Big Red

Yesterday I assembled my Christmas present, a shiny red cement mixer from Northern Tool. It was actually fairly easy to assemble. Except for one corner of the motor housing that had been dinged up by some sort of forklift accident, everything was straight and the holes all lined up. Getting the rubber gasket between the upper and lower drum halves was amusing - if you can imagine a flat rubber snake with the patience of a two-year-old, you've got the basic idea.

So what does one do with a cement mixer? One mixes concrete. Which raises this question: if it mixes concrete, why is it called a cement mixer? Why are trucks that carry concrete called cement trucks?

Concrete is pretty amazing stuff, if you ask me. You just add water to this stuff and it turns into a greenish goo that in the long run cures hard as a rock?? That's pretty fabulous. There are things that are even more fabulous - hot dogs, for one - but still, that's pretty fabulous. Back in my youth my dad and I poured an awful lot of concrete for driveways and walkways. We were mixing it in an ancient cement mixer, so we tended to form up slabs that could be mixed and poured and finished in about a day. We used a huge pile of gravel ("ABC" round these parts) and cats also used it as a giant open-air litter box.

It was possible to determine the order in which we poured the slabs by counting the little irregular voids in the surface of the concrete where cat poops rotted and came out. The first slabs were smooth and clean, but then the number of cat poop craters began to increase. The last slab looked like Swiss cheese or perhaps a scale model of the moon. Some of those voids got pretty big - I remember not wanting to meet the enormous feral cats that produced some of those poops.

Fun facts about concrete! The first actual concrete was invented by the Romans, and was used to build all sorts of interesting things. So far as I know, the Pantheon in Rome remains the world's largest, and oldest, unreinforced concrete dome. Modern Portland cement of the form we use today was a product of the Industrial Revolution, invented in the mid-1800s by some British fellow. (I used to think that Portland cement came from Portland, and I worried that at the rate people were building concrete buildings and superhighways, that one day Portland would be nothing but a huge crater from all that mining, as though the Borg had come.)

Here's another fun fact about concrete: mixing concrete in a wheelbarrow is one of the most unpleasant tasks known to man. I'd rather dig splinters out of my fingers. I'd rather try to give Baxter T. Cat a pill. I'd rather sand the raised panel lines off a 1970s-era Monogram airplane model and rescribe them (and if you know me very well at all, you know that I regard rescribing panel lines as exceedingly unrewarding).

Hence Big Red. Now that I have it, what do I propose to do with it? Building a Pantheon might be a little ambitious, but maybe a nice sunken garden...

Death Metal Dead

Death metal has been pronounced dead.

I had occasion to read the list of the top ten metal songs of the year, as picked by "Noisecreep", whoever they are. I'm not normally prone to reading this sort of thing - I like what I like and generally don't require validation from alleged cognoscenti. But it is interesting to note the bands who produced their top ten songs:

Priestess

Fear Factory

Scorpions

Iron Maiden

Mar De Grises

High on Fire

Deftones

Nachtmysterium

Ratt

Triptycon

Not a death metal act in the whole bunch. Actually, not much metal of any kind at all.

Here's one of their comments on Nachtmysterium:

'No Funeral' pulsates like something you might hear in a darkwave/goth dance club, and despite its gorgeous synthesizer-led melodies, many closed-minded metalheads shunned it.

If I wanted darkwave/goth dance music, then I guess it would make me happy. But I don't, so it didn't. But I guess that makes me a "hater".

Here's another comment on Deftones:

On top of everything, Chino Moreno's angelic crooning during the track's chorus is total ear candy.

It's like a segment from Sesame Street where we're enjoined to guess which one of these things just doesn't belong - metal music on the one hand, and total ear candy angelic crooning on the other. It's like going to a Mexican restaurant and getting Hollandaise sauce on one's enchilada - someone somewhere didn't get a very important memo. There's nothing wrong with Mexican food, and there's nothing wrong with Hollandaise sauce, but I prefer that the two not fuse into some horrid postmodern mess.

But, then again, Noisecreep picked Judas Priest winning some kind of award as the top metal moment of the year. Since when did metal care about awards? And since when was Judas Priest metal? I don't dislike Judas Priest by any means - but if you think Judas Priest is metal, you probably think canned tamales are Mexican food.

And the very thought of a Ratt song being the #2 metal song of the year made me buy a whole Amon Amarth album by way of overcompensation.

Vacuum Collapse

People talk a lot these days about the "zero-point energy" or "vacuum energy". You know an idea is hot when people start trying to sell you gadgets that supposedly exploit whatever the idea is, and I've seen at least a few products or services that were in some way supposed to derive some kind of power from the vacuum energy.

Unfortunately for them - at least if I understand this correctly - the vacuum energy predicted by quantum field theory is the minimum allowable energy. Since the vacuum is already at its minimum energy potential, there's no way to get any energy out of it (once the gas tank is empty, you can't get another 20 miles down the road by making the gas tank extra-empty). Virtual particle production continues apace because - again, if I understand this correctly - the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle allows a little slop in time and energy, as though the universe doesn't mind violations of the conservation of energy if they're sufficiently temporary.

Curiously, these virtual particles can actually be promoted and turned into real particles, but you have to supply some energy to do it. Hawking radiation is one example of how you can make virtual particles real.

But what if the vacuum isn't at its minimum energy? What if it's as a false minimum? What if, by means of quantum indeterminacy, or some sort of high-energy procedure carried out by earnest physicists, the false vacuum is allowed to tunnel or collapse to a lower energy, presumably the real minimum? Physicists argue that such a collapse would completely destroy the universe in its entirety - the mathematics of such things argue that the potential energy of a new pocket of lower-energy vacuum actually increases as its volume increases, so it would propagate outward at just below the speed of light, and we'd have no warning whatsoever. Not that there would be much we could do about it even if we had advance warning. The whole universe would end up collapsing to this new minimum energy vacuum, and us along with it.

For a while people were worried that the Large Hadron Collider at CERN might do the trick, but it seems unlikely. I'm no physicist, but it seems to me that if all it took to cause a vacuum collapse was a sufficiently energetic collision, it would have happened already - cosmic rays hit the top of the Earth's atmosphere with energies many times above what the LHC can generate, and we're still here. Even more dramatic, if current theories about the Big Bang are correct, there was a time in the very early universe when energies were much higher still, at the Grand Unification level if not the Planck energy itself. And we're still here.

So I think it's safe to assume that we aren't ripe for a vacuum collapse.

But even so, when I go outside to look for falling stars, I prefer not to think about the notion of a vacuum collapse. I have enough to worry about as it is without having to fret about the possibility of the entire universe being destroyed in a catastrophic vacuum collapse, thank you very much.

Most Obnoxious Noise

I am pretty sensitive to noise pollution. Light pollution doesn't really bother me. Air pollution is unsightly and unsafe, but I can sort of ignore it. If I come across a stream clogged with old tires, shot-up cars and beer cans, I'm irked, but I can always close my eyes. But I have a hard time shutting out noise pollution. It works its way into my brain until I'm actually listening to it. I'd almost rather have toxic chemicals in my water supply than noise in my ear.

Most forms of human endeavor seem to create noise, and most of the time it's okay with me. You need to mow your lawn or cut your firewood? Fine and dandy - I can live with noise that exists for some gainful purpose. You want to race your dragster at the nearby drag strip? I'm okay with that too, because you're racing your car at a place that was designed for car races, and sometimes I sit outside on a Friday night and listen to the roaring of the V-8s in the distance.

But there are certain classes of noise that just irk me to no end.

Commercials on the radio are especially annoying. They blare in my ear, and they're always so damned insistent. Commercials on TV are annoying too, but I'm usually in a position to mute them as they occur. Radio commercials always seem to feature a rapid-fire torrent of goofy sound effects with a breathless announcer with maximum reverb bellowing Bring Your Camera!

