2012

I love end-of-the-world theories. I never believe them, but I love them, in the same way that I loved the SF novel Rendezvous With Rama or the movie The Road Warrior. A story doesn't have to be plausible, or even possible in the strict sense of the world, to be enjoyable.

The short version of the 2012 End Of The World Theory is this: that on some day in the year 2012, the Mayan "Long Count" calendar will "max out" (or "overflow", as computer scientists would put it). When the Long Count overflows, time will end, the world will be destroyed, and pigs will fly (among other things).

The Mayans had three calendars. There was a 260-day sacred calendar, based perhaps on observations of the planet Venus. Then there was a 365-day secular calender. These were "geared together" in such a way that a single named day wouldn't recur in that system for 52 years - but the difficulty was that the two geared calendars couldn't distinguish one 52-year cycle from any other. You could specify a single day within the 52-year cycle, but you couldn't specify which 52-year cycle you were talking about (52 years is a long time, but it was possible and I'm sure it happened that an individual's lifespan exceeded a single 52-year cycle, so it wasn't a strictly academic problem).

To address this problem, the Maya developed the "Long Count", a sequential count of days starting somewhere in the year 3114 BC. The count was recorded in a number that looks a lot like a modern IP address, in the form of century.decade.year.month.day, such as 32.9.11.2.12. Supposedly this way of recording dates will overflow in 2012, signaling the end of days and the Phoenix Suns winning an NBA championship.

But according to what I've read, the Mayan priests who developed and maintained the calenders knew that the system would eventually overflow, and went ahead and calculated up another nineteen named periods of time beyond the century, culminating in the alautan, a period of time lasting about 63 million years. In other words, recognizing that eventually the "five-digit" Long Count would overflow, they cheerfully permitted it to simply add more digits as required. So 2012 does not signal the end of days and the Phoenix Suns winning anything; it merely represents the year that the sixth digit of the notation rolls over from zero to one. Consult Appendix D of the book 1491 by Charles C. Mann for a concise example.

My high school math thus suggests that the system, with its nineteen named time periods, should be able to enumerate 126 million years minus one day, give or take - that is, it'll remain functional until the year 125,997,000 AD, give or take a little. In other words, the problem of the Long Count overflowing is one we can comfortably put off for a few million years...

But you can't tell the nuts anything. 2012 has become a key feature in the nutcase view of the world, a view that now seems to include crystal skulls, UFOs, crop circles, Sedona-style vortices and other pseudo-spiritual gewgawry. In same way that "Y2K" became the mating call of survivalists in the late 1990s, "2012" has become the mating call of that fringe element in society that seems to have a particular taste for end-of-the-world theories.

While I'm at it, let me say that I think we as a society should be able to levy a Stupidity Tax on people who misuse the word apocalypse. Apocalypse is a Greek word meaning "revelation"; it doesn't refer to the end of the world at all. Nor does "Armageddon" for that matter either; Armageddon was the name of an ancient city-state and hill in modern-day Israel. I think any time some maroon refers to the end of the world as an apocalypse or an armageddon, he (or she) should have to pay the nearest sane person a five-dollar Stupidity Tax. These should even be additive - someone who refers to the "2012 Apocalypse" should have to pay a ten dollar Stupidity Tax, five dollars for misusing the word apocalypse and five dollars for not taking the time to understand what the Long Count is and how it really works.

Culling The Herd

Every now and then I read about some group of off-road enthusiasts who try to make themselves more palatable to the population at large by repairing trails, picking up trash, or issuing press releases urging their members to be courteous and to obey property laws. I'm all in favor of that. As a former dirt biker myself, I have no problem with people enjoying themselves with off-road vehicles. But I happen to think that their efforts are doomed by the fact that a significant population of quad owners are jerkwads. I don't know of it's 10% or 40% or what, but I'd estimate that at least a quarter of all the quad owners I've come into contact with in the last few years have, shall we say, taken their social cues from NASCAR.

There was the guy who, when told that he was trespassing on private property, said "So?"

It's not like we have a huge spread either. We own two and a half acres of land, so it's not as though we're running the Ponderosa Ranch here.

