The Lost Weekend

Well, the four-day weekend is almost over and it's time to start getting myself ready to go back to work. It's kind of a drag, but not too severe of one. Mostly it means getting up early in the morning, which I resent even though I'm usually up early anyway.

I had a good Thanksgiving. The main familial Thanksgiving was fun, even if the Arizona Cardinals did stink up the football field something awful and a blob of some manner of food fell off my plate and into my shirt pocket. The second "Thanksgiving with Friends" the next day was fun too, even though my wretched bum leg made me feel like a bit of a wet blanket. But it did seem that practically everyone I ran into over the weekend thought I had lost weight, so I've got that going for me (and what a wonderful thing to say to me too, I might add).

And now it's time to go back to work. Mostly, in my mind, it's one day closer to finding out what's wrong with my leg and, hopefully, having it fixed. And then, back on the exercise program!

Not Technically

It's not technically Thanksgiving yet. That doesn't happen until tomorrow, but I doubt I'll get to spend much time near my computer, at least not until we all get back from Thanksgiving with the extended family. That ought to be fun. I expect several of them to be nearly psychotic with outrage that Obama won the election; the others won't wear their hearing aids and it'll be a nonstop festival of well-intentioned but quite loud shouting.

Meantime, I decay. Something has gone horribly wrong with my left leg and it's swelled up to twice or three times its normal size. I can barely bend it at the knee, and sometimes my skin hurts because it doesn't like being stretched like sausage casing. The swelling goes down at night a bit, but not much. It sucks. It's hard to get in the car. It's hard to put on socks and shoes. Sometimes I wear a compression stocking on my lower leg, but it hurts so much by the end of the day that I want to scream.

I went to the doctor to have an ultrasound performed on it. The "ultrasound guy" never tells you anything. Ask him what time it is and he refers you to the "ordering physician", which makes me think of Chinese take-out. But obviously he found something of interest. He spent a few minutes at most on my calf, behind my knee and at a spot a few inches above my knee. The rest of the hour-long ultrasound ordeal was dedicated to minutely examining a spot in my far upper thigh. I don't want to give too many gory details, but let's say that by the time it was over with, I had so much gel in my underpants I didn't so much walk as slither. My testicles haven't been that slippery since... well, ever, really.

Now I wait to see what's wrong with me. It isn't a congestive heart failure thing, because that would involve both legs. It's a blockage or a blood clot or something. They'll probably say "Eh, it's just the new you; adapt or die, bub." So I can look forward to lugging this immense 3X left leg around, right?

I started taking Vitamin B-6 and dandelion root because they're alleged to be mild diuretics, and anything that wrung a little water out of my leg must be good. But I can't report that they've made much difference at all. Maybe I'm using them incorrectly. Maybe I'm supposed to smoke them or something. Nothing does much good. Elevating my leg improves it a little bit, but not very much. I think I'm becoming depressed about the whole thing.

But this is Thanksgiving, damn it! We're supposed to be talking about things we're thankful for, not stuff what depresses us. So what am I thankful for? The fact that I'm still alive, I guess.

Whee!

De Craw

I went to Lowe's today to get stuff for the garden, and I think I'm officially disappointed with their seed selection. Lots and lots of green bean types, but no green onions? Did I see that correctly? I did. I got leek seeds; maybe leeks harvested early will resemble green onions. Yeah, and maybe leeks harvested late make their own soup (I can't think of leeks in any way at all without being reminded of Knorr leek soup).

While I was there I bought one of those multiple-tined claw-like tilling tools. Normally I just turn the dirt over with a narrow garden spade, but those claw deals have always tempted me. This one claimed to not just dig up hard-packed soil, but to annihilate it entirely. We'll see.

The soil on my property varies considerably from spot to spot. On the western and southern expanses, it is basically sand and gravel to some indeterminate depth. I've dug down a ways and never really dug myself out of the gravel, though the deeper one goes the more one starts to encounter flat lenses of clay. In the middle part (including where my garden is) lies an intermixed layer of silt and clay about three feet deep overlying an apparently bottomless (and surprisingly wet) gravel formation. In the eastern regions, though, the ground becomes all clay all the way down, and it's as hard and bitterly resistant as unshelled Brazil nuts. It's as tough and hard three feet down as it is at the surface, which makes planting trees in the front yard unpopular.

