Ten Worst?

I've grown weary of the "Ten Best Whatchamacallit" shows on the Military Channel. Actually I can't watch them at all because I tend to screech at the TV - what do you mean, a Tiger is better than a Comet, are you smoking crack or what? And perhaps as an antidote to them, I'll now offer my analysis of the worst production tanks ever made. Note the word production. It would be all too easy to tee off on freaks like the Tortoise or the Tsar and populate the list with one-off weirdos, so I'm going to stick to tanks that actually had a production run.

1. The worst production tank ever made: The Soviet T-62. On paper it sounds pretty effective: transverse V-12 diesel engine, hemispheric turret, 115mm smoothbore gun, torsion bar suspension. But the tank contained more design flaws than the Turbo Yugo and was so badly manufactured it proved to be one of the most unreliable tanks ever built - one NATO officer noted that a T-62 regiment tended to lose one tank every two miles during a road march, usually to clutch problems. The need to elevate the gun for reloading meant that it was constitutionally incapable of firing aimed second shots, and... Oh, that'll do, I reckon. There were certain Warsaw Pact countries that, when offered T-62s, said "No thank you, we'll stick with our T-55s, thank you very much."

2. The whole Early Cold War Heavy Tank spectacle, including the IS-3, T-10, M103 and Conqueror. At least the M103 and Conqueror were competently executed, and the T-10M arguably competently executed, but it seems laughable in light of the development of the Vickers 105mm L7 tank gun that the notion of the "heavy tank" lasted as long as it did. It bears pointing out that IS-3s were easily dealt with by US-made and Israeli-crewed M48 Pattons during the Six-Day War, and those only had 90mm guns.

3. The Convenanter. It seems too easy to pick on this drab, unimpressive vehicle. The British took the classic but under-armored A13 cruiser in hand for a redesign, and somehow the resulting vehicle, the Covenanter, was worse than the A13. Then came the A15 Crusader, which was functionally nothing more than an A13 with a slightly different shape, and... Oh, no wonder the Cromwell ended up being two years late.

4. TOG. The only sane reaction upon viewing this thing has to be "Someone is joking, right?" One variant of the TOG even had the gall to carry the excellent 17-Pounder OQF gun, which is more or less the same as serving fresh apple pie on a paper plate made of horse manure. Oh, but TOG never got past the prototype stage, did it? I seem to be a hypocrite, but I'm just clearing the way for:

5. Maus. This was a German super-duper-heavy tank that they wasted time with in the closing days of the war. They built five of them and none are believed to have seen combat, but that segment of the modeling/wargaming hobby that reveres all things Wehrmacht believes that two of them saw combat against the Russians and could have singlehandedly altered the outcome of the war if they'd only had more ammo. In fact Maus was just another in the line of overly large, overly-heavy, overly-optimistic boondoggles that the Nazis seemed to specialize in. My theory is that if the Nazis hadn't wasted so much time and money on super-heavy tanks, ballistic missiles, rocket fighters and the like, the war might well have lasted another year.

6. Pzkw-II Lynx. Oh yes, dogpile on the Germans. Here we're at the other end of the scale, dealing with a light tank that the Germans spent way too much time and effort on. A complete waste of metal, time and money? That's a roger, especially since the Lynx couldn't do anything that Germany's highly satisfactory family of eight-wheel-drive armored cars couldn't do better, cheaper and more quietly.

7. Medium Tank M3 (AKA Lee/Grant). The Lee and Grant (same tank with certain detail differences) played a major role in combat in theaters ranging from Libya to Tunisia to Burma, but the tank was really a ghastly mess. The fact that it was used in such numbers, and with such generally favorable results, speaks mainly to the lack of acceptable alternatives. The tank was huge, had limited traverse for the main gun, wasn't easy to get into defilade, and required a crew of seven men. The Soviets were so unhappy with it they nicknamed it the "Tomb for Seven Brothers", and the Americans and British used it only for as long as it took for vastly superior Shermans to arrive. (One thing one can say about it, though, is that it was pretty reliable.)

8. ARL-44. The French felt the need to resume tank production as soon as possible after the Liberation, partly as a matter of national pride and partly because they wanted to do their part to help defeat Nazi Germany. In view of the fact that the Americans would have given the French all the Shermans they wanted free of charge, the new French tank needed to be bigger and heavier and better-armed than the Sherman, otherwise there was no logic in building it. So they took what amounted to the 1940-vintage Char B chassis and plopped a new turret armed with a 90mm gun atop that. The result was a bizarre mishmash of prewar lack of mobility with postwar upgunning.

