Sunday Night

It's Sunday night, too late to have a cup of coffee or I won't sleep, but too early to just stick a fork in the day and go to bed. So what do I think?

1. I think I want to build a model airplane, but I'm unsure of the type. I have two X-15A2 kits, but they're earmarked for special projects - one's going to turn into a stretched delta-winged X-15A5, the other is going to become Pete Knight's airplane the day he set the speed record of Mach 6.71. I want to build something easy and casual, and neither of these will be easy or casual. I have a pair of Academy Me-163 Komets, and I do like the pip-squeakish Komet, but I'd be a lot more interested in the kits if they were the 1/32nd scale Hasegawa kits. I have a startling number of Arado-234 variants, and an He-177 Greif with Hs-293 glide bombs, and a very nice ICM Il-2M3 Sturmovik.

But none of this really appeals to me. I find myself wishing I had, of all things, a 1/48th scale B-24J Liberator, or something groovy and peculiar from the 1950s, especially an XF-91 Thunderceptor. Or a Hawker Fury, a classic biplane that never goes out of style with me, or... Riddle me this, Batman: how come the models that most appeal to me are the models I don't have in my collection?

2. I think I detect among historians in general a kind of anti-Roman stance. Or is that a pro-Mithridatic, pro-Hannibal stance? Not that I care, and not that it makes a difference, but somehow it seems a little silly to prefer Mithridates on moral grounds over the man who finally defeated him, Pompey the Great. It's as though they've never heard of the Asiatic Vespers...

3. I'm going to have a bowl of cereal tonight for the first time in almost a year. The prospect fills me with almost childish joy!

Eggnog

I was cleaning out the fridge the other day so I could put the new groceries away when I found a half-gallon of Safeway-brand eggnog in the back. It was unopened and quite tidy on the outside, but still, hoarding a carton of eggnog for almost four months isn't a good sign. It's actually kind of humiliating.

How, you might ask, does one miss a carton of eggnog in the back of the fridge? Well, there's a jug of blueberry-pomegranate juice in the fridge. My wife thinks it's mine. I think it's hers. It hasn't been touched in months, and the eggnog was hiding behind the juice. I think the bottom line is that if you have a jug of juice that's been in the fridge for so long the post office has assigned it its own zip code, you should consider throwing it away. At the very least, you should move it from time to time in case something behind it is on the verge of evolving opposable thumbs.

Posture Pals

I don't have a history of back trouble. Let's get that out of the way at the outset. I pull the occasional muscle and subject myself to occasional overwork like anyone, but for the most part my back has been as uncomplaining a mass of bone, muscle and gristle as one could want.

Which made my sudden descent into back pain about two weeks ago seem really strange and alarming. It was concentrated in my lower back and it was awful, so bad that I was starting to think that there was something seriously wrong with me (and there still might be). By Tuesday of this week I wanted to scream it was so awful. Or was it? "Awful" is a tricky thing - one person's awful is another person's minor annoyance, and in any event awful in my book is reserved for heart attack pain. That shit's awful. The back pain was just kind of annoying, so that I'd get home after 12 hours at work and I really wouldn't want to do anything but take four Tylenol, take a shower, go to bed, and try not to imagine all the horrible things that might be wrong with my back.

So Wednesday I was sitting at work being morose - my back hurt and my iPod battery had given out - when I became dimly aware of the coincidence that my back pain really started at about the same time I started using a new chair in the environmental lab at work. The environmental lab is pretty much a bummer in and of itself - it varies between very hot and very cold, depending on which of the environmental chambers are leaking, and the ceaseless racket of the air hammers in the vibration tables sounds for all the world like a parking lot full of idling big rigs.

The environmental lab is also where chairs go to die. Nobody goes back there unless they have to, so if anyone has a broken or deformed chair they want to get rid of, they wheel it back into the environmental lab and ditch it. There's a chair that pitches violently forward. There's a chair whose wheels fall off when you try to roll. There's a chair whose height adjustment cylinder leaks and subjects you to heart-stoppingly sudden jerks as it drops about an inch at a time. Then there's my chair, which I didn't realize at the time was channelling the spirit of Doan, of Doan's Pills fame.

