Oh For Crying Out Loud

The first thing I drank in the hospital after my breathing tube was dragged, kicking and screaming, out of my throat was a cup of apple juice. It was such a flavor shock that it burned itself more or less indelibly into my brain. It was cold and wet and refreshing and sweet and it tasted good, and it was like being reminded that I was alive and good things still existed in the world. I'd never been a real fan of apple juice before, but that first cup? Man! It was like manna.

Since then I've had to give up a number of guilty pleasures. Smoking? Outta here! Alka-Seltzers? Outta here! Ice cream? Outta here! Cheese? Outta here, for the most part. But I always had my apple juice, which I used to wash down my pills in the morning and evening, sort of a tasty start to the day and a cold, refreshing end to the day.

Now I read that drinking fruit juice twice a day increases your chances of developing Type-2 diabetes by 31 percent, though it varies somewhat with the juice in question. But apple juice is one of the heavy sinners; grapefruit juice on the other hand is much less dangerous.

Isn't that great? It's like the world just handed me a telegram saying "Oh, by the way, remember apple juice? That's what you'll be doing in the future, remembering it, because if you keep going, it's probably diabetes-city, and welcome to the seventh coronary risk factor."

Double drat. Maybe I can find sugar-free apple juice, or drink sugar-free lemonade. That would work, in a pinch, but once again I have to give up something I like because someone out there found a reason it'll kill me.

Cold War Redux

Many years ago I read a book wherein a Western diplomat retold the story of when he asked a Chinese diplomat in the 1970s if he thought the French Revolution had been a good thing or not. "It's too early to tell," the Chinese diplomat said, with obvious respect for the long view of history. I can't remember the name of the book or the names of either diplomat, but that's par for the course for me - I remember the footnote but not the title of the book.

I bring this up mainly because John McCain is starting to frighten me. A lot. I never intended to vote him, but I always reassured myself by saying "Well, even if in the worst case he does become President, at least he isn't a lunatic." Now I'm not so sure.

Lately McCain has bestirred himself to threaten to kick the Russians out of the G8 and, presumably, snub them something awful at other international conventions. This to punish them for the erosion in Russian democracy, or so he says. I think he was just more comfortable in the glory days of the Cold War and wants to go back to that paradigm, when wars like Vietnam and Korea could be understood in the context of the superpowers and were thus a lot easier to understand than dreadful muddles like Iraq.

But don't we have enough trouble on our plate - several economic crises all at the same time, Iraq, Aghanistan, the energy crisis, ballooning government debt - without provoking an arms race with the Russians that will be just as pointless as the old one but many times more expensive? McCain's apparent desire to return to the days of the Cold War scare me silly. I'm no fool and I know the Russians aren't our friends - but they aren't our enemies either. And let's keep them that way.

So what does this have to do with Chinese diplomats and the French Revolution? We have to remember that democracy in Russia is really in its infancy. Despite sops to democracy like the Czar's Duma and the CPSU's Supreme Soviet, Russia was an authoritarian or even totalitarian state since basically day one. It wasn't until the fall of the USSR in the 1990s that the Russians had even the most cursory experience with democracy, and it shouldn't surprise anyone when they sometimes get it wrong.

Should Putin be rewarded for steering Russia back toward a much more authoritarian form of government? Of course not. But neither should the Russians as a whole be punished for political mistakes, and history has shown (or shown me, anyway) that a common political mistake made in formerly fascist countries is an unhealthy flirtation with neo-fascism. Like McCain longing for the cold war, the "patriots" in countries like Russia today or Germany in the 1920s yearn for earlier and better days when there was a kaiser, or a czar, or a Stalin, or what-have-you. In a hundred years or so we'll be able to say with some confidence if the Russian experiment with democracy has gone well or not, but now, less than two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union? Pfft. Still far too early to tell.

The Russians have to find their own way, and the paranoid finger-waving of people like McCain doesn't help. But the scary thing about McCain is that he might be elected! If so, I guess that means war with Iran, no attention paid to Afghanistan, a new Cold War with the Russians, and God knows what other foreign policy atrocities...

My eyebrow is starting to twitch again.