9. XMBT-70. XMBT stands for "Experimental Main Battle Tank". This technological wonder was supposed to establish a new benchmark for tank design that would last into the 21st Century, and the wonder isn't that it failed, but that it got as close to success as it did, considering the obstacles. It was a joint German-US venture, and the two sides never could agree on the gun (the Germans wanted a 120mm smoothbore gun; the US wanted a 152mm combined gun-missile launcher). The tank was a wonderland of features, including variable-height hydropneumatic suspension, a very high power to weight ratio, advanced armor, advanced fire controls, and the aforementioned gun-missile system. But it cost a fortune and eventually they killed the program before it bankrupted both countries. The Americans later "rescoped" it (as they say) and called it the XM803, which proved to be almost as good a money incinerator as the original XMBT-70.

The large amounts of money invested in the XMBT-70 and XM803 probably had a lot to do with the US Army having to soldier on with M60s for about ten years longer than they should have - the XMBT-70 probably delayed the M1 by a decade. But it must also be said that with the first-rate M60A3 TTS in its inventory, the US Army could afford to wait.

The Speed of E-Business

Don't make me laugh. All E-business amounts to for me is a pain in the ass.

Where to start? The US Post Office won't deliver mail to my house. We are apparently too far off the edge of the world for that, even though I can literally see mailboxes from my front yard. It's too much bother for the postal carrier to travel another thousand feet to my house. But in a way that's okay, because whoever delivers the mail has Herman Munster's throttle foot and is forever tearing up the road with excessive wheelspin.

Meantime, FedEx and other carriers won't ship to my Post Office Box - they'd rather find my house than find the post office, I guess.

Meantime, most of the companies I do mail-order business don't understand this critical distinction and are forever sending my stuff to the wrong damn address! Our stuff is forever being returned to senders because it was sent to the wrong address. Sometimes I can intervene if I know the tracking number, but most of the time it's just gone, as though it fell into a black hole.

Here's the latest example. I bought a relay from a company back east somewhere, and clicked the FedEx box on their website. Confident that they would actually use FedEx, I gave them my street address, because FedEx will ship to it (but not to my PO Box). So I check my email today and see that they've shipped my relay, fine and dandy, except, goddamnit, they changed the shipping method to the US Postal Service, which means my package isn't addressed properly because the US Post Office won't deliver to my house! So the relay will go back to the company, and I'll have to order a new one, and chances are that once again they'll randomly change the shipping method...

One of the reasons I do a lot of business with Squadron (http://www.squadron.com/) is that they've never screwed up the shipment method. I've never had to chase down a shipment, and they're so reliable I don't even bother with tracking numbers. They've got this e-business stuff down. But most of the other companies I do business, getting them to ship to the right address is like having my wisdom teeth pulled. Gawd. It's enough to make me scream.

UPDATE: It's official, the relay has to go back to Iowa; the USPS can't (more like won't) forward it to my PO Box. That's nice. But they never miss an opportunity to raise stamp prices, do they?

Weekend Update with Dennis Miller

No, not with Dennis Miller. Anyone but Dennis Miller.

I think my cat Poopie is dying, but I've thought that before, haven't I? She has new symptoms in that she's apparently gone stone deaf. She doesn't seem to be suffering and she still eats me out of house and home, so I don't feel that I'm at the point where I have to decide if I should have her put to sleep or not. Her deafness is kind of a bother, actually. She doesn't realize how loud she has become, and you can't shut her up with a strategic hissing sound either. But you can sneak up on her from behind quite readily, and send her into the lower troposphere by poking her. That's dirty pool, but so is waking me up at 4:30 in the morning with earsplittingly-loud yowling sung in a minor and sort of flattish key.

Poopie was my third cat. My first cat, Oberon, was handed to me by my friend's mom when I went to visit her. Then someone at work gave me another kitten that I named Hobbes. After a few years Hobbes developed Valley Fever. We (the vet and I) kept him alive for about six months with various anti-fungal medications, and he actually seemed to be getting better, but then the bottom fell out. He grew horrible granulomas on his legs, he went blind, and within a day or two he died of encephalitis. I didn't take that very well. It was my first pet death in many years, and I was fairly devastated. So the next day I went to the Humane Society and vowed to adopt the first kitten that approached me, and that happened to be Poopie. And now she's failing, and the cycle will renew itself. Max, by the way, was rescued from the Safeway. He was sheltering behind the bike rack, just a tiny little puffball of a kitten, and we brought him home. He's not doing so well himself, but he's pretty elderly too. Not as old as Poopie, but a respectable old age for a cat. Before long the cat banner will pass to Baxter, I think, and then we'll have to decide if we want to replenish the cat population or not.

After having vacuumed up about three and a half tons of cat hair over the years, I'm inclined to say "One cat is plenty."

Network Repair Checklist

"Hello, my DSL isn't working."

"Have you tried rebooting your computer?"

"Yes."

"Have you tried resetting the DSL modem?"

"Yes."

"Have you tested your local LAN?"

"Yes."

"Have you paid your bill lately?"

"Yes."

"Have you removed the wreckage of the burned car from underneath the fried main trunk phone line, replaced the charred telephone pole, and replaced the fried telephone cable?"

"Umm... Let me call you back on that."

