Please To Understand!

Yesterday I bought a new model, a 1/35th scale "SAM-6 Antiaircraft missile" from Trumpeter. I don't really like Trumpeter very much, for reasons I may go into later, but for now I'm mostly going to hoot at the instruction sheet.

It says it right up front: Study and understand these instructions thoroughly before beginning assembly. And that's certainly good advice. But what, exactly, are we to try to understand?

Foist off, we find the parts list, where we find that the kit includes two "pastern ducts". What's a pastern duct? The material itself looks like small-diameter vinyl or rubber tubing. Okay, I understand, but my confidence has been strained.

Moving on, we encounter "Track Costruction". There goes a bit more of my confidence, but we move along for a few pages without any issues and I start to feel better about things.

And then, Step 12, we have "Guided Bomb Assembly". I think that should be "guided missile assembly", but what do I know? And then in step 13, we have a requirement to install some of the pastern duct and step 14 instructs us on "attaching lunch pad".

In step 15 the wheels really fall off the cart, for we are "attaching guided bomb" and installing "pastern duck" (NOT pastern duct, but apparently a whole new order of creation). The next step builds up the "Immobility Rack", something better known as a travel lock. And the penultimate step, 19, has us "Attaching stanspont state hand rail".

How's the model look? It looks okay. But the documentation is a shambles. The decal sheet clearly shows markings for a Soviet, an East German, a Polish and a Czech example. But the color painting and decal sheet only shows the East German and Czech examples. The instructions were clearly proofread by Inspector Clouseau.

People get angry at me for scolding instructions for being badly translated, poorly edited, and incompetently proofread. "You're being too hard on them," the cognoscenti tell me. "They're trying really hard and you're faulting them for things that don't matter."

Things that don't matter... Writing, one of mankind's most precious talents, doesn't matter. Hmm. One would think that a company that clearly intends to become a major force in the model industry would have enough pride and professionalism to have just one English-speaking person scan the instructions, but I guess not. Hell, I'll do it for them - it'd take me, what, five minutes to correct the goofy mistakes in the instruction sheet and tell their art department to document the other two marking options on the decal sheet. (And while I'm at it, who decided on East German and Polish versions when the two most glaringly obvious versions should have been Syrian and Egyptian?)

And I think it does matter. If they can't get basic grammar and spelling on the instruction sheet right, or even close to right, what else can't they get right? Is this the same sort of thinking that, um, leads to propylene glycol in toothpaste, by chance?

But Trumpeter is big news. The model shop nerds positively wet themselves in their ardor for Trumpeter kits, but I'm not impressed. It's not xenophobia. I like a great many foreign kit manufacturers, including the equally Chinese company Dragon. But Trumpeter? It leaves me about as cold as bubble-gum-flavored Jell-O.

Not Responsible

Aggregate companies are joining the new American habit of dodging responsibility for their actions. Most of the dump trucks that I see in my local area, which is target-rich from the point of view of dump trucks, sport little stickers that read "Not Responsible For Broken Windshields."

And those stickers strike me as being a lot like big red-painted middle fingers, because the bastards keep breaking my windshield. Repeatedly. Often. I cringe when dump trucks pass me going the other way, I genuinely do, especially on Highway 74 or 203rd Avenue, because I just know I'm going to get a barrage of gravel and rocks. And the dump truck will roar into the distance flying its little flag of defiance, its little "Not Responsible" sign, and leave me with another long crack or impact star in my fricking windshield. I don't even bother having the damn thing fixed any more. What's the point? In a week a speeding transfer truck is just going to break it anyway; I'll save myself the emotional roller coaster.

My windshield wasn't broken when I bought my car. I didn't take a hammer to it and break it. It was broken by rocks flying off or kicked up by dump trucks. How are they not responsible for that? Oh, I'm sure in the legal sense they aren't responsible; the lobbyists always find ways to craft legislation that permits big business to skip out on its responsibilities. But how can they not be responsible in a scientific sense? Truck throws up rock. Rock hits my windshield. Windshield breaks. "Not Responsible" sticker proved to be false. They may not be liable, but they're still responsible.

It makes me so mad. I want to do something, but all I can do is helplessly roar STOP BREAKING MY #$&*@ WINDSHIELD as the dump truck vanishes into the heat shimmer.

I don't tailgate dump trucks. I don't tailgate in general. I've never been hit by a rock while following a dump truck (curiously, I think I take fewer rock strikes when I follow a dump truck; I think the leading truck sweeps out the airspace for me). Only when the dump truck is going the other way, which by my math means that rocks raised by the dump truck could be hitting my windshield at a combined speed of about 140 miles per hour out on the open highway. Even on days when I'd like to drive with the windows down, I don't, because I've taken rock strikes on the side windows and can't begin to imagine what a rock strike in the middle of my forehead would feel like (though I don't doubt that the dump truck operators would lose no time putting "Not Responsible For Head Wounds" stickers on their trucks).

I hope, I really hope, that every now and then a dump truck loses a headlight to a rock thrown up by my car. But I know they don't.

I think I'm going to make a sticker that reads "Not Responsible For Sudden Gouts of Hellish Flame" and leave them to wonder what I'm up to.

Chilling

I don't rememeber driving home this evening. I remember leaving work, and I remember stopping at Circle-K to buy a less than fully acceptable cup of coffee, but that's about all I remember about the drive home.

It was a pretty good day at work, all things considered - the last bugs were ironed out of what I was working on, and now it's just a matter of the "due diligence" part of the operation where I confirm, line item by line item, that the published CRC values for various bits of software are actually right (how I yearn for a CRC of 0xDEADBEEF).

But around three PM I started to develop a caffiene withdrawal headache, which is all the proof required that I spent too much of my three-day weekend guzzling cup after cup of coffee ranked "extra-bold" on the Keurig scale. (And have I said lately what a boon this Keurig coffee maker is? Yikes! I can't imagine living without it, frankly.)

By the time I left work my head hurt so bad I don't even really remember driving home. Granted, longish parts of the drive are, at that hour, quite deserted and I could drive on the wrong side of the road for miles without anyone knowing or caring, but it's still kind of alarming to realize that I can't account for about 45 minutes of my day, and even more alarming to know that I was operating heavy equipment (to the extent that a Hyundai is heavy equipment) during the gap.

Time to back off on the coffee, I think, before this turns into a daily thing.

State of the Art for 1978

Yikes, who remembers this stuff? This was the state of the art in gaming excitement in the mid-1970s. Not these two games in particular, though the top one had a higher claim to that title than the bottom one, but these sorts of games. Paper wargames. Manual simulations. Consims. Heuristic Intensive Manual Simulations (and I am not making that up). Whatever. The top one is the old SPI solitaire classic Deathmaze, which could be played with equipment no more advanced than a coffee cup and a TV tray. The bottom one is the relatively unlamented SPI non-classic Mechwar '77, a tactical armor offering drawn from the lineage of Kampfpanzer and Desert War. I always liked the "T70" counter on the lower right corner; at the time nobody knew what the Soviets were going to call their replacement for the T-62 MBT. At least they tried with "T70", which was better than the "XMBT" thing they tried in Firefight. But to this day I can't decide if I think the T70 is really the T64 or the T72 - or if it really matters. Of course it does - doesn't it?

.

What killed this sort of gaming? It's kind of like asking "What brought low the Roman Empire?" It depends on what haunts you in the wee hours of the morning. Many blamed Dungeons & Dragons, as though the mere sight of the game would turn a formerly-virile Eastfronter into a sebaceous sunken-chested "DM" unless he beat a saving roll of 18 or had the Panzergruppe Guderian Charm-Shield. Many blamed computer games, but the truth is that most wargames and most wargame companies were one with the dust of history long before PCs and PC games became even remotely feasible (though it can be fairly said that computer sports games did wipe out the old manual sports games like "Statis-Pro Basketball"). I think, in the end, all of us guys that used to play a lot of wargames and, more importantly, bought a lot of wargames (I still have 100+ of the beggars in storage in my garage) simply woke up during a gaming session and said "You know, these things are expensive and time-consuming, they contribute nothing toward my career prospects, and when's the last time any of us actually saw a girl?" So the next guy over said "What say we adjourn the gaming session in perpetuity and go get lives?" And thus it happened.

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But sometimes it's fun to leaf through them and see what the world looked like to geeks before the computer revolution happened. Lotsa paper, lotsa complicated rules, and lotsa little cerebral bleeds when it was 2 AM and you suddenly couldn't remember what the procedure was for deciding how many warp packs got blown off your pseudo-fighter in Star Fleet Battles.

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But if you're even remotely interested, permit me to recommend http://www.grognard.com/, the best wargaming website that I know of, and one that covers the nostalic games of yesteryear as well as the new releases that occasionally crop up like cold sores on the lower lip of human progress.

It's Official

It's official, it's been decided that I know "diddley-doo-wah" about pop culture. I was reading the "Ten Unsexiest Male Stars" list on AOL and I hardly know any of them. Eric Dane? No idea. Ditto for Phillippe Whomever or Whomever Hartnett, Pete Wentz, James "Is that your real beard" Blunt, Kevin Connolly, Brandon Davis and Pete Doherty. I have absolutely no idea who any of those prancers are. Wilmer Valderrama sounds a bit like a bull rider from Brazil, but I suspect he's a pop singer. Simon Cowell has something to do with the American Idol snore-fest. And Howard Stern is "that guy that curses on the radio". So that really leaves only one star, Ben Stiller, that I've actually heard of and could spot in a crowd!

I was going to scream bloody murder about how this was a waste of perfectly good time and bandwidth and all that, until it struck me that the time and bandwidth being wasted were my own, and voluntarily at that. So I decided to scale my snarling counter-cultural assault to a bland assertion of ignorance. James Blunt??? Eric Dane???? I'm sorry, were you talking to me?

In truth I don't want to know very much about pop culture. There are things that I like - Finnish death metal, for example - but I don't feel inadequate because I know diddley-doo-wah about R&B or obscure 1990s TV shows or the works of indie (pick one) rockers, directors, actors, writers, poseurs. Rather than feeling inadequate because I don't know who these allegedly unsexy stars are or can't seem to catch the wave of indie coffee-house kultur, I can gleefully devote my time and attention to other things entirely.

