Little Sore Spot

Remember the song The Police did where Sting sings about a "little black spot on the sun today?" It's probably my favorite Police song because I can't help but think it has some deep meaning that I'm just not quite smart enough to grasp, though the punk remake of "Message In A Bottle" comes close.

But never mind. It turns out that there's a little sore spot on my head today... It's the same old thing as yesterday...

As I was getting dressed this morning, my sock fell out of my nerveless, pitchfork-like hands. I bent down to snatch it up and thumped my head on the bedpost, foresquare, right on my left eyebrow, hard enough I saw protons and quarks and other shit floating around the room for a while. Now I feel like an apple with a mushy spot and I worry that soon I'll spoil the whole barrel.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about.

I've been writing fiction since I was roughly nine years old, and certainly thinking fiction long before that (I'm sure that what looked like childish play with Major Matt Mason toys was in fact an attempt to plot a killer SF masterpiece, but alas my seven year old brain just couldn't handle the pressure). And I've almost always, except when forced on pain of death, written in first person. I did this, I did that, they did this-or-that to me. But lately I find that I've started to slip into third person, which is sort of like waking up on a nice Saturday morning and realizing that one has been left-handed all along and just didn't notice it. Unanswered, however, is the question of whether it's a positive development or not.

But holy cow! How did that happen? Romanis eunt domus!

History Intestinal

I don't know... Maybe I expect too much from the History Channel and its first cousin, Hysterical Intestinal. It's just a cable channel, and it has no more real control over content than ABC does over sitcoms. The best it can do is cancel (or stop funding) egregious failures.

But seriously, folks, something has to be done about some of the crap that appears.

Yesterday I watched part of a show called "UFO Files" or something, which purported to show that the US Air Force has been using "flying saucers" for generations. So they tap the memories of some guy identified only as a "military publisher" and trot out silly Photoshopped recreations of these alleged disk-shaped craft, and it's obvious that they're just airplanes with round wings. What's novel about that? Why didn't they show XF5U, a disk-shaped airplane that's so well documented we don't need to rely on Photoshopped evidence, so well documented it even had a nickname, the Flying Flapjack? Maybe because it was a Navy project.

Here's a good site:

http://www.daveswarbirds.com/usplanes/aircraft/flapjack.htm

But it got worse. The show started to merge the idea of an airplane with circular wings (which don't handle well, as it turns out) with flying saucers from other planets, and got right on the edge of claiming that circular wings possess some mystical New Age aerodynamic property that makes them better than Melba Toast. They had an "expert" claim that one of these disk-shaped airplanes was capable of flying at 15,500 miles per hour.

Let's explore that number just a bit. First off, he claimed that the aircraft was capable of "spaceflight", which I take to mean that it could go into orbit, which means it has to be capable of going 17,500 miles per hour - not 15,500 miles per hour. Doh! Second, the airplane is clearly seen to be uninsulated, what aeronautical engineers would call a hot structure. The X-15 was also, for most of its career, a hot structure, except for the experiments with the various spray-on ablators toward the end of the flight test program. So let's think about that. An X-15, with a powerful rocket engine and an airframe made out of an exotic high-temperature steel alloy called Inconel-X, was seriously damaged by heating and shock wave impingement at Mach 6.71. But this round airplane with conventional jet engines and an aluminum structure can do Mach 15? I am, as they say, dubious.

Here is the shape of high-speed flight, by the way, the North American Aviation X-15, which is still, as far as anyone has ever confessed, the fastest manned aircraft to have ever flown, and still, due to a technicality in the rules, holds the world altitude record for an aircraft:

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/news/FactSheets/FS-052-DFRC.html

Seriously, it doesn't matter. Do you believe that airplanes with round wings can fly 15,500 miles per hour? It won't materially alter the world in the slightest if you do - or don't. But gee whiz does it ever irritate me when the Hitler Channel and Hysterical Intestinal put nonsense like that on the air. How hard would it be to fact-check the show? How hard would it be to fix the comical "F1-17" typo in the caption? And how hard would it have been to point out to the writer that the "F1-17" is not supersonic?*

Arrrgh.

I need a beer. Perhaps two.

The "F1-17" typo appeared more than once, so I think the show was written by someone who had never actually read anything about the Nighthawk, least of all seen its actual designation of "F-117". But if you just sit at the bar and listen to some guy pontificate, I guess you could hear it was "F1-17".