Geez

I sometimes wonder where people get their senses of historical perspective. I was listening to a guy on Nova-M today... It doesn't matter who he was or what group he was representing, because my argument isn't with what he believes in, but the larger meta-point about the world in general. He argued that 1968 was a turning point in the world where we suddenly as a people took a turn toward progressive policies and humane government, and he basically wants to try to recreate the "success" of 1968 in 2008.

I can appreciate the sentiment, but let's look at just two of the cases he cited. One was the Prague Uprising, which apparently brought enlightened government and human rights to the people of Czechoslovakia. Or at least until it was crushed flat by Soviet tanks. Gee whiz. I was eight years old at the time and even I remember Soviet T-55 tanks with white recognition markings rolling through the streets and transforming the "Prague Summer" into the "Politburo Fall". It was such a basic part of world history that it was part of the Saturday Night Live "Wild and Crazy Guys" sketch, for crying out loud!

The other example he cited was the United States itself. But wait a second, didn't we elect NIXON in 1968? And again in 1972? And wasn't Nixon followed (except for the troubled but laudable tenture of Jimmy Carter, and Ford the Nonentity) by eight years of King Ronald?

And he wants to recreate these things? Best to let them lie, I say, because if this guy's mistaken ideas about 1968 become part of real life in 2008, we're in for a McCain presidency and escalation of US military operations around the world.

Yeah, the world changed in 1968 - for the worse. Cripes.

Shadows Fall

I have to confess, the Shadows Fall album I bought (Threads of Life) is starting to grow on me. I'm not normally a huge fan of metalcore, and the rap on Shadows Fall was (at least among the few metal aficionados that I know) that they were basically a somewhat-more-artistic-than-usual metalcore act.

And it must be said that there's metalcore, and then there's metalcore. Avenged Sevenfold I can generally get behind, but Hatebreed is a little too metalcore, if you know what I mean. After a while that hoarse tuneless hardcore shouting gets a little old, or a lot old, and even righteously metallic music isn't enough to keep me interested when that happens.

But Shadows Fall, it turns out, isn't really metalcore. What is it? It's an interesting mix of things. In my Bullshit Analysis (c), the music seems very strongly influenced by death metal, but the vocals tend to wander around. Sometimes it's a little deathy, sometimes it's straight metalcore, sometimes it's right on the edge of Hammerfall-style power metal, and sometimes it's its own thing entirely.

But it's good. Musically it's plenty hard and metallic, but the varying moods and vocal styles lend the overall album nice variety. It's neither entirely death metal nor hardcore nor power metal, but it's pretty much all good.

I also bought a straight death metal album, Slaughter of the Soup... no, make that Slaughter of the Soul. It's by At The Gates, and if you like Amon Amarth, you'll probably like this. It seems to be more crunchitudinous than Amon Amarth, but it's definitely in that class of metal. It also brings to mind In Flames, but a sort of alternate-history version of In Flames that didn't get all poppy (or poppy as death metal acts go, anyway).

But the song I wish to highlight tonight is "Going Under" by Devo, off the album The New Traditionalists. Devo doesn't get much credit these days for much of anything. They're widely (and perhaps properly) dismissed as a novelty or gag act, and I remember an interview with one of the founding members of Devo who confessed great surprise that they'd managed to pull off the joke for as long as they had.

So you think about Devo and you think of goofball gag dance songs like "Canary in a Coal Mine" or "Slap your Mammy" or "Whip It" or "Through Being Cool". But there's something strange, surreal and almost sinister about the song "Going Under". Devo songs always have a certain lightness of spirit, but not this one; it's like Devo under the influence of huge quantities of Vasopressin, or an extremely bad mood. I can't say I know what "Going Under" is about in a lyric sense - it's one of those things, like the novel VALIS by Philip K. Dick, that I always think will start to make sense if I just think about it a little bit harder, but even though it doesn't seem to make any objective sense, it's still weird and sinister.

Fooled Mother Nature

Today I fooled Mother Nature - I had a headache at work! Woohoo! That's much preferable to having a headache on the weekend.

I've mentioned, I'm sure, that I've gotten fairly serious about losing weight again, and one of my tactics is taking fruit to work for lunch. Now, I'm not a big fan of apples, and I never have been, but they're so convenient they're hard to pass up as lunch fodder. No peeling, long shelf-life, reasonably filling, not very messy, they're an excellent lunch fruit except for the fact that I don't really like the way they taste. I really like bananas, but they go bad within 20 minutes of purchase. I really really like apricots, but they're too small for lunch duty; I'd need to eat 25 of them, and that sort of defeats the purpose. Pears are too juicy, or too hard, one or the other. Oranges are good and refreshing, but a bit messy and sometimes difficult to peel.