Such as?

Such as this: how come, when I was a kid, the country was known as "The Ukraine" but today it is known simply as "Ukraine"? When did that happen? Why wasn't I copied in the memo? If the Ukrainians are happier without the "the", I'm happy too, but someone's not keeping me informed. At least when I learned that Upper Volta had become Burkina Faso I learned it by flipping through an updated world atlas, but the "the Ukraine/Ukraine" business rankles because I think I learned it while reading a brief biography of Milla Jovovich, not the proper venue for a major geopolitical shift like that at all. Not that it was the esteemed Ms. Jovovich's fault in any way. Careful with those guns, ma'am.

(I blame the Germans for this - I spent most of my "formative years" reading books about the Eastern Front in World War Two, and most of those seemed to have been written by Germans like Paul "Einsatzgruppen B Vas Chust Followink Orders" Carrell and F.W. "Der Fuehrer Screwed Us All" von Mellenthin. They always seemed to say things like "On the 13th, our victorious panzer columns passed into the Ukraine as the schwerpunkt moved relentlessly east, carried on the clattering tracks of von Manteuffel's panzers." Given this sort of hyperbole, maybe I should blame the Germans. And I can't help but reflect when I read such things that in a very few years, the schwerpunkt is gonna haul ass to the west, carried on the clattering tracks of Rokossovskii's T-34s and IS-2s.)

I don't even want to be a member of the counter-culture. I think I'm generally happy inhabiting a strange cultural space all my own, as the preceding paragraph probably demonstrates all too well.

(And for heaven's sake don't get me started on the whole Belarus-Byelorussia-White Russia business, especially since I can't, right off the top of my head, remember whether Belarus went back in with Russia or not.)

The World According To Jon Garp

Jon Kyl jumps up and down and protests that asking Mukasey for an opinion on waterboarding is "unfair". Unfair in what way? Asking the nominee for the nation's top lawyer job a question on how detained suspects should treated is unfair? What the hell are we supposed to ask such nominees then? Blade or shaver? Foam or Edge? Pastrami or corned beef?? It's like someone jumping up and down and screaming that asking the Surgeon-General for an opinion on obesity is unfair.

Nothing John Kyl says really surprises me. He's a shill for the Republican establishment and I'm okay with that, mostly because I never voted for him and never in my wildest fever dreams imagined voting for him. I wasn't even remotely convinced by his first campaign TV commercials that showed his RV breaking down in Arizona and leaving him with no option but to run for the Senate. Uh huh. Sure. Excuse me, I have to sneeze - ah-Carpetbagger-choo! So what he says, and what he always claims he says on my behalf (snort), goes in one ear and out the other.

But Kyl's histrionics in Mukasey's defense seem weird and partisan even by Kyl's sturdily partisan standards. If you don't mind shutting your cake-hole for a minute, Jon, I think the people who are going to be paying Mr. Mukasey's paycheck (that would be the taxpayers) might be interested, one way or the other, in what Mr. Mukasey has to say regarding what he thinks the limits should be on the treatment of of detained suspects, and have a right to know, since frankly a great deal hinges on his answer.

Maybe since J.D. Hayworth is no longer in the House and Arizona has lost its perennial candidate for gasbag of the year, Jon Kyl sees yet another opportunity... Nah, he wouldn't do that twice, would he?

Democratic Bobbleheads

I wasn't in Michael Mukasey's hearing, so I really can't offer any opinion on how he stacks up compared to the unlamented Alberto Gonzalez, or how sound his professional qualifications are, or for that matter where he stands on the character-o-meter. But I can say I wasn't awfully surprised that he tap-danced around the question of whether waterboarding is torture or not, considering who nominated him, and I bet he wastes no time at all in studying the matter and deciding - hey presto! - that waterboarding isn't torture and thus isn't unconstitutional.

And now I see that Shumer and Feinstein are signed up to vote for him, even though Patrick Leahy himself declined to board the Waterboarding Express. Isn't that nice? We elect a majority of Democrats in Congress hoping for change, and the only change we get is the names on the office doors. Everything else remains status quo. The next time the Democratic Party calls me and asks for a donation, I'm going to suggest that they go pound sand because as far as I'm concerned they've wasted every vote and every cent I've given them.

But back to what I was talking about. What was I talking about? Oh yeah, waterboarding. Is it torture, or is it not? Let's discuss what waterboarding is first. In its most basic form, it amounts to pouring water on a person's face which for some reason seems to very readily invoke terror of drowning. In its more advanced version (one might say "institutional waterboarding" as opposed to "field waterboarding") the prisoner is strapped to a heavy inclined board, with his feet higher than his head. His face is covered with a cloth or a piece of cellophane, and water is poured over his face. Somehow this triggers terror of death in almost everyone - it is said that the average person will break under 14 seconds of waterboarding and that resisting for more than a minute or two requires almost superhuman willpower.

Is this torture? By the carefully honed and very exclusive definition offered by the Bush Administration, no, it isn't torture. But to anyone who lives in the real world, it is torture, absolutely. Maybe not physical torture, but psychological torture of the highest rank. It actually strikes me as being a form of mock execution, and I believe mock executions have already been defined as torture. I know I sure as Shinola wouldn't want to be waterboarded, and I wouldn't want anyone waterboarded in my name either. Even John McCain believes waterboarding is torture, and as he has first-hand experience in such matters, I'll accept his word without question.

But don't ask the Democrats in Congress, who as a group are slowly turning into a bunch of Bobble-heads who simply nod assent to anything the Bush Administration says. Hey, you bozos, the reason we elected you is because we became uneasy with the growth of Executive power and privilege, and what exactly have you done about it? What's the word? Squat? Yep, that's the word.

So now you're going to go off and vote to recommend confirmation of Mukasey even though he won't offer you a hard opinion on whether waterboarding is torture or not. I hope you guys still respect yourselves in the morning, because I sure as hell won't.

Historical Nugget

And now, a dash of Arizona history.

We live in Wittmann, which is a somewhat amorphous geographical region that lies, roughly, between Surprise and Circle City. The area is becoming more popularly known as Surprise, thanks to the Professional Urban Planners (read "ambitious bastards") in Surprise who decided that the whole area should eventually join their city.

But for now, it's unincorporated, and it's called Wittmann, and Surprise can go fish. Upon touring Our Fair Wide Spot In The Road, one will note that the school is called not Wittmann, but Nadaburg. What up with that??

The only thing here, originally, was a railroad siding that the railroad named Nada, the Spanish word nothing. They named it that because there was probably nothing there - maybe the cemetary and some free-floating dread, but not much else. As people started to live around the railroad siding, which for some reason they often seem to end up doing, the resulting pocket of habitation became known as Nadaburg, or almost literally "Nothing-town". Later the siding (and habitation pocket) was renamed Wittmann, but the school at least remembers the really old days and the original name of the place.

Nothing-town. I prefer that over Surprise, which I can't really think about without hearing the Gomer Pyle USMC theme music.

The Fruits

Been known to complain, have I, during these last two weeks, about those nine-hour days killing me, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. And, truth be told, those nine-hour days haven't been a wonderland of joy, because sitting at a desk in "action pose" for that long does make my chest hurt. Actually, it's about 80% chest incision pain and about 20% flaccid back muscle pain, brought on by the fact that I haven't really sat at a proper desk in a while (my sitting posture at home, as I type this, is radically different than how I sit at work. At home, I recline such that I can and occasionally do nod off when the mood strikes me, but at work that's kind of a bad idea).

But the point is that sitting at the desk causes me pain. By the end of the day it's pretty bad, but at least the drive home allows me to lean back just enough that the "direction of stress" in my chest changes and the pain goes away. (This is going to sound odd, but leaning back makes my chest feel like it is pulling apart; sitting up makes it feel like it is being pressed together.) So I was known to whine about the level of pain, and last Friday it was so bad I starting to question the wisdom of this "going back to work" idea in the first place.

But now it pays off, because today was my day off, and payday at the same time! Could it possibly get any better?? So what did I do on my day off?

I mustered out of rehab. That's over, or at least Phase II part of it. Now I have the option of continuing with Phase III rehab, at $16 a week, or pretending to do rehab at home, which has the characteristic aroma of wishful thinking clinging to it. I don't know if $16 is a bargain or not, but I'm tempted to go that route anyway. It's across the street, in a larger facility, and features a much wider selection of machinery, but it's still semi-supervised (meaning, I guess, that if I fall over face-first, someone will at least call 911).

I got my prescriptions filled, replenished my supply of arcane supplements, and reloaded mein pillschlepper, a plastic deal that holds a weeks' worth of pills and which greatly simplifies the process of taking pills at 5:45 AM. It looks pretty ominous - the compartments are full of big gnarly-looking gel-caps and capsules and spacecraft (a wan The Right Stuff joke, if you'll indulge me), but the actual drugs are tiny pink and white tablets and the big gnarly things are mostly fish oil, red something-or-the-other and niacin.

I went to the grocery store, which was fun, and the book store, which was funner. I found that my lawn tractor is continuing to malfunction and is once again full to the gills with errant gasoline, but the large tractor runs like a top since I carried out the Great Obscure Spark Plug Search and adjusted the carburetor properly (all I can imagine is that the last owner misread "one and a half turns" as "six and a half turns").

So was it worth the pain in my chest to have today off? Well, yeah, to have today off and a paycheck to go along with it, sure!

Can't Do Anything

Something I heard on the radio tonight really struck a nerve with me. It wasn't anything particular to the BBC, which I happened to be listening to, nor was it anything really that the BBC said. They were simply discussing various forms of alternative power generation, and they had an "expert" on who basically couldn't stand the thought of any kind of alternative power generation. He only rained on a few alternative power schemes, but that's probably only because they didn't have time to talk about all of them.