Which is extremely boring, now that I think about it, but if you want an exciting blog, maybe you should be looking elsewhere, aye?

Anyway, in the next few hours I'll test out the craw and see if it works worth a damn (and will throw it a good distance if it doesn't), and I'll lay out my odd mix of seeds and see if they please anyone. Spinach, head lettuce, leaf lettuce, Brussels sprouts, carrots, bulb onions, leeks, beets, broccoli and cauliflower... If they don't work, I guess I'll throw them too.

Commercial Rebuttals

Americans are becoming a wildly unscientific bunch. Exactly why that is depends on who you ask. People blame video games, public school, the Internets, pop culture and heavy metal music for this state of affairs, but whoever you blame, the result is the same: Americans are turning into dunces.

I blame TV commercials. For example, one set of TV commercials tells us "grace is power" or "precision is power." I hate to quibble, but power is an amount of work divided by how long it takes to perform said work - P = W/t in other words. Grace is an unquantifiable term, and precision refers to the repeatability of successive measurements. And neither one is power.

Then there's the one with the breathy indie folk singer type who, over the plinkety-pink of "soulful guitar", gushes that she's green today and chirps with joy like crickets. Wait a second, I always thought crickets chirped with reproductive intent, not joy. They chirp, humans slather on Axe and wear jeans two sizes too small ("His batch," Crow T. Robot gasped in horror). But neither one has anything to do with the joy of being alive, or the insipid cloying sensibility of overwrought indie folk music. Blech.

My favorite is the one where the ominously self-possessed somewhat post-pubescent Young Thing tells us that these plant-based cleansers she's hawking don't contain any "nasty chemicals", presumably because they're plant-based. Sure. And plants never produce any nasty chemicals, do they? Curare, aconite, poison ivy, deadly nightshade, foxglove, oleander, heck no, I can't think of a single plant that produces a "nasty chemical."

Gawd.

Tornado Lust

Rather than doing anything productive this morning (like cleaning the kitchen or even making toast) I watched another episode of Stormchasers on whatever-the-hell channel it comes on. Discovery, I think. And what an unseemly mess it is.

Not that I have anything against stormchasers, stormchasing, making money off stormchasing, Doppler radar or anything else. Guys want to chase powerful storms looking for tornadoes? Hey, this is America, and if you can figure out a way to make money out of it, more power to you.

But holy cow, do they always have to be so excited about tornadoes all the time? They're hooping and hollering and pumping fists as though the advent of a huge-assed tornado is the best thing that's ever happened to them, better than their first kiss, better than their first orgasm, better even than their first beer.

I think if I were a Kansas farmer who'd just lost everything I owned, including probably my wife and kids, and I saw video of these juvenile knuckleheads cavorting and high-fiving over the F4 tornado that wiped out my farm, the urge to punch their teeth out would become overpowering.

Show at least a little decorum, would you, and not give off the creepy vibe that you're about to masturbate on the spot? In the words of Dr. Evil, "Starting to creep, just a little."

Home Sick

I stayed home today. I got about an hour of sleep last night, something I ate this morning nauseated me intensely, and I feel like a radio-controlled toy running on that last despairing trickle of battery power before everything stops.

When I was a kid I liked staying home sick. Nobody liked having the mumps or chicken pox or whatever, but it was still kind of fun - it got you out of school, and you had the feeling that whatever the illness was, it wouldn't last long, wouldn't be that bad, and would more than likely get your mom to get you some ice cream. So yeah, bring on the fever and the rashes and the whatnot, and make my ice cream strawberry while you're at it!

Being sick when you're older isn't as much fun. In my case, I don't have sick time, so I have to ask myself "Am I really that sick? Taking the day off costs money." And my illnesses seem a lot less interesting these days. When I was a kid, I had actual diseases - mumps, measles, chicken pox. Now what do I have? "I feel like crap." "I'm run down." "I just can't seem to get my ass in gear."

What fun. Meantime, I'm going back to bed.