I switched chairs and within a half an hour the steady, relentless pain in my back started to fade. On the way home I leaned my car seat back farther than normal, far enough that the upper left part of my forehead no longer hit the raised trim piece on the ceiling of the car. By the time I got home I felt wonderful, and I didn't even have that sore spot on the upper left side of my forehead either.

I note that since Wednesday, my back pain isn't quite gone. Apparently it isn't enough to just sit in a different chair; I also have to perform some sort of exorcism on the Satan Chair that half-wrecked me in the first place. I have it hidden behind a chamber, next to the yellow cabinet that bears the vivid (and amusing) sign "Danger: Alcahal!" When I figure out what the proper rites are, I'll go ahead with the exorcism, and then I imagine the last twinges of back pain will go away for good. The power of good posture compells you!


There is a link between drugs used in heart surgery and kidney tumors, and I really need to get myself to the doctor even though it doesn't hurt any more. Better safe than sorry.

Arthur C. Clarke

So Arthur C. Clarke is dead, and I feel a little older and grimmer. It's not that I knew the man, or that I had signed on to an Arthur C. Clarke cult of personality. It's mostly a case that he'd been a part of my life since roughly 1968 and all of a sudden he's gone.

I'm not here to write a eulogy; I'll leave that to people who either knew him better or can write better than I can. Nor am I here to try to establish his place in the pantheon of writers; I can hardly find my favorite pair of socks, let alone figure out anyone's place in the Pantheon. Besides, I quit reading science fiction a long time ago and it would be foolish of me to try to put him into context because my context ends in about 1990.

But I will say this. When I was eight my mom bought me a book of his called The Promise of Space, which is partly a fairly light treatment of some of the notable technical difficulties that pertain to spaceflight, and partly a very effective appeal to emotion and sentimentality to justify the costs and risks of spaceflight. And for all the other books of his that I read and enjoyed - Rendezvous with Rama and Against the Fall of Night in particular - what I'll always most remember of his work are the closing four paragraphs of The Promise of Space, which even today, forty years after I first read them, resonate with me. And with this recitation of them I honor the memory of Arthur C. Clarke:

We must not let our pride in our achievements blind us to the lessons of history. Over the first cities of mankind, the desert sands now lie centuries deep. Could the builders of Ur or Babylon - once the wonders of the world - have pictured London or New York? Nor can we imagine the citadels that our descendants may one day build beneath the blistering sun of Mercury or under the stars of the cold Plutonian wastes. And beyond the planets, through ages still ahead of us in time, lies the unknown and infinite promise of the stellar universe.

There will, it is true, be danger in space, as there has always been on the oceans or in the air. Some of these dangers we may guess; others we shall not know until we meet them. Nature is no friend of man's, and the most that he can hope for is her neutrality. But if he meets destruction, will be at his own hands and according to a familiar pattern.

The dream of flight was one of the noblest and one of the most disinterested of of all man's aspirations. Yet it led in the end to that B-29 driving in passionless beauty through August skies toward the city whose name it was to sear into the conscience of the world. Already there has been half-serious talk concerned the use of the Moon for military bases and launching sites. The crossing of space may thus bring, not a new Renaissance, but the final catastrophe that haunts our generation.

That is the danger, the dark thundercloud that threatens the promise of the dawn. The rocket has already been the instrument of evil, and may be so again. But there is no way back into the past; the choice, as Wells once said, is the universe - or nothing. Though men and civilizations may yearn for rest, for the dream of the lotus-eaters, that is a desire that merges imperceptibly into death. The challenge of the great spaces between the worlds is a stupendous one; but if we fail to meet it, the story of our race will be drawing to its close. Humanity will have turned its back upon the still-untrodden heights and will be descending the long slope that stretches, across a thousand million years of time, down to the shores of the primeval sea.

-- Arthur C. Clarke
The Promise of Space
Harper & Rowe, New York, 1968

I couldn't have said it better myself.

I, Clavdivs

I'm probably not alone in feeling a certain amount of shame because I haven't read this-or-that classic book. I've never read the Iliad, or any Charles Dickens, or even Beowulf, though I can't imagine how I got through high school without having to. This gnaws at me a certain amount because I think one would probably benefit from reading the books that helped to form the cultural background of the west. It's somehow expected of us that we should struggle through The Republic and Of Mice And Men and feel ourselves to be, if not edified, then at least duly chastened.