The ability of special interest advocates to paralyze public debate in this country is truly appalling. Nothing can ever be done because it always offends some exceedingly small constituency that remains adamantly opposed to whatever is being discussed.

We take it as a given that oil won't last forever. It's a finite resource, and sooner or later it's going to run out. Experts and ideologues can argue about when that day will come, but the bottom line is that oil isn't forever. And neither are the other great power generation fuels currently in use, coal and gas, and all of them have the undesirable side-effect of pumping carbon dioxide, among other things, into the air. So we should take it as given that eventually fossil fuels will run out, and when that happens, we'd best have some alternative power sources ready to roll or face a sudden collapse in our standard of living back to roughly the Neolithic Age.

Okay. So what about hydroelectric power? It's clean, it's reliable, it... Oh, wait, it causes widespread environmental damage and in any event there are few rivers left in America that could be gainfully dammed anyway. Okay, scratch that.

What about wind power? It's clean, and though it doesn't generate much power per installation, the plants can be quite widespread and maybe there's some hidden advantage in having a decentralized generation grid. Oh, wait, the blades make "whooshing" sounds that the neighbors object to, and bird lovers complain that birds are occasionally clubbed to death by the blades. Scratch that.

Okay, what about biofuels? Not clean, really, but at least more neutral with regard to CO2 than fossil fuels, and they reduce dependence on politically unreliable foreign oil. Oh, wait, it's immoral to take food out of someone's mouth and make it into fuel and in any event it's inefficient, and pay no attention to that Brazil behind the curtain!

Hmm. How are we on solar power? It's clean, quiet, non-polluting... Oh, wait, it's expensive and inefficient, it only works during the daytime so environmentally damaging batteries are required, and the panels themselves may pose toxic chemical risks when disposed of. Scratch that.

Cripes. This is getting hard! What about, uh, nuclear power? Huge generation capacity per plant, and zero contribution toward global warming! Oh, wait, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and the groovitude of being in the avant garde of the nuclear protest movement. Scratch that.

Maybe conservation will help. Maybe we can require that cars get some minimum fuel mileage, or that some percentage of cars be hybrids or entirely electric. Oh, wait, that's government intrusion on the workings of a free market and we wouldn't want to raise Adam Smith from his grave, would we?

What about improved mass transit? Dedesign our cities to make better use of mass transit, and encourage people to use it! Oh, wait, mass transit is a socialist experiment in social engineering. Scratch that.

So, ultimately, nothing can be done. All we can do is sit in our SUVs in traffic jams, burn Middle Eastern and Venezuelan oil, and wait for the end. That seems to be the only thing the "experts" can agree on. It's too bad we can't develop some technology that uses special-interest experts as a fuel source; I'd personally love to see an oil industry lawyer masquerading as a expert on the pitfalls of biofuels or a pop singer turned nuclear protester being forced to generate a few thousand watts. I'd love that a lot.

Put The Hammer To It

Who here remembers Tom Schoendienst, a Phoenix-area TV sportscaster back in the 1970s who used to come on the Friday news and give the results of all the local high school football games? This was back before fancy graphics and remote locations were common in local news, so mostly it was a matter of the somewhat spooky-looking Schoendienst reading results. Not scores, just results. The scores were shown on-screen; all he did was say who beat who. And he'd try to spice it up a little in a primitive and unsuccessful stab at what would later come to be known as the ESPN style. His favorite was "put the hammer to". McClintock put the hammer to St. Mary's, St. Mary's put the hammer to Peoria, Peoria put the hammer to Velveeta Vocational, Velveeta Vocational put the hammer to some amoebae found in a puddle outside the Reflective Cheese Performin' Arts and Fondue Center.

I was sitting here at about 5:30 AM with my nose in a cup of coffee, bleating softly and trying to determine how many Tylenol I should take, when I suddenly heard the ghostly voice of Tom Schoendienst saying "These nine-and-a-half-hour days are putting the hammer to him."

Boy howdy.

Hydraulic-ed

We haven't been using the lawn tractor much lately, mostly because it had four tires with various species of slow leaks and it's sort of a pain in the butt to have to drag the compressor or the hand pump out to air up yon tires every time you want to do something. So it sat, and sat, and sat, until finally I ordered four replacement tires from Northern Tool for it. So the tires duly arrived, and I duly went out to move the tractor to the carport so I could work on it on concrete rather than on dirt.

It wouldn't start. The starter would spin the engine to the compression stoke, then the starter would stall. I figured the battery was simply a little weak and wouldn't power the starter past the compression stroke, so I clapped the battery charger on it and proceeded to pull of the wheels where it sat. Now, I don't have a jack that really works on the tractor, so jacking it up consists mainly of grabbing one end of the tractor, grunting extravagantly, and trying to kick something like a milk crate or stool under the tractor while holding it aloft by brute strength. It works, sort of.

So I got the wheels off, and proceeded to try to get the tires off the rims. They'd had so much flat tire sealer pumped into them over the years the insides of the tires were full of an orange-green slime that coated everything, including me and my garage floor, with joyous abandon. It was so slippery I assumed it would help me get the tubeless tires off the rims, but no sale. It also made holding on to tools difficult. I broke the beads on one of the rims and managed to get the tire half-off, but I just couldn't get the inside bead off the outside rim. It was awful. There was no way to get any leverage on the thing at all with the tools I had, so I cut the bead with bolt cutters. Cheating, I know, but you do what you have to do.

Now it was time to put the new tire on the rim, which I'd scrubbed to rid it of the slimy green substance. I replaced the slimy green substance with a slimy blue substance, laundry detergent, used to try to lubricate the beads over the rims. I managed to get one tire on a rim, and even then only by kneeling on the tire with both knees and taking tiny eighth-inch bites with a screwdriver. This experience left me with double vision, a whooping cough, and bubbles of nitrogen in my bloodstream brought on by too much screaming, but worse was in store.

Now I couldn't get the beads to set. The tire had been squashed flattish for shipment and there was just no way of compressing it circumferentially enough to get the beads to come out far enough to seal on the rims. No way. I used my usual standby compression straps - a leather belt and a piece of strap - and nothing worked. Still, I wasn't about to admit defeat. I was about to start to cobble up a compression strap using my four-ton cable come-along when my wife said "Why don't I just take all this stuff down to Discount Tire and let them mount the tires?"

Why indeed? Frankly, I'd never even considered the possibility that Discount Tire would deal with lawn tractor tires. Even now I'm a little astonished that they not only claimed they could handle them, but that they did indeed handle them, and for four dollars per rim. By that afternoon the four shiny black tires were mounted on the rims, though I notice one of the rims still has a smear of greenish slime...

I mounted the rims on the tractor yesterday and decided I'd just drive it around to see how it felt. I turned the key, and the starter spun the engine through about a half a revolution, and again it stalled against the compression stroke. Now, remember that it had been on the charger all day, so I knew it wasn't a weak battery. So what was it? I backed the engine off by hand so the starter could get a "running start" at the compression stroke, and again it stalled. And it stalled hard, like there was something in the cylinder. Hmm. I tried to pull the engine past the compression stroke by hand, but no sale - it locked up hard at a certain point and simply wouldn't go any further.

Fiddling with this led me to ponder why the engine was making so many strange liquid gurgling and slurping sounds when the crankshaft was slowly revolved by hand. I took out the spark plug (thank heaven for small spark plug sockets) and there was a sudden gush of raw gasoline from the spark plug hole. And not a little raw gas either, we're talking a cup or so. Clearly the engine had hydraulicked on gasoline, meaning that there was so much gasoline in the cylinder that the piston couldn't complete its up-and-down motion because liquids can't be compressed. Engines normally hydraulic when they fill up with water, and are usually severely damaged in the process. But in this case, the engine had hydraulicked on gasoline, not water, and because it wasn't running when it happened, it wasn't damaged, it just wouldn't start.

So why would the engine be so full of gasoline? There was no time to think about it, because it was time to shower all the gasoline off my person so we could go to a Halloween party.

This morning I returned to the hunt. I had concluded that the most likely explanation was a carburetor malfunction, specifically something with the system that regulates the amount of gasoline in the float bowl. I had viddied that any one of several things might have happened. The float might have filled with gasoline and sunk. The float might have broken off the hinge arm. The needle might have gotten jammed in the needle valve throat. A flake of some wretched foreign material might have gotten wedged between the needle and the seat. All of these would result in the float valve remaining stuck open, which would allow gasoline to overflow the float bowl, trickle down the intake tube, and slowly pool in the cylinder.

So I took the carburetor off and took it apart and found nothing wrong. Nothing. Everything seemed to work. The needle sealed, the float floated, the hinge hinged. So I put it back together and let it sit for a minute with the fuel line hooked up, and presently it gushed fluids like a person chopping onions. Crap! So I took it apart again, and again, and finally did the old blow-in-the-fuel-inlet business while turning the carburetor upside down and right side up, and finally demonstrated that the needle sealed upside down and didn't seal right side up (the expected behavior). So I put it back together and this time it didn't gush fluids. I don't know why. I just went with it.

I put the engine back together and started it. It ran for about five seconds and died, and when I tried to start it again, it was hydraulicked again! Aaaagh! So I took the carburetor off again and found it, the cylinder, the intake tube and pretty much everything (including my shirt) soaked with a strange pale amber fluid that had some of the characteristics of gasoline, and some of the characteristics of motor oil.

You're probably ahead of me. As the thing sat with the carburetor slowly draining into the cylinder, the cylinder itself drained into the crankcase until the whole engine, cylinder and crankcase and all, filled up with gasoline. Instead of a crankcase filled with 1.6 quarts of oil, I had a crankcase filled with a couple of gallons of gasoline mixed with 1.6 quarts of oil, and any movement of the crankshaft caused the crankcase breather to pump this slimy fluid into the engine faster than the engine could get rid of it.

So I drained the engine, which took a long time, and put in new oil, and put the carburetor back on, and wiped as much of the mess off the engine as I could, and started the thing. It ran like a top, it did, just like brand new, so I decided to drive it around for a little while as a reward for all that work.

