The Dust Storm Story

And now, by lack of popular demand, I present the dust storm story.

For many years we lived in a small house in Peoria, a suburb of Phoenix. Over those years I collected a lot of unbuilt kits, and when it came time to move, I packed all those kits into various boxes and put them in storage. Due to various scheduling problems, we had to be out of our old house before our new house was ready. In fact, we were out of our old house about a full year before our new house was ready. Two of those months were spent living in a long-term hotel near a Cajun restaurant, so all my stuff (along with pretty much everything else we owned except soap and clothes) had to go into storage. We rented a house and eventually moved there, but we knew that we would only be staying there for six months or so, just long enough for our new house to be finished.

To save money, I emptied out the storage lockers, but there didn't seem to be any point in unboxing everything in the rental house, because we would only be boxing it all right back up again. So the house was full of boxes, and the carport (no garage) was also full of boxes, many of them my boxes full of unbuilt kits.

In the late summer in central Arizona, a weather pattern known somewhat inaccurately as "the monsoon" starts. It gets humid, thunderstorms percolate all day, and by late afternoon storms of considerable power are common. Thunderstorms in central Arizona follow a certain pattern. First comes the dust, then the lightning, and then, if you're lucky, actual rain. Dust and lightning are guaranteed; rain is not.

So anyway, a storm came up, and it appeared to be pretty bad. You can usually gauge the power of a storm by the density and size of the wall of dust that precedes it, and this one looked bad. And there were all my boxes of kits on the carport, completely exposed to the oncoming wall of dust. We started to try to weight the boxes with rocks, but we were too late - soon the visibility had dropped to about twenty feet and the wind was starting to blow boxes around.

Then it got bad. I went out into the storm to try to corral a couple of model boxes that had blown off the carport, just in time for a whole box of kits to blow over and disgorge its contents in a particularly powerful gust of wind. The dust was so thick I couldn't see more than three or four feet in any direction. That is literally true and not hyperbole - at times I couldn't see my own feet for the dust. Model boxes, instruction sheets, decals, sprues and whatnot flew by me in the wind, and I grabbed randomly at what I could, stuffing the rescued bits and pieces into my shirt. In a way it was like netting fish - I didn't catch things, I just held my hands out in the stream of model parts and things blew into my hands.

It was very strange. I've never been in a white-out, but I can say I know what it must feel like, because I was in a tan-out. I couldn't see anything but myself. No houses, no horizon, no sky, nothing but orange-glowing tan dust and fluttering, skittering model parts. For a while I had only the haziest idea of where the house was, and that was only because I knew what general direction the wind had been blowing when the dust storm started.

After the wind let up I went scouting downwind and found sprues, instructions, empty boxes and other model junk in a "strewn field" that extended several hundred yards before the search was cut off because it crossed into private property. To this day I wonder what the owners made of the stuff they must surely have found on their property, stuck in fences or wedged in bushes. To this day I have a boxful of random model stuff I rescued from the dust storm, mostly bagged sprues of parts covered with talc-like dust. One bag of parts survived intact, but there was a hole in the bag and if you hold the bag up, it contains literally an inch of dust in the bottom.

It was terrible. I looked at myself in the mirror and I had turned completely tan from head to toe, except for my lips and eyes, which were ringed with dark mud. The wind had blown so much dust under the doors of the house that we left footprints in the dust on the floor. Dust had gotten into my car through the window seals, turning the grey interior tan.

Oh, those were the days. Sometimes when I look at the sprue bag with the inch of dust in the bottom I can actually remember what the dust tasted like, and it's not a good memory.

Six-Footers

When I start a model, I usually decide at the outset if I want to make a really nice display model, or if I'm just going to make something that will hang from the garage ceiling. I call these latter models "six-footers" because they look pretty good at a range of six feet.

The decision to make a model into a six-footer is usually determined by objective circumstances. Sometimes the kit is missing an important part, usually the canopy. Other times the kit is just really nasty, like the alleged F-84F Thunderstreak that Testors was hawking for a while. Or it's a kit that just doesn't seem to benefit from cockpit work, like the SR-71. You can do all the cockpit work you want, but you won't see any of it, so why bother?

Six-footers usually have their landing gear put away and no cockpit detail at all. I usually paint over the canopy when I paint the model, and later hand-paint the "glass" blue or black and cover it with a few coats of Future to make it glossy. This greatly reduces the amount of work required to finish a model, and I can concentrate on the things I like doing - overall painting and decaling - and avoid the things that I don't much like doing - masking canopies and working with landing gear.

This weekend I finished an MPM P-63 King Cobra, a Dragon Tornado ECR (the 1/144th scale one) and an Emhar F-94C Starfire. They were all six-footers, and all for a reason. I lost the canopy for the King Cobra and the Tornado, and had to carve passable replacements out of Durham's putty. I didn't like the level of detail in the F-94's landing gear or cockpit and decided not to bother.

This probably drives the purists nuts, but that's okay. Purists don't hang their models by fishing line from the ceiling of their garages anyway.

I have an old Arii P-51D Mustang that I was going to make into a six-footer, but as I looked at the parts it struck me that it was actually quite a nice model, and I put it back on the pile. Someday I'll finish it as a nice display model, unless of course I lose the canopy. Then all bets are off.

Also on my workbench is an old Dragon He-219 Uhu night fighter, which is also getting the six-footer treatment. Several parts were missing from this kit - remind me someday to tell the story about the dust storm - and I had to carve a new canopy and belly cannon tray out of Durhams, and tonight I made replacement "stag horn" radar antennae because I also lost the photoetched parts. It won't be as nice as it would have been had I not lost all those parts, but I did lose them, and now it's a case of having a fairly nice six-footer He-219 or throwing it away, because I won't buy aftermarket parts for it.

Lunacy-esta

So you're lying in bed, sleepless and disturbed because you have a "restless mind", whatever that means. Then in through the window flutters some horrid phosphorescent green thing that looks like a cross between a deep sea creature and a paramecium, the kind of horrible thing that seen in the clear light of day would make you reach for a can of Raid or call for a priest. But not to worry - this refulgent thing lights on your head and suddenly you fall sound asleep, leaving yourself entirely at the mercy of the Green Thing.

Where I come from, that's called "nightmare fuel".

We Americans are such pansies. We can't do anything for ourselves any more. Now we can't even sleep. Instead we toss and turn, mentally reviewing our to-do lists, replaying unpleasant phone calls, revisiting awkward social encounters, and driving ourselves mad with our strange combination of heroic self-importance and wilting lack of confidence. So we turn to sleep aids to accomplish what we can apparently no longer accomplish on our own. We invite glowing green fluttery things to enter our bedrooms, light on our foreheads, and do God knows what to our brains.

Where I come from, the only sleep aid I ever needed was Nyquil.

Now, there are certain people who have very good reasons for not being able to sleep very well, such as chronic pain (like my wife) or sleep apnea (like a friend's husband). I don't lump these people into the pansy category, and for them, inviting the glowing green deep-sea moth into the bedroom might be a boon. But I don't accept "a restless mind" as a reason for loss of sleep, and especially when the restless mind is consumed with nonsense like work to-do lists. I can understand being consumed with concern for an absent loved one, a sick friend, or even a pet who isn't doing well. But reliving telephone conversations and to-do lists and social snubs? In the immortal word of Paul von Hindenburg, "Phooey!"

Maybe I shouldn't say I don't accept it as a reason. It's closer to the truth to say that I don't understand it as a reason, because I really don't have that problem. Oh, now and then my mind will start to wrap itself around its own axle as it tries to work out financial issues or worries about this or that issue. But for me, anyway, stopping that kind of useless mental whirling is desperately easy.

Most often, if my mind seems like it wants to act up, I lie in bed and think about disassembling something and putting it back together, visualizing each step in sequence - removing the bolts one by one, cleaning the parts, punching out the new gaskets, and so on. It's boring, and that's really the point - I rarely get past the part where I get all the bolts out before I fall asleep. Common subjects are pulling the heads off a V-8 or pulling the engine out of a tractor, things that are very procedural and involve lots and lots of bolts. This technique is so powerful that if I really do want to lay in bed and reflect upon things for a while (and not infrequently I do) I have to be careful to not think about engines, bolts or wrenches.

But this is America, and we don't do things for ourselves. Why count sheep when you can take a pill that will count sheep, or phosphorescent green deep sea monstrosities, for you?

I'm not sure when it happened - I want to blame the 1990s - but all of a sudden having minor health issues became all the rage. Suddenly everyone had carpal tunnel syndrome, or chronic fatigue syndrome, or allergies to unusual things, or restless minds. This is really more a reflection of affluence than anything else, as working-class people generally can't afford to have carpal tunnel syndrome or neuroses or weird allergies. I'm not saying that allergies, carpal tunnel syndrome and chronic fatigue syndrome don't exist - but I am saying that I think the majority of alleged sufferers are faking it in the same way that they fake cell phone calls. I knew a woman who claimed to be allergic to, among other things, aluminum and "positive ions". Not negative ions, just the positive ones. And the positive ions gave her diarrhea, which only added to my amused puzzlement. And who doesn't have at least one friend who seems perfectly healthy in daily life, able to walk through malls and go bowling and carry new TVs into his house, but who suddenly has a bad back or a trick knee or a thyroid problem when you ask if he can help you move? (I had a friend whose usual excuse for getting out of any kind of physical work was "I hab a sinus infection." To which I once replied "Perhaps so, but you don't lift with your nose, do you?")

I know people who have real health issues - a friend with osteogenesis imperfecta, my wife with a failed hip replacement, a friend's husband with severe sleep apnea, a friend who is in the process of losing her lymphoma remission, a friend who had to have cardiac bypass surgery done at the age of 41, a co-worker who simultaneously got pregnant and was diagnosed with breast cancer* - and it irritates me when I see pansies on TV wrapping themselves in the mantle of wounded suffering as they display sleeplessness, the latest and trendiest malady du jour. Count your blessings, you pansies.