A TV in another room always kind of irks me, especially if the TV isn't being watched. It just sits there, pumping out its endless blare of noise, and it always seems to be tuned to a TV show I really can't stand, like The Obnoxious Self-Absorbed Housewives of Hoboken. I'm trying to understand the Schwartzschild solution of General Relativity, and suddenly the TV is screaming at me about the ignominy of having a flat butt.

Loud motorcycles are no picnic either. Several towns in Arizona have enacted noise laws because the incessant racket of thousands of these rolling ego-machines eventually pissed off the whole population, and I don't blame them.

Telephones. I've never liked talking on the telephone. Never. I don't know why; I just don't. And the idea of calling someone on my cell phone because I'm bored just never occurs to me. It therefore should be no surprise that I don't like telephone ring tones, and I don't enjoy listening to people talking on their phones. I know they enjoy it, and I don't mind that, I just don't particularly want to listen to someone saying "Dude, guess where I'm at! No, man! Guess again! No, dude, not even close!"

I don't like crowd noise at concerts. I'm there to hear the music, not to listen to a bunch of people go WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Honestly, people, just shut up and listen. I like to watch videos of my nephew's doom metal band on YouTube, but they're hard to fully appreciate because there's always some beered-up numbskull in the audience who keeps screaming FUCK YEAH! It isn't the cursing that bothers me; it's the fact that I can't hear the music over his beery screeching. (Closely related to this are the people who want you to listen to some groovy new piece of music they found, but they're so busy talking about the groovy new music you can't actually hear it. Sometimes they have to explain what makes the music so groovy, but more often than not they think it'll put the music in context if they explain in great detail everything they were doing and thinking at the moment they discovered this music - "I first heard this when I was in high school, Ted and Scruffy and I had gone to the Tastee-Freez in Avondale, this was back when going to the Tastee-Freez was what we did, you know, we'd go to Tastee-Freez and talk about girls and stuff, and Ted was wearing this hat... Oh man, I remember that hat! It was like...")

There are people who echo everything I say, and embellish it. I'm in the parking lot at work, walking to my car to get lunch, and the following conversation ensues:

"Where you going?"

"Lunch."

"Lunch. Munchies. Grub. Where you going?"

"McDonalds, probably."

"Micky-Ds, the Golden Arches, Ronald's Place. Whatcha getting?"

"Maybe a Big Mac, I haven't decided."

"A Big Mac. Big Whack. El Mac Grande. Mac-a-rack-a-ding-dong-dang. Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce--"

"Look, I have a half an hour for lunch, so if you want to chat, get in the car and come with me. If not, can we pick this up again later?"

I honestly think that the main reason people make so much useless noise is that introspection makes them uncomfortable.

Lose-Lose

Proponents of unmanned space exploration rejoice! The space shuttle is dead. Well, dying, anyway.

How do we get into these situations? Why do people always insist on turning things like this into zero-sum games, where anything that the manned space exploration part of NASA loses, the unmanned side gains, and vice versa? And we all know what's going to happen anyway - whatever money is saved by shutting down the Shuttle program isn't going to go toward new unmanned space science; it's just going to vanish in the overall Federal budget.

Nobody wins, as far as I can see.

Now the only way to get people into space is the Russian Soyuz. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the Soyuz except that it is too small, can't carry any meaningful cargo, and can only barely reach orbit in the first place (the reason Mir and the ISS have to be re-boosted every so often is because the basic Soyuz-U booster can't reach a higher orbit, so the ISS has to orbit so low it encounters a good deal of atmospheric drag). Ever seen the interior of a Soyuz TMA with the crew aboard? It looks like one of those fraternity row stunts where they try to pack as many people into a phone booth as possible.

Soyuz just doesn't seem like the road to the future. Neither did the Shuttle, to be honest, as its design requirements forced it to be much heavier and less efficient than it should have been (in particular, the abandonment of the "flyback booster" and the high cross-range wing demanded by the single-revolution return to launch site abort requirement). But I always thought the shuttle would just be a sort of stand-in while a more sensible replacement was developed.

But no. Turns out, there is no replacement. The Shuttle is gone, and all that's left is Soyuz. No X-33, no NASP, no Lockheed Starclipper, no Rockwell low-cross-range orbiter, nothing. In a single move, we go right back to the same booster that launched Sputnik. I don't see that as a positive development.

I am occasionally accused of being opposed to unmanned space science, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Unmanned probes often return astounding insight into the nature of things, and often at next to no cost. It is quite impossible to look at the accomplishments of such unmanned probes as COBE, WMAP, Galileo, Voyager 1 and 2, Opportunity, Spirit, Viking, SOHO and others without being forced to say "Yeah, those were excellent investments."

But I also happen to believe that people have business being in space, and I think that the next logical objective should be the establishment of a manned presence on Mars.

So to me, it isn't a question of unmanned space science or manned space science; I think it should be both. Yes, I'm a naive dreamer. But is seems to me that if we as a society can spend billions on hair replacement, billions on erection pills, and billions on breast enhancement, we could also spend billions on manned and unmanned space science.

But honestly, I don't think we give a rat's ass any more. The Far Left is suspicious of space science, because it rejects the notion of science in general. The postmodernist stance seems to be that science is "just another myth" and that "the project of the Enlightenment is dead." (It amuses me that they use the product of that "western scientific myth", namely computers and the Internet, to write and publish their profoundly mistaken bullshit.*) Religious conservatives, on the other hand, are known to argue that anything we need to know is already encoded in scripture and that attempts to learn about ourselves and the universe amount to some kind of strange secular assault on religion. And in between, the majority of Americans seem so absorbed by numbnut celebrities, the wonders of their smart phones, and irrelevancies like "style" and "self-expression" to have any kind of curiosity about the universe around us.**

And meantime, people who should really be allies - the proponents of manned and unmanned space exploration - savage one another to try to get as much of the dwindling pie as they can.

*I recently read a quote from some postmodern scholar that argued that Einstein's famous equivalence, E = MC^2, is "sexed" and "biased" because it accords a special power and significance to the speed of light, thus discriminating against other speeds that are just as useful to us. But what galls me even more than the aggressive stupidity of this allegation is that I can just picture this scholar's acolytes, all shaking their heads and whispering oh, the injustice! That Einstein was SUCH a white male oppressor! Sometimes all I can do is grip my forehead in both hands and sigh.

**Here's a "fun" (read "depressing") statistic. According to CNBC, the "diet industry" amounted to $59.7 billion last year. NASA's budget for 2010 was about $18.7 billion.

Dark Flow??

I do a lot of reading on the subject of cosmology. I find the field fascinating for a variety of reasons, not least because it includes aspects of quantum mechanics, General Relativity, high-energy physics, thermodynamics, astrophysics, and a heap of other stuff. If you read about, say, quantum chromodynamics, all you get is quantum chromodynamics, but if you read about cosmology, you get the whole enchilada.

And it's so weird.

At first we thought that all there was in the universe was matter and radiation. Then it turned out that there wasn't enough matter to explain the behavior of stars in galaxies, so we had to postulate the existence of "dark matter". Nobody knows what dark matter really is, but it seems almost a given that is has to exist, even though we can only guess at most of its properties. Then it turned out that the expansion of the universe was not slowing down, as one would expect, but actually speeding up. So we had to postulate the existence of "dark energy" to explain this accelerating expansion. Thus far nobody has any idea what dark energy really is, and there doesn't even seem to be much agreement on what observations we might make that would give us insight into its nature.

And now we have something new - "dark flow". Analysis of great heaps of data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe suggest that a fairly sizable chunk of the observable universe (the Local Group, the Virgo Supercluster and perhaps even the Great Attractor) all demonstrate a fairly uniform peculiar velocity (the term "peculiar velocity" refers to the velocity being directed in an actual direction with respect to the cosmic microwave background, rather than just being the recessional velocity that the Hubble Constant implies). This peculiar velocity is called "dark flow", maybe just because it sounds creepy.