Consider that the engine was pretty much coated with that oil-and-gas mixture. Consider that the engine had pumped a pint or so of the oil-and-gas mixture into the muffler. Consider that hot oil smokes. Presently I looked like a steam locomotive, my tractor emitting such a thick cloud of smoke it actually left a shadow on the ground. There was smoke everywhere. I was afraid the neighbors were going to call the volunteer fire department, or perhaps report a crashed airplane, or that I would pass out under that incredible pall of smoke and simply die.

Eventually the oil burned off and the tractor stopped smoking, but wow was it a smoky mess for a while.

So that's been my weekend. Tires, a hydraulicked engine, and enough smoke to give Al Gore the cool shivers. And me? I'm covered with several layers of slime, including green tire sealer slime, amber oil-and-gas slime, and black carboniferous-smelling slime that rubs off my tools and probably dates back to the time I had to fix the blown head gasket in my truck.

Meerkat Madness

I see another one of the meerkats on Meerkat Manor died. Mozart, I guess, was the rodent's name, and not long after the demise of Flower, who was apparently the mob's leader.

In the interests of full disclosure, I have to say that I watch the show from time to time and find it fairly interesting if extremely contrived, especially when the narrator presumes to tell us what Some Random Meerkat is thinking. How would he know? I suspect that if you could read the mind of a meerkat, it would sound something like this: "Food! Food! Sex! Sex! Danger! Danger! Food! Food! Sex! Sex! Danger! Danger!" (and, truth be told, that's what MY mind sounds like most of the time too). But aside from the relentless anthropomorphizing that goes on, it's an interesting and fun show except for those parts where the meerkats eat sundry enormous insects. I can live without that. Especially foul tasting sundry enormous insects. I figure that if a millipede is going to go to the effort of secreting a foul-tasting oil, you should honor the millipede's industriousness by leaving it the hell alone and eating the cameraman's pastrami sandwich instead.

Every time a meerkat dies, the viewing community is consumed with grief and soon the Internet abounds with tributes and memorials. Viewers post poems, tracts, illiterate scrawls and God knows what else as they try to articulate their grief because a meerkat got bitten on the head by a cobra. And fair enough - it's not for me to say how someone should express their grief. When my first cat died, I wore a rubber band around my wrist for a few days without really knowing why I was doing it.

But here's my question. Hundreds of people die every day for reasons that are as random and meaningless as the cobra-bitten and jackal-mauled meerkats on the TV show, but nobody seems to be all that concerned about them. Not even me. Don't mistake this for a sermon, because I have the same problem. A meerkat croaks on the TV show, and I think Oh, that's sad! A hundred people are blown to bloody smithereens in a car bomb attack in Iraq and I think Gosh, what a mess. The problem isn't that the death of a scruffy, flea-infested meerkat on the TV shouldn't be sad. The problem is that the deaths of a hundred human beings with their own hopes and aspirations should be sad.

But somehow it doesn't seem to work out that way. How many stupid wars would we fight if we felt the loss of each human being as keenly as we feel the loss of a dusty, bug-eating rodent on a TV show? And how do we get to that point, the point where human beings are as precious as meerkats and penguins? I wish I knew.

Hi Ho, Hi Ho

I'm back to work. After low-key negotiations with an unnamed aerospace company, I'm back at work in the general field of aircraft collision avoidance systems and terrain awareness systems (why do we avoid collisions with other aircraft, but we're only expected to be 'aware' of the ground?).

It's my policy to not blog about work, since that seems to be a fairly efficient means of committing career suicide these days, and I don't need that sort of help.

But oh crap did the drive home yesterday suck! When did Phoenix turn into such a traffic nightmare? Or was it a one-day festival of crappy driving habits staged by the city just to get me back into the swing of things?

The hard part of my drive home is the business between 7th Avenue and I-17. I have to merge to the left four times, and in heavy traffic. One of those merges is fail-passive, meaning that if I fail to merge, I just drive on the shoulder till I can merge. But three are not fail-passive - if I don't merge successfully, I depart the freeway and head for (in order) 19th Avenue, Deer Valley, or Tucson. I'm not complaining about that. I'm a grown-up and I can handle merging on the freeway. But it's all the other BS that goes on in the merging lanes that scares me.

There are three threats. The first, and most serious, is the Professional in the Huge SUV. It's usually but not always a woman, and she's usually blabbing on her cell phone as she mashes the throttle on her Ford Excursion to the floor. The chief threat they pose to me is that they seem entirely oblivious of the existence of other people. They're too important, I guess, so they drive on the shoulders, they bull through merging situations, they go 85 MPH, they tailgate, and the whole time they're carrying on an animated conversation with God Knows Who about God Knows What (I imagine they're complaining about their housekeepers, but what do I know?).

(Closely related to the Professional in the SUV is the Realtor in the SUV, most common out in the sticks where I live. This is a guy in a Hummer who spends half his time yammering over the back of the seat, the other half of his time pawing at his maps and listings, and all of his time going way too fast and swerving violently from shoulder to shoulder. If they find themselves on dirt roads, they cry "Hot dog!" and go as fast as they can since God favors the person who makes the biggest cloud of dust. But then, just when their overly-fast driving reaches a zenith of insanity, they stop dead, half on and half off the road, and then you can see six, eight, sometimes as many as twenty people in the Hummer wildly pointing in various directions.)

The second, and about as serious, is the "Noncomformist Outdoorsman" in the Huge Pickup, usually but not always a Dodge. (Seriously, I heard that eighty-odd percent of the guys who buy Dodge pickups describe themselves as "noncomformist outdoorsmen".) These guys are also usually on their cell phones, but they're probably looking for oversized wheels or trying to order a Coors Party Ball. Unlike the Professionals in the SUVs, they're aware of the traffic around them; they just don't give a shit. Life has done them wrong in some way and they get back at it by being jerks in traffic. Unlike the Professional who doesn't let you merge because she just doesn't realize there are other people in the world, the Nonconformist Outdoorsman won't let you merge because thwarting you transfers some of your penis girth to him, and everything is a matter of subtle penis one-upmanship.

The third threat is people like me, who behave in a sane, patient and cooperative manner in traffic until the stress, the Professionals, and the Nonconformist Outdoorsmen cause us to explode violently, destroying our cars and killing seven other motorists in a tsunami of flaming gasoline and torn metal fragments. We're not IEDs, we're UEDs - Unintentional Explosive Devices.

Apparently, I Have Problems

I fell asleep with the TV on last night, which isn't unusual. I can sleep perfectly well with the TV and reading lamp on, and sometimes even with a cup of coffee balanced on my chest. But last night I went to sleep with the TV tuned to the Ovation channel - Martin Scorcese was holding forth on the subject of movies that influenced him, and while I can't say I really dote on what Martin Scorcese thinks, it was interesting (read harmless) background for what I was really doing, namely, leafing through old magazines.

But sometime after I fell asleep, Martin was replaced by a great surfeit of paid programming, and when I woke up this morning, I imagined myself to have no end of bad vibes. Bad credit, halitosis, insomnia, an inability to use glucosamine, torn this-and-that membranes in my joints, arthritis, type-2 diabetes, tax problems, and who knows what else. About the only things the paid programming didn't insinuate on my behalf were erectile dysfunction, pancreatitis, and involvement in Nigerian get-rich-quick schemes.

Thanks, guys. Now I can't even drink my morning coffee without casting a suspicious glance at my breadbasket and mumbling "Why can't my colon read? Errr, I mean, why can't my colon process glucosamine?"

What Stays In Vegas

What stays in Vegas stays in Vegas, I guess. I left some portions of me behind in Vegas and I imagine they're still there. Some carbon dioxide. Some water vapor. Skin flakes. Some of my tame eyebrow hairs...

I have two sorts of eyebrow hairs, tame and wild. The tame ones are thin, blonde, straight, well-behaved, entirely happy to rest closely against my skin, and so placid they can be convinced to fall out without much effort. The wild ones are just that - long, kinky, twisting, oddly-colored, and often so curvy they bend down and poke me in my own eye. And they won't fall out no matter what.

But that's not why I'm here.

I'm here to say a few words about Vegas. I think, upon due reflection, that those words include "noise", "crowds", "secondhand smoke", and "no free lunch". Not that Vegas was a bad time. The purpose was to travel to Vegas to get my nephew hitched, and that mission was achieved in fine fashion. But I guess I'm just not the Vegas sort. If given the choice between going to Puerto Penasco and Las Vegas, I have to side with Puerto Penasco - the rooms are at least as nice, and the ocean is free. If Las Vegas had an ocean, I'm sure they'd figure out a way to charge for it - and find a way to make a not-so-subtle status display out of it. "I'm sorry, sir, but only Platinum Club members are allowed to wade in past their kneecaps. You, being a member of the Sheet Metal Club, are only entitled to get your ankles wet." Meanwhile, members of the Einsteinium Club are faintly visible on the horizon, dodging plastic sharks and shouting "Feed them another homeless person!"

I saw a lot of doors in Vegas marked "Platinum Club Only" but with no idea of what lay beyond them. Roman-style orgies? Fire-lit abysses? Watercress sandwiches?

As most of my regular readers know, I used to smoke until fairly recently, and I'm still at that fairly delicate state of quitting where cigarette smoke bothers me. No, let me rephrase that. It tempts me. It doesn't make me cough or make my eyes water or make liquidy rales come rasping up from the depths of my lungs. It makes me want to light up, man, and drag deep. I didn't. I survived the secondhand smoke and the roaming cigarette girls without wrapping myself in the blue miasma of the tobacconist's art. But it was hard.

Vegas is about the only place left in America where one can smoke in public. As a consequence, people seem to smoke in public in Vegas with a kind of joyous abandon. "I can smoke, therefore I'm going to really smoke!" You almost expect the occasionally overzealous security guards to force hookahs and cigars on you at the entrances to the casinos. In some places the casinos smelled like Rod Serling's ash trays.

