Ach! My Poll!

I don't think my poll feature is working. It's supposed to work, but every time I try to vote in my own dang poll, it complains. So for now, consider it a mocking taunt - here would be a poll if only it worked, so you only get to see the impression of a poll.

Maybe next time.

Temperature Regulation

"Is that normal?" I asked my cardiologist.

"Eh," she said, not looking up from her lunch. "It happens... you know..."

"What can I do about it?"

"Eh, nothing much... you know..."

Since my surgery I've had occasional flutzpahs in my temperature regulation system. For reasons unknown my body decides it's freezing, and there's no convincing it otherwise. This state of affairs reaches a state of almost fatal irony during the summer in hell - the outside air temperature is a hundred and eight fricking degrees, and I think I'm freezing to death. It would be about as silly as someone near the summit of Mount Everest suddenly collapsing of heatstroke.

I had such an attack yesterday. We went to the grocery store yesterday evening, mostly to get cat food and get out of the house for a while, and my body temperature decided to crash.

It seemed to take hours to get back home, even though it didn't, and I got in bed and put a heating pad on my chest. The heating pad is covered with warnings like "If you fall asleep while using this product, YOU'LL DIE HORRIBLY! THIS MEANS YOU, LUMPY!" So I slept for a couple of hours with the heating pad on my chest. When I finally woke up, I was no longer cold and I had a lovely rectangular red patch on my chest.

I guess what I'm saying is that if anyone has any clue why surgery has caused my internal thermostat to go haywire, I'm all ears. Or eyes, as the case may be.

Rock and Roll What?

I read today that our state politicians are talking about building a Rock and Roll theme park somewhere south or southeast of Phoenix - I think Coolidge, but I don't remember specifically because I spent so much time trying to figure out what a rock and roll theme park would be like I forgot where it was supposed to be built.

How would that work? Would they, say, put you in a cage and shake you violently so you sounded like Tiny Tim? Or make you wear fake Jerry Garcia hair and beard and make you try to roll an enormous joint in the back seat of the Long Strange Journey (tm) roller coaster? Wear funny hats and repeatedly cross the street in groups of four while "Number Nine" plays from hidden speakers?

I don't know. I must be missing something. If rock and roll has any enduring themes at all, they're probably sex and drugs. And wouldn't it be easier to market the theme park if they called it a Sex and Drugs Theme Park intead of a Rock and Roll Theme Park? People would say "Rock and Roll Theme Park? Nah, they'll probably have a huge section dedicated to Bob Dylan and I'll have to pretend that his warbly caterwauling doesn't really make me vomit. Even though it does. Besides, I'm going to spending the next 42 weeks straight at the Sex and Drugs Theme Park."

Just a thought.

More Filler

It occurs to me that I missed a good deal of good music in my previous post about how I intend to defuse the BFS/death metal thermonuclear reaction likely to destroy my iPod and wipe out all life on earth. Here's some more filler:

Thomas Dolby. I'm not universally in favor of Thomas Dolby and a little generally lasts me a long time, but as long as "a little" includes the songs Blinded Me With Science (because it's just good fun) and One Of Our Submarines (because it's mournfully strange), I'm good.

Elton John, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Rocketman, among others. Elton John is one of those anomalous guys where at first I say "No, I don't care for him very much." But then people start to list his songs, and I say "Yeah, that was good. And so was that one. So maybe I like him more than I think." The same effect is generally true of Tom Petty, now that I think about it.

Tesla, Modern Day Cowboy. Though it's sung in a modestly aggravating 80s warble, it still manages to kick some fairly extensive ass. Plus it fits into my general preference for rock and roll songs about cowboys, which makes no sense at all, does it?

Bon Jovi, Livin' On A Prayer. Uh-uh-uh-oh-wah-oh indeed.

Rush. Rush is easy to overdo because there's only so much Geddy Lee one can take, and it seems to me that everything since Grace Under Pressure suffers from serious overproduction, but they're rich as Croesus and they need my advice like a frog needs a reading lamp. But still, there is some good Rush: Countdown, Natural Science, Distant Early Warning, Circumstances, and chunks of the album 2112.

Talking Heads, Take Me To The River. It's such an odd-sounding thing and it reminds me very strongly of a specific time and place, when I was rebuilding a KTM engine from a Penton motorcycle and KDKB played this song every eleven minutes whether I wanted to hear it or not. I also like Burning Down The House, and I can't get enough of the same-as-it-ever-was arm action.

Da Scorpions! How could one not like a group with a guitarist named Mattias Jabs? I mean really! Winds of Change is very good, and who better than German group to sing it? No One Like You because of the groovy guitar harmony, and Blackout because it stones. Err, I mean, rocks. I can, however, do without Rock You Like a Hurricane.

Al Stewart, On The Border. Not much else is required of him, though I can listen to Year of the Cat and Roads to Moscow without feeling any pain.

