Rail Gun

I feel much better now that I've made up my mind about politics. Barring unforseen emotional and/or ethical catastrophes, Barack's got my vote. Now I can think about other things, like this:

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/navy-tests-high-tech-railgun/20080131154909990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001

Good heavens. I'm tempted to ask "why" but I already know why: because they're Guys, and Guys think rail guns are cool. Hell, I'd love to have a rail gun!

The main feature of rail guns is the incredibly high velocity of the projectile. The projectiles are so fast you don't even need to put an explosive in them - when your RV takes a 6mm Lexan projectile up side the head at five kilometers per second, you don't need no stinking explosives; raw kinetic energy gets the job done.

But why? What can a rail gun do that a conventional gun can't?

Here's the main difference. In a conventional gun, you burn some amount of powder in the barrel of the gun, which releases a lot of hot gas that pushes the shell out of the gun. The pressure inside the gun is very high and the impulse on the shell is also quite high. And if you want to make the gun shoot farther, you have to worry that the gas pressure might rupture the gun or cause the shell to collapse in the bore.

A rail gun doesn't subject the projectile to a single momentary impulse. Instead it accelerates the projective smoothly during the entire time it's in the rail. There is no freakishly high gas pressure to deal with, acceleration loading is reduced, and all other things being equal, the rail gun will fire a projectile at a much higher velocity. (In practice, there are problems with rail guns too. The design I'm familiar with works by first vaporizing a thin layer of aluminum on the back of the cylindrical Lexan projectile. This allows the high voltage between the rails to arc over, and then by the immutable laws of electromagnetics, including that three-fingered deal that today looks like some thug shooting a gang sign, the arc sends the projectile off down the rail. But it requires good isolation, good capacitors, good switching, and woe betide the rail gunner who lets a hair or a piece of dust bridge the gap between the rails.) If you want your rail gun to shoot farther, you just charge the batteries longer, so to speak.

My sense is that rail guns may have utility in space where the projectiles are not subject to aerodynamic heating, but that modern guns are already plenty powerful enough for everyday use, thank you very much, and a 155mm howitzer is a considerably tougher and more mobile apparatus than a rail gun.

Who here remembers the old Safeguard ABM system? It consisted of two different missiles, the long-range high-altitude Spartan and the short-range terminal-defense Sprint. Sprint accelerated off the pad at 100+ gees and within a few seconds of flight the nose cone was glowing red hot and the missile itself was completely encased in a sheath of incandescent plasma caused by air resistance. That's what a rail gain would do to its projectiles, especially if someone made a mistake and set it to "11".

I think we can put that down in the "fiscally irresponsible and tactically irrelevant but oh so boss all the same" column.

This is fun!

http://www.darklyrics.com/lyrics/insomnium/abovetheweepingworld.html#9

Tis Official

I've finally decided who I'm going to vote for, and I'll tell you who and why in just a moment.

First off, I don't think Presidents have much control over the economy. The economy tends to be cyclical and there's simply not much any one man can do about it, so I don't really listen to their economic blather. "We need to make more opportunities and celebrate small businesses..." Yeah, yeah, yeah, now what do you really propose? The interlinked global economy has become so complex and has so many variable-gain feedback channels that I'm not sure anyone really understands it, let alone knows how to influence it positively. So honestly, the less the politicians (who are almost always lawyers anyway) say about the economy, the happier I am.

Secondly, it's been my observation that all of the viable candidates (and oh, how it must cheese the D-listers when I use that term) have adopted a policy of staying in Iraq. They differ only in details. So why pay attention to them? Besides, once we've made the decision to stay in Iraq, I'm of the opinion that the guys who should be in charge of the counter-insurgency effort in Iraq and Afghanistan are not the politicians with spray-varnished hair; it should be the majors and colonels in the US Marine Corps who have studied the problem. (Not that I'm insulting the US Army, but since the 1950s the US Army and US Marine Corps have had very different missions. The US Army was equipped and trained to fight the Red Army, a job that clearly required aggressiveness, firepower, and as much shock as could be brought to bear. The US Marines, on the other hand, were often asked to intervene in much less intense conflicts and had to develop proficiency in counter-insurgency and guerilla warfare.)

The politicians love to talk about things they can't really influence. They have no control over the economy, but they like to pretend they do. They've all abdicated responsibility for Iraq, so they stomp around the barnyard like roosters loudly spouting things that don't make any difference. They all have to weigh in on their Kulturkampf hot-button issues, even though it's not up to the President (any President) to enact legislation or deliver Supreme Court verdicts.

And they always go out of their way to remain suspiciously silent on some of the issues that they can (and should) influence. Such as:

1. The shameful neglect of the real central front in the war against terror, Afghanistan. How can we, years after the initial invasion, be reading newspaper accounts about how the Taliban is re-establishing itself?? Did we not defeat them utterly? Oh, no, wait a minute, we didn't defeat them utterly because politicos got in the way... Never mind.

2. The shameful lack of emphasis on moving away from the combustion of fossil fuels for energy. I personally am dubious that wind power can deliver energy in sufficiently large quantities to be worthwhile, but I could be wrong and I'm willing to give wind engineers a chance. But we're stuck with coal and gasoline as the preferred national choices, so no serious work gets done.

