wait for my opportunity to start chemo, and in the meantime, I don't know what to say. I don't want to report that I'm getting worse, but I think I am. The pain in my left thigh, hip and left lower back have become chronic and intense. I think my foot and lower leg are actually starting to decompress a little, that is, to become a little less swollen, but it turns out that the lymphoma has slipped the bounds of the lymphatic system in my leg and it's infiltrating my left thigh and groin, which also accounts for its oddly swollen nature, perhaps, and its extremely painful nature, perhaps. I have occasional difficulty swallowing. I'm so doped up that most of the time I'm not entirely sure what I'm thinking.

I'm probably setting myself up for disappointment by hoping that the first chemo treatment on Wednesday will debulk the tumors in my groin and leg to the point that I'll regain reasonable use of my leg, but I have to believe in something. The alternative is to sit awake all night and reflect upon the fact that I haven't had any treatment at all yet and am, technically speaking, dying of this shit. Stage IV. Lovely.

I'd rather hold out hope for an unrealistically-rapid cure, if it's all the same to anyone else.

I have the strangest craving for canned peaches. What can it mean? When I get over this lymphoma stuff I'm going to publish a list of Immutable Laws and I suspect at least a third of them are going to involve canned peaches in some way.

Just Too Much

Here's a photograph of mild interest, at least to me. First off, it's a photograph of a model displayed on the hood of the truck and posed in a way that it causes a kind of unintentional confusion. Plane? Car? House? Sky? Runway? Or doofus with a camera?

Second, it's a picture taken with my cell phone and emailed to my computer, which for me is an act of almost frightening cybernetic sophistication. Why, next thing you know I'll be programming up artificial intelligences and making pivot tables. This is not normally the sort of thing I do. I still half-expect to have to look down into the tops of cameras, so that's how advanced I am.

Third, it's a picture of the Italeri re-release of the old and treasured AMT/Ertl XB-70 Valkyrie nuclear bomber, not to be confused with the Tom Cruise nuclear bomb of the same name (I'm sorry, Tom Cruise as a Junker aristocrat? I'm just not seeing it). The XB-70 was too much of everything. Too powerful, too big, too expensive, too fast, too radical, just too damn too everything, so obviously it's the sort of model airplane that's right up my alley. Six J-79 jet engines? I need me some of that! I thought after the demise of the AMT/Ertl issue that we'd never see this particular model ever again, but those charming lads at Italeri have stepped into the breach and rescued it from oblivion.

I probably won't start working on the XB-70 for a while, but at least I have it. It is far too big and cumbersome a model to work on in bed, and sitting up in a hard chair to work on a model isn't particularly pleasant yet. Though my lower left leg and foot seem to be improving a little, my left hip, thigh and lower back are still pretty bad, and I find that when I'm in a lot of pain, I lose patience for some of the finer aspects of model-building.

"Honey, you glued the cowboy to the horse's belly; was that on purpose?"

"No, I just lost patience."

Day After Christmas

Twas the day after Christmas,
and all through the house...
Not a creature was stirring,
and neither would I have been had I had the sense to have taken my Percocet on schedule.

The Marrow Of The Issue

I had my bone marrow biopsy this morning. The oncology clinic called and said "If you can get here in half an hour or so, we can do the procedure." So once again I found myself being subjected to a medium-painful procedure without so much fortification as a single cup of coffee!

Oh, it wasn't that bad. The doctor used a goodly quantity of anesthetic (Lidocaine?) so I didn't feel the various needles passing through my skin and flesh. But the big needle jamming into the crest of my hipbone was a pretty intense experience. Not painful, really, though it was quite painful. Mostly it was just really intense. I'm reasonably tough, or like to pretend that I am, but the biopsy left me drenched with sweat and and shaking. It didn't help that my bones proved to be very hard and dense. "You won't suffer from osteoporosis later in life," the doctor remarked as he leaned on the T-handle and tried to drive the needle into my bone. (The first biopsy needle bent and they had to get a new kit.)

Later I found that the copious quantity of anesthetic he used had partially shut down my right leg, so I had a bit of a Walter Brennan gimp going as I left the office. Dag-nabbit, Little Luke.

So now I have a new dressing, this one on my back, and once again I can't take a shower. Arrrgh! I'd give almost anything for a hot shower at this point. Twenty dollars, fifty, take my dawg, I don't care!

Chemo starts Wednesday, of a form he described as "medium-aggressive". It's one day of chemo followed by two weeks off, repeated as necessary but for at least six months. Interspersed will be a PET scan and possibly a bone marrow biopsy (whee) to see if the treatment is working.

Time for orange sherbet, which sounds incredibly soothing to me right now.

Symptomology

I can't sleep to save my life tonight. Or at least, not at this instant. I slept earlier, but once I awaken under these circumstances, sleep doesn't always return. One of the symptoms of Hodgkin's Lymphoma is what the books circumspectly call "night sweats". I call them "an absolutely disgusting torrent of sweat." Doesn't matter if you're awake or asleep either, apparently - I soaked the sheets and woke myself up, and now I'm soaking my shirt and shorts in front of the computer.

Another symptom is a sudden attack of nonspecific itching. Normally it's just the broad surfaces like my back, shoulders or chest, but sometimes (like right now) even the small, fiddly patches of skin get involved. Even that structure that lies between my nostrils itches. The skin behind my ears itches. The whole sweep of my back itches all at the same time. I have vivid fantasies of taking off my clothes and standing in a car wash so the industriously-whirling scrub brushes could itch every part of me simultaneously.

So here I sit, itching and scratching and sweating. Lovely image, isn't it? I feel filthy. Nobody can be this itchy and sweaty without needing a shower, right? And, truth be told, showers sometimes do help. I mean, at the very least you don't have to feel beads of sweat running down your legs and into your socks. But I can't take a shower yet - surgeon's orders. I sport a gay festoonery of dressings from my biopsy and Borg Implant, and the surgeon doesn't want them to get wet. Inasmuch as one of them could provide bacteria with access to my vena cava (superior or inferior? I wish I knew) I guess I should take orders seriously.

I guess the modern approach is to sponge betadine in huge quantity over the areas of interest and to let it dry afterwards. I have (well, had) dried betadine all over my chest and neck, and even had a good deal of it in my hair. Tonight's profuse night sweat has sort of mobilized the betadine, however. It's flowing down my chest in streaky rivulets of rust-colored sweat and betadine, as if I didn't need another reason to desperately crave a shower.

But oh God this itching it driving me mad. It isn't like a rash, where the same spot itches over and over. It's different. It's every spot itching at one time or another. You scratch your nose, then the small of your back, then behind one knee, then an eyebrow, it just goes on and on and on like a childhood game of Locate All Your Body Parts.

And now I'm starting to hurt again. I can feel my pain pills losing their edge.

So let me wish everyone a merry Christmas, and let me wish us all peace and prosperity.

That said, I'm going to go take some pain pills and see if I can convert a broom into a high-speed overall-body scratching apparatus. Yowzer.

It Has A Name

Well, it has a name. The surgeon who did the biopsy apparently kept prodding the pathologist, who said it was Hodgkin's. The official report hasn't worked its way through channels yet so I guess technically I still don't have a diagnosis, but the "telephone diagnosis" is Hodgkin's. And it's good to know.

But in a way, I was hoping for one of those other lymphomas that didn't have a name, just so I could call it "Earl's Lymphoma" or something. I didn't really want to name it after me. It's like Lou Gehrig's Disease; everyone shudders and thinks "Oh man, that poor bastard." I don't need a lot of poor bastard shudders associated with my name, so I was going to name it after Earl.

Another Step

The biopsy node has been taken out and the port, central line or whatever you choose to call it has been put in. I feel really no pain at all from those incisions, just some generic pulling and tugging from the patchwork of dressings I wear on the right side of my chest and neck. I'm supposed to be in bed and not up and "farting around", as they say, and soon enough I will be. The catheter from the port goes down into my vena cava and they really won't want it to come out. They don't? Me either!

The worst part was the weird bulge in their operating table. Maybe I was on it wrong or something - I routinely overflow hospital beds and operating tables - but it was pushing a bulge of something into the small of my back that was extremely painful. They tried for a few minutes to rearrange me with pillows, then the surgeon finally told them not to bother; I would be out within a few minutes anyway. And I was.

One step closer, though I'm festooned with dressings and can't really move my neck in any direction at all. It reminds me a tad of the grand old bypass days.

Man of Few Words

Biopsy tomorrow. Vicodin tonight. Comedy at some unspecified point in the future.

Holland Loader

Sometimes, when you feel bad, only a Holland Loader will suffice.

http://www.hollandloader.com/Default.htm

I first saw one of these many years ago somewhere near Las Vegas. Like the time I beheld one of those Petersen DD9G Quad-Tracs converted to a ripper, it was an experience that remained with me. This modern Holland Loader is yoked to what appears to me to be a pair of Cat D10s; the one I saw had a pair of Allis-Chalmers HD-41s. The D10s are better dozers by far, but back in the day the old HD-41s had a certain machismo.

And having ruminated thus, I feel better.

Bowls

I spent most of yesterday watching obscure college football bowl games. At least that's what it looked like from where I was sitting.

I think for the sake of efficiency I'll establish a rule that unless I say otherwise, each successive day should be assumed to be worse than the day before. Yesterday was very bad indeed, but there's no need to for me to say how bad because of this new rule. Today, however, is a little better than yesterday, so I'll mention it in passing.