Nothing is free in Vegas. You don't even have the option of making a cup of instant coffee in your own room, presumably so you'll buy four-dollar cups of coffee from the faux French bakery down in the shopping district (the zone d'shoppage, fully gridlocked by hommes du cigarettes and shoppeurs). I found this rather annoying and cite it as one of the reasons I'm not likely to return to Vegas any time soon. Between the relentlessly grasping nature of the hotels (six bucks to print out an airline boarding pass! Four bucks for a tiny bottle of Diet Pepsi!), the cheesitude of the faux culture, and the ever-present clouds of cigarette smoke, I believe I'll pass.

By The Numbers

The crew of Expedition 17 is currently in Earth orbit, going through the usual two-day rendezvous sequence before they can dock at the Internation Space Station. Cool enough on its own, but as I was inhaling coffee through my nose and reading press releases, I was struck by the fact that the importance of a person's job in any given spaceflight is inversely proportional to the number of letters in the job description.

For example, let's look at "Pilot". Five letters, short and crisp, and pretty dang important. Even though modern spacecraft are typically under computer control all of the time, someone's got to make sure the computer is running properly and that all the million-and-one checklist steps have been completed. And, in the worst case, someone has to take manual control when the computer burps up a hairball and land or dock the sucker.

How about "Commander"? Nine letters by my count, and thus according to my schema the pilot is more important than the commander, but not twice as important. And what, really, does the commander do except dominate air-to-ground communications? I suppose it's good to have someone who is unequivocally in charge. Heaven knows what sort of Haight-Ashbury chaos might ensue if there was no commander, after all. But I'm comfortable with the idea that the commander isn't as important as the pilot.

Now we have that staple of the ISS, the "Flight Engineer". That's fifteen letters plus the whitespace, and exactly one third as important as the pilot. What does the Flight Engineer really do? Lots of technical stuff that doesn't involve piloting or commanding. The Flight Engineer is usually seen on NASA TV wrassling with veritable Sargassos of plastic tubing, though I'm not sure why.

Then there's the equivalent in the Shuttle world, the "Mission Specialist", which is 18 letters and presumably somewhat less important than the ISS Flight Engineer position. Is this fair? In the shuttle program, the title "Mission Specialist" is usually given to people who are neither commanding nor piloting, and who have no specific technical training for a given payload. The mission specialists are the EVA guys, the flying schoolteachers, and the "guest astronauts" flown as part of a patronage program, so yeah, in general I'd say they're a little less important than the ISS Flight Engineers who keep the hardware ticking over for months and months at a time.

Then what about the "Payload Specialist"? This is another Shuttle-only job title, in this case referring to someone who has specific training in and responsibility for a specific payload. Still 18 letters, and thus on par with the Mission Specialist. Fair? I guess so. I would personally tend to think that the Payload Specialist should be one rung lower on the totem pole than the guys who, say, repaired Hubble or tacked another truss segment onto the ISS, so maybe I'll lobby to have them redesignated "Payload Specialiste".

And then there's is the bottom of the rung, the "Spaceflight Participant", which is 22 or 23 letters or so (it's so long I ran out of fingers). What's a Spaceflight Participant's main function? Making a very large deposit of cash into the nearly derelict Russian space program. Past that, they might vacuum out the air filters and change the CO2 scrubber cartridges, but don't count on them making dinner. I'm also told that a major part of the Spaceflight Participant job involves being spacesick on a grand scale (consult the book Riding Rockets and its discussion of the "Garn" as a unit of spacesickness).

Thus we again see how Apollo was superior to everything else. All the crew members had crisp three-letter acronyms for their job titles - CDR, LMP, CMP - and thus nobody had to feel insecure for having a clumsy job title. Those were the days! Now it's a seething minefield of jealousy and hatred.

Baxter!

We have a little orange cat named Baxter, but it's hard to prove that he exists. Nobody ever sees him. He sleeps in the closet all day and only comes out at night when nobody is around. He's about as easy for guests to see as the Tooth Fairy, and when I talk about Baxter the Imaginary Cat I'm sure my friends are all silently gritting their teeth and thinking "Oh crap, please don't let him to totally crazy till we're outta here!"

So here's proof that Baxter really exists. You'll just have to take my word that it really is Baxter, though the underexposed, poorly-framed nature of the photograph is in keeping with all the rest of the photographs I've taken, so even if you adopt the viewpoint that I'm faking it in a despairing attempt to appear "normal", you have to admit that at least my photographic evidence is consistent. My, wasn't that a long and somewhat tortured sentence?

Diet

I can't decide which event was the most traumatic for me, my heart attack or my bypass surgery. But either way, ever since the heart attack, I've been fairly conscious of my diet. Perhaps not as conscious as I should be, but I've tried to eat in a relatively sane way that would simultaneously cause me to lose weight and cause my cholesterol levels to move toward healthier levels (my numbers are 190 total cholesterol and 117 LDL, which were better than I expected. Still, the targets for people in my boat are pretty aggressive, so I started taking simvastatin and Zetia to get them to <170 and <70 respectively).

But as powerful and effective as modern drugs are, diet still plays an important role (one imagines, anyway). So my wife and I went on the South Beach diet on Monday. We happened to see a book called The South Beach Heart Program that contained a lot of useful and interesting information on coronary artery disease. It made its case so convincingly that after reading it and The South Beach Diet we went on the diet.

We're about at the end of the first week of Phase 1, the strictest part of it. A great many things are permissible on the diet, but a great many things are also banned, including anything that would make for a convenient breakfast. No cereal, no muffins, no bagels, no instant oatmeal, no flavored yogurt, no fruit juice, no fruit. Breakfast options generally come down to two things: eggs, or meat. Or eggs and meat, I guess. Not that this is a problem with my taste buds, but it suddenly turns breakfast into an undertaking. That's my only real complaint with the diet so far, that breakfast preparation has become time-consuming and messy. And one could argue that that's not a problem with the diet but with my own faulty application of cooking science.

Still, the diet works. I don't weigh myself every day because my bathroom scale is a notorious liar. It seems to delight in being wrong, and it's often wrong by quite large amounts. As much as I'd like to believe I really weigh seven pounds, I'm pretty sure it's just the scale messing with my head. I gauge my weight by sensing the tightness of my belt, and the belt's testimony is clear: I'm shrinking.

But I knew I would. My wife and I did the Adkins diet four or five years ago, and we stayed on it for a couple of years and lost tons of weight. I can't remember what my total weight loss was, but it was close to 100 pounds. Unfortunately, we didn't stay on the diet permanently and the weight came back and invited some of its friends along for the ride. And, though I can't prove anything, I can't help but wonder whether all that bacon had anything to do with my heart attack. I honestly don't know and I didn't have my cholesterol tested often enough to know what direction it was headed in.

The author of the South Beach diet is pretty adamant that it isn't a "low-carb diet". He prefers to call it a "good-carb diet". But if you compare it to the Adkins diet, you'll see that it's in the same general category, with a strong emphasis on eliminating "empty" carbohydrates and little or no emphasis on "counting calories" in the traditional sense - once you eliminate the empty processed carbs and bring your insulin levels under control, portion size will work itself out automatically.

South Beach differs from Adkins in several important respects, however. One is that Adkins turned a blind eye to fat consumption. If you wanted 83 pounds of bacon in one day, good on you! As far as Adkins was concerned, one fat was about as good as any other. But South Beach is more sophisticated in its handling of fats. Some, like olive oil and canola oil, are encouraged. Others, like animal fat, are tolerated but discouraged. Others, like palm oil and triglycerides, are excommunicated entirely. So while you can have bacon on the South Beach diet, you're expected to demonstrate a little mature restraint and call it quits at two or three pieces, not two or three packages.

Another difference is that the South Beach diet has more wiggle room in what it permits. Cereal and milk were pretty much grub non grata on Adkins, but you can eventually start adding cereal and milk back into South Beach, so long as the cereal isn't reinforced with sugar and the milk is low-fat. This is a boon to people like me who aren't necessarily at their most productive first thing in the morning and for whom cooking a breakfast of steak and eggs at 6 AM isn't a major life goal.

But fundamentally they're about the same things and point at the same basic metabolic fact - that "white carbohydrates" are bad. And unfortunately, white carbohydrates are addictive and convenient so you have to give something up to lose weight and improve your health. For me, it was always the convenience angle that was most difficult. I'd be on my way home from work, tired and drained and hungry, and I'd think "We can cook something at home and fight with pots, pans and cutting boards, and have to clean the stove and wash the dishes, or I can just stop at Taco Bell." That was what eventually did in the Adkins Diet for us, we got lazy and started buying food that was easy, and food that's easy is almost always bad. And once you start down that slope, it takes a conscious decision to stop. We didn't.

And so now I have coronary artery bypasses and a patch of damaged heart muscle, but I like to think that I have a more advanced understanding of myself now. And I think South Beach is something I'm going to be able to stick with and turn into a lifestyle. The alternative is another heart attack.

Two Bad Things

I watched a TV show very early Saturday morning that got me to thinking about picking out two bad things that go worse together. Asparasus? Bad. Giblet gravy? Bad. But asparagus with giblet gravy? Two bad things that go worse together. Britney Spears? Bad. Rush Limbaugh? Bad. Britney Spears and Rush Limbaugh making out in the back of a station wagon? Two bad things that go worse together.

The show was about a "dance battle" between a break dancing crew and a loose association of five or six krump dancers. Or were they crump dancers? I confess I don't know. It featured endless torrents of utter bilge from the organizers, hoohah about "keeping it real" and whatnot, and given the context, I can't even begin to guess what "keeping it real" means. What's the alternative? Keeping it unreal? That could be more fun than keeping it real. Keeping it real usually involves income taxes and car insurance; keeping it unreal could involve phasers, transporters and emitting tachyon pulses from the main deflector dish. Which would you prefer?

In the end, the contest was judged a draw, which suited me fine. The crump dancers looked like they were trying to beat up ghosts for the most part, and the break dancers ("b-boys") kept pulling their arms into their sleeves and reminding me unwittingly of the old joke about Nazis. They were also annoyingly obsessed with their overly precious hats. But the draw seemed to perturb the dancers, all of whom assumed that they had won, but since there were no judges and no judging criteria, I'm not sure how anyone could have determined a victor. Maybe one group had snappier costumes, I don't know, or had more energy during the chorus.