An iPod Gizmo Worth Having

I've tried a couple of those iPod-to-FM Radio transmitter things for my car. They both were made by Belkin, but you shouldn't necessarily take my comments as an attack on Belkin; the fact that they didn't work very well probably owes at least as much to the specifics of my car as to the devices themselves. Whatever the reason, they suffered from really bad signal-to-noise ratios, and for some reason stepping on the brake made them even noisier (I speculate that my brake and tail lights are multiplexed and somehow all the electrical activity is making the EMI situation in my car worse than it usually is).

I stopped using them because they were just more trouble than they were worth. Rotate the thing twenty degrees and suddenly noisy music becomes just noise...

But I found one for the house that's powered off the iPod's internal battery and not off the cigarette lighter in the car (remember when they were called "cigarette lighters" and not "auxiliary power outlets"?). It's actually Jean's, she got it for her birthday, but she hadn't even gotten it out of the package, and today I decided to experiment with it. Soon I was a third of the way through a box of Mike's Hard Lemonade and listening to my iPod and carrying on a spastic, convulsive twitching that only barely qualified as dancing, but was dancing nevertheless. The bookshelf stereo isn't the most impressive piece of sound equipment the world's ever seen, but for whatever reason, the little FM transmitter gets the signal to the tuner in the bookshelf stereo with no noise at all. It works really quite well - it's the "iTrip by Griffin" and I think it's worth it.

I let my iPod shuffle out a bunch of songs until I finally succumbed to a long day and four Hard Lemonades and felt that it was time for a nap.

Shirtless

I haven't done much writing this week, have I? I've been busy; the wife is off in Louisiana taking care of family business leaving me to take care of the house and animals here. So I spend 12 hours working and commuting, and then I have to stay up to feed the horses at 10, but because I get out of bed at about 4:30, I like to be in bed by nine, so let's just say that I've been dealing with competing calls on my time and energy, and didn't have the time to write.

I was going to though. We had an ozone warning today and I was going to research ozone and write about it, but I guess the ozone must have gotten to me; I sat in front of my computer with my shirt off for about a half an hour and finally fell sound asleep instead of researching anything.

Yesterday I was going to write about a TV show I watched that described some of the changes the Navy and Raytheon had to make to the SM-3 missile and fire control system to enable the USS Lake Erie to shoot down the faulty satellite. Interesting show. Too bad I took my shirt off and fell asleep in the middle of it.

Are you detecting a pattern yet?

The Newish Math

(Uriah Heep) - (keyboards) + (heaviness^2) - (goofy elf references) + (bleak irony) + (10log(Candlemass/Distance_from_Sweden)) - (freaky crimped hair) = Solitude Aeturnus. Am I right, or am I just talking to my heads here??

Seriously, when I listen to Solitude Aeturnus, I hear Uriah Heep in there, and I also hear Candlemass in there, but I also hear Robert Mitchum reading selections from Incest Orgy, so nothing I hear is to be entirely trusted (let alone spoken of).

Either way, it's good stuff, nice well-executed doom metal* with the prototypical chunky, heavy riffs, clean vocals, and rather sedate pace. I hope they don't pull a fast one and whip a bunch of ambient stuff on me - given that they're from Texas, what would Saturday night ambient 'round the rehearsal space sound like? The popping of beer bottles, the frying of doomed insects trapped in the bug zapper, and somewhere in the far distance, the faint cry of "Anyone seen mah truck?" Come to think of it, that's probably an improvement over the ambient 'round the average Arizona rehearsal space, which consists almost entirely of the sound of dripping sweat, overheated bodies slumping to the ground with wet splats, and the survivors gasping "Holy crap it's hot! Whose idea was this anyway?"

I will now hoist myself atop my soap box and emit a generalization. The older Solitude Aeturnus sounds a bit mushy and grindy, which I happen to like. The newer stuff is cleaner and crisper and doesn't suffer from the (intentional or otherwise) scooping that results in the grindy sound. But I like that too.

What's sad about this whole exercise is that it started out with The Fratellis. I was continuing my project to widen the musical offerings on my iPod and got stuck on which Fratellis album was appropriate - Flathead, Costello Music, Here We Stand - and lacking expert opinion, I started fiddling around. Now, in the world of metal it has to be said that some bands have great names and others have great music. Among the best "names" in metal are Shadows Fall and Solitude Aeturnus (I don't know why but I really love those names) and I check them from time to time for new work. Shadows Fall is unfortunately a bit too metalcore for my liking. But Solitude Aeturnus I've always rather liked, though I was forced by iPod space limitations to not buy any of their albums. But that was then, and this is now. I guess what I'm saying is that I added a splendid Bruce Springsteen album called "Magic", but then I offset it with a Solitude Aeturnus album, so I'm right back to square one.

