Worst Day of My Life

No, today wasn't the worst day of my life. The worst days of my life all involve someone close to me dying, because there's no repairing those sorts of losses at all.

Today was a very bad day, but nothing that a good hot shower and a washing machine couldn't fix. But it was still one of the most embarrassing, humiliating, mortifying experiences I've ever had. It made me want to cry, that's how bad it was.

Today was my last day at my job for a month, and that's not the badness. They still intend to bring me back in a month, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't looking forward to sleeping in a little for the next month. But some friends of mine (Dean and Paul) took me to lunch as a Chinese restaurant for my last day. I was eating my chicken chow mein, a dish I happen to enjoy a great deal despite its blandness and simplicity. Suddenly, out of nowhere, I was hit by a wave of horrible, intense nausea and vertigo, the kind of vertigo that comes with a countdown: "Spew in six seconds... Five... Four..." Vertigo so intense that you can already feel the innards getting ready for their curtain call...

That's terror - knowing that you're going to throw up and there's nothing you can do about it, and knowing that you don't have anything like enough time to get to the restrooms, which are way over on the other side of the restaurant, with an obstacle course of happy lunch diners in between.

I don't want to provide too many details, because they're disgusting. Suffice it to say that I didn't make it to the bathroom, and what I was uanble to contain with my napkin ended up on my shirt and pants and socks and shoes. It was so horrible, so depressing, sitting there and having that happen, knowing that I'd just ruined lunch for myself and everyone sitting around me...

Obviously I couldn't go back to work. I managed to strip in the bathroom and flush out my clothes to the point I merely looked wet rather than disgusting, but that sort of job is never entirely complete. So I had to make what apologies I could, get my stuff from my desk, and go home, wet and stinking.

The vertigo and nausea didn't really go away until I got home and could spend some quality time in the bathroom, which left me sweaty and trembling and lying on the floor, still so embarrassed I wanted to cry. Why me? And why today?

Well - I've got a month to get over it, I guess.

Sexist Palaver

I was watching bull riding last night on TV, which in its PBR variant is a sort of slick, polished, pop-culturally hip version of older rodeo events. PBR events are rodeo without the obscure roping events and with loud music and pyrotechnics, something partway between rodeo events, patriotic rallies and rock concerts.

Anyway, there is a woman on the Versus TV crew, Leah Garcia, whose job is to do quickie interviews with the cowboys, which often go like this:

Leah: What did you do differently this time?
Happy Cowboy: I hung on and dint get bucked off.

Or:

Leah: What are you going to have to do differently to get back into it?
Sulky Cowboy: Not get bucked off, I reckon.

Not prime journalism, in other words, but someone has to do the flavor stories. Last night they gave her an opportunity to actually express some of he opinions on bull riding and the season in general – to do something akin to actual reporting - and after rendering her opinions, she sent it back to the booth with a sort of “What do you think of that?” remark.

What did they think of that? Did they take her opinions at all seriously? Of course not! They didn’t even acknowledge the fact that she had had opinions! One guy just said “She’s sure a lot prettier than we are.” There you go, you knucklehead, don’t even take her opinions seriously and only comment on how she looks. I’m sure he didn’t mean to be insulting – or did he? Bull riding's a pretty traditional sport and plays to pretty traditional people who don’t always seem to have a lot of use for new-fangled inventions like city folk, women with opinions, and Brazilians.

So with that said, I now approach the subject I really wanted to talk about, that being Ashley Force winning an NHRA Funny Car race title. See this link for official NHRA news:

http://www.nhra.com/content/team_report.asp?articleid=28489&zoneid=86

It’s not my normal policy to congratulate people for winning things like this – John Force has won umpteen titles and I never congratulated him, and other than respect for his accomplishments, I never went out of my way to honor Don Garlits either. So does congratulating Ashley Force amount to a kind of institutional sexism? Am I calling attention to her sex or her appearance instead of calling attention to her skill as a driver? I don’t know – but I do know that beating John Force isn’t easy, and reaching 320 miles per hour in a Funny Car isn’t easy, and doing it consistently enough to win the event isn’t easy. So, congratulations.

I confess I was always one of those guys who assumed that Ashley was driving simply because her father wanted her to. John Force would likely not be an easy man to turn down. He’s passionate, he has a larger-than-life personality, and he seems to have some difficulty taking “no” for an answer, so I always assumed Ashley was in drag racing just to buy a certain amount of family peace – easier to race than to fight Daddy Force all the time. But perhaps I’m wrong – I don’t know, but I would think it would be hard to win the title if you didn’t have a fairly high level of commitment to the task.

Swansong

Not everything happens immediately. For some time I've been meaning to buy the Carcass album Swansong. I'd already heard a couple songs from it, including the amusing "Keep On Rotting In The Free World", and I kind of liked that sound.

I have a hair trigger when it comes to Carcass's earlier grindy stuff. When they're good, they're brilliant, as in "Corporeal Jigsore Quandary", "Inpropagation" and the like. But when they're off, that sloppy grindy nastiness gets old in a hurry (let's be honest and admit that some, if not all, of the "Peel Sessions" blow chunks).

Apparently they got tired of it too, because starting with Heartwork and especially on Swansong, Carcass moved away from grindcore-based death metal and turned into what could best be described as a heavier-than-usual rock band with a death metal ethic but not necessarily a death metal sound - a thrashy version of Def Leppard in an ugly mood, one might say, heavy enough but not atonal in the way that really heavy death metal can get.

I happen to like that sound, but the early hardcore fans of Carcass view it as a disgusting sellout of the most appalling sort. But it strikes me that Swansong is a good entree into death metal - if you can listen to Swansong and find it halfway decent, you may find further explorations in death metal of interest. If you listen to Swansong and find it too heavy or contrived, well, best that you didn't pay money for something truly heavy like Descanting the Insalubrious.

Back when I used to play the guitar and imagined that sensitive pickups, "Blue Steel" strings and lots of distortion pedals were what made one metal, I kept trying to write my own song (one can cover Tesla and Metallica for so long) and I now realize that the song I was trying (and failing) to write was something very much like "Polarized" or "R**K The Vote".

It's Over

We, as Democrats, have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, I fear.