War Zone

I see they picked Ray Stevenson to be the Punisher in the War Zone movie. This is probably old news to everyone. People who visit Hollywood news websites have probably known this for at least 120 years, but it's news to me because I don't haunt such websites and typically don't know what movies are coming out, or who's in them, until the trailers hit satellite TV.

Ray Stevenson is a good choice. He has the right stature and physical presence to be the Punisher, and he's about the right age and has the right ruggedness. And if one can judge from the work Stevenson did in the HBO series Rome, I think he'll have no problem with the physical aspects of the acting job. (Might I say that Rome was a splendid bit of TV and that Ray Stevenson's Titus Pullo was the bedrock of the series. The contrast between Pullo's good-natured affability and raw brutality was stark and, I think, very Roman in nature. The scene where Pullo and Cicero have their fateful meeting in the garden is a perfect example.) I always argued that the ideal man to play the Punisher would be a bulked-up Robert DeNiro from roughly the vintage of Ronin, and that's sort of what Ray Stevenson is.

The main question is whether Stevenson can pull off a suitably flat American accent, and I don't see why not. This is the one area where I thought Thomas Jane did a particularly good job. I thought he was far too young and handsome to be the Punisher in the last movie, but the voice was right on the mark. I got so used to the Thomas Jane voiceover in the Punisher video game that I actually can't imagine any other voice for the Punisher.

Did You Know? That the Roman name "Cicero" mentioned above means "chickpea"? Think about that the next time anyone describes "chickpea" as a great orator and able administrator and unmasker of the Cataline conspiracy.

Natters! Yippee!

I've always liked the German Ba349 Natter rocket interceptor. Well, I shouldn't say "like", because that sort of implies that I wish I'd gone to the senior prom with one, and that isn't the case at all. Let's just say I find the Natter interesting in concept and design, a vertical-launch manned rocket interceptor that works more like a surface-to-air missile than an airplane, with the rocket engine and the pilot landing by parachute and the rest of it going straight into the dumpster. No loss though, since it's made mostly of laminated wood and the WWII equivalent of melted-down tin cans.

The latest issue of FineScale Modeler contains a lengthy article by Matt Irvine, which is good for two reasons. The first is that I always enjoy his articles (I always enjoy his books too; Creating Space remains high on my list of "beach books"), and the second is that his article was about a massive display of Natters, ground vehicles, launch towers, gewgaws and whatnot, complete with a representation of Dr. Erich Bachem himself, looking more like a Pentecostal preacher than a German engineer.

I won't say that FSM has bored me lately, but I think it's fair to say it hasn't exactly thrilled me either. Oh great, another 1/32nd Trumpeter this-or-that... Oh great, another 1/35th Tiger with more aftermarket parts than Don Garlit's dragster. Ho-de-hum. It's the superdetailed German armor with $500 of added detail parts that particularly exhaust me. But all of a sudden here's Matt Irvine and Natters, and my day is brightened.

But it also betrays the subtle risk in doing too much research on the Internet. Matt in his article claims that the Natter made only one manned flight, namely, the fateful flight were Leutnant Lothar Sieber was killed. It took off, vanished into clouds, and presently reappeared coming straight down. Officials blamed the canopy for tearing away prematurely, though it is possible it came off because Sieber was attempting to bale out. Postwar investigation revealed that at least one of the four solid-fuel booster rockets had not jettisoned properly, a much more likely explanation for the accident. Not that matters; Sieber was dead and that was that. Matt says in more than one place that this is the only manned vertically launched flight until the flight of Yuri Gagarin in 1961.

But I've read in several places that after Sieber's flight, the Natter development team flew several Natters unmanned and with success (the Patin autopilot could manage that task) and then flew at least one fully successful manned flight. But since nobody ever seems to cite the name of this alleged German pilot, maybe his flight is more alleged than I like to think. I suspect without being able to prove it that Sieber's flight was the last flight sponsored by the SS, who had a habit of taking things over in Germany, but Bachem himself may have tried to carry on the program. But either way, Matt is right: Sieber's flight is the last confirmed manned flight of the Natter.

I don't think the Natter would ever have been the answer that the Germans were looking for - the whole Jaegernotprogramm was doomed to failure by the very scale of the problem that the Germans faced, even if the most promising aspects of it (such as the Wasserfall) had worked. Nor should it; the Nazis could not under any circumstances have been allowed to win the war. But as an off-the-cuff attempt to build a rocket, the Natter deserves a certain amount of respect. Just don't ask Lothar Sieber what he thinks of it.