So why did I watch this show? Because my sternum is still pretty sore from my bypass surgery and after sleeping for four or five hours, I tend to wake up. Not every day, but often enough to watch dance battles on TV.

Adolf Hitler? Bad. Saddam Hussein? Bad. Saddam Hussein and Hitler scrawling anti-Semitic slogans on the wall of my bathroom? Two bad things that go worse together.

(The old Nazi joke: Where do Nazis keep their armies? In their sleevies. The other old Nazi joke: How to Germans tie their shoesies? In little Nazis.)

Performin' Artz

I wish I could go to an elite but charmingly run-down urban performing arts high school so I could wear no end of clingy, revealing dance costumes and loom in the hallways and devise dance numbers that would win me the Nobel Prize, not to mention successfully liberate quarks from hadrons, and I could get into all sorts of tepid interpersonal conflict because I'm from a different social class than my fellow dancers and my upscale parents don't think I should dance with beetle-browed spawn of garbagemen, but everyone knows it'll be all right in the end because love and athletic modern dance conquers all especially when set against a backdrop of Mozart (to convince us we're cultured) and watered-down hip-hop (to convince us we've got cred), though there'll be a scrape with the law because my street cred is such that I run with dangerous dudes who'll get me in trouble, but the school principal, who has become frankly astonished by my raw physicality, will ask the judge to not throw the book at me because she can fix me with a program of hard work, simmering glances, lingering attraction, and fairly large amounts of Kaopectate because she knows that under my backwards-hat-wearing thug exterior lies a soul as true and artistic as Bob Fosse and I just need to stop hanging out at krunk nightclubs and stealing cars to realize my full artistic potential.

On second thought, I think I'm just going to go back to bed.

Uncle Fritz

I'll grant that I'm not the wisest person in the world and I'm not a source of really profound life advice. I've never gone skydiving, base-jumping or cave-diving, so I can't speak knowingly about the issues and opportunites that attend death-aspected thrillseeking. I can't even tell you how to hit a halfway decent tee shot, since my golf experience is limited chiefly to bombarding the tractor shed and having the wheel on my golf bag pull cart fall off.

But listen to Uncle Fritz when I tell you, in all earnestness, to never, ever, spend a whole day drinking crappy light beer and watching Bridezillas on the WE channel. I've done it, and I'm here to caution you strongly against such shenanigans. I'll go so far as to steal the remote control or have the power to your house turned off. I might even gnaw through the TV cable and throw away all your beer if that's what's required to keep you from drinking light beer and watching Bridezillas.

To paraphase every single Bridezilla they ever show, Oh My God! It's a complete skull-shattering nightmare when you're sober, but when you're about half-lit, it's enough to make you long for death. I kept wondering if I screamed really loud if I could get my coronary artery bypasses to fall off, and if not, if I could saw through my wrists with a can opener or blind myself with a pair of tongs. It's the kind of jaw-dropping lack of taste, perspective and circumspection that makes you think that maybe the Muslim Brothers aren't entirely wrong, that maybe in their calls for moderation and rejection of Western excess they might be on to something.

It's amazing there aren't more murders in wedding parties. It's amazing there aren't more suicides in wedding parties!

Holy Moses!

And can I say, for the record, that for all the snooty beer hauteur displayed on Samuel Adams beer commercials, their light beer gives me headaches just like Milwaukee's Beast does. There's your high-end beer for you.

The Blue Max

I've always liked the movie The Blue Max.

The plot overview is this: Bruno Stachel is a German infantryman in World War One who decides to become a pilot (smart decision, I think). He's completely eaten up with lust for the Blue Max, Germany's highest military decoration, and pretty soon he's completely eaten up with lust for Kaete, who happens to be the wife of a well-placed German general and the aunt and lover of a pilot in Stachel's squadron.

Everyone in the movie is a bastard. Stachel is a bastard. Willi is a bastard, just a somewhat cultured one. The General is a bastard, just an officious one. Even Kaete is a bastard. The only person who isn't a bastard is Stachel's squadron commander, and he's kind of a well-intentioned boob who doesn't fully realize that 1918 isn't the same as 1450.

In the end, nobody is well-served. Willi and Bruno have a penis-measuring contest, and Willi crashes into a building and dies in the midst of it. Stachel is double-crossed and dies in a prototype monoplane fighter that we're not supposed to recognize as a Moraine-Saulnier trainer from the 1930s. Kaete ends up with The Stuffy Old General, which doesn't seem like the desired outcome from her point of view (but since her other lovers are dead, well, one takes what one can get). And The Stuffy Old General is on the losing side of a doomed war and a few short months will no longer be a general and will be asking the German equivalent of "You want fries with that?"

But it's still a good movie. The flying scenes are particularly good. Most of the airplanes are recognizable as British Tiger Moth trainers equipped with Pfalz-shaped rudders, but that's okay; at least they're biplanes and they are neither models nor computer-generated. But some of the airplanes are very nicely done - the Fokker Dr.1 triplanes, the Fokker D.VII biplanes, and the British SE5A fighters are reproductions, but excellent reproductions. (The only real giveaway that the Dr.1s are reproductions is the fact that they are powered by conventional fixed-crankcase radial engines and not rotaries, but I can live with that. And I think the SE5As are missing a Vickers MG on the cowling. But I can live with that too.)

In general, the flying scenes are magnificent, the airplanes are excellent, and the movie conveys a very strong sense of realism in its flying scenes. Throw in George Peppard as a grinning and ice-cold bastard, and Jeremy Kemp as a sly aristocratic bastard, and you've got the makings of a war movie masterpiece.

But I ask you, how did they get that towel to stick to Ursula Andress's breasts?

Morning Rehab

Since I started rehab I've been on a waiting list to get into the 6:30AM class, which is apparently wildly popular. I wanted to get into the early morning session so I could still to go rehab if I found a job. I haven't found a job yet, but there are a few leads developing, and I was worried that I might have to abandon rehab.

Let me say, right here, that I don't enjoy physical work. I'm not turning into Jim Fixx or one of those people who experiences a flood of endorphins when I exercise. But I feel better after I exercise, mentally and physically, and... hey, wait a second, maybe I am one of those people! The point is that I enjoy the structured rehab - it gives me motivation to go and it reassures me that medical professionals are watching my EKG and will intervene in the unlikely event that something goes haywire (when I walk in the desert, the only things liable to intervene if something goes haywire are vultures).

So I finally got into the 6:30 session, and it's harder. My body isn't used to working at that ridiculous hour and I experience a definite and large amount of suffering before my body "breaks over" and starts to work better. What's most odd is that the level of physical work that would drive my heart rate to 130 at noon will only drive it to 110 at six AM. The rehab guys think it's because it's closer to when I took my medications and they're all concentrated and hard-hitting. I think my heart is just sleepy, along with the rest of me.

But what's most interesting is the demographics. If I had to guess beforehand, I'd have said that the early-morning rehab session would be populated by the fifty-something guys who still have to work, and the noon sessions would be populated by the retired guys who could go at any time. But it's actually completely backwards. The noon session was mostly working guys, while the morning session is completely populated by retired country club golf Episcopalians. The difference is very marked.

The noon crowd tended to do a lot of that hail-fellow-well-met business, not quite backslapping but close, and they'd always trot out the same jokes about challenging one another to exercise bike races. Cell phones were always going off, and most of the guys tried to engage Jessica (one of the Rehab Persons) in hearty repartee.

The morning crowd is very different. There's no joking and no clowning around. There's hardly any talking at all. They aren't rude, really, or even unfriendly; it's more a matter of refinement, as though they believe that gentlemen shouldn't open their mouths before the sun is over the yardarm. Or perhaps they prefer to conserve their strength for the golf games that inevitably follow, where they can invoke the spirit of Goldwater to aid them in avoiding double-bogeys and liberals.

"8 Seconds"

In keeping with this week's apparent theme of bull riding, I ordered the movie 8 Seconds a few days ago and it appeared at the post office today, so we popped it in the malfunctioning DVD player and had a look. (I don't know what's wrong with the DVD player, but sometimes you have to give the thing a fairly liberal thump to get it to work. What do you expect for a $30 made-in-China thing? I guess I'm lucky it doesn't leak propylene glycol or spray chips of lead paint at me or poison my dawg with industrial solvents.)

It proved to be a very polite movie. It came to the door and rang the doorbell and said "I'm going to be an entirely conventional movie. I'm going to observe all of the traditions of B-grade American movies, such that when it's all over, everyone will have reconciled with everyone." In short, it came to the house, wiped its feet, took its hat off before coming indoors, and left immediately after it was over without leaving water rings on the coffee table.

The movie is a dramatized biopic of a young bull rider named Lane Frost, who was killed in 1989 at a rodeo in Cheyenne. Immediately after his ride, the bull (named Taking Care of Business) gored Lane in the back, tearing Lane's aorta with the end of a broken rib. Nothing could be done and Lane was dead before he left the arena. This is all true.

I never knew Lane, so I won't presume to guess how the movie did at portraying him. Consult the Lane Frost tribute site at http://www.lanefrost.com/ for all the discussion of Lane Frost and 8 Seconds you'll ever want, though I would describe the Frost family's attitude toward the movie as one of "slightly pained approval".

Nor am I going to say much about the world of bull riding. Thanked in the credits are guys like Tuff Hedeman and Cody Lambert, and they've already forgotten more about the world of bull riding than I'll ever know.

But what I WILL comment on is the fact that most of the 8-second rides actually seemed to take sixteen to twenty seconds. I never got around to timing Tuff Hedeman's 8+8 tribute ride and the National Finals Rodeo because I'd just flat given up by then, but it must surely have been in the thirty second range.

Great movie? Not great, no. But it was polite and respectful of my sensibilities, and there are worse ways to spend a couple of hours than watching this movie.