King

I recently (as in last night) read Stephen King's On Writing. Most of the how-to portion of the book seemed pretty straightforward, and indeed triggered a sense of familiarity, as though I'd read it somewhere before. The main item of interest, for me, was the fact that Stephen King claimed to have little, if any, memory of having written Cujo, presumably because of the booze and drugs. The word-image of him shoving Q-tips up his nose to staunch the coke-induced bleeding, that's a doozie...

But Cujo... It seems unimaginable that one could write a fairly successful novel and not remember it, even if the novel was pretty bad. It's one of my least favorite books of all time, transcending the category of "worst Stephen King novel" and going straight on into the competition for "worst novel ever". It isn't the worst novel ever, but the fact that it's on that list at all tells you what I think of it. It isn't just bad, it's tedious.

But never mind that. Having read the entire Dark Tower series, Lisey's Story, The Stand, On Writing and all of the short story compilations, what King should be next? To be honest, I lean toward From a Buick 8.

Because of budgetary reasons beyond my control, I'm going to be laid off from work for the month of May, which on the one hand opens all sorts of interesting possibilities when it comes to landscaping and reading and home improvements, and on the other hand fills me with bitter stress and uncertainty for the future. But maybe a hefty King novel will get me through part of that dead time when I would normally sit and gnaw my fingernails.

Asskickery

I've been casting about in my music collection, seeking Just The Right Thing. I seek Metal To Kick Ass By. Not that I want to kick anyone's ass in particular. I'm not even in a bad mood. I just feel the need to listen to Metal To Kick Ass By. There are times when it becomes necessary to lay the pretensions and boundaries of civilization aside and listen to the sort of music the Germans might have listened to before killing 20,000 Roman soldiers in the Teutoberger Wald.

Not all metal is suitable for this purpose. Black metal has a cold, evil tone, but it doesn't sound particularly violent or aggressive. In many cases it sounds thin and "wiry", which I think was an acoustic accident in the early days of Darkthrone and later became a stylistic element as ubiquitous as corpsepaint (ironically, the first Mayhem album sounds much richer than "Transilvanian Hunger", but there's no fighting progress). Mind you, I like black metal, but I don't find that it appeases the Inner Teuton much at all.

I'm also greatly fond of melodic death metal in most of its forms, especially Insomnium and including the quasi-pop schtuff like In Flames. It's moderately aggressive (a review of an Insomium concert concluded that they "left no ass unkicked") but it's not stupendously so. Too many melodic breaks, too many keyboard washes, too much discipline to get stuck in a riff that would make Nathan Explosion nod. I'm reminded of Still Moving Sinews by Dark Tranquility. I think it's positively brilliant until 0:41 elapsed, when all of a sudden the bottom drops out and the thing hacks and spits like a Poppin' Johnnie at idle. I love my melodic death metal (or Karelian Metal, or whatever they're calling these days) but it doesn't really defeat the legionary, if you get my drift, and to extend the Teutoberger Wald motif.

Sometimes metalcore can get the job done, but I don't have a large metalcore collection and the only real metalcore album I have, "Sounding the Seventh Trumpet", never quite seems to go over the top. I like it, in particular for its narrative thread and for its interesting mixture of styles and textures, but Hatebreed it aint, and it doesn't take long for that monotonous hoarse shouting to grow old on me.

I'm not a fan of Florida death metal.

So when one desires Metal To Kick Ass By, one must reach for the Carcass, its ancestor Carnage, and its by-product Dismember. The first two songs of "Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious" are usually enough to take care of my need for Ass-Kickin' Metal. How can one go wrong with Inpropagation and Corporeal Jigsore Quandary, two songs which amount to almost thirteen minutes of high-grade ass-kickery? That'll get your Teutonic tribesmen jumping, ja! Hell, even Carcass in its later death-and-roll phase is still pretty vigorous - clap ears on Rock The Vote someday. The story is that Carcass got tired of doing grindy death metal and changed styles, producing something that wasn't quite heavy enough for old fans, but too heavy for the mainstream, but it'll do for me, because I can't get enough of that "electric saw" guitar sound.