But I spent most of yesterday remaining as stationary as possible and watching college football. It was the day of obscure bowl games, apparently, though I'm used to bowl games happening betwixt Christmas and New Years. I guess when you're a Division 9 team, you play when and as you can. The Chutney Bowl. The Hominy Bowl. The Affiliated Plastic Lunch Tray Bowl. But I'll say this much: most of the teams (according to the announcers) don't hand out athletic scholarships, so there was refreshing lack of ego. None of this T.O., Heisman candidate, hyping the self BS, just a bunch of guys out playing football in places I've never heard of and, generally, going a good job of it. Just the kind of soap required to get an oily Cowboys game off one's skin.

A Message

And now, a message from the Sturgeon-General:

Warning! Eating caviar may be harmful to your health.

I met with the general surgeon today, who I quickly came to think of as the surgeon-general, and then the sturgeon-general. I have a node (not the node, because he didn't seem sure which one he most fancied yet) removed Monday, and this is a big step. It's where they finally arrive at a final diagnosis of what it is. Is it lymphoma? And if so, what sort? I confess there's a part of me that thinks that even at this late hour they'll reject the lymphoma diagnosis and say "Oh, it was just tuleremia or a bad cold or the funky chicken or something." But four out of four doctors think it's lymphoma; it's hard to argue with that kind of surety.

Time to get started. I'm losing leg function at a rate that in a week will probably cripple me. The weird thing is that I can walk and stand fairly normally, but I'm losing the ability to put on shoes, socks and pants, and I'm having trouble getting in and out of cars. The surgeon felt that once chemo started the nodes would just melt away and things would be better. That's a thought I believe I'll cling to.

The Dickens!

My leg hurts like the dickens today, and I've crossed a new boundary in my experience with illness: I've actually taken a Vicodin before coffee. This makes me feel like a lowly moral coward. A lowly moral coward without a deep stabbing pain in my leg, but a lowly moral coward anyway.

But what is a dickens? All my life I've enjoyed picking up odd non-standard words from people around me. One of my favorites was jag. My dad would say "Let's go get a jag of dirt," where jag was synonymous with truckload. Curiously, there didn't seem to be a half-jag or a quarter-jag. Nor could one have a jag of, say, lumber or scrap iron. Only dirt and gravel constituted a jag, and any quantity thereof was a full jag.

Another one that I like, simply because of the way it rolls off the tongue, came from my Uncle Bob in Iowa, when he would refer to a direction as caddywampus. "You head caddywampus across that field," meaning go across that field cross-wise at some arbitrary angle. He also once referred to a badly twisted barn as being caddywampus, which suggested that the word had more utility than you'd think and could be applied to something that had been cruelly twisted out of useful shape. (Stephen King uses the word widdershins to convey the same idea, but I contend that a widdershins sounds like some kind of gelatinous mollusc that lives in glorious but constrained majesty in some ghastly Maine tidepool before its cold, gooey life is snuffed out by something even nastier.)

My grampa was occasionally agin the idea. That's what he would say. "I'm agin the idea," though it was not always clear exactly what the idea was. He often said it to himself while scrawling a disorienting network of lines, dashes and squiggles on a piece of steel plate with a soapstone. If he was in a hurry, he was merely agin it.

But yeah. My leg's gone all caddywampus, as though I've been hauling jags of dirt, and I'm agin the idea.

Duct Tape

Tomorrow is my last workday for two weeks. It's also our highly mysterious Christmas party that they weren't going to have but decided to have anyway. It's all very hoosh-hoosh, as they say, but if it conflicts with my appointment with the general surgeon, well, I guess I'll have to miss it.

Because, yes, by cracky, tomorrow we decide which of my sullen nodes deserves to be gouged out of my flesh. The actual procedure isn't until next Monday; this is mostly a dry run designed to get me familiar with where the hospital is and stuff.

I'm a little put off by the idea of the shunt. What if it comes out? I don't think they're supposed to come out, but the Titanic wasn't supposed to sink either. I figure I'll cover it over with duct tape and JB Weld just in case.

The Irradiated Man

My PET scan today was interesting. It turns out that I have an inflamed schnauzer.

Mostly it involves a lot of lying around. Lay in a dark room and rest for an hour as the material works its way through your body. Lay on the PET scan table for a half an hour as the table moves back and forth in little jerks. This was a combined CT scan/PET scan, so the ring-shaped CT scanner was spinning around me, uncannily like the rings on the space portal machine in the movie Contact.

PET scans make you radioactive. When I had the nuclear stress test, the technetium-99m tracer caused me to emit gamma rays at about 105 keV (kilo-electron volts). But the fluorine isotope in the radioactive sugar for the PET scan causes one to emit gamma rays at 511 keV - five times the energy of the nuclear stress test, and hot enough that the technicians had no desire to be in the same room as I. Later I sat in my cubicle at work and realized that never once in my entire life did I ever imagine that I would end up intensely radioactive...

One more test out of the way. All that remains now are the two biopsies. I'm in something of a hurry to get started, because when I bend over I feel a strange sensation in my chest that I think is an enlarged lymph node pressing into my lung. It's deeply disturbing and I'd just as soon it was taken care of immediately. But there's a disconnect and the only hospital that the insurance company will authorize is heavily backed up...

That's what happens when you've got an inflamed schnauzer and a dawg that smells like Beef-a-roni.

Tomorrow's Test

Tomorrow I have a PET scan. I can already predict the results.

"Dear sir:

Most of your pets are spoiled, fat and ill-behaved. The exception is Max, who is merely spoiled and ill-behaved. Your dog smells like Beef-a-roni and the cats have fish-breath from eating canned salmon. Oh, and while you weren't looking, the other dog ate all your fig newtons."

That's the sort of PET scan I expect.

PET scans are actually fascinating. I don't know if anyone's all that interested in the mechanics of the thing, but suffice it to say that it involves anti-matter. Yes, anti-matter, that great hokum from Star Trek. The way it works is that imitation glucose molecules are tagged with radioactive isotopes of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen or fluorine (usually the latter because if its slightly longer half-life). Inside the body, the radioactive isotopes undergo what is called beta decay, and in the process emit positrons. A positron is the anti-particle of the electron - yes, Virginia, it's real anti-matter.

These positrons fly out into your tissues, where they quite by accident encounter normal electrons. The two particles completely destroy one another and produce a pair of gamma rays that are in the ballpark of 511 keV, moving in almost exactly opposite directions (the conservation of momentum isn't just a good idea, it's the dad-gummed law). The gamma rays are then received by the scanner, which exploits the paired nature of the gamma rays to selectively reject gamma rays that come from elsewhere.

The result is a three-dimensional model of the metabolic activity taking place in your body. The brain and heart are pretty active, but so are cancers, and by noting the prevalance of metabolically "hot" lymph nodes in one's scan, one can determine the extent of one's cancer.

And my dog really does smell like Beef-a-roni, by the way. I don't know why.

Sung to the tune of Huey Lewis

I need a new phone.

I think it's time. I've had the same old cell phone for a long time, and it's been of only marginal usefulness to me. For one thing, the battery appears to consist of paper clip electrodes submerged in an applesauce electrolyte; the point is that the battery literally lasts only about seven minutes. If you call me and I suddenly fall silent after seven minutes, it's not because I was suddenly laid low by The Grippe or struck by a meteorite; my battery just quit. This is no exaggeration. It fails to rapidly you can actually see the battery bars dwindle. I bought a new one a while back, but it's really no better. Maybe I shouldn't have purchased a phone with a toaster-oven attachment.

The next problem with my phone is that my number was recycled from some previous person. Whoever this Calvin fellow was, he must have been something of a man about town, because I get no end of calls from, shall we say, crisis debt management firms looking to have unholy congress with his checking account. The man's got some bad debts is what I'm saying, and they automatically assume that just because I answer the phone I must be the Calvin in question.

It might be different if it were some lovely contralto voice saying "Hey baby, tell me about your Krebs Cycle." But it's always a harsh, nasal voice that says "We're going to nuke you into next week if you don't call us back."

I stopped answering the phone, partially because I don't enjoy empty threats, and partially because by the time I convince them that I'm not Calvin and I never purchased a set of Harley-Davidson leather trousers, my seven minutes of battery time are up and I'm back in the Land that Time Forgot. So why bother? Better to not answer the phone at all than to have seven minutes of highly unsatisfactory parley with people who constitutionally mistrust me (you can hear it in their voices: "You say you aren't Calvin, but I know you're really Calvin, because you sound like Calvin, you bastard!").

What would life be like if my cell phone number had been used by someone more notable? Say, Judge Judy?

Rough Day

Today was a rough day. I don't know why it was so bad, necessarily. Perhaps a byproduct of the nuclear stress test, perhaps an insalubrious alignment of the planets, perhaps just bad luck, but I felt like crap all day, with the nadir occuring around noon. I'm always quick to attribute this sort of thing to eating the wrong kind of food, eating a bad piece of bologna, failing to take my medications at the right time. But what if it isn't really anything like that? What if I feel like crap just because I've got cancer and my body is starting to unwind and fail?

Brrr. Scary thought.