And now, I'm off to disassemble a John Deere 4020 in my mind.

*Knowing me is apparently bad for one's health.

The Shoe Monologue

On my way home from work, I traverse a four-mile stretch of practically deserted county road. It's rare that I see more than one car (other than my own) on this stretch of road, and if I see two, it is traditional to bellow "Holy Moses, where'd all this traffic come from??"

The road is straight and deserted, and I have plenty of time to observe the flora, fauna and footwear along the side of the road. Yes, footwear. I've spotted three shoes along the side of that road, and none of them match (this does not include the pair of shoes hanging from the telephone line).

I could understand seeing a pair of old shoes abandoned along the side of the road, but why three shoes, and mismatched shoes at that? I have visions of a three-legged alien with terrible fashion sense being hit by a dump truck on that road and leaving nothing but its shoes behind. Or maybe three different one-legged men. Or maybe a traveling shoe salesman.

And why shoes? I see no hats, no socks, no shirts, no mittens, no blazers, no trousers. Just shoes. Why do shoes end up abandoned along the road and not turtleneck sweaters or cowboy hats?

I can understand the pair of shoes hung over the telephone pole. What teenager growing up in a rural area hasn't tied the shoelaces of an old pair of sneakers together and tried to toss them over a power line? The fact that I never succeeded does not mean that I never tried to leave my mark on the world in that way.

But who would intentionally abandon a shoe on the side of the road? It just doesn't make sense to me. But maybe it doesn't have to.

Lost

I was quite disappointed with last night's episode of Lost. It wasn't the worst thing I've seen on TV, and even in its wretchedness it was better than American Idol at its best, but that's like saying double pneumonia isn't as bad as leukemia. It is true, but it is also irrelevant (to paraphrase a North Vietnamese official).

It just didn't seem to amount to anything. The whose business of Kate and What's-her-name being handcuffed together was a plot point so easy and artificial they might as well have gotten it out of the Chained Heat script vending machine. The whole thing was... I want to say silly, but that's not really the right word. Easy comes closer to what I'm trying to say. Not easy to film, or easy to act, but easy to write.

Last week's episode was largely irrelevant as a story, but it managed to produce a certain chill horror when they buried Nikki and Paulo alive. But this week's episode? I suppose it was supposed to be a significant advancement in the story, but mostly I found it overly convenient and generally unsatisfactory.

Case in point: Sawyer is a professional con man who made a living by charming women out of large sums of cash, but all of a sudden he turns into a shoe-scuffling dork when it comes time to talk to Claire. In the immortal words of Mike Nelson, "I call no way!"

According To The Amazing Rondo:

"You know a blog is lame when its author accounts for 85% of all its traffic."

- The Amazing Rondo

Losing It

Like most modelers, I buy more models than I finish, and that's saying something because as modelers go, I'm reasonably prolific. I've got about 150 kits heaped up in various piles awaiting their moment in the sun. The problem with this (or, should I say, one of the problems with this) is that I am prone to opening the boxes, reading the instructions, fiddling with the parts and gawking at the decals even though I have no intention of starting the kit any time soon.

This means that I tend to lose things. No, wait a minute, I have to rephrase that. This is America, after all, and America is all about avoiding personal responsibility. So I don't lose things. They are taken from me. Somewhere there's a shadowy team of corporate mercenaries on the government payroll and directed by "intelligences vast and cool" in UFOs that steal my decals, clear parts, instructions and the left front wheel from my dang Boss Nova drag car. It's not my fault I have about fifteen kits that I can no longer complete in the expected fashion because of missing parts.

Actually, in a way, it isn't all my fault. Some of this I blame on the roadrunners. Most people think the Roadrunner cartoon was an accurate depiction of roadrunners. They think they're cute, long-legged seed-eaters that go meep-meep and have a penchant for holding up sardonic signs. One hates to be a wet blanket, but the reality is that roadrunners are violent, ugly, menacing dinosaurs that would gladly eat my liver if they were just a tad bigger. They don't make cute sounds, they don't eat seeds, and they like to come into my workshop, get up in the shelves where my unbuilt kits are stored, and scatter them to the four winds as they scrape out places to hunker down. If I go to my workshop and see boxes all over the floor, I know there's a roadrunner in there somewhere; it's just a matter of finding it. They don't intimidate easily. I had to poke at one for a while with a yardstick before he finally left, and the whole time he snapped at me, made a hideous hissing screech, and flashed red cheek patches at me. I'm sure somewhere in his reptilian brain he was thinking "Oh, if only I had thumbs!" (Yes, I know roadrunners are birds and not reptiles, but seen up close, the reptile label seems more accurate.)

Oh, sure, and I suppose it's my fault I leave the door open too, huh? Pfft!

(I also think I have a pack rat. Every now and then I hear the scurrying of little feet and catch momentary glimpses of a small hairy thing darting behind boxes, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was the pack rat that swiped the canopy for my He-219 Owl night fighter right off my workbench. Oooh! Shiny! That's mine! I needs it! Someday I'll find the pack rat's stash, and I'll probably find all sorts of interesting things - the missing valve stem wrench, the missing He-219 canopy, the missing left front wheel from my drag car and - who knows? - maybe even my four-inch Crescent wrench.)

Oh well. Toss the He-219 onto the pile of stuff what can't be finished.

April Madness

Now that it's April, is March Madness over with? I confess I don't know. I am so disconnected from the world of organized sports I don't know who won the Tournament or for that matter if it's still going on or not. I don't know the record of the local NBA basketball team, and if I had to name four players on the team or face a swift and certain demise, it would be wise of me to make sure my affairs were in order.

I'm not anti-sports. I just don't care about sports. I get disoriented when I watch ESPN because they assume I have some minimum level of sports knowledge, and I just don't. They might as well be talking about organic chemistry or obscure topics in Zoroastrian thought for all the sense it makes to me. Sometimes they don't even seem to be speaking English - it's as though they've developed a special language called SportsJabber.

Ach, My Chest Hairs!

There's a part of me that appreciates tacky horror movies, and for the last couple of weeks I've had The Descent and Saw III on my shelf, waiting for the right moment. That moment came today, after I'd done my flood control earthmoving, my haystack moving, and moving of various other things and sorts.

So here's my capsule review: they're both better than trying to peel tape off your bare chest. How do I know this? Because I was... Oh, hell, there's no polite or tasteful way to say this, so I'll just say it. I'd bought a pre-packaged salad, the kind that comes in a clear plastic UFO and is sealed with tape, and I was naked, having just gotten out of the shower. Bat-21 was on TV, not that I like that movie (after a while the Bird Dog, do you read? radio chatter gets pretty tedious)... The point is that I was trying to eat a salad in bed while I was naked (or "taking an air bath" as Someone Famous once said) and I got the strip of tape that formerly held the salad UFO together stuck to the middle of my chest. I'm not particularly hirsute, but I'm even less hirsute now, the tape having removed approximately 33% of my chest hair from a strip an inch wide and six inches long.

So there's a visual you don't need - me eating a salad in bed in my altogether.

But I while I was at it I watched Saw III and The Descent. Goodness! And be warned that spoilers lurk beyond this point.

Neither one qualifies as "supernatural horror" and neither one generates any real horror. Mostly they generate squirming discomfort, though in different ways.

You know going in that Saw III is going to be full of outlandish traps, blood, screaming, ominously hoarse whispers, and protestations to the effect that Jigsaw doesn't murder anyone; his test subjects simply lack the "stuff" required to survive. And the movie delivers in that regard. The traps are suitably diabolical, there's a sufficiency of screaming and bleeding and bone-cracking, there are a few unexpected plot twists, and in the end the viewer comes away saying "Yes, this was very much congruent with the experience of having watched Saw and Saw II." I think my main criticism would be that it is relatively uninvolving - I didn't have any stake in the survival of anyone at all. The characters are all fairly flat and dull except for Amanda, and she's obviously a fruitcake. A buffly attractive fruitcake, but a fruitcake nevertheless. I also didn't think it matched the pinnacle of horror from Saw II, namely the pit full of hypodermic syringes. So, in short, it was dark, full of jerky camera moves, populated by relatively dull characters, and of interest mainly because it's a part of the Saw franchise. There were only two things that really took me by surprise and generated anything approaching real horror, the first being the revelation that Amanda is a cutter, and the second being Amanda taking a slug through the neck.

The Descent is a lot like The Cave only not underwater. It takes place in a cave that six oddly assorted women try to explore. Like The Cave, most of the real horror of The Descent is delivered by the environment, not the antagonist. The scenes of actual spelunking are pretty intense from that point of view - I'm not cut out to crawl through tiny passageways that are only barely shoulder-wide two miles below ground, so those scenes made my toes curl a bit. Most of the movie is frankly pretty confusing, especially once the party gets split up. There's a lot of running and flashlight-waving, and I got confused on who was where. But I guess it doesn't matter, since none of them survive anyway. In some ways I have to salute the ending. It was a novel way to spin the standard "horror movie ending", but having said that, I thought the touch of the blonde woman chopping the other woman through the knee was overdone. Given the circumstances, I'd have delayed retribution until reaching the surface, as two people have a better chance than just one.

So they're not great movies, but they're good movies. Better than peeling tape off your chest while watching Bat-21, and you can take that to the bank.

Oh, Dem Finns!

Regular readers of my blog (assuming there are any) will recall my taste for a Finnish melodic death metal band called Insomnium. I believe I have now found their cousins in the form of a Finnish melodic doom/death metal band called Swallow the Sun. There are passing similiaries between them - emphasis on mood rather than raw technique, and an overall sensibility that "tr00 fans" (as they apparently call themselves) would likely describe as "sellout". But they're both good.

Insomnium is in general faster, more aggressive, and closer to melodic death. Swallow the Sun is slower, much closer to doom and in some cases verging upon funeral doom. But they both are moody, melodic and atmospheric, and I like them both a lot.