Blue Oyster Cult, Cultosaurus Erectus. I have a genuine fondness for this entire album. I like some of the songs more than others (Black Blade, Lips in the Hills, Divine Wind and Marshall Plan being particularly good) but the whole album is good. Lips in the Hills never fails to remind me of playing the wargame Mechwar '77, and in particular the last-ditch defense of a hilltop complex by a British battalion task force against a Soviet armored juggernaut. Them Chieftains is buggers!

Millenyptica

I don't understand the attraction of apocalyptic religion. I honestly don't. But what I really don't understand is the glee with which some people practice or preach apocalyptic religion. Go to the bookstore and flip through a book on the Mayan calendar prophesy, and you can't help but get the feeling that the author is strongly in favor of such a cataclysm. Those who believe in the Rapture are even more eager - they're positively champing at the bit to see the world end.

It's silly, all of it. If you asked the Mayan astronomer-priests of old what happens when the Long Count runs out, they'd probably shrug and say "Hell, we don't know, it probably just starts over again..." If you asked John of Patmos what he meant with all that beast-with-seven-horns business, he'd stare at you for a moment and say "Um, Emperor Nero and the Roman Empire, of course. What the heck are you smoking?"

Why are people in such a hurry to see the end of time? And why are unrelated events always thought to be part of the prophecy? What prompted this whole post was a comment attached to a news story about a passenger ferry in the Philippines that apparently foundered in a typhoon, with large loss of human life. The comment claimed that this was just another in a chain of natural disasters leading up to the End of Times, the final start of the Christian eschatology-slash-orgasm. Was it really? Or was it someone making a serious mistake and sailing a passenger ferry into a typhoon? What does one see here, the hand of God who had to sink ships and flood cities to start the End Times, or the hand of a select handful of human beings who made a serious mistake??

No wonder I grow skeptical with age.

iPod Blues

I got my iPod for Christmas, and it was good.

I bought a bunch of music and loaded it, and it was good.

I bought a bunch more music, and it was still good.

I bought more music yet, and suddenly the bottom fell out.

My iPod will hold two gigs, but I've got way more music on my computer than will fit on my iPod. And it seems that every time I try to remove music from my iPod, it ends up removing it from my computer too. No, I scream, I merely want to remove the song from the iPod but I want to keep the master on my hard drive! Okie-dokie, it says, and it goes on to delete everything off my iPod. Seriously.

Examination of the current contents of my iPod will reveal that it consists mainly of Bowling For Soup and death metal. This isn't a good combination. It's like mixing Clorox and ammonia and releasing chlorine gas, or mixing Ipecac and lukewarm pork roast and releasing nausea rays. But I don't want to take either off. I like Bowling For Soup, and I like death metal. So my theory is that if I could slip some buffer material into the mix, I could avert the ugly BFS/death metal explosion that is sure to come any day now. And when I get a bigger iPod, which could be as early as this afternoon, that's what'll happen.

But what filler material? What do I like other than Bowling For Soup and death metal? How about this list:

Pink Floyd, The Wall. The whole album, please, but particularly Comfortably Numb, Run Like Hell and Young Lust.

Bruce Springteen. I like a good deal of Springsteen - Dancing in the Dark, The River, Born to Run, I'm On Fire, and so forth. He also performed a song for Liveaid (I think) that I heard on the radio and thought was truly breathtaking, but I can't find it anywhere. I think it was called "Trapped" but I could be wrong.

Robin Trower. Trower is probably an acquired taste, being a very bluesy sort of English blues, but it was Big Stuff for me when I was in junior high and high school. Here, we're looking at songs like Bridge of Sighs, Too Rolling Stoned, Little Bit of Sympathy and, frankly, almost all of the Bridge of Sighs album. My absolute favorite, Twice Removed from Yesterday, is not available on iTunes.

David Bowie - how can one argue with Heroes, Suffragette City, Changes, or even Let's Dance?

Uriah Heep. Oh, them were the days, playing Dungeons & Dragons while listening to Demons and Wizards over and over and over and over, with pauses every now and then to listen to The Magician's Birthday.

Blue Oyster Cult, another one of my "formative bands". A lot of early BOC hasn't aged particularly well with me, but there's still something fresh and cool about Transmaniacon MC and Then Came The Last Days in May.

Wall of Voodoo, Mexican Radio. How could I not? For I really do feel a hot wind on my shoulder! (The Celtic Frost cover of this is not to be missed, mostly because of its raw gall - no comprende, it's a riddle...)

Ronnie Montrose, Speed of Sound and Territory. Though originally sold as jazz, they're more like instrumental rock, a way Ronnie could show off his impressive guitar skills without having to actually write any lyrics or pay a singer. Not all of it is all that great, but it's generally good enough one can live with the clunkers.