Meps!

* Do you think metal musicians wince when reviewers refer to their music as "nice"? It must feel like a high-grade Circle-K Freezee cold tumor.

Evil Explained?

I think I have determined why evil happens.

It all happened so suddenly. A while back I was lying in the bathtub trying to read a magazine without getting it wet and wondering why nobody ever hears much of the Mexican navy. Do they have a navy? Does it stay in port? Or does it simply go about its business in a quiet and workmanlike fashion? Anyway, I was contemplating this mystery when a larger mystery suddenly barged into my consciousness like a large man shouldering kids aside in the Subway "order here" line. I have since dedicated whole minutes to detailed and determined study of this larger mystery, and I can now say why evil walks the earth.

Religious athletes.

That's it. That's the Big Answer.

We'll need a theological structure to base my argument upon, and I've decided to use the theology of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But really, it could be any theology, including the Church of the Sub-Genius (I personally like their guarantee of salvation or triple your money back).

So let's say there's a conference going on that could bring peace to a region that has been plagued by religious, economic and ethnic struggles for generations. The two sides, under the watchful meatball-eye of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the careful nudging of His Noodly Appendage, are getting closer and closer to a breakthrough, the moment where they set aside their differences and vow to live in peace and trade kitten prints.

Then a rodeo cowboy prays for divine assistance to help him ride a bull for eight seconds. The prayer is properly formatted and apparently legitimate, so the Flying Spaghetti Monster has to leave the peace conference for a few seconds to help the cowboy cling to the bull with his butt-cheeks. Nine seconds later he's back, but it's too late. In the nine seconds that His Noodliness was away, a translator mistranslated "Those are nice slacks; where did you get them?" as "Your jockstrap smells wonderful; may I borrow it?" Seconds later, the peace conference dissolves in a general melee and forty-two people are beaten to death with lunch trays and elaborate blown-glass ash trays, and the region is plunged into violent madness for another ten generations.

A man driving a truck over a mountain road blows a tire in a driving rainstorm and shouts "God help me!" as his truck careers toward the precipice on the side of the road. The Flying Spaghetti Monster extends a good-sized Bolus of Noodle (we believe this usage to be accurate) to push the track back onto the road, but NO!

Suddenly a football player is praying to score a touchdown, so it's off to the football game. By the time the football game is in the books and the last cheeky "I'm pointing at you, God" salute is rendered, it's too late to do anything for the truck driver except tell the rescue crews where to start looking for the wreckage.

A dangerous fault on the floor of the Indian Ocean is starting to build up energy. The Flying Spaghetti Monster inserts Noodly Appendages as required to relieve the pressure in a long, slow, unthreatening sigh. But all of a sudden a bicycle racer prays for God to help him win a stage in the Tour de France. "But that'll take all damn day," the Flying Spaghetti Monster complains, but there's no gainsaying a prayer. So it's off to Alpe d'Huez for the Flying Spaghetti Monster, who delivers suitable divine assistance in permitting the bicyclist to pedal his keester off and win the stage before collapsing in sweaty ruin - just like the losers.

In the five hours He is away, the fault on the floor of the Indian Ocean lets go and a quarter of a million people are wiped out by the resulting tsunami.

My theory is that we shouldn't tolerate athletes who pray for victory. First, if you require divine assistance to win, there might be something wrong with your training, or your technique may need improvement, or maybe you just suck. Second, if doping is considered cheating, what do you call the intervention of a divine omnipotent entity?? Third, you keep distracting the relevant entities with your silly requests for victory and in so doing drag their attention away from the real issues and problems. Who knows, was Ted Bundy the consequence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster helping Bart Starr win a football game in the long-ago? (I can almost hear it: "Ted's already born? Oh shit, I forgot to put in his soul!")

But wait, people say - God is omniscient and omnipotent and can perform an infinite number of tasks in an infinitesimally small period of time - even more if He's well rested. But come on, it's one thing to say Someone is omnipotent, and quite another for it to be true all the time. Everyone needs a little slack now and then, after all, a time when one deliberately closes one's eyes and lays omnipotence aside.