But I'm not good at reading classics. There's too much new stuff to read, and I'll just come out and say it - many classics are just flat hard to read, especially fiction. Classical histories remain as interesting to me as ever, though it's important to leaven them with more modern histories so we don't get too wrapped around the author's preconceptions. Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, for example, remains a classic, but its fundamental conclusions - that Rome fell as a consequence of "immoderate greatness" and "superstition" require a bit more thought. But classical fiction? Hrm. A while back I picked up a copy of Dickens in a Barnes & Nobles and couldn't even last through the five-minute no-guilt test-drive.

But yesterday I finally finished an old book that's been nagging at me seemingly for years. Years and years ago I watched the PBS/BBS production of I, Claudius (better known as I, Clavdivs) and liked it well enough - John Hurt makes a creepy Caligula, let me tell you, and I can't think about Sejanus without visualizing Patrick Stewart - and not long thereafter I bought the paperback of the Robert Graves novel that the show was based on. That was in, oh, about 1977. So thirty years later I finally finished reading the book, whose binding and glue were failing and which sprayed loose pages and flakes of the cover in all directions. Even more fun, it turns out that it's only the first book of two; it ends at the moment the praetorians make Claudius emperor and one has to read the second book, Claudius the God, to get the rest of the story.

What to say about it? I feel better that I've finally read this classic, though since it was first published in the 1930s it's not really that classical. And I find some of its historical assertions unlikely, such as the allegation that Augustus was nothing but an affable, easily-led buffoon who was manipulated from beginning to end by Livia. I don't doubt that Livia did her fair share of manipulating, but the idea that Augustus was a mild-mannered buffoon is, frankly, kind of silly. I also think the book overestimates the achievements of Germanicus (not his esteem, but his achievements) and denigrates Tiberius to the extent that he is given no credit for ending the Ponnonian and Dalmatian uprisings.

I guess what I'm saying is that the book hits all the proper historical notes, but the inflection is what varies. And I often disagree with the inflection. I'll cite but one example. When Augustus was very old and felt that he was near death, he started the process of transferring his authority to his adopted son, Tiberius. This was a complicated procedure that required the sending of many letters and proclamations, and once started, it could not be easily stopped. But then Augustus didn't die and started to get better! The Robert Graves version of what happened next is that Livia poisoned Augustus so that Tiberius, her son, would become emperor that much sooner. The modern historical take is that Augustus wished to die - one author once described the Roman preoccupation with suicide as being "gloomily fashionable" - and he and Livia arranged for Livia to poison him as a means of assisted suicide.

Does it matter? I guess not. Augustus is still dead either way, and Tiberius turned out to be an efficient monster in human skin either way. But it makes a difference to how one views Livia, and I just don't see her being the efficient and busy poisoner that Robert Graves says she was. But is it a good book? It's a good book. Not a page-ripper in the modern fashion, and after a while the names run together into a horrible Greco-Roman multi-car pileup and you end up being unable to determine who did what to whom (I'm pretty good with the immediate heirs of Augustus, but when you get past, say, Agrippa Posthumus, I start to lose power). But it's not bad. Not as fun to read as Conn Iggulden's historical novels about Julius Caesar, and written in a style that makes it less accessible than The Grass Crown, but it's okay.

But I do wish - oh how I wish - that Graves had not assumed that we're all idiots and changed various Roman terms into equivalent but unrelated English ones. Colonels for military tribunes, assegais for spears, captains for centurions, regiments for legions, "protectors of the people" for tribunes, gowns for togas, sword-fighters for gladiators, guardsmen for praetors, and no word at all for lictors.

But anyway.

Olympics

I heard the first mention of a boycott of the Olympics yesterday, in connection with the operations of Chinese troops in Tibet. The last time we did it was 1980, when we boycotted the Moscow Olympics because the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan in 1979 (though to hear them say it, they were "invited" in by a "friendly regime" to put down "bandits"). It took a long time for US policy to arrive at anything approaching sophistication in Afghanistan, and in some ways the fruits of our efforts were decidedly unfortunate - would a lame socialist government backstopped by limitless Soviet military resources and scant fiscal resources really be worse than the Taliban? And was playing a role, however incidental and inadvertent, in the formation of al Qaeda something we really should have done?