Time to get that chemo shit going! For those keeping score, Monday I go to my PCP, and Tuesday I go back to the oncology institute (the one "behind Albertson's", in their memorable phrase) for the PET scan. That leaves only the invasive biopsies to be done. I figure I'll take the first course of chemo just before Christmas, which means on Christmas eve at mom's house I'll be sitting in a corner, wearing a plastic poncho with a bucket between my legs. How festive! Maybe I can find a nice green bucket.

Wow

If anyone invites you to participate in a nuclear stress test, you may want to consider unlawful flight as an option.

Oh, come on, it isn't that bad, is it? Besides, who in their right mind would encourage people to avoid useful diagnostic tests?

The hard part of the stress test is getting your heart rate to the desired target, which in my case was about 150 beats per minute. To achieve that, they had to speed up the treadmill until I was walking literally as fast as I could. One tiny bit faster and I would have had to break into a run, which might actually have been more comfortable. And the angle! I felt like I was a Mexican speed-walker going up the Lhotse Face, for crying out loud. Never mind me, just on my way to the Geneva Spur...

But bear in mind that what started this whole medical extravaganza was the fact that my leg had ballooned up like something the Montgolfier Brothers would have been proud to claim, and over time had become increasingly painful and balky. My leg didn't enjoy that experience. Not at all. And it continued to let me know that it found that experience objectionable until I got myself propped up in bed and took a Percocet. In fact, it's still kind of pissed off at me, but at least it's stopped packing its little overnight bag.

The take-away from all this? If you have any kind of problem with your legs, skip the treadmill and go straight to the adenosine, a drug that chemically simulates exercise. I wish I had. Adenosine is pretty creepy, in my opinion, but it beats having your left leg suffer what NASCAR fans might well refer to as "the Big One."

And thus I offer my sorry experience as a service to mankind.

Griping

I don't necessarily mind all these tests. I don't mind having various radioactive and radio-opaque substances squirted into my veins, or having various forms of radiation sent sleeting through my tissues like hail through a sheet of newspaper.

What I mind is not being able to have coffee in the morning. These 24-hour fasting tests are a bummer.

So I get out of bed. Already I can smell coffee on the air, because Jean's already had a cup. And I walk out to the kitchen and think "Yes, a hot cup of aromatic coffee would be splendid, wouldn't it?" And there stands the coffee maker, and there stands the supply of my preferred Sumatran Reserve coffee, and there's my cup, and I think "No, I think instead of this wonder of nature, I'll have a glass of cold water. Yeah! That's ever so much better than coffee!"

I've been known to cheat before medical tests before. What difference could it make to, say, a lipid test if I sneak a cuppa Sumatran Reserve or not? And if the numbers end up being way off, who cares, we'll just repeat the test. But these recent tests have a more overtly life-and-death aspect to them, and I think I'll resist the urge to cheat.

But not the urge to gripe about it.

Tomorrow's Test

Tomorrow's test? Nuclear stress test. Have to make sure the old ticker is up to the challenge of having a node taken out and a Borg implant put in. Oh, it's just a shunt, but I prefer to think of it as the first of many steps that will lead, ultimately, to Borg. Resistance is futile.

I'm considering taking a big jug of vodka with me tomorrow. What better to help one deal with a stress test than a big jug of cheap vodka, huh?

I am a little freaked out by the fact that the radioactive tracer used in the test is thallium. Hey, isn't that also the active ingredient in rat poison??

Diagnostic Update

I don't want to beat lymphoma to death because I've already vowed that I don't want to turn into a professional cancer patient. I want to remain me, and if I happen to write about lymphoma now and then, well, that's fine, but I don't want to make a career out of it.

We still don't know what exact form my lymphoma has taken. I have to go in and have a node surgically removed for microscopic examination, I need to have a bone marrow biopsy (ick) and I need to have a PET scan. That will allow them to determine the nature and extent of my disease, at which time they select the appropriate chemotherapy drugs from their amamentarium and let me have it with both barrels.

I'll likely have six months of chemo, with a five-days-on, 25-days-off schedule. I expect this to be a fairly unpleasant ordeal, but my oncologist seems reasonably certain that the results will be good. He believes I have an aggressive, fast-growing form that also succumbs to chemotherapy quite well, as opposed to slower-growing, almost-benign forms that can't be killed.

It can't start too soon. My leg is really becoming a problem and the nodes in my neck and head are starting to ache, though as Jean pointed out, maybe I just have a huge stress headache.

Diagnosis

Well, I've been given a diagnosis of lymphoma based on what the doctors saw in my CAT scan. The exact nature (Hodgkin's versus non-Hodgkin's) will require a biopsy to determine. I only found out today, so I have no idea of how I'll be treated, how advanced it is, and what my ultimate fate might be. I'll know more tomorrow, after I see the oncologist in the afternoon.

What a spectacular turn of events.

No, Really, That's Enough

TV has really gotten on my nerves today. It usually does, but this time, it's gotten in my nerves in two very specific ways.

The first is an ad for the TV show Brink, which strikes me as a sort of gosh-wow science show for the people who don't know much about science. Brink as a word is apparently a neologism intended to convey a sense of cutting-edge science-ness, or, for lack of a better set of words, gosh-wow-ness. And here's the bit that really gets under my skin. "A lunar rover? Not brink. A Mars rover built in someone's back yard? Brink!"

Wait a goddamned minute here. You design and build a lunar rover that not only meets certain critical weight and space requirements, but folds up so it can be stored in the descent stage of the LM and survive the vibration and gee forces of flight on a gol-durned Saturn V, but can be unfolded and deployed by only two men wearing highly restrictive spacesuits, and it works and allows the astronauts to travel a much farther across the moon's surface while providing excellent-quality TV pictures and telemetry, and that's not brink? But some guy builds an obvious clone of Spirit and Opportunity in his back yard and drives it across his lawn and it hasn't so much as been near a booster and that's somehow brink?

Oy. In other words, Brink isn't brink. No need for me to waste time with that clinker. I anticipate that watching it will only cause me to hemmorhage.

The second item is when Michio Kaku asks the plaintive question "What the heck is a parallel universe anyway?" Oh, I know what they're thinking, but I also know what I'm thinking, which is "A parallel universe is really a fanciful bit of fiction intended to buttress a particularly messianic interpretation of the superstring guess (it doesn't yet qualify as a theory) but since a parallel universe can't (as far I know) be measured or accessed in any way, it's just as much fun to imagine that my garage is occupied by invisble, massless blue Hungarians who dance and cavort and would be great fun to watch if we could figure out a way to actually see them or hear their multi-dimensional accordions."

He's better off asking "What the heck is a misleading question anyway?"

Back to my book. At least Brian Lumley hasn't yet employed the word "brink" or demanded an accounting of me about the nature of parallel universes.

The Tenth Album

Readers of my previous post will no doubt be acutely aware of my last-minute choke, namely, citing the Nine Crucial Albums because I couldn't make up my mind on the tenth one. Well, I think I may be ready to declare the tenth album, but not without (as is my wont) a great deal of needless palaver.

Let's list some of the contenders.

Shadows Fall, Threads of Life
Not popular amongst the death metal set because it is more or less overtly metalcore, this still isn't a bad album. Taint death metal or black metal, but taint straight Hatebreed-style metalcore either. I happen to like it, but I don't think I would thrive on a steady diet of it.

Amon Amarth, With Oden On Our Side
I like this album because of its workmanlike nature. There's nothing new or spectacular here, just a bunch of guys who like to eat and play death metal, and really, does everything have to be a damned artistic statement? Sometimes you just want to headbang in the company of guys who, like me, rarely skip dinner.

Entombed, Left Hand Path
This one gets in on the technicality vote, based more on its novelty and otherness than how much I like it. I have to be honest and say that I'd like the album a whole lot more if pinched harmonics were not present in such abundance. Here's what pinched harmonics do for me. They remind me of the Dr. Rockzo character in Metalocalypse, complete with that preternaturally squirming scrotum and the jubilant cry of "I do cocaine!" But other than that, there's certainly nothing wrong with the "death and roll" music. (Ironically enough, considering this album's status as a classic of metal, Entombed was once dismissed by no less than Hellhammer when he said "I was playing with the shit band Entombed...")

Enslaved, Eld
I don't know if this qualifies as Viking Metal or not, but I usually regard it as such, based mainly on the occasional outbreak of manly Viking-style choruses where one would normally expect black metal screeching. And musically it's quite striking - the guitarist and drummer both manage to sound different and novel without sounding weird (listen to the first minute or two of A Long Time Ago and you'll hear what I mean). You can generally listen to a mystery song and tell within a few seconds if it's by Enslaved because of the characteristic style. But it isn't perfect. At 16 minutes long, the first track is self-indulgent and useful mainly for killing the last 15 minutes of a workday.

But the winner is:

Insomnium, The Day It All Came Down.
It's just that good, at least for me. I particularly commend the song Daughter of the Moon. It isn't death metal except by the most narrow and technical of definitions (the vocalist gurgles) but whatever it is, it appears to sooth my Inner Finn, and who could argue with that?

Here is an item of Finland lore that I suspect most people don't know. The highest kill ratio established by any fighter aircraft in any war was established by the chunky Brewster Buffalo in Finnish hands, flying against the Soviets in the Winter War and the Continuation War. Put that in your sauna and sweat it out.