Eddie Money, Gimme Some Water. Most Eddie Money hits me in the "that's not bad" zone, but I greatly like the song Gimme Some Water, perhaps because of its Old West associations and perhaps not.

Thin Lizzy, Cowboy Song. This works on me about the same way Gimme Some Water does. Thin Lizzy is neither here nor there for the most part for me, but Cowboy Song stands head and shoulders above the Thin Lizzy ouevre and I happen to like it a lot.

Deep Purple, Highway Star and nothing else, please. None of that dull Smoke on the Water business, thank you very much.

Billy Joel, We Didn't Start The Fire. Yeah, I know, it's kitschy and silly and all, but by damn I like that song.

The Vapors, Turning Japanese. On top of being a cheeky joke about masturbation, it's a darn fun song to listen to.

And lastly, Billy Thorpe, Children of the Sun. This album has a bad reputation among some, since it's both in some ways crushingly naive and in others stupefyingly pretentious, but I like it. East of Eden's Gate and The Beginning are particularly good, I think.

And on that note, I'm going to either to get my damned iPod or stop torturing myself. Thank you.

Bad News

Bad news, men! Due to budget cuts, the Roman Army has been reduced to seventeen men. But we're still better off than the Britons; they've only got one guy and he's so tired he can't stand up without leaning on his shield.

Dear Liberal Talk Radio

I've been listening to liberal talk radio lately, which is kind of a departure for me. Normally I don't much care for talk radio simply because of the format, even when I fully agree with the hosts and callers. But in the spririt of adventurousness I'm giving it a fresh try.

But I do have one complaint to make.

Nobody in their right mind would imply that Barack Obama is unsuited to be President because he's black, or Hillary Clinton because she's a woman. We understand that "criticizing" someone for their race or gender is not only morally wrong and quite tasteless, but it is in some respects illegal - the Civil Rights Act lists race, color and gender as three of the protected categories.

But wait a second, isn't age also one of the protected categories? Yep. Sure is. So how come practically every day I hear someone on liberal talk radio say something nasty about John McCain's age? They call him "Grampa McSame" and clearly imply that he's a doddering fool whose first step upon gaining the Oval Office would be to accidentally make a Metamucil stain on the rug.

But come on, people. Either you're serious about civil rights, or you aren't. Make up your minds. Either you respect all of the Civil Rights Act, or you respect none of it.

Not that I want to see John McCain be elected, mind you. I think a McCain presidency would be like a... like a... well, like a thing that's really bad. And his character, temperament, philosophy, political ideas and policies are all fair game for criticism, and personally I think there's more than enough material there to sink his Presidential bid. But attacking him on the basis of his age is tacky and wrong and you should stop immediately.

I have spoken.

Guest Blogger

Today I wish to turn the controls of my blog over to a guest blogger. She holds a doctorate in political science and... no, I'm just kidding, I don't have a guest blogger. I just thought it would make me sound important.

But seriously - what's with the Green Planet channel? Actually, it isn't bad. Some of the shows are pretty good, such as the Renovation Nation thing with Steve Thomas (who, I must say, isn't as young as he once was, but then again, neither am I, and he carries his age better than I do). The show manages to strike a pretty good balance between environmentalism and practicality.

But there's another show that was so bad that I'll never, ever, watch it again. I don't remember what it's called. Eco-something. Eco-Nausea. It's a ceaseless Brownian smear of smug, holier-than-thou, hipper-than-thou cardboard cutouts who think that the "sustainability report" on a piece of furniture is the only thing that counts. Let's see, I'm buying a new crib for my baby, what's more important, that it be structurally sound and not have lead paint on it, or that the wood be "fully sustainable"? And the toybox built so the door couldn't overbalance and would thus crash down on the little girl's head every time she opened it, that was rich too. But the woman was the worst. She meandered through the show with a kind of dreamy-eyed detachment, as though she was deeply and fully centered in the Zen now, but maybe she just drank too much cough syrup. The two guys were well-intentioned but overzealous, but the woman crossed the line and ended up just flat annoying.

Suffice it to say that I'll be giving that particular mess a very wide berth in the future. It's the kind of overly smug, holier-than-thou crap that gives environmentalism a bad name. Actually, I confess, I associate green with things like the Eco-humbug show, and environmentalism with actual science and political and social action.

Back To Work, Ya Slobs!

I went back to work today. I should perhaps explain - the company I contract with ran out of money to pay me with (makes me sound just dreadfully overpaid, doesn't it?) so they asked me to sit out four to six weeks until they got fresh funding scraped up. So I sat out six weeks, and finally went back to work today.

The good news is that I'm funded for eighteen months to two years, at least, and in the next fiscal year the department budget is going to expand significantly, so who knows what'll happen in the long run.