What, I wonder, would Cthulhu do with a cowboy who prayed to him for help in riding a bull? I think the word CHAWMP! pretty much sums it up.*

* Yes, I know that Cthulhu is technically an immortal extraterrestrial and not a supernatural deity as such, but throw me a bone...

Berfday

Here's a strange, disorienting picture of what I got for my birthday - a new iPod, and an 80-gig one at that! That's just too cool, isn't it? I wanted to take a picture of it but the lighting in my office is bad and I couldn't find a spot to lay it down, so I just held the thing sideways and snapped away. High-quality photographic composition is not my strength. But having and 80-gig iPod apparently is!

It's a very comfy thing. Going from a 2-gig iPod to an 80-gig iPod is like peeling off six-sizes-too-small swim trunks and stepping into Quintuple-X sweat pants. The sensation of room is almost intoxicating.

So now I'm officially taking recommendations on how to fill it!

Ich Bin Ein Chronic Whiner

I went to the grocery store today and whined myself right into a $110 grocery bill. And yet I could carry it all away from the store in a cart that was really less than half-loaded. Gone are the days when $110 would buy you so many groceries you needed a caravan of carts to get it to the parking lot, and a rented truck to get it home. But I'm just a gutless un-American whiner. I should be ashamed of myself for succumbing to bad press and imaginging that I should get more for my money than I do.

Ultimate Saturn V

I've always had a yen to build the ultimate Saturn V model. I'm not sure what that means exactly. Wouldn't the ultimate Saturn V model be at 1:1 scale and actually fly? Okay, then I have a yen to build the ultimate scale Saturn V model. Does that mean I'm going to scratchbuild a huge museum-grade model out of exotic materials like Australian joolapahoolagog wood and Peruvian silver? Not likely. So I guess what I'm saying is that I want to build the ultimate commercially available scale Saturn V. Does that mean I'm going to produce the best craftsmanship on the planet? Hmm. I'm pretty good, but I don't think I'm that good.

All right. I want to build a good Saturn V model, good by my standards, and to hell with all those museum models! To this end I've been collecting "stuff".

I have, for example, the Revell 1/96th Saturn V model kit.

I have, for additional example, the New Ware detail and decal set which adds a couple of hundred photoetched brass and resin parts to the Revell kit, and throws in good decals as a bonus. I wouldn't want to say this is the best thing that ever came out of the Czech Republic - a great many Czech citizens might argue that they are better than a dumb model rocket detail set - but it is good stuff.

I have, for additional example, the RealSpace Models Boost Protective Cover, and will soon have the Batted F-1 engines (and I'm already trying to think of cool ways of displaying the pretty nicely detailed and quite unbatted Revell F-1s).

I have, for example, a paper kit of the whole Launch Umbilical Tower. I saw it on eBay and bought it, and though I've had it for a while, I haven't really messed with it much; I've left it in a cool dark place well out of reach of the cats because the more I handle paper models, the more I seem to smear them.

The only thing I don't have is the Crawler-Transporter, and I guess that's okay. I want to build all of this stuff as though the time is my birthday in 1969, the day before Apollo 11 set out for the moon. And they wouldn't leave the crawler parked under the Saturn V. That would be dumb. That would be something I would do.

Crawler Boss: "Anyone seen the crawler? We can't seem to find it."

Me: Uh-oh... I hope they didn't look in the flame pit yet; maybe a little Bondo and spray paint will fix it up.

I'll be okay in a few days; it's just that Space Week on Discovery makes me a little crazy.

Ich Bin Ein Middle-Class Whiner

Yep, I confess it, I'm a whiner. I routinely stop at the gas station and whine that gas isn't expensive enough. Come on, hit me with some really expensive gas! Make me whine like ET with a sore throat!

Why is Phil Gramm in the position he's in? The elitism and arrogance of his whiner comments are bad enough, but really appalls me is their stupidity. And this is the man John McCain thinks should be his economic advisor? All I can say, honestly, all I can say, is "Holy cow, that's the dumbest thing I've heard in... gosh, it must be months!"

And it is.

I'd carry on at length, but I've got some navel-gazing and whining to do - I won't be happy until GM lays off about 50,000 workers and the price of gas reaches five bucks a gallon. Then, and only then, will I cease my un-American whining and grumbling and admit that Phil Gramm is right-right-right.