One thing that Swallow the Sun's vocalist does that I find particularly chilling is switching from a very deep death gurgle to a high-pitched black metal shriek apparently at whim, as showcased in Horror, Pt 1. (And that crash ending in Horror, Pt 1? Jeez. Unsettling!) And then a few songs later he sings clean and well, and then drops into a death gurgle and winds it up into a black metal shriek without taking a breath. He's versatile, if nothing else. (Just my luck, it'll turn out the clean vocalist is a session guy they hired just to make me look foolish.)

Lords of Chaos

I recently read a book called "Lords of Chaos", about the bloody rise of Satanic black metal music. Much of the book is pretty interesting, charting as it does the evolution of black metal from thrash, and the subsequent evolution of Norwegian black metal and its violent subculture (usually referred to as a "scene"). It's incomplete, especially its rather cursory treatment of thrash and death metal and its complete lack of any explanation of what black metal really sounds like, but it's still interesting enough.

The book gets much less interesting when its authors start the usual mass media accusations that all black metal fans are criminals waiting for a crime scene, that all black metal is Nazi, and that there's a great occult satanic black metal conspiracy out there. Black metal has to be "taken seriously", they intone gravely, lest something bad happen. I'm no Pollyanna and I know that bad things have happened in the black metal scene, especially in Norway and Germany, and that bad things are probably going to happen in Poland and Russia in the near future. But come on, do they seriously think that the fact that I listen to Enslaved, Darkthrone and Emperor means that I'm going to commit some beastly act of antisocial protest? Do I have to go on some watch list because I own - gasp - a Burzum album??* And - double gasp - I actually like it???**

The authors strongly imply that black metal makes people do bad things. I think they miss the point, which is that some people do bad things, and some of them happen to listen to black metal. Are some lackwits chivvied into doing bad things because they they think Varg wants them to? Probably. But they'd probably do bad things anyway, even without Varg; they'd just listen to a different Peid Piper. (Varg Vikernes is such a convenient figure for the mass media to focus on that, as they say, if he didn't exist, they'd have to invent him.) They seem to argue that there's no way to just listen to black metal without actually sinking into the black metal lifestyle as it existed in the early 1990s, in much the same way that critics of rap argue that you can't listen to rap without turning into a grill-sporting misogynist with a Hummer and an AK-47. Are there misogynist gun-toting thugs in rap? Sure, but there would have been misogynistic gun-toting thugs even without rap; we'd just be blaming someone else (Perry Como, maybe).

Still, I liked the book, even though I found its later sociological chapters somewhat unconvincing, and its heavy focus on Varg Vikernes, NSBM, and Satanism somewhat limiting, and its alarmist tone kind of heavy-handed. Parts of it reminded me of Civics classes in the early 1970s, when we had to be taught alarmist nonsense about the Communist world takeover timetable. Now it's the black metal Satanist world takeover timetable. At least the Communists had a whole country to work with. Most black metal groups seem to have trouble scraping up a rehearsal space. It's hard to take a conspiracy seriously when it has to crash in its friend's basement because it can't scrape up rent money.

(NSBM stands for National Socialist Black Metal, which is kind of a contradiction in terms. Most black metal seems to stress the power and primacy of the individual, while National Socialism teaches the subjugation of the individual to the state. NSBM does exist, but it's not as common as they would have us believe. Most of the true racist material I've heard over the years sounds more like hardcore or Oi! than black metal to me anyway.)

*The album I refer to is Filosofem, Burzum's last pre-incarceration album. It's something of a classic in the black metal field, up there with In the Nightside Eclipse and Transilvanian Hunger, but let's be honest about something - it's sung in German, which I am not fluent in, and even if I was fluent in German, I couldn't understand the vocals anyway. And I have no intention of ever looking up the lyrics, because I just don't care about the lyrics. But as a musical effort, it is quite singular; the first two tracks are almost hypnotic, and even though it's black metal it's curiously soporific and calming.

**Let there be no misunderstanding here. I do not and never did approve of the church burnings that Burzum advocated, Varg Kikernes was convicted of, and some black metal mouthpieces approve of. Nor do I personally admire Varg Vikernes, or agree with his political, racial and philosophical positions. The snippets of Vargsmal that I've read come off sounding like warmed-over Nietzsche filtered through Josef Goebbels, and that's a tough act to hang with. But as an album, musically, it's amazing.

Yuppie Bastards

Tonight I watched an episode of the new "Planet Earth" series in Discover. Pretty nice, it was, full of good camera work and novel things, and I happen to like Sigourney Weaver's voice. But man was it ever hard to finish. It seemed that every five minutes the show cut to commercials, and one set of commercials in particular made me scream with frustration - the new Volvo commercials touting the safety features of their cars. I'm sure the engineers at Volvo designed them in good faith, but the commercials make it obvious that the supremely unconcerned yuppie bastards in the car are clearly relying on technology to take the place of judgment.

Fer instance: here's the self-important yuppie couple driving home from some insufferably self-important yuppie soiree (I like to think it's a Dave Matthews Band concert or a "poetry slam" at the local coffee house). It's dark, and it's foggy, and they're going too damn fast, and they're constantly looking at each other as they flap their gums and emit wan self-important drivel. It's only when the collision-avoidance system starts to flash that Yuppie Bastard At The Wheel looks up to see the newspaper delivery truck, and what's his move? Hit the brakes? Oh, come on, I'm driving a damn Volvo, I'm too self-important to hit the brakes! I just duck into the next lane. The moral of the story is that you don't have to slow down in fog, exercise good judgment behind the wheel, or for that matter even look at the road, because your collision avoidance system will do the work. Meantime, you can exchange tepid and superficial po-mo claptrap with your date without having to look up.

Fer instance: here's another yuppie cruising down the freeway in light traffic, and suddenly he's held up by another car. He gives his rear view mirror the most cursory of examinations, too regal in his august yuppiedom to actually turn his head and look, and he almost runs a motorcycle off the road until his "blind spot detector" tells him to stay in his own lane already. Heaven forbid the self-satisfied moron should actually expend any energy at all by turning his head and looking. The moral of this story is that there's no need to check your blind spots and maintain situational awareness; you can forget the world around you and cruise in blithe, unconcerned self-satisfaction knowing that technology will keep you from squashing someone. Besides, Louis XIV never had to check his blind spots; why should you?

Fer instance: a woman walks toward her car in the dark parking lot and the remote can now tell her if it detects a heartbeat in the car. She backs up and walks away quickly, presumably to call Ghostbusters to get the class-5 full-roaming vapor out of her car (a real nasty one too). Does this actually happen? Is it common practice for thugs to lurk in the backs of cars? It's never happened to me, but then again, I'm 6'4" and nobody would ever want to rape me, so maybe I'm not the right person to judge the relative lunacy of this "safety feature", but it certainly sounds to me like it's pandering to paranoia and urban myth, not actual need. But if it helps someone avoid being attacked, I'm all for that, and unlike the aforementioned "safety features" it doesn't actually encourage bad driving habits. It's just such an overt Oxygen/WE touch it seems crass and exploitative to me.

If Volvo is really serious about improving the safety of the highways, here's a short list of technological features they should put in their cars.

1. A system that every 20 seconds would bellow SLOW DOWN, PAY ATTENTION, SHUT UP, AND STOP TAILGATING!

2. A robot arm that would grab any cell phone in sight and chuck it out the window. It's drivin' time, you clod, so lose the phone.

According to The Amazing Rondo:

"The reason I don't listen to the Dave Matthews Band is because they don't knife each other."

- The Amazing Rondo

Words I Don't Want To Hear

I was in the bathroom at work a few days ago, standing before the porcelain dingus, attending to my business, when a guy two urinals down suddenly looked at me and said "I just noticed something odd."

There are many things wrong with this, the first being that when I'm in the bathroom, I don't want to have a conversation about anything. Maybe exchanging a word or two over the sink or while trying to convince the fancy high-tech paper towel dispensers to actually dispense a scrap of paper towel, but no more than that. There is nothing - nothing - that can be so important that I can't be allowed to attend to my business first. I mean that seriously. The building is falling down? My shoes are on fire? A rabid leopard is in one of the stalls? Scientists have located an asteroid aimed directly at me? Okay, I'll deal with it when I'm done, but not until I'm done.

And then there's the chill horror of realizing that someone in a state of partial disrobement suddenly noticed something odd. Any "urinal conversation" is bad, but one that creates such a landscape of horrible visuals is worse. But not the worst.

The worst is the inter-stall conversation, something so appalling I can't bring myself to write about it.

This highlights a problem that I encounter fairly often - the inability of people around me to keep their mouths shut for more than a few seconds at a time. I'm not talking about friends. I figure they have the right. I'm talking about guys I don't know from Adam who can't spend 45 seconds in a bathroom without having to yammer about something irrelevant. I choose to view it as a kind of narcissism - the belief that their thoughts are of such value and relevance they can't even let me tinkle in peace without having to tell me about their political convictions, theories on UFOs, or mindless prattle about how the Seahawks need more left-handed offensive guards. I mean, for heaven's sake, if you're going to prattle about irrelevant things, start a blog that nobody reads and prattle away without bothering anyone. But leave me alone in the bathroom, okay?

Oh, and the odd thing he noticed? It was in reference to a group email that had been sent out the day before. One would think it could have waited.

On The Other Hand...

One might well think that I do nothing but complain about the state of the model hobby these days. And just to prove that I don't always whine, I'd now like to talk about some of the things that I like.

I like, for example, the tidal wave of new 1/72nd scale armor kits coming out of Russia and Eastern Europe. I've always liked 1/72nd scale armor - the kits are generally fairly inexpensive, easy to build, easy to paint, and easy to display. For years there was a decided lack of variety in this scale, but the Eastern Europeans are pouring on the kits and it seems that the "main line" companies like Revell-Germany and Esci are joining the cavalcade.

I like Academy kits. Good fit, good detail, good decals, an increasingly good mix of subjects, and all at a reasonable price.

