400

This is my 400th post. I'm susceptible to nice round numbers like that - if I'd kept track of the numbers, I probably would have celebrated my 400th hot dog or 400th headache or 400th bottle of Newcastle too.

A lot has changed since the days I first started writing blog entries. Unemployment, heart attack, open-heart surgery, quitting smoking, depression, physical rehab, bizarre disturbances in my temperature regulation and sleep schedule, slow recovery; but as I reread my old posts, I sense that the main thing hasn't changed. I'm the same dumbass I was way back then, and I think that's good.

Filler

This post is mostly just filler. I'm coming up on my 400th post and since I am by nature impatient to achieve milestones of that sort, I'm burning this post (#399) with a cheesy discussion of nothing at all so I can move on to 400.

So what's new? My tractor has a flat tire, which is a bummer in that I don't have a jack that will allow me to safely remove the tire for repair. A few years ago some company took over the Saguaro Janes building here in bustling downtown Wittmann and set up a tool sale. I can't remember if this was before Harbor Freight had opened its tool store or not, but even if it was after, these guys were a mile and a half away, and Harbor Freight was something like forty.

So I bought a bunch of stuff. As I was waiting in line to collect my stuff at the tractor-trailer that served as the warehouse, I saw that they were closing out their farm jacks for twenty bucks a pop. All I needed to do was go back inside and pay the woman $20 and get a slip, but I decided that that was too much trouble.

Now here I am, some years on, wishing I'd just gone inside and gotten the slip, because now I need the dang jack.

I may also need to do some welding on me tractor - I think I either produced a new crack, or aggravated an existing crack, in the mount for the three-point top link, this from trying to uproot a poorly-placed desert broom bush by attacking it in reverse. That bush is one tough peckerwood - no taller than my waist, but it brought my tractor to a screeching halt and when I tried to raise the scraper to get some hydraulic boost on the matter, I proceeded to hoist the front tires off the ground.

But at least I've already got the welder.

McHugo's Navy

One of the predictable outcomes of the mess in Georgia is that the Russians, peeved by what they saw as US involvement in their bowl of chili, would proceed to mess with our bowl of chili. They decided that Hugo Chavez was the right man for the job, being easily impressed by small numbers of airplanes and possessed of enough oil money to make for a reasonable arms buyer.

God knows Hugo loves it. This latest news must have made him utterly speechless with self-important joy, the news that the Russians were sending a flotilla of four warships on a "goodwill cruise" that would just by happenstance include a visit to Venezuela. One imagines Hugo putting on his skipper's hat and begging the Russians to let him take the helm of the Peter the Great.

I detect a minor ripple of consternation out there in Fear-Land. Back in the 1970s someone (I think it was William F. Buckley) started the "Pearl Harbor Association for Keeping Our Eyes on the Soviet Fleet." The fear factor isn't as high today, but this Russian flotilla is causing altogether too much underwear-bunching, in my opinion.

Only two of the ships have been named in news reports. One is the Peter the Great, a hulking nuclear-powered Kirov-class battlecruiser. Another is the Admiral Chabanenko, one of the Udaloy class of anti-submarine ships. The other two are not named, which suggests that they are fairly minor in nature. I like to think they're a couple of old, worn-out ships from that bizarre K-named jungle of Soviet warships from the 1960s and 1970s - Kynda, Kresta, Krivak, Kara, Kanin, Kashin... But since they aren't named, I don't know.

The Udaloy ASW destroyer is pretty fair as ASW destroyers go, but it's not the sort of thing that's liable to upset the balance of power in the Western Hemisphere. It's probably a little better than a basic Spruance, but not in the league as any of the Arleigh Burkes. Its main defects on a worldwide cruise of that sort would probably be relatively short range and no particular area AAW or ASuW capability.

The Kirov doesn't suffer from those weaknesses. By any standard, the Kirovs are powerful surface combatants with an excellent mix of long-range anti-aircraft, anti-submarine and anti-ship missiles. They're huge by modern standards, the size of smallish battleships, and unlike the majority of Soviet warships that were suited only for the "Battle of the First Salvo", they possess a degree of durability and staying power that no other Russian warship can touch. Let's put it this way: Peter the Great could single-handedly defeat the combined navies of all of South America, and probably in a single afternoon, and without having to reload.

This isn't hyperbole. The ship is huge for a modern warship - 25,000 tons - and large size (really, large displacement) means that the ship can carry mutiple weapons systems that provide overlapping capability. The ship is extremely well-armed, to say the least - I won't recite the numbers because they're meaningless to most people, but suffice it to say that the Peter the Great can attack aircraft, surface ships and submarines alike at long range.

So why doesn't it bother me more than it does? All of a sudden there's this heavily-armed Russian behemoth cruising around in our hemisphere, and it doesn't bother me?? No, not a bit. And I'll tell you why (you were wondering if I would, weren't you?). Because, like every other surface warship built since about 1920, this mighty nuclear battlecruiser can't protect itself indefinitely against air attack. The list of mighty warships that have gone to Davy Jones's Locker courtesy of air attack is long and distinguished: Ostfriesland, Arizona, Oklahoma, Hornet, Prince of Wales, Repulse, Yamato, Musashi, Tirpitz, Sheffield, Ardent, Arrow, Coventry... And a US carrier task force would quickly add the Peter the Great to the list.