Scheisse...

Almost Had a Wreck

I almost wrecked my car today. I was listening to the local Nova-M radio station on the drive home (1480 AM) when someone called in and said something so dumb I almost drove my car into a gas pump.

Most of the people I heard were bellyaching ferociously about Obama voting for the FISA bill, and claiming that this act of fascism was losing Obama their vote. Is that so? And who else do you propose to vote for? McCain? Nader? Or are you going to write in for Bozo the Clown? Come on, guys, it's okay to be disappointed and unhappy with the FISA bill - I certainly am - but it doesn't change by so much as an Angstrom unit the reality of the situation, which is that we've got a choice between McCain and Obama. Nobody else. You can stack up all the other independents and libertarians and Greens and whatnot and they still won't get more than a few percent of the vote, so please stop threatening to take your vote elsewhere - there's nowhere else to go with it, and all this wounded suffering isn't doing anyone any good.

But it was the guy talking about Hitler that really did the deed. He said, apropos of nothing and with apparent convinction, that "everything Hitler did was legal." I brayed something and in the process of of braying, I almost drove into a gas pump.

Do people actually believe that? Do people actually believe that the Reichstag Fire was legal? Come on; nobody could be that cynical, could they? I guess they could. Actually, I'm modestly surprised that more people don't see certain malign parallels between the Reichstag Fire and 9/11, but never mind that.

But my consternation with this was short-lived, because the guy then went on to say that the Nuremburg war crimes trials were "BS", and the host merely went "uh huh". How sad. One of the crowning achievements of international law brings the representatives of German government, military and industry to account for crimes against humanity, and some guy can dismiss it all by calling it "BS" without even having to say why he thinks it's BS.

I didn't know how to react to that for a while, but I think I've finally settled on feeling sad.

No iPod This Week

Regular readers (both of you, ha ha) might be wondering what's become of my "I'm getting a new iPod" campaign. I still don't have a new iPod, so what's the deal? Was I lying? Am I just lazy?

No. I just need tires.

I picked up a finish nail in the right front tire of my car, and it sat unused for most of the July Fourth weekend and went completely flat until we decided to go to the store Saturday morning. Our house is at the end of a gravel road. It's pretty good as gravel roads go and contributes a nice sense of rurality (is that a word?) but it's the shits for "feel" and I didn't even notice that we had a flat until a neighbor literally called us and said "You may want to check your tire."

By then the tire looked about like a Blimp after an attack by a bunch of flying hedge trimmers. The tire was so ruined Ho Chi Minh couldn't even have made sandals out of it. Not even Mitch Hedberg could have said anything fully about it. The guy at Discount Tire described it as "cool" but I think he was merely humoring me.

I hate buying cheap tires. I bought cheap tires once and they almost killed me. They kept forming bubbles and sidewall separations, and I had them blow up violently on me three times, once on the freeway, though the nasty vibration had warned me that something was up and I was down to about 40 miles per hour when it went bang and left behind a tremendous cloud of black brake dust. I bought the original set of four, and ended up cashing in to the tune of about eight more because they were so defective they'd fail in highly unusual ways before ever wearing out. They were terrible, so terrible that I hesitate to name the manufacturer because the manufactuer has a halfway decent reputation with everyone but me.

So I bought four new Pirellis, and that, as they say, that knocked my iPod fund onto its ass. It's always something, isn't it? I hesitate to think what it'll be next, but it'll probably involve tungsten carbide in some strange way.

Good TV

I spend a lot of time on my blog complaining about TV shows and TV commercials, but I'd like to offset a bit of that by recommending a particularly good TV show. Well, I think it's particularly good, but if you don't have any particular interest in the Apollo program, it's not likely to strike your fancy.

It's called Moon Machines and it purports to tell in the span of a commercially-interrupted hour the story of each major chunk of Apollo hardware. The first one covered the Saturn V booster; the second the Apollo command module; the third the navigation computers in the complex. They persistently make it sound like one computer, but it was actually three - the IU at the top of the Saturn V, the computer in the CM and the computer in the LM. I scanned ahead 24 hours and the subject of tomorrow's installment is the Lunar Module, which still (so far as I know) holds the distinction of being the only true manned spacecraft ever built.