I like the 1/72nd scale Revell Gato, even though I'll never build it. I don't look forward to wrestling with a five-foot submarine, and there's literally nowhere I could possibly display it, but I like knowing I have that option (I have the 1/72nd scale Type-VII U-boat in the early stages of construction, and it's just about as big as I ever care to go with a model.)

I like the wide and ever-widening range of decals that are available.

I like most model magazines, especially FSM and SAMI. The latter has a wonderfully dry sense of humor, and I find it quite interesting that it routinely features models that were brush-painted and nobody gets all bent out of shape over it.

I like the way Model Master II paints airbrush.

So there.

Oh Boy, Another Tiger

Modeling, like any other human activity, is subject to fad and fashion. Remember the 1960s when spacecraft models were hot? They were fashionable then, but today, admitting that you build spacecraft models is a bit like admitting that you still wear platform shoes and polyester slacks.

"Oh," they say. "You're one of those niche modelers."

Every year Fine Scale Modeler has a "five most-wanted kits" contest, where the consuming public has a chance to suggest to the various manufacturers what new models should be made. I almost dread these things. What manner of obscure German tank is going to make the top of the list this year? I ask. Oh boy, a steel-wheeled late-production Tiger E, as though there aren't enough damn Tiger models already.

Every year I dutifully draw up my list, knowing full well that it's entirely futile. How many other votes for a 1/48th scale Spirit rover or Lunar Rover, or a good accurate Apollo CSM/LM, do I think they'll get? As an example of how unpopular spacecraft modeling is, there's only one category for spacecraft, and it is usually dominated by science fiction subjects, while I think there are three armor categories, one for each of the major scales (and all of them, most likely, dominated by increasingly obscure subtypes of German vehicles).

A while ago I went to my local hobby shop. Actually, it's been quite a while ago, but never mind. The DML 1/35th scale Maus super-heavy tank model had just come out, and the "Panzer Lobby" had accumulated at the counter to ogle the contents of said kit. I couldn't help but listen in as they tried to impress one another with their encyclopedic command of Maus lore - its cushy ride, its 5.1 surround-sound stereo system, its ice-water dispenser, its ability to wipe out entire armies of those stupid smelly Russians with a single blow.

But they kept pronouncing its name Maws, and clearly believed that it had something to do with the Maws of Death. Entirely lost on them was the fact that Maus is pronounced mouse, and indeed means mouse, and was an ironic name German tankers foisted on the vehicle because of its immense size and clumsiness. Also lost on them was the fact that only a handful of them were built (five, as I recall) and there isn't any evidence that they were ever used in combat.

So there is is. We get a brand-new kit of a tank that wasn't mass-produced and never saw action, but we don't get a kit of a spacecraft that carried men to the Moon, or which is currently exploring Mars.

Well, time for me to go put on my platform shoes and polyester slacks, I guess.

Fine Scale Collector

I've subscribed to a model magazine called Fine Scale Modeler for over a decade. Maybe over two decades. So long that I don't remember how long. In the last year I've noticed a development in the hobby (only the pretentious would call it an "industry") that finally reached its final form on the back cover of the latest FSM.

For a while now so-called "die cast replicas" have been proliferating. They're sort of like models, only you don't actually build them; you just buy them and put them on a shelf (or store them in dry nitrogen if you think that they, like early Star Wars toys, will appreciate in value). Die-cast replicas used to be limited to cars, farm machinery and things like that, but in the last year there has been a literal explosion in die-cast replicas of tanks, aircraft, and even figures.

Fair enough. Some people like collecting things like that, and I have no problem with that. I personally derive no satisfaction from buying a die-cast replica of anything, and on those rare occasions when I do buy "pre-finished models" I tend to take them apart, repaint them, and reassemble them. But I recognize that for some people, collecting might be more fun than actually building.

Anyway, on the back cover of the latest FSM were a bunch of pictures of various pre-finished models. German soldiers, a KFOR Challenger and whatnot. And the text read "Do these things belong in Fine Scale Modeler? ABSOLUTELY!"

To which I reply, ABSOLUTELY THE HELL NOT!

If you want to collect pre-finished models, do so in good health. If you want to read a magazine about collecting pre-finished models, do so in good health. But at least thus far, the M in FSM stands for Modeler, and I see nothing in collecting pre-finished models (or die-cast replicas) that is in any way related to modeling.

What would a Workbench Review of a pre-finished model read like?

I took the F-86 out of the package. I put it on the shelf. It didn't seem centered so I moved it a little to one side. I turned it slightly. My wife asked me to get it out of the living room so I put it back in the package.

If they change the name of the magazine to Fine Scale Collector, then I'd say such things belong in the magazine. But until they do, I'd prefer that such things not appear in the magazine.

I used to think that the Detail Fetish was the most worrying thing in scale modeling. Put simply, the Detail Fetish argues that the quality of a model, or the enjoyment you derive from building it, is directly proportional to how many aftermarket detail sets you bought for it. Hardly a single model appears in FSM's Reader's Gallery without a listing of the aftermaket stuff that went into it - cockpit detail sets, turned aluminum gun barrels, working metal tracks, whatever.

I don't generally buy aftermarket detail sets. I do occasionally buy conversion parts, and I'm a notorious collector of decal sets, but I rarely buy detail sets. It's not that I'm a tightwad, or that I can't afford them. Nor is it that I'm a purist and think that every improvement should be stratchbuilt. (Or maybe I am! I'm not a great scratchbuilder, but there's very little that I won't attempt with sheet styrene, stretched sprue, bits of wire and a punch-and-die set.) I just derive no satisfaction from sticking detail sets in a model, even though my modeling compadres automatically deduct a full point from my modeling GPA because I don't have aftermarket flattened tires on my Lancaster or didn't put photoetched exhaust shrouds on my Tiger (not that I build many Tigers, but that's a subject for a different day).

This used to bug me, and in a way it still does. Since when is the quality of a model, or the pleasure in building it, related strictly to the quantity of detail sets one put into the model? If you like detail sets, for heaven's sake, buy a lot of them and have fun with them. But don't automatically dismiss any model that doesn't have a Cutting Edge cockpit simply because it doesn't have a Cutting Edge cockpit.

But looking back on it, I see the guys who subscribe to the Detail Fetish as being fellow modelers, albeit a type of modeler that I don't really understand and who don't really understand me. But at least they're modelers.

I don't see collectors of pre-finished models as modelers at all. And I think they're slowly taking over "my" magazine.

AC-130

I heard a story on NPR today about how the AC-130 gunship may represent excessive use of force in an urban environment such as Baghdad - that the power of the AC-130 is a greater danger to innocent civilians than a threat to insurgents.

And reviewing the armament of the aircraft, it's a tempting conclusion. The armament varies from subtype to subtype, but the most common modern variant the AC-130U, appears to be armed with a 25mm Gatling gun, a 40mm gun, and a 105mm howitzer (the difference between a "gun" and a "howitzer" in this context being that a howitzer has a shorter barrel and a lower muzzle velocity than a gun). TV documentaries usually talk about this with a certain amount of boyish vim, the announcers going on and on about the devastating impact of all this, a veritable testosterone-soaked buffet of gore and slaughter.

So the average citizen thinks about an airplane using a 25mm gun, a 40mm gun, and a 105mm howitzer in a city, reflects on the gore-and-devastation angle of the documentaries, and can't help but imagine that the AC-130 is a flying slaughterhouse.

And it certainly can be. Used as the limits of its firepower, the AC-130 is indeed a first-rate killing machine, but it need not always be used at the limits of its firepower. Unlike a lot of aircraft, the AC-130 has the ability to moderate its firepower by employing the smallest weapon that will achieve the tactical end. An AC-130 fire control operator could, in principle, elect to engage a target with a single 25mm cannon round, a projectile about the size of a human thumb (or at least my human thumb). Simply because it can fire thousands of rounds per minute from three different guns, one of them powerful enough to blow the average house flat, doesn't mean that it has to.

The use of aircraft in counter-insurgency operations is tricky, at best. Say you spot insurgents on a rooftop and employ aircraft to eliminate them. About the smallest guided weapon a conventional airplane can use would be a AGM-65 Maverick, which weighs about 550 pounds (some more, some less) at launch, and has a warhead of 125 to 300 pounds of high explosive, depending on the type. The next smallest but probably more common guided weapon would be a laser-designated bomb, anywhere from 500 to 2000 pounds in weight. This is a lot of bang, as they say, enough to flatten the insurgents, the house they're on, the houses around it, and earn the lasting hatred and distrust of the innocent people who survived the attack. (This problem has led the US military to consider developing a guidance package for the currently unguided 70mm Hydra rocket, which would reduce the effective bang to about ten pounds of high explosive. Another option being considered is making guided but inert bombs that have no explosive filling at all and destroy their targets simply by crashing into them - this weapon has been referred to as the "Mosque-saver" because it could conceivably pick off tanks parked next to mosques without damaging the mosques.)

The point is that using any kind of bomb or missile in an urban environment is made difficult by the fact that current bombs and missiles are way too powerful. They cause far too much collateral damage, and almost invariably end up killing large numbers of the population whose goodwill is essential in winning the counter-insurgency campaign in the first place. The same problem also affects artillery, and perhaps even more so because artillery rounds, being unguided, are less accurate than precision-guided aircraft weapons. How much more inaccurate is a matter of some contention. The case is less unambiguous for things like tank main guns and squad-level anti-tank missiles and rockets, which are more discriminating in effect because they are basically a lot less explosive than aircraft bombs. (During the Battle of Hue in Vietnam, the use of artillery and aerial bombs was prohibited because they would cause too much damage to the historic city, so the Marines relied extensively on 3.5-inch rocket launchers (Bazookas, basically), recoilless rifles, and 90mm tank guns for fire support because they simply couldn't do as much damage as the Big Stuff.)