Mind you, it would be an interesting tactical problem. What is the best way through the ship's interleaved and overlapping air defense systems? Would a program of steady but low-count standoff ASM (e.g. Tomahawks) attacks eventually expend its missile ammunition? Or would a much more intense attack with weapons like Harpoons overload its fire control systems and lead to quicker neutralization? Or would a regime of jamming and anti-radiation missiles eventually blind it and leave it vulnerable to close-in attack? I imagine this is the sort of problem that would keep a group of US naval officers amused for an hour or two, discussing various ways into and out of the tactical problem, but at the root of the matter is the basic fact that given halfway competent leadership of the carrier, the Russian ship is doomed unless the battle starts with the carrier already within range of the Kirov's missiles. But that's why we stipulate "halfway competent leadership".

So it doesn't worry me. It might even be an interesting tactical problem for the US Air Force, which I don't think has had much opportunity to bomb boats since the glory days of the Fifth Air Force in World War Two.

Why, I ask, would the Soviets have bothered building a ship as large and expensive as the Kirov if they were that vulnerable to air attack? I think there were three reasons for them.

First, the Soviets wanted prestige. They wanted to match the US Navy's impression of power, but lacking aircraft carriers of their own, they concluded that maybe a novel nuclear battlecruiser would be good for prestige. Lousy for the budget, but good for brochures.

Second, the Soviets wanted a ship that could survive the Battle of the First Salvo. It was easy to imagine, in the 1970s, the entire deployed Soviet fleet either being wiped out or missile-expended in a single afternoon, leaving them with basically nothing but submarines. These big new battlecruisers would give Soviet surface action groups a measure of stamina and durability they didn't have up until then.

Third, I believe that the Soviets intended for the Kirovs to serve as dedicated escorts for the proposed Soviet aircraft carriers, but when the carriers were never finished, the doctrinal purpose of the Kirovs went away too.

So here we are. The Cold War is over, most of the Kirovs aren't in commission any more, and the best of the lot, the Peter the Great, is propping up the macho pretensions of Hugo Chavez. One imagines that Admiral Gorshkov is spinning in his grave.

Afterword: Why Kirov? Why that name? There is a city of Kirov, but it's an inland transportation hub and I can attest to the fact that it's pretty grey and bleak and doesn't in any way call the ocean to mind. I think the ship was actually named after Sergei M. Kirov, the party boss of 1920s Leningrad who proved to be too charismatic and popular for Stalin's taste. Stalin reportedly had him assassinated, then marched as the chief mourner in his funeral - a touch that would have made Trotsky wince if in fact Stalin hadn't had him assassinated at well.

Atom Smasher

I was watching the morning news last week when a pair of elaborately-coiffed newsreaders (one hesitates to call them "journalists") had a bit of a yuk-yuk over those dumbassed coneheaded scientists who had already broken their new toy, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. They thought this was quite funny, drawing all sorts of conclusions about how highbrow scientists can't be trusted with expensive equipment, unlike (say) elaborately-coiffed newsreaders. Excuse me, dear newsreader but do you even know what a goddamned hadron is? This streak of American anti-intellectualism kind of irritates me. No, it doesn't "kind of" irritate me; it just flat-out irritates me, and I simply can't see why people would be proud of their selective ignorance.

But what, really, is the Large Hadron Collider all about? What does it do? At its heart, it is a giant circle some 27 kilometers in diameter. It passes a beam of protons around this circle, accelerating them to the highest speeds possible, before steering them into head-on collisions with fixed targets or (even more fun) a beam of anti-protons circling the opposite direction. Let's not worry about that latter business too much for now.

What's a hadron? Physicsts divide the dizzying array of subatomic particles into several general categories based on various physical characteristics. In this case, we're using weight. Light particles (like electrons) are called leptons, which is Greek (I think) for "light ones". Medium-weight particles (like pions) are called mesons, which is Greek (I think) for "medium-weight ones." Heavy particles, like protons and neutrons, are called hadrons, which is Greek (I think) for "heavy ones." So that's all a hadron is, a heavy particle with a rest mass somewhere in the ballpark of the proton and on up from there (some hadrons get really heavy indeed).

(Update: I was lying in bed last night after my dosing with tonic water, spluttering and shuddering, when it struck me that I'd confused hadron with baryon. In the preceeding discussion, this business of light, medium and heavy particles, what I called hadrons are in fact baryons, and the distinction has really nothing at all to do with the LHC. Nay. Hadrons are a class of particles that are bound together by the strong nuclear force, chiefly protons and neutrons.)

Why are we colliding hadrons? What's in it for us? What, fundamentally, is the point of all this? One point would be proving or disproving the validity of the "Standard Model" of quantum mechanics. Fundamental to this model is the existence of the so-called "Higgs field", along with its associated "Higgs particle". These are required to exist by the Standard Model because they enforce symmetry breakages at specific energies, but nobody's ever actually seen a Higgs particle. Proving or disproving the existence of the Higgs particle would have major consequences for particle physics and cosmogony, to name just two areas.

The "Standard Model" of quantum mechanics also predicts the theoretical existence of other particles, most of them fairly exotic, like gluons and quarks. Proving that these particles really exist (or proving that they don't really exist) would have a major impact on quantum physics (if we can't prove quarks exist, well then, we've got a lot of work to do).