Water under the bridge, of course, but for all that, our boycott of the Moscow Olympics did annoy the Soviets. They pretended not to show it, but the "asterisk Olympics" irritated them. They didn't pour all that concrete and beautify all those drab Stalinist apartment blocks to please their own people; they did it because they hoped to look good on TV in front of all those non-aligned folk who the Soviets figured would be easily gulled by fancy new stadiums and not-so-drab Stalinist apartment buildings. I think that my favorite piece of Soviet Olympic cheesitude was the VDNKh, or "Exposition of Economic Achievement" that was built during Olympic Fever and was supposed to showcase the efficiency of socialist endeavor. Back then it was the Soviet equivalent of the Smithsonian, a glittering expanse of cars, rocket engines, spidery spacecraft, generators, diesel engines and other gewgaws of socialist endeavor, all of it assembled beneath the munificent but to my eye slightly wistful gaze of the largest poster of Yuri Gagarin I've ever seen. I'm told that nowadays they've dragged all the exhibits and displays out and they sell used cars and cassette tapes in the main hall.*

The Chinese are doing the same thing, of course. The Olympics are an expression of Chinese power, imperium, gravitas, cultural supremacy, what have you. And I have no desire to be implicated in them. I don't know if the US government (or any other government) will boycott the Olympics for any particular reason, but I believe I will. You put propylene glycol in my toothpaste, poison my dog, poison my kids, and spy on my country, and you expect me to give a rat's ass about your Olympics? I think not.

And it's a pity, because I usually enjoy the Olympics. I'm sort of a tyro when it comes to the ins and outs of track and field events, and the hyperabundance (no other word will do) of ice skating coverage in the Winter Olympics leaves me - wait for it - cold. And there are always those pointless arguments about whether, say, synchronized swimming is more of a sport than rhythmic gymnastics. But the notion of the Olympics in a general sense I support, and who can not help but by amused (at the very least) by things like Eddie the Eagle and the Jamaican bobsled team and the downhill skiier from Morocco?

But when the Olympics turn into another glittering aspect of a given country's propaganda offensive, I can find better things to do with my time. I wish them success - without me.

* Though I think the strangest bit of Olympic doodadery I saw in the USSR was in the lobby of the airport in Bratsk, one of those places where one side of the runway was a civil airport and the other side was a bunch of blue-grey MiG-25 interceptors in hardened revetments. Inside the lobby was an enormous thumb about eight to ten feet tall, made of concrete if my tappings of it were any guide, and spray-painted bright metallic gold. Just an erect thumb, nothing more. No hand, no thumbscrew, no explanation of any sort for how this gargantuan golden thumb came to be in the airport lobby looming over the passengers like some kind of bizarre Parthian phallus. When asked, our Intourist guide suggested (with notable lack of confidence) that it was "related to the Olympics." I referred to it thereafter as the Golden Thumb of Socialist Endeavour.

I Hate To Think It

I hate to say it. I hate to even think it. But I think the Clinton Campaign is slowly turning into the sort of thing I couldn't possibly support.

In the interests of full disclosure, I've been supporting Barack Obama for some time on the basis of my tactical assessment that he is more electable than Hillary Clinton, who has for years been the nexus of an "anyone but Hillary" movement in Republican circles.

But I couldn't say that in terms of policy or behavior there were many difference between the Obama and Clinton campaigns, so my preference for Obama was based strictly on a who-can-beat-McCain calculation. But lately it seems that the Clinton campaign is morphing into something I find mildly repugnant, and she (or her handlers) are becoming more and more overt about the fact that they're power-hungry politicians who'll not eschew any bit of gamesmanship or nastiness if they think it'll help them win.

I love the latest one - Hillary's cries that the voters of Michigan and Florida have been disenfranchised. By whom? By The Man? Is Dick Cheney down there throwing ballots in the trash? No - they were blocked from participating by the Democratic Party because the people that run the state campaigns broke the DNC's own rules! Gah! Your pathetic attempt to turn a technical breach of DNC rules into a human rights issue (really, a delegate issue) irritates me.