3. The shameful Corporate policy of exporting jobs overseas for the sake of "investors" who own pieces of paper that are about as meaningful as Magic: The Gathering playing cards. Or even better, for the sake of the CEOs that purport to run these companies. That is to say, the tax structure that makes that practice not only legal, but tax deductible (to borrow a memorable line from Deal of the Century). The MBAs think this is good clean economic fun, whereas I think it's unpatriotic and about as morally indefensible as war profiteering.


So imagine my shock when I saw this:

http://www.rediff.com/money/2007/aug/16bpo.htm

It's a pretty good article. I especially like the smug self-assurance of some the commentators at the bottom of the piece. But if Barack Obama has said enough things about curbing the exporting of jobs (I refuse to call it globalization) that he's come to the attention of the Indian expatriate press, he gets my vote. He can't fix Iraq, he can't manipulate the economy, and he won't do anything about energy policy, but at least I can support his policy on job exportation. And thus I'll support his candidacy.

Delicious Red

I'm back to my usual diet of basic red wine, better known (though perhaps inaccurately known) as "Delicious Red". I appreciate the fact that the vinyard took the bold step of naming it "delicious" so I wouldn't have to wonder. Had they not taken that step, I might have referred to it as Crappy Red, or Fair Red, or Simply Red.

And I'd rather not do that.

Last weekend I had (rather a lot of) good red wine, stuff that came in actual bottles and bore at least some sense of geographical pride. With Delicious Red, you're never sure where it's from, but these wines were more specific than that. They were all better than Delicious Red, but it's very difficult for me to say why, or in what way.

I don't, you see, know the first thing about the vocabulary and grammar of wine tasting. One of the three wines I had last weekend had a very vivid aftertaste - or was it a finishing note? - but I can't really explain it. Was is redolent of flint and tinder? Or did it sorta remind me of a high-grade hot dog? Did the wine have a tawny nose? Or was pleasantly odiferous in the manner of a freshly unwrapped Slim Jim? Was the early note light and fruity, or was it sort of in the same general flavor class as, say, chicken broth? No. But I can say that all of these red wines were not nearly as sweet as Delicious Red, which has a sweet berry-like finish that brings some manner of red Kool-Aid to mind (and here, one expects a giant anthropomorphic pitcher full of agitated red fluid to come crashing through the wall. Perhaps with a corkscrew; perhaps not).

Admittedly, I have been exposed to very high levels of wine snobbery on TV shows (clearly not shows intended for my consumption, but nevertheless still accessible to cretins such as myself). And while those TV shows generally convince me that speaking of the woody oaken nature of the mid-note of the bottom half of the last third of the swig of such and such a wine is folly, at least I now realize that wine is more diverse than (oh, let's just ride the metaphor all the way to the station) Kool-Aid.

All red Kool-Aids are alike, unless you make a serious mistake and mix in salt instead of sugar (not to belittle anyone, but my brother once made a "kit" cheesecake and used salt in the crust mix instead of sugar. I'll never forget the intense and very strange taste dislocation that caused. I took a bite of the crust and suddenly my throat shouted "IT COULD BE PHOSGENE!" I didn't know what it was. Phosgene, burnt rubber, elastomers, a light dusting of humus. Once I figured out it was salt I was okay, relatively speaking, but for a while it was very unnerving. Julius Caesar to the contrary, I always imagine the Romans to be master poisoners and my first instinct might have been to tighten my toga just a hair, and perhaps to lay off so much Delicious Red before posting.)

What was I talking about? I've been drinking Delicious Red wine and I seem to have lost control of my point. Sometimes I picture my mind as being a bit like a cowboy trying to keep a herd of several hundred head of point headed in the right direction, but not always successfully. Sometimes the trail forks and in the dust and confusion, my tired mental cowboy doesn't realize that half my herd of point has down the fork labelled "You'll Never Have That Thought Again".

I realize that judging wines on the basis of how rowdy the hangover turns out to be is like judging mini-vans on the basis of whether they explode on impact after falling off cliffs or not. It's not supposed to matter. It's not even supposed to be a subject. I sense wine fans everywhere recoiling in histrionic horror at my unseemly intoxication - "Reinhold, he drinks to excess! Fetch me my carriage!" But finer angles be damned: I find that Delicious Red equips me with a formidable hangover. Not as bad as, say, Old Milwaukee, but it's still a pretty burly hangover. If the headache were a primate, it would be at least an orangutan, and a surly one at that. But I note that higher-end red wines were less hateful in that respect. Mainly they just left me desperately thirsty, and the irony of chugging water out of a Kokopelli wine glass because of wine chugged out of a wine glass was not lost on me, but largely ignored by me because it's the sort of hoohah that only seems relevant when it's actually 5:30 AM and you're in the act.

BUT, and there we get to the operative heart of things, the red wine didn't make me ill. I have soft, spongy areas in my memory that probably mean that I probably tried my hand at some Gilbert & Sullivan, but at least there was none of that unsteady Force 8 business in my midsection, the feeling that I'm a fishing trawler full of aging salmon and it can't possibly end well.

Aint red wine great??