So how would we prove that quarks, gluons, Higgs particles and other exotic particles exist? The basic problem is that they can exist only in very high energy situations, such as the first few milliseconds after the Big Bang or in the heart of a thermonuclear weapon, neither of which are entirely feasible experimental apparati - there's only been one Big Bang that we know of, and one imagines that a grant proposal that includes the line "...then we detonate the hydrogen bomb..." would likely not get past the National Science Foundation safety people.

So that's the problem. To detect these exotic particles, we first have to create them, and to create them, we need to jam an awful lot of energy into a fairly small area. In particle physics, the easiest way to produce high energies is to slam atomic nuclei or subatomic particles at high speed into targets of various sorts (some of them as ordinary as chunks of aluminum). We remember from our high school physics that the kinetic energy of a moving object is a product of the mass of the moving object times the square of the speed - KE = 1/2 MV^2. The easiest way to increase the energy is to increase the speed of the collision, but if you're already pushing particles as fast as you can, the only way to increase energy is to increase the mass of the particles.

Think of it this way. You're standing at a table covered with ping pong balls and steelies, and ten feet away is a pane of glass that you'd like to break. So you throw a ping pong ball at the glass, and it bounces off. So you throw a ping ping ball harder, and it still bounces off. Eventually you're throwing ping pong balls as hard as you can, hard enough to dislocate your shoulder and produce that funny sensation of recoil up your neck and into your brain. And still the window doesn't break. Conclusion: we've gotten all the speed we can out of the accelerator (your arm) so to increase the energy we're going to have to increase the mass of the particle. Grab a steelie and throw it, and it shatters the window.

That's exactly what the LHC hopes to do. It hopes to move the heaviest practical particles, protons, at the highest practical speed, just shy of the speed of light, and by so doing pack enough energy into collisions to crease a few of these Higgs particles and gluons and quarks and whatnot that are predicted to exist at high energies. It is different from other particle accelerators simply because it is larger and operates at higher energies - it's the Ferrari of particle accelerators, one could say.

Will it work? It'll probably successfully liberate quarks and gluons. Indeed, they've already been claimed to have been seen in other particle accelerators, but in such densely packed messes that they've been hard to study. The LHC might produce them in an environment that is easier to work with. Will it find the Higgs particle? I hope so, but I'm not entirely sanguine. For one thing, the theoretical predictions of the mass of the Higgs particle are awfully one-sided. They say "It has to be at least this heavy, but it may be a lot heavier." Meaning, if we don't see it with the LHC, it might because there's no such thing as the Higgs particle, or maybe because the Higgs particle is just a hair too heavy for the LHC to produce. Things like this drive me crazy.

The End Of The World Angle

People have been worrying a lot lately about whether the LHC will create "quantum black holes" that will eventually cause the destruction of the Earth. The theory is that the quantum black hole, once generated, will slowly settle to the center of the Earth, where it will slowly consume the crystalline and liquid iron at the core and become a not-so-quantum black hole, whereupon it will either (choose your poison) consume the Earth entirely, or blow the Earth to smithereens with high-energy gamma rays.

It's possible, I suppose, but I think it's unlikely. My reasoning goes like this. The Earth is constantly bombarded by cosmic rays, which are basically nothing more than protons and other charged particles from deep space. Some of these particles are most impressively energetic, to coin a phrase. One of them, referred to as the "Oh-My-God Particle", had roughly the energy of a baseball thrown by a major league pitcher. In fact, some of these particles pose problems for Special Relativity in that they seem to exceed the GZK Limit, a sort of "speed limit" imposed by interactions between the particles and the photons of the background radiation; above a certain velocity they would interact and bleed off energy in the form of pions. But we occasionally detect particles well above the GZK Limit, which seems to hint that either Special Relatively is wrong or is inconsistent at large scales (leading to formulations such as "Doubly-Special Relativity").

My point has nothing to do with GZK limits. It has to do with the idea that very high energy cosmic rays fill space, and there are uglier things out there too, gamma rays and x-rays, and all of this shit (no other word will do) flies around and collides and never seems to produce quantum black holes, at least not that we've ever seen. Not even supernovae seem to produce the beasts. If the universe itself seems disinclined to produce quantum black holes with all of the energies and particles at its disposal, I can't really see the LHC making any either. If the LHC were closer to the Planck energy I might be more worried, but it's nowhere near that level of performance.

Cease'n'Desist, Fer Cryingout Loud

It's no great secret that I'm fairly liberal. I don't even feel the need to hide behind the label progressive. I occasionally refer to people who do that as chicken liberals, in the same way that agnostics often end up called chicken atheists.

I'm also something of an environmentalist, or at least which I like to think of as a sensible environmentalist. I accept that we will practically always have to have mines of one sort or another, and the best you can do with mines is make sure the mining is done responsibly and proper reclamation takes place afterwards. I accept that we will from time to time have to build flood control and water reclamation projects that will involve a good deal of environmental disruption. But I'm not so sure that we need to tear up another fifty square miles of desert just so we can put in more suburbs, strip malls and golf courses, as though we don't already have a great plenty of them already (and please, God, if they do put in more subdivisions, and someone names them stupid things like Whispering Timbers or Eagle Creek - in a goddamned desert - please to smite them with lightning).