My point is that Hillary Clinton these days seems like your basic standard-issue power-hungry politician, and I know a lot of people who feel betrayed and let down by her because they had hoped for something more than a prancing ego in a power suit.

Alas. Earwax.

28 Legions

I've been gnawing on an idea for the last couple of weeks and I haven't really reached a conclusion. But nevertheless I'm struck anew by the idea every time I wrassle with it.

It is this:

We'll remember that Augustus Caesar became the first emperor of Rome (though he preferred the term princeps, or "first citizen") by defeating, among others, Marc Antony in a civil war. The army he inherited afterwards consisted of upwards of fifty legions of varying size and organization. He regularized the army at 28 legions all organized in the same way. Each legion contained 5,120 men, so the Roman army as a whole had 143,360 men. This means that during the Pax Romana, the "Roman Peace", the Romans controlled Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, chunks of Mesopotamia, the Middle East, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain, with a combined population of about 53 million people, with less than 150,000 regular soldiers.

This boggles me to a certain extent. How could the Romans control basically The West with 150,000 men under arms, while we can't seem to control Iraq with roughly the same number of men under arms? Rome had no spy satellites, no reconnaissance drones, no helicopters, no night vision equipment, no CIA, no FBI, no secret police, nothing. So how did they do it??

I think - but I can't prove - that the Romans did it, at least in part, by making people want to be in with the Roman empire. The Romans offered powerful incentives to join with them - citizenship, protection, aqueducts, baths, roads, trade, peace, orderly public administration, and a sense of being a stakeholder in the empire. The Roman empire didn't stay together because of the power of the Roman army, but because there were powerful inducements to join the empire, or least abide it in silence. The Romans were capable of extreme ruthlessness when pressed, but they were also pratical, realistic pragmatists who saw that there was a certain value in achieving their ends without bloodshed if possible.

What does this mean? I don't know yet. But I'm struck every time by the observation that the Romans maintained the peace throughout the western world with the same number of troops that we have in Iraq. There's a lesson in there somewhere, but I don't know what it is yet.

(Subsequent events proved that the Roman army of 28 legions was too small to carry out sustained field operations, and the lack of a central reserve meant that Rome was vulnerable to things like the "Varus Disaster", where three of the 28 legions were wiped out to the last man by German tribesmen. But even though later emperors raised additional legions, the count never exceeded 31 until the time of Domitian when the nature of the legion was drastically altered.)

(I also concede the point that for every Roman regular soldier, there was an auxiliary. The legions consisted almost exclusively of heavy infantry, which the Romans believed was the arm of decision. All the other types of soldiery that an army needs - archers, cavalrymen, scouts, light infantry - were supplied by the provinces in the form of auxiliaries. So it's reasonable to say that the Roman army consisted of 143,000 professional soldiers and an equal number of somewhat irregular auxiliaries, but the auxiliaries were never the heart of the army and were never (or at least almost never) used independently.)

Roman Names

I've always wondered what my name would have been if I had been a Roman. I've already reconciled myself to just three names; not being famous or victorious, I wouldn't cash in on any of that cool agnomen business (but how cool is a name like Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Majoris? I mean really).

It turns out that Roman name generators abound on the Internet, so I took pot luck at one. What did I get?

Spurius Flaccus Maximian.

Cripes. I mean, I wasn't really holding my breath for Marcus Tullius Cicero or Gaius Julius Caesar or anything, but Spurius Flaccus? It sounds like a Latin rendering of Accidental Fart! How would that sound in the Senate? "I wish to yield the floor to my colleague, Accidental Gas."

Let's try it again. Aulus Opsius Quiriac. Nope. No sale; it sounds like "Oopsie, I dropped my quinine." Nothing doing. One more try. Decius Sabucius Receptus. No, I don't really like that either; it's too close to Sebaceous Receptacle, but at least Decius is cool.