The bad news is that nothing got done while I was gone. Criminy! I don't think they even vacuumed out my cubicle or dusted the tops of the flipper cabinets. I left a tin of Altoids spearmint candies on my computer when I left, and it was still there when I came in today (and when I moved it, it left a clear spot in the dust, proof that nobody had so much as breathed on it in six weeks). My badge worked in the door, and other than forgetting my computer password and having to call IT, my computer is exactly as I left it.

Why is that bad? I was sort of hoping I'd get a fancy new cubicle with if not a wet bar then at least an iced tea machine and a masseuse (for my back, you know, strictly for my back and not for anything else). But no, it's the same old cubicle with the strange desktop that's an odd color that could be dark reddish brown or could be slightly confused burgundy, depending on the lighting, and the same collection of meaningless Post-it Note scrawls stuck to the side of my computer (such as an exhortation to call "Meester Beeg", but I have no idea who "Meester Beeg" is - I ended up throwing that one away because it was creepy).

But I did get a new chair. My old chair was evil, pure and simple, and I think much of the reason my back caused me such difficulties for the last few months at work was that dreadful chair. I complained about it and stole a better chair from across the aisle, but they finally got me a new chair while I was out (either that or the former owner of the chair decided it just wasn't worth fighting a custody battle).

It's good to be back at work. Nothing's changed, nothing has been accomplished and I'm slotting back in right where I left off six weeks ago, only I feel a lot better physically. I didn't take a single pain pill today and I actually felt pretty good all day until I got home and tried sticking tiny bits of tape to a model airplane, but I can hardly blame work for that discomfort, can I?

Sure I can! This is America, I can blame whoever I want!

Pileup

I logged on to AOL tonight and looked at the "news headlines" on the welcome screen. Usually it's pop cultural nonsense - what celebrity is having the worst meltdown, what celebrity is wearing what other celebrity's underwear, I don't know what all. Meaningless junk, in other words, stuff that seems hardly worthy of anyone's time.

But tonight, they piled up their headlines in such a way that seems to hint at a larger meta-story. I quote:

Spectacular Event Seen For First Time
Astronomers waited for 30 years
What unfolds before their eyes?
British princess caught naked
Apprehended for frolicking in the buff

Well, all rightie then!

Day of the Gol-Durn Lepus

The desert's starting to get pretty dry, and the rabbits are starting to get pretty industrious about finding ways to break into our garden. At first it was kind of amusing because they'd just crop a little grass on the fringes of the back yard, but now they're starting to regard the garden as their personal Souper Salad franchise without so much Souper.

So what are we looking at here? This is the little stub fence that connects the gate on the right to the house on the left. The black mesh is some kind of plastic mesh that I tied to the wrought iron fence to keep the rabbits and squirrels out. It worked until the rabbits gnawed a hole in the mesh. I heaped rocks up in front of the hole. They kicked the rocks out of the way. I heaped rocks and dirt up in front of it and put the metal can on top, which is half-full of rocks itself (it's a metal can from one of those Christmas three-flavor popcorn deals, but I don't remember why I filled it halfway with rocks).

So what did they do? They tunneled clean under the damn can! What you see in the photograph is the rabbit equivalent of the Interstate-10 tunnel!

This is getting ridiculous. I don't know which is worse, the guys with ATVs who watch too much TV and think that my property exists solely for their noise-making, dust-raising enjoyment, or the rabbits who tunnel under my can and eat the last of the bean plants. Clearly I need to get serious. Perhaps a minefield would solve both problems.

Old Man and the Sea Part Two

Photographs of me on vacation are not exactly thick on the ground, though that isn't a consequence of deliberate policy - I just never seem to end up in a lot of photographs, and that's probably just as well.

But here's a picture of me swimming in the ocean at Puerto Vallarta, nice and early when the beach and ocean were still deserted and I had the whole place to myself. I've subjected this photograph to detailed pixel-by-pixel scrutiny and it turns out I'm wearing a blue shirt and facing away from the camera, probably on my way out to the buoys beyond.

I Tried

Today I read a news story about how Lil Wayne (whom I have honestly never heard of before) had sold fourteen quadrillion copies of his latest album in thirty-seven seconds. Or maybe I'm being hyperbolic. But either way, I decided to listen to one of the songs from that album, just to make sure I wasn't arbitrarily excluding some major work of musical genius from my life just out of sheer stubbornness.

Turns out that I'm not. Whatever the merits of Lil Wayne's album, it's just not for me. When I listen to rap (which this was) I often calibrate my reaction to it based on how many times I have to listen to my current favorite metal song of the day to get the rap out of my head. Today my favorite metal tune is "Gods of War Arise" by Amon Amarth, and I had to listen to it four times to get the rap out of my head.

You like rap? Enjoy it in good health, but don't expect me to like it.

Seriously!

I'm serious, it drives me fricking nuts when documentaries about space exploration use computer-generated graphics where actual footage could be used.