That paragraph got totally out of control, but its main thrust is that I'm an environmentalist and I think that the more we do now to limit the damage we inflict on the planet, the better off we'll all be in the future. But there is one area where I have to part ways with my uber-environmentalist friends and dig in my heels. I can't - I won't - watch that business involving Tommy Lee and Ludacris on Planet Green. I just can't.

Why? It's not that I don't approve of the spirit of the thing. It's not that I disapprove of the individuals involved. No. My complaint is based on the number of limp, meaningless, and completely out of place metal-horn salutes that are thrown around on the show. Abuse of the metal horns is already widespread in our society. It's as though they want to make the touchdown sign, but doing it with one hand is easier than throwing up one's arms. It's bad enough to watch some numbnuts sans clue making the metal-horn sign with his thumb hanging out, as though he can't decide if he's a devil-rocker or the Big Kahuna. It's bad enough to see the metal-horn sign become part of suburban life, where guys wearing Crocs get the lawnmower started on the second pull and flash the horns - "Score, got it running, yay me!" But when the metal-horns morph into an environmentalist symbol, oh, that's just too much.

Stop it already! Here's a proper metal-horn evil-eye deal as delivered by Dio.

If you cannot manage this level of intensity, don't bother making the metal-horn sign. Period!

Arrrrr!

For is it not written in the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster that every Friday is a religious holiday? And is it not also written that International Talk Like A Pirate Day, September 19th, is among the most important of religious holidays?

Of course it is so written; I read the book just last night and I oughta know.*

So have ye some grog, scalawag, and say "Arrrr!"**

*I bought the book at Barnes & Nobles last night and thought I detected on the face of the middle-aged woman cashier, doubtless a Sarah Palin clone, a sneer of contempt. Or maybe she was merely responding to my animal magnetism. Either is possible, though one is more likely than the other.

**The original meaning of "grog" was apparently a mix of about four parts water to one part rum, done mostly to make nasty spoiled stored water palatable enough to choke down aboard old-style sailing ships. Since then, the word has expanded to include practically any kind of alcoholic beverage, though one would perhaps be reluctant to suddenly shout "Yar, slosh me some more of ye grog, matey!" at a wine tasting. Reluctant, but not completely opposed. Go ahead, dare me.

Given that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is pretty accommodating, I don't think there would be a problem with wine, beer, or anything else being temporarily reclassified as "grog" for the purposes of today. Me, ye lubbers, I'm having me yon Mike's Hard Lemonade.

Yarrr!

Literary Interview

I watched a biography of Stephen King on the Biography Channel (of all places) and was really struck by how fundamentally normal he was. Mind you, he's rich as Croesus and as one of the most fabulously successful writers of all time, he can do things that to us ordinary mortals would seem like magic. But strip away his money and success and he comes across as normal, perhaps even a bit dweebish. The biography did leave out certain less than appealing phases in his life, but that's okay - everyone has moments in their life that they aren't terribly proud of, and what's the point of dwelling on them? I used to have a mullet haircut, for example, an abomination that I am only too glad was not photographed in the wild. I would feel awful if my life ended up on the Biography Channel and I had to hear Peter Graves say something like "The mid-Eighties were dominated by hockey hair and cheap beer, desperate cries for help that were answered by..."

Best to leave such insalubriousness alone.

But even so, the normalcy of Stephen King's life seems strange. We seem to expect, perhaps even need, for him to be weird and unsettling. How could he write things like "The Mist" and "The Mangler" and not be weird and settling? So I imagined an interview with Stephen King as carried out by Lorna Doon, cub reporter for the Wittmann Windbreaker, a free newspaper whose masthead reads "Ripping good news or triple your money back!"

Thank you, Mr. King, for agreeing to meet with me.

Not a problem, and call me Steve.

Thank you, Steve. You know, as I was ringing your doorbell, I couldn't help but notice that terrible steel blade leaning against the wall. That was the blade of the guillotine that was used to decapitate Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, if I'm not mistaken, and it doubtless keens in the night as it remembers its bath in blood --

No, actually, that's my new snow shovel. I already had a good one, but Tractor Supply Company had them on sale, so I bought another one. I left it there because they're predicting snow in a week and this way I won't have to clump around to the shed to get a shovel.

Um. I see. A snow shovel... Well, what about that urn by the door; that's quite striking. Tell me, does it contain the still-living guts of a five thousand year old Sumerian priest-king? Do the guts writhe and churn with ceaseless hatred toward all those who walk the Earth? Do they --

We got that at Crate & Barrel, I think. We used to put dried flowers in the vase, but the cats keeps tearing them up, so we stopped. Shouldn't you be, um, more interested in my writing technique, or my insight as a author?

Yes, precisely. Let's talk about how you get ideas for your stories. It's said that you have a scriptorium under the house, a vile debauched library where you consult scrolls inked in blood on human skin where the blackest and most vile blasphemies are --

Actually, that's my library over there. Those bookcases.

That large book, that must surely be the handwritten diary of a Nazi concentration camp commandant, written on tanned skin torn from a Jewish inmate! Surely it must be full of the most perverse and twisted occult rites where the Nazis sought union with Wotan, the War-Father, to --

Farmer's Almanac.

What?

It's a Farmer's Almanac, published in 1903. I bought it at an antique store.