Tomorrow: The Blue Max, I hope, one of my favoritest movies of all time and the reason I get rowdy when people bad-mouth George Peppard.

My Garbageman

My garbageman is cute!

Well, I don't know that for sure, but you see so few blonde women driving 20-yard packers that you really can't help but assume that any blonde woman so employed would be cute. Why do I think that? I dunno. It just seems appropriate somehow.

Like a lot of suburbanites, I've put a lot of thought into discarding things that won't quite fit in the trash can. Once I poured a concrete slab for a storage building and had about a wheelbarrow full of excess concrete. So I shoveled it out on the ground and over the course of about a month threw the chunks away in the residential trash can (or "barrel", as my private waste management company calls it).

Somehow we ended up with a huge snarl of discarded hog wire, so I cut it into sections, folded the sections up into things about the size of throw pillows, and jumped up and down on them to crush them flat. Now I'm in the process of throwing the pillows away about six at at a time, a rate high enough to show progress but not so high that the garbagewoman complains that I'm filling the barrel with junk instead of trash. (I'm occasionally tempted to slip them into my neighbor's chronically unattended dumpster, but that would take the fizz out of the festivities, I think).

One advantage of living in the sticks is that one can burn certain kinds of trash, like broken chairs and wooden pallets. Mind you, you can't burn it just to get rid of it. If you do that, the volunteer fire department shows up and you end up in no end of hot water. But if you stand near the fire, preferably grasping a beer, you're not disposing of trash by burning it, you've enjoying a bonfire. And that's permissible. I'm not sure how the volunteer fire department knows the difference, but they always seem to.

So instead of cutting up old wood and throwing it away a few pieces at a time, I accumulate it in shabby piles and occasionally burn it. While grasping a beer, of course.

One year, not long after I bought my first house, I was trying to plant something and found a huge mass of rocks, concrete debris, nails, broken drywall and general junk the builders had buried just outside my back door. I shoveled the whole mass into the trash barrel and managed, through a process involving much wheezing and grunting, to wheel it to the street. I was on second shift at the time and was home when the garbage truck came. It stopped. The arms unfolded and grabbed the can. The engine roared. The can didn't move. The truck driver gave up and moved on.

You'll pardon me for drifting, of course. I'm just killing time before I have to go into town for rehab. Whee.

Barbarians

Has anyone else watched those "Barbarians" shows on the Histrionic Channel? Has anyone else concluded that they're the epitome of high school history? That is, lurid, pat, tidy, simple, and almost entirely wrong?

"History" of this sort wears me down. Instead of consulting the experts in the field and presenting what historians believe to be what's true, they find three or four guys at Moe's Bar and Grill who profess to be experts because they read the sidebar in a high school history book about the Goths and the Battle of Adrianople and, maybe, watched parts of Gladiator.

But sometimes the Histrionic Channel redeems itself. Just yesterday I watched a show called "The Conquerors" that, in this instance, was about C. Julius Caesar and the conquest of Gaul. I thought it was very well done. It was even-handed, reasonably comprehensive considering the hour-long format, and revelatory of Caesar's personality. And I have to say, the recreationists they used in the TV show were very, very good.

The difference, I think, is that the BBC was behind "The Conquerors" and the Histrionic Channel was behind "Barbarians". Hmm.

Middlebuster

I tried my new middlebuster this morning. Yikes! That thing's a digging fool! I foresee getting much use out of that thing in the future. Even behind my relatively modest tractor it'll cut furrows through hard-baked desert soil about as deep as I care to go. It's cool!

It's a bit tricky getting the thing mounted on the tractor, though, especially getting the top link pin in. The factory pressed the ears a little too close together so I have to hammer the top link bushing into place, and then hammer the top link pin through (it's tapered so it tends to automatically center the top link bushing, but it has to be fairly close to right to start with).

My tractor runs like crap lately. It's missing steadily on one cylinder and occasionally on as many as three; it won't even idle without dying. It's an ignition problem; I sense the usual suspects of a cracked distributor cap, bad spark plug wires, or cracked/fouled spark plugs. Too bad it's so hot outside or I'd go do something proactive about it.

UPDATE: I can't find my spark plug sockets, so I guess I have no choice but to stay inside and drink beer. Darn!

Celebrity Bull Riding II

I don't as a normal rule get sucked into commercial TV shows. If I watch commercial TV, it's usually out of the spirit of self-mortification. I enjoy being insulted by the shows and manipulated by the commercials and I flagellate myself like some strange Crusader knight dragging myself on bloody knees toward Jerusalem.

But I did get sucked into Ty Murray's Celebrity Bull Riding Challenge in a pretty big way. It's a good thing it wrapped up last night, except for the marathon reshowing of all the episodes on Sunday, or I'd have gotten nothing accomplished. Oh, wait, I did get nothing accomplished. Never mind.

Most of the celebrities in the show turned out to be pretty decent guys - Rocket Ismail, Francisco Quinn, "Nitro" Dan and I apologize for forgetting the remainder of his name. Even the guys I wouldn't normally see myself having a beer with, like Josh Haynes, turned out to be honorable men, if not exactly the sorts of personalities I like to associate with. In fact, I can only think of one guy on the show that disgraced himself, that being the ever-lovin' Leif Garrett.

The "story arc" is that Ty Murray, the world seven-time champion all-around rodeo cowboy, would teach these various celebrities how to ride bulls over the span of about a week, and they would go to ride fairly serious bulls at a PBR (Professional Bull Riding) event in Nashville. The celebrities included:

Vanilla Ice (rapper)
Leif Garrett (pop star)
Stephen Baldwin (actor and junior member of the bold, sprawling Baldwin clan)
Jonny Fairplay (reality TV "star")
Josh Haynes (UFC fighter and monolith)
Dan Clark (American Gladiator dude)
Kenny Bartram (motocross racer and X-Games freestyle motocross dude)
Francesco Quinn (actor and Famous Son)
"Rocket" Ismail (former NFL star and one of the fastest men to play in the NFL)

So out of this list, with all these tough guys like Quinn and Haynes and Clark and Ismail, who do you think was the only guy to ride his bull for eight seconds in Nashville? The tough guys like Haynes and Nitro? The guys with tons of natural athleticism like Ismail and Bartram?

No, the smallest and least physical of the whole bunch, Jonny Fairplay. Amazing!

Leif Garrett quit after the first day. Stephen Baldwin broke something in his shoulder. Francesco Quinn got stomped and broke three ribs in his back. So six of them went to Nashville and it was Jonny Fairplay that got to the horn.

To be fair (har har) it must be admitted that Jonny Fairplay's bull was relatively modest. I could have ridden it, and I'm not joking - at most, it ran around like a mildly spooked horse and never really bucked. But - and this is a big but - it's a standard rule in bull riding that you can't control the bull you drew, and you can't control the bull's performance day to day. So you ride what you drew, and that's where the griping stops. Jonny Fairplay's bull was pretty easy, but that doesn't matter. In the end, he rode for eight seconds and nobody else did. Amazing.

But I salute them all. And it was good TV for a change!

Principles of War

Every army observes principles of war, which are general rules or principles that commanders use to organize and clarify their thinking when planning and executing military operations. They aren't always the same from one country to the next - the Red Army, for example, placed much less emphasis on the principle of economy of force than the US Army, and the US Army placed less emphasis on the principle of a high tempo of combat operations than the Red Army did. This reflects the reality that the Red Army, being relatively unskilled, would have to rely on superior numbers, high-speed offensive shock, and a certain willingness to sustain heavy casualties to prevail in the face of smaller but more skilled opponents.

But the point is that if you canvas the principles of war as defined by most of the major industrialized states, you'll find that most of them observe certain basic principles. The one I wish to speak about here is Mass: Having enough forces to complete the objective.

Mass makes up for a great many military sins. If you just flat outnumber the enemy, you can get things done that you couldn't otherwise. Consider major Soviet victories in World War Two like Stalingrad, Kursk and Bagration. They didn't win these battles by being better than the Germans man-for-man or tank-for-tank; they won by outnumbering the Germans in every conceivable measure of combat power and simply working the Germans into the topsoil with a plowshare of artillery, armor and numbers. It aint pretty, but it gets the job done.

Even the US Army relied on mass in World War Two. Not to the extent that the Soviets did, but if the opportunity presented itself for the US Army to make use of superior numbers (and especially superior weight of artillery) the Americans were not loathe to do so. US commanders rarely, if ever, turned down opportunities to add more forces to their operations and were much more likely to claim they were undermanned, even though by VE Day there were a couple of million GIs in Europe, not to mention substantial numbers of British and Commonwealth troops to boot.

But since World War Two, the MBAs in the Department of Defense have started to toy with the principles of war. Some of them even argue that "flexibility" should be considered a principle of war, up there with mass and maintenance of the objective and unity of command. I argue that flexibility is an important quality for an army to have, but it is subsumed within simplicity and is an operational concern in any event, not a principle of war (such as the Bundeswehr's scary fascination with beweglichkeit, or agility. It's one of those things that either makes you look like a genius, or makes you look like MacMahon at Sedan in 1870).

What does this have to do with anything?

We invaded Iraq and defeated the Iraqi Army, which wasn't a surprise. We brought down Saddam Hussein's regime, which wasn't a surprise. We lost control of the streets because we didn't have nearly enough men in-theater, which wasn't a surprise. So what is a surprise?

That the MBAs of the war continue to screw with the notions of mass and objective. The situation gets out of hand, so we send in 30,000 more men. The situation improves slightly and the political cost of the "surge" grows. We take them back out, mostly to save political pain. And the situation will of course decay again. And this is all wrong.

There are only two possible courses of action. The first is to send enough men to Iraq to achieve the objectives quickly and decisively. In other words, to apply the principle of mass. Maintaining order in a mess like Iraq is more like a law enforcement operation than a military operation, and the only way to really do that is to have so many men patrolling the streets that the insurgents are if nothing else cowed into immobility. Granted, this kind of "troop icecap" can't go on forever, but it can provide stability and security while the government and society transition into something new and different. Give people stability, a halfway functional economy and security from car bombs and they'll start to develop a mild preference for the status quo.