The shows are modestly technical - not enough to give me geek thrills, but enough that I can enjoy the show. For example, in the show about the Saturn V, there was a fascinating nugget of information on the cause of the F-1 engine combustion instability problem that I'd never heard before, and this one bit of lore was worth the whole TV show, to me. Though the show, really, is about the engineers, and the best part of the shows are often the idle recollections of the engineers, and the then-and-now photographs of them.


If you're into the space program, by all means give Moon Machines a gander. I don't think you'll be disappointed. If you aren't into the space program, well, I suppose The Singing Office might be on, I don't know.

Hmm

Well, here I am at the end of another four-day weekend, and facing the prospect of having to get up early tomorrow morning to go to work. Have I accomplished anything in these four days? It certainly doesn't seem like it, but at least I didn't make anything worse, like shooting my foot off with a shotgun or finding a colony of strongly telepathic pod-people out in the farther reaches of the ranch. That's something, I guess.

I should note for the record that my aunt Eleanor died on the 4th. She was 84 and hadn't been doing very well, so the word from Iowa (where it happened) is that it was "not unexpected." Mostly what I remember about her is that she was always baking something, and she lived in that little house that always seemed half-submerged in dense growths of hemp.

Year And A Day

It's been a year and a day since I quit smoking. I think at this point I can change my status from "quitter" to "nonsmoker", can't I?

I confess, though, I keep peering out the window to see if the American Lung Association is going to send me a gift basket or not. I think I deserve something for the effort, don't you?

Big Day

Tomorrow is a big day for me. Not big in the sense that I'm going to be doing something dramatic and exciting. No skydiving, no curing of cancer, no bringing relief to scabby eczema, nothing like that. Mostly it's the anniversay of the day I didn't die. Regulars will remember that on July Fourth of last year I suffered a heart attack which led to quadruple bypass surgery on the Fifth.

So tomorrow is sort of my didn't-die-day, as opposed to a birthday. I plan to celebrate in the time-honored fashion, by consuming a six-pack of Newcastle Brown Ale while sitting in the swimming pool. If I get a new iPod in time, I could even listen to Bruce Springsteen while I'm at it, even though right now I'm (still) listening to Amon Amarth.

So if you're looking for me, that's where I'll be.

Uncle! Uncle!

Is there some kind of affidavit I can sign that will get me out of having to watch any more Vonage commercials? Seriously, I've seen about ten thousand of them and I'm starting to develop really unhealthy levels of hatred toward the people in the ads, the ads themselves, and Vonage as a company.

I was watching Most Evil today, one of my favorite shows, and every commercial break was dominated by Vonage commercials. And not the short ones either; we're talking the long, interminable, tedious abominations. And as if that wasn't enough, some of them were doubled! One Vonage ad wasn't enough, so they'd run a second one right after the first one!

After a while that yoo-hoo, yoo-hoo-hoo music and the dull throbbing sound of the Orange Membrane and the Wave-Emitting Magical Swelling Logo (watch the bottom of the screen if you don't believe me) start to drive me insane, and after the doubled Vonage ads started, I had to stop watching my TV show and leave the room. Really, it's come that that, I'd rather watch nothing at all than risk accidental exposure to any more Vonage ads. I'd rather have no phone at all than do business with Vonage. So I went to my computer and naively checked my email, only to find - wait for it! - Vonage pop-up ads on my web browser!!

It's too much! Make it stop! Please! I'm only one man, afflicted by weaknesses and foibles, I submit to the tireless oppressive energy of your multi-billion-dollar ad campaign! I give already! Uncle, for fuck's sake, Uncle!

I first saw the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey back in the late 1960s, and it (along with Major Matt Mason toys and other Space Age gewgaws) convinced me that the future would always be better than the past, because people with enormously powerful and clinically cool brains would always see to it that human society and human institutions moved in the direction of justice, rationality, fairness and peace. Oh how these Vonage ads would have made that little boy weep, because that little boy would have been forced to cry out "The future is not better than the past! The future sucks!"

Have you ever gone through a period in your life when you ate the same thing over and over and you thought you liked it until suddenly a threshold was crossed and projectile vomiting set in? My parents went to Europe for about a month when I was sixteen, and with my grocery money I laid in a truly awesome supply of beef pot pies. Beef pot pies were the thing, man; I'd never get sit of eating beef pot pies while watching Emergency on TV. Until I did. To this day I can't stand beef pot pies.