Or the guy who tried to argue with me that he had the perfect right to ride on my land because it happens to include a portion of a dry wash and was thus "public property". He got all red-faced and ornery about it too, apparently believing that it was better to try to intimidate his way into riding on my property than to simply go out in the desert where tens of thousands of acres of actual public land awaited him.

Or the guys who tore down our "No Trespassing" signs and threw them in the bushes, or the guys who dismantled and moved aside the barricade we put up to replace the signs, or the guys who can't find anything else to do with their quads except spin doughnuts on the gravel road and tear it to hell, or the guys who can't seem to find anywhere to blubber back and forth on their quads than six inches beyond my property line, back and forth, back and forth, all damn day, pausing only long enough to throw down another six pack of cut-rate discount beer.

So while I applaud the efforts of concerned off-road enthusiasts to give their hobby a better political smell, I don't think they'll succeed until they cull their own herd. I don't know how many of these boobs they'd have to kill, but maybe after rubbing out a few thousand of them the rest would get the idea. Every time I hear off-roaders crying about how they're being systematically shut out of this or that area, I can't help but think "You know, if some of you guys didn't act like assholes and didn't comport yourselves as the lords of creation because you've got quads, maybe you wouldn't be systematically shut out."

Not that quads and off-roading are the only offenders. Every hobby and pastime has its proportion of assholes, and the "normal" members of that hobby or pastime should be given extraordinary powers to thin out the jerks. I once entered a model of a Chieftain main battle tank in Iranian markings in a model contest, only to be told in a highly deprecatory manner that "Iranian Centurions were never that color." Oh yeah? First of all, it's a Chieftain, not a Centurion. Second, how the hell do you know what color Iranian tanks are painted? Served in the Pasdaran Baseej, have you? One should be permitted - expected - perhaps even required - to drop such people on the spot with a single well-aimed shot. (Nobody has any real clue exactly what WWII German airplane colors like "grauviolett" really looked like, but you'll still run into self-satisfied turds who insist that they know.)

One of my favorites was the owner of a hobby shop (I won't divulge names) who suffered from Panzer Lust. The characteristic features of Panzer Lust are a bizarre fixation on German tanks from World War Two and a tendency to say things like "The Germans had the most powerful military machine in the world..." (A statement which any sane person would recognize as nonsense, considering the truly unparalleled size, power and reach of the US military in World War Two.) Anyhow, in the closing stages of World War Two German engineers developed a superheavy tank that German tankers nicknamed Maus. Maus is pronounced "mouse" and in fact means mouse; the German tankers intended for the nickname to be ironic, considering the vast size, inordinate weight and general clumsiness of the superheavy tank. But this guy, the guy with the Panzer Lust, proceeded to tell his cronies in the hobby shop about the great features of the tank, which he consistently mis-pronounced as Maws, clearly suggesting to his credulous lackies that it was somehow related to the Maws of Death. Anyhow, as he was going on about how if the Germans had only built ten or fifteen more of them they could have thrown the stupid smelly Russians all the way back to Moscow, I found myself wishing that I had been granted what the Romans called postestas maior so I could have culled the herd.

Panzer Lust really irritates me, mostly because I can't tell it from low-grade Nazi Worship.

Once I was in a wargame store where the clerk and his chubby, sebaceous, ungroomed cohorts were having a fairly impassioned discussion of what exactly they should do to celebrate Rommel's Birthday. Last time I checked, Rommel was a Nazi who fought for the most evil regime in modern history (and maybe the most evil regime ever). But there they were, debating whether they should have burgers or brats, and whether they should play Panzerarmee Afrika or Tobruk to celebrate. These guys weren't physically intimidating, nor were they assholes in the usual sense, but still, Rommel's Birthday? What's next, Zyklon-B Day?

The need for cullage even extends into music. I once read a quote from a black metal drummer who calls himself Hellhammer, where he said something like "I was playing in the shit band Entombed..." BLAM! Time for that to end. If Entombed was such a shit band, what were you doing in it? And I think that any band which records a song that includes the lyric "Yeah!" needs to be culled. Or bands that mention themselves, or who write "concert songs" that consist of basically nothing but a list of cities, so that no matter where they go they can get a cheap roar from the crowd (and, if Hoboken isn't on the list, they can simply swap Holbrook out and get a cheap roar anyway).