How hard would it be to come up with a list of things the "average American", whatever that really means, worries about? Health insurance, jobs being sent overseas, the weak economy, suspicious increases in gasoline prices, the war in Iraq, climate change, the decaying strength of the dollar, national debt, the imbalance of trade, the possibility of Social Security going belly-up, nuclear proliferation in the developing world, state-sponsored terrorism, why on earth people have to take their shoes off at airports... (Not that all Americans agree on these issues, but all Americans could be expected to care about, say, the climate change debate one way or the other.)

That's just what I could come up with in the time between sips of coffee.

And what do the Democratic candidates seem to want to talk about? Whose minister said what, who wears tackier clothes, who's a bigger blue-blood elitist, gaffes, personal animosity, who needs a teleprompter the worst, who did or didn't approve of blowjobs in the Oval Office, whether one has or has not had debates...

I predict John McCain will win. Normally I would say he's unelectable because of his temper and his dubious connections with Charles Keating, but that's assuming that he's running against a rational opponent who can intelligently use issues like the war in Iraq or climate change or energy policy against him.

But that won't happen. Clinton's strategy is clearly one of scorched-earth: if she can't win, no Democrat will win. If she wins the nomination, she's guaranteed to lose because nobody, not even Mother Teresa, can win with a 68% negative rating, and John McCain sweeps into the White House. If Barack Obama wins the nomination, he'll be so weakened and bloodied by this stupid internecine fighting with Clinton that he'll find it difficult to defeat McCain, who will have spent the whole time resting, accumulating money, and devising strategies.

Clearly I support Barack Obama, but honestly, in the beginning I didn't think there would be that much to choose between him and Hillary. I figured the differences between them would be a matter of nuance; I didn't expect her to be crazy as a roof rat, modern-day America's version of Marcus Porcius Cato.

I grow weary of the whole seedy, unproductive spectacle. Belgium looks better and better to me. Who's with me?

Warning from the Sturgeon-General

The Sturgeon-General reports that driving fifteen miles with two freshly-made Pizza Hut pizzas on the back seat of your car will drive you crazy enough you'll start writing long, meandering blog posts about gladiators.

Oh no, not again...

Gladiating

This is a topic that's been on my mind lately, but I'll readily admit that the odds of it interesting anyone else are slim, at best. It has to do with gladiators in ancient Rome, or more precisely the modern attitude toward gladiators in ancient Rome. When I read most modern historians, I sense that they are in some way kind of angry at the Romans. Modern historians seem to say "Gosh, you guys were so advanced in administration and engineering, such a military powerhouse, such a stabilizing and civilizing influence for nigh unto a thousand years, and you'd be so easy to admire if it wasn't for those blood-soaked gladiatorial games." It pisses the historians off that the Romans enjoyed gladiatorial contests because it somehow means that the historians can't openly admire the Romans.

Historians take several tacks when dealing with gladiators. The first method seems to be to mention the Games in a vaguely negative light, but then to ignore them henceforth and hope that everyone else ignores them too. The second method is even cheesier, which is to somehow blame the rowdy mob for the Games. They usually quote the "punch-line" of Juvenal's famous line about how the people demand only panum et circenses, "bread and circuses", served up by long-suffering aristocrats who themselves hated the Games but felt they had to keep the bloodthirsty mob happy. But when you real the rest of the quotation of Juvenal, you see that he wasn't refering to the plebs or the mob or anyone else; he said "we", meaning all Romans, and he was really talking about a loss of civic virtue in general and not the bread dole and the Games in specific.

I think what bothers most historians is that for all our protestations of being somehow better than the Romans, we're really no better. The Games live on and we just don't want to admit it, and we're not so far removed from the bloody spectacle that was Rome after all.

The Games can be divided into three general categories of atrocity: public executions of criminals, cruelty to animals (or sometimes cruelty BY animals) and armed combat.

As for public execution, we modern folk have no leg to stand on. Supposedly civilized countries like Iran and China maintain the practice of public execution even in the 21st Century, and the last public execution in the United States didn't take place all that long ago. Every now and then one reads letters to the editor in the local paper claiming that bringing back public executions would somehow deter crime better than private executions. Would they really? Or do you just want to watch?

When it comes to cruelty to animals, we differ from the Romans only in scale. Remember what Michael Vick was convicted of? 'Nuff said. Cock-fights remain popular throughout the Southwest. It's hard to find a medium-size town in Mexico or Spain that doesn't have a bull ring. And canned hunts where bloated losers blast caged leopards and cougars with high-powered rifles are actually worse than anything the Romans did with animals - at least the Romans expected you to man up and go fight the big cat with nothing but a spear, not a high-powered rifle and a steel cage (The Romans knew all about what it meant to man up or cowboy up, but they referred to it as virtus).

The only area where we can claim any kind of moral superiority at all is in the field of combat between armed gladiators, but we're getting there. As boxing gave way to ultimate cage-fighting and MMA, they will in turn give way to something more violent yet. The Internet already teems with videos of guys getting killed in various ways, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if underground fight clubs don't produce the occasional fatality. Will we have televised matches between sword-armed gladiators on TV? I don't know - but we're only a few steps from joining the happy Roman throng in its orgy of blood and violence.

But you know what? It might actually be a welcome diversion from the crawling horror that the Democratic Presidential primaries have turned into. Panum et circenses? Ita! Believe I'll have me some!

Something Controversial

The gasoline situation gnaws at me. If four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline isn't enough to convince people that it's time to get serious about ending our dependence on petroleum, I don't know what will. Five-dollar-a-gallon gas? Rationing? Half-mile lines at the gas pumps like in the 1970s?

One of the things that irritates me about this whole situation is that no matter what idea you have to reduce dependence on oil, one or another industry think-tank has experts that think your idea of the worst thing since liver-flavored Jell-O. In the end the industry experts seem to argue that nothing can be done to alter the status quo because the oil company executives and stockholders aren't sufficiently rich yet.

Well. There is a way to take a large chunk out of our dependence on petroleum and to eliminate - not reduce, but eliminate - carbon dioxide emissions. But as a liberal I'm not supposed to think its name, let alone say it. It is literally the N-word of liberalism: nuclear energy. Oh, I hear it already: "Oh my God! Three Mile Island, Rocky Flats, Chernobyl, two-headed chickens, plutonium in the water system!"

I'm not blind to the risks of nuclear power, and I recognize that it only takes one accident like Chernobyl to render the whole nuclear power industry a bad investment (and make no mistake, the Chernobyl accident is still going on, and will be going on at the very least until the final permanent sarcophagus is built and rainwater can be kept out of the ruined reactor building. And if the reactor building falls apart, or if the huge reactor lid falls over, and the sarcophagus fails, the original disaster will happen all over again except this time there won't be a graphite fire).