Compendium Metallicum

The Nine Crucial Metal Albums I Don't Leave Home Without*

Carcass Necroticism (Descanting the Insalubrious)
This is a classic of death metal that's kind of grindy and sloppy, and includes what is perhaps the
best kind of grindy, kind of sloppy death metal song ever performed, Corporeal Jigsore Quandry. Later Carcass (such as Swansong) is cleaner, tighter, more accessible and more commercial, but somehow it seems to lack the energy and warped sense of humor of this album. If you aren't ready for the full grindy-deathy immersion, you may want to consider Choice Cuts, a "greatest hits" album that mixes early and later stuff into a mess that might be more to the taste of newcomers.

Mayhem De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas
A classic in minimalist Norwegian black metal, and the only real album that ever came out of the
Count Grishnak/Euronymous pairing, a pairing more notable for murder than for music in that the former ended up stabbing the latter in the head (he claims it was self-defense, but still, he stabbed him in the HEAD, man). It's pretty good black metal, not as "abraded" as some early black metal, but well short of the florid nature of Emperor's In the Nightside Eclipse. The album has two main failings. One is that the vocalist sounds a trifle silly sometimes. Instead of sounding like an evil dwarf, the desired sound for a black metal vocalist, he sounds like he's trying to pass a navy bean through his nose. The other is that the album doesn't have much variety and if you listen to the whole thing, the last few tracks develop a strong "been there, done that" vibe.

Insomnium Above the Weeping World
This is a Finnish band that started out playing more or less conventional melodic death metal in
the Swedish fashion, but starting with their second album they began to move away from death metal and toward something that one is tempted to call melancholic metal. It's not really doom metal (or "doomdeath", as it is technically known) but it isn't death metal either. Indeed, by the third album (Above The Weeping World) the melodic death metal influence is difficult to detect, but the album is atmospheric, artistic and heavy all at the same time. Insomnium is often compared to Katatonia, and I can understand why, but I personally think they surpass Katatonia. There are three tracks of particular interest on this album, The Gale, Mortal Share, and In the Groves of Death.

Burzum Filosofem
This is one of the strangest and yet most evocative of black metal albums, minimalistic and spare, but at the same time almost hypnotic. Each of the six tracks are lengthy and could strike the pop-attuned listener as tedious, but each has a specific texture and feel that sets it apart from the others. It follows the usual black metal trope of having a fairly thin and "abraded" sound, especially the vocals, which even at high volume strike the listener as being at-best half-heard. This was the last album made by Varg Vikernes before starting his prison sentence for stabbing Euronymous in the head. Parts of the album hint at the dark ambient sound that he would later dabble with (dark ambient seems to be the curse of black metal - you make black metal, you experiment, and all of a sudden you're doing dark ambient, and nobody knows why).

Avenged Sevenfold Sounding the Seventh Trumpet
Normally I'm not a fan of metalcore. I leave the defense of metalcore to its fans; I for one don't
really enjoy all that hoarse shouting. And there's normally something poppy and juvenile about
Avenged Sevenfold - it, like Slipknot, is the Approved Metal of Summer Break, when fifteen year olds listen to metalcore and ride skateboards and experiment with cigarettes. But this album, Sounding the Seventh Trumpet, has a nice variety of songs and doesn't have that poppy teeny-bopper sound that we've come to know and hate. I quite like it, and I like the way that the album seems to knit itself together to form a seamless whole.

Metallica ...And Justice For All
America doesn't, in my mind, make good death metal, or good black metal. But it does make good thrash, and this is among the best thrash albums ever made. It isn't as aggressive and heavy as earlier Metallica albums, but it reveals a growing musical sophistication and confidence that the earlier albums didn't have. They were toothy, but unfinished. Justice isn't quite as toothy, but it's a more rounded listening experience, including as it does the seminal One and the slower, almost reflective To Live Is To Die. Some Metallica fans claim that one can detect in Justice the looming sell-out that the Black Album turned out to be, but I don't agree. I don't get much of a sell-out whiff from Justice, personally. But I do have a lot of fun spreading the rumor that Dyer's Eve is absolutely unplayable in concert even with fifty musicians.

Dark Tranquility The Mind's I
There are, as a general rule of thumb, three major Swedish melodic death metal bands. Not really three, but I simply for the sake of illustration. On the one hand is In Flames, which seems thrashy and commercial to me. On the other hand is At The Gates, a band that I'm frankly still trying to come to grips with. And on the gripping hand is Dark Tranquility, which is speedy and reasonably metallic but not really very heavy at all (where heavy means, basically, it sounds like Dismember). I like it, but sometimes I find myself wishing for just a bit more heavitude. The song Still Moving Sinews comes to mind: I love the beginning, with its strange stacked power chord descent, but then the bottom falls out and it turns into, I don't know, pablum. So I like Dark Tranquility, but I don't rely on them to deliver crushing riffs or mind-altering heavitude, because that's not their game. They're much more delicate than that.

Dissection Storm of the Light's Bane
Dissection did a form of music known to the inner circle as "blackened death metal", meaning it was musically related to death metal but employed black metal vocal techniques and lyrical content. And it's not a bad album. Better than hoary classics like Venom's Black Metal or Emperor's In The Nightside Eclipse. Where the album goes awry is its real-world trappings, what with the leader of the band committing suicide after penning an outrageous press release announcing that he'd accomplished Satan's work on earth. That so?

Dismember Like An Ever-Flowing Stream
This is pretty much the primal essence of grim death metal. Dismember reminds me of Carcass, but Carcass in a bad mood. The lyrical content of this album is pretty obnoxious and I wouldn't recommend anyone look up the lyrics, but the music is pure electric saw metal mayhem of a sort that I happen to like. Probably my favorite track on the whole album is Justifiable Homicide, which seems to invite one to engage in shoutery.

* It was supposed to be ten albums but I never could make up my mind on the tenth one.

Failout

Let's see. The economy is melting down. A key segment of the US industrial economy is on the verge of dying. India and Pakistan are edging closer and closer to war, each side polishing its nukes. The Taliban is coming back, smarter than ever if not actually stronger.

But we have news stories like "The top five movies that make Jennifer Aniston cry."

Do I care what moves make Jennifer Aniston cry? NO!
Do I care what Jennifer Aniston thinks? NO!
Do I even know who the hell she is? NOT REALLY!
Do I care? NO!

On a different subject:

I don't understand what's gotten into Congress. As as of the last time anyone fessed up to me, the US government has hosed in excess of $300 billion on various financial companies, and usually without requiring the financial companies to do anything at all. We (meaning the taxpayers) had to pay to bail AIG out twice, and that was *after* their swanky retreat. I heard a radio report (since quashed, I imagine) to the effect that the various financial "institutions" (I guess it makes them sound more noble than "financial companies") had spent about a third of the bailout money on things like stockholder dividends and executive compensation. Not, in other words, what we naively expected them to spend it on.

Then the automakers come to Washington to ask for between $25 billion and $34 billion in credit, loan guarantees and direct loans, and all of a sudden Congressmen turn into Scrooges. "What? A bailout? We can't just give you money! What do you think you are, an investment bank? Get real!" So to get the bailout, the Congress lays increasingly bizarre conditions on the automakers. "You have to fire your CEO. You have to stop using the letter 'X' in car models. You have to reduce by one third the number of restrooms in your factories. We want to see at least forty thousand retirees be killed, skinned and recycled into cat food to reduce pension costs. You have to alter the universal gravitational coefficient."

Why can the US government hose money all over the banks, who produce nothing tangible, and not all over the carmakers, who at least produce a product that can be seen and felt and, in principle, exported? Is this some kind of bizarre discrimination against blue-collar workers? Or, even better, another manifestation of the government's fairly widely perceived hostility toward unions? Are banker types seen as intrinsically more worthy than line workers at a GM transmission plant? Is Gordon Gekko combing his hair with a piece of warm bacon somehow more entitled to help than a guy that runs a CNC mill in a transmission factory? Is it because the Congressmen in question hope to score rich consulting positions for Wall Street firms once the electorate throws them out on their flaccid, ineffectual backsides?

This is really incredible. Congress has apparently decided that their hypcrisy doesn't stink. It makes me think that maybe there are too many lawyers and bankers in Washington, and not nearly enough engineers, doctors and machine tool operators.

Mind you, I do think it is appropriate for the carmakers to present a business plan that details what they're going to use the money for and what steps they're going to take to regain viability. And I further think it is entirely appropriate for the old guard corporate leadership to step down - as the consultants always say, you get the behavior that you reward, and rewarding failed executives doesn't seem wise to me.

But at the same time, the pretense that white collar Wall Street jobs are somehow deserving of bailout while blue-collar manufacturing jobs are not seriously pisses me off. Seriously. Full stop.

The Lost Weekend

Well, the four-day weekend is almost over and it's time to start getting myself ready to go back to work. It's kind of a drag, but not too severe of one. Mostly it means getting up early in the morning, which I resent even though I'm usually up early anyway.

I had a good Thanksgiving. The main familial Thanksgiving was fun, even if the Arizona Cardinals did stink up the football field something awful and a blob of some manner of food fell off my plate and into my shirt pocket. The second "Thanksgiving with Friends" the next day was fun too, even though my wretched bum leg made me feel like a bit of a wet blanket. But it did seem that practically everyone I ran into over the weekend thought I had lost weight, so I've got that going for me (and what a wonderful thing to say to me too, I might add).