Is there a connection between beef pot pies and Vonage? The question awaits scholarship.

Next Model

Now that I have four days off from work, I've decided to bore everyone with a gloriously irrelevant post about the next model I propose to build. Here is a Messerschmitt Me-163B Komet interceptor as operated by Nazi Germany in the last year of the war. It's a tiny tailless rocket-propelled airplane that was easily the fastest and fastest-climbing airplane of the war. The fastest Allied fighters would do about 450 miles per hour; the Me-163 would do 650 miles per hour - but not for very long because rocket engines are voracious consumers of fuel.

The peculiar-looking Me-163 was an abject failure as a warplane and, insofar as the German war effort was concerned, an egregious waste of resources. But as a technical exercise it was brilliant and established a number of aerodynamic features that we today take for granted, like the fact that thin swept wings delay the onset of compressibility effects much better than thick unswept wings, that tailless aircraft can be perfectly controllable and indeed pleasant to fly, and that if high speed flight research is your bag, rocket engines can get you to the "area of interest" with dispatch. And let's face it, compared to the old piston-engined fighters of World War Two, the Me-163 still looks modern and rakish.

I have the Academy kit and intend to finish it in the overall red scheme of PK+QL as flown by Major Wolfgang Spaethe in a demonstration in 1944.

And now, back to your normally scheduled weekend.

Patriotism

A friend of mine recently put a peace symbol with a background of stars and stripes on her blog, and to me it conveyed the idea that loving peace and being patriotic are not perpetually opposed. And as is my wont, I decided to blog forth. To wit:

There are those who believe (to borrow from the old Battlestar Galactica TV show) that there are only three tests of patriotism. They are:

1. Do you support President Bush, without question?
2. Do you support the war in Iraq?
3. Are you a Republican?

Answer "no" to any of these questions and you get a free examination of your patriotism, your role in American society, and your probable ultimate fate at the hands of these self-important patriotism goobers.

I think it's possible to answer "no" to ALL of those questions and still be a genuine patriot, a real patriot, not some flag-waving numbnuts who mistakes blind obedience for loyalty and who knows only what his handlers at Fox News want him to know.

To be sure, I do occasionally run into liberals that I have to describe as "America-hating". I'm not sure why, but their disgust with US foreign policy in particular has reached such a point that they don't see anything good about America at all. It's all bad, as they loudly espouse, and the Republican goobers say "See?? We told you so, all liberals are America-hating boobs!"

But it's possible (I think) to disagree vehemently with US foreign policy and to find fault with other aspects of America, such as the steady decay in educational standards, gentrification, trust-fund hippiedom, spectacular overconsumption, and an increasing preference for waging the Kulturkampf instead of debating and implementing coherent public policy, and still be a patriot. The heart of America is the Constitution, and by defending it against an overzealous Executive, I feel I'm more patriotic than they are. And don't even begin to belabor me with "we have to bend the rules to win the war" argument, because I refuse to debate on the basic of carefully-promulgated public fear.

But it goes farther than that, farther than just defending the Constitution. There are things about America that I am genuinely and unabashedly proud of, regardless of what lunacy the Administration or its lackeys is getting up to on any given day. In the near future Bush will be gone and cooler heads can begin to undo the damage he caused, but meantime these great American things of which I speak will still be there, as worthy of admiration as ever.

Such as? NASA - any time you read about an airliner having improved efficiency, who do you think did the basic research in aerodynamics and propulsion? The NOAA - the first step in healing the planet it observing it closely, and nobody does that on a global basis like NOAA. The National Weather Service - how many lives a year are saved by the warnings and watches that come out of this organization? Predicting the weather is hard and the NWS gets it wrong sometimes, but we'd be in a world of hurt without it. The USDA - mistakes happen, as the recent tomato salmonella outbreak demonstrates, but on the whole, the USDA does an admirably good job of safeguarding our food supply with what strikes me as a pitiful minimum of resources. The FDA - again, mistakes happen and the FDA isn't immune to the pressures of money and politics, but by an large it does a good job of keeing useless or dangerous drugs off the market. Not as good as it could, but at least it tries. Most other countries rely on the US FDA to do their work for them - "What? The FDA approved Maalox? Then by cracky we will too!"