A Salmon Of My Own Making

We have three cats, Max, Poopie and Baxter. Max started to show signs of failing about six or eight months ago. He lost a lot of weight and seemed lethargic and unhappy, and it seemed that he was having trouble eating dry cat food. So I switched him to canned cat food, and he quickly settled on Friskies Senior Salmon Meal as his favorite. Oh he loves his salmon, and thanks to a can of salmon a day for months, he's put on a lot of weight and seems a lot happier.

But I wasn't giving any of the other cats salmon, because frankly it's messy and expensive and they can eat dry cat food just fine. But they can smell the salmon. Poopie is normally a pretty vocal cat to begin with, but when she thinks she deserves a bit of salmon, she says "wow" over and over with the monotonous regularity, and almost the volume, of a fire alarm. It's a psychic pressure that I'm unable to endure; I end up giving the cat who doesn't need salmon some salmon just so she'll stop making that noise.

So here's Max eating his salmon on the counter, and Poopie eating her salmon on the floor. Now in comes Baxter, the youngest cat, a healthy and lithe whippersnapper who simply pushes Max out of the way so he can take the greater portion of the salmon. So now I have to ride shotgun over the damn salmon feast to keep Baxter away... And at least twice a week I get salmon oil on my hands so I go to work smelling like a cannery.

Before I go to the store I have to inventory the salmon because almost nothing is as bad as running out of salmon. Seriously. Slamming my head in a car door is not worse than running out of salmon. Zipping a testicle up in my jeans is not worse than running out of salmon. Dropping a pizza face-down on the floor is not worse than running out of salmon. The only thing worse than running out of salmon, I think, would be actually dying.

It's a lot of trouble, frankly. But when I lie down after I get home from work, Max comes and lies on my chest and looks into my eyes and it's like he's saying "Thanks for getting me salmon." And I always think "It's nothing. Enjoy it in good health."

Then he hooks his claws in my surgical scar and makes me scream, but he's like that.

Quick Sick Of That

I'm so sick of the news. I'm sick of all of the news, but as it happens, there are aspects of the news that I find particularly fatiguing.

The Democratic Primaries: Hillary said this, Barak said that, he's touching me, she's looking at me, Bill stole my lollipop. I swear to God if they were kids in the back of my car, I'd be giving them the "Don't make me stop this car" speech. I'm not inclined to vote for any of them, frankly, and if they don't stop acting like adolescents who've been taking in too much sugar, I won't vote for any of them.

The Stock Market: The markets shoot up, the markets shoot down, experts try to tell why I should care if it shoots up or shoots down, and it's all just a charade. For all the real difference any of it makes they might as well be playing Magic: The Gathering and the analysts could breathlessly try to explain to me why tapping a swamp so they can summon a skeleton means that currency exchange rates are out of balance.

Entertainment news: What new low can Amy Winehouse sink to? Or will Britney's new low exceed Amy's new low? I don't care. Honestly, I don't. So stop telling me.

So what's left? Filter out the election news, the stock market news, and the celebrities-circling-the-drain news, what's left? Oh yeah, sports news about increasingly unappealing sports people playing increasingly unappealing sports for the behest of increasingly unappealing corporate interests.

Echo Results

My echocardiogram results are in, and it appears that I'll survive. They didn't see anything alarming, and could only produce a slightly enlarged right ventricle and left atrium as the main diagnostic finding (well, that and the entirely expected minor loss of compliance in the left ventricle).

In honor of this I tripled the distance that I walk at lunch, and I'm going to add five minutes to my exercise time at night.

More importantly, I'm going to declare victory and stop thinking of myself as a fragile, damaged heart attack survivor. One must exercise due caution, of course. I don't want to spring my chest open, after all, and the more weight I lose and the lower I get my cholesterol level, the better off I'll be. But I think it's time to declare victory and move on. There are a great many other things I can worry about instead!

Gaming Update

Well, my conservatorial efforts are complete. I've cleaned, sorted, organized, and stored my games. The games I don't intend to play any time this century have been wrapped in clear plastic leaf bags and put back into storage. Things that I might play this century have been stashed in plastic bins. Things I will definitely play are in a plastic bin in my closet. All the role-playing rules are in one spot, except for all my Tunnels & Trolls adventures, which I'm not convinced are really role-playing.

It's hard to say why I keep some of these games. Flat Top is a good example. I didn't enjoy it the few times I played it. It's fiddly and large and yet incomplete. The package weighs a ton. The ruptured box spews counters like the Amoco Cadiz. I should just throw it away, since it's damaged and incomplete and I don't even like it. But I just can't seem to get within 15 feet of the trash can with it.

Or Fast Patrol Boats. This one I did like, more than I probably should have, and I played it a lot. But now the game (which came shipped in what amounts to a double LP holder) is badly damaged. It got wet at some point, so the album has stuck together and the whole thing smells like mold. But I can't throw it away! Geez!

Well, now everything's halfway organized and sealed in plastic. I guess that's an improvement.

Crickets

I was driving home this evening and happened to catch the sport report on the BBC. I'm always particularly amused by the cricket scores. "Australia is on for 25 for 7 with 19 and 5, crossing 3 with 11 for 143, and 8. Excuse me, the 7 should have been a 6. With 2."