And now it's time to go back to work. Mostly, in my mind, it's one day closer to finding out what's wrong with my leg and, hopefully, having it fixed. And then, back on the exercise program!

Not Technically

It's not technically Thanksgiving yet. That doesn't happen until tomorrow, but I doubt I'll get to spend much time near my computer, at least not until we all get back from Thanksgiving with the extended family. That ought to be fun. I expect several of them to be nearly psychotic with outrage that Obama won the election; the others won't wear their hearing aids and it'll be a nonstop festival of well-intentioned but quite loud shouting.

Meantime, I decay. Something has gone horribly wrong with my left leg and it's swelled up to twice or three times its normal size. I can barely bend it at the knee, and sometimes my skin hurts because it doesn't like being stretched like sausage casing. The swelling goes down at night a bit, but not much. It sucks. It's hard to get in the car. It's hard to put on socks and shoes. Sometimes I wear a compression stocking on my lower leg, but it hurts so much by the end of the day that I want to scream.

I went to the doctor to have an ultrasound performed on it. The "ultrasound guy" never tells you anything. Ask him what time it is and he refers you to the "ordering physician", which makes me think of Chinese take-out. But obviously he found something of interest. He spent a few minutes at most on my calf, behind my knee and at a spot a few inches above my knee. The rest of the hour-long ultrasound ordeal was dedicated to minutely examining a spot in my far upper thigh. I don't want to give too many gory details, but let's say that by the time it was over with, I had so much gel in my underpants I didn't so much walk as slither. My testicles haven't been that slippery since... well, ever, really.

Now I wait to see what's wrong with me. It isn't a congestive heart failure thing, because that would involve both legs. It's a blockage or a blood clot or something. They'll probably say "Eh, it's just the new you; adapt or die, bub." So I can look forward to lugging this immense 3X left leg around, right?

I started taking Vitamin B-6 and dandelion root because they're alleged to be mild diuretics, and anything that wrung a little water out of my leg must be good. But I can't report that they've made much difference at all. Maybe I'm using them incorrectly. Maybe I'm supposed to smoke them or something. Nothing does much good. Elevating my leg improves it a little bit, but not very much. I think I'm becoming depressed about the whole thing.

But this is Thanksgiving, damn it! We're supposed to be talking about things we're thankful for, not stuff what depresses us. So what am I thankful for? The fact that I'm still alive, I guess.

Whee!

De Craw

I went to Lowe's today to get stuff for the garden, and I think I'm officially disappointed with their seed selection. Lots and lots of green bean types, but no green onions? Did I see that correctly? I did. I got leek seeds; maybe leeks harvested early will resemble green onions. Yeah, and maybe leeks harvested late make their own soup (I can't think of leeks in any way at all without being reminded of Knorr leek soup).

While I was there I bought one of those multiple-tined claw-like tilling tools. Normally I just turn the dirt over with a narrow garden spade, but those claw deals have always tempted me. This one claimed to not just dig up hard-packed soil, but to annihilate it entirely. We'll see.

The soil on my property varies considerably from spot to spot. On the western and southern expanses, it is basically sand and gravel to some indeterminate depth. I've dug down a ways and never really dug myself out of the gravel, though the deeper one goes the more one starts to encounter flat lenses of clay. In the middle part (including where my garden is) lies an intermixed layer of silt and clay about three feet deep overlying an apparently bottomless (and surprisingly wet) gravel formation. In the eastern regions, though, the ground becomes all clay all the way down, and it's as hard and bitterly resistant as unshelled Brazil nuts. It's as tough and hard three feet down as it is at the surface, which makes planting trees in the front yard unpopular.

Which is extremely boring, now that I think about it, but if you want an exciting blog, maybe you should be looking elsewhere, aye?

Anyway, in the next few hours I'll test out the craw and see if it works worth a damn (and will throw it a good distance if it doesn't), and I'll lay out my odd mix of seeds and see if they please anyone. Spinach, head lettuce, leaf lettuce, Brussels sprouts, carrots, bulb onions, leeks, beets, broccoli and cauliflower... If they don't work, I guess I'll throw them too.

Commercial Rebuttals

Americans are becoming a wildly unscientific bunch. Exactly why that is depends on who you ask. People blame video games, public school, the Internets, pop culture and heavy metal music for this state of affairs, but whoever you blame, the result is the same: Americans are turning into dunces.

I blame TV commercials. For example, one set of TV commercials tells us "grace is power" or "precision is power." I hate to quibble, but power is an amount of work divided by how long it takes to perform said work - P = W/t in other words. Grace is an unquantifiable term, and precision refers to the repeatability of successive measurements. And neither one is power.

Then there's the one with the breathy indie folk singer type who, over the plinkety-pink of "soulful guitar", gushes that she's green today and chirps with joy like crickets. Wait a second, I always thought crickets chirped with reproductive intent, not joy. They chirp, humans slather on Axe and wear jeans two sizes too small ("His batch," Crow T. Robot gasped in horror). But neither one has anything to do with the joy of being alive, or the insipid cloying sensibility of overwrought indie folk music. Blech.

My favorite is the one where the ominously self-possessed somewhat post-pubescent Young Thing tells us that these plant-based cleansers she's hawking don't contain any "nasty chemicals", presumably because they're plant-based. Sure. And plants never produce any nasty chemicals, do they? Curare, aconite, poison ivy, deadly nightshade, foxglove, oleander, heck no, I can't think of a single plant that produces a "nasty chemical."

Gawd.

Tornado Lust

Rather than doing anything productive this morning (like cleaning the kitchen or even making toast) I watched another episode of Stormchasers on whatever-the-hell channel it comes on. Discovery, I think. And what an unseemly mess it is.

Not that I have anything against stormchasers, stormchasing, making money off stormchasing, Doppler radar or anything else. Guys want to chase powerful storms looking for tornadoes? Hey, this is America, and if you can figure out a way to make money out of it, more power to you.

But holy cow, do they always have to be so excited about tornadoes all the time? They're hooping and hollering and pumping fists as though the advent of a huge-assed tornado is the best thing that's ever happened to them, better than their first kiss, better than their first orgasm, better even than their first beer.

I think if I were a Kansas farmer who'd just lost everything I owned, including probably my wife and kids, and I saw video of these juvenile knuckleheads cavorting and high-fiving over the F4 tornado that wiped out my farm, the urge to punch their teeth out would become overpowering.

Show at least a little decorum, would you, and not give off the creepy vibe that you're about to masturbate on the spot? In the words of Dr. Evil, "Starting to creep, just a little."

Home Sick

I stayed home today. I got about an hour of sleep last night, something I ate this morning nauseated me intensely, and I feel like a radio-controlled toy running on that last despairing trickle of battery power before everything stops.

When I was a kid I liked staying home sick. Nobody liked having the mumps or chicken pox or whatever, but it was still kind of fun - it got you out of school, and you had the feeling that whatever the illness was, it wouldn't last long, wouldn't be that bad, and would more than likely get your mom to get you some ice cream. So yeah, bring on the fever and the rashes and the whatnot, and make my ice cream strawberry while you're at it!

Being sick when you're older isn't as much fun. In my case, I don't have sick time, so I have to ask myself "Am I really that sick? Taking the day off costs money." And my illnesses seem a lot less interesting these days. When I was a kid, I had actual diseases - mumps, measles, chicken pox. Now what do I have? "I feel like crap." "I'm run down." "I just can't seem to get my ass in gear."

What fun. Meantime, I'm going back to bed.

War Zone

I see they picked Ray Stevenson to be the Punisher in the War Zone movie. This is probably old news to everyone. People who visit Hollywood news websites have probably known this for at least 120 years, but it's news to me because I don't haunt such websites and typically don't know what movies are coming out, or who's in them, until the trailers hit satellite TV.

Ray Stevenson is a good choice. He has the right stature and physical presence to be the Punisher, and he's about the right age and has the right ruggedness. And if one can judge from the work Stevenson did in the HBO series Rome, I think he'll have no problem with the physical aspects of the acting job. (Might I say that Rome was a splendid bit of TV and that Ray Stevenson's Titus Pullo was the bedrock of the series. The contrast between Pullo's good-natured affability and raw brutality was stark and, I think, very Roman in nature. The scene where Pullo and Cicero have their fateful meeting in the garden is a perfect example.) I always argued that the ideal man to play the Punisher would be a bulked-up Robert DeNiro from roughly the vintage of Ronin, and that's sort of what Ray Stevenson is.

The main question is whether Stevenson can pull off a suitably flat American accent, and I don't see why not. This is the one area where I thought Thomas Jane did a particularly good job. I thought he was far too young and handsome to be the Punisher in the last movie, but the voice was right on the mark. I got so used to the Thomas Jane voiceover in the Punisher video game that I actually can't imagine any other voice for the Punisher.

Did You Know? That the Roman name "Cicero" mentioned above means "chickpea"? Think about that the next time anyone describes "chickpea" as a great orator and able administrator and unmasker of the Cataline conspiracy.

Natters! Yippee!

I've always liked the German Ba349 Natter rocket interceptor. Well, I shouldn't say "like", because that sort of implies that I wish I'd gone to the senior prom with one, and that isn't the case at all. Let's just say I find the Natter interesting in concept and design, a vertical-launch manned rocket interceptor that works more like a surface-to-air missile than an airplane, with the rocket engine and the pilot landing by parachute and the rest of it going straight into the dumpster. No loss though, since it's made mostly of laminated wood and the WWII equivalent of melted-down tin cans.