The worst example I've ever seen was in a NASA-funded film about the New Horizons spacecraft. Because Pluto is a fairly distant target and the energy demands are pretty high, they used an Atlas V to launch the thing, instead of the more common but smaller Delta IV (though in the real glory days, I imagine it would have been a Titan IV). So they show the booster sitting there on the strangely sterile-looking "clean pad", and then it launches, and instead of using any of the millions of feet of videotape that were doubtless captured during the launch, they switched immediately to really bad CGI that appeared to show the RD-180 engine puking out a series of stationary cotton balls.

There was better footage of V-2s during World War Two, for crying out loud, and that was what, sixty years ago?? It's insulting the way these digi-morons think that CG is automatically better than actual footage. "That's so analog," they seem to be saying. Yeah, well, your digital crap is so stupid.

When We Left Earth: A Review

Modern documentaries about the glory days of the space program (Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, more or less) tend to make the same mistakes over and over. But the new Discovery Channel documentary When We Left Earth avoids all those mistakes with uncanny poise and it ends up turning into perhaps the best documentary on the subject.

What does it do so right?

1. It uses genuine documentary footage and completely avoids the use of computer-generated BS. The directors seem to have said "If footage exists, we'll use it. If footage doesn't exist, we won't fake it." This gives the documentary a strongly contemporary feel - I felt as though I was there again without jarring and clumsy CG to destroy my immersion. Much of the footage is stuff I've never seen before, or have seen only rarely - how many times have you seen fire-in-the-hole staging of a Titan booster, to cite just one example? Or footage of Armstrong and Scott getting rid of the Agena while they were trying to figure out the control problem in their Gemini spacecraft? The use of vintage footage and the avoidance of CG, which never looks right, is so good it practically makes the whole documentary. I extend my heartiest thanks to whatever group of people made that decision.

2. It avoids the modern tendency to recast all of these spaceflights in terms of how dangerous and edgy they were. Spaceflight is dangerous, sure, but the producers chose not to turn into drama queens about it. When danger existed, it was acknowledged - Gene Cernan almost passing out during his EVA, the control problem in Gemini 8, the risks of flying within six inches of one another during Gemini 6 and Gemini 7. But they didn't dredge up a bunch of Cassandras to whip up drama about dangers that were manageable.

3. It has Neil Armstrong. This is quite a coup. I don't know why Neil Armstrong chose to participate in this documetary (even now, the narrow-tie engineer in me wants to call him "Mr. Armstrong") but I'm glad he did. Since his retirement from NASA he has been either private or unapproachable, depending on who you're talking to, and I think it's a significant coup for this documentary that they got him - how can you in good faith do a serious documentary about the first moon landing without the first guy to land on the moon?

4. It begins with footage of the X-15. If you propose to make a documentary about spaceflight and you want my complete approval, throw in some footage of the X-15 and say good things about it. It's like honey for a bear; I just can't get enough of the X-15 (I have, built and unbuilt, nine X-15 models floating around the house). I won't say that the X-15 is the quickest way to my heart, because that would be pathetic, but I will say that I'm favorably disposed toward anyone who knows what the X-15 was.

5. It includes plenty of Gene Krantz and Chris Krafft. Gene Krantz is, for me, the bona fide voice and face of the space program. Not having him would be like trying to do a documentary about baseball without, say, Cal Ripkin.

It's not perfect. Some of the footage is used out of place - they kept using a piece of Gemini re-entry footage in situations where Gemini wasn't re-entering, but at least it was real footage. And it's not very technical at all - where technical problems like EVA or rendezvous and docking crop up, they're discussed only in the broadest of terms, usually with the last sentence "by such-and-such a mission the issue had been solved." And I thought it was particularly commercial-heavy on a channel that's already notorious for having a lot of commercials.

I recommend it quite highly, mostly for its very immersive use of real footage, much of it stuff that hasn't been given wide circulation before. But it's pretty well written and respectful of the subject matter, and it includes authoritative comments from people like Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Jim Lovell, Gene Krantz, Gene Cernan and Chris Krafft. Very good stuff indeed.

Doobage

One of the nights we were in Mexico, we went to a fiesta at some hacienda in the hills. The general procedure is for a bunch of tourists to pile aboard the bus, drive into the hinterlands at the complete mercy of the bus driver, eat, drink, listen to a bunch of music, and then return to the hotel on the bus.

It was actually a lot of fun. The food was really quite good (I was particularly pleased with the chili relleno) and the music and dancing were good enough that the abundance of drinks more than made up for any lapses in performance.

But during the festivities someone did something that puzzles me to this day. Was it an act of cheeky savoir-faire, or bone-headed stupidity? I'm tempted to say the former, but I've seen too many of those "Locked Up Abroad" shows on TV for it to seem like anything but complete lunacy. During dinner someone at the next table over produced a pretty burly marijuana cigarette and lit up on the spot. At first I didn't think that's what it was - surely nobody would smoke out in public, in a country where drug-related crimes are punished pretty severely, surely it must be a handrolled cigarette. But you don't pass handrolled cigarettes to your chums, and handrolled cigarettes don't have that characteristic burning-sock smell unless they're rolled out of something other than plain old tobacco.