But I believe that properly managed, nuclear power alone of all the alternative energy sources has the capacity to make a serious dent in our petroleum usage. Nuclear power plants deliver huge quantites of power and they deliver it without carbon dioxide and without dependence on politically unreliable foreign fuel sources. Sounds good to me.

Is this where I have to stop saying I'm a card-carrying liberal?

People ask me "What do you propose we do with all the radioactive waste? Where should the spent fuel rods be kept? Do you agree to have a radioactive materials storage site next door to your house?" And my answer is "I don't know what to do with the radioactive waste, and I don't know where to put the spent fuel rods, and no, I'm not particularly enamored of the idea of a Yucca Mountain-style facility next door to my house, but I think I'd prefer figuring out the answers to those problems to the idea of diverting all my disposable income to oil company executives and Middle Eastern warlords while at the same time filling the atmosphere with nitric acid and carbon dioxide which may, in the long, prove to be a lot more dangerous to the planet than a bunch of blue-glowing fuel rods in a storage pond somewhere."

Ha! Controversy!

Perverting Justice?

I spent most of the morning cleaning up the back yard, mostly a matter of chopping brush, throwing stuff away, raking up debris, putting tools away, and things of that nature. Then I came inside to have some apple juice and sat down to read the headlines, such as they are, on AOL. I routinely accuse AOL of being the worst news service in the world, but they aren't. They're just playing to their market, which prefers to read stories about Capri pants, Dancing With The Stars, the latest grave pronouncement from the court of Queen Angelina, and the police-blotter hijinks of NBA and NFL stars.

But they also have a morbid fascination with Amy Winehouse, which in a way I kind of share. I find her remarkable, and here I caution readers that "remarkable" doesn't mean good, it just means "worthy of being remarked upon". (This is akin to "awesome", which doesn't mean great, it simply means "capable of inducing awe" one way or the other.) Anyway, the news story this morning had something to do with her husband, Fielder-Civil, being held in jail awaiting trial on charges of "perverting the course of justice."

Wow! Perverting the course of justice! That's why the English are better than we are: they recognize perversion of the course of justice as a crime, while to us it's just business as usual and the best legal perverts get the biggest retainers.

I'm just in a cynical mood today. Yet another blue-ribbon panel of industry experts convenes to get to the bottom of the increase in gasoline prices, and they find no evidence of gouging. Yet I'll bet you a doughnut that Exxon-Mobil posts record profits this year and once again their executives are going to have to pretend to be remorseful about it while privately high-fiving one another. But there's no gouging.

There's a perversion of some kind, I'm just not sure what.

Boileth Over

Or - my indignation boils over - the same agency that decided that if Thiokol had no problem with the O-rings, then they didn't have a problem either. Yeah, it's kind of a cheap shot, but how many times does complacency have to be repaid with disaster before program managers stop imagining that spaceflight is somehow routine or that failures can't happen simply because they haven't happened?

And that's quite enough out of me, I'm sure.

Beverage Hell

This is a true story. The fact that it's true doesn't mean it isn't pathetic, but it is true.

Every now and then I become despondent over the range of fizzy beverages at the grocery store. You've got your cola family, your root beer/cream soda family, your citrus family, your berry family, and that's about it. And sometimes I think "That's it? For the rest of human history we'll have to get by on these four flavor families? Oh, say it isn't so!"

But then the endless inventiveness of America redeems my faith by coming out with Baja Blast. Now, mind you, I don't like Baja Blast very much - it's way too sweet and it causes general unrest amid my Isles of Langerhans - but mirabile dictu it's a new flavor unrelated to the previous four! Mankind can continue to plan to go the stars secure in the knowedge that new flavors of soft drink are possible, and they needn't necessarily feature mango. But for all that I don't care for Baja Blast very much, it's come to feature in my Friday Lunch, which is a Taco Bell #3 (three Super Tacos) and a tankard of Baja Blast, all downed in the parking lot behind where I work while listening to the radio or a book on CD.

I worried when I was a kid that astronauts would tire of Tang. What would become of them in the midst of a ten-day lunar mission if they suddenly developed a strong distaste for Tang and wanted, say, a rum and Coke? Would insanity set in? Anything could happen. They might open the Apollo capsule at the end of the mission and find nothing but fingernail claw-marks on the inside of the spacecraft, and the hastily-scrawled note can't live with that god-pounding Tang another minute...

I used to really like the works of William Gibson, especially the Burning Chrome collection of short stories and the early cyberpunk novels like Neuromancer and Count Zero. Later his apparent obsession with fashion design quelled my interest in such things as Idoru and Pattern Recognition, but that's okay; he doesn't need my money that badly any more anyway. Anyway, he wrote a short story whose name escapes me, but the upshot is that people go out into a circumscribed region of space and pop flares, and according to some scheme nobody understands, some of the spacecraft are taken. Nobody knows where they go, because when they come back (and they always come back) the occupant is suicidal and insane, but almost always clutching some piece of bizarre alien technology, like the cure for cancer inscribed on a ring of black iron. It's a haunting piece of fiction and extremely effective because Gibson doesn't even begin to bother with the explanation; his story is about the emotions in the caregivers that try to keep these poor yahoos from killing themselves.

It was the notion of an empty Apollo capsule coming back with fingernail claw-marks on the inside that suddenly reminded me of that Gibson tale. I'd love to sit down and have a beer with him and talk about that story for a bit, but somehow I get the feeling that William Gibson doesn't have blue-collar beers with fans who buy clothes at chain stores and wouldn't know a designer jacket if one attacked.

Actually, I have a list of people that I'd like to have a beer with. The top two are pretty solid, but after that, the list moves around a little, and sometimes there are major changes when someone high up on the list dies, like Arthur C. Clarke.

1. Michael J. Nelson of MST3K infame. He seems like he'd be a good beer dude.
2. Stephen King, though he may not appreciate me trying to get him to start drinking again.
3. William Gibson, in honor of the amazing power of his early writing
4. Neil Armstrong, who probably wouldn't appreciate the invitation very much.
5. Madeleine Albright, because I'd love to know exactly what she said to Slobodan.
6. Tracy Caldwell, simply because it is the nature of moths to circulate around lights.
(See http://www.titanmag.com/2002/caldwell/index.html for details.)