I don't listen to metal all the time. In fact, most of my real favorites aren't metal at all. If you asked me to quickly name my top ten favorite songs, the list would look something like this:

Dance With You (Bowling For Soup)
A Tale Untold (Robin Trower)
Twice Removed From Yesterday (Robin Trower)
Castle Walls (Styx)
Big Log (Viktor Krauss remake of Robert Plant)
Run Like Hell (Pink Floyd)
In the Groves of Death (Insomnium)
Adagio for Strings (Samuel Barber)
Cosmic Messenger (Jean-Luc Ponty)
Freeway Jam (Jeff Beck)
Why Me? (Planet P)

But when you're in a mood for ass-kicking music, I'm afraid that the likes of Jean-Luc Ponty and Styx just aren't going to get it done.

Funniest Thing I've Seen In Weeks

I was in the break room weighing the "Skittles versus peanuts" question when I saw this comic strip in the local paper. It's the funniest thing I've seen since the destruction of the model of the Wasa in "Get Fuzzy".

(Honestly, I thought the whole Wasa thread in Get Fuzzy was genius - the idea that the model must meet the fate of the genuine article is provocative, to say the least. So if one builds a model of a P-51D Mustang, must one then get George Preddy or Don Gentile to sit on it and attempt to fly it over Berlin? If one builds a model of Apollo 13, must one then contrive to have the model LOX tank explode? Oh, would that one could!)

PS: George Preddy and Don Gentile are two famous P-51 Mustang aces, though certainly not the only ones. I mention Preddy because of his fantabulous Clark Gable moustache, and Don Gentile because he maybe wasn't a great instinctive ace with a killer marksman's eye, but he was a great fighter leader and I have to respect the courage of any man who strapped on a P-51 and took it all the way downtown into the very Heart of Darkness.

DId I Hear That Right?

It hasn't been a great week for me and I've spent a lot of time just sitting and staring at the AOL welcome screem, watching the news stories slowly go by on their own. One of them said (and I am not making this up) "NASCAR driver takes heroine before race".

And I thought, what exactly is wrong with that? Why not just before a race? It seems like as good a time to take a heroine as any other.

My Mistake

It turns out that the He-177 model I intend to build comes with Fritz-X guided bombs, not Hs-293 guided missiles. I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

I say this because it livens my day to imagine that I have a "following", a corps of fans who slavishly build what I build (or imagine to build what I imagine to build) simply because I am, as they say, all that and a bag of chips (Doritos Salsa Verde, please). And I like to imagine my corps of fans suddenly throwing their He-177 models in the trash and slavishly ordering the proper ones from www.squadron.com.

I'm not really that much of an egotist. I just play one on TV.

Good Greif!

I've thought about it and decided that the model I'm going to build next is the Revell 1/72nd scale Heinkel He-177 Greif, the one with the Hs-293 missiles under the wings. I'm not a big fan of this airplane, which I think is ugly in a characteristically German way and it wasn't all that successful either (all the other airplanes laughed at it and called it names, but it was too busy suffering spontaneous engine fires and crashing to do anything about it). But the Hs-293 missiles were a major advance in the state of the art. It's lucky for everyone, frankly, that the Germans spent so much time screwing around with irrelevancies like the V1 and V2 and squandered resources that could have been devoted to the Hs-293 and the Wasserfall surface-to-air missile.

I don't suffer from the delusion that what model I intend to build next makes any difference to anyone. I just thought it would be fun to post three times in one day.

But why this airplane? I don't have big plans for it and it's just going to hang from the ceiling of the garage, so I don't have to get myself all sweated up about it. I have a large number of models I could build, and many that I really want to build before this clunker, but the fact that the He-177 isn't going to present me with any stress is frankly kind of appealing.

There must be a name for this mental illness, where you really want to build a particular model but you have such high expectations for it you're actually unwilling to start, so you end up building models you don't like because you have low expectations of them. Geez. It's like not barbecuing a steak because you're afraid of ruining it, so instead you eat a floppy room-temperature slab of Spam. It just aint right.

Remastery

I mentioned remastered albums the other day, and how pleased I was that the remastered Bridge of Sighs was actually pretty true to the original. Who here remembers the remastered ZZ Top song "La Grange?" A classic in its original form, acoustic deficiencies and all, it turned into a remastered mess that had so much reverb it sounded like it had been re-recorded in a large oil tank. I couldn't bear to listen to the remastered versions, which caused me pain akin to that of a root-planing procedure. But there are worse things, such as the time Pink Floyd remastered "Money". I'm not even sure that "remastered" is the right word. They changed the time signature and made it into a dance song, and how could they do that without re-performing the song? I don't know. I'm not a sound engineer and they can do amazing things with computers these days. But I didn't care for the outcome.