The other course of action is to withdraw. If we cannot afford, politically, emotionally, financially, or strategically, to commit enough forces to the theater to achieve the military objectives, then we cannot afford to be there at all.

But this in-between state is lunacy. It doesn't come close to achieving realistic objectives as measured by real things, not 3D bar charts on some staffer's PowerPoint chart. But it doesn't protect US troops from attack. It leaves us exposed to enemy attack without us being able to really do anything about the enemy in the long run because we can't dominate all of his centers of gravity simultaneously. We beef up Baghdad, and they go to the provinces. We man up the provinces and they go to Baghdad. But we don't have enough men to man up everywhere, so the enemy can always find quiet sectors where he can tinker with car bombs and recruit suicide bombers.

How many men do I think it would require? Before the war started I thought a half a million men was a reasonable estimate. But I was opposed to the invasion of Iraq in the first place and felt from the very beginning that the decisive theater was Afghanistan, which was al Qaeda's center of gravity. But alas, we blew our opportunity in Afghanistan by, once again, not having enough men on the ground to achieve the stated objectives. And I think this shabby outcome can be attributed, at least in part, to the transformationalists in the Pentagon who read too many brochures about modern weapons and too few history books.

But then again, we're not so good at defining objectives any more either. What was the defined objective of the ETO in World War Two? Force Germany into unconditional surrender. That's pretty simple. But what's the defined objective of our occupation of Iraq? I'm sure I don't know. Do you?

Robot Boy

According to AOL a "Robot Boy" has just been unveiled. Isn't that just what we needed, synthetic people. Synthetic people who don't actually do anything useful, like clean up nuclear accidents or shovel coal. The robot boy looks like a cross between Chuckie and Jonathon Winters. I don't know about you, but where I come from, that's high-octane nightmare fuel.

When I was a kid science fiction authors used to assure me that robots would take over all of the work of maintaining civilization so human beings would be free to do whatever they felt they wanted to do - finish crossworld puzzles, write the Great American Novel, finally get to the bottom of why most of the spoons seem to be missing from the kitchen. Even Star Trek made the same promises, though it was the replicator more than robots what dun it.

I think I'm disappointed. Instead of being freed by technology to do what moves us, we work longer hours at jobs that suck significantly more than they used to.

Petraeus Report

I see General Petraeus is due to submit his report to Congress. It wouldn't particularly surprise me if it said "My commanding officer is a genius! A military genius!" I'm always just a little skeptical of "independent" reports that come out of the military. "This aint a democracy, this is the ARMY," they always shout, and it's for that very reason that I question just how independent any such report could really be. (A quick way to solve it might be to make USAF generals report on Army doings, and vice versa. It might not lead to independent reports, but the swelling profusion of insulting nicknames would be amusing.)

But really, why doesn't Congress ever ask me to compile weighty reports? I could come in with my halfway passable command of Pentagonese, some PowerPoint slides, and a pitcher of water, and offer all sorts of interesting commentary on the Cinnabun Surge, or the results of Operation Taco Bell, or (one of my favorites) the Macaroni Grill Through History. ("Julius never ate at the Macaroni Grill. Neither did Napoleon. That concludes my presentation. Thank you.") I'm sorry, Mr. Chairman, but I can't speak about Pizza Hut yet; we need another $1.5 million to give the cheesy bread adequate study. No sir, "Pizza Pizza" is from Little Caesar's. You're welcome, sir.

And when it comes to Iraq, does one ill-informed report make much more sense than any other? Killings are up! No, they're down! IEDs are up! No, they're down! The morgue is full! No, the morgue is empty. We can't even agree on the statistics, fer cryin' out loud!

So here's my weighty Iraq report:

It sucks over there! Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Enough Already!

I found out yesterday that my insurance company had declined to pay some of my medical claims. The biggest ones, as it turns out, leaving me liable for about $40,000 in medical bills. I am going to appeal, of course, and I think because of technical considerations that need not detain us here that my appeal is sound.

But really, it's not about the money. It's about the way that all summer long the wheels on my cart have loosened, begun to wobble, and fallen off altogether. All I'm waiting for now is for my life to grind to a shuddering halt and burst into flames. Or for the summer to end and for autumn to bring a new dynamic. Is that an irrational hope? Yeah, sure, we all know that the seasons don't really impact what happens to us, but I can't help but think that autumn will be somewhat more tenderly disposed toward me.

So now, on top of everything else going on in my life, I have to worry about filing multiple appeals with the insurance company, something I never thought would be necessary (what part of "medical emergency" don't they understand?) nor wanted to have to do.

But I guess there's nothing to do but to do it. It just cheeses me that I have to do it at all. I'd pronounce myself depressed if being depressed wasn't ruled out by the Cowboy Way. Maybe it's time to see how the Newcastle Brown Ale Way works.

The What River?

I've been watching a series of lectures on VHS. This set of lectures is by Professor Brian Fagan and it has to do with human evolution and prehistory. It's quite good, and Professor Fagan certainly knows way more than I do.

But last night he was talking about the Pueblo cultures of the American Southwest and referred to the Hohokam people who lived along the Jilla River in central Arizona.

One problem with that. It's pronounced Hee-la, not Jill-uh. Oh, all right, he's English, I'll leave him alone.

Oh well, my own family makes the same mistake and to this day I chuckle at the thought of going to Gill-uh Bend. Or Jill-uh Bend. Or I suppose Gee-la Bend.

But when in Gila Bend, do stop at the Space Age Hotel for lunch. It's time well-spent.

80s Metal

Last night I watched a show on VH1 Classic called "Metal Mania".

Did metal in the 80s really suck that badly? I remember there being a lot of bad metal in those days - the likes of Whitesnake and Poison and Ratt and Krokus (or "Crockus" as I liked to call them, and I never could get over the idea that the front man was really the guy from Air Supply). But gee whiz.

I think the world owes Metallica something. Whether you like Metallica or not, they rose up and hammered a wooden stake into the heart of that ridiculous glam metal that covered the landscape in the 1980s like so much spilled Dippity-Doo. I don't personally like the direction Metallica took after ...And Justice For All, but that's okay, they don't need my approval and I don't need their music. But it's hard for me to watch a video from the 1980s of some glammed-up prancing pretty-boy band all smeared with lipstick and hair oil and not think "Oh thank God for Metallica!" You almost want to see Hetfield come striding into the video and swing his guitar into an elaborately coiffed head with a toothy roar of genuine emotion. Take that, you mincing poser!

It's scary to think where American metal might have ended up without Kill 'Em All, Ride The Lightning and Master of Puppets. There would be lots of elaborately coiffed hair, to be sure, and excessively tight Zubaz, and lipstick, and plenty of that guitar-as-phallus business, something I personally can't seem to get enough of... European metal would probably have evolved more or less as it did (especially since Anthrax, Testament and the like would have emigrated), but it would have been sealed off from America by a hermetic membrane of hair gel, mascara, crappy riffs, and extreme superficiality. So while fans outside the United States would be enjoying bands like Carcass, Mercyful Fate, Bathory and Opeth, fans inside the United States would be buying Poison reunion tour albums and Twisted Sister greatest-hits compilations and (ach, say it aint so!) Bullet Boys Unplugged.

The Worst Things Ever

After years of dedicated and selfless research, the Committee Studying Things That Suck is ready to release its list of the three worst things ever:

1. Whitesnake.

2. Plutonium.

3. Cat poop.

Dubious Metaphysics

I watched The Lake House today, or at least enough of it for me to claim I watched the whole thing. I missed five minutes of it in the middle while I was feeding the cat, and I missed about five more minutes when the glacial pace of events caused me to go channel-surfing before my entire central nervous system shut down from lack of stimulation.

But I'm not here to really trash the movie, which was decent as such movies go and I like Sandra Bullock as long as she doesn't get too New Joisey on me.

Mostly I'm just disturbed by the metaphysics. She's two years in his future, if I understand correctly. So when they sign their marriage certificate, he'll have to sign (say) November 8, 2008, and she'll have to sign November 8, 2010. I think that's illegal.

Or if they're smooching on a bench in this ridiculous overly-idealized version of Chicago (akin to but not as over the top as the Nora Emphrom version of New York) and they see a fatal traffic accident. John Q. Victim dies in 2008 according to him, and again in 2010 according to her. This, if it isn't illegal, ought to be.

Could she pass him winning lottery ticket numbers? Or the winners of the Kentucky Derby? I don't see anything preventing such a thing.

Maybe I ought not to think about it so much.


Strictly as an aside, I watched a TV show the other day where the narrator kept saying "Some scientists believe..." as a way of wrapping outrageous claims in objective respectability. "Some scientists believe that the laws of physics don't prohibit time travel." Huh? First of all, the "laws of physics" aren't written on tablets of stone like the Ten Commandments. Nowhere does it say "time travel is possible" and nowhere does it say "time travel is not possible"; you have to work out the implications of Special Relativity to know whether time travel is possible or not.

The argument was that since the laws of physics don't prohibit time travel, it must be possible. Well, the laws of physics don't prohibit me suddenly turning into Ethel Merman, so that also must be possible - and possibly even an improvement.

But mostly I'm ticked out the "some scientists believe..." line. Sure, some scientists will believe almost anything. The inventor of the transistor, a good rational scientist by any measure, believed in the inherent superiority of white people. The show needs to be more specific. Instead of "some scientists believe..." they need to quantify the matter. "Nine scientists believe that it is possible to travel in time into the past. Seventeen thousand, four hundred and six believe that it is not possible, and some were too busy covering their mouths and tittering to give coherent answers."

Did you ever see the "debate" on TV about the Apollo Moon Landing Hoax? The TV show lined the two sides up so it seemed that the numbers on either side of the question are the same, but they are not. You saw, in that one show, pretty much all of the "serious" representatives of the hoax theory, but you didn't see the huge number of people who disagree, including the four or five hundred thousand people NASA employed during the Apollo program. But the strange gimleted eye of the TV camera flattens the argument so every point of view had equal validity.