PS: "Natter" is a tricky word to translate. Some sources render it as "viper", while others have it as "colubrid", which is a huge family of snakes that does not include vipers. So I don't know. I usually settle for "viper" because it seems like a more virile-sounding name than colubrid...

Phoenix Finis

NASA officially pulled the plug on the Phoenix mission this week. The Mars lander went silent early in November and finally, after remaining silent for a week, was declared dead. It was a natural and expected death brought on by the coldness and darkness of the Martian winter. Unlike the rovers or the spacecraft in orbit around Mars, Phoenix had a limited lifespan and the only question was how long it would hang on before cold and dark killed it.

It used solar panels to collect electricity to operate its computer and instruments, and to keep its batteries charged. As the Martial winter approached, the sun dropped lower and lower in the sky, making it difficult for Phoenix to collect enough energy. Eventually its batteries ran down to the point that it couldn't run its computer and communicate with Earth, and it fell silent. NASA gave it a week to see if it could "trickle-charge" its batteries into a last spasm of activity, but it remained stubbornly silent and was declared defunct..

It lasted about five months on the surface of Mars, though it was originally expected to last only three months. There is a technical possiblity that when the next Martian spring arrives the increasing amount of sunlight will recharge the battery and Phoenix will suddenly wake up from its coma, but it is extremely unlikely - it will spend the winter mantled in a coating of dry ice, which as you might imagine is not a good environment for electronic devices.

The first spacecraft designed to explicitly look for life on Mars were the Viking landers, which
touched down on Mars in 1976. They carried various experiments that scientists felt would answer once and for all the question of whether there were microbes or other forms of life in the Martian soil. The actual experiments produced odd, unexpected results that to a small group of scientists looked like evidence of life on Mars and looked like "funny soil chemisty" to the majority.

For years NASA and the ESA dispatched additional spacecraft to Mars, but instead of trying to
answer the Big Question ("Was there ever life on Mars?") these new spacecraft were designed to test a smaller but more basic question: "Were there ever conditions suitable for the formation of
life on Mars?" And that question can in turn be boiled down to this: "Did Mars ever have large amounts of liquid water on its surface that organisms could have grown in?"

It's really hard to say if you've found life or not. Even on Earth it's not always clear if a dark mark in a rock is a hardy algae, or just a smear of dirt. And on Mars, the peculiar soil chemistry made it difficult to find life by the usual means - dump some Martian dirt in a warm nutrient soup and see if it starts to produce gas. But it is easier to say if you've found evidence of liquid water or not, because liquid water leaves certain telltale clues behind, such as stratified and cross-bedded sediments, the presence of carbonates, the presence of certain chemicals like hematite and so forth, things that we know from prior experience require liquid water to form.

The two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, were designed to carry out a detailed study of the Martian surface to look for such evidence of liquid water, and the evidence seems pretty firm that Mars did indeed have liquid water on its surface for a significantly long period of time. You might think that having found evidence for liquid water, the next question would be "Was there life in that liquid water?" But really the next cautious question is "Where did the water go, and why?"

It was always assumed that the water in the Martian northern ocean vanished by two main routes. Some of it would evaporate and in the from of water vapor be blown away from Mars by the solar wind, along with the remainder of Mars's atmosphere (one of the many downsides of a planet not having a magnetic field). But most of it would simply sink into the planet's porous regolith and freeze underground. Measurements taken from orbit hinted that this was the right answer, but until someone actually landed there and found said ice, it was nothing more than a hypothesis. So Phoenix was designed to land in the extreme northern part of Mars and determine by direct measurements if there was ice in the ground.

And it did. Phoenix found ice aplenty, both fairly solid chunks of ice and a sort of rime-and-dirt
mixture. This confirmed the theory that the water had largely frozen into the crust, and helped to confirm that there had once been a genuine Martian ocean. None of this proves that life existed, but it provides answers to basic questions like "Could life have existed?"