I engage in hyperbole to make a point, of course, which is - what? I don't remember. I actually know how cricket is played and scored, or at least as well as any American can, but still, if the announcers do - not - speak - very - deliberately during the cricket scores they might as well be reading bingo cards. I was once instructed by a pretty good Indian "spinner" on how to bowl properly. Perhaps because of my American upbringing, I apparently lack the suitable tendons and ligaments in my shoulders, for the act of "bowling properly" caused me such pain I emitted a coarse epithet. Complaining bitterly of a sticky wicket and a possible torn rotator cuff, I retreated to the patio for a gin and tonic (and I am not making this up).

There was something I heard on the radio and/or TV today that really did irritate me royally, but somehow the process of getting through the day and managing to remember to get oranges at the grocery store drove the anonymous outrage out of my head. And maybe it's just as well; given my tender state I really don't need the radio to irritate me.

But I'll bet twenty dollars that it had something to do with Glenn Beck.

Squat

It turns out that that is how much I knew about echocardiograms going in: squat.

"It's a painless procedure." Famous last words, for the Marquesa de Sade will spend twenty minutes grinding an ultrasound transducer into the center of your surgical scar, pressing and twisting until you end up with a spiffy bruise and an urge to, in the words of Justin McBride, "kill the shit out of everything."

But at least it's over with. And it's most cool to watch, even though I'm not competent to interpret the results. But how many times in the average day do you get to see your heart valves in action? Or hear the sound of blood moving hither and yon in your various atria and ventricles (ventria?)? During this test, where I could actually hear the phwish-phew-pwish-phew of my blood, there were occasional loud cracking pops. I couldn't decide if I thought they were caused by turbulence at the instant of the heart valves opening, or were artifacts that should have been filtered out by the software. So I asked her if those popping sounds were normal, and she said "Well, I'll tell you, if you didn't hear them, you wouldn't be here to ask."

So I'm confused - if you have a heart attack in a forest, does it make a sound??

Well, now I just have to wait, but I'm still a little flabbergasted by the thought that yesterday I could see my heart doing its thing. I have a hard time believing I have internal organs at all (I guess I assume that all that "stuff" in there is just wadded-up newspaper) but there it was in all of its many-tubed, artery-girded, throbbing, valve-pumping glory. I expected my valves to be fluttery little things, almost delicate, but as it happens they open and close with considerable authority. I hope that's good.

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EchoPandemonioGram

Tomorrow I go in and have my first post-recovery echocardiogram, which amounts of a fairly sophisticated ultrasound of the heart (they can even tell by Doppler analysis which way one's blood is flowing and color it appropriately).

Why does this test make me so anxious? It's not as though it hurts. The hardest part of having an echocardiogram is not giggling when they smear cold tranducer grease on your chest, and there's some cleaning up afterwards before you can put your shirt on. The worst case, if they do a contrast echocardiogram, is that they'll fit me with an IV by which they can introduce contrast medium (dye or frothy saline) into my bloodstream. So there's no risk of pain or injury, no small-but-nonzero chance of a stroke, no cutting and breaking of ribs.

So why does it make me a little anxious? Because I want a good result. I've been through a lot since the heart attack - surgery, drugs, diet, rehab, quitting smoking, exercise - and I want all of that effort to be shown to be worthwhile. I want my heart to be reasonably healthy so I can stop thinking about it all the time, so I don't have to analyze every twinge in my chest and decide if I think I'm having a heart attack or if it was just the tamales acting up. I want to stop being a heart attack and open heart surgery survivor and go back to being the person I used to be (though hopefully a thinner, more fit, nonsmoking version of the person I used to be).

I don't want them to look at my heart and find it enlarged and weak, with a poor ejection fraction and lots of regurgitation and turbulence caused by leaking valves, stricken with cardiomyopathy and about halfway down the road to congestive heart failure. I don't want that. I really don't want that. I want my heart to have shown signs of healing and improvement. I want all the stuff I've been through to mean something. It would suck if I went through all of that and just got worse.

But I don't think I am worse. I don't honestly think my heart is in bad shape, all things considered. At the very least, it's no worse than it was back before last July. But until they actually tell me the results of the test, I'm going to be a little anxious about it. I fully expect to have a good result - but until I actually hear the words, well, I'm going to fret, just a little.

And now, back to my regularly-scheduled BS.

Yikes

People* will say** that I'm liable to build just about any kind of model. Some modelers*** are pretty good at restricting themselves to specific collections. You'll sometimes hear them say "Ah, well, I only build models of US combat aircraft in 1/48th scale with two or more engines from 1929 to 1935." Or "I only build tank models because I'm a tread-head****."

I'm not able to stick to collection restrictions like that. I could build just about anything at any time.

People***** will sometimes say****** that I have a modest interest in the Old West, especially the mythic Old West and not the genuine article with its tuberculosis, bad teeth and short lifespans. So one day when I was leafing through a model catalog and saw that they were offering a 1/16th scale stagecoach model complete with four horses and figures, I said "I think I have to have that."******* The funny thing is that I was looking at a catalog from an outfit that specialized in wooden sailing ship model kits; the stagecoach seemed decidedly out of place.