What does this have to do with the AC-130? This. People imagine that the AC-130, with all those guns, could cover a city with cannon rounds. And it could, and it would cause horrendous casualties if it did. But it doesn't have to. The AC-130 fire control officer can scale the firepower back to the minimum required to deal with the target at hand. The AC-130, unlike an aerial bomb, has at least some hope of engaging a point target and destroying it without blowing half a dozen houses flat and filling the hospitals and morgues with innocent victims. I'm not saying that the AC-130 can always eliminate every target without killing innocent people, but I am saying that it has a much better chance of doing so than, say, an A-10 or F-15 (or a battery of 155mm howitzers).

Some of the things that make the AC-130 useful in night operations over cities include:

1. The ability to scale firepower to the target and situation.
2. The ability to see in the dark.
3. The ability to carry enough fuel and ammunition to stay overhead all night.
4. The ability to provide fire support for friendly troops even when closely engaged.
5. The ability, in principle, to engage a point target with affecting adjacent buildings.
6. The ability to help friendly troops in unexpected ways.

The last point was made to me when I read a book about US Marine operations during the two battles of Fallujah, where an AC-130 used its powerful infrared spotlight to help guide Marines through a confusing snarl of alleys and streets. The AC-130 didn't fire a shot, but it helped guide the Marines who simply had to follow the "bouncing red ball" of the infrared spotlight.

So let's imagine I'm an insurgent. I pick up my AK and a bag of magazines and slip out the back door, intent on causing mischief, and I pause when I hear the distant whine of a multi-engined turboprop airplane somewhere in the night sky. Odds are that the airplane in question is an AC-130, whose crew can see me in the dark. They can tell US forces where I am and what I'm doing, or if the situation is right, they can wax me with a handful of 25mm cannon rounds. And the plane has enough fuel and ammunition to stay up there all night (US generals sometimes call this "dominating the battlespace").

I conclude that I'm better off going back inside, putting my AK away, and delaying my insurging for a night less dominated by AC-130s.

Operation Desert Blunder

Here's a quote from globalsecurity.org:

The success of strikes against Iran's WMD facilities requires both tactical and strategic surprise, so there will not be the sort of public rhetorical buildup in the weeks preceeding hostilities, of the sort that preceeded the invasion of Iraq. To the contrary, the Bush Administration will do everything within its power to deceive Iran's leaders into believing that military action is not imminent.

The full text can be read at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iran-timeline.htm and it includes an interesting timeline of when President Bush might and might not authorize an attack on Iran.

I'm not griping about anything that was said on globalsecurity.org, which has over the years been fairly sober. What I'm griping about is the way we (read President Bush and his people) keep taking their eye off the ball.

Who declared war on the United States? Who brought down the World Trade Center buildings and attacked the Pentagon? Who blew a hole in the side of USS Cole?. Hint: it wasn't Iran. So why are we taking our eyes off the real objective in this so-called War on Terror, Afghanistan, and getting ourselves all wrapped around the axle with Iran?

Is it really just the nuclear issue? North Korea built and detonated a half-assed nuclear weapon, and we rewarded them with a package deal that gives them "energy supplies" (read oil) in return for suspending a weapons program they couldn't afford in the first place. Why is it that North Korea, a member of the "Axis of Evil", is rewarded for building a nuke, while Iran is threatened with war for merely enriching uranium? For the sake of consistency alone we should hold both countries to the same standard, it seems to me. And is a nuclear-capable Iran any more of a threat to us than, say, a nuclear-capable Pakistan? Pakistan is one revolution away from looking like Iran in 1979, after all, and where is that OBL fellow said to be hiding again?

I can't help but wonder if part of the US government's preoccupation with Iran these days has to do with the Big O - oil. I can't prove it, and just thinking it makes me feel a little bit like a conspiracy theorist, but there it is, all the same.

I have over the last decade become a firm believer in what I call the "China theory", even though good examples of it have been seen in the USSR and Vietnam. It works thus. You simply ignore what the allegedly hostile government does, maintain economic relationships, and wait for social and economic changes to render the allegedly hostile government irrelevant. Sure, there are still hard-line Communists in the Chinese government, but they have been almost completely marginalized by events. Attempts by the Communists to stop the changes taking place in China today would be akin to shoveling dirt into the Yellow River, and at some point the hard-liners will shuffle off to the great Stalinist Old Folks Home and leave the Chinese government in the hands of the new entrepreneurs (which opens a different can of worms, but a less dangerous can of worms).

The same thing can happen in Iran, assuming we don't attack Iran (note that we never declare war on anyone any more, which I think amounts to dereliction of duty by the Senate. We have votes to "authorize military action" but if you put a motion before the Senate to declare war on anyone, I bet those media hounds would head for the hills so fast the dust cloud wouldn't settle for three days). A policy of engagement will lead to economic and social changes inside Iran that will, at some point, render the existing leadership irrelevant. What, really, is the single thread that unifies the Iranian goverment right now? I would bet that it is a sense of being under siege by the West in general and the United States in specific.

Release that state of siege and engage with Iran and I suspect that sooner rather than later the hard-liners in the Iranian government will be rendered irrelevant by the facts on the ground. This is not to say that Iran will ever look like the United States. Iran will always draw inspiration from its rich Persian history and from its Muslim orientation, but I don't see that a proud and vigorous Iran has to necessarily pose a risk to the United States.

But, having said that, Bush will do what he's going to do. He's already called the Constitution, a document he swore to defend, a "goddamned piece of paper"*, and his signing statements often promulgate points of view that even to me seem to be wildly unconstitutional. So he'll do what he wants to do - he is the Decider, after all. But I, for one, am sick of bankrolling the wars he started for bogus reasons while the one war that I do think needs to be fought (that would be Afghanistan) gets no attention at all.

I will make you this bet. I will bet that there are more people in the US military working up preliminary planning for an attack on Iran than there are US infantrymen holding ground in Afghanistan. And I think that's criminal. This talk of the anticipated Taliban "Spring Offensive" shouldn't even be on the news. We should have sufficient manpower and money in place in Afghanistan to make any talk of a Taliban offensive ridiculous. But we don't, and that makes me mad.

*Consult http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp12142005.html if you don't believe me.

Comic Opera

Now and then I try to read comic books, but I find that I do with relatively little conviction. When I was a boy I read comic books, though back then we didn't read comic books; we looked at them. Mostly I read the World War Two-based comics that were fairly common back then, most notably Sergeant Rock and The Ghost Tank. There was another one (I can't remember the name) that retold the stories of Medal of Honor winners in World War Two; the only one that really sticks with me is the story of a Marine machine gunner on Guadalcanal (my grandfather was a Seabee who served on Guadalcanal and the remainder of Halsey's drive up the Solomons toward New Britain and beyond, so anything having to do with Guadalcanal tends to stick with me. My father was an ordinary GI who served under Eisenhower and his contribution to the war effort was guarding German POWs. Not glamorous, but someone had to do it).

Anyway, I have reasonably fond memories of comic books, and I know a fair number of people at work who buy comic books with almost religious zeal, and now and then I try to catch the wave. But most modern comics don't appeal to me. I think what I miss is the idea of a comic book being about ordinary people. Sergeant Rock and his riflemen weren't mutants with super powers, or supernatural beings, or ninjas from shadowy organization that has developed techniques for mind control or anti-gravity. They were just ordinary guys, a squad of perfectly normal guys who had nothing but Garands, BARs, maybe a Bazooka, and their brains.

When I try to read X-men comics (of which there must be six or eight titles at least) all the mutants run together on me, and some of their mutations seem a little strange. Or a lot strange. Why is it that nobody has maladaptive mutations, like only being able to digest peanut butter, or having two left feet, or having one nostril large enough to house a teacup? The movie Men of Mystery parodied this - I especially loved The Shoveler, who, when his wife criticized his mutant power as being silly, just shrugged and said "It's what I do. I shovel." And then I get all wound around the figurative axle trying to make sense of some of them. Like Magneto. Can he only affect ferromagnetic metals, like iron? Or can he manipulate any metal, like aluminum? What about paramagnetic materials, like liquid oxygen? You see my problem. It gets even worse when I start to obsess about the various conservation laws. I once sat down to calculate how many Cheezit crackers Magneto would have to eat to generate enough energy to lift an airplane, but fortunately I came to my senses before I got very far along.

I found that I really liked the series The Red Star, with its odd mix of technology, magic, alternate history and brilliant artwork, but its creators seemed to stumble over their own egos and plans for a new line of The Red Star comics seem to have been scuttled.

I generally like The Punisher, which tends to be coarse and heavily R-rated, but at least harkens back to the moral clarity of Sergeant Rock (whatever else you want to believe about World War Two, it has to be admitted that there was a Good side and a Bad side, and it was imperative that Good triumph over Bad. Exactly how Good triumphed can and should be debated - was it necessary to nuke Hiroshima, for example - but whether Good should have triumphed is very much a closed question). But later runs of The Punisher seem to be falling into the same general trap that brutal death metal wandered into - the need to constantly one-up itself by constantly raising the brutality bar. It's not bad, really, since it is just a comic book, but I still get the feeling when I read certain panels that the writers sat around a table in a pizza shop saying "We need to kill this guy in a really cool way. Any ideas?" "Let's burn him to death!" "No, we did that in the last one." "Oh. Let's burn him to death with a plasma arc cutter!" "Yeah!" It's not the brutality that bothers me; it's the crass way brutality is exploited that bothers me. And you always know that no matter what happens, Frank Castle will get banged up, he'll grit his teeth, he'll emit some grim monologue, and then he'll mow down the Bad Guys. And then there's the backstory as shown in "Born" that suggests that the Punisher isn't really just a normal guy any more...

Frankly, I'd be just has happy with a new version of Sergeant Rock. No mutations, no god-like powers, no super-stealthy ninjas from obscure schools of martial arts, and no strange artifacts like the lasso that compels you tell the truth.