Phoenix also got to the bottom of the "funny soil chemistry" that so vexed the Viking landers. It
turns out that the Martian soil contains peroxides and perchlorates, which are powerful oxidizing
compounds. Many scientists, upon hearing about this, said "That's it, Mars must be sterile because these peroxides and perchlorates are the kiss of death for microorganisms." And indeed they are - usually. In fact, if you went just by the experience of the two rovers and Phoenix, you'd have to say that Mars was an extremely hostile environment for life: bombarded by ultraviolet radiation because there's no ozone layer, bombarded by cosmic rays and charged particles because there's no magnetic field, tortured by peroxides and wrecked by perchlorates; what chance could life have against such dreadful odds?

Then people doing research in the Atacama Desert of South America found a class of bacteria that actually eat and thrive on perchlorates found naturally in the dry, cold soil. This doesn't automatically mean that there are Martian bugs that use perchlorates as an energy source; it simply means that at least in the case of the Atacama Desert, perchlorates are not an automatic death sentence.

So, from the life point of view, we're back to square one. There was once liquid water, and that
liquid water is frozen into the rocky soil of the northern hemisphere. There are peroxides and perchlorates in the soil that normally kill bacteria, but there are bacteria that use them as food. So the life question still isn't settled, by any means. So that is Phoenix's legacy: the confirmation of ice, and a first assay of the strange chemistry of the Martian soil.

Every scientist and engineer ever involved with a Mars spacecraft probably has fantasized at least once about looking at a high-resolution photograph of the ground next to the spacecraft and seeing obvious evidence of life. Something lichen-like clinging to the side of a protected alcove, or a fossil of something with obvious radial symmetry. They never admit such fantasies because science makes people cautious and methodical, and because it's considered gauche to hope for such a find. But Phoenix did something almost as striking. It found the water, and where the water is, so also lies the hopes for finding life on Mars.

Ornamentation

When we went to Home Depot yesterday I saw that they're already laying out the Christmas decorations. Perhaps they anticipate a really bad Christmas season and they're starting early, or perhaps it's normal to crowd out Thanksgiving with Christmas decor. This sort of thing used to bother me when I was younger, but looking back on it now, I can't really figure out what was so awful about it. What does it bother me if stores put up Christmas displays and play Christmas music even though Thanksgiving isn't even really in the planning stages yet?

But my, how the ornaments have changed. When I was a kid, it seemed that most of our familial ornaments were either clear glass bulbs with chipped stripes painted around their equators, or spiky, spiny Sputnik-looking deals that I think were made out of a primitive sort of chrome-plated plastic. The lights were immense. I don't keep track of light nomenclature so the Patio Men that know C7s from C5s will laugh at me. Suffice it to say that the lights were the size of large grapes and if you got a preponderance of the blue lights on one side of the tree, strange but appealing grotto effects could be produced.

The trees were always real, of course, at first lumpy, misshapen sad sacks that we cut off my grampa's mining claim, and later wretched things bought at the Christmas tree lot and brought home, complete with shedding needles, smell of mildew and (occasionally) great big bugs. But somehow lumpy misshapen sad sacks of trees with thin spots turned out looking pretty nice with its clear glass bulbs and enormous lights and twinkly spiny Sputniks and that weird treetop ornament that looked like a cross between Papal headgear and a 1950s spaceship.

There was lots of tinsel. There was always a certain give-and-take in the tinsel department. Mom argued that it was impossible to clean up and just ruined the vacuum, but we thought it was far too traditional to skip. We tended to save and reuse our tinsel (because we were cheap, not because we were particularly green), so instead of the tree being draped with long, graceful arcs of pristine gossamer tinsel, we had tinsel-wads shoved into the branches here and there. The tinsel would wind up on itself, often including needles and twigs from previous years, and form horrible Gordian knots that simply couldn't be undone. From a distance it looked okay, but up close the resemblance to the shavings one finds on the floor of a machine shop was striking.

We weren't much for "theme ornaments". We didn't put photographs or postcards in the tree, and we didn't have any Hallmark ornaments. It was pretty much a matter of lights, tinsel and bulbs for us, though I was known to hide model airplanes in the tree, especially a Heinkel He100D that I particularly favored. Somehow the tree just seemed to need unpainted plastic model airplanes, but even at my insensitive worst I recognized that model tanks were out of the question. (These days I resist the urge to put model airplanes in the tree, but whenever I'm invited anywhere for Christmas, I always at least think about bringing a model airplane and tucking it unseen into the host's tree so later they can scratch their heads and wonder what the hell is going on with the world.)