Role-playing games are occasionally remastered. That's not what they call it, but that's what goes on. It's the same game, but the copyright holders let ardent fans rework the rules according to their own notions of what the original game lacked, and the final results are usually not good. Take Car Wars, where the original game wasn't too complicated and could be played reasonably quickly and enjoyed appropriately, but after about 23,000 updates and extensions had reached the complexity of nuclear physics. Or Traveler, which was a (in my opinion) particularly nice science-fiction role playing game. But that's until the fans remastered it into Mega-Traveler. Now, there were certain ideas in Mega-Traveler that I found flavorful, but my overall reaction upon leafing through the rules was "Well, we won't be incorporating any of this in MY universe." Plus - and maybe I'm just being fractious and difficult - I couldn't (or perhaps wouldn't) understand what "mega" had to do with anything.

Which is irrelevant, isn't it? One would think there would be no way I could possibly mix badly remastered ZZ Top songs and science-fiction role playing games in the same article, but huzzah! There you have it! It's beer time.

Last Stand

I think that as long as I'm making futile stands against things, I might as well make a futile Gandamak-like stand against alternative endings in movies. Alternative endings used to be pretty rare in movies - the movie was what it was and that was that - but now I see ads for DVDs that gush about having three or four alternative endings. I'm not so sure I like that idea. Let me cite one example.

The movie Clerks isn't really meant for me, I don't think. I find Jay irritating as high-strength ammonia, and even when he isn't in the movie (which isn't nearly long enough, if you ask me) I find the movie mumbly and meaningless. It was recommended to me by someone who was almost my age, so we weren't having a generation divide. Mostly we were having a rum divide, in that he'd consumed most of a bottle of rum and I hadn't. But anyway. Right at the end of the movie some guy comes in, pulls a gun, and shoots Dante (the clerk of title fame) dead in his shoes. And I remember thinking "Wow, that's a bleak and cynical end to a bleak and cynical movie..." And I thought about it no more, until I had a conversation with someone much later about the movie and he assured me that Dante was alive and well and had never been shot.

It turns out there are two distinct endings, and by this gimmick Kevin Smith got me to spend more of my time and mental effort discussing his movie than I had ever intended. And my associate and I had very different impressions of the movie because we'd seen different endings, and in the end we were never able to agree on anything because we couldn't even agree on whether the main character (I guess Dante is the main character) is alive or dead.

I really wish directors would make one ending, the ending that the script or their artistic vision called for, and stopped pandering by filming different endings. It seems dishonest to make different endings designed to appeal to different audiences - one ending for the suburban theater-going set, a different ending for the family-night DVD-viewing set, and a third dark and violent ending for the late-nite DVD-viewing set. The director gets to appease the MPAA while simultaneously titillating the sebaceous fanboys, and I think that's cheating - not that anyone listens to me.

On the other hand, I'm torn on the notion of "director's cuts" of old movies, where a director goes back and re-edits an old movie. They usually say that the re-edit was done to bring the movie more fully into line with the director's original vision, though sometimes I darkly suspect that they re-edit movies just so they can sell a bunch of DVDs... This is different from the practice of making alternative endings because the movie generally retains the same ending as before; what changes is the stuff that lies between the opening credits and the ending. Like the Star Wars movies, where the additions are mostly bad or at least irrelevant CGI additions to the backgrounds and wide shots. Alien had a bit more work done to it, but the overall story didn't change; we just got a chance to see what became of Dallas (and we also lost stuff that I liked, like the dreamily dystopic corridor shots. But the most notable are probably Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, where the extended versions of the movies contain whole scenes and characters that do not occur in the theatrical versions. I think I like that. If I liked the original movie, the chances are that I'm going to like seeing more of it. But I'm torn, just because it's fun to be torn.

News I'd Like To See

Here's a news story I'd like to see. I'd like to read about a group of astronomers and planetary scientists, excited by the latest batch of "bodacious" pictures to come back from the Hubble Space Telescope, getting drunk and invading the downtown region to overturn cars, light bonfires, holler incoherent drunken cheers into the darkness, and finally stagger home wearing one another's shirts and singing bawdy songs about the background radiation and the solar wind.

But no, it's only sports fans who get to have fun like that. Go figure.

iTune Blues

I'm working up a certain amount of hostility toward iTunes these days. I still like iTunes more than I dislike it, but in the words of the Babylon 5 movie "In the Beginning", "not as much as in the beginning."