It seems that us, the Local Group, the Virgo Supercluster and the Great Attractor are all being drawn toward something. But what? Something hugely massive, surely, but as far as we've been able to see, there's nothing out there that fills the bill. One theory is that it's something hugely massive that lies beyond the rim of the visible universe - not because our telescopes aren't good enough to see it, but because light from this sinister thing out there hasn't had time to reach us even though it's been traveling at the speed of light since the beginning of the universe.

I don't know if that's actually the case. Some theorize it's gravitational attraction from a parallel universe, or perhaps from a sub-universe that split off from ours during the period of superluminal inflation, or... But whatever it is, it fascinates me.

Cosmology can be kind of a bummer, because none of the theorized "ends of the universe" are at all appealing. The Big Crunch is bad. The Big Rip is bad. The Big Bounce is bad, but maybe not quite as bad. Universal heat death is just plain depressing. (I can fully understand why physicists like Fred Hoyle might have preferred the Steady State theory, which at least offers an eternal lifetime and doesn't require that the universe be obliterated in one way or another. Though I accept the Big Bang on intellectual grounds, a part of me pines for the comforting eternity of the Steady State model.)

But the presence of this unseen thing out there that causes dark flow might open the door for other outcomes. Maybe we really are headed somewhere special, and maybe the universe isn't just a really big, really long-playing exercise in the conservation of energy. Or maybe I just find ideas like the Big Rip or the Big Crunch spiritually unrewarding and hope for some other outcome because I find futility depressing.

Erroneous Celebration

I was watching a football game for a while earlier. I was actually working outside, but the tractor had developed a malfunction and I decided that it was more important to me that I eat something than fix it.

But anyway, I was watching the football game mostly because out of seventeen thousand channels on satellite TV, it was the least offensive thing. And they were playing, and the officials threw the occasional flag for "excessive celebration". And I think we as reasonable people can all agree that a seven-foot-six 850-pound lineman doing the Funky Chicken really is excessive.

But I notice there's a lot of other celebrating that goes on. Some guy comes off the field, downs a cup of Gatorade, and pumps his fist. "Yeah! I totally owned that beverage! Boo-yah!" Most of the time it seems to me that they're celebrating just doing their job. Excuse me, Mr. Defensive Tackle, but isn't it sort of your job to tackle the running back when he attempts to run up the middle? Why are you celebrating doing something that you're expected to do? Do you need more attention? Do you need a cookie? Other than paying you your generous salary, I'm not sure what more the world owes you for stopping the running back on a third-and-short.

But maybe I have it backwards. Maybe we should all celebrate doing our jobs. Maybe if I write a big chunk of code and it successfully compiles and links, I should jump up, windmill my arms, and shout "Oof! Oof! I pwned that do-while loop, oof, oof, who let the dogs out, oof oof. Oh yeah, look at that loop counter increment; I am THE MAN, I took that loop counter downtown and totally made it look like an unsigned short integer!"

Or maybe I just think "Well, that's pretty much what I get paid to do, and besides my ego is pretty secure and I don't require sustained pumping-up."

I finally had to admit to myself that I don't like watching basketball any more. The endless celebrating, taunting, pumping up, chest-bumping, huffing, puffing, and wall-to-wall tattoos finally got to me. I like playing basketball, and I like basketball the game, but I don't care for the NBA's apparent idolization of thuggery and nastiness (and I don't like how the only play they run any more is "clear out for the superstar"). And football isn't all that far behind. The only thing going in its favor is the fact that they wear more clothes and their tattoos aren't as visible.

And with that said, permit me to spin wildly in my chair and shout "Oh YEAH, I totally made this post my bitch! Boo-yah!"

The Envelope Please

I got my PET scan results today, and they're good. Remission is still holding - there's been no real change since the last scan. The disturbed nodes are still scarred and oversized, but not growing and not particularly active in a metabolic sense. And nothing's cropped up elsewhere. I am, for the moment at least, not afflicted with cancer.

Some people might celebrate this by going to Disneyland. Others might pop a beer. I believe I might dig out an old Monogram X-15A2 and convert it to a delta-winged X-15A5. Or maybe dig my Special Hobby 1/32nd X-15 out from under the bed and build it. Either way, I strongly suspect an X-15 is going to be involved.

Scanxiety

Tomorrow I get the results of my PET scan. It'll probably be good news, but I suspect that cancer is going to leave as many scars on my mind as it did on my body. One of them is going to be a chronic nagging - not fear, really, more like irrational dread - that it's coming back, even when it isn't.

So.

I haven't watched the Food Network in a while, but I started to tune in again last week. I see that little has changed in my absence. There are a few new competition shows, but by and large, it's the same bunch of people. I'm a little surprised to see that Chopped is still on - I figured that culinary clinker was doomed to sink of its own unappetizing weight - and this new "Neurotic Chefs of Beverly Hills" appeals to me about as much as a good-sized slug of dacarbazine. But there's Ina Garten, and that's a relief. I'm also glad to see Bobby Flay is still gainfully employed. And Michael Symon grows on me; maybe he's growing into the job. And there's a new Iron Chef, I see. Pretty soon there'll be enough of them to play basketball, and won't that be fun, watching Masaharu Morimoto drive the baseline and dunk over Mario Batali. "In your FACE, Pasta-Man!"

Ace of Cakes is still on, and that's good. But it doesn't seem to have much to do with cakes any more; it's mostly the madcap antics of the quirky folk at the bakery. As long as you make that switch and don't expect anything technical, it's still fun. And Dinner: Impossible, starring Robert Irvine's Gigantic Arms. That seems only right and proper. And Paula Deen is still ya'lling and deep-frying butter, just as she should.

I watched the Cooking Channel the other day, but was rapidly driven away by the sheer smugness of it all. It doesn't seem to have much to do with cooking; it's mostly about status and style, and every time I switched to it, my Smug-O-Meter began to beep. The show where some numbskull insists that real hamburgers are fried on a slab of black iron was the coup de grace. I'll have my hamburgers done on a grill in the back yard, with lettuce and tomato and mustard, and if this stylish nabob doesn't like it, well, I'll fetch the stepladder... I live in Arizona. I was born in Arizona. And I don't necessarily accept the Received Wisdom that the New York City interpretation of a hamburger is the only valid one. (Michael J. Nelson once wrote that New York City is fine as long as you don't mind warm blasts of urine-scented air coming up out of gratings in the streets. And I find that I DO mind them.)

And the commercials! I like wine as much as the next person, but come on, at some point I have to throw a flag and call Excessive Smugness on the commercials (ten yards and loss of down). "This wine is fruity and round, but with hints of flint and tinder, and subtle tones of uranium hexaflouride that drape on the palate like the Golden Fleece." And what they really mean is "Won't your friends be shocked at your eliteness when they see you quaffing this shit!"

Of course, I'm drinking a glass of Spicy Hot V-8 juice, so I'm obviously a Philistine.

A possible exception is "Food(ography)", now with 100% more Mo Rocca than before. It has an Alton Brown-esque flavor, though without Alton's penchant for tedious amateur thespianism, and Mo himself doesn't bother me. So we'll see. The episode I watched was mostly about Julia Child, which seems like a good first step to me - if you're going to do a geek show about cooking, you'd best start by honoring the giants, in the same way that science shows on the Science Channel had best start out with a healthy amount of smooching on Albert Einstein's backside.

Thanksgiving

Well, it turns out that dining out on Thanksgiving isn't the same experience as having it at home. It wasn't bad, it just didn't really feel like Thanksgiving to me. Just another family dinner - not that there's anything wrong with that. That's easy for me to say, though, since I'm not the one who roasts the turkey, or for that matter paid for lunch today.