My first personal tree was a plastic two-footer that came complete with a string of about 25 lights and an equal number of silver bulbs roughly the size of grapes. The great advantage of this tree was that it was easy to take down; you simply grabbed it by the top and shoved it in a closet, still fully dressed. Every year rough treatment from the cats ruined a few bulbs, and eventually the thing developed a sad, weary Charlie Brown aspect. I eventually refreshed the ornamentation with new lights and bulbs, but then one of my cats developed the habit of spraying on the tree, which had the effect of turning it into a two-foot-tall piss-scented Glade air freshener. When you have to take your Christmas tree outside and try to make it palatable by squirting it with Formula 409 and spraying it with the garden hose, it might be time to get a new tree.

My wife does the ornamenting this year, which is only fair because 90% of the ornaments are hers. By my analysis we always end up with an insufficient number of lights and an excess of random ornaments, but my analysis is irrelevant. I like it when the tree is so bright you have to sort of avert your eyes from it. This year we've lost so many strings of lights we're finally going to have to get new ones, and as usual I'll wheedle without success for all-blue strings.

We use an artificial tree, of course, one of those dark green jobs that does a halfway decent job of simulating an actual tree. It's actually kind of sad - a simulated dying tree. But it beats a real dying tree, I guess, though I confess that sometimes I miss the ease of use of my old two-footer.

Modern ornaments seem to be either very expensive, or very huge. I know a guy who specializes in Hallmark ornaments, particularly the Star Trek ones, and they actually talk. It's kind of shocking to hear his tree suddenly blurt "Spock to Enterprise, Happy Holidays". Other of his ornaments light up, emit laser beams, shoot missiles and I don't know what all. I half-expect a Darth Vader ornament that says "I find your lack of faith disturbing." Meantime, Home Depot was offering ornaments that I swear were the size of cantaloupes in one case, and large infants in another. What would one do with an ornament that huge? Cut holes in it and make it into a boat??

A Tale of Two Paints

I went to Home Depot this morning to get a can of grey spray paint. Home Depot doesn't have a particularly good selection of grey spray paint, as it turns out, but as I was rummaging through what selection they did have, I amused myself by constrasting the difference between buying spray paint at home centers and hobby shops.

At home centers, you go through the shelves looking for, say, grey. You find such things as lavender, taupe, tangerine, pumpkin, marigold, eccrue, putty, and bone. Is it a paint rack or a fruit stand?? There are 20 distinct cans of paint that are all roughly the same color as "Almond", and 15 that are roughly the same color as "Rose". But no grey, unless you want sandable primer, which I didn't want. (If you must know, I was looking for light grey that I could spray on an SA-2 surface-to-air missile, the kind of apparatus that looks a bit foolish painted "Lemon".)

If you go to a hobby shop, virtually all colors of paint are grey, sand, or green. But mostly they're all grey. Ocean grey, medium grey, neutral grey, gull grey, dark gull grey, aggressor grey, dark sea grey, extra-dark sea grey (logically enough, I suppose), field grey, haze grey, light grey, camoflauge grey, Euro I grey, dark grey, barley grey, deck grey, Japanese Army grey, Japanese Navy grey (why not?)... (There are almost as many greens, and they're even harder to tell apart, but since they unnerve me, I don't want to spend any time talking about them.)

I guess the bottom line is that I didn't get any light grey spray paint at Home Depot. So I looked at my collection of spray paint out in the garage and asked myself "What's wrong with spraying an SA-2 missile Burgundy? I mean, who's going to care? And maybe it'll be an improvement."

I'm going to cut this short because I sense that I am in imminent danger of freezing to death. Making a pot of iced tea on a cold, windy day like today may not have been the best idea I've ever had.

Congratulations

Congratulations to Guilherme Marchi, 2008 PBR World Champion. He not only won, but he won in convincing and comprehensive fashion. And, by gum, he deserved it too.