First, they take all the Insomnium off iTunes. I don't know why - maybe it wasn't even iTunes that dictated that decision. But it grates on me, especially since they sell Ratt and (hang on to your butts) Bullet Boys. It's like being slapped with a large fish; I can't decide if it's insulting or merely annoying.

Then they dangle the prospect of Robin Trower before me. I've been waiting patiently for the album Bridge of Sighs to appear on iTunes. It was my favorite album by far in high school, and though some of the songs haven't aged all that well, certain ones like "Day of the Eagle" and "Too Rolling Stoned" and "Bridge of Sighs" remain excellent. The only thing that might be better would be finding the Robin Trower song "Twice Removed from Yesterday" on iTunes. But Bridge of Sighs is an amazing album, I think. Not my usual style, but still pretty amazing.

So one day it appears, and I click buy album. Only I can't, because you have to have "iTunes Plus" to buy it. Why? It's an album, right? Just like all the other albums I've bought, right? What about this album requires "iTunes Plus"?

I tried to download iTunes Plus but it wouldn't take; it kept complaining that "Bonjour" wouldn't start, and Apple, true their bullshit version of customer service, never mentions what Bonjour is, what it does, or even that it exists in the first place. You think you're installing iTunes Plus and all of a sudden it's installing Bonjour... I suspect it's about advertising. Usually when someone tries to interest me in an improved cell phone, website or music buying experience, it's because someone figured out a way to advertise to me in new and unusual ways. They can hoot about the grooviness of it all, but let's face it, it's all about the money, and I personally resent them holding Bridge of Sighs hostage to some marketing chucklehead's idea of what software on MY computer should or should not do.

So the bottom line is that iTunes Plus wouldn't load, so Bridge of Sighs remains unpurchased, and I've half a mind to give up on iTunes altogether and start buying albums on CDs again. But on the good side, though the album claims to have been remastered, it was remastered with a certain amount of taste and decorum and doesn't sound significantly different from the original effort (unlike the old ZZ Top albums which, after being remastered, sounded more like Devo than ZZ Top).

Sunday Night

It's Sunday night, too late to have a cup of coffee or I won't sleep, but too early to just stick a fork in the day and go to bed. So what do I think?

1. I think I want to build a model airplane, but I'm unsure of the type. I have two X-15A2 kits, but they're earmarked for special projects - one's going to turn into a stretched delta-winged X-15A5, the other is going to become Pete Knight's airplane the day he set the speed record of Mach 6.71. I want to build something easy and casual, and neither of these will be easy or casual. I have a pair of Academy Me-163 Komets, and I do like the pip-squeakish Komet, but I'd be a lot more interested in the kits if they were the 1/32nd scale Hasegawa kits. I have a startling number of Arado-234 variants, and an He-177 Greif with Hs-293 glide bombs, and a very nice ICM Il-2M3 Sturmovik.

But none of this really appeals to me. I find myself wishing I had, of all things, a 1/48th scale B-24J Liberator, or something groovy and peculiar from the 1950s, especially an XF-91 Thunderceptor. Or a Hawker Fury, a classic biplane that never goes out of style with me, or... Riddle me this, Batman: how come the models that most appeal to me are the models I don't have in my collection?

2. I think I detect among historians in general a kind of anti-Roman stance. Or is that a pro-Mithridatic, pro-Hannibal stance? Not that I care, and not that it makes a difference, but somehow it seems a little silly to prefer Mithridates on moral grounds over the man who finally defeated him, Pompey the Great. It's as though they've never heard of the Asiatic Vespers...

3. I'm going to have a bowl of cereal tonight for the first time in almost a year. The prospect fills me with almost childish joy!

Eggnog

I was cleaning out the fridge the other day so I could put the new groceries away when I found a half-gallon of Safeway-brand eggnog in the back. It was unopened and quite tidy on the outside, but still, hoarding a carton of eggnog for almost four months isn't a good sign. It's actually kind of humiliating.

How, you might ask, does one miss a carton of eggnog in the back of the fridge? Well, there's a jug of blueberry-pomegranate juice in the fridge. My wife thinks it's mine. I think it's hers. It hasn't been touched in months, and the eggnog was hiding behind the juice. I think the bottom line is that if you have a jug of juice that's been in the fridge for so long the post office has assigned it its own zip code, you should consider throwing it away. At the very least, you should move it from time to time in case something behind it is on the verge of evolving opposable thumbs.