All right. Enough stream of consciousness for today, wouldn't you say?

"No Serious Problems"

NASA apparently released a statement today claiming that the ballistic re-entry of the Soyuz presented no serious problems and didn't put the life of the crew at risk. Their source? The Russian space agency, which NASA cited as being "not very concerned".

This is the wrong way to do a safety analysis, people. You're driving down the road and some yokel in a huge SUV (I like picking on huge SUVs) runs a red light and barely misses you. The incident is dismissed as irrelevant because Robbie Knievel, standing on the streetcorner, wasn't excited by the near miss.

Great.

I grant the validity of the proposition that one shouldn't over-react in the face of this incident. But to say that there was never any real risk because the Russians are not sweating is clearly ridiculous. The allegations are that the service block hung on to the DM until it separated from aerodynamic forces! I don't know about NASA, or the Russians, but that's pretty serious in my book, and I'd prefer for the agencies involved to speak to this specific alleged failure and not fob me off with BS like "Oh, well, they aren't concerned, so we aren't concerned."

These are, after all, the same institutions that had no problem with turning off the ranging radar during the Progress docking disaster...

Ballistic Re-entry

So the Russians had another Soyuz spacecraft switch to ballistic re-entry, the third one in about two years. What does that mean, and it is important?

First, what it means. The Soyuz spacecraft consists of three major chunks, but only the bell-shaped Descent Module (often called the "DM" to the presumable confusion of Dungeons & Dragons fans) makes it back to earth. Because of its shape, it is capable of generating a small amount of lift. Unlike a rock that simply falls straight to the ground, the Soyuz DM (like most manned spacecraft) can be flown, though it has to be said that the amount of lift is really quite small.

What's the point then, if the amount of lift is so small? One reason to do this "lifting re-entry", as it is sometimes called, is because it reduces the strain on the crew. When the DM is flying in its half-assed way, the gee-forces on the crew are substantially reduced. Another good reason to have lifting re-entry is that you can steer the DM to a precise touchdown - during the Gemini and Apollo programs, some feared (and not entirely irrationally) that the lifting re-entry technique made the Gemini and Apollo capsules so accurate they might actually hit their recovery aircraft carrier, which would be simultaneously very impressive and very sad.

So those are the advantages. Lifting re-entry is comfortable for the crew, especially for a crew that's been aboard a space station for a while and isn't fully adapted to gravity. Lifting re-entry is also accurate and you can in principle plop the capsule down right next to the caterer's van.

But it requires that the spacecraft be under positive control. Lifting re-entry doesn't just happen; you have to control the spacecraft using its attitude control jets to make it happen. And that means that the spacecraft needs a functional computer control system, functional attitude control jets, and functional other bits like a navigation system, an inertial reference system and so forth.

What is some part of this system fails? What if you can't control the spacecraft and can't do that groovy lifting re-entry? Ah, then you go for the backup ballistic re-entry, where you don't need a control system; the spacecraft is designed in such a way that it'll fly a ballistic re-entry even if the computers are all turned off (indeed the word ballistic implies that there is no control and guidance; it's as uncontrolled as the flight of a bullet). As it happens, this ballistic re-entry is much more vigorous than lifting re-entry. The angle is steeper, the deceleration is harder, and the spacecraft lands much sooner than it would have. In the case of the Soyuz, uncontrolled ballistic re-entry caused it to land about 250 miles "upstream" of where it was expected to land.

Is any of this bad? Well, yes and no. Nobody wants to make the crew uncomfortable, and a control system failure of any kind is always worrisome. And coming down 250 miles away from the recovery people is annoying, especially when nobody knows where you are and you have to literally call home and tell them where you are. But none of this is all that much more dangerous than normal spaceflight. Annoying, uncomfy, unexpected, sure, but not particularly dangerous.

The real question is WHY.

The last time this happened, the Russians tried to blame the crew - I remember reading that the first reaction of the controllers when they heard that the Soyuz had gone in ballistic was What did you touch? Up until recently, "crew error"was responsible for everything, including the time the Progress rammed Mir when Tsibliev was supposed to fly it to a manual docking with no range or range-rate information - insert sound of forehead being gripped here. Later they concluded that an electrical problem had disabled the flight control computer, and the capsule reverted by heavenly routine to ballistic re-entry, safe enough though inconvenient and uncomfortable.

But this time? There are reports, thus far unconfirmed, that an explosive bolt holding either the Service Block or the Orbital Module to the DM didn't blow, or didn't blow properly, which caused the DM to tumble during the early part of re-entry presumably until aerodynamic forces built up to the point that the bolt sheared. This has happened before, at least once, and it's potentially deadly, an issue much, MUCH more serious than the mere ballistic re-entry.

The Soyuz spacecraft and booster have been admirably safe and effective and have given the Russians sterling service over the years. There have been accidents, sure, but so far only four men have died in Soyuz spacecraft in almost forty years of use. So I'm not necessarily one of those Safety Cassandras that insists that the Soyuz be scrapped because something went haywire on the last mission. But this business with the explosive bolt, if that's true, that's very bad juju, and I for one wouldn't take a seat on a Soyuz until the Russians presented me with some pretty compelling failure-analysis and corrective-action information. Ballistic re-entry? I can hack it. But a Service Block trailing my DM all the way down? Negative. Moscow, we have a problem.

Phantasm Vegables

Our garden produced its first crop of vegables last weekend, though they're Phantasm vegables. Phantasm vegables, not phantasm vegables, savvy?

Ever seen the movie Phantasm, in particular the part where the kid almost gets sucked through the Ominously Whirring Tuning Fork and sees troll dolls laboring in the mine or whatever it was? Turns out they were full-size people at some point, but were scrunched down into miniature troll dolls so they could withstand the higher gravity or something. Yeah, whatever. The point is that these troll dolls still have all the foibles of full-size people - all the bad ideas, all the foolish intentions, all the superficial preoccupations - but they occupy a quarter of the volume. Such a deal, a full gallon of venality in a handy pint-sized package!

(Unless the scrunching process squeezes the evil out of them, in which case they'd have a problem disposing of the dark, oily evil essence that Rachael Ray might well refer to as "EEPO", or Extra-Evil People Oil - rub a little of it on the Dalai Lama's gums and suddenly he breaks out in oily, hairy moles and starts shrieking about lebensraum.)