I met him and shook his hand, and I found him pleasant and affable. So now I've got Barack Obama for President, and Guilherme Marchi for PBR World Champion. What could possibly be next? Winning a 75-pound meat loaf from Safeway? Finding the missing part that is preventing me from making progress on my model of the Calypso? Waking up with Sean Hannity hair?

Nodeless

I made an interesting discovery last night: one should not drink a quart of chocolate milk immediately before going to bed. I must have made about 40 trips to the necessarium during the night, and I felt like I'd swallowed a ShamWow or something. It was as though there was something huge, fluffy and "uber-absorbent" in my midsection, pressing on all my internal organs and making me have strange, borderline unwelcome dreams about wagon trains.

President Obama. That has a nice ring to it. I note that America is already starting to become modestly cool in other parts of the world. That didn't take long, and I can only expect for the situation to improve. Just as Bush set the tone by repudiating the Kyoto Accord early in his administration, I expect Obama to set an equal but opposite tone early in his.

The whiny right-wingers at work insist that what the world thinks of the United States is irrelevant. Some go so far as to say that it's better to be feared than loved, which I think was the inadvertent credo of Caligula, and you saw what happened to him (spitted by his own bodyguards). I think it does matter. I think it's better to have 150 countries that admire you in one way or another than it is to have 150 countries that fear and despise you.

So even though Obama isn't President yet, and hasn't even named his Cabinet, I am reassured and calmed by the way things are working out. I'm not stupid and I know that it won't be all sunlight and flowers - contrary to what my embittered right-wing associates think, I'm neither stupid nor naive - but reading the international news reports and finding people favorably disposed toward my country again? Oh, that makes me feel good.

I remember a time when people were very favorably disposed toward my country, when America was regarded with awe even by its enemies. I was in the USSR in the 1980s and noticed that the one country the Russians seemed to admire more than any other was the United States, and this was during a chilly spell in the Cold War when we were fixing to nuke one another's underpants off.

It's been a good week.

President Obama

CNN has just called the Presidential race for Barack Obama, and with almost 300 electoral votes in hand and more likely to come. Oh, the whining tomorrow morning at work is going to be positively epic - and music to my ears.

I haven't posted much in a while because I've been sick, or half-sick. I seem to have just about enough energy to get to and from work, with none left over for anything else. But today the antibiotics finally seem to be starting to work. The lymph nodes in my neck are greatly reduced in size, I have much more energy, and I no longer feel like I'm alternating between fever and chills.

But then again, maybe it's the prospect of a civilized Presidency and not the antibiotics at all. You think??

J'cancel!

I will confess several things up front. First, I confess that I've intended to vote for the Democratic candidate, no matter who it was. Second, I confess that I was deeply worried going into the election. After what happened in 2000 in Florida and 2004 in Ohio, I was worried that if the election was even remotely close "something" would happen to turn it into a Republican victory. But it now appears that the election is going so strongly against McCain that even the most egregious shenanigans can't change the basic outcome.

I wasn't going to watch the news tonight, but I was driving home and found myself a little sleepy at the wheel, and sometimes listening to the radio wakes me up. For some reason I can't really get Nova-M in my car. Some days I can hear it, other days it sounds like someone dragging a 55-gallon drum across a garage floor. Today I couldn't make out a word, so I listened to NPR, which presented the leading edge of the Obama victory in a way that didn't make me jittery. So when I got home I turned the TV on and watched the news, vowing that I'd turn it off the minute things started to go badly or the minute that anyone started to argue. I don't need bad news and I don't need an argument, and I'll take drastic steps to deal with either.

My own voting experience was quite banal. It took me not more than twenty minutes get my ballot and vote, and at least five of those minutes were expended talking to neighbors that I met in line. The polling place in Wittmann was well-organized and very efficient, even though most of the volunteers were so old they looked like they'd been recently unearthed in the Valley of the Kings. I kid the volunteers, of course.

I would say that the odds of Arizona going blue are not just practically zero, but entirely zero. But I knew that when I showed up to vote. Honestly, I voted more to cancel out the vote of a notable Republican than to alter Arizona's electoral makeup. It's irrational and silly, yes, but nevertheless, there I was snarling "J'cancel!" as I fed my ballot into the optical reader.