I ordered it, and after milling around in Postal Limbo for a while (curse that 4th Class Domestic rate!) the box arrived at the Post Office. It made the poor Post Office woman grunt when she picked it up. It was big enough to ship an entirely family in. But I figured the size and weight came from the sailing ship model I'd also ordered; I kept thinking of the stagecoach as being not much larger than the average 1/25th scale truck and trailer kit.

Then I got it home and opened the box and saw what I was dealing with. I'm pretty sure that the stagecoach box is the single largest model box I have ever seen in my life. It's positively epic, and it's actually kind of heavy, which is not something you generally expect out of a model box. It's like ordering Skeletor for your He-Man action figure collection and getting a life-size dude in the mail complete with a personal pan pizza.

Hard to say at this point how the kit looks. Lots of parts. Lots of *big* parts. The horses aren't bad - a trifle generic, but I'll soon transform them utilizing Dr. Frankenstein's Patented Home Surgery Kit. The figures aren't bad, but they'll also pass beneath Dr. Frankenstein's Horrific Buzz-Saw of Plastic Transfiguration********. The rest I can work with. And the interesting aspect of this whole thing is that 1/16th scale is also 120mm, which is a pretty popular scale for figure modeling, and I happen to have a quite large collection of 120mm body parts lying around the place.

Further bulletins as events warrant, though I'll probably move discussion of it to my other blog.*********

* Some of them, anyway

** Go ahead, ask them

*** This footnote was totally gratuitous

**** Their term, not mine

***** Oh god, not again

****** Please stop!

******* Not my exact words, but close enough for a PG blog

******** Permit me to pull up a stool next to that joke and milk it all day

********* Did I hear you say "Thank God"?

Things Best Left Unseen

One thing that having intimations of mortality will do for you is make you look back on the good old days through a golden scrim of warm, fuzzy nostalgia. And since my interests these days lie in the general direction of gaming, I've been having wonderful warm golden fuzzy flashbacks to the glory days of wargaming and... no, wait a second, that's not a warm golden fuzzy memory! That's a horrible memory!

Okay. One thing that having intimations of mortality will do for you is make you look back on the good old days and realize they're full of horror.

Once I decided to drive all the way across Phoenix to get to a particular game store in Gilbert. I've always lived on the far west side of Phoenix, so going to Gilbert almost qualified as a pilgrimage. I wouldn't go there just to sample the tacos, if you take my meaning, and though I can't remember why I went to that game store in Gilbert, it had to be for a pretty serious reason. My personal mythology is that I went all that distance seeking a copy of SPQR, but it's more likely that it had something to do with Traveller supplements or D&D figures.

Anyway, I drove all that way, and when I went into the game store, I found a group of guys playing a game on card tables in the middle of the store. That's pretty common in game stores. Guys are forever playing games on card tables in the middle of game stores, but as I came closer to see what they were playing, my flesh began to crawl.

The guys were in their thirties, faces unshaven and gleaming in a rank sebaceous way, hair limp and coated with what looked like a thin layer of Pennzoil's finest. They were clad in wife-beaters and t-shirts and sweat pants, all of them greasy and smudged, the kind of clothing that you just know will stink up your whole house if left in your clothes hamper for any length of time. They were playing a role-playing game. Most of them were playing the game with the kind of excessive seriousness that only sebaceous thirty-something men can pull off (the only to have fun is to be serious about it, you see) but one guy had blushed to the color of cooked lobster and looked like he was about ready to start beating himself to death with a copy of Russian Campaign.

And for good reason. They were playing - and I shudder to speak it - a Sailor Moon role playing game! See the artwork at the top of this article. That's Sailor Moon. So what would possess thirty-something guys to role-play nubile fourteen year old girls?? It's wrong on so many levels I scarcely know where to have my emotional breakdown.

First, nobody should role-play Sailor Moon. Ever. At all. For any reason. That may sound harsh, but that's my stand.

Second, thirty-something guys in particular should not role-play Sailor Moon.

Third, sebaceous, unshaved guys in dirty clothes shouldn't be role-playing anything. They should be taking showers and laundering their togs.

Anyway, that image continues to corrode my soul to this day. I never even bought what I went there to get in the first place, so horrified was I. I suspect I felt a little bit like a survivor of the Titanic. After all that tragedy, all that horror, all that shipwreck and rescue business, I imagine a lot of them said "Uh, does anyone remember why I was going to New York in the first place? Because I sure as Shinola can't." I think the image of basement-dwellers role-playing Sailor Moon completely drove my mission of out my head and I tottered back out to the parking lot, spent and defeated.

Exercise

One of the things I really miss about rehab is the way they could provide me with all sorts of interesting physiological data afterwards because I was all wired up to an EKG the whole time. They couldn't tell me anything about my VOmax or whatever because I wasn't plumbed for gas, but they could discern all sorts of interesting things just in the EKG data.

When I started exercising on my own, I really missed that fountain of data, especially since the heart rate monitor built into my exercise machine is, shall we say, a trifle declasse. It varies by a good deal depending on whether you're leaning forward or backwards, and depending on which finger you put on the pad, and sometimes it just seems to pick up neutrinos from the sun. There are times when it's picking up someone's heart but it doesn't seem to be mine, which is kind of ominous.