My point is that I usually take two apples to work. Normally I buy Fuji apples, which I find palatable, but the store ran out and I bought big green apples instead. Turns out they're Granny Smiths, and they're not suitable for lunch consumption at all. They have an odd chewing texture that I don't like - the nearest I can get to describing the texture is that it's like chewing underwear, but since I've never chewed underwear, I've clearly gone insane. And they're tart, and they have a strange taste that is actually made worse instead of better by the addition of salt. I'm sure that with some sugar, cinnamon and baking, they'd be wonderful, but as casual lunch food, they suck.

I just couldn't face the Granny Smiths today. Some days I'm tough, and some days I'm not. There they sat on my desk, the glistening green Granny Smiths of death, daring me to pick them up and eat them, and my morale collapsed. I was going to go to the cafeteria and get a (vastly overpriced) salad, but difficulties arose in the environmental lab that required me to work through lunch. Then I had a meeting, which kept me occupied until the cafeteria had closed for the day. By this point I was so famished I was tempted to start eating bugs and twigs, and since I hadn't had a chance to drink much of anything all day, I had a colossal headache from not getting enough water (at least that's my Bullshit Theory).

Meantime, other time pressures had begun to manifest themselves, and it wasn't about going out and having an unhurried lunch. I went to McDonalds and got two cheeseburgers and a drink, and learned that I could choke down two cheeseburgers in the time it takes to drive a mile. Healthy? Decidedly not, but it beat eating twigs and bugs, and eventually the drink took the edge off my headache, enough that I could work late without giving voice to a series of inarticulate screams of pain and rage.

For what it's worth, I've already lost about ten pounds. Of course, I'd gained those same ten pounds in the last couple of months so at best I'm back to square one, but it's better than nothing.

Nobody Likes A Whiner

Especially not Phil Gramm, but I don't care what he thinks, and I'm going to whine.

I woke up this morning with a devastating headache. Put your finger in your right ear canal, then move your fingertip forward until you leave "ear meat" and touch skull. That's where it hurt(s), like someone driving a 3/8ths-inch drill bit into my skull with one of those old cast-metal drills that runs fairly slow and produces a strong smell of ozone. This was at about four AM, and I figured as long as I was up and suffering, I might as well try out the bag of strawberry-flavored mini-wheat cereal I bought.

It's kind of a disappointment. It's not very strawberry-flavored and proved to be nothing at all like the Strawberry Quik indulgence I was hoping for, but it was better than lying there in the dark and being hungry. Trouble was, it attracted Baxter, the orange cat. Turns out he loves strawberry-scented milk. He loves it a lot. He was all over me, purring and making soft little "can I have some milk" sounds, digging his little feets into my surgical scar, sticking his head into the bowl, even licking droplets of said milk off my finger. He wasn't even driven away when all this hoohah attracted the attentions of the Stinking Black Flobberworms, AKA the dogs, who normally give Baxter the creeps. Eventually I sank to the level of feeding Baxter the milk one spoonful at a time until the milk was gone and my usefulness had ended. I haven't seen Baxter since, in case you were wondering.

So I determined the cereal wasn't much good, but I got some quality cat time, and that's always worthwhile.

My headache has been coming and going most of the day. It remained gone as long as I was in the swimming pool and drinking beer, but not long after I got out it came back. It went away again as I napped through TV coverage of the Olympics, but then Poopie (another cat) decided to start yowling from under the bed. She used to yowl from the bedroom door, but we started driving her away with squirt guns. Now she yowls from under the bed, where she's safe from squirt gun fire, the hussy. So she woke me up and my headache came back...

Suffice it to say that I think headaches on a weekend are singularly unfair. It wasn't that I had much planned for today - working on a model, writing, playing on the computer and swimming, mainly - but man I hate it when my important leisure activities are crimped by a headache.

Oh well. Time to end this boring post and go back to bed, I guess.

Oy

I can only surmise that there is something fundamentally wrong with my psychological makeup, some deep and abiding flaw that puts me on the same level as serial killers and pamphlet writers.

I can't stand it when they show "family reaction shots" during sporting events. There, I said it. I revealed my inhumanity. I showed off my thickened, crusty psychological scar.

But really, honestly, I can't stand that shit.

I haven't watched much Olympics in the last ten or fifteen years, and none at all of the current Olympics, but last night as I struggled with foot cramps and a headache and general gleefus, I flipped to a channel carrying the Olympics. Almost immediately I was forced to watch the mother and sister (wife? I confess I had the sound turned off) of Famous Swimmer Person twitching and gyrating while he swam.

It's not that I dislike them, but I really don't want to watch them either. Let them enjoy their Olympics in peace, without a camera trained on them, and let me "enjoy" the Olympics in peace without having to watch what amounts to random people in the stands. It's a bit like having to put up with news about Britney Spears's sister just because she's Britney Spear's sister - even one degree of separation is enough to make me not care.

Somehow the Olympics don't seem as interesting to me as they used to. I don't think it has anything to do with commercialization in general, or with Chinese pretensions in this case in particular. They just don't interest me as much. "Oh look, some people running their asses off. Oh look, more people running their asses off. Here's something new; it's a bunch of people running their asses off. Whee."