I'm drifting off topic.

Mainly, I'm just complaining that there seems to be a lot more stupidity out and about these days than in the past, and that pop culture makes virtues of stupidity and confrontational nastiness. I don't like that development. And if you don't like it, I'll punch you in the snoot! Oh no, they've gotten to me too!

Time to cull myself.

Orympics

I like watching the Winter Olympics on TV. More so than the Summer Olympics, at any rate. I especially like the strange and inexplicable events like luge, skeleton, biathalon, ski jumping and downhill skiing. How did ski jumping come about anyway? I can see how biathalon might have started among hunters in a snowy clime, but ski jumping? Was there a need in the old days to cross major rivers by jumping over them? But practicality and real-world meaning (or lack thereof) aside, I like watching those events.

But I don't care for ice dancing. I don't hate it. It doesn't make me break out in hives. But it just doesn't hold my interest, and sometimes I want to slap the announcers. "They're really dancing with power and conviction," one of the announcers said last night. How can you tell, one set of twizzles (their word, not mine) being about the same as any other? Or "They're really sinking into their knees." Yeah, right. The jargon of ice dancing is stupid, and the event itself is nothing more than a popularity contest (I contend that any sport whose outcome is determined by judges is nothing more than a popularity contest in the end. Dick Button gets all defensive about that point and says that if you're going to dislike ice dancing because it's a judged event, you have to dislike all the other judged events.

I'm cool with that. I'm all for sticking to sports that are determined by objective criteria - distance, time, speed, quantitative measurements that don't depend on the whim or mood of the ruler or clock. (The terms "figure skating" and "judging scandal" are so closely linked in my mind I have a hard time telling them apart.)

Maybe I'd like ice dancing more if I was a pubescent girl or gay, groups not normally known for sartorial moderation and for whom the costumes are probably spiffy and not, as in my case, foppishly annoying. Or if they leaped 140 meters in a single go, or if they had to stop in mid-twizzle and mow down lemon-sized targets with a .22 rifle, or if they suddenly accelerated to 92 miles per hour and had to negotiate banked turns. But no, it's all scarves and twizzles and fabulously overwrought commentary from the announcers.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it's hard to do, and I don't hate it. It just doesn't interest me, and doesn't in my mind repay its own hype. I'd just much rather watch ski jumping and wonder what sort of immense clanging brass cojones it requires to step off that little couch-like thing on the ramp and commit yourself to a jump spanning 130+ meters. Or watch people ski cross-country till their heart rates reach about two billion beats per minute, and then have to shoot accurately.

Drat

I do a lot of writing - not professionally, by any means, but certainly a lot of amateur writing. I used to keep the documents on my hard drive and occasionally copy them to a thumb drive as a backup, but then I got into the bad habit of just keeping them on the thumb drive and not having any local copies. Sure as crabgrass, about a week ago my thumb drive got corrupted and I lost everything. Well, not everything. I had a second thumb drive with an emergency backup from June of 2008, so I was able to recover everything up to that date.

But I've lost everything between June 2008 and today. That's a roughly 18-month slice of my life, and that's kind of annoying. I wasn't diagnosed with cancer until December 2008, so I lost everything I ever wrote about cancer, chemotherapy and mortality, which maybe isn't that bad a deal; who needs to dwell on that?

But I am highly annoyed that I now have an 18-month gap in my model diary. One of my more peculiar habits is keeping track of my modeling hobby in an immense seventy-page (at last count) text file. It includes every model I've finished since 1998, things I've learned, ideas, speculations, reviews, whiny complaints, the works. It isn't a serious loss - it is just a text file about a hobby, after all. But it does torque me that managed to keep this file intact for over ten years, through several different computers, only to lose 18 months of it because of a failed Geek Squad thumb drive.

So what's the moral of the story? There are two. A) Don't be so anal-retentive as to maintain a 70-page text file about your hobby, or B) if you must be so anal-retentive, don't forget to back the stupid thing up somewhere.

Dang it. Just dang it.