The latest issue of FineScale Modeler contains a lengthy article by Matt Irvine, which is good for two reasons. The first is that I always enjoy his articles (I always enjoy his books too; Creating Space remains high on my list of "beach books"), and the second is that his article was about a massive display of Natters, ground vehicles, launch towers, gewgaws and whatnot, complete with a representation of Dr. Erich Bachem himself, looking more like a Pentecostal preacher than a German engineer.

I won't say that FSM has bored me lately, but I think it's fair to say it hasn't exactly thrilled me either. Oh great, another 1/32nd Trumpeter this-or-that... Oh great, another 1/35th Tiger with more aftermarket parts than Don Garlit's dragster. Ho-de-hum. It's the superdetailed German armor with $500 of added detail parts that particularly exhaust me. But all of a sudden here's Matt Irvine and Natters, and my day is brightened.

But it also betrays the subtle risk in doing too much research on the Internet. Matt in his article claims that the Natter made only one manned flight, namely, the fateful flight were Leutnant Lothar Sieber was killed. It took off, vanished into clouds, and presently reappeared coming straight down. Officials blamed the canopy for tearing away prematurely, though it is possible it came off because Sieber was attempting to bale out. Postwar investigation revealed that at least one of the four solid-fuel booster rockets had not jettisoned properly, a much more likely explanation for the accident. Not that matters; Sieber was dead and that was that. Matt says in more than one place that this is the only manned vertically launched flight until the flight of Yuri Gagarin in 1961.

But I've read in several places that after Sieber's flight, the Natter development team flew several Natters unmanned and with success (the Patin autopilot could manage that task) and then flew at least one fully successful manned flight. But since nobody ever seems to cite the name of this alleged German pilot, maybe his flight is more alleged than I like to think. I suspect without being able to prove it that Sieber's flight was the last flight sponsored by the SS, who had a habit of taking things over in Germany, but Bachem himself may have tried to carry on the program. But either way, Matt is right: Sieber's flight is the last confirmed manned flight of the Natter.

I don't think the Natter would ever have been the answer that the Germans were looking for - the whole Jaegernotprogramm was doomed to failure by the very scale of the problem that the Germans faced, even if the most promising aspects of it (such as the Wasserfall) had worked. Nor should it; the Nazis could not under any circumstances have been allowed to win the war. But as an off-the-cuff attempt to build a rocket, the Natter deserves a certain amount of respect. Just don't ask Lothar Sieber what he thinks of it.

PS: "Natter" is a tricky word to translate. Some sources render it as "viper", while others have it as "colubrid", which is a huge family of snakes that does not include vipers. So I don't know. I usually settle for "viper" because it seems like a more virile-sounding name than colubrid...

Phoenix Finis

NASA officially pulled the plug on the Phoenix mission this week. The Mars lander went silent early in November and finally, after remaining silent for a week, was declared dead. It was a natural and expected death brought on by the coldness and darkness of the Martian winter. Unlike the rovers or the spacecraft in orbit around Mars, Phoenix had a limited lifespan and the only question was how long it would hang on before cold and dark killed it.

It used solar panels to collect electricity to operate its computer and instruments, and to keep its batteries charged. As the Martial winter approached, the sun dropped lower and lower in the sky, making it difficult for Phoenix to collect enough energy. Eventually its batteries ran down to the point that it couldn't run its computer and communicate with Earth, and it fell silent. NASA gave it a week to see if it could "trickle-charge" its batteries into a last spasm of activity, but it remained stubbornly silent and was declared defunct..

It lasted about five months on the surface of Mars, though it was originally expected to last only three months. There is a technical possiblity that when the next Martian spring arrives the increasing amount of sunlight will recharge the battery and Phoenix will suddenly wake up from its coma, but it is extremely unlikely - it will spend the winter mantled in a coating of dry ice, which as you might imagine is not a good environment for electronic devices.

The first spacecraft designed to explicitly look for life on Mars were the Viking landers, which
touched down on Mars in 1976. They carried various experiments that scientists felt would answer once and for all the question of whether there were microbes or other forms of life in the Martian soil. The actual experiments produced odd, unexpected results that to a small group of scientists looked like evidence of life on Mars and looked like "funny soil chemisty" to the majority.

For years NASA and the ESA dispatched additional spacecraft to Mars, but instead of trying to
answer the Big Question ("Was there ever life on Mars?") these new spacecraft were designed to test a smaller but more basic question: "Were there ever conditions suitable for the formation of
life on Mars?" And that question can in turn be boiled down to this: "Did Mars ever have large amounts of liquid water on its surface that organisms could have grown in?"

It's really hard to say if you've found life or not. Even on Earth it's not always clear if a dark mark in a rock is a hardy algae, or just a smear of dirt. And on Mars, the peculiar soil chemistry made it difficult to find life by the usual means - dump some Martian dirt in a warm nutrient soup and see if it starts to produce gas. But it is easier to say if you've found evidence of liquid water or not, because liquid water leaves certain telltale clues behind, such as stratified and cross-bedded sediments, the presence of carbonates, the presence of certain chemicals like hematite and so forth, things that we know from prior experience require liquid water to form.

The two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, were designed to carry out a detailed study of the Martian surface to look for such evidence of liquid water, and the evidence seems pretty firm that Mars did indeed have liquid water on its surface for a significantly long period of time. You might think that having found evidence for liquid water, the next question would be "Was there life in that liquid water?" But really the next cautious question is "Where did the water go, and why?"

It was always assumed that the water in the Martian northern ocean vanished by two main routes. Some of it would evaporate and in the from of water vapor be blown away from Mars by the solar wind, along with the remainder of Mars's atmosphere (one of the many downsides of a planet not having a magnetic field). But most of it would simply sink into the planet's porous regolith and freeze underground. Measurements taken from orbit hinted that this was the right answer, but until someone actually landed there and found said ice, it was nothing more than a hypothesis. So Phoenix was designed to land in the extreme northern part of Mars and determine by direct measurements if there was ice in the ground.

And it did. Phoenix found ice aplenty, both fairly solid chunks of ice and a sort of rime-and-dirt
mixture. This confirmed the theory that the water had largely frozen into the crust, and helped to confirm that there had once been a genuine Martian ocean. None of this proves that life existed, but it provides answers to basic questions like "Could life have existed?"

Phoenix also got to the bottom of the "funny soil chemistry" that so vexed the Viking landers. It
turns out that the Martian soil contains peroxides and perchlorates, which are powerful oxidizing
compounds. Many scientists, upon hearing about this, said "That's it, Mars must be sterile because these peroxides and perchlorates are the kiss of death for microorganisms." And indeed they are - usually. In fact, if you went just by the experience of the two rovers and Phoenix, you'd have to say that Mars was an extremely hostile environment for life: bombarded by ultraviolet radiation because there's no ozone layer, bombarded by cosmic rays and charged particles because there's no magnetic field, tortured by peroxides and wrecked by perchlorates; what chance could life have against such dreadful odds?

Then people doing research in the Atacama Desert of South America found a class of bacteria that actually eat and thrive on perchlorates found naturally in the dry, cold soil. This doesn't automatically mean that there are Martian bugs that use perchlorates as an energy source; it simply means that at least in the case of the Atacama Desert, perchlorates are not an automatic death sentence.

So, from the life point of view, we're back to square one. There was once liquid water, and that
liquid water is frozen into the rocky soil of the northern hemisphere. There are peroxides and perchlorates in the soil that normally kill bacteria, but there are bacteria that use them as food. So the life question still isn't settled, by any means. So that is Phoenix's legacy: the confirmation of ice, and a first assay of the strange chemistry of the Martian soil.

Every scientist and engineer ever involved with a Mars spacecraft probably has fantasized at least once about looking at a high-resolution photograph of the ground next to the spacecraft and seeing obvious evidence of life. Something lichen-like clinging to the side of a protected alcove, or a fossil of something with obvious radial symmetry. They never admit such fantasies because science makes people cautious and methodical, and because it's considered gauche to hope for such a find. But Phoenix did something almost as striking. It found the water, and where the water is, so also lies the hopes for finding life on Mars.

Ornamentation

When we went to Home Depot yesterday I saw that they're already laying out the Christmas decorations. Perhaps they anticipate a really bad Christmas season and they're starting early, or perhaps it's normal to crowd out Thanksgiving with Christmas decor. This sort of thing used to bother me when I was younger, but looking back on it now, I can't really figure out what was so awful about it. What does it bother me if stores put up Christmas displays and play Christmas music even though Thanksgiving isn't even really in the planning stages yet?

But my, how the ornaments have changed. When I was a kid, it seemed that most of our familial ornaments were either clear glass bulbs with chipped stripes painted around their equators, or spiky, spiny Sputnik-looking deals that I think were made out of a primitive sort of chrome-plated plastic. The lights were immense. I don't keep track of light nomenclature so the Patio Men that know C7s from C5s will laugh at me. Suffice it to say that the lights were the size of large grapes and if you got a preponderance of the blue lights on one side of the tree, strange but appealing grotto effects could be produced.