But back to the vegables. The garden produced about five squash and a similar number of green beans that were similarly scrunched down. Perfectly formed, but very small. Little tiny squash that were perfectly recognizable as squash, but no bigger than my little finger, and little tiny bean pods that were perfectly recognizable at bean pods, but about the size of matchsticks (you've heard of shoestring potatoes? These are matchstick beans). But in recompense they had all the flavor of their full-size cousins in a tiny fraction of their volume, so biting into them was like summer carrying out a full-scale assault on one's taste buds. "Wow, now that's a mumble-frotz squash," one couldn't help saying as the little tiny baby squash released full-size squash flavor.

Back in the old days, when I was prone to watching the GI Joe cartoon on TV, they advertised some bubble gum in this way: a kid would chaw into a hunk of said gum, there would be a terrible rumbling, and suddenly his native guide (go figure) would shout "Flavormundo!" as gouts of sticky magenta flavor fluid erupted from the bowels of the earth. "Flavormundo" not being a standard English word, the commercial supplied subtitles, which read "It's a tidal wave of flavor!" But I actually think that "flavormundo" should have been subtitled "a world of flavor" or, even more interestingly, "flavor world". I love the idea of Flavor World, a Big Lots-style store where unsuccessful flavors are liquidated in large lots to shoppers who aren't terribly choosy. Flavors like split bee soup, the infamous MST3K crotch-flavored popcorn, pretzels made with genuine Buna-S rubber, Sweaty Sock brand cheese, and maraconi'n'liverwurst. And would it not be ironic to find Flavor Flav himself working at Flavor World? Word!

I digress.

Oh, I'm Not Well

Recently the Stephen King book Duma Key was recommended to me, and I've duly penciled it into my wish-list (now if only I'd stop buying those gosh-darn Chicken Soup for the Sociopathic Soul books).

Pursuant to this I went out and read a few quicky Internet reviews, and my goodness it's amazing how a single well-chosen paragraph can change one's view of a book. Here's how it works. You take me, you tell me about a book called Duma Key, and I, like a dumbass, assume that it's got something to do with the key to the front door of the Russian Parliament, also known as the Duma. So I rumple my forehead and think "Well, it's an interesting idea for a spy novel, I guess, but I'm not sure how Steve - I bought the whole Dark Tower series; surely we're on a first-name basis by now - can make that into a horror novel."

The answer is - he can't. It's got nothing to do with door keys or the Russian Parliament, double-dumbass, it's named after a small island in the Florida Keys!

I blame the mushy spot on my forehead, which is starting to smell a bit like ethylene gas.

For Instance

A bit earlier I remarked that I'd suddenly started to write in the third person. Maybe not well in the third person, but in the third person nevertheless. Here's the first page of a story that I started over the weekend, a post-WWII horror novel, that I may or may not actually finish, but it's striking to me that it's written in third person, and it wasn't a conscious decision on my part to write it in third person. In the immortal words of James Bond, "Shocking!"

And now, the first page of the story:


“Hey Captain, what are we looking for again?”

“Rocket parts.”

“Uh huh. Rocket parts. What do, uh, rocket parts look like, Captain?”

“You’ll know them if you see them,” Captain Howard said, though he secretly believed that it was another dead end, or maybe what they called a dry hole in Texas. Well, not so dry, what with the groundwater seeping and dripping out of the tunnel roof like the tears of the earth itself, but certainly a hole. What was the name of this one? Emmenthaler 8. Just another dry hole.

Corporal Blowfish lapsed into silence as the group of men slowly walked along the railroad tracks in the tunnel, the five blobs of yellow light from their dog-leg GI flashlights wobbling around them like so many timid ghosts. In the gloom and shadows Captain Howard could see a good deal of stuff, but nothing that looked useful. Capsized file cabinets bearing hand-sized patches of scabby rust. Bunk bed frames made out of metal tubing, now twisted and bent into useless shapes dripping with condensation. Here and there human detritus in the form of an abandoned boot, a mildewed cap with its red-white-black German cockade looking as out of place as a cat-eye marble in black Louisiana mud.

Dry hole, and fortunately a short hole. Howard could see the end of the railroad tunnel just ahead, wet rock glistening where the Krauts had simply stopped digging. What would they want with a tunnel like that, a simple tunnel with a railroad track in it that simply ended about a hundred yards in? He couldn’t think of a reason, but he knew better than to second-guess the Krauts. With a fiendish imagination like theirs, even this stupid dumb box canyon of a tunnel took on a strange sinister aspect, as though the Nazis had dug it with the specific purpose of capturing and killing Captain James R. Howard and his band of four brothers, bored and inattentive young infantrymen on dubious loan to him from some ridiculously high-numbered infantry division – the two thousand and thirty-third or something equally absurd.

Howard stopped, listening to the strange overlapping echoes of their boots scraping on the dirt and grit on the concrete floor of the tunnel and the steady dripping of water. He had a pretty good idea of what to look for in these Nazi tunnels – hatches, electrical conduits, overhead lights, floor drains, things that betrayed the possibility of Higher Purpose than simple covered parking – and though he hadn’t seen anything in this particular tunnel, it didn’t hurt to make sure.

“Anyone see any side tunnels or anything?” he asked.

“Just the vent shaft,” one of the soldiers said, a lanky young man who never seemed to get more than about two feet away from his automatic rifle. The yellow blobs of government-issue light wobbled and fluttered like moths, gravitating toward the metal grating in the roof that probably covered a simple ventilation hole. Up above, the upper end was probably concealed in a doghouse or a Catholic shrine or something equally harmless – the Nazis hardly missed a trick. But the shaft was probably four or five inches in diameter, not nearly big enough to be the magic door leading to the kind of underground realm that Howard was interested in.

“Okay. That’s it, back outside.”

“Yeah,” the lanky soldier with the Browning Automatic Rifle said glumly. “Out of the dripping and into the rain.” His Zippo flared in the gloom, almost blinding Howard, and a little voice inside him thought it’s a good thing we didn’t actually find what we’re looking for, or we’d be dead right now.

Little Sore Spot

Remember the song The Police did where Sting sings about a "little black spot on the sun today?" It's probably my favorite Police song because I can't help but think it has some deep meaning that I'm just not quite smart enough to grasp, though the punk remake of "Message In A Bottle" comes close.

But never mind. It turns out that there's a little sore spot on my head today... It's the same old thing as yesterday...