And doubtless it describes the black paleo-pagan harvest rituals used in fin de siecle New England, where dour farmers ritually crucify young women so that their cries of anguish would enrich and protect the harvest through the shedding of innocent blood --

I think it actually predicted a wetter-than-usual spring.

Floods? Tidal waves? Torrents of endless rain that drive men mad, that drive them to take up axes in sweaty, twitching and --

A wetter than usual spring for 1904.

All right, all right. Let's talk about your office, where you write. It must be below, yes, down in the cellar, the basement, the crypt, in the dank and damp realms of the earth --

It's right there. That desk. That's where I write. Under the kitten calendar.

Well let's talk about your cellar anyway. The the Unholy of Unholies. What's down there, really? Bodies stacked like cordwood? Egyptian sarcophagi looted from the Valley of the Kings, still redolent of pitch and natron? A heart in a jar! Robert Bloch's heart in a jar!

Actually, there isn't much down there except the storm shutters, some sleds, and my fishing gear. Maybe some reserve toilet paper and a box of Christmas ornaments.

Fishing gear, stainless steel treble hooks the size of pine cones that you use in your attempts to capture Neptron, who swims the icy depths hungering for human blood even as his dim consciousness tries to convince him that not all people are bad; what the high school kids did to him on that terrible night with the broom handle and the overhead projector and the can of refried beans, that not all people are like that and he doesn't need to kill them all, all --

Actually I don't fish much. The fishing gear is just protective coloration so people don't think I'm weird for just sitting on the lakeside and watching the clouds go by.

Yes, outside, the great outdoors, beneath the hard pitiless stars, where beyond angled space blind twisted entities gnaw at the stuff of of the universe, where unseeing and uncaring alien creatures and principalities go about their rounds in supreme indifference to us and our terrible fate, ants, mere ants, derelict and void beneath the pitiless stars --

Actually, most days I'm in bed by eight PM; I don't stay up very late these days.

Oh come on, Steve, I mean, make with the horror! Isn't there anything horrible around here? Anything at all?? Not even pig's knuckles??

Well, I could show you my MC Hammer phat pants, if that would help.

It's a start...

Why Headaches?

Why do people get headaches? What do they mean? Every time I've ever asked a doctor about headaches, I get the answer "Eh..." Maybe not that literal answer, but that's what they mean.

I rarely get headaches these days. Between stopping smoking, controlling my blood pressure and cutting back on coffee, most of my headaches have gone away, and if they do hang around, they're more annoying than anything - kind of like trying to watch a Star Trek marathon, after the sixth episode or so, it starts to get a bit much and you wish it would just go away.

Except tonight. I think it's a voodoo thing; someone is industriously working a quarter-inch drill bit into a voodoo doll of me, drilling through my skull just above my left ear. Why? What did I do to deserve this? Something heinous in a previous life? Something heinous in THIS life?

Oh well. It'll go away, as soon as whoever it is stops drilling. And even though it hurts, it's still better than reading mass emails about how Barack Obama is the Antichrist as predicted by the Book of Revelation.

The Five Million Dollar Saint

It's customary in most religious traditions that a person is not elevated to sainthood until they can semi-plausibly claim to have performed a genuine miracle or two, or until they've lived a long, hard, miracle-free but nevertheless entirely meritorious life of service.

This is why the ascension of Saint Justin is such a bummer, because he hasn't performed any miracles, and my tractor is older than he is, but there he is, the stiff-lipped patron saint of bull riding, looking on on the masses and probably wishing he hadn't threatened to "kill the shit out of everything".

You know me, I don't like to complain. Not me, no! The Professional Bull Riders and the Versus network have always made a fetish out of Justin McBride, apparently according to the ancient TV dictum "winners = ratings". But their performance in the first night coverage of the Grand Rapids event exceeded their already high standards of biased reporting and backwoods hagiography - they'd have claimed he was the son of God if they thought it would help him cross that magical five million dollar threshold.

Let me explain that. As of the event televised yesterday, McBride was within a few dollars of exceeding five million dollars in total earnings. My complaint isn't that he doesn't deserve the money - as far as I'm concerned, McBride earned it all the hard way, by riding bulls. I don't personally like McBride all that much, but I'm not prepared to say he's an untalented hack, because he isn't. Nor am I irked because there's too much money in the PBR these days - though I suspect that at the rate the money is escalating, before too long we'll be sainting cowboys for exceeding ten million in lifetime earnings.

You'd think that Justin McBride was being considered for Pope the way the Versus crew carried on. Justin this, Justin that, it turned into a kind of false, saccharine hagiography that was literally nauseating. My wife left the room; I muted the sound and read a book. We never got a chance to see at least a third of the bull riders because Versus decided that we needed to hear Craig Hummer gush about Justin McBride instead. When Guilherme Marchi broke the record for the number of single-season rides, the Versus crew seemed actually started (all but Ty Murray) - "What?? You mean someone other than Justin McBride accomplished something?? No! False teachings! Heresy!"

It's really gotten ridiculous. It's gone past hero worship. It's gone past relentless promotion of a very popular commercial commodity. It's gone beyond ratings. It's hagiography, pure and simple, and it's disgusting.