Ho-hum. When do the fairly novel sports get TV coverage? Things like fencing or kayaking or the equestrian stuff? Because frankly I've already had all the running, swimming and beach volleyball I can stand. And moms and families in the stands hopeful during the event and exultant afterwards; I've had enough of that too.

Drivingest Dawg

Well, I tried it again, I dressed Dawg in my clothes and sent her off to work with a little paper bag carrying a large dog biscuit and a bottle of water. She got as far as the freeway interchange at I-17 and the 101 before she got confused and ended up in Tucson.

Potpourri

I tried dressing the Dawg in my clothes and sending her to work in my place. The attempt failed because she can't quite reach the pedals in the car and she sat in the driveway for ten minutes flailing her scrawny legs trying to hit the gas pedal. But she's willing, at least I can say that about her.

I thought it was extremely cool that the man-eating flower blossoms in The Ruins were capable of imitating sounds. If you're a man-eating plant, you'd find auditory mimicry pretty handy too, I bet. But I think I'd want to be able to shoot hypodermic seed pods shaped like minature golf tees, as seen on Star Trek in the episode about Va'al where a great many Redshirts cashed in their studio parking chits and went to the sandwich line in the sky.

The only thing worse than finding a huge rotten spot in a banana is not noticing it until you bite into it while reading the Reuters news website. Blech. I'm trying to eat fruit for lunch and exercise every other night at home on my Gazelle. The exercise is going well, but the fruit diet is a bit of a trial - sometimes you just feel like burying your face in a huge vat of Spaghetti-Os no matter what the Surgeon General says. The problem with fruit is that fruit never tastes like meat (and, upon thinking about it, maybe it's best that it doesn't; the confusion caused by meat-fruit might be more than I can endure). Fruit also contains imperfections - rotten spots, cysts, bits of fibrous whatnot; it lacks the smooth predictability of, say, a McDonalds cheeseburger. Every McDonalds cheeseburger looks alike, tastes alike, and eats alike; the only uncertainty is the exact location of the pickle slices.

For about the last six or eight months my back has hurt, sometimes so bad it's crippling. There was a time when bending over to pluck a tomato out of the garden was beyond me; no amount of grunting and snarling would get the job done. But I've altered how I sit (no slouching and no leaning back), I've started elevating my legs in the evening when I get home from work, I take little walks when necessary, I don't stand in one spot for any longer than necessary, I sleep with fewer pillows, and I've started exercising again. My back, I am pleased to report, seems to have returned to normal. I haven't taken a Tylenol in three or four days, and that's a major improvement. Whee!

I don't know why Bush et al spend so much time blaming Russia for the war in Georgia. The Georgians seem to have started it, or at least grossly underestimated Russian resolve, though it's also true that the Russian reaction was disproportionately violent. The Georgians should have known better than to intervene in South Ossetia, and the Russians needn't have sent in the whole damn Fifth Guards Tank Army either. It takes two to make a mess like this, though it does tend to serve notice that the epoch of Russian timidity is probably over.

Barack Obama is starting to piss me off. His lack of reaction to the stupid, annoying, juvenile and often downright malicious campaign ads coming from the McCain camp is starting to remind me of Kerry and the Swift Boat Veterans. The Democratic pundits tell me "Just wait till after the convention; it'll be a bare-knuckle fight then!" But I'm not so sure. It should be a bare-knuckle fight now and I don't understand the wait-and-bleed strategy. Maybe Democrats just don't have the guts for a hard fight... Either way, as the most visible Democrat in the land, Barack gets the blame.

The Ruin: My Review

Last week I bought a DVD copy of The Ruin, which was helpfully billed as "too extreme for theaters". Maybe it is and maybe it isn't - I don't know what passes for extreme in movie theaters these days - but I can say that the movie wasn't an overt waste of time. It had some extreme moments, and some moments of reasonable creepiness, and in the end plenty of blood and gore. Plus it had trust fund babies suffering inordinately, and who doesn't like that?

The upshot of the story is that four fairly annoying empty-headed Americans on vacation in Mexico decide to stop drinking and having sex long enough to go out into the jungle with a faux German named Mattias to cast eyes upon a "VIP" Mayan ruin. They get there, and are presently surrounded by a large number of people armed with (among other things) bows and arrows and Wyatt Earp's Buntline Special. Seems the Mayan pyramid is covered with man-eating vegetation, and the locals, who grunt and gesticulate like the "Flavormundo" native, force the Americans (und Mattias, ja) to hunker down on the pyramid and die so they won't spread the deadly vegetation.

As someone who has spent an appreciable fraction of my life trying to keep Bermuda grass from invading gardens and flower beds, I can fully grok their thinking in this matter.