As I was getting dressed this morning, my sock fell out of my nerveless, pitchfork-like hands. I bent down to snatch it up and thumped my head on the bedpost, foresquare, right on my left eyebrow, hard enough I saw protons and quarks and other shit floating around the room for a while. Now I feel like an apple with a mushy spot and I worry that soon I'll spoil the whole barrel.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about.

I've been writing fiction since I was roughly nine years old, and certainly thinking fiction long before that (I'm sure that what looked like childish play with Major Matt Mason toys was in fact an attempt to plot a killer SF masterpiece, but alas my seven year old brain just couldn't handle the pressure). And I've almost always, except when forced on pain of death, written in first person. I did this, I did that, they did this-or-that to me. But lately I find that I've started to slip into third person, which is sort of like waking up on a nice Saturday morning and realizing that one has been left-handed all along and just didn't notice it. Unanswered, however, is the question of whether it's a positive development or not.

But holy cow! How did that happen? Romanis eunt domus!

History Intestinal

I don't know... Maybe I expect too much from the History Channel and its first cousin, Hysterical Intestinal. It's just a cable channel, and it has no more real control over content than ABC does over sitcoms. The best it can do is cancel (or stop funding) egregious failures.

But seriously, folks, something has to be done about some of the crap that appears.

Yesterday I watched part of a show called "UFO Files" or something, which purported to show that the US Air Force has been using "flying saucers" for generations. So they tap the memories of some guy identified only as a "military publisher" and trot out silly Photoshopped recreations of these alleged disk-shaped craft, and it's obvious that they're just airplanes with round wings. What's novel about that? Why didn't they show XF5U, a disk-shaped airplane that's so well documented we don't need to rely on Photoshopped evidence, so well documented it even had a nickname, the Flying Flapjack? Maybe because it was a Navy project.

Here's a good site:

http://www.daveswarbirds.com/usplanes/aircraft/flapjack.htm

But it got worse. The show started to merge the idea of an airplane with circular wings (which don't handle well, as it turns out) with flying saucers from other planets, and got right on the edge of claiming that circular wings possess some mystical New Age aerodynamic property that makes them better than Melba Toast. They had an "expert" claim that one of these disk-shaped airplanes was capable of flying at 15,500 miles per hour.

Let's explore that number just a bit. First off, he claimed that the aircraft was capable of "spaceflight", which I take to mean that it could go into orbit, which means it has to be capable of going 17,500 miles per hour - not 15,500 miles per hour. Doh! Second, the airplane is clearly seen to be uninsulated, what aeronautical engineers would call a hot structure. The X-15 was also, for most of its career, a hot structure, except for the experiments with the various spray-on ablators toward the end of the flight test program. So let's think about that. An X-15, with a powerful rocket engine and an airframe made out of an exotic high-temperature steel alloy called Inconel-X, was seriously damaged by heating and shock wave impingement at Mach 6.71. But this round airplane with conventional jet engines and an aluminum structure can do Mach 15? I am, as they say, dubious.

Here is the shape of high-speed flight, by the way, the North American Aviation X-15, which is still, as far as anyone has ever confessed, the fastest manned aircraft to have ever flown, and still, due to a technicality in the rules, holds the world altitude record for an aircraft:

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/news/FactSheets/FS-052-DFRC.html

Seriously, it doesn't matter. Do you believe that airplanes with round wings can fly 15,500 miles per hour? It won't materially alter the world in the slightest if you do - or don't. But gee whiz does it ever irritate me when the Hitler Channel and Hysterical Intestinal put nonsense like that on the air. How hard would it be to fact-check the show? How hard would it be to fix the comical "F1-17" typo in the caption? And how hard would it have been to point out to the writer that the "F1-17" is not supersonic?*

Arrrgh.

I need a beer. Perhaps two.

The "F1-17" typo appeared more than once, so I think the show was written by someone who had never actually read anything about the Nighthawk, least of all seen its actual designation of "F-117". But if you just sit at the bar and listen to some guy pontificate, I guess you could hear it was "F1-17".

King

I recently (as in last night) read Stephen King's On Writing. Most of the how-to portion of the book seemed pretty straightforward, and indeed triggered a sense of familiarity, as though I'd read it somewhere before. The main item of interest, for me, was the fact that Stephen King claimed to have little, if any, memory of having written Cujo, presumably because of the booze and drugs. The word-image of him shoving Q-tips up his nose to staunch the coke-induced bleeding, that's a doozie...

But Cujo... It seems unimaginable that one could write a fairly successful novel and not remember it, even if the novel was pretty bad. It's one of my least favorite books of all time, transcending the category of "worst Stephen King novel" and going straight on into the competition for "worst novel ever". It isn't the worst novel ever, but the fact that it's on that list at all tells you what I think of it. It isn't just bad, it's tedious.

But never mind that. Having read the entire Dark Tower series, Lisey's Story, The Stand, On Writing and all of the short story compilations, what King should be next? To be honest, I lean toward From a Buick 8.

Because of budgetary reasons beyond my control, I'm going to be laid off from work for the month of May, which on the one hand opens all sorts of interesting possibilities when it comes to landscaping and reading and home improvements, and on the other hand fills me with bitter stress and uncertainty for the future. But maybe a hefty King novel will get me through part of that dead time when I would normally sit and gnaw my fingernails.

Asskickery

I've been casting about in my music collection, seeking Just The Right Thing. I seek Metal To Kick Ass By. Not that I want to kick anyone's ass in particular. I'm not even in a bad mood. I just feel the need to listen to Metal To Kick Ass By. There are times when it becomes necessary to lay the pretensions and boundaries of civilization aside and listen to the sort of music the Germans might have listened to before killing 20,000 Roman soldiers in the Teutoberger Wald.

Not all metal is suitable for this purpose. Black metal has a cold, evil tone, but it doesn't sound particularly violent or aggressive. In many cases it sounds thin and "wiry", which I think was an acoustic accident in the early days of Darkthrone and later became a stylistic element as ubiquitous as corpsepaint (ironically, the first Mayhem album sounds much richer than "Transilvanian Hunger", but there's no fighting progress). Mind you, I like black metal, but I don't find that it appeases the Inner Teuton much at all.