Blood and Hokum

I find that I don't care for the series Spartacus - Blood and Sand very much. It reminds me way too much of the movie 300, and that's a bad thing, since I think 300 was one of the worst movies ever made.

How's that for a brief review?

Baxter

I miss Baxter, our goofy orange cat. I'm allowed to play with the dogs a little, but so far I'm not allowed to be near cats. Apparently, despite their reputation for cleanliness, cats carry litter box residue on their paws and are for now pets non grata. Baxter has been confined to the spare bedroom while my immune system gets itself worked out, and I haven't seen him for months. The other day I crept into his bedroom just to see him, and found him sleeping in the closet, on top of a pad of foam rubber we bought for one craft project or another. He looked up at me, blinked, and hissed.

Fine, you little fink. I risk deadly infection to see you and you hiss at me? Jeez.

Meantime, I'm suffering from a horrible attack of nausea. Chemo, the gift that keeps on giving.

Shopping Carts

One of my stranger hobbies is virtual shopping. I go to the website of some company that sells stuff on the Internet and fill up the shopping cart. I leave the shopping cart full for a few days, then I empty it out and start over. Depending on what the website sells, I can easily get thousands of dollars of stuff in the cart, only to throw it all out and start over.

So the other night I went to a specialist tool distributor at www.micro-mark.com, which specializes in small tools for modelers, dollhouse builders and so forth. I filled my cart with about $400 in various things, then went to bed. But now my hobby may be biting me in the ass, because I went back today and just happened to look over the shopping cart, and I thought hey, I really do want all that stuff! All of a sudden I couldn't empty out the cart and start over, because all the stuff in the cart seemed impossibly cool (a miniaturized table saw? Oh yes!)

So here I sit, unable to click on the Empty Cart button, but unable to quite contenance clicking on the Check Out Now button.

Sigh. It's taking all the fun out of my shopping hobby.

Dietary Restrictions

One of the key features of a bone marrow transplant is that for a while the population of white blood cells (B lymphocytes, I think) in your blood drops to zero for several days. This disables roughly half of your immune system (there are two halves, which rely respectively on B lymphocytes and T lymphocytes) and leaves you at significant risk of illness and infection. Fortunately stem cells are industrious little buggers and six or seven days after being returned to your system, have implanted, reproduced, and completely rebuilt your population of white blood cells.

The practical result of this is that for a while you have to take fairly stringent measures to prevent illness and infection. You can't go to any sort of public function such as a concert or a movie. You have to avoid sick people like, well, the plague. You can't use knives or sharp instruments, as the slightest cut can result in disaster. You have to wear masks, take prophylactic antibiotics, and avoid cats (apparently because bacteria from their litter boxes lingers on their stinky little feet).

But the part that really galls is the list of dietary restrictions. No fresh vegetables of any kind. No fresh fruit, except basically bananas. No buffets. No fast food. No nuts (apparently nuts can and occasionally do carry the aflatoxin fungus). No restaurants. No leftovers. No pepper unless you put it in the food at the outset and cook it. No microwave ovens, when they argue don't heat foods evenly and leave pockets of potentially lethal bacteria here and there. About the only things you can really eat with a clear conscience are things that have been wildly overcooked to kill bacteria, or things out of cans, which I guess are wildly overcooked as a matter of manufacturing process.

Now I get around to my point. There's a Chinese buffet that we go to fairly often. Buffets are the kiss of death for someone with an impaired immune system, and they probably aren't good ideas for anyone at all. But I do happen to like Americanized Chinese food, and I rather miss the buffet and its ridiculous wonton soup (I call it ridiculous because I think it's 99.9% chicken broth and 0.1% other stuff).

Today I spent six hours at work, which was rather a long time. Afterwards I felt pretty good, so I went to the hobby shop and bought some glue (two kinds of glue, not that it matters). And on the way home I stopped at a menu-based Chinese restaurant called Big Heng to satisfy my months-old craving for Chinese food. Hey, it isn't a buffet, right? And they did clear me to eat at restaurants so long as I didn't eat anything raw. I brought dinner home, ate, and felt good enough to go outside and work on my Imhotep model for a while, till my bald head got uncomfortably cold.