I was hoping I'd have my PET scan results by now, but I probably won't hear anything until the 29th. I have no reason to believe that the results will be unfavorable, but still, I'd like to know. There's a theory that if the oncologist doesn't call you in a mild panic that they didn't find anything distressing, but my oncologist has not always been particularly efficient at returning phone calls and it is possible to hypothesize that he prefers to give bad news in person.

And I'm not going to think about that. I wanted to be thankful for still being alive, but now I'm starting to wear myself down. So it could be time for a cup of Earl Grey and a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, a combination that always makes me feel better.

A CNN Thing

I read a thing on CNN today - I call it a "thing" because it certainly wasn't news.

Anyway, apparently someone has decided that some email domain names are "more awesome" and some are "less awesome." Myname@gmail.com is more awesome than Myname@yahoo.com. Having your own domain name is the most awesome, and having an AOL domain is the least awesome.

How interesting. Smug hipsters, no longer content with merely turning clothes and gadgets into status totems, have now made email domains into a minefield of angst and inadequacy. According to their resident expert, having an AOL email account means that you're probably seventy years old and haven't changed your email address since 1997. Well, I'm not seventy, but I haven't changed my email address in years - since everyone knows this one, it seems easier to keep it than to change it just to fit in with a bunch of idiotic techno-hipsters. And somehow I really don't think that getting my own domain name will make me a different person in the morning.

What fun it must be to live in a world where everything, literally everything, is some kind of status struggle, where lives and reputations hinge on having the right email address, listening to the right kind of music, or driving the right kind of car.

They go to the store to buy paper plates, and it's all so damned elite. "These paper plates are made from the finest Canadian boreal fir trees, and are processed without bleach in a carbon-neutral plant employing dispossessed Cambodian smallholders." Or, "These paper plates are hand-made by soulful artists in Brooklyn, with whom I've gotten severely gassed on crappy American beer." Geez. How can I possibly compete with that, when my main criteria for buying paper plates is finding ones thick enough that the hot food doesn't fry my genitals when I eat dinner in front of the TV?

There are, I believe, certain experiences one goes through in life that put things like that into proper perspective. Once, when I was going through chemo, my innards were so devastated I had diarrhea and I had to throw up at the same time. As distasteful as it sounds, I had to decide (and right sharply at that) which spurting end of me was most profitably aimed at the toilet. Do that a few times and you realize that all your hipster pretensions, all your yuppie status displays, all your elite stances don't make any difference at all.

Ultimately, all that matters is which end you aim at the toilet.

PET Scan

I have another PET scan Monday morning - at least I think I do. The oncology clinic called back and confirmed the scan, so I guess it's really going to happen this time. Scheduling PET scans is more ticklish than most medical procedures because of the brief half-life of the radioactive materials involved - in this case, a radioactive isotope of fluorine masquerading as oxygen, I believe. It doesn't exist in nature and has to be whipped up in a cyclotron, which I find endlessly interesting. In fact, I find the whole notion of beta decay endlessly interesting. How does it do that? And why??

I guess if we knew why beta decay happened, we'd all be wiser.

Anyway, I have no symptoms of cancer, so I expect the PET scan to be something of a formality. My leg is still somewhat swollen and sullenly uncooperative, but I think that's just a fact of life. I don't seem to have any bumps, lumps, night sweats, unexplained itches or that odd subliminal feeling that my body is up to something stupid.

But you never know, and if it's all right with everyone, I think I'll "go ahead on" (as Joe Don Baker said) and worry about it anyway, just in case. I personally find PET scans painless and restful, but I also find the business of waiting for the results quite stressful. I remember once I was waiting for a biopsy result to come back. I knew I still had cancer - I could feel the nodes in my neck and groin - so there wasn't that much stress. I knew I still had cancer; all the test could do was confirm what I already knew. But when you think you don't have cancer, the tests become even more stressful. You want good news so bad you can taste it, but at the same time, cancer has a weird inevitability that preys on the mind. It's like trying to keep Bermuda grass out of the garden - sure, there's no Bermuda in there now, but all it takes is one itty-bitty little Bermuda seed floating on the breeze and you've got real work on your hands. And all it takes is one mutant B lymphocyte to get a wild hair, and it all starts over again.

Back when I was going through chemo I used to listen to the song "Step Up" by Drowning Pool. I'm not a fan of the Drowning Pool ouerve, but that song had a certain accessibility, and it served as well as any other as a chemo fight song. But then I made the mistake of viewing the music video for it a few weeks ago. Oh dear. What is that thing on that guy's chin? And they're all so noodley!

I'm tempted to declare "Runes To My Memory" by Amon Amarth as the new fight song, because I happen to really like that song, and at least the guys in the band are fairly big and tough-looking. But I'm not sure the message of the song is one that I want sent down to my immune system. I want those little T-cells and whatnot to go around and kick the crap out of my mutant B lymphocytes, not sit around lamenting the fact that they're dying next to a river deep in the land of the Rus and they'll never make it home.

"Gods Of War Arise" by Amon Amarth might be a better choice. (In case you haven't noticed, I've been listening to Amon Amarth a good deal lately. Normally I just pick and choose the one or two Amon Amarth songs that I like, but I was fiddling with one of those gadgets that broadcasts your iPod on an unused FM radio station, and inasmuch as I was going about 70 miles per hour on the freeway, I didn't think that screwing around with the iPod was such a hot idea. So I just let it play, and the song "Asator" came on. I'd never really listened to it all the way through, and it really isn't that good, but about halfway through they drop into a thrashy sort of riff that kind of reminds me of "Dark Transmission" by Vader (or "Trans Dark Mission" as they say more than once). And yes, that's a good thing. So I've been listening to that Amon Amarth album ever since, trying to see what other good things I've missed.)

Getting Ready for Thanksgiving

It occurs to me that this is the first Thanksgiving in a long time when I haven't felt bad for one reason or another. Thanksgiving 2008 was ruined because I had advanced cancer and didn't know it; I only knew I was a wreck. Thanksgiving 2009 was ruined because I was rushing back and forth from the hospital getting ready for the first bone marrow transplant. Or actually having it, I don't really remember.

So I intend to celebrate this year in a way that makes up for the last two years. I may eat the whole goddamned pie, just because.

Table Finis

The table project is at an end. Not bad for just goofing around. Professionals and experts will no doubt spot a million things wrong with it, but if they'd seen it in the "before" state, even they'd have to say it was an improvement.

Unless they like gloss black furniture.

Not Such A Bummer

My wife's table-thing, after being stripped, sanded, stained, and given one coat of varnish. Tomorrow I'll sand the varnish lightly and give it another dose, and will repeat that until nausea sets in or she demands that I give it back. Lots better than the old gloss black paint, if I do say so myself.

Bummer

Bummer. It doesn't look too bad in this picture, but that tire is roont, as they say. There's a rip in the sidewall and the valve stem actually sucked back in through the hole in the rim and vanished (yes, it's so old it isn't tubeless). Drat.

Restart

I haven't done much around the house in the last few years. It's hard to attend to various jobs, tasks and chores when your sternum has just been sawed apart, or when you're so messed up from ESHAP chemotherapy you hallucinate that all your skin has fallen off, or when the tandem bone marrow transplant renders you so weak you can't walk twenty feet without stopping.

But I'm feeling much better these days, and I'm starting to do more things. I still get pretty tired if I do too much, and I still have occasional outbreaks of the blackest sort of depression - a gift of chemo, I'm sure. But I try to work through these things, and by and large I succeed. There are still things I can't do very well because my leg is uncooperative, and I don't have a whole lot of cardiopulmonary reserve yet. But I try.

I'm trying to emulate our neighbor, Doug. I'm not sure where Doug is from. Oklahoma, judging from his accent. But wherever he's from, he's tough. He isn't a big man by any means, but he's tough and he just won't quit. Something happened to his shoulder and he's basically lost the use of one arm completely, but he still goes up ladders and drags bales of hay off the top of his haystack with only one functional arm. I'm not sure I could do that. Not because bales of hay are too heavy, but because I have acrophobia and find the experience of being on top of a tall ladder most unpleasant.