The problem is that the random name generator is just that: it's too random. In Roman naming, the first name, or praenomen, was sort of like a given name - Gaius, Marcus, Gnaeus, and there weren't many of them. The middle name, or just plain nomen, was the name of your clan, tribe or family unit - Julius, Claudius. There were a lot of them, but not all that many proper aristocratic ones. The last name, the cognomen, was a nickname, which was necessary because the first two names were hereditary and tended to repeat. The third name, the cognomen, was supposed to be based on some personal trait or characteristic of the person. Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, for example: Marcus was his given name, Vipsanius his clan, but Agrippa, that was all his - he had been born breech, and that's what Agrippa meant. How about a cognomen like Ahenobarbus, meaning "Bronze-bearded"? Or Cicero, meaning - for some reason - "chickpea"? Or the dreaded Posthumus, which meant that your father had died before you were born?

So what would I pick as my own cognomen? Bibulus, meaning "drunkard"? Flavus, for "blonde-haired"? Pulcher, meaning "attractive"? Or Celsus, for "tall"?

Gaius Marius Celsus*. That has a ring, don't you think? Though there are times when Titus Flavius Flavus makes me chuckle - if I were Flavius Flavus, would I have to wear a sundial on a chain around my neck? Yo!

* The real Gaius Marius, who was defeated by Cornelius Sulla in the civil war before the Civil War, had no cognomen, and I don't feel the least bit guilty usurping his name.

Whoops

Man, how would you like to lie awake at night and ruminate on the fact that you might have killed Antoine Saint-Exupery? That would bum one. But irony takes a cruel turn when it transpires that the Luftwaffe pilot who may have shot Saint-Exupery down over the south of France was - oh dear - a huge fan of Saint-Exupery's writing. Nobody is sure if the Luftwaffe pilot, Horst Rippert, really shot Saint-Exupery's P-38 Lightning down or not, but Rippert believes he did, and that's all that matters from irony's point of view.

It's akin to the fate of Archimedes during the siege of Syracuse during the Second Punic War. Marcellus, commanding the Roman forces during the siege, gave orders that the famous mathematician and engineer Archimedes was not to be killed. But after the Romans successfully carried the walls and broke into the city, some nameless legionary killed Archimedes, apparently without realizing who he was. Later, one imagines, he clapped his hands to his head and cried "shittus!" How'd you like to spend the rest of your modest life being known as the guy who killed Archimedes?

Not that I'm making light of the deaths of Saint-Exupery or Archimedes. Far from it.

When I was a kid (eight, maybe ten) I had a book on the battle of Stalingrad, and in it was a picture of some nameless German sergeant sheltering behind a pile of dirt and waving the rest of his men to come up. This was Stalingrad, a true meatgrinder and no mistake, and the odds are that he didn't survive the battle. The part that always got me was that he was an absolute dead ringer for Leonard Nimoy, and I remember being somewhat upset and confused by the strange, unhappy notion that Leonard Nimoy might have been killed before he could play Spock on TV.

It was my first realization that war might be significantly worse than had been depicted in the war movies of the day. I was just reminded of that by reading about Saint-Exupery this evening. I'd go read something cheerful, but neither of the books I'm currently reading - Lisey's Story by Stephen King and I, Claudius by Robert Graves - are the least bit cheerful.

251

This is my two hundred and fifty-first post, by the way. Kind of an odd anniversary, but I like odd anniversaries.

But I was really interested in the new Star Trek XI movie, which will apparently be produced, written and directed by the people who bring us Lost. I'm not sure what to think of that. They also brought us Mission: Impossible, and I didn't really like either of the M:I movies, and I'm not sure that anything we've seen on Lost really suits the world of Star Trek. But I'm happy to withhold judgment and see how they do.

But so far I'm not inordinately pleased. I'm not sure I care to see the life and times of the Old Show regulars before there was an old show. This is an invitation to the most dreaded words in all of fandom, the retcon and the reboot. Retcon stands for "retroactive continuity" and is what happens when the objective facts of a series do not change, but their interpretation does. The "dream season" in Dalls is a classic retcon. The death of Superman required the writers to retcon vulnerabilities into him that didn't exist originally. If they make Mr. Sulu gay in the movie, it will be a retcon, though a harmless one. A reboot is more extensive and odious; it amounts to re-launching a series and paying no attention to any of the existing material. Cynics can, and do, argue that the third season of Lost amounted to a reboot, because all of a sudden we were dealing with situations, people, and shit in a general sense that we'd never seen before - and none of the situations, people and shit we were used to were still around.