Fortunately I was well along in my attempt to drink them clean of margaritas and was not seriously discommoded by this happenstance. It was only later that I started to worry somewhat for the welfare of those people, who either must have gone to the incredibly foolhardy length of smuggling pot into Mexico, or buying it on the street in Mexico, neither of which seem to be activities with good long-term odds of success.

So what's the dumbest thing you've ever done on a vacation? My act of wanton stupidity was roughing up a Russian soldier in Siberia. Though I can't say I really all that worried about it - the little shit was drunker than I was - I was still tempted to drop to my knees and plant a big wet kiss on the tarmac of the airport in Helsinki when we finally landed.

Gifts

I just read a "Father's Day" do-and-don't article on AOL. I don't know who writes these articles, or why, but they're goofy as the dickens. But this one is more insidious than the rest, because all the gift ideas are, basically, Sharper Image gewgaws and the article contains links to the AOL Marketplace where they can be ordered without hesitation. It's advertising disguised as an advice column, and it's idiotic.

It seems that every year the experts recommend ever more expensive gifts. This article mentioned such things as a blazer, silver and diamond cufflinks, a GPS unit, a Nintendo DS, and a 13-piece garden tool set complete with a plastic carrying case. I guess the days when one carried one's garden tools in a five-gallon bucket are over; now we need a custom-made plastic case in hunter green. Ugh.

Still, I can't help but think that there's something severely wrong with me. I read the list of suggested gifts and not a single one of them really jumped out at me. Ask me what I really want and I'll say a dozen tamales or a farm jack. What's wrong with me? Why would I want a farm jack instead of silver and diamond cufflinks? And tamales! Criminy; I might as well ask for indigestion and get it over with.

Note: For those who don't know what a farm jack is, consult this link:

http://www.harborfreight.com/cpi/ctaf/displayitem.taf?Itemnumber=6530

Oh Dear

You may want to read the post immediately after this one to place matters in their proper context, but the gist of it is that as soon as I posted photographs of the largest zucchini I'd ever seen, a bigger one yet emerged from the depths of the garden. The one on the bottom is the zucchini from the previous post. It's girthier, to borrow a word from Stephen Colbert, but not as long... Hrmm...

This is all starting to sound faintly obscene. I need a shower all of a sudden.

Zucchini - It's What's For Dinner

I'm not going to claim that this is the biggest zucchini ever grown. I'm sure there are much larger zucchini out there in the world somewhere, straining at their bonds and just dying to wreak havoc on some unsuspecting Midwestern burg - Sheboyban, perhaps, in honor of the old SPI game.

But when your zucchini is bigger than your dog, and bigger than already generous size-14 sneaker, it's probably a sign that either you're not checking your garden often enough, or that your soil is productive beyond the wildest fantasies of Tuscan farmers.

It would be funnier is this was the only giant zucchini we have, but it's not. We gave one to my mom a few days ago that was so large it made her emit an inarticulate cry of horror, the same sort of noise most people would make if a house guest suddenly produced a Gila Monster from a bag and held it out.

This zucchini crisis has reached the point that zucchini have become our primary foodstuff in the form of zucchini casserole. The general procedure is to take a big Pyrex dish and line the bottom with Stovetop Stuffing or some other breadlike stuffing material, then atop that place a layer of sliced and slightly steamed (cooked, not angry) zucchini. Then over the whole works goes a mixture of cream of chicken soup and sour cream, and then cheese on the top. Bake and enjoy.

The Universe Has a Sense of Humor

I don't feel terribly good today. I'm not sick, really, I just seem to be suffering from a kind of malaise, the sort of thing President Carter might have attributed to inflation or stagflation or cultural ennui or whatever. It's probably just because I haven't eaten anything yet today and my blood sugar is just about expended.

But no matter. To conserve energy I decided to watch a little TV, and tuned in to a program about neo-Nazis in America. It showed them doing their thing in Idaho somewhere, shouting white power, white power and snapping off ragged and inaccurate imitations of what I guess they take to be the Hitlergruss, and right in the middle of this seamy, seedy exhibition of intolerance and stupidity, my satellite TV receiver put up the warning Poor Quality Signal, superimposed right over the skinheads.

Boy, was that ever accurate.

Novelty Drinks

I'm really not good at knowing drink ingredients. What's in a Boilermaker? Or a My Tai? Or a Sex on the Beach? I have no idea and have to rely on several highly informative websites to keep me current on the state of the art in mixology. I'm not even sure what goes in my favorite drinks - I just know that my attempts to make pina coladas at home have never proved fully successful.