As Justin McKee would say, "He's tougher than boiled owl."

I'm not as tough as boiled owl. But I'm trying.

X-15

And now, just because, a photograph of an X-15 high speed research aircraft, taken just at the moment of release from its NB-52 carrier aircraft, probably somewhere over southwestern Nevada. The photograph was probably taken in the early 1960s. Note the white astronaut helmet of the pilot barely visible through the window - yes, there's really a guy in there, and he's about to light the fire on a rocket engine with a thrust of about 60,000 pounds, and in a scant few moments he's going to leave that shiny F-104 Starfighter in the background behind like a dog leashed to a fireplug.

The X-15 has a long and distinguished record, racking up many "firsts" and a very solid body of research data in its 199 flights. Until the first flight of the Space Shuttle, it was the fastest and highest-flying manned winged aircraft ever flown, and most of its pilots are today considered astronauts even though for policy reasons NASA and the US Air Force didn't seem to give X-15 pilots astronaut wings.

Back when I was in elementary school, NASA used to send packages of photographic prints and data sheets to elementary schools. Whatever else could be said for NASA back then, they took excellent photographs, and their shiny prints were highly prized. All us kids were squabbling over the photographs in the NASA school kit, most of them color stuff from the later Gemini missions, but suddenly I saw a photograph of this strange black airplane. Back then I knew nothing about hypersonic flight, rocket engines, thermal issues in high speed flight, or much of anything else. I just knew that when I saw that picture of that airplane, I went oh... my... God...

I am still an X-15 junkie. Though I am widely quoted as saying that the Saturn V is the most impressive machine ever made by mere humans, the X-15 is still my favorite airplane. We just don't seem to do things like this any more. We (meaning NASA) seem to have gotten so caught up in PowerPoint presentations, program management mumbo-jumbo and political wrangling we just don't seem build things like the X-15 any more, or ask men like Pete Knight or Neil Armstrong to take them out see what they'll do.

What, No NDA?

I don't want to go into too much detail on who I work for, or what exactly I do. I don't necessarily have an NDA with my employer or contractor; suffice it to say that I'm a freelance contract test engineer and the fewer names I spill, the better.

Mainly I work in the area of airliner collision avoidance systems, known generally as "TCAS", which I think stands for "Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System". As an oversimplification, it's a two-part system, with each aircraft being equipped with a transponder and a TCAS interrogator. There are a bunch of different modes and sub-modes, but fundamentally an interrogator transmits an encoded signal that basically reads "Who are you and how high are you?" The transponder receivers the interrogation and transmits a reply that basically reads "This is me, and I'm at 15,000 feet."

The TCAS interrogator then works out the approximate range by which whisper-shout step triggered the reply and the approximate bearing by differential signal strength and phase as seen by four directional antennae. It then does some spooky math on all this and determines if the "intruder" (as the replying airplane is known) is too close or likely to get too close in the near future (and if so, it has what I like to think of as a "conniption fit" and instructs the flight crew to take evasive action - when the voice advisory system is working, you get all sorts of interesting voice messages, like CLIMB! CLIMB NOW! CLIMB, CROSSING, CLIMB! And then, at the very end, the meek little Clear of conflict... Voice advisory is a whole 'nuther subject. One of the voice messages you can get is the mysterious word "MINIMUM", which I believe is announced as the aircraft is nearing its decision height in an instrument approach, or perhaps decelerating toward its minimum safe flight speed, I'm not sure, though I think that one gets you "AIRSPEED". Anyway, a woman at work once asked me "Why does that thing keep saying enema, enema?")

It's more complicated than it sounds, especially when everything is working in full Mode-S mode and transferring data back and forth by means of DPSK modulation (I've always had this odd "wouldn't it be a fun world" fantasy where women are more impressed by the fact that I know that DPSK stands for differential phase shift keying than by some guy's fancy-shmancy Corvette, and where they say "Is that a long Mode-S interrogation you have there, or are you just happy to me?").

Anyway, among other things I design the hardware used to test and calibrate all this stuff, and write the software that runs the tests themselves. It's fun, except that the airways are now so crowded that there's a constant barrage of interrogations and replies flying back and forth. All of this traffic makes it hard to perform certain tests - when you're trying to get the unit to reply to a single interrogation while everyone else on the planet is transmitting away, well, it can be a mess. Synchronous garble is fun. Weird FRUIT is even more fun. I'm not exactly sure what FRUIT stands for - I've seen at least two different versions, but I prefer False Reply Uncorrelated In Time, meaning a reply that comes at a time when one is not expected...

The short version of all this hoohah is that to get a quiet enough environment (from a radio frequency point of view) it is sometimes necessary to set up your equipment and run your tests in a screen room. A screen room is just a metal room, almost always copper, usually either solid or what looks like window screen made out of copper. The power feeds have special filters, and even the air conditioning ducts have special traps in them that in some cases look like metal honeycombs, specially sized to reject radio signals at a particular frequency (in my line of work, the frequencies of interest are 1030 MHz and 1090 MHz). The doors are usually solid metal, and are secured with mammoth latches that wouldn't seem out of place on a battleship.

The point is that these screen rooms are like submarines. Once you're in and the door is latched, you're in your own private world. You can't see the outside world. You can't hear the outside world. Your cell phone doesn't have any bars at all. Wireless network devices don't work. And for some reason, such screen rooms are always either insufferably hot or bone-chillingly cold. I've worked in both. The hot ones are like being in a sauna; at the end of the day you're sweaty and kind of ripe, and all you really want to do is go home and take a shower. The cold ones are worse, if anything - your body takes on a deep, persistent chill that's very hard to break. You know your screen room is too cold when you go outside in a Phoenix summer just to warm up. And I note that ever since chemo, I'm much more sensitive to cold, though I tend to blame everything on chemo. "I dropped a hammer on my toe; damn I hate chemo!"

I've been working nights lately, meaning for the last couple of months. There are two real reasons for this. The first is that there's only one test station, and two different groups of people want to use it (Production, so they can test and ship boxes and make money, and me, so I can develop the remainder of the tests). The second is that there's less air traffic in general at night. In particular, the VFR traffic at the nearby airport stops, so there's just less of a mess in the airwaves. Though I don't think you need a transponder for strict VFR operation, they always do, and they're always a-squittering away in Mode-A or Mode-C, either of which can cause synchronous garble with Mode-S ("Crap! It missed three replies! I wish those flight students would turn off their transponders!") (One of the unsolved mysteries in this whole ATCRBS (Air Traffic Control Radar Beacon System) business is why an unsolicited reply is called a "squitter". But sometimes when someone tells me something I didn't want to know about, I catch myself thinking "Oh great, he's squittering again.")

My point, really, is that working nights in a copper screen room is doubly isolating. I hardly see anyone at all in the span of any given week. There are a few people loitering around the place in the late afternoon when I get there, but otherwise, it's just me, the cleaning crew, and the night guard. And since they are not typically fluent in English and I am not fluent in Spanish, there isn't much opportunity for conversation beyond the occasional friendly nod. It's just me and my Finnish and Polish death metal.

So those are my workdays lately: bone-chilling cold and levels of isolation that probably rival those of a nuclear submarine on patrol. But hey, at least the traffic is pretty light going home.

So the next time you're on approach to some airport and you sense that your airplane suddenly stops descending and climbs a little bit, look over at the passenger next to you and say "DPSK, you know..."

Sound Infidelity

I dislike my new headphones. I have trouble with "ear buds", frankly, and I prefer not to use them. They fall out, mainly. Either I have enormous ear canals that one could fit a squash into, or I have really tiny ear canals and the ear buds won't go in, but either way, they won't stay in.