Frankly, I don't want to see a reboot of Kirk, Spock and McCoy. If they're going to do that, I'd just as soon they made up new characters. And I'm not sure I'm even in the mood for an awful lot of retconning either. I watched the "Under Construction" trailer and I have to say, I liked it - it makes a nice connection between the American space program of the 1960s and Starfleet of the 23rd Century, and I like the timeless nature of the ironworkers who hammer the freakin' thing together. And the ship looks pretty much like the original-release Enterprise. But - uhoh! - what's this??

It's built on Earth? Last time I checked, it was built at the San Francisco Shipyards in orbit around Earth, not on Earth (though I personally prefer the Utopia Planitia Shipyards, if only because the geographical names on Mars seem exceedingly cool to me). Second, what's with the enormous and obviously freewheeling turbine blades in the warp nacelles? What's there in space to either drive or be driven by a turbine? And why do they look so much like spinner hubcabs on a tacky SUV?

Oh, I'm doing it already, aren't I? My geek nature is showing. Sorry about that. Happy 251, ya geek.

Oh, I Didn't Just See That, Did I?

The Pharaoh's Tomb - so it's dusty, the size of a small trailer park, and contains jars of dessicated organs? That sounds appetizing. So by what nickname is her lover's organ known? The Sarcophagus? Howard Carter?

If there's anything worse than waking up and first thing in the morning reading about some celebrity's nickname for her genitalia, it must surely be having nicknames for one's genitalia in the first place. Don't you agree, Sven Veenie?

I should know better than to read celebrity news. It's a delirium of baby bumps, bad hair, bad behavior, Botox and superficiality, but I still read it. Apparently I hate myself.

But I do beg one favor: please, please, stop using the expression "baby bump". Celebrities and yuppies seem to have done a pretty good job of turning babies into accessories - they're not something you raise, but something you show off. I'm all in favor of motherhood. That's how I got here, after all. But this postmodern obsession with babies as status symbols makes me sigh. So what happens when Ms. Celebrity's batch of offspring turn 13 and start to eat everything in the house, break things that cannot normally be broken, cycle rapidly between black despair and frothy self-assurance, whine for days because they, as 13 year olds, do not understand love, and in the same breath refer to you as a Fascist and ask if you can drive them to the mall? Will there be a press conference from Ms. Celebrity where she says "Oh, my preteen rug rats stopped being the sorts of things I could lord over my friends and started to have independent thoughts, so I had them all shot. My rut rats and my friends. Meantime, haven't you noticed that I'm showing? Have you got a good angle to see my baby bump?"

I theorize that if you could somehow convince celebrities that there are adoptable babies on the moons of Saturn, they'd pool their billions and pay for scientists to design a warp drive just so they can pose for photos amid this Saturnian baby population.

Epic-who?

Today in the aftermath of my cardiology visit I was sitting at my desk eating an orange and trying to bend a paperclip into new and hitherto-unknown shapes and became gripped by a strange train of thought. When I was in high school I fancied myself to be a Stoic. Actually, my friend fancied himself to be a Stoic too, and we took turns trying to prove that we knew Epictetus's Enchiridion better than the other. What does this have to do with cardiology? Nothing, but welcome to the strange world of how seemingly unconnected things go together in my head.

Anyway, we used to have contests to see who had the better command of Epictetus, but what I remember more than anything is the way we argued about his name. How do you pronounce Epictetus? I favored "epic-tea-tus". He favorited "ee-pic-teh-tus". So instead of having a fruitful discussion about a reasonably formative school of philosophy, we fought about the poor bastard's name.

Later I lost the Stoic faith, such as it is, and had a thrillful fling with what I fancied to be phenomonology until I realized that what I really knew about phenomonology would fit in a thimble. What I had done was read a little bit about phenomonology and invent an all-new school of philosophy that should have been called dumbassology. But it was fun. Dark, but fun. Darkly fun?