I wish to make a prediction. The PBR and Versus don't like Guilherme Marchi, the man who is likely to win the world championship this year, because he isn't fluent in English and isn't likely to translate into huge ratings. He's photogenic, but he doesn't have the swashbuckling charm of Adriano Moraes or the English fluency of Mike White or Justin McBride. So they're going to find a way to get Justin McBride into a position to challenge for the world champion by whatever means necessary. You wait, they'll give him a bonus of three thousand points for "lifetime achievement" or "multiplying loaves" just so he can compete for the world title, just so they can get high ratings, just so they can make money, just so Craig Hummer can have a journalistic orgasm over the whole thing.

And I wish to make an observation: there are alternatives to the PBR, and I've never yet seen anything even remotely approaching this level of foolishness in the PRCA.

The Most Confusing Thing Ever

I've found the most confusing thing ever. Ever.

I used to think string theory was kind of confusing, what with its Calabi-Yau manifolds and 10-to-the-bazillionth tweakable parameters and left-hand and right-hand winding. I used to think biology was confusing, what with its adenosine triphosphate and Krebs Cycle and base pairs.

But holy cow, nothing, I mean nothing, compares to the struggle for Roman succession roundabouts 306 AD, a Charleton Heston-style madhouse involving (as near as I can tell) Diocletian, Maximian, Maxentius, Constantius, Severus, Galerius, Constantine, Maximinius... Oh hell, why not, let's have Severus Snape and Albus Dumbledore put in appearances, shall we? It can't get much worse. At one point I'm pretty sure five men believed they were emperor, and I couldn't say that any of their claims were any more right (or any more wrong) than anyone else's.

I've tried attacking this problem in various ways. I tried reading about it in Michael Grant's biography of Constantine, which failed because Michael Grant readily confuses me. I tried again in Michael Grant's collection of emperor biographies, and failed. I tried various on-line resources. I tried the Essential Histories. I tried a lecture I have on videotape. It still doesn't make any sense. It's the most confusing and in many ways frustrating piece of history I've ever blundered into, and maybe the most confusing thing ever.

What really cheeses me is that out of all this madness comes a fairly simple reality - Constantine the Great - but I can't trace the historical thread. Meps!

It's a madhouse! A madhouse!

But the carpet looks a lot better. I spent most of my carpet-cleaning time thinking about this Roman matter, which is how it came to be on my blog. I didn't figure out anything about Rome, but the floor looks ever so much better.

Vires quod virtus

I'm going to need it, because it's time to dig out the carpet cleaner.

Soon enough I'm going to tear the carpet out entirely, but until I reach that point, I have to do something about the carpet.

Vires quod virtus.

How come everything sounds more meaningful to me if it's in Latin? In a way it's like being drunk. When I'm drunk, everything I think seems more profound. When I read, everything in Latin seems more profound. And Latin isn't even the root language of English! That would be some species of old Anglo-Saxon, though there are plenty of Latin words in English. How come it doesn't sound nearly as profound in Old English or Anglo-Saxon as it does in Latin??

One of my favorite examples of Anglo-Saxon versus Latin is the word "window". In everyday conversion, we say "I threw that yahoo out the window!" That's Anglo-Saxon. But in a court of law, we'd say "I was forced to defenestrate the plantiff." That's Latin.

Or horse stuff. We "equestrian sports". That's high Latin. We have "cavalry". That's descended from vulgate Latin. We have "horses". That's derived from Anglo-Saxon. Three words that all refer (more or less) to the same thing, but they come from three different languages! Man I love English!

None of which has served to do a thing about the carpet, so off I go.

Vires quod virtus.

Evanescence

Whenever someone (or even a cat) dies around me, I dwell for a while on the evanescence of it all. We're born, we live, and then we're gone. There may or may not be something after this life, but for those who remain behind, we the departed are remembered for what we did and how we acted.

So something dies and I think "I want to have a greater impact. I want people to remember me, and generally fondly. I need to treat people better. I need to be a better person. I need to live a more meaningful life."

Until a week later, when I blurt "Man, this living meaningfully stuff is HARD; can't I just take a nap instead?"

* * * *

I'm noticing a pattern at work. Any time anything heavy needs to be moved, or someone has to crawl around on the floor to connect something, or someone needs to climb on top of something to get something, I'm the slob on duty. I don't mind, because even though I'm still technically post-op, I'm still more physically capable than all my co-workers put together. But there's that phrase, post-op. The other day I was carrying a large computer from the early 1990s, one of those old-school computers that was made mostly of metal and weighed about as much as the average woman. I bent and twisted to put it on the floor and something in my ribs went "Oh no, you didn't just do that, did you?" I'm still paying for it, and if anything it hurts more now than it did at the time.

But that's the price we pay for carrying women and/or computers around the workplace. Women are more fun to carry, but computers don't scream as much if you run them into the doorjamb.

The system software people in the adjoining cubicles were carrying out a Most Excellent Jabber today. One of them in particular is extremely loud. How loud? I was listening to the song "Justifiable Homicide" by Dismember on my iPod at half-volume, and I could still hear her over the music, and that's death metal, for crying out loud! I'm not saying that she talks too much. That's a value judgment that I'm not prepared to make. But she does talk an awful lot; that much is safe to say. But it's days like these that allow me to get to know the deeper recesses of my iPod better. Today, for example, I listened to "Night Driver" from Tom Petty half a dozen times. I'm mostly neutral on the subject of Tom Petty, to the extent that I hardly ever think about him at all. But by gum I rather liked "Night Driver" and I suppose I should be thankful in a backwards kind of way to those horrendous motor-mouths in system software for allowing me to get to know this song.