But I remembered that I have a Polar heart rate monitor and I started wearing it while I exercise. It's not as groovy as a strip from an EKG, but it seems to chart my minimum, maximum and average heart rates pretty well, and one of my favorite statistics, heart slow-down time, can be determined by studying the thing. Yesterday I lost 1 beat per second for quite some time, but I don't know if that's good or bad. Better than before, I can tell you that, when I sometimes didn't lose more than two or three beats per hour and had a resting heart rate that was downright frightening.

By the by, I continue to be pleased with my Gazelle. The heart rate monitor doesn't work terribly well (or I don't allow it to work terribly well) but the rest of the machine does work well. The difficulty level seems to drop a bit when the shocks get hot and the oil thins out, but A) I can't be sure if that's really happening or if it's just my legs getting into the swing of things, and B) I don't mind a reduction in difficulty level at around the 15-minute mark. One shock has started to make a soft hydraulic wheezing sound as it goes through its range of motion, but that's it. No squeaking, rattling, loose parts, cracks or anything else.

Dag Nabbit!

I've got five or six games of various sorts heaped up on my nightstand, all of which I intend to play "sometime soon". The problem is, about the time I pick one of them and start to brush up on the rules, the next one down in the heap calls to me, so I pick it up, and then the third one calls to me...

Seriously, the top contender right now is Avalon Hill's rather choice "Gunslinger" game. I have a soft spot for the Old West to start with and the use of cards rather than dice takes the game out of the strict wargame category. I think the combat system is very strange - it's so disorganized I'd swear Richard Hamblen was suffering from a fever dream when he wrote the rules - but once you play it through a few times, you at least get to the point you can work with it and appreciate the rest of the game. It's a fun game to play, and it gets even better when you go the whole Mythic Old West route. "A man's got to make some kind of living..." "Dyin' aint no kind of livin', boy..."

Then I have Great Medieval Battles, or at least half thereof, the Decision Games reissue of the venerable (and very spendy) SPI version. I'm not too interested in Bannockburn, but I am interested in Angorra. Just to look at the units, though, I fear that Sultan Bayazid is liable to lose his turban pretty regularly in this game; Tamerlane brought The Package and outnumbers the Sultan about 2:1 by thumbnail estimate. I thought it was pretty close until I realized those marks on the hillside weren't bushes but more of Tamerlane's units! Cricky, my flank is overflowed! I like the Great Medieval Battles system; I think it has good feel and detail for minimum outlay in cranial smoke, but it's a two-player wargame and not the sort of thing one springs on house guests.

Then there is Car Wars, a late addition because it was hiding in a different box. It can handle as many players as can sit at the table, but obviously the more players you have, the clumsier it gets (imagine 600 people playing one game and you'd have a pretty good scale model of the 101 at rush hour). Car Wars is sort of like Star Fleet Battles: it can be made as complicated as you like. I like the simple early version, myself. We don't need no steenking hoeveorcraft... houvourkraft... heoorvorcarft... Hovercraft, he's saying hovercraft...

And what's this? Boot Hill! Not much of a tabletop game in the usual sense of the word, and kind of disappointing as an RPG, but it's got great bones and deserves to be better.

Then there's SS Panzer, a game that dates from the upper strata of my collection. Why this game appeals to me remains a perpetual mystery, but it does. It's sort of like Across 5 Aprils meets Mein Kampf, or PGG with chit-draw activation, but the system is weird, more like Yahtzee than anything else, though I am perpetually reminded of Risk and/or Kaiser's Battle every time I wonder how many dice I should throw. And those mystery Russian battalions make one question the accuracy of it all, not to mention the fact the game only lasts FOUR turns! (Mostly, one darkly suspects, to factor out the arrival of powerful Soviet reinforcements in the afternoon - heaven forbid the SS should be shown having a hard time, I guess).

But hey, at least they can spell "Leibstandarte". That's sumthin.

And then there's the Task Force classic Prochorovka, described by its creators as a body-slam at the hands of schnapps-breathed geeks. Sounds like fun. I'll have two, please.

Yet curiously, the game I most want to play right now is a game I no longer own: Inkerman, an installment in the Crimean War Quad. Why did I ever sell that? Only the good are sold early.

So a little while ago I was out in the garage doing preservation work on my collection and realized that I was subconsciously building another "to be played soon pile". I knew what it was when I saw that it included Red Star/White Star 2, Mechwar '77, Napoleon's Last Battles and Little Round Top. But NO! Just say NO to more games on the to-be-played-pile! If this madness doesn't stop, I'll wake up one morning and find The Next War, Drang Nach Osten and - oh crap - Campaign for North Africa on my pile. And that game alone is good for about seven and a half years of playing time...

What was my point? I didn't have one. Sue me already.

Cart Wars

I've been going through my collection of old games lately. It's actually much larger than I had originally thought. I offhand estimated it at "fifty or sixty" games, but at last count, it's up to 239 games, and that's without counting about twenty role-playing games (D&D, T&T, DQ, and other cryptic things). The website I use to keep track of my games doesn't consider D&D and other games of its ilk a game, while other RPG websites don't consider my other games games... Can't we all just get along? Apparently not. You got D&D on my PGG!