So I normally listen to music using headphones. But the other day the right channel in my old headphones went out. Listening to music with one ear makes me constantly feel like I'm turning to the left, like some kind of 1960s NASA "nausea chair" experiment. So I got some new ones. They're bigger than the old ones. Beefier. And better at sealing out ambient noise. But man, they sound awful. The low end is gone. Just gone. The midrange is gone. All there is is treble, and a whole lot of overly bright, clashy treble at that. You know your bottom end is gone when you can't hear the double bass drum in an Amon Amarth song. And my old headphones were way loud - with everything turned up, they were loud enough to hear across the room, loud enough to probably cause me permanent loss. But these new ones are like a carpeted library - even with all the amps spun wide open and pumping out all the Joules they can, everything has a curiously hushed quality.*

It's a little like hearing the world as though it had been mixed by early primitive black metal bands. Everything sounds wiry, abraded, muddy...

So I tinkered with the various equalizer settings, hunting for something that would make the new headphones sound tolerable. Only one did: Spoken Word. Is it just me, or is there something fundamentally wrong with that?

* Back in my youth I had a component stereo system that included, among other things, an audio power amplifier that would pump about 2KWrms. It was so ugly I kept it in a closet all by itself, and its heat sinks were so heavy they caused a measurable perturbation in the orbit of Neptune. I spun it wide open one day because I really wanted to hear the shit out of the cellos in the opening part of Saturn by Holst. I don't know what the wavelength of the fundamental tone was (I read somewhere it was 32 feet), but it seemed to cause my whole house to resonate and the air conditioning vent fell clean out of the wall, screws and all.

Proposition 203

We've been getting a lot of phone calls from various groups trying to get us to vote against Proposition 203, which if passed would permit medically-supervised use of marijuana. I'm not here to debate the fine points of the Proposition itself, since it is my general belief that ballot propositions are so closely-worded you need to be a lawyer or a specialist to make sense of them.

But I do wish to make two points.

The first is that one of the phone calls against Prop 203 was funded by the Arizona Cardinals football team. Wait a second. You guys get the taxpayers to build you a new stadium, and then you turn into an advocacy group? Am I the only one who thinks that a commercial enterprise that was bankrolled in part by the taxpayers ought to have the good grace to keep its mouth firmly shut? And I ask you this - how many Cardinals fans have a brewski at the game? If you're going to piss and moan about destructive drugs, you may as well drop the hypocrisy and add alcohol to the list. Oh, but that might eat into the Cardinals bottom line! Can't have that.

The second is that when I was going through my many chemo treatments, if my oncologist (the inestimable Dr. Sarkodee-Adoo) had permitted me to smoke a little marijuana to help with the daunting side-effects of chemotherapy, I would have. In the words of Captain Willard from the movie Apocalypse Now, "Absolutely goddamn right." I'd probably have tried to eat a hash brownie, though it probably wouldn't have stayed down long enough to do any good.

And I'm hardly a stoner.

The pro-marijuana groups make me chuckle though. They always have some frail bald woman who is undergoing savage chemo and asks "Please, if it'll help me get through this hell, can I please smoke a little marijuana?" And right next to her are a bunch of stoners with scraggly hair and seed burns on their shirts saying "Like, it's totally natural, dude." Get your message in order here. Middle America, whose votes you need to pass things like this, sees only the stoners and thinks "Well, I'm not in favor of that." And so the frail bald woman continues to suffer.

It's like the gay rights advocacy groups. All Middle America remembers are the guys in tiny leather shorts dry-humping one another in the gay pride parades, and thus the message is lost. I suppose as a general proposition I accept the notion that people have the right to wear tiny leather shorts and dry-hump one another, but it isn't a question of what's right or not; it's a question of how you manage your message so you don't alienate people who are not generally committed to your cause in the first place.

And in closing, I offer this thought. The "War on Drugs" has failed. Prohibition failed. All of these attempts to legislate morality inevitably fail. At what point does one accept the inevitable - and tax it appropriately? Personally, I'd rather marijuana be legal, regulated and taxed than see all that money flow into the hands of drug cartels and smugglers. Since it is obvious that marijuana use cannot ever be stopped by passing ever more draconian laws, the choice (it seems to me) is who you want the money to go to: your local municipality, or the drug cartels. I know which way I lean.

Cunnel Quaritch

Heap Big Numbnuts

Just so we're on the same page, I'm referring to the character, not the actor. I don't know if this will be Stephen Lang's favorite role when he gets around to making a final summing-up of his career, but he, Stephen Lang, was certainly good in this role.

Cunnel Quaritch, on the other hand, is a complete numbnuts.

Proposition 1: The Navi have a single target they must defend. It's not just a high-value target, it's a maximum-value target.

Proposition 2: The Navi have no means of defending said maximum-value target from orbital bombardment.

Proposition 3: Cunnel Quaritch has at his disposal a groovy VTOL shuttle that is capable of not just exo-atmospheric flight, but actual orbital operations.

Proposition 4: Dropping a suitably large inert mass (say, a bulldozer) on the maximum-value target from orbit may not destroy it the first time around, but if you repeat it about 20 or 30 times, the job can eventually be considered done.

Proposition 5: There's more than enough cheddar in the ground to pay for all of this.

So what does Quaritch do?

Well, I guess it wouldn't be much of a movie if they did it the the way I think they should have. It would be more like the closing scenes of Metaluna in the movie This Island Earth, with those doggone Zagon meteors smashing everything flat, and we'd have to listen to Barber's Adagio for Strings as the Navi come to the belated understanding that sometimes even the fanciest flying dragon is no match for a seventy-ton bulldozer traveling at oh, say, 20,000 miles per hour. Physics be physics, man, whether you're flying the Hero Dragon or not.

My point is that once Quaritch and The Company (was it Weyland-Yutani, as in Aliens?) had decided that matters had degenerated into a "shit-fight", Quaritch made one serious operational blunder after another.

German generals made a sort of second career after World War Two at blaming everything on Hitler. It was Hitler's fault the British Army got away at Dunkirk. It was Hitler's fault the Luftwaffe was unable to subdue the RAF. It was Hitler's fault that the Red Army handed them their hats at Stalingrad. It was Hitler's fault that nobody could come up with a good answer to the USAAF and RAF bomber offensives. It was Hitler's fault the cream of the German Army got plowed into the topsoil at Kursk. It was Hitler's fault that German radar research was so bad they never realized that the British were using high-frequency centimetric radar against German U-boats. Of course, this wasn't all Hitler's fault, but when you've got an opportunity to offload blame on someone that nobody will stand up for and defend, you take it. (If I were Iraqi, for example, I'd blame my fallen arches on Saddam Hussein, and who would argue otherwise?)

But in the case of Avatar, Quaritch owns all the command mistakes.

People occasionally accuse me of siding with the Company in the movie. That's not necessarily true - my own feelings on the matter are complex, but somewhere in amongst them is the understanding that the Company could give me electricity and the Navi could not, and that's a pretty powerful argument in favor of collaboration. But in any event, my real point is that contrary to the "life lessons" people think they've taken away from the movie, naturalistic spiritual harmony counts for exactly squat in the face of extremely high kinetic energies.

There You Have It

Figure 1: Sports Fan

Figure 2: Star Trek Fans

I trust that no further commentary from me is necessary.

By Grabthar's Hammer

The forgotten (well, not so forgotten) classic, Galaxyquest. One thing I have to say for Star Trek fans is that, on top of being generally amiable and peaceable sorts, they're good sports. Galaxyquest spoofs the whole Trek "thing" fairly relentlessly, yet Trek fans (of which I am one) roll with it. Maybe we even see a little of ourselves in the movie, though in my case I'm more like the kid building the model than any of the actors (my sole acting experience involves being a Russian second lieutenant who takes a lead pill and collapses sideways into a bush - slim pickings as an acting resume).

Be it known, however, that a model of the NSEA Protector is now available, many years after its due time. But I hear that it's made out of ABS plastic or something of that ilk, not good old fashioned styrene. What up with that?