Not Even Wrong

I've been reading a lot of books about string theory lately, or more properly books about the failure of string theory to turn into anything like a real scientific theory that makes predictions that can be tested in the real world. String theorists often refer to it as the "theory of everything", since it (supposedly) unifies quantum field theory with gravitation, but its detractors sometimes call it the "theory of anything" because one can tweak the theory by altering the constants that define the Calabi-Yau manifolds and make the theory look like anything at all. Got an inconvenient experimental finding you can't explain in string theory? Heck, just perturb the six-dimentional manifolds for a while until the theory "explains" the experimental result.

It is said that there is no single string theory as such. Instead, there is a "landscape" of a huge number of string theories - according to one estimate, 10E1500 (that's 10 followed by 1500 zeros) distinct string theories. When pressed on the point, string theorists insist that the theory is right, even if experiments and common sense argue otherwise, and what is really faulty isn't string theory, but our understanding of what a fundamental theory should do.

I think all of this is nonsense. Granted, I'm no string theorist, but it seems to me that string theory fails several common-sense real world tests. The first is that it seems to make no verifiable predictions at all. This is like me theorizing that there is an invisible demon in my garage. It isn't provable either way, so it's can't be a theory in the scientific sense. Another is that the theory depends on supersymmetry to work, and I'm sorry, but I find the whole notion of supersymmetry kind of far-fetched. One would think, one would, that if supersymmetrical partner particles existed, at least some of them would be light enough to be seen in existing particle colliders. (Why, given that the electron has a mass of, what, a few hundred KEV, would its supersymmetrical partner is much, much more massive?) But no - they're all just a little too massive to be produced by existing hardware, and when CERN's Large Hadron Collider comes on line, I suspect they'll still be a little too massive to be seen. Is it reasonable to assume that all the supersymmetry partners are above the 14 TEV or so energy LHC can generate, or is it reasonable to assume that in fact supersymmetry is an elegant mathematic formalism that has no connection with the real world? Another thing that bothers me is that string theory currently exists in five forms, and some of them predict the existence of tachyons, which seems to me to be prima facie evidence that that particular theory has a problem. (But I'm also dubious of the Higgs particle, which is predicted by quantum field theory and yet remains slightly too massive to be revealed by existing particle accelerators. So in a sense, nothing pleases me, since if I wave a magic wand and make the Higgs particle go away, nothing forces symmetry breakage in the Standard Model and the universe would have to look very different than it really does. But I'm not as dubious of the Higgs particle as I am of supersymmetrical partners - one particle being too massive to appear I can roll with ; a whole menagerie of them being too massive to appear starts to tickle my erroneous zone.)

String theory (more properly supersymmetrical string theory) could still turn out to be right. But it strikes me that the super-smart people behind string theory want me to take an awful lot on faith, including a series of conjectures that haven't been proved, as well as the entire notion of supersymmetry and the existence of Calabi-Yau manifolds that curl up the 'excess dimensions' that the theory requires to work. All of this could be true, but from where I sit, firmly in the world of engineering where theories and mathematics have strong predictive power, string theory seems a little suspect.

It's also possible I have a personal bias. I once knew a fellow who liked to joust with me on intellectual matters. I am an engineer by trade and tend to believe fundamental laws and mathematics, especially ones like Newton's Second Law of Motion. He was much more accomodating in his view of the universe and believed, among other things, that entropy can be reversed, that perpetual motion machines can be built, and that Nazi scientists had built a working anti-gravity drive. So when he told me he understood string theory, I automatically lumped string theory in with all the other junk he believed, junk that I will, for the sake of courtesy, merely call highly dubious.

I don't know what the real "theory of everything" is. I am forced to agree with Leonard Susskind to the extent that if there is a "theory of everything" we simply may not be smart enough to understand it, let alone formulate its basic mathematics. But I am also loath to abandon Einstein, who believed that we would know we had stumbled on the "theory of everything" because it would be beautiful and simple. String theory is neither beautiful nor simple, and so I remain dubious.

His Royal Majesty

My cat, the Emperor Maximus, in more or less his natural state. I am more of a cat person than a dog person, truth be told. Cats are generally (but not always) quieter, cleaner, easier to take care of, and less emotionally needy. Dogs sometimes seem to be co-dependent; they require constant reassurance that they aren't about to be put on the spit and barbecued, whereas cats really couldn't care less what we think of them. Dogs seem insecure; cats suffer from self-importance that almost borders on the kind of hubris Greek playwrights used to talk about.

Maximus is especially prone to lying on my chest when I'm trying to read in bed. I probably have lesions on my liver and pancreas shaped like cat footprints, and Max had puffed so much hair in my face it's a wonder that I don't hack up hairballs.

We have two other cats, but they lack Maximus's savoir-faire. Baxter sleeps in the closet all day and only comes out at night to leap between my stomach and the windowsill. Poopie wanders around all day looking haggard and annoyed and acting like she wants to barf on something expensive.

What was I saying about cats being easier to take care of than dogs? Give a dog a piece of bread and she's happy. Give a cat a slice of bread and they call the Mother Ship and arrange to have you turned into a cloud of ionized gas.

Deputy Dawg

Oh heck, why not? Here's a picture of my dog, who I refer to with artful creativity as "Dawg" even though her name is Annie. She came from the pound and was scheduled to be put to sleep within a day or two when my wife saw her.

Dawg is trying very hard to look cute and mild in this photograph, but don't let that fool you. She goes through life emitting noise at an average of about 85 decibels. If it's not barking, then it's grunting or snorting or sneezing or stranger sounds yet. Still, the idea that she was within hours of being put to sleep just for being noisy appalls me.

But she means well, even if she sometimes does steal my cheesecake when I'm not looking.

And she's really not noisy. She's just having the best day ever, every day.

Chilling Irony

I feel the urge to put something new on my blog, but I can't think of anything serious to say. No, that's not quite right. I have plenty to say; I just don't have the energy to say it. So with that in mind, I present an old photograph of a model rocket accident that I find amusing.

Behold my shirt and my hands. In my hands is a gloss red Gemini DC model rocket. Note that the rocket has a hole blown through the side of the rocket, and that the rocket engine (and its retainer) have been blown halfway out the back of the rocket. In the Gemini DC, the two recovery parachutes are stowed in the "nacelles" on the sides of the main rocket and are driven out backwards by the ejection charge. In principle, anyway. In practice, the parachutes stuck in the tubes and the ejection charge blew out the side wall of the rocket.

Not too memorable, and not too amusing. But what gets me is that the blowout in my shirt is almost exactly the same size as the blowout in the rocket. That, to me, is chilling. (For the record, the blowout in my shirt was not caused by any kind of gas expulsion; I was grinding something with a Dremel tool and managed to grind a hole in my shirt.)

In the background is my Chevrolet truck, which I think has to go down in history as my favorite vehicle. It was stolen from the parking lot where I work, and when the surveillance video was reviewed, we discovered that it took them less than thirty seconds to make off with it. It still makes me so mad I could spit.

A clean workbench is a sign of... what, exactly? I'm almost embarrassed to put this picture on my blog, as it might give one the impression that I am, to say the least, an unrepentant slob. And the conclusion is tempting; who could blame one? But let me 'splain.

This was when we lived in the small house in town, and my 'workbench' amounted to an old desktop perched between a couple of two-by-fours in the closet that held the water heater. I had enough room to get into my chair and sit down, but that was about it. I had no room to store anything, so I said "Heck with it" and threw organization to the four winds and let myself go. Now that I've moved to a much bigger house, I'm somewhat more organized.

What can one discern about me from this picture, other than that at the time I was a slob? I smoke, and that's a bummer. I drink coffee. I take the occasional Alka-Seltzer. I wear eyeglasses, but remove them for close-up work. I use a lot of "craft paint". I have a hard time throwing plastic bowls away.

What's funny is that you almost can't see the project I was working on for all the mess. It's a pair of Andreas 54mm Roman legionaries.

Hmmm

Well, I guess that was harmless enough. I am now a Google-being. Somehow I expected trumpets.

Chinese ASAT

The people where I work seem to be unduly worried about the recent Chinese ASAT (anti-satellite) test. Well, not all of them. Not even most of them. Most of them don't even think about it at all, but those who mention it seem to drape it in cloaks of elaborate Maoist horror, as though they fully expect the faceless Commie hordes to come marching over the horizon at any moment.

The truth is that intercepting a satellite isn't especially difficult. If a country has the basic technology required to launch a satellite in the first place, it has all the technology it needs to intercept a satellite. Both the Soviet Union and the United States demonstrated that they could intercept satellites back in the 1980s, and both stopped doing so after a few tests because the tests tended to litter the heavens with tens of thousands of fragments of the sacrificial satellites.

In principle any spacefaring nation could intercept a satellite if it wanted to. The list of spacefaring nations includes the United States, Russia, Ukraine, the European Union, Japan, Israel, Brazil, India, and China. Even North Korea claims to have launched its own satellite, and Iran recently announced plans to launch its own satellite. Once you've got a booster that can put a payload in orbit, you've got about 90% of what you need to intercept a satellite.

Now, the Chinese test was of the so-called direct ascent type and not the simpler co-orbital type. A direct-ascent kill is harder to pull off than a co-orbital kill because you need a booster of higher performance and you need some sort of fairly precise terminal guidance system. But even so, it's not that hard. You could buy pretty much everything you need off the shelf, from booster to infrared sensor, and there are even websites where you can get the orbital elements of pretty much any satellite you're interested in so you can predict its position in the future.

So I view the successful Chinese test as a notable technical achievement, but nothing that is new or revolutionary or even all that threatening. It would have been much more threatening if we had not known about the test - if the Chinese had been able to kill the satellite without us knowing they had done it. Anyone with a big booster can kill a satellite in a messy and destructive way, but the true test of sophistication is being able to kill a satellite quietly, cleanly, and in such a way that it looks like the satellite just died on its own. And that would scare me - but of course, I wouldn't know, so it wouldn't scare me.