I'm also greatly fond of melodic death metal in most of its forms, especially Insomnium and including the quasi-pop schtuff like In Flames. It's moderately aggressive (a review of an Insomium concert concluded that they "left no ass unkicked") but it's not stupendously so. Too many melodic breaks, too many keyboard washes, too much discipline to get stuck in a riff that would make Nathan Explosion nod. I'm reminded of Still Moving Sinews by Dark Tranquility. I think it's positively brilliant until 0:41 elapsed, when all of a sudden the bottom drops out and the thing hacks and spits like a Poppin' Johnnie at idle. I love my melodic death metal (or Karelian Metal, or whatever they're calling these days) but it doesn't really defeat the legionary, if you get my drift, and to extend the Teutoberger Wald motif.

Sometimes metalcore can get the job done, but I don't have a large metalcore collection and the only real metalcore album I have, "Sounding the Seventh Trumpet", never quite seems to go over the top. I like it, in particular for its narrative thread and for its interesting mixture of styles and textures, but Hatebreed it aint, and it doesn't take long for that monotonous hoarse shouting to grow old on me.

I'm not a fan of Florida death metal.

So when one desires Metal To Kick Ass By, one must reach for the Carcass, its ancestor Carnage, and its by-product Dismember. The first two songs of "Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious" are usually enough to take care of my need for Ass-Kickin' Metal. How can one go wrong with Inpropagation and Corporeal Jigsore Quandary, two songs which amount to almost thirteen minutes of high-grade ass-kickery? That'll get your Teutonic tribesmen jumping, ja! Hell, even Carcass in its later death-and-roll phase is still pretty vigorous - clap ears on Rock The Vote someday. The story is that Carcass got tired of doing grindy death metal and changed styles, producing something that wasn't quite heavy enough for old fans, but too heavy for the mainstream, but it'll do for me, because I can't get enough of that "electric saw" guitar sound.

I don't listen to metal all the time. In fact, most of my real favorites aren't metal at all. If you asked me to quickly name my top ten favorite songs, the list would look something like this:

Dance With You (Bowling For Soup)
A Tale Untold (Robin Trower)
Twice Removed From Yesterday (Robin Trower)
Castle Walls (Styx)
Big Log (Viktor Krauss remake of Robert Plant)
Run Like Hell (Pink Floyd)
In the Groves of Death (Insomnium)
Adagio for Strings (Samuel Barber)
Cosmic Messenger (Jean-Luc Ponty)
Freeway Jam (Jeff Beck)
Why Me? (Planet P)

But when you're in a mood for ass-kicking music, I'm afraid that the likes of Jean-Luc Ponty and Styx just aren't going to get it done.

Funniest Thing I've Seen In Weeks

I was in the break room weighing the "Skittles versus peanuts" question when I saw this comic strip in the local paper. It's the funniest thing I've seen since the destruction of the model of the Wasa in "Get Fuzzy".

(Honestly, I thought the whole Wasa thread in Get Fuzzy was genius - the idea that the model must meet the fate of the genuine article is provocative, to say the least. So if one builds a model of a P-51D Mustang, must one then get George Preddy or Don Gentile to sit on it and attempt to fly it over Berlin? If one builds a model of Apollo 13, must one then contrive to have the model LOX tank explode? Oh, would that one could!)

PS: George Preddy and Don Gentile are two famous P-51 Mustang aces, though certainly not the only ones. I mention Preddy because of his fantabulous Clark Gable moustache, and Don Gentile because he maybe wasn't a great instinctive ace with a killer marksman's eye, but he was a great fighter leader and I have to respect the courage of any man who strapped on a P-51 and took it all the way downtown into the very Heart of Darkness.

DId I Hear That Right?

It hasn't been a great week for me and I've spent a lot of time just sitting and staring at the AOL welcome screem, watching the news stories slowly go by on their own. One of them said (and I am not making this up) "NASCAR driver takes heroine before race".

And I thought, what exactly is wrong with that? Why not just before a race? It seems like as good a time to take a heroine as any other.

My Mistake

It turns out that the He-177 model I intend to build comes with Fritz-X guided bombs, not Hs-293 guided missiles. I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

I say this because it livens my day to imagine that I have a "following", a corps of fans who slavishly build what I build (or imagine to build what I imagine to build) simply because I am, as they say, all that and a bag of chips (Doritos Salsa Verde, please). And I like to imagine my corps of fans suddenly throwing their He-177 models in the trash and slavishly ordering the proper ones from www.squadron.com.

I'm not really that much of an egotist. I just play one on TV.

Good Greif!

I've thought about it and decided that the model I'm going to build next is the Revell 1/72nd scale Heinkel He-177 Greif, the one with the Hs-293 missiles under the wings. I'm not a big fan of this airplane, which I think is ugly in a characteristically German way and it wasn't all that successful either (all the other airplanes laughed at it and called it names, but it was too busy suffering spontaneous engine fires and crashing to do anything about it). But the Hs-293 missiles were a major advance in the state of the art. It's lucky for everyone, frankly, that the Germans spent so much time screwing around with irrelevancies like the V1 and V2 and squandered resources that could have been devoted to the Hs-293 and the Wasserfall surface-to-air missile.

I don't suffer from the delusion that what model I intend to build next makes any difference to anyone. I just thought it would be fun to post three times in one day.

But why this airplane? I don't have big plans for it and it's just going to hang from the ceiling of the garage, so I don't have to get myself all sweated up about it. I have a large number of models I could build, and many that I really want to build before this clunker, but the fact that the He-177 isn't going to present me with any stress is frankly kind of appealing.

There must be a name for this mental illness, where you really want to build a particular model but you have such high expectations for it you're actually unwilling to start, so you end up building models you don't like because you have low expectations of them. Geez. It's like not barbecuing a steak because you're afraid of ruining it, so instead you eat a floppy room-temperature slab of Spam. It just aint right.

Remastery

I mentioned remastered albums the other day, and how pleased I was that the remastered Bridge of Sighs was actually pretty true to the original. Who here remembers the remastered ZZ Top song "La Grange?" A classic in its original form, acoustic deficiencies and all, it turned into a remastered mess that had so much reverb it sounded like it had been re-recorded in a large oil tank. I couldn't bear to listen to the remastered versions, which caused me pain akin to that of a root-planing procedure. But there are worse things, such as the time Pink Floyd remastered "Money". I'm not even sure that "remastered" is the right word. They changed the time signature and made it into a dance song, and how could they do that without re-performing the song? I don't know. I'm not a sound engineer and they can do amazing things with computers these days. But I didn't care for the outcome.