Anyway, soon the festering and dying begins, and the Blood Quotient goes up accordingly. Parts of it could actually qualify as squeam-inducing, like when the annoying blonde girl (as opposed to the annoying dark-haired girl) elects to carve upon herself. But this scene also violated a basic rule of common sense, which is that you never approach a crazy person with a knife who is busy hacking off a major thigh muscle. Odds are you're going to get your palm slashed or, worse yet, take the knife right in your aorta... And I did have to give a hearty Oh, no way when they amputated Mattias's legs, which truth be told had already more or less fallen off anyway. I mean, why bother?

It goes for the avant-garde ending by having the dark-haired girl escape even as the deadly vegetation starts to take her over. Next time you select hair shampoo that contains phytochemicals or botanicals, think about evil vegetation that grows under your skin.

But in one respect, the vines are pretty helpful. They never seem to drag living people away, or even sleeping people. But the minute you die, in they come to drag the body away. That's handy, isn't it? Better than having a bunch of stiffs cluttering the movie, especially awkwardly shaped ones like Mattias.

I didn't like any of the characters. The girls were all sluts and the guys were all BMOCs out having a little fun in Mexico, except for Mattias, who was simply not to be believed. And so it didn't much matter to me that they all died; the main reason I watched it was to determine not if they died, but how. So, that's it in a nutshell. A bunch of unappealing characters die in various ways amid a Vegetable Nightmare, with plenty of blood and a certain amount of squeam. If you're a fan of bloody horror movies, you won't be too disappointed. If you're a fan of Fred Astaire, you may want to give it a miss - but you probably already knew that.

Really Moving Out

If you look in a dictionary under the phrase moving out, this is the picture that should appear. The aircraft is the Bell X-2, which had the ill fortune of being just fast enough to fly itself inertial coupling at the bottom of the thermal barrier, killing Captain Mel Apt in the process. I believe the pilot in this picture to be Iven Kincheloe, the Air Force's golden boy and Original Astronaut, and what makes this picture for me are those gawdawful mach diamonds in the exhaust plume. We also note with a mild thrill that the XLR-25 main engine has been fitted with expansion nozzles.

That's moving out, when your two-chamber over-and-under XLR-25 is producing more mach diamonds than you can count. Yikes!

But there's another kind of moving out.

Today was payday (technically, the day after payday) and I decided to spend some time and money on iTunes. It was a good haul. One of the albums I bought was the "remastered" album Bridge of Sighs by Robin Trower. Normally the word "remastered" has about the same connotation for me as the word "colonoscopy", but in this case they either flat skipped the remastering or managed to keep the changes down to a bare minimum. It sounds like I remember it sounding, remastered or otherwise.

And now we get to the other sort of moving out. Holy crap Robin Trower can jam! I forgot just how fast he could be when the mood was upon him, and how tasteful he could be even when moving out. But he doesn't always move out. The song "Bridge of Sighs" itself is almost a dirge, and it's hard to describe "In This Place" as speedy. But then he smokes the paint right off his geetar with songs like "Little Bit of Sympathy" and "Too Rolling Stoned" and "The Fool and Me." Heavens.

I haven't listened to Trower in a serious way in at least a couple of decades - I didn't much like the album Victims of the Fury and sort of wrote him off. But as I come back this album after twenty years, I can only shake my head because if anything he seems to have gotten better with time. I wish I could say the same thing of myself.

What else did I buy?

Billy Joel, "We Didn't Start The Fire" and "Movin' Out"

Thin Lizzy, "The Cowboy Song"

Eddie Money, "Gimme Some Water"

Bruce Springsteen, most Born in the USA

Brujeria, "Marijuana"

The Vapors, "Turning Japanese"

Neil Young, "Old Man"

Alan Parsons Project, "Genesis Ch. 1 V. 32"

Shadows Fall, Threads of Life

Pink Floyd, "Comfortably Numb" and "Mother" (I figure I'll chip away at The Wall)

Authority Zero, "Mexican Radio"

Meredith Brooks, "Bitch"

And finally, At The Gates, Slaughter of the Soul (the expanded version, no less)

Well, that's not too bad. One death metal album (At The Gates), one metalcore album (Shadows Fall) and one piece of peculiar metal (Brujeria). The rest is actually normal, kinda sorta.

A - Free Zone

Remember when it was popular to declare areas to be something-free zones? Schools set up drug-free zones and weapon-free zones. Various establishments were smoke-free zones. New Zealand and Japan, among others, declared themselves nuclear-free zones. Well, I've decided that I should also declare myself to be a zone free of various things. So let it be known that I am:

A Judd Apatow-Free Zone. His movies never pleased me inordinately and I thought The Forty-Year Old Virgin was overrated, but Stepbrothers? Yeech. Then again...

A Will Farrell-Free Zone. I have nothing against Will Farrell. I just think he's grossly over-exposed; just the other day I had a Hollywood agent call me to see if they could book Will Farrell for my recurring nightmares about cracks opening in the ground and things crawling out.