Groggus Maximus

Certain things just don't make sense to me before my first cup of coffee in the morning. Or sometimes even after my first cup of coffee, but never mind that for now.

I logged on to AOL this morning to adjust our satellite TV account. We had grown weary of what we came to call the "Bruce Willis Channel" - that would be Starz, with its literally endless repeats of Armageddon, Mercury Rising and selections from the Die Hard family of movies. Does Bruce Willis own Starz? Or have I not been paying attention and somehow 85% of all movies ever made now star Bruce Willis? Not that I dislike Bruce Willis; I just don't want to watch Armageddon every night. Or any night. Once was enough.

But that's not the point. The point is that I logged on to AOL to adjust our satellite TV package to add HBO. I have a deep and apparently bottomless curiosity about Rome, and I confess the idea of watching the HBO series "Rome" appealed to me. And the idea of watching movies other than Armageddon also appealed to me. So we picked HBO, which combines new movies and "Rome", and thus are all plants watered.

And as usually happens, I got drawn into the pop cultural train wreck that is AOL's welcome screen. I regard the "lifestyle" and "entertainment" tabs on the AOL screen to be two somethings of the apocalypse. Maybe not two actual horsemen of the apocalypse, but maybe two stable boys of the apocalypse, or two mounting blocks of the apocalypse. The apocalypse aint here, but when you read the lifestyle and entertainment tabs, you can sort of see it coming.

So this morning I was nostril-deep in my coffee reading these press releases from the outer circles of trivial celebrity hell and saw something called "Natural Beauty", where AOL proposes to reveal its top ten picks for women who possess natural beauty and don't require "four hours in a makeup chair". Like a moth drawn to the headlights of a speeding Kenworth, I clicked on this story.

Ugh. My point isn't that the women listed in the article weren't beautiful. And I have no personal point of view on the great makeup-vs-no makeup argument. I don't dispute the fact that some women are naturally beautiful (and I might even go further and argue that most are naturally beautiful).

Here's what confused me. These ten women who are supposed to be exemplars of natural beauty who didn't need four hours of prep work to look good had all been subjected to four hours of prep work! Some of the photo captions even listed the makeup and hair artists who had done the work! So we can't even be sure that the women AOL listed really were naturally beautiful. We just have to take their word for it.

I think I need more coffee. A lot more coffee.

Insomnium

I recently discovered a particularly good death metal band. I like using the word "discovered". It makes me feel like I was feeling my way through a long-dead Egyptian tomb beneath some eroded pyramid and found Insomium lying there in the dust. I also like the phrase "particularly good" because it's the kind of sweeping overgeneralization I generally dislike.

So let me rephrase. I recently happened to hear of a death metal band named Insomnium that I happen to like an awful lot. Better?

Thus far they've released three albums - "In The Halls Of Awaiting", "Since The Day It All Came Down", and "Above The Weeping World." The band does not get particularly high marks on www.bnr.com, which it describes as (and this is not a direct quote) good but not highly original. And maybe that's true, but there's something about this band's style that appeals to me very much.

Their first album, "In The Halls Of Awaiting", seems to me to be pretty deeply influenced by Swedish melodic death metal of the Gothenburg type. The album brings to mind Dark Tranquility or In Flames, depending on the song, but even then, the approach isn't straight imitation. For one thing, Insomnium's lyrics make sense to me, after a fashion. I enjoy Dark Tranquility a great deal, but when I look up their lyrics on www.darklyrics.com, the words still make no sense to me. Insomnium's lyrics are considerably more poetic, though since they are probably translated from Finnish there are places where the lyric flow gets a little lost. Plus one hears here and there on the album doom metal influences - it is in places much slower and more somber than conventional death metal, and there is thankfully next to none of that Florida school drum-pounding business.

Their second album, "The Day It All Came Down", is even better. The Gothenburg death metal influence is still there, but the doom metal influence is much stronger. The pace is slower, the mood is more somber, and the lyrics continue to be epic and poetic. "The Daughter Of The Moon" is particularly good, half death metal and half doom metal and all good. The parts with the slow whispered lyrics send chills down my spine. Some of the songs show more Gothenburg influence and others show more doom influence, but taken as a whole, the album is an excellent listen, somber and atmospheric without being sappy.

I haven't heard their third album all the way through yet, so I have to withhold comment, but what I've heard so far sounds pretty good, the same nice mix of melodic death and doom, stylistically similar to the second album, and just as polished.

There are certain tropes in death metal that fatigue me. One is the "brutality arms race" where the quality of the music is apparently proportional to the brutality of the lyrics. Though is is mostly a feature of American death metal, the Scandinavians aren't above this sort of thing either. (And let's face it, Scandinavia is the real home of death metal). I shall cite as my example Dismember, which isn't bad musically. It sounds like grindcore filtered through Carcass, with the same characteristic guitar sound that is sometimes called the "electric saw". But the lyrics! If songs like "Skin Her Alive" or "Sickening Art" don't unsettle you, you just aren't paying attention. They're brutal for the sake of being brutal, though cynics could argue that since the vocals are indecipherable anyway, they might as well be using a grocery list for lyrics. There are worse examples, but the point is that some bands seem to be brutal and disgusting just for the sake of being brutal and disgusting, an arms race of tastelessness that after a while I grow weary of (though I should point out there are bands that as a matter of deliberate practice parody this tendency by being outrageously, heroically tacky).

The other main trope is Satanism, often ridiculously over-the-top Satanism that is clearly intended to sell albums to self-hating teenagers who think Satanism will provide answers to questions like "How come nobody likes me?" This is such a defining trait of black metal that you almost can't have black metal that doesn't mention Satanism in some way, but it also exists in some forms of death metal, most notably the stuff that comes out of Florida (and yes, I'm thinking of Deicide).* I grow weary of this sort of nonsense pretty quickly, and no, it isn't because the Satanic point of view shakes my beliefs - it takes more than tattooing an upside-down crucifix on your forehead to "challenge my beliefs". I'm just readily fatigued by the way they use Satanism as a crass marketing tool. This is why I don't listen to Deicide or black metal acts like Dimmu Borgir, because the shameless exploitation of their ingrained Satanism just wears me down.

It is against this background that I find Insomnium especially pleasing. It's extreme metal, make no mistake, but extreme metal of unusual musical sophistication and highly unusual lyrical taste. Instead of extolling the dubious virtues of brutality, violence and schlock blasphemy, Insomnium is much more subtle. The prevailing mood is somber rather than violent, with most of the songs being about loss, longing and regret rather than hacking people apart with medical instruments or sacrificing black chickens to Satan. The mix of death metal and doom metal is very sophisticated and atmospheric, and I frankly can't get enough of it. It isn't uplifting music that makes one want to dance and sing the way Bowling For Soup does. (Yes, my droogies, I like Bowling For Soup a lot too.) But as a slice of atmospheric, somber, and very advanced and sophisticated doom/death metal, Insomnium seems pretty hard to beat.

(I have to be careful with terms like "doomdeath metal" because there is already a class of music known as doomdeath, which includes bands like My Dying Bride. Insomnium isn't as doomy as doomdeath metal, but it isn't as deathy as death metal. So what is it? It's good, that's what it is!)

*There is a genre of black metal, usually from Norwegian bands, that is anti-Christian but not Satanic. This genre is sometimes called "Viking metal" because it isn't clear that it can be black metal without being Satanic.

Torpedo Boat Flotilla

Here's a bad picture of my fleet of 1/72nd scale torpedo boats. Why not?

The long grey one in the foreground is a German S-100. Behind it is a Lindberg "Coast Guard patrol boat", whatever that means. Aft of the S-100 is a Revell PT-109, and behind the PT-109 is an Airfix Vosper MBT.

The PT-109 is an old Revell kit. It's been around for a long time, and the molds seem to be deteriorating. The crew figures are misshapen and mutant, and thin parts like the propeller shafts and 20mm gun barrel are almost unusable. Flash and mold misalignment plague most of the other small parts. I replaced the shafts with wire, but managed to make the screws, depression railings, .5o-caliber guns and other small parts work. I added a 37mm deck gun from White Ensign Models, which curiously enough was harder to assemble than the PT-109 in the first place. I don't know what White Ensign uses for its "white metal parts", but they seem particularly immune to super glue. Most of the itme I spent on the model was spent improving the torpedo tubes - removing the seams and scratchbuilding representations of the loading hatches. When I do this kit again (as surely I will) I intend to model a boat from later in the war, with a 40mm Bofors, 37mm automatic cannon, lightweight torpedoes and torpedo racks, and masthead radar.

The Airfix MBT is a surprisingly nice kit, a bit unconvential in terms of engineering but it builts up into a pleasingly cluttered and detail-rich model. The crew figures are good, though the twin 20mm guns are not great. Beats me how the magazines attach to the guns! I faked it, and it looks okay from a distance, but my solution is not correct.

The Lindberg patrol boat is also surprisingly nice. It came with hardware so it could be battery-powered, but I left that out. The main problem with the kit is that I can't find any references for it. I have no idea what kind of boat it is. The 20mm guns are also dreadful; I replaced them with a single 20mm Oerlikon from an old PT-109 kit.

The Revell S-100 is the most modern of the four, and is a very nice kit, well-detailed, well-engineered and nice-fitting with a couple of exceptions. One is that the screws take a lot of work to make them look decent, and even then they don't match the real screws. Another is that the 37mm gun is dreadful. And the last is that the kit comes with no crew figures. I bought a set of Revell vinyl Kriegsmarine crew figures and I'll eventually paint a few for the S-100 (and for the Type-VIIC U-boat that I haven't started yet) but for now, the kit is devoid of crew. And what's up with that misshapen jaguar on the decal sheet?

Pay no attention to the collection of 1/70oth scale battleships!