Role-playing games are occasionally remastered. That's not what they call it, but that's what goes on. It's the same game, but the copyright holders let ardent fans rework the rules according to their own notions of what the original game lacked, and the final results are usually not good. Take Car Wars, where the original game wasn't too complicated and could be played reasonably quickly and enjoyed appropriately, but after about 23,000 updates and extensions had reached the complexity of nuclear physics. Or Traveler, which was a (in my opinion) particularly nice science-fiction role playing game. But that's until the fans remastered it into Mega-Traveler. Now, there were certain ideas in Mega-Traveler that I found flavorful, but my overall reaction upon leafing through the rules was "Well, we won't be incorporating any of this in MY universe." Plus - and maybe I'm just being fractious and difficult - I couldn't (or perhaps wouldn't) understand what "mega" had to do with anything.

Which is irrelevant, isn't it? One would think there would be no way I could possibly mix badly remastered ZZ Top songs and science-fiction role playing games in the same article, but huzzah! There you have it! It's beer time.

Last Stand

I think that as long as I'm making futile stands against things, I might as well make a futile Gandamak-like stand against alternative endings in movies. Alternative endings used to be pretty rare in movies - the movie was what it was and that was that - but now I see ads for DVDs that gush about having three or four alternative endings. I'm not so sure I like that idea. Let me cite one example.

The movie Clerks isn't really meant for me, I don't think. I find Jay irritating as high-strength ammonia, and even when he isn't in the movie (which isn't nearly long enough, if you ask me) I find the movie mumbly and meaningless. It was recommended to me by someone who was almost my age, so we weren't having a generation divide. Mostly we were having a rum divide, in that he'd consumed most of a bottle of rum and I hadn't. But anyway. Right at the end of the movie some guy comes in, pulls a gun, and shoots Dante (the clerk of title fame) dead in his shoes. And I remember thinking "Wow, that's a bleak and cynical end to a bleak and cynical movie..." And I thought about it no more, until I had a conversation with someone much later about the movie and he assured me that Dante was alive and well and had never been shot.

It turns out there are two distinct endings, and by this gimmick Kevin Smith got me to spend more of my time and mental effort discussing his movie than I had ever intended. And my associate and I had very different impressions of the movie because we'd seen different endings, and in the end we were never able to agree on anything because we couldn't even agree on whether the main character (I guess Dante is the main character) is alive or dead.

I really wish directors would make one ending, the ending that the script or their artistic vision called for, and stopped pandering by filming different endings. It seems dishonest to make different endings designed to appeal to different audiences - one ending for the suburban theater-going set, a different ending for the family-night DVD-viewing set, and a third dark and violent ending for the late-nite DVD-viewing set. The director gets to appease the MPAA while simultaneously titillating the sebaceous fanboys, and I think that's cheating - not that anyone listens to me.

On the other hand, I'm torn on the notion of "director's cuts" of old movies, where a director goes back and re-edits an old movie. They usually say that the re-edit was done to bring the movie more fully into line with the director's original vision, though sometimes I darkly suspect that they re-edit movies just so they can sell a bunch of DVDs... This is different from the practice of making alternative endings because the movie generally retains the same ending as before; what changes is the stuff that lies between the opening credits and the ending. Like the Star Wars movies, where the additions are mostly bad or at least irrelevant CGI additions to the backgrounds and wide shots. Alien had a bit more work done to it, but the overall story didn't change; we just got a chance to see what became of Dallas (and we also lost stuff that I liked, like the dreamily dystopic corridor shots. But the most notable are probably Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, where the extended versions of the movies contain whole scenes and characters that do not occur in the theatrical versions. I think I like that. If I liked the original movie, the chances are that I'm going to like seeing more of it. But I'm torn, just because it's fun to be torn.

News I'd Like To See

Here's a news story I'd like to see. I'd like to read about a group of astronomers and planetary scientists, excited by the latest batch of "bodacious" pictures to come back from the Hubble Space Telescope, getting drunk and invading the downtown region to overturn cars, light bonfires, holler incoherent drunken cheers into the darkness, and finally stagger home wearing one another's shirts and singing bawdy songs about the background radiation and the solar wind.

But no, it's only sports fans who get to have fun like that. Go figure.

iTune Blues

I'm working up a certain amount of hostility toward iTunes these days. I still like iTunes more than I dislike it, but in the words of the Babylon 5 movie "In the Beginning", "not as much as in the beginning."

First, they take all the Insomnium off iTunes. I don't know why - maybe it wasn't even iTunes that dictated that decision. But it grates on me, especially since they sell Ratt and (hang on to your butts) Bullet Boys. It's like being slapped with a large fish; I can't decide if it's insulting or merely annoying.

Then they dangle the prospect of Robin Trower before me. I've been waiting patiently for the album Bridge of Sighs to appear on iTunes. It was my favorite album by far in high school, and though some of the songs haven't aged all that well, certain ones like "Day of the Eagle" and "Too Rolling Stoned" and "Bridge of Sighs" remain excellent. The only thing that might be better would be finding the Robin Trower song "Twice Removed from Yesterday" on iTunes. But Bridge of Sighs is an amazing album, I think. Not my usual style, but still pretty amazing.

So one day it appears, and I click buy album. Only I can't, because you have to have "iTunes Plus" to buy it. Why? It's an album, right? Just like all the other albums I've bought, right? What about this album requires "iTunes Plus"?

I tried to download iTunes Plus but it wouldn't take; it kept complaining that "Bonjour" wouldn't start, and Apple, true their bullshit version of customer service, never mentions what Bonjour is, what it does, or even that it exists in the first place. You think you're installing iTunes Plus and all of a sudden it's installing Bonjour... I suspect it's about advertising. Usually when someone tries to interest me in an improved cell phone, website or music buying experience, it's because someone figured out a way to advertise to me in new and unusual ways. They can hoot about the grooviness of it all, but let's face it, it's all about the money, and I personally resent them holding Bridge of Sighs hostage to some marketing chucklehead's idea of what software on MY computer should or should not do.

So the bottom line is that iTunes Plus wouldn't load, so Bridge of Sighs remains unpurchased, and I've half a mind to give up on iTunes altogether and start buying albums on CDs again. But on the good side, though the album claims to have been remastered, it was remastered with a certain amount of taste and decorum and doesn't sound significantly different from the original effort (unlike the old ZZ Top albums which, after being remastered, sounded more like Devo than ZZ Top).