The National Transportation Safety Board - the steady decrease in fatal accidents over the years owes directly to the NTSB and its mission of investigating accidents and finding out why they happened, and for recommending technical improvements where appropriate. The National Interagency Fire Center - in those years when it seems that the whole American West is burning down, I'm comforted to know that there are professionals who are managing the difficult and expensive regional wildfire effort for me.

There are other examples, some I know of (like the US Coast Guard) and some I don't know about. But the point is that these are agencies and organizations that I'm proud of. When people ask me if I'm a patriot, I think of these agencies and the work they do that allows us all to have better lives, and I think "Yes, by damn I am a patriot." And I'm a patriot even if I that this current administration has spawned some of the most disastrous foreign policy mistakes the United States has ever seen at the hands of a President that refers to the Constitution as a "goddamned piece of paper."

AOHell

I grow increasingly weary of AOL and I'd ditch it altogether if practically everyone I know didn't know me by my AOL email address.

How do I loathe AOL? Let me count the ways.

1. A couple of months ago it downloaded some kind of "update" that now causes two processes (both named "aolsoftware.exe") to run in the background. One typically ends up being about 120 meg in size (they get bigger the longer they're allowed to run) and soon enough they drag my computer to a literal halt. The other day it took my computer two and a half minutes to switch between AOL and Word for Windows! But if I kill these two stupid processes, my computer behaves normally.

2. AOL has the exceedingly annoying habit of snatching focus away from the dialog box you're working in and directing it elsewhere. You think you're typing a URL into the Explorer address bar, but suddenly the text is being directed to some other box, usually a "search AOL" box.

3. About every third day AOL simply refuses to connect and I have to reboot my computer. But thanks to all the twidget bullshit AOL, Adobe, Winzip and everyone else has gratuitously loaded onto my computer, I literally have to go get a cup of coffee while I wait for my PC to boot because the frustration of watching it sit there comatose for six minutes while it loads 27,000 system tray things would drive me to homicide.

4. AOL's version of Exploder won't cooperate with Blogger polls. Microsoft Explorer will. Thanks, AOL, thanks for the seamless implementation of your browser. Jesus.

5. Click on any AOL news story that links to "switched.com" (whatever the hell that is) and you're doomed to reboot. It locks up my AOL tighter than a drum, and it's fricking AOL doing it! I can kill AOL via the task manager and can sometimes reconnect, but the crash leaves my computer in such a disordered state it doesn't work right and rebooting is the only viable option.

6. In reference to #5 above, the downward pressure on the common denominator for AOL news stories must be incredible, almost as bad as the upward pressure on marketing in AOL news stories. "AOL news" is pretty much a joke - it's either a succession of links to stories about pinhead celebrities I don't care about, or links to pinhead lifestyle stories that are irrelevant to me, or a succession of links to on-line stores where I can (or am supposed to) buy stuff. And let's not forget that there's a problem with "switched.com" that thoroughly hoses my computer. I don't even screw with the "Welcome Screen" any more because it's a fricking oxymoron.

7. AOL has recently gotten into the habit of tacking on a bit of advertising to the bottoms of my emails! If I wanted to advertise in my emails, I would, but I really don't appreciate AOL's high-handed assumption that it can append anything it wants to my emails without my permission. I've actually had people email me and ask me to stop appending the advertising because it makes them uncomfortable from a security point of view, but is there a way to turn it off? Hell if I know! AOL's help feature is great if you like reading restatements of the crushingly obvious, but when it comes to arcane features, pfft. Fuggedaboudit.

And I'm paying for this!

Do you sense that I'm a bit frustrated with AOL? It goes in cycles. Every so often AOL pisses me off to the point that I'm ready to email everyone I know with a new gmail address, but so far every time I start to go through with it, I go get a cup of coffee or something and I calm down. But this new business with the enormous "aolsoftware.exe" resource-hogs is really getting to be too much. But what really set me off this time was finding out that the problem with my blog poll wasn't the poll, or the blog, but AOL.

Not that AOL is the only offender. Microsoft, Adobe and others get up to strange hijinks too, but AOL is by far the worst. It's considered such a joke where I work that I can't even work at home. Sharing files between one's work computer and one's home computer is acceptable to the IT gods, but only if the home computer doesn't have AOL installed on it. If it does, well, you're SOL; you aren't allowed to share files.

That's great. Mattie's proud. Not.