The Second Tractor

This is my second tractor, a 1956 Ford 850. It is closely related to but slightly larger than the more common 8N and 9N tractors, but it has a five-speed transmission with a "Christmas Tree" shifter instead of the four-speed found in N-series tractors. It has been nicely restored, with the only major problems from a restoration point of view being a non-stock seat, no decals, and no headlights. It was my Christmas present. Shortly before Christmas we saw it on the side of the road for sale, and we stopped and bought it. We probably paid a little bit too much for it, but the price we paid wasn't outrageous by any means.

Why a 1956 Ford 850? Nostalgia, mainly. I like vintage equipment, and it reminded me of the 9N that my grandfather had, and I think it was a certain visual appeal compared to the hyper-modern hydrostatic fully-loaded "compact tractors" some of my neighbors have. And I could hitch my $4,000 Ford 850 to my neighbor's $20,000 New Holland "compact" and tow the New Holland backwards for as long as I wanted to. One of the problems one faces when buying vintage tractors is the dread spectre of the "proprietary hitch". But with a Ford, this isn't a problem. The Ferguson-Ford hitch arrangement became the standard type, so any modern category-one three point implement should hitch right up, unlike the case with other vintage tractors, where a certain amount of adaptation is sometimes necessary. I'm not sure if the Ford's PTO output is standard, but since I don't have any PTO attachments, it's irrelevant for now. (And, frankly, a lot of PTO attachments kind of scare me anyway.)

It came with the blade as shown above, but it was rusted to the point it wouldn't pivot. Some persuasion with Liquid Wrench, a long 4x4 and my largest hammer broke it loose, though, and now I can pivot the blade just by leaning on it. I want to find a one-bottom plow or hardpan breaker for it now - the tractor is shown sitting on the spot that will one day be our garden, but I currently have no implements that will break up the hard desert soil.

It starts easily and runs well. It is quiet. It is also fast in fifth gear. The only leak is a tiny bit of seepage from the front main seal. The hydraulics, transmission and differential are tight and leak-free. The clutch doesn't grab or chatter. When I first got it, the right brake hardly worked at all, but fixing it was a simple matter of adjustment. When I first got it, it steered fairly hard to the left, but after pumping a bunch of grease into the front end it works much better. There are a couple of cracks where the top link attaches to the draft control linkage, but I can weld those. And the hood is difficult to latch because I think it's slightly misaligned.

I'm very pleased with it. It isn't as handy as my lawn tractor, but it'll do work that my lawn tractor won't. I've moved quite a bit of dirt with it already, mostly building a flood control berm along the north and west sides of our property, and I've used it to fix our private haul road and to build a private horse cart path around the back of our property. And sometimes, I confess, I start it up and fiddle with it just because it's fun. My two tractors work pretty well together. The Ford breaks up, moves and positions the dirt; and the Bolens does the final grading.

I've ordered some stuff for it. I ordered three generic 12-volt headlights (the tractor is already a 12-volt system with an alternator) so I can mount two on the front and one at the rear as a work light. My wife ordered me the user's manual, shop manual and parts manual (that's how I knew how to adjust the brakes!).

Now I just need a plow. And a box scraper. And forklift blades. And a post-hole digger. And a PTO tiller. And a three-point hitch disk. And... And...

The First Tractor

This is my first tractor. Yeah, I know, it's a lawn tractor, and worse yet, an $800 chain store tractor. Not even a good lawn tractor, you sniff dismissively. But I have to say, this tractor has given us superb service. All I've ever had to do to it is change the oil, clean the air filter, put gas in it, and fix flat tires.

It's just your basic 15.5-horsepower Bolens, and I originally bought it because my property was seriously overgrown with dead grass and weeds that posed a serious grassfire risk. So I bought this thing and proceeded to mow brush for about a week. It would have been faster to use a real tractor and a brush mower, but not being able to afford a real tractor and a brush mower, I used this. And I used it hard too, mowing brush and weeds three or four feet tall on rolling and uneven ground, and other than getting stuck a time or two, the tractor never quit. I had to fix five or six flat tires (mesquite thorns go right through the thin "Turf-Saver" tires) but then I put a tube of green Slime in each tire and the problem with flats went away.

Then I bought one of those cheap $60 stamped-metal assemble-it-yourself wagons for it, and I've used it as a motorized wheelbarrow for about two years. And I've used it a lot. I've moved tons and tons of dirt and gravel, scrap iron, manure, furniture, rocks and brush with it. The original paper-thin tires lasted about six months, then they sprang hundreds of spontaneous leaks. I covered the tires with soapy water to find out where they were leaking, and there were so many leaks the tires looked like they were foaming. So I ordered a set of beefy, muscular hand truck tires from Northern Tool and managed, through the proper employment of words I wouldn't want my kids to say, to get them forced onto the rims and got them to inflate. Since then, the cart had put in many a hard day of work with no complaints at all.

I realized I could drop the mower deck to its lowest position and use it as a grader. My neighbors think I'm mowing dirt, but I'm actually grading with the blades disengaged. It works really surprisingly well, so long as the dirt is soft, but a few passes with the deck and the dirt is smooth and level and nicely graded.

My son left a bunch of scrap iron with me after he quit working for a metal fabrication shop, and I built the blade shown in the picture out of those scraps. That was about a year ago, and time and use revealed certain weaknesses in my design and my welding technique. I fixed the weak welds, added a few gussets where necessary, and changed the design of the hand-powered lifting lever. Then I covered it with red spray paint so it wouldn't look quite so much like Depression-era junk. It may look cheesy, and it certainly won't dig in hard ground, but it's excellent for cleaning stalls, spreading soft dirt and gravel, and skimming big rocks off the ground. The tractor pulls it without any problem, and will pull it even when the blade is overflowing. And it doesn't interfere with the normal trailer hitch, so I don't have to unbolt anything to switch from the blade to the trailer - I just pull out a piece of pipe that serves as the blade's hinge pin, and it drops right off. I can dismount the blade without even getting off the tractor.

It is also handy, because it will fit through standard equestrian gates and will turn in a relatively short radius, making it highly useful in stalls and tight areas.

Also visible in one of the pictures is a mount I made for a dozer blade, which I also made. The dozer blade proved to be relatively unsuccessful. The geometry of the mount is such that it tends to lift the front wheels of the tractor off the ground, plus when pushing things the nose of the tractor makes ominous creaking noises. So I discontinued use of the dozer blade, but the rear box scraper remains in frequent use.

My point, and I guess I have one, is that I am very pleased with my chain store lawn tractor. It is about three years old now and it has proved to be very reliable, other than a burned-out headlight, and it starts every time. My future plans for the tractor are mostly related to tires. I want to order tougher, burlier tires for it from Northern Tool, and since I'm not worried about saving my turf, I'm going to see if I can find rear tires with lugs. It doesn't need the additional traction; I just think it would look boss. And I have vague notions of building a genuine midships grader blade, with adjustable sweep angle, that uses the stock mower deck mounting points and height adjustment mechanism. Why? Because it would be boss!

If I have any complaint with the tractor at all, it is this. I lost the plastic trough you're supposed to use when you drain the oil, and without it, the tractor kind of makes a mess of itself when you remove the oil drain plug. I think I can live with that.

If I Were King...

Things would be different if I was King. In the words of Glenn Beck, but hopefully not in his style, "I have a list..."

Maybe the first thing I would do if I was King was put news back on Headline News and send Glenn Beck and Nancy Grace back to whence they came. A disgrunted partisan hack and Roland Friesler in nice clothes - I certainly never asked for either one.

But I digress. If I were King, I'd bring Pro Mod and AA/FA back to the NHRA. I was never sure what the movitation for killing Pro Mod was, but in retrospect it seems obvious it was a mistake. Cars with huge V-8s and blowers sticking out of their hoods? What's not to like? This isn't to take anything away from Pro Stock, which is certainly cool in its own right, but c'mon, we're talking about big blowers here!

I read in a book a while back that the NHRA scuttled the AA/FA ("Fuel Altered") class because of the popularly of Funny Cars and the fact that AA/FA cars were more or less indistinguishable from Funny Cars anyway. True? I don't know. I've only seen two FA cars run in person in my life, and most of what I know about the class comes from old magazines and books, so I may not have the slightest idea of what I'm talking about. But I do know that at my local drag strip, as soon as a FA car fires up, everyone stands up and all the guys that were in line to get Cokes at the snack bar or get rid of Cokes at the bathroom turn around to watch the run. Now, this is against a backdrop of cars that, while impressive and fast on their own, are not powered by nitromethane. If there were a bunch of top fuelers or funny cars there, would anyone give a hoot about a Fuel Altered with a ridiculous Topolino body?

Of course they would! They would because I, as King, would decree that it be so.

(Tellingly enough, I've seen about nine FA runs, and only one of them was clean. The others were marred by blown engines, wall rubs and other hijinks brought on by piling too much horsepower on too little car. But that one clean run, somewhere in the vicinity of 5.4 seconds if I remember correctly, that was magic. And there was no prying the grin off the driver's face.)

And while I'm at it, I would decree that the NHRA continue to get crappy TV coverage. One of my greatest fears (in drag racing anyway) is that the NHRA will suddenly become hugely and peculiarly popular for no apparent reason in the way the NASCAR suddenly became hugely and peculiarily popular. I think that would be bad.

Pinks is bad enough. People turn on this wretched program and think they're going to be watching drag racing, but it is to drag racing as the WWE is to Greco-Roman wrestling. It's all a bunch of ego-fueled posing and bad-mouthing, exactly the kind of Dueling Testicles crap I don't want to watch on TV. They could settle the matter at hand within the first 15 seconds of the show. Start your damn cars, get in, and race. But no. The principals must bop heads in a metaphorical sense, shout hoarse nonsense, threaten to take their basketballs and go home, and suddenly remember they were scheduled for tap dance lessons and can't race after all.

And when they do race, some guy waves them off the line with his hat. What is this, a time warp? Is it 1951 again? You mean to say we installed all those fancy timing systems at our drag strips so we can ignore them and wave cars off with our hats?

Oh, right. It's not about racing. It's about drama.

My mistake.