Week Off

I've been off for a week. The whole plant closed for a week - a "furlough", they called it, but it amounts to everyone being laid off for a week. Which is fine, I guess; I had plenty of advance warning and saved money for the unpaid week.

And in truth it was nice to have a week off. Now that I feel pretty good (for the first time in a few years) it's nice to get around to fixing all the things I'd been sort of neglecting. The lawn tractor wouldn't start. The big tractor had a flat tire. The garage was full of junk that needed to be sorted through and, for the most part, chucked. I had shelves to build, a barbecue to fix, rubber mats to move around. The essence of the matter is that for the first time in about three years I feel "normal", whatever that means, and it's such a hoot to do things again.

It's so much fun I actually manage to forget for days in a row that I had cancer, and may still have it. The thing that keeps reminding me of the real situation is my PET scan, scheduled for Wednesday. I'll be having PET scans for a long time to come, and I have no reason to believe that they'll actually find anything, but I still kind of tighten up at the thought. The worst stress is when I'm waiting for the results. The test itself is next to painless and I almost always fall asleep inside the machine, but the week-plus of waiting for the results isn't always a lot of fun.

But, I have no reason to believe I have cancer. No lumps, no bumps, no weird B-symptoms, no unexplained pain, no sudden fatigue. If anything, I keep feeling better, not worse. So I'm hopeful. I feel good enough, actually, that I think it's time to start thinking seriously about some kind of exercise program. I think I've regained all the strength and energy I'm ever going to by pursuing daily activities, and now it's time to move up to the next level.

I believe I'll start with a single 12-ounce curl, and see how that goes.

Had This Been An Actual Post...

Had this been an actual post, it would have contained something of merit. I'm really just testing the "tag" feature to see if I feel like sticking with it over time.

Three SF Horror Movies

Here are three science fiction/horror movies that I happen to like. Not the only three, by any means, but just three, picked more or less at random.

Pandorum

I've seen this movie a few times, and I'm still not entirely sure I know what it's about. The short version is that a bunch of humans are dispatched to a habitable planet in hibernation aboard a starship that looks like a bunch of Hula-Hoops. Things proceed downhill from there. There's racial degeneration, paranoia, blatant insanity, cannibalism, amnesia and no end of technical difficulties. It's dark. It's grim. It's frankly kinda confusing. It's gory. But it's atmospheric as the dickens, has more plot twists than a whole year of X-Man comics, and Antje Traue is no hardship to look at either (see above).

John Carpenter's The Thing

Scientists and various hangers-on at an Antarctic base sally forth to explore something they found buried under several thousand years of ice, and things go very badly indeed. It's a pretty good adaptation of Campbell's famous story Who Goes There? Better than the movie with James Arness was, anyway. It's way graphic and way gory, and the startling thing is that the effects were achieved practically, for the most part; there's no CG in the movie at all (other than a by today's standards laughable animation of alien cells taking over human cells) and I don't recall seeing any stop-motion work. I like the writing and acting (Kurt Russell - see above, regarding a frozen Norwegian - and Keith David in particular), and the spider-head alone is worth the price of a rental. But it's nihilistic in the end (if none of your actions matter, why bother to do anything at all?) and even I, a fairly seasoned horror movie watcher, am occasionally undone by the sheer grossness of it all.

Event Horizon

The spacecraft Event Horizon goes out to test a new kind of gravity propulsion system. It's supposed to open gateways to various other locales in our universe, but it opens what amounts to a portal to Hell. When it returns, it comes back with more aboard it than when it left, if you get my drift. It's easy to dismiss as a cross between Alien and Hellraiser, and the last third of the movie suffers; it stops being weird and turns into just another hero-versus-monster movie, and not a particularly good one at that. But when it's being weird and atmospheric, it's tastily weird and atmospheric. Event Horizon is like a bag of Cheetos - it isn't very good for me, and it leaves a residue that can only be removed with athletic hand-scrubbing, but I still indulge from time to time.

Four SF Movies

Four of my favorite science fiction movies, presented in no particular order and with no particular rhyme or reason.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars

This was a surprisingly faithful retelling of the famous novel, though with certain exceptions, such as the fact that Friday apparently hails from Alpha Centauri and I personally do not recall slavers in manta-ray ships cruising around in the novel. I mostly remember the rather dramatic backgrounds (matte paintings, but good ones) and the sense of menace when the alien slavers in their ships (which look like recycled War of the Worlds props) appear in the black sky. The matte paintings and the locations give Mars a certain scale and presence that I quite like. Some detect in it the malign hand of European imperialism, but come on, sometimes an SF movie is just an SF movie.

2001: A Space Odyssey

My dad hated this movie. Hated it. From the moment we first watched it on a hot summer night at a drive-in theater he hated it, and referred to the entire genre from that point forward as "science friction". Dad was an otherwise honorable man, though, so we smile benignly at his lack of respect for what is truly a landmark in science fiction. Its special effects remain good to this very day, but mostly I like its sense of purpose and calm rationality - it presents a near future where policy is made by rational people with huge brains, not dominated by the sleazy doings of a bunch of celebrity idiots who wouldn't know a magnetic anomaly if one bit them on the ass. It also captures some of the mystical element I detect in some of Arthur C. Clarke's novels, and I for one wasn't bothered by the "confusing" ending. And the scene where Dave "lobotomizes" HAL remains pretty disturbing, almost half a century later - I still don't know why I feel sorry for a murderous computer, but I do. Its sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact abandoned much of the Utopian rationalism of 2001 and portrayed a world poised on the brink of annihilation at the hands of squabbling child-like Superpowers, but it isn't bad either. Not at good as 2001, but not bad.

5,000,000 Years to Earth

Another classic from the mid-1960s. Here, engineers digging a new tunnel for the London Underground find what they think is an unexploded German bomb from the war. Turns out it's something much more interesting: an ancient telepathic spacecraft from Mars that can change colors, makes funny noises, and causes a giant electrical mirage of one of the telepathic Martian mantis-creatures to loom over London like a bad omen. There's a lot to like about this movie, not least of which is the fact that the hero is a middle-aged scientist with a beard and a tweed jacket (see above) who may or may not actually be mad. It has it all. Science versus the military-industrial complex, paranoia, telepathy, ancient astronauts, ethnic cleansing, demon possession, mysterious substances, and a hero holding a teacup (again, see above). And how many times do you see a movie where the alien menace is terminated with the assistance of a giant crane? 'Nuff said.

Alien

Truly one of the scariest movies I've ever seen, it retells the (grim) adventures of the crew of the Nostromo after the ship is re-routed to investigate a rescue beacon. Turns out (Aha! Corporate malfeasance!) it's a warning beacon, and things don't go well from that point on. Critics complain it's more of a conventional horror movie than a science fiction movie, and maybe that's true. But it had a spaceship, so I think it's SF. If the future of 2001 is clean, orderly and rational, the future of Alien is grubby and workaday and kind of corrupt - probably a more accurate model of the future than 2001, now that I think about it. The Alien of title fame turns out to be a really tall, thin guy in a rubber suit, but the movie nonetheless manages to generate a very real sense of Lovecraft-style terror. By the standards of the 1970s it was a fountain of gruesome gore, and it still has moments that can make me writhe, but compared to the Saw franchise it's about as gory as He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.

New Religion

Every time I see an ad for the "Booty Pop" on TV, I think I should come up with a new religion, a religion whose first commandment is Thou Shalt Not Play Booty-Pop Commercials On TV While William Is Watching. I don't think that's an unreasonable commandment at all.

And while I'm on the subject, why, why, "Booty Pop"? It sounds like something you'd get from the ice cream man. "I'd like two bomb pops, a Fudgsicle, and a Booty Pop, please." What flavor is a Booty Pop anyway? No, don't even think about it. Think about something else. What kind of washing machine does Iron Man use.... Anything...