A Cyrus-Free Zone. Either one of them, though in Miley's defense it must be said she hasn't produced anything akin to Achy Breaky Heart yet.

A 300-Free Zone. The more I think about it, the more I think 300 is among the worst movies ever made. We have little ground squirrels here that I now call 300 squirrels because they move in the same curious combination of fast and slow motion as the Heaped Pectorals did in the movie.

A Bill O'Reilly-Free Zone. I don't know where Nova-M got the clips of him reading from what is apparently a novel he wrote, but they're positively chilling. Each time I hear them, my will to live wanes.

A Sean Hannity-Free Zone. I could actually extend that and declare myself a Right-Wing Blowhard Free Zone. Whatever happened to thinking conservatives like George Will and William F. Buckley? I guess thoughtful conservatism doesn't get good enough ratings; you have be extreme and shrill, like Savage on the subject of autism, to get noticed.

An Asparagus-Free Zone. 'Nuff said.

A Smoke-Free Zone.

A TapouT-Free Zone. I don't know if this is the worst TV show ever made - The Tyra Banks Show probably gives it a run for its money, if nothing else - but it's still pretty damn bad. I wish them luck with their search for the next "MMA badass" and I hope that their search takes them to a very distant continent from which it proves impossible to broadcast a TV signal.

And I think, for now, that that'll do.

Afterparty Aftertaste

In the aftermath of the 2008 PBR event in Glendale, Arizona, my wife and I debated going to the PBR after-party. It never seemed like a good idea, necessarily, but the more we thought about it, the more like an interesting idea it seemed. Soon we were off, crawling through downtown Litchfield Park (such as it is) at 15 miles per hour looking for the Wigwam Resort.

Understand that my formative years were spent in the dusty environs of Avondale, Arizona, and we’d certainly heard of the Wigwam. It was supposed to be so ritzy and luxurious that it didn’t quite belong on planet Earth any more; we thought maybe it floated six inches above the ground and was patrolled by elves and cherubs. None of us had actually been to the Wigwam, but everyone knew the friend of a second cousin who’d been there and had seen – whoa, check it out! – people wearing tennis bracelets therein. It was so ritzy that I was quite sure that the moment I, a mere dust-encrusted scion of blue-collar roots, tried to step onto the Wigwam property, bat-wielding mooks would emerge from the impeccably trimmed undergrowth and instruct me on the fundamental error of attempting to rise above my social station.

On the off chance that the Wigwam’s attorneys are reading this, permit me to point out that the Wigwam is doubtless a fine and upstanding establishment which has never engaged in any kind of exclusionary behavior at all.

We eventually found it, or what we presumed to be it, in that we found a parking lot that offered valet parking. You don’t see offers for valet parking in someone’s driveway, so we were pretty sure we were on the grounds of some sort of resort. Then my wife saw people with cowboy hats walking across the parking lot. It had to be the place. Nobody but PBR fans would show up at the Wigwam wearing the official Arizona summer-issue white straw cowboy hat, after all.

The Wigwam seemed… Well, it turned out it didn’t float six inches above the ground and I didn’t see any cherubs, so I was a little disappointed. It’s nice, sure, but not that nice, not nice enough to justify bat-wielding mooks. We wandered around for a while, seeking both a handicapped access ramp (the Wigwam, for whatever it’s worth, possesses more steps per capita than any other building in west-central Arizona) and the PBR after-party itself. The place seemed deserted and the only sound I could hear was my own torturous, wheezing breathing as I pushed my wife’s wheelchair across what seemed like several furlongs of deep, practically impassable carpet. Then, just as it seemed that I must surely perish from overwork, we spotted a PBR sign, and were quickly vetted by the Deputy Sheriff and banded by the guy who looked like Dr. Kevorkian, and we were in.

In what?

It was a large rectangular room. Scattered around the room were about three sit-down tables and about five stand-up tables (and what, really, is the purpose of the stand-up table? Everybody knows that “Let’s get a table” is a euphemism for “Damn! My feet hurt! Let’s go sit down” The table is more or less irrelevant; it is the chair that is the primary operational element). Scattered around the outside were three bars. The whole effect was decidedly underwhelming, and my attention was quickly drawn to the big-screen TV in the corner that appeared to be showing Versus coverage of some PBR event (it was the event where Robson Palermo got helicoptered and bludgeoned silly, but I leave it to those with better memories to figure out which event it was).

Now, I don’t know how much money the PBR spends on promotions and whatnot in the course of a year. Nor do I have any idea how much the Wigwam charges for the use of a large, barren banquet room. But it just seems to me that somehow the two could have come up with something a little more inviting – a few more chairs and a six-foot party sub would have been a good start. I bet the PBR spends more on propane each week (to fuel the FBHs, or Flaming Bull Heads) than it does on the afterparty.