My point - my real point - is that I did a lot today, and never really got that tired. Compared to the wretched ass-draggery I experienced last week, I feel really quite strong and rested. Is this just the result of taking it easy over the weekend, or is my body really getting stronger and fitter? I vote for the latter. And now that I have two kinds of glue, the sky's the limit.

Tubeless

I had my last Borg implant removed last week. The central line in the left side of my chest was removed quite some time ago, but I had the central line (technically a Hickman catheter) removed from my right side last week.

It's an amazing procedure. Now, bear in mind that the Hickman catheter consists of a plastic tube that goes up into your neck and then down into your superior vena cava, terminating just above the heart valve. This is as deeply embedded in one's circulatory system as anything can get. And how do you think they remove such a thing?

They grab it and yank it out. It's amazing to me that they could yank this thing out of my jugular vein without microsurgery and electrocautery and whatnot, but they not only can, they did. And it didn't even bleed. It was painful, but only momentarily, when the scar tissue let go.

Now I have groovy scars on my chest that look like old gunshot wounds, and it's ever so much easier to take a shower.

The Old Order

Here's something I wrote while I was in the hospital, presented here for no particular reason:

My mom bought me an ancient anthology of Isaac Asimov science fiction short stories at a yard sale for me to read while I was in the hospital. Read them I did. Asimov was never my favorite, but how can one argue with a man whose personal publishing career runs to some 500-plus volumes? He writes "idea stories", driven by interesting (or not) ideas or sometimes just bad puns, and never really gets too wrapped up in characters or even really plot.

But that's not the point. In reading this collection of short stories, I was put in mind of the gentle days of science fiction in general, which for me stretched from about 1968 to maybe 1988. Plenty of SF did I consume in those years, often simply *because* it was SF. Was it good? Doesn't matter; it said "SF" on the cover so I read it. I was even a partisan in the gentle debate between Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov on whether hair length was directly or inversely proportional to writing talent.

But for the last twenty years, I've been almost completely out of the habit of reading science fiction. The last true SF novel I read was one of those sly "you think it's by Arthur C. Clarke but it's really by someone else" efforts, and while I can't say that one single book killed my interest in SF, it is interesting that I haven't really been back since. Something changed in the mid-1980s, something that seemed to suck the enjoyment out of SF. Was it the nature of the literature that changed? Or was it just me, growing old and stodgy with a mortgage?

There's no way back into the past, and I don't think there's any way, or for that matter any reason, to try to rekindle a deep interest in science fiction. But there is a part of me that misses the old order, when Asimov and Clarke and Heinlein were the kings of the realm, when "new guys" (how that amuses me) like Larry Niven were trying to force their way into the popular culture of science fiction conventions, when Ringworld was fresh and everyone was still alive.

Still alive... They're all dead, you know. Almost all of them. Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Fred Saberhagen, Gordon Dickson, Robert Heinlein. All the masters of my youthful fling with SF are dead and gone, some of them dead and gone for a long time - Asimov died in 1992 and I didn't even know until I Googled him just the other day. Maybe what I miss isn't the old order of the well-regulated science fiction universe as it existed in the Seventies; maybe I just feel the passing of my own years and figure that missing the Old Masters of SF is somehow less self-absorbed than whimpering over my own inevitable aging.

Long Road Back

I've been back at work for three days, and I think I'm wearing down a little. I suppose that's to be expected - I had my bone marrow killed only about three weeks ago, so I guess it's normal to be tired a lot. But it's starting to frustrate me a little. I know I shouldn't expect too much of myself just yet, but it still annoys me from time to time that I'm not as strong as I was.

I'm always tired. I'm always cold. And I complain a lot too, apparently.

What really bugs me is that I seem to have forgotten how to paint a model. I've been working on the Moebius issue of Imhotep for a while, and it seems that everything I try is wrong. I bought the wrong colors of paint. I seem to have forgotten how to thin acrylic paint. I can't paint a straight line. It'll come back, I'm sure - I've been building models since I was seven, and surely forty years of experience can't vanish because of a little chemo and a few weeks in the hospital. But on top of being constantly tired and cold, it would be nice if I could at least paint something properly.

But let's look at it this way: where would I be today without the chemo? That puts things into perspective, doesn't it?