But maybe it would be fun to develop a new religion anyway, even without Booty Pop commercials. Not that I have any particularly deep spiritual insight to offer - the best I can come up with is the vague statement "Try not to be a butt-head all of the time." People seem to think that being a cancer survivor gives you some kind of ineffable insight into the human condition and the nature of the soul. If so, I'm still waiting for my package of insight to arrive in the mail; as near as I can tell, I'm not any more advanced spiritually now than I was before cancer came along.

But having said that, the tax-exempt status of being a religion is tempting, isn't it?

I used to be something of a hobbyist of bogus geek pseudo-religions, of which there were several, including the Church of the Sub-Genius and Discordianism. But lately (meaning within the last ten years or so) trips to the Sub-Genius website leave me feeling a little uncomfortable. It's so odd and so forced; it's like being the only sober person in a room full of drunks who are all screaming with laughter at a joke that just isn't that funny. In the words of Michael J. Nelson, they pulled up a stool next to that joke and milked it for all it was worth, and then some.

Okay, here's another potential commandment: Thou Shalt Not Make Movies That Have Fight Scenes In Slow Motion.

I'm open to suggestion.

Is That A Behemoth?

Is that a Behemoth on your iPod, or are you just happy to hear me?

I am utterly fascinated by my deep and abiding liking for metal music. It's so strange and unexpected. And it keeps getting worse. I note among many of my friends a tendency for musical tastes to mellow over time, and I catch them saying things like "Yeah, James Taylor really rocked out at the concert last night." Not that there's anything wrong with James Taylor. I just can't figure out why all my peers seem to mellow, and I find myself sinking deeper and deeper into the quagmire of underground metal.

Not that I go to "shows" or try to blend into the "scene", or whatever they call such things these days. Metal as a fashion statement is pretty hideous, and metal as a lifestyle is pretty unappealing. I just like the music; I have no particular use for its accessories. I don't even own any metal t-shirts, which are apparently obligatory if you're to fit in, and I often find myself in the position of listening to extreme underground metal while wearing button-down shirts and white sneakers. I don't have much hair, and I can't even head-bang without getting dizzy and staggering around like a hugely oversized Weeble.

The whole black metal "thing" gets particularly silly. I don't know if the musicians still use corpse-paint makeup and adopt odd nomes d'metal like Count Grishnakh or Quorthon or Euronymous. But the whole over-the-top Satanism of black metal seems particularly affected, trite and dumb to me, and I don't think that has gone away. There are black metal bands that I enjoy listening to, but the whole cultural edifice erected over the music is pretty silly, if you ask me. (If you want to know, I prefer Mayhem to Emperor, so you know where I come down on the whole "symphonic black metal" question.)

I really don't inflict my metal on anyone else. I've posted one or two links to Insomnium songs on Facebook, but I can't see what good could possibly come from trying to get anyone I know to listen to Amon Amarth, Mayhem, or Vader. (I don't care for music videos in general, and I generally hate metal music videos. The other day I watched the video for the Metallica cover of the old Bob Seger classic "Turn The Page" and it was some strange business apparently involving prostitution and domestic abuse, neither of which have anything to do with the song. It may sound pretentious, but I generally prefer my own mental images to the quotidian nonsense the director slaps together.) And while I might like the music to "Gods of War Arise", my friends might listen to the words and say "You know, they're not sending a particularly good message there..." And they aren't. So I don't listen to the words, and I don't ask anyone else to listen to the music.

Tonight I'm listening to the album Evangelion by Behemoth. I think it's of a form called "blackened death metal", sort of a combination of the musical style of death metal and the vocal style and (goofy) thematic elements of black metal. It's pretty good - pretty heavy. And it's another milepost on my personal road to perdition: it's Polish. Most of the metal I listen to is either British, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish or Polish. Where's the American stuff?

American metal seems to me to take three forms these days, none of which I really care for. There's metalcore, which I can stand in small doses (though, curiously, I never seem to get tired of the album "Sounding the Seventh Trumpet" by Avenged Sevenfold, a commercial mainstream metalcore act that should make my flesh crawl). Then there's nu-metal, which I really don't like at all. And then there's industrial metal, made most famous by Marilyn Manson, but the only industrial act I really like is Rob Zombie.

So I have to go to Finland to get my metal these days. Or Poland. One curiosity of the metal world is why German metal is so bad. No offense to the Vaterland, but geez, how many power metal bands does one country need? And why do they always sound so happy?

One exception the never-make-a-friend-listen-to-metal rule is the album "Swansong" by Carcass. Carcass started out making grindy brutal death metal, including two albums that are pretty much must-owns for a death metal fan ("Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious" and "Heartwork"). I guess this got old, or they wanted to do something else, so they did the album "Swansong." Old-school Carcass fans apparently hate it - it moves away from the grindy dissonance of the earlier stuff and sounds somewhat more mainstream - what Iron Maiden would sound like if they had a vocalist that growled. It's a combination of death metal and mainstream rock and roll that I like to call "death and roll", even though this label was apparently claimed by Entombed with their album "Left Hand Path".

The point is that I've played the song R**K The Vote off the "Swansong" album to a few people as a test. If it disgusts them, there's no need to go any farther into the dark forest and the experiment stops there. If they can hang with that one, I play them The Hive from the album "Whoracle" by In Flames, which is a little more metallic but not extreme by any means. If they're still with me, then we move on into darker realms.

So far, nobody's even gotten past R**K The Vote.

Early Literature

I've been trying to remember the first science fiction story I ever read. And honestly, I don't remember. The first book I can remember reading had something to do with pumpkins and autumn leaves. The first book I can remember in halfway concrete terms was a kid's biography of the seven Mercury astronauts.

But the first science fiction I ever read that had a distinct impact on me was Arthur C. Clarke's Against the Fall of Night. It impressed me so much that soon I had dredged the family's old Royal typewriter out of the closet and was hammering away, using a ribbon so worn out the letters were no more than ghosts. I'd guess I was about twelve, but that's just a guess. The highest praise I can give a book is that it makes me want to write something equally good. The worst condemnation I can give a book is that it makes me think I could easily write something better. Against the Fall of Night definitely is of the former variety.

I've been a fan of Clarke ever since. I remember there was a lot of argument about the Clarke school of science fiction and the Asimov school. I was definitely a Clarke partisan. I liked Asimov well enough (though I never actually made it all the way through the hefty Foundation business), but if I had to pick one author to have dinner with, it would have been Clarke. I particularly liked the fact that his science fiction has all the usual technical elements, but it also had a strong metaphysical component, something that I thought was lacking in the Asimov/Niven tradition. That metaphysical element was present in Against the Fall of Night and would eventually reach fruition in the masterful Childhood's End.

It doesn't seem to me that science fiction today has figures like Arthur C. Clarke any more. It seems that everything I've read lately (meaning, since about 1985) falls into one of about four categories:

1. Hard science fiction in the manner of The Integral Trees, which is interesting as an intellectual exercise but not very much fun as a story. This also includes the later Ringworld novels, which I didn't find very compelling.

2. Cyberpunk stuff, where the authors try to imitate the power and style of William Gibson's short stories Burning Chrome and Johnny Mnemonic and fail every time.

3. Alternate history stuff of the Harry Turtledove ilk, which I find interesting for a little while, but these "what if Julius Caesar had a Piper Cub" speculations are a bit like shoestring potatoes - good at first, but I don't want the whole can, and they aren't good for me anyway. (Curiously, I had a cat that loved shoestring potatoes and got pretty good at hooking them out of the can with an extended claw. Maybe she would have finished the World At War series.)

4. Avant garde stuff that tries so hard to be "unconventional" I can never seem to figure out what's going on. Such stuff often takes on weird textual forms - multiple levels of indenting, lack of capital letters, strange out-of-context sentences that may well be snippets from a Maytag washing machine manual for all I can tell.

Where are the novels like Childhood's End these days?