Is it considered rude to suddenly stand up and shout "Shut up! Just shut up! Just shut up, for God's sake! Shut up!"? I'm starting to have giggly hand-rubbing fantasies involving tasers and duct tape, and that's probably not good.

Pie

The last week or two seem to have been really taxing, for some reason. It seems like all I do is drive and work, and the business with Poopie has been pretty draining too. I know it's chic among a certain class of trogodytic men to pretend that cats don't matter and should be killed anyway, but watching your cat die is kind of draining - almost as draining as putting up with troglodytic men who make a fetish out of hating cats. I'd go into this in more detail, but what's the point, really? The fact that he wasn't immediately struck by a bolt of lightning is proof of how little control I have over the universe, and I'll leave the matter rest there.

So tonight it's apple pie and ice cream. It's been about a decade since I had pie and ice cream, and we intend to eat a whole lotta pie and ice cream, just because. Because it's fun. Because I'm tired and worn out. Because my ribs hurt. Because I feel depressed. Because I'm sick of having to put up with troglodyte assholes. Because I want to do something other than drive and work. Because I want to do something fun, by cracky.

So if you happen to be my cardiologist and you're reading this, please permit me this one wild excessive orgy of fat and cholesterol and sugar and monosodium whatever-the-hell without laying the Heavy Brow on me.

Thank you. And now, I consign myself to a Safeway pie and a half-gallon of French Vanilla ice cream.

The Clearing

Poopie, my cat, has reached the clearing at the end of the trail today, and our lives are the more impoverished.

Requies-cat in pace.

Mailbox

Well, now we have a street mailbox - upon further review, the Mail Authorities smiled upon us, so we put in a mailbox out on the street, or road, or whatever you call it.

Mailboxes can be dreadfully expensive! One looked like a scale model of Monticello, and I imagine it wouldn't be hard to find a little figure of of Thomas Jefferson to tape to its front door as though perpetually greeting the mailman with hearty democratic bonhomie, but I think $170 is a bit steep for a mailbox, even if it does resemble Monticello.

Yes, I'm a cheapskate.

We didn't get the bottom-of-the-line mailbox, the one made out of a rinsed-out gallon milk container, but ours isn't very evolved in an aesthetic sense, unless you're Dutch and you think featureless black metal is somehow engrossing. But the pole is green; that's got to count for something.

This whole thing leaves me with oddly mixed feelings, which I guess proves only that there's no pleasing me. As my grampa would say, "I'd bitch if they hung me with a new rope."

BM-24-8

I was working on a little Polish-made model of a BM-24-8 rocket launcher, which compared to the clunky old models of the Cold War era is actually pretty good. Who remembers VEB-Plasticart? I think that was the name of that outfit. I bought a model of a Tu-20 Bear that I'm pretty sure was a VEB reissue of a kit made by some grim Stalinist outfit, and it sucked! My refrigerator had better panel lines, but it was really the misshapen propellers that destroyed my enthusiasm for the project (and since a Tu-20 disposes of 32 propeller blades, bad propeller blades stick out like an infected tooth).

Anyway, while I was fiddling with this model, and determining that the spacers C17 (I think C17) are grossly oversized, I got tired of two species of TV commercials. One irritates me, the other outrages me.

The irritating one is the American Express commercial where the guy is paying for a business lunch, or buying a flight to a business meeting, and tries to pay for it with a charge charge adorned with a comic book character or kittens. The Krauts get all self-conscious and embarrassed and up and abandon the poor schmuck on the spot, despite the fact that the Germans were the ones that gave us lederhosen! What are they so uppity about all of a sudden? Or the woman at the airline counter has thugs come in and drag the guy away because his charge carge had kittens on it.

Puh-lease. Business is as a general rule grim and cheerless enough without American Express insinuating that any expression of individuality is a symptom of amateurishness. I think American Express should plan its future operations without including me, as I rather doubt I'll ever use their services again - and I just might get a charge card with kittens on it just to piss them off.

But that's nothing. That's just irritating piffle executed by business hacks, the same people who think "value-add" is an actual word. Here's the commercial that outrages me:

Some guys appears. "I owed a hundred and seventy thousand dollars to the IRS, but Peckerwood and Sloane settled my debt for only seventy-nine cents!" And there's a whole procession of these people, claiming they owed a jillion dollars to the IRS and got out of it for literally cents on the dollar.

I pay my income taxes every year, and I paid an outstanding IRS debt that wasn't mine, and I paid that thing in full. How dare these people act all excited about dodging a responsibility that everyone else in America seems to be able to manage! They might as well put on an eye patch and unfurl the Jolly Roger and exclaim "Arrrrrr, mateys, I dodged my responsibility to the tune of a quarter of a million dollars, yar, let the lubbers make up the difference, yar!"

It's possible to get into trouble with the IRS. I know people who have done it, but they were generally people at or near the bottom of the socioeconomic scale where the calculus is between feeding their kids or paying the IRS. But these doctors and lawyers and contractors? I doubt it's come to that - and how do you even end up owing $150,000 in taxes to begin with? How much do you have to make to run up that kind of tax debt in any kind of reasonable time? And how much sympathy am I supposed to feel for some schmuck who doesn't pay his taxes so he can make the payments on his Hummer and power boat? There are people who deserve some sort of tax relief, and then there are people who just don't. Liquidate the timeshare and sell the power boat and pay your damn taxes already. I do.