So with that incompetent mixology in mind, permit me to describe the "Mexican Flag", a novelty drink I had a couple of times in Puerto Vallarta.

It starts with a tall glass. Fill it a third of the way with Midori. Carefully float a thick layer of slushy pina colada on top of that. Float another layer of strawberry daquiri atop that. The result in a green-white-red parfait-like thing that brings the Mexican flag to mind (though without the eagle-snake-cactus business, which I suppose could be decaled on the side of the glass if one were in search of maximum accuracy).

The short review: Pretty good! It's not going to displace any of my favorite drinks, but at least I can now claim that I know the ingredients of a novelty drink. I feel better knowing that. I may not know which quarks comprise any given hadron, or the proper spark plug gap for a Jaguar XKE, or why I find burgundy fingernails arresting, but at least by damn I know what goes into a Mexican Flag.

Huzzah!

The Agony of Flight

Practically everyone has written an essay about how bad flying sucks today compared to the old days. For a while I was going to take the moral high road and not stoop to such an essay myself, but then I said "The hell I am!"

I don't know when flying officially turned to shit. Many people think it's a consequence of 9/11 and the absurd security restrictions that were applied not long thereafter and which intensify to this day. Yes, absurd. How many airplane accidents have been caused in the past by butane cigarette lighters, or six-ounce bottles of sunscreen? It's frankly ridiculous, a symptom of our willingness to jettison civil rights and even common sense in the search for an illusory sense of security, but Americans seem to be uniquely vulnerable to that sort of lunacy.

But flying started to suck long before 9/11, and I can't really blame the TSA and goofy American fetish for security at the cost of rationality for the change.

When I was younger, flying was a shared adventure. Here we are, a bunch of people in a metal tube, about to hurl ourselves into the air in search of adventure, the stratosphere, and other landscapes. It was a communal exercise, a communal thrill, something new and exciting and somehow ineffably modern. The airplanes were inefficient turbojet-powered screamers that puked huge clouds of black smoke into the air and pilots still squinted at pointers and needles on dials, but somehow we got through it and when we landed, there was a sense that we had done something significant.

And it was treated that way. There were meals and civility and plastic wings for the kids. The phrase "jet set" meant something. Flying wasn't just a tawdry form of mass transportation; it was in a way a part of the vacation itself. "We're flying to Mogadishu," someone would say, and we would think "Well, Mogadishu's no picnic, but the flying part will be fun!"

Now we're just cattle. We may as well bellow and blow snot as we board the airplane. The flight attendants can't be bothered with our pathetic needs, the seats are so close together a normal-sized adult male can't sit down without losing both kneecaps, you're lucky if you get to keep the can when you ask for a 7-Up, and the aisles are so narrow the beverage cart threatens to take your elbows off.

Passengers don't do themselves any favors either. Back in the old days, carry-on bags were relatively modest things, but now they're enormous! Entire families of Cambodians could fit in some of the larger carry-ons, and how many times have I had to stand in the aisle and wait because some chunkhead is trying to pack an overstuffed carry-on the size of a refrigerator into an overhead compartment?

Then there are the passengers that never quite seem to light. They pack their stuff into the overhead compartments and they sit down. No, wait, they need an aspirin! So they get up and rummage around in their bags, get an aspirin, and sit down again. No, wait, they need their Sudoku book! No, wait, they need their paperback! Their custom-fitted cervical collar! Their sunglasses! And every time one of these mental giants feels some vague longing for some bit of gear in their carry-on, I have to get up, smash my head on the side of the drop-down video screen, and get out of their way.

Once a woman said, apparently by way of apology for making me stand up 118 times before takeoff, "I just can't seem to get my shit together." And I gave her a glance that said "You had best get your shit together before I get it together for you, and you won't like it."

But the overbooking is the worst thing. You pile into an airport terminal with two hundred other people and everyone looks around with hollow eyes because everyone knows that fifteen people aren't getting on the plane. The suits that deemed overbooking an acceptable procedure ("We're just protecting our profit, slim enough already," they say) should spend a day with a broccoli rubber band twisted around their genitalia and see how they like it.

Flying sucks. There's no good way to put it. Getting to the airport sucks. Checking in sucks. Security sucks. The overbooking lottery sucks. Trying to get on the plane while idiots wrestle with man-killing carry-on bags sucks. Having to stand up and sit down every 39 seconds because the person next to you needs something out of her carry-on bag sucks. Having to listen to self-important yuppies who carry on loud conversations about SUVs, golf clubs, or how they propose to change the world now that they've got their MBAs suck. And there are not words to express the intensity of my hatred for the bozos who sit in front of me and recline their seats, thus eating up half my scant personal space and making it impossible for me to put down my tray table.

It's just a good thing that I like Puerto Vallarta, otherwise there's no telling how hysterical it might have made me.