And that's the point. You get out of your cardiology appointment with nothing but good news to show for it, and suddenly it's fun to think about the bullshit philosophies one espoused in high school again.

Cardiology

I went to the cardiologist today and was pronounced "excellent". I've felt pretty good heart-wise for quite a while, but it's good to have the doctors concur, what with their impressive test equipment and all. Even my EKG was good, and since it was my first EKG since I left phase-II rehab, it made me scream like a scared puppy when she tore the electrodes off my chest.

But I'm annoyed that my doctor didn't officially recognize my weight loss. What's the use of losing weight if nobody in a position of authority notices?

Hall of Fame

I see Madonna was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That doesn't move me much one way or the other; I've never had particularly strong feelings about Madonna one way or the other. Not my kind of music, and past that, I don't care. But doesn't it seem odd that someone who is still practicing, or capable of practicing, one's profession should already be in the Hall of Fame?

Apparently one becomes eligible for the Hall of Fame 25 years after the first release of one's first bit of work. So it's 2008, and I think that means that artists who came out in 1983 are now eligible for the Hall of Fame. Think about it. Eddie Money? 707?? The Buggles??? THE WAITRESSES???

It kind of makes the Hall of Fame seem irrelevant when you're competing against the Bullet Boys, dunnit?

3 AM Phone Call

Who do I want answering the "red phone" in the White House at 3 AM? Not Hillary Clinton, I can tell you that much for free, because power-hungry career politicians give me gas. No, I want Babe Ruth to answer the 3 AM phone calls. Why? Because he's dead, and everyone knows he's dead, and what could be scarier than talking to a dead man on the telephone? A dead man who might or might not have control of the US nuclear arsenal?? Nobody would do anything contrary to the wishes of US foreign policy for fear of tangling with the spirit of Babe Ruth, mean and hung-over and nuclear-capable. It would even get to Osama. "I see jowly Americans with Louisville Sluggers and hip flasks, oh it's so horrible!"

Variety Plate

New Music. I was farting around on iTunes (I think "farting around" is actually a technical term when it comes to iTunes) and found a complication album called something like NorthernBreeze II. It sounds a bit like King Haakon's yacht, but it's subtitled "Finnish metal compilation." Nice, except some of the bands are Norwegian, some of them aren't metal, and how can you possibly have a Finnish metal compilation without Children of Bodom and Insomnium? But it did have a song from an interesting new band, Mors Principium Est, which my schoolboy Latin translates as "Death Begins" or "Death is Beginning". Or is it "Death is Foremost"? I guess it doesn't matter. Carthago delenda est. Mors Principium Est sounds like blackened death metal to me, and it's not bad. It's not great - it's a bit of an acoustic mess, especially in the first minute or two of the song, and if I were engineering the thing, I'd have heavied it up just a tad (the effect we're aiming for is to make Nathan Explosion nod and say "It's getting nice and heavy") and cleaned it up considerably. It's not quite cold enough to be black metal and not quite aggressive enough to be death metal, but it'll do, for now, at least until "Dance With You" and "At the Gates of Sleep" stop getting all mixed up in my head.

New Game. I went to my mom's birthday luncheon today and had opportunity to play Rock Star for about 20 seconds before I was unceremoniously failed. Clearly I missed something, and it's probably just as well. Fun? It seemed like it, but one has to ask how I of all people ended up having to do a Hole song in Rock Star. Hole! Those whom the gods would destroy they first bemuse with intense irony. The only other option was "Orange Crush" by REM, which frankly isn't much of an option. Hole or REM. Wow. It's like having to choose between taking a sword in the groin or the throat. "I'll take hideous painful death for two hundred, Alex."

New Ailment. I haven't blogged much in the last week. I developed a low-grade sinus infection earlier this week, and its main function is to make my writing ideas seem dumb and sap my energy by about 15%, just enough to make me lazy and unproductive and to periodically awaken me with that unpleasant sense of drainage.

So Soon?

I had cause to look at my butt in the mirror yesterday. Or let's say that the whim to look at my butt and a mirror happened to coincide in time and space, and I made a shocking discovery: my incentive pants are already baggy in back. I don't know whether that's good or bad, mostly because I'm too startled to think about clearly, but there it is.