What's next? "I blew off my child support payments for 13 years, but Peckerwood and Sloane discharged my accumulated debt for twenty-seven dollars and a Home Depot gift card. Yar, ye lubbers!"

Isn't America great?

That's Effing Incredible!

I couldn't sleep last night, so I picked up a copy of Nostradamus and started to read. And boy howdy, wouldn't you know, I found a quatrain that prophesized that I wouldn't be able to sleep!

No sleep shall he get
Smelly dogs his place shall take
Reach for the green death,
Find it not, Bazter shall have it.

That's amazing! Not only couldn't I sleep, but every time I moved the smelly little dogs edged me closer and closer to the edge of the bed, and when I tried to dose myself with green Nyquil (the "green death" mentioned in the quatrain, I'm sure) I couldn't find it because Baxter the Cat had knocked it off my nightstand! That's amazing!

Apologia

I should apologize to someone, but I'm not sure who. Remember all my screeching about the relay being shipped to the wrong address and how this was going to lead in the end to the collapse of Western civilization and the widespread adoption of Zoroastrian funerary practices?

Well, someone stepped in and neatly slipped the box containing my relay into my PO Box without being asked to, thus short-circuiting the whole mess. And what's really sad is that he or she would probably get in trouble with the Mail Gods if this act of human charity was made public. So maybe I should shut up now, before I get someone in trouble.

Tomorrow I'll install the relay and see if that resolves the relay chatter problem the Shrieking Eel is experiencing.

Why not today? Because today I'm being officially OCD. Years ago I was reading something about Rome and found myself somewhat irritated because they'd mention things like the Battle of Graupius Mons or the Catalaunian Fields and I never knew anything about the battles - where they were, when they were, why they were fought, who won. And I said to myself "You know, I wish someone would write a comprehensive atlas of Roman military history, roughly one page per battle, that would place battles and wars into some kind of context."

So far I'm up to 165 pages of text, and that's without any of the planned sidebars, and I'm actually not much farther along than Teutobergerwald. I could easily fill another 100 pages with tedious and annoying Roman civil wars and still not be at the time of Aetius or Stilicho. The OCD aspect of it comes from the feeling that I have to add at least one battle a day to the text, and tonight it's the turn of Edessa, where Valerian goes down to dusty defeat. And THAT is why I can't install the relay tonight.

Poised On The Brink

Our house is about half ceramic tile flooring and half carpet. All the bedrooms are carpeted, and there's a trapezoid-shaped chunk of carpet in a room I imagine the architects rather snootily referred to as the "Great Room" when they were designing it. (Because the walls are white, I refer to it as "The Great White Space", consciously aping the name of the flawed-but-fun British horror novel, a book done in Lovecraft style but with bad pacing.)

Carpets and pets don't exactly mix. Maybe some people are able to train pets to never make messes on the carpet, but it seems that at any one time, at least one of our pets is incontinent for mental, emotional or physical reasons. "What's that noise?! It's THUNDER! I'm crapping right here!" So the carpets need fairly regular cleaning, which means digging out the carpet cleaning machine. It does a good enough job, I suppose, but it's a lot of work. It basically consumes the whole weekend, and you spend the weekend hunched over because the handle isn't quite long enough, and by Sunday night I feel like (and probably resemble) Quasimodo.

Then there's the piercing scream the machine makes, which is literally deafening. For a week afterwards the world sounds like it's been turned to the Jupiter channel - all I hear are leathery creaking sounds, hisses, and occasional pops. I spend a lot of time going "Huh?"

So is this really any easier that just taking up the carpet and laying tile where it once was? I have some experience with laying ceramic tile, and I know that it's neither easy nor exciting. It's a very wet and dirty procedure that's exceptionally hard on one's hands and knees, and if you aren't careful, you can create awful spacing and gap problems that will haunt you for the rest of your unnatural life. But when you do it reasonably well, you at least have the assurance that the tile will last a good long while and pet messes will not turn permanent. And the layout of our house lends itself to doing the floors piecemeal - doing the great room doesn't require that one do any other rooms at the same time.

But here I stand, poised on the edge of tearing out the carpet, unsure if I really should or not. Is my back up to the challenge? I think so. Is my sternum up to the challenge? I certainly hope so. Will I give myself tennis elbow again? Probably.

Tennis elbow. It's pretty funny until it happens to you. I gave it to myself when I was unloading a pickup truck load of carpet scraps at the landfill. I felt the tendon let go as I threw chunks out backhand, and for the next year my arm hurt. For a while it hurt so bad I couldn't even pick up a glass of water - my fingers literally couldn't squeeze hard enough to grip the glass, and trying to hammer tack strips off the floor? Agony. And once I shook a can of spray paint with my affected arm and nearly screamed.

So that's where I'm at. I stand on the edge of the tile and look at the carpet, and I think about tennis elbow. I should be thinking about measuring the room to get an idea of square footage, or comparing colors to see what tile would look good, but no. I think about tennis elbow.

But the carpet really does need to go. It may be worth the sacrifice.