The first cowboy spotting was Cord McCoy, who was easily recognized by his Enterprise shirt and the fact that he couldn’t go anywhere without an official bevy of young women. Most men don’t travel the world with bevies, so when one sees such a procession, one can only assume that it’s a Big Cheese of some sort. I don’t know that they were buckle bunnies in the traditional sense of the word, but I do know that they were young and not at all the sorts of women who would have given me the time of day when I was that age. Not that I’m bitter, but gee whiz, I’m 6’4” and Cord has to stand on tiptoes to see over the tops of his boots... While we watched Cord danced with at least four of the bevy, though it was always the same dance regardless of the music. First he’d take his wrap, then hunker down with his left arm out and forward, chin tucked and riding arm cocked slightly at the elbow, then once the dance started, he’d commence to spurring with his outside foot… what on earth am I saying? No, mostly he twirled them.

I caught a brief glimpse of JB Mauney, who acted like a man who was preoccupied by the fact that his hat didn’t fit right. But then we started to lose our visibility of one whole half of the room because a very large man began to invade our field of view. It was a bit like watching an eclipse – you never saw him move, but every time we looked up, more and more of the room had been blotted out by his immense back (and, I regret to say, backside).

The wife sent me to the bar to get a Jack Daniels and Coke, which at $8 seemed like a pretty poor investment. For same eight bucks I could have bought a case of Milwaukee’s Beast, but I guess at PBR events one either takes tight-lipped swigs from longnecks (I believe the characteristic swig is designed to avoid flushing out one’s Copenhagen) or has mixed drinks, but Milwaukee’s Beast would be horribly déclassé.

There seemed to be very little actual cowboy participation, so I amused myself in a detailed study of the wallflowers (half of them guys who clearly wished they were cowboys, and the other half girls who wished the guys were cowboys too). Then the wife made a Significant Spotting: Guillherme Marchi, or a guy we were pretty sure was Guillherme. He wasn’t wearing his sponsor shirt and as a sartorial specimen he looked like any other Saturday night cowboy looking for something to do. We weren’t even sure it was Guillherme. He had the jaw, to be sure, and was about the right size and seemed fit, but no, surely Guillherme wouldn’t be standing by himself against the back of the room, would he?

Why, the poor guy even had to shell out for his own drink! I watched him pull out a wallet and hand green to the bartender, which seemed like a ridiculous thing for a PBR cowboy to have to. Surely the PBR would comp the world number one bull rider a few drinks, wouldn’t they? I mean, the guy goes to the after-party for the sake of fan enthusiasm and the PBR and the Wigwam stiff him eight bucks for a drink? I call no way! When Brett Favre goes to a Packers party, do the Packers make him pay for his own Pabst Blue Ribbon? I bet not!

Still, it sure looked like him. So I slipped into my secret identity, Sooper Spy, and pretended to walk right past him en route to the bathroom. Yep, definitely Guillherme. Now, understand that we’ve been fans of Guillherme for a while. He rides well, and unlike some of the knobs and yokels that inhabit the PBR, he seems to display a certain amount of dignity and character. And when he flashes that I’m not sure what Leah Garcia just asked me smile, well, he’s hard to beat. But such was my skill as Sooper Spy that I also recognized Renato Nunez, another one of the Brazilian riders, and walked right past Mike White without recognizing him.

That’s kind of embarrassing. There are some PBR cowboys that I just flat don’t like, and in most cases I couldn’t even tell you why. JB Mauney and Travis Briscoe just flat rub me the wrong way, for example. But there are a lot of cowboys that I do like, such as Mike White, Luke Snyder, Dustin “How Hard Can It Be” Elliot, Zack Brown, and even good old Cord McCoy. I walked right by Mike White without recognizing him, and this detail will come back to haunt my narrative.

Upon my return to the Great Barren Room, I grabbed the wheelchair and told my wife we were going to go meet Guillherme Marchi. I hate to say I finally resolved to meet him while straddling a urinal, but that’s about how it played. In the words of my grandfather, it aint a purty thought, but it is a thought. Guillherme, blissfully unaware of the events in my life in the immediately preceding few minutes, saw us coming and shifted his drink to his left hand and smiled as he shook my hand. I had the whole speech worked out in advance: “I’ve been a fan of yours for a long time, and I feel that this is your year and I wish you the best of luck.” But what came out? “Errr, haberdashers, you know, nine-iron woodsman poker handle! Crumpets!” And Guilherme, being a pleasant and affable sort, smiled and nodded and clapped me on the shoulder and said “Thank you very much.” My wife managed to say “We’re going to eat at your restaurant” before she was overcome by his apparently quite delectable eyelashes.

So we staggered away from Guillherme, and decided that it would be best to leave the afterparty on that note, before we staggered up to the next Famous Cowboy and blurted “Origami spheres truly tingle my benefactors! Argentina!”

Oh, and sorry, Mike. Had I seen you, I would certainly have stopped to shake your hand, but – alas, earwax. Blame it on the Bossa Nova.