The trees were always real, of course, at first lumpy, misshapen sad sacks that we cut off my grampa's mining claim, and later wretched things bought at the Christmas tree lot and brought home, complete with shedding needles, smell of mildew and (occasionally) great big bugs. But somehow lumpy misshapen sad sacks of trees with thin spots turned out looking pretty nice with its clear glass bulbs and enormous lights and twinkly spiny Sputniks and that weird treetop ornament that looked like a cross between Papal headgear and a 1950s spaceship.

There was lots of tinsel. There was always a certain give-and-take in the tinsel department. Mom argued that it was impossible to clean up and just ruined the vacuum, but we thought it was far too traditional to skip. We tended to save and reuse our tinsel (because we were cheap, not because we were particularly green), so instead of the tree being draped with long, graceful arcs of pristine gossamer tinsel, we had tinsel-wads shoved into the branches here and there. The tinsel would wind up on itself, often including needles and twigs from previous years, and form horrible Gordian knots that simply couldn't be undone. From a distance it looked okay, but up close the resemblance to the shavings one finds on the floor of a machine shop was striking.

We weren't much for "theme ornaments". We didn't put photographs or postcards in the tree, and we didn't have any Hallmark ornaments. It was pretty much a matter of lights, tinsel and bulbs for us, though I was known to hide model airplanes in the tree, especially a Heinkel He100D that I particularly favored. Somehow the tree just seemed to need unpainted plastic model airplanes, but even at my insensitive worst I recognized that model tanks were out of the question. (These days I resist the urge to put model airplanes in the tree, but whenever I'm invited anywhere for Christmas, I always at least think about bringing a model airplane and tucking it unseen into the host's tree so later they can scratch their heads and wonder what the hell is going on with the world.)

My first personal tree was a plastic two-footer that came complete with a string of about 25 lights and an equal number of silver bulbs roughly the size of grapes. The great advantage of this tree was that it was easy to take down; you simply grabbed it by the top and shoved it in a closet, still fully dressed. Every year rough treatment from the cats ruined a few bulbs, and eventually the thing developed a sad, weary Charlie Brown aspect. I eventually refreshed the ornamentation with new lights and bulbs, but then one of my cats developed the habit of spraying on the tree, which had the effect of turning it into a two-foot-tall piss-scented Glade air freshener. When you have to take your Christmas tree outside and try to make it palatable by squirting it with Formula 409 and spraying it with the garden hose, it might be time to get a new tree.

My wife does the ornamenting this year, which is only fair because 90% of the ornaments are hers. By my analysis we always end up with an insufficient number of lights and an excess of random ornaments, but my analysis is irrelevant. I like it when the tree is so bright you have to sort of avert your eyes from it. This year we've lost so many strings of lights we're finally going to have to get new ones, and as usual I'll wheedle without success for all-blue strings.

We use an artificial tree, of course, one of those dark green jobs that does a halfway decent job of simulating an actual tree. It's actually kind of sad - a simulated dying tree. But it beats a real dying tree, I guess, though I confess that sometimes I miss the ease of use of my old two-footer.

Modern ornaments seem to be either very expensive, or very huge. I know a guy who specializes in Hallmark ornaments, particularly the Star Trek ones, and they actually talk. It's kind of shocking to hear his tree suddenly blurt "Spock to Enterprise, Happy Holidays". Other of his ornaments light up, emit laser beams, shoot missiles and I don't know what all. I half-expect a Darth Vader ornament that says "I find your lack of faith disturbing." Meantime, Home Depot was offering ornaments that I swear were the size of cantaloupes in one case, and large infants in another. What would one do with an ornament that huge? Cut holes in it and make it into a boat??

A Tale of Two Paints

I went to Home Depot this morning to get a can of grey spray paint. Home Depot doesn't have a particularly good selection of grey spray paint, as it turns out, but as I was rummaging through what selection they did have, I amused myself by constrasting the difference between buying spray paint at home centers and hobby shops.

At home centers, you go through the shelves looking for, say, grey. You find such things as lavender, taupe, tangerine, pumpkin, marigold, eccrue, putty, and bone. Is it a paint rack or a fruit stand?? There are 20 distinct cans of paint that are all roughly the same color as "Almond", and 15 that are roughly the same color as "Rose". But no grey, unless you want sandable primer, which I didn't want. (If you must know, I was looking for light grey that I could spray on an SA-2 surface-to-air missile, the kind of apparatus that looks a bit foolish painted "Lemon".)

If you go to a hobby shop, virtually all colors of paint are grey, sand, or green. But mostly they're all grey. Ocean grey, medium grey, neutral grey, gull grey, dark gull grey, aggressor grey, dark sea grey, extra-dark sea grey (logically enough, I suppose), field grey, haze grey, light grey, camoflauge grey, Euro I grey, dark grey, barley grey, deck grey, Japanese Army grey, Japanese Navy grey (why not?)... (There are almost as many greens, and they're even harder to tell apart, but since they unnerve me, I don't want to spend any time talking about them.)

I guess the bottom line is that I didn't get any light grey spray paint at Home Depot. So I looked at my collection of spray paint out in the garage and asked myself "What's wrong with spraying an SA-2 missile Burgundy? I mean, who's going to care? And maybe it'll be an improvement."

I'm going to cut this short because I sense that I am in imminent danger of freezing to death. Making a pot of iced tea on a cold, windy day like today may not have been the best idea I've ever had.

Congratulations

Congratulations to Guilherme Marchi, 2008 PBR World Champion. He not only won, but he won in convincing and comprehensive fashion. And, by gum, he deserved it too.

I met him and shook his hand, and I found him pleasant and affable. So now I've got Barack Obama for President, and Guilherme Marchi for PBR World Champion. What could possibly be next? Winning a 75-pound meat loaf from Safeway? Finding the missing part that is preventing me from making progress on my model of the Calypso? Waking up with Sean Hannity hair?

Nodeless

I made an interesting discovery last night: one should not drink a quart of chocolate milk immediately before going to bed. I must have made about 40 trips to the necessarium during the night, and I felt like I'd swallowed a ShamWow or something. It was as though there was something huge, fluffy and "uber-absorbent" in my midsection, pressing on all my internal organs and making me have strange, borderline unwelcome dreams about wagon trains.

President Obama. That has a nice ring to it. I note that America is already starting to become modestly cool in other parts of the world. That didn't take long, and I can only expect for the situation to improve. Just as Bush set the tone by repudiating the Kyoto Accord early in his administration, I expect Obama to set an equal but opposite tone early in his.

The whiny right-wingers at work insist that what the world thinks of the United States is irrelevant. Some go so far as to say that it's better to be feared than loved, which I think was the inadvertent credo of Caligula, and you saw what happened to him (spitted by his own bodyguards). I think it does matter. I think it's better to have 150 countries that admire you in one way or another than it is to have 150 countries that fear and despise you.

So even though Obama isn't President yet, and hasn't even named his Cabinet, I am reassured and calmed by the way things are working out. I'm not stupid and I know that it won't be all sunlight and flowers - contrary to what my embittered right-wing associates think, I'm neither stupid nor naive - but reading the international news reports and finding people favorably disposed toward my country again? Oh, that makes me feel good.

I remember a time when people were very favorably disposed toward my country, when America was regarded with awe even by its enemies. I was in the USSR in the 1980s and noticed that the one country the Russians seemed to admire more than any other was the United States, and this was during a chilly spell in the Cold War when we were fixing to nuke one another's underpants off.

It's been a good week.

President Obama

CNN has just called the Presidential race for Barack Obama, and with almost 300 electoral votes in hand and more likely to come. Oh, the whining tomorrow morning at work is going to be positively epic - and music to my ears.

I haven't posted much in a while because I've been sick, or half-sick. I seem to have just about enough energy to get to and from work, with none left over for anything else. But today the antibiotics finally seem to be starting to work. The lymph nodes in my neck are greatly reduced in size, I have much more energy, and I no longer feel like I'm alternating between fever and chills.

But then again, maybe it's the prospect of a civilized Presidency and not the antibiotics at all. You think??

J'cancel!

I will confess several things up front. First, I confess that I've intended to vote for the Democratic candidate, no matter who it was. Second, I confess that I was deeply worried going into the election. After what happened in 2000 in Florida and 2004 in Ohio, I was worried that if the election was even remotely close "something" would happen to turn it into a Republican victory. But it now appears that the election is going so strongly against McCain that even the most egregious shenanigans can't change the basic outcome.

I wasn't going to watch the news tonight, but I was driving home and found myself a little sleepy at the wheel, and sometimes listening to the radio wakes me up. For some reason I can't really get Nova-M in my car. Some days I can hear it, other days it sounds like someone dragging a 55-gallon drum across a garage floor. Today I couldn't make out a word, so I listened to NPR, which presented the leading edge of the Obama victory in a way that didn't make me jittery. So when I got home I turned the TV on and watched the news, vowing that I'd turn it off the minute things started to go badly or the minute that anyone started to argue. I don't need bad news and I don't need an argument, and I'll take drastic steps to deal with either.

My own voting experience was quite banal. It took me not more than twenty minutes get my ballot and vote, and at least five of those minutes were expended talking to neighbors that I met in line. The polling place in Wittmann was well-organized and very efficient, even though most of the volunteers were so old they looked like they'd been recently unearthed in the Valley of the Kings. I kid the volunteers, of course.