So I've been going through my collection, partially to inventory it, partially to undertake some simple preservation measures (some of my games, like Atlantic Wall, are worth some fairly serious money) and partially to skim off the groovy games that I'd like to play in the near future. My primary preservation technique consists of shoving things into plastic Ziploc bags and storing the bags in plastic totes. Had I done this five or six years ago, my game collection would be worth a good deal more than it currently is.

But enough sniveling. I didn't get tipsy so I could snivel!

As I was going through my collection, I found things that frankly astonished me, like the game charts and CRT for Prochorovka, printed on a half-sheet of blood red paper and half-eaten by cats (I'm pretty sure it was cats). I've been trying to play Prochorovka again for years and couldn't because I didn't have the CRT, but ask and the flying spaghetti mass (or whatever) will deliver. I thought I'd lost the magic rules for Dragonquest, a rival to D&D, but I found them too! With the critical hit table from the first book tucked into it! A double-score.

One game I've always regretted giving away was Car Wars. It has a strong Mad Max kind of flavor where you haul ass in various kinds of cars and motorcycles and get involved in all sorts of mayhem. Normally most of the mayhem is supposed to come from car-mounted machine guns and the like, but I always liked leaving the shooting irons at home and doing it demolition derby style, bumper-to-bumper and may the best-protected radiator win. But the point is that I really missed that game, but as I was going through the Richthofen's War box, I found my copies of Car Wars, Sunday Drivers, Truck Stop and at least one expansion. Crikey. What's going wrong with my brain? I have such strong memories of having given that game away, but there it is, and I know it's mine because it's got my handwriting in the rules...

So now I have strange delusions of hosting a Horrendous Car Wars Tournament someday. It's one of those games that actually gets more fun with more players, and if you assign an arbitrary limit to complexity, it plays reasonably quickly.

Car Wars suffers notoriously from "Second-System Effect", where the original clean and tidy system was stretched and expanded to the point it was about as comfortable as chain mail underpants. The original Car Wars was great fun. Sunday Drivers was a good expansion, since it was more about the town and pedestrians than the cars. Truck Stop was good because how could one possibly not like crashing through a flimsy roadblock at the wheel of a Mack RD-688? Even without a gravel trailer full of concrete blocks for momentum?? But later expansions got a little goofy when they started to add things as distant from the car motif as hovercraft, helicopters, tanks and the like, and it got so complicated it was less fun than filling out the 1040 long form. By then it was all turrets and heavy weapons and was dangerously close to turning back into Ogre, a game that I half-suspect it was distantly derived from in the first place.

You're welcome, by the way, to insert a mental image of Toki and Skwisgaar trying to pronounce the word "hovercraft" at this point. God knows I did.)

What was I talking about? Oh yeah. I hope to someday get a proper D&D session going, but if that fails, I hope to get a decidedly improper Car Wars session going. If that fails, well, I suspect I'll have another beer and evaluate my options.

Homo Williamensis

I'm thinking of having myself designated an Endangered Species. Can I do that? Do I have the power? I guess I can go ahead and do it; the question is, will anyone honor it? But I think it would have enormous advantages in the long run, being an endangered species. A great many of life's minor annoyances would suddenly turn into potential species-threatening events and my elite team of lawyers would descend on the miscreants like, I don't know, like my cats having a feeding frenzy at the Salmon Bowl.

Consider:

Professional evangelizers appear on my doorstep and ring the doorbell. Alarms go off and Kevlar-clad attorneys descend from the rafters via ropes, shouting "The Endangered Species is taking a nap and waking it suddenly could prove harmful to its health! Now hit the road, Oral, and don't come back."

I go into Taco Bell and order a bean burrito with sour cream. The GBC ("Guy Behind the Counter") says "Why don't you just get a Burrito Supreme; it works out the same." Suddenly my crack staff of nutritionists grab the guy by the collar and say "If the Endangered Species had wanted a Burrito Supreme, it would have ordered one! Now get to pumping the sour cream before we send a chrome-plated subpoena right up your..."

I'm being driven home through heavy traffic, but since I'm in my sound-insulated trailer, I am hardly aware of what's going on. Then, what's that sound? The dull monotonous thumping of pop music?? The radios crackle with commands: "The E.S. is being annoyed by that monotonous thumping; we have permission to fire. Weapons hot!" And a sniper puts a series of bullets through the speakers of the offending car, and peace returns to the Endangered Species Trailer.

The sight of that grim-faced Captain CEO on the Bose TV commercial (you know the one, the one that looks as grave as Teddy Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore as he says "wow") causes me to rise out of my half-sleep, irritated and annoyed at this monstrosity invading my dreams. An elite team of sleep specialists leaps into action. "The Endangered Species is threatening to wake up! Execute Emergency Sleep Plan!" Personal specialists massage my scalp and feet. Someone toasts a cinnamon and brown sugar Pop-Tart to the perfect degree of toastedness. Someone gently wafts cedar incense smoke into the room. Others put on a six-hour Mystery Science Theater compilation and turn the volume down to the perfect level. The Endangered Species drifts back off to sleep while a highly trained Away Team tracks down Captain CEO and, as they say, puts the boots to him "medium-style".

Oh, but I suppose that's all too much to ask for!