Old Man and the Sea

Mexico is, for me, synonymous with the beach and everything that comes with the beach, such as pina coladas, gazing into the sunset, and - yes, it's true - swimming in the ocean and losing stuff while swimming in the ocean.

The ocean started each day very calm. I'd wade out to the deep water at the line of buoys and just float in the warm placid water, thinking about everything and nothing. Throughout the day the wind built up, blowing directly inland, and the ocean got rougher and rougher. I never noticed it because I was floating in deep water and riding up and down on the passing waves, as bothered as a piece of cork. But eventually I'd have to return to the shore if for nothing else than to replenish my body's store of pina colada or margarita.

And that's where the fun started, trying to cross the white-water zone between my placid deep-water anchorage and the safety of the beach itself. Our party lost two pairs of sunglasses, one hotel room key, a $20 bill and three toothpicks in that thundering welter of waves and foam and spray. Once a wave thumped me soundly into the bottom and caused my knee to lock up, but the next wave thumped me into the bottom even harder and broke my knee loose again. There was a rather long period where I couldn't seem to get to my feet at all; I just rolled forward and back in an awkward tangle of arms, legs and spray, doing my best to impersonate an actual beached whale. Now that I know what being beached feels like, my sympathy for those poor bastards has increased greatly.

But it was fun. How many times in your life do you get your ass kicked by water?

Yon Hotel

I'm back from Mexico. I was tempted to blog from Mexico, but the Internet cafe associated with the hotel was not a particularly good writing environment, being socked in with a dense overcast of stale cigarette and cigar smoke on the one hand, and being equipped with Mexican-standard keyboards that I found irksome. Most of the punctuation marks I use often, such as -;',"? and !, were replaced with other things - upward facing arrows, enyas, whatever.

So I waited until I was home. So before I move on to other things, let's say a few things about the hotel. BIG place, for one thing. There were a lot of people there, but the hotel was so freakin' big it was able to accomodate the crowd without ever quite feeling crowded. It was decorated in a strange coral-and-brown Art Deco style, and it featured a buncha bars and restaurants, almost all of them buffet-style.

There were those in my party who grumbled that the food had a distinct been-there, done-that quality, and I'll confess that there wasn't a great deal of variety from one day to the next. "Oh look, here's the plate of cucumbers. Oh look, here's the steak fajita meat. Oh look, here's that mysterious chili-and-tortilla-chip business." But I never went hungry and I never found a food item that was actually objectionable, except for the boiled-down soy sauce and lemon juice found in the Asian-themed restaurant. It was so salty it put my taste buds into comas and I have no idea what it really tasted like.

Drinks were available in many locations pretty much all the time. I tended to specialize in margaritas, Bloody Marys, pina coladas and the occasional gin and tonic just to cleanse my pallette. The drinks were not particularly strong - one night I had, at a conservative estimate, twelve drinks, and though I was tipsy, I wasn't anywhere near the point of doing anything embarrassing. The mini-bar in the room came equipped with four plus-sized bottles of hooch (vodka, tequila, gin and grain spirits) but I elected not to tempt fate by mixing my own drinks; nine stories is a long way to fall when one gets woozy and falls off the balcony.

Accessibility was, frankly, a joke. Each room was divided into two sections, an upper part with the bathroom and beds, and a lower part with the balcony and the living room, separated by two steps. There were no ramps leading to the beach, and there was no easy way to get from the lobby to the pools and restaurants without taking an ill-defined "back way" that included four ramps that were much too steep for wheelchairs. It seemed that there were steps or curbs everywhere. The lobby area was very nice and devoid of steps, but sometimes one wants to leave the nice lobby and go to the pool, the ocean, or points beyond. I can't imagine how someone in a wheelchair could possibly get into the bathtub - I'm 6'4" and even I had to cling to the handrails when trying to climb over the abnormally high bathtub wall.

But - they've put a lot of effort into that part of Puerto Vallarta. The airport has been extensively renovated and is as clean, modern and efficient as anything you'll find in Arizona. The whole tourist industry seems cleaner and more efficient than last time, and I didn't detect the slightly hint of bitterness or resentment in the part of the workers. Everyone seemed genuinely happy to see us, probably because without us in the general sense, they wouldn't have jobs.

So I found the hotel acceptable, but I find that I prefer somewhat smaller and more intimate hotels, like the Presidente-Internacional found much farther to the south, on the other side of Puerto Vallarta. The food was good but not great, the room was good but not great, the drinks were plentiful and tasty, and the ocean was handy. The decor and landscaping were nice, and it was always very clean.

The only area where I felt it didn't meet acceptable standards was handicapped access, which was so poor they might as well not even have tried. Oh, and I didn't much care for the fact that the Internet cafe was an alcove off the side of the sports bar, which means stale cigarette smoke, lots of hoarse shouting, blaring TVs, and that most obnoxious of sounds, the machine-gun rattle of air hockey tables.