I would say that the odds of Arizona going blue are not just practically zero, but entirely zero. But I knew that when I showed up to vote. Honestly, I voted more to cancel out the vote of a notable Republican than to alter Arizona's electoral makeup. It's irrational and silly, yes, but nevertheless, there I was snarling "J'cancel!" as I fed my ballot into the optical reader.

Past My Time

I don't think I care for the 21st Century very much. I expected it to be better, frankly, and the sense of disappointment I feel over the lunkheaded stupidity of my own species wears me down and makes me feel old and tired. I believed the movie 2001 when it came out. I believed that we'd have moonbases and the like, but more than that, leaving the science-fiction trinkets behind, I believed that we would have triumphed over ignorance, parochialism, racism and all those other wonderful -isms (the Communists, quick to diagnose but crappy clinicians to the bitter end, claimed that Communism would in the end eradicate -isms. I always wondered if they included Communism in that calculation).

I don't really miss the flying cars that we were promised, because it doesn't take much thought to realize that flying cars would be a disaster. If aggressive impatient morons make driving on surface streets into a game of chance, imagine what flying around them would be like. I don't really miss the spaceships and moonbases either. But the realization that people are getting stupider and meaner makes me ill. You'd think that by now people would decide to vote for (or against, for that matter) Barack Obama without regard to skin color. But how many times have I heard supposedly educated people where I work announce that they couldn't vote for him because he's a n-----? One gawks at these morons as though grasping for a punchline, but it isn't there. They actually believe that, and what's more, they feel comfortable enough with it to actually say it.

This isn't the 21st Century as it should have been. Something went terribly wrong somewhere along the line. Religious fundamentalists determine the science curricula of public schools. Racists and bigots threaten to determine the outcomes of elections. For most of us, the convenience of opinion has become more powerful than the weight of fact. What is true is not nearly as important as what we deem to be true, and we can selectively redefine anything on a whim. The mere fact that we sit around arguing about whether "the surge" worked or not is proof that we don't understand the merest outline of the problems in Iraq, and is proof that we don't care either.

One of my acquaintances is a prime right-wing blowhard, the sort who imagines that he has the solution to every problem around the world, and somehow his solutions always seem to involve violence. He was holding forth on how to solve the religious problems in Iraq, and I simply had to ask him if he knew the difference between Sunni and Shia. "Sure," this mental giant said. "They wear different-colored towels." It is a testament to my self-control that I didn't follow through on my first instinct, which was slap him sideways.

But what is the alternative? To wish for a quieter and simpler time? Tempting, except I find that I am loathe to give up electricity, running water, and satellite TV. So maybe the trick is to find a quieter and simpler geographical part of the 21st Century, to find and live in a part of the world that hasn't yet been despoiled by stupidity.

Maybe things will be less unwholesome after the election, because elections often act to stir up slimy sediments that normally lie undisturbed on the bottom of the septic tank. But I don't know. Once you start to take pride in your stupidity, all bets are off.

Hellbound Machinery

Years ago I had a dream wherein I was driving a Volkswagen Bug toward Phoenix. It was night, and I became aware that the VW engine was overheating when I could see its orange glow on the guard rails and signs alongside the highway. For a while the dream revolved around how to shut off this obviously demon-possessed engine - no engine, VW or otherwise, can possibly glow white-hot and still run. And I couldn't shut it off by any conventional means, or even unconventional means (I remember pouring handfuls of pinto beans, of all things, into the tops of the carburetors).

But it didn't matter because right around then, Phoenix was nuked by principalities unknown and suddenly the overheating demon-possessed engine paled to nothing compared to the mushroom cloud boiling up over the hills to the south.

Now, brace yourself for the wrenching segue. I have been, for the last week or so, doing a bit of reading about pre-dreadnought battleships and the wars they were involved in, chiefly the Russo-Japanese War and the Spanish-American War (of You may put the steaks on the fire at any time, Gridley fame). Say, 1890 to roughly 1910, though clunky old pre-dreadnoughts remained in some inventories well into the 1940s.

The more I learn about these ships, the more I am utterly convinced that they were designed in Hell and manufactured in Hell's suburbs. There's the smoke factor, for one thing. They don't just put out a little smoke. They don't puff a bit like the Hogwarts Express. These things puke out thick opaque churning gouts of smoke that boil and churn and seem almost to be alive and malevolent. And that's just to get up to speeds of nine or ten knots! And the innards! What must that be like, four triple-expansion steam engines clattering and thumping away, tierods flying, connecting rods whooshing, governors and links and valves clattering, things spinning, steam jetting out of leaks, the whole place half-lost in a fog of steam and smoke and coal dust. And somewhere in that desolation toil men half-broken by toil and half-killed by coal dust inhalation...

I once saw a picture of a Russian pre-dreadnought battleship. It's at sea and it's making headway because it's turned up a bit of a bow wave, but not much of one. And from the funnels pour these hellish plumes of smoke, the kind of smoke that seems to blot out every finer human impulse, including probably the impulse to cook and eat bacon. "Sorry, no bacon for me, I've got pre-dreadnought battleship smoke in my soul and nothing pleases me." Anyway, barely visible in the open bridge ahead of these demonic smokestacks stands a single man in a white uniform, clutching the railing as though in terror of where this Mephistopholean nightmare is taking him. Certainly not to port, unless there are ports on the River Styx.

They're appalling. Maybe the most appalling things I've ever seen.

And somewhere therein, I'm quite sure, a novel resides.

No Country For Old Men

My wife hated the movie No Country For Old Men. I don't think I'm overstating her reaction; I think honest unalloyed hate was pretty much her reaction to it. She thought it was violent, gratuitious, and essentially meaningless.

Maybe so, but I thought it was excellent. Maybe not as good as its hype, but still very, very good. I could have watched Tommy Lee Jones for hours, playing that character in a way that didn't turn him into a gimping, mouth-foaming stereotype. And the guy who played Anton Chigurgh (sp?) was brilliant in his soft-spoken, almost dainty, and deeply disturbing way. Anton is a nightmare and no mistake, but a nightmare I enjoyed watching. I liked the way he was amused by people always saying "You don't have to do this," because to him, he did always have to do that.

It's a movie that starts out full of dead stuff, and additional bodies pile up like cordwood as Anton makes his bloody way through Texas (though Anton is far from the only evil, he is the primary evil). Meantime Tommy Lee Jones drives around, giving voice to the ineffable and never quite managing to protect anyone at all. And that scene with Tommy Lee Jones and Maurice (you know who I mean) was so richly layered I feel that I want to watch it five or six times to fully grok what they were talking about. There's that line from Maurice, something about how sometimes a man can only hope to get a tourniquet on "it", whatever it is, but we believe it to be life in general.

Striking. Very striking. But I know better than to see if my wife wants to watch it!

Who??

There's an ad for a comedy TV show, the "Supreme Court of Comedy" I believe it's called, where it appears that famous comedians take the role of judge, prosecutor and defense counsel in a People's Court sort of deal, only without Judge Wapner.

The commercial kills me because it features Jon Lovitz raising himself up to his full height and demanding in an imperious tone "Who is crapping their pants now?" Who indeed.

On A Lighter Note, Mikasa!

I don't suppose many people have heard of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, and I don't suppose that many who do really care very much. Just another filthy, muddy squabble over incomprehensible political objectives that got a few hundred thousand young men killed while the men really responsible for the war sat on their butts in Moscow and Tokyo and wrote moving speeches.

But the war did have a bit of drama. The Japanese managed to neutralize the Russian fleet in the Pacific early on, and the only chance for Russian success in the war lay in having their Baltic Sea Fleet steam all the way around the world, eighteen thousand miles, defeat the Japanese Combined Fleet, and then drive away the Japanese merchant ships so the Japanese troops in Manchuria and Korea would be cut off.

This is a bold decision, especially when your fleet consists of slow and relatively unseaworthy battleships known collectively as pre-dreadnoughts. That means all sorts of nautical goofiness, like reciprocating machinery, mixed-caliber main armament, strange notions on armor thickness, and lots of men stained pitch-black from shoveling coal.

The Russians were doomed. They had to steam 18,000 miles to get to the battle site, and without the benefit of friendly ports along the way (they mostly replenished coal supplies by transferring coal from freighters). By the time the Russian fleet got there, their hulls were so fouled with marine growth they could barely manage a speed of nine knots, their ships were in serious need of maintenance, and crew morale had fallen to about as low as it can get before officers start being thrown overboard. Meantime the Japanese Combined Fleet rested in its anchorage at Pusan, the men rested and fit, the ships clean and well-maintained, and the fleet extensively exercised in long-range gunnery.

In the resulting battle, the Japanese lost three torpedo boats, while the Russians lost pretty much the whole schmeer. Three ships managed to get through the Japanese and reach port at Vladivostok, and a few others managed to retreat to Manila. The rest went to the bottom or surrendered to the Japanese, whose gunfire on that day was accurate and devastating.

Flagship of the fleet under Admiral Heihachiro Togo was the battleship Mikasa. It survived the battle but went on to a rough life afterwards, suffering a magazine explosion and a serious grounding, and the Japanese could have been pardoned for just scrapping the goddamned thing once and for all. But they finally gave it a thorough restoration in the 1960s and remains today the only fully restored example of a pre-dreadnought battleship in existence.

But all of this is really prelude to a bad joke that keeps circulating in my head. Every time I read about the Battle of Tsushima Straits and see the battleship Mikasa mentioned, I read it as Mikasa Sukasa.