Endorsement

I've decided to endorse Bill Richardson for President. Of all the candidates that I've had to suffer through listening to, he's caused me the least suffering and seems the closest generally to what I personally believe. Plus I don't get the feeling from him (as I do from most of the others) that he'd say pretty much anything to get elected, though he very well might. He might even say "I'll get that fish fer yeh, college-boy." I don't know.

But since he's running 93rd in the polls and is about as likely to be elected President as Cord McCoy*, my endorsement can be thought of as a "protest endorsement". But somehow none of the others do much for me - it's a maelstrom of hoarse voices, immacute coifs, gleaming teeth, and insincerity, and I'm tired of them all.

*Cord McCoy, the Amazing Helium-Filled Cowboy: when he talks, he sounds for all the world like he's been inhaling helium.

CAS

Ilyushin Il2m3 Sturmovik

I've always been interested (if "interested" is really by the right word) by close air support operations in World War Two, and especially with two aircraft that were pretty good at it. Everyone did close air support, of course, and most everyone was pretty good at it. Just as the sad-sack German tankers in the Falaise Pocket how effective Royal Air Force Typhoon fighter-bombers were, and USAAF Thunderbolts rained on many a Wehrmacht party.

But only the Soviets and Germans built dedicated close air support machines in the modern sense, aircraft that sported heavy armor and were designed to take the fight to enemy tanks and vehicles at treetop height.

The primary German machine was the Henschel Hs-129, a twin-engined ground attack airplane whose chief defects were that it was not built in large quantity (less than 800 total) and its French-made engines were never terribly reliable. But the Hs-129B2 variant armed with a 30mm MK-101 or MK-103 cannon in a ventral pod proved to be extremely effective. The 30mm gun wasn't so big it prevented the aircraft from carrying its normal MG-151 "secondary guns" and it could even carry 50-kilogram bombs on wing pylons. Later versions replaced the compact-but-effective MK-101 with bigger and less graceful weapons, culminating in the colossal 75mm BK7.5 semi-automatic gun based on the Wehrmacht's 75mm PAK-40 anti-tank gun.

The Soviet equivalent was the Ilyushin Il2 "Sturmovik", an aircraft that enjoys relatively little exposure outside of Russia. Every nation came out of World War Two with an airplane that in some way exemplified its resistance to the Nazis. For the British, the symbol of resistance was the shapely and effective Spitfire, victor of the Battle of Britain. For the Americans, it was the P-51 Mustang, the fighter that took the war all the way to Berlin and broke the back of the Luftwaffe in the great fighter battles of 1944. For the Russians, though, the symbol of resistance was the big, brutish and heavy Sturmovik.

There's not a lot of point in listing specifications, because they aren't that interesting for most people. But the Sturmovik was a pretty effective flying tank, armed with a pair of 23mm cannon or 37mm cannon (depending on the version) and able to drop PTAB anti-tank cluster bombs and carry 82mm or 132mm rockets under its wings. The Soviets ended up building about 36,000 of them during the war, making it one of the most widely produced aircraft of all time. Sturmovik crews suffered horrendous casualties, but in the end, as the Soviets closed in on Berlin, they were led as much by the clouds of snarling Sturmoviks overhead as by the obdurate courage of the Red Army's soldiers.

The Future

So this is the future... Hmm... I think I'm disappointed. Where are the flying cars and the space stations (the round kind) and the women wearing shimmering pink and purple Rayon wigs who would whisper in soft, breathy tones things like "The accessway to Sector Gamma is now closed for de-ionization..."

When I was a kid, say, in 1968, I believed that the future should be spelled The Future. Capitalized, you know, because Big Things were in store. We were going to the moon, we were tackling difficult problems like understanding the nature of base drag and wave drag in hypersonic flight, we were starting to make computers that could actually do things instead of those ENIAC-style things that just sort of sat there and got hot, and there was a sense that The Shit was about to happen. There'd be robots so we wouldn't have to clean our own houses and garages. Manual labor would be a thing of the past. People would, if not actually fly to work, then at least go to work in impossibly quiet and unobtrusive vehicles (the real sturm und drang of transportation would take place at altitudes of 80,000 feet and above, where scramjets would accelerate wedge-shaped lifting bodies out to Mach 15... but I'm digressing)... Diseases would be not just cured, not just eradicated, but destroyed so utterly that whole families of related diseases would die too out of sheer despair. And any day now, any damn day, Allis-Chalmers was going to work the bugs out of the HD-41 super-bulldozer, and then by God watch the dirt fly!

I guess the real future as opposed to The Future is okay. Computers are cool, and I like my X-Box, and who in 1968 would have predicted that top fuel dragsters would exceed 300 miles per hour? And the HD-41 is considered moderately puny by super-dozer standards. And we still have Cheez-Whiz, and we haven't nuked ourselves into a wasteland of ash and ruined dreams. And I have to say my off-pump open-heart surgery was highly successful and MOSTLY free of complications, and that isn't something they could have done in 1968. But still, I can't help but think that the future should have amounted to more than "Twittering" on cell phones and downloading reruns of The Family Guy and - uhoh - blogging.

Still, I suppose I shouldn't complain. Even if all that Major Matt Mason wide-eyed The Future nonsense petered out and died like a gladiola in Death Valley, at least I didn't personally peter out and die like a gladiola in Death Valley.

And please tell me that that's an improvement over what might have been.