Posture Pals

I don't have a history of back trouble. Let's get that out of the way at the outset. I pull the occasional muscle and subject myself to occasional overwork like anyone, but for the most part my back has been as uncomplaining a mass of bone, muscle and gristle as one could want.

Which made my sudden descent into back pain about two weeks ago seem really strange and alarming. It was concentrated in my lower back and it was awful, so bad that I was starting to think that there was something seriously wrong with me (and there still might be). By Tuesday of this week I wanted to scream it was so awful. Or was it? "Awful" is a tricky thing - one person's awful is another person's minor annoyance, and in any event awful in my book is reserved for heart attack pain. That shit's awful. The back pain was just kind of annoying, so that I'd get home after 12 hours at work and I really wouldn't want to do anything but take four Tylenol, take a shower, go to bed, and try not to imagine all the horrible things that might be wrong with my back.

So Wednesday I was sitting at work being morose - my back hurt and my iPod battery had given out - when I became dimly aware of the coincidence that my back pain really started at about the same time I started using a new chair in the environmental lab at work. The environmental lab is pretty much a bummer in and of itself - it varies between very hot and very cold, depending on which of the environmental chambers are leaking, and the ceaseless racket of the air hammers in the vibration tables sounds for all the world like a parking lot full of idling big rigs.

The environmental lab is also where chairs go to die. Nobody goes back there unless they have to, so if anyone has a broken or deformed chair they want to get rid of, they wheel it back into the environmental lab and ditch it. There's a chair that pitches violently forward. There's a chair whose wheels fall off when you try to roll. There's a chair whose height adjustment cylinder leaks and subjects you to heart-stoppingly sudden jerks as it drops about an inch at a time. Then there's my chair, which I didn't realize at the time was channelling the spirit of Doan, of Doan's Pills fame.

I switched chairs and within a half an hour the steady, relentless pain in my back started to fade. On the way home I leaned my car seat back farther than normal, far enough that the upper left part of my forehead no longer hit the raised trim piece on the ceiling of the car. By the time I got home I felt wonderful, and I didn't even have that sore spot on the upper left side of my forehead either.

I note that since Wednesday, my back pain isn't quite gone. Apparently it isn't enough to just sit in a different chair; I also have to perform some sort of exorcism on the Satan Chair that half-wrecked me in the first place. I have it hidden behind a chamber, next to the yellow cabinet that bears the vivid (and amusing) sign "Danger: Alcahal!" When I figure out what the proper rites are, I'll go ahead with the exorcism, and then I imagine the last twinges of back pain will go away for good. The power of good posture compells you!


There is a link between drugs used in heart surgery and kidney tumors, and I really need to get myself to the doctor even though it doesn't hurt any more. Better safe than sorry.

Arthur C. Clarke

So Arthur C. Clarke is dead, and I feel a little older and grimmer. It's not that I knew the man, or that I had signed on to an Arthur C. Clarke cult of personality. It's mostly a case that he'd been a part of my life since roughly 1968 and all of a sudden he's gone.

I'm not here to write a eulogy; I'll leave that to people who either knew him better or can write better than I can. Nor am I here to try to establish his place in the pantheon of writers; I can hardly find my favorite pair of socks, let alone figure out anyone's place in the Pantheon. Besides, I quit reading science fiction a long time ago and it would be foolish of me to try to put him into context because my context ends in about 1990.

But I will say this. When I was eight my mom bought me a book of his called The Promise of Space, which is partly a fairly light treatment of some of the notable technical difficulties that pertain to spaceflight, and partly a very effective appeal to emotion and sentimentality to justify the costs and risks of spaceflight. And for all the other books of his that I read and enjoyed - Rendezvous with Rama and Against the Fall of Night in particular - what I'll always most remember of his work are the closing four paragraphs of The Promise of Space, which even today, forty years after I first read them, resonate with me. And with this recitation of them I honor the memory of Arthur C. Clarke:

We must not let our pride in our achievements blind us to the lessons of history. Over the first cities of mankind, the desert sands now lie centuries deep. Could the builders of Ur or Babylon - once the wonders of the world - have pictured London or New York? Nor can we imagine the citadels that our descendants may one day build beneath the blistering sun of Mercury or under the stars of the cold Plutonian wastes. And beyond the planets, through ages still ahead of us in time, lies the unknown and infinite promise of the stellar universe.

There will, it is true, be danger in space, as there has always been on the oceans or in the air. Some of these dangers we may guess; others we shall not know until we meet them. Nature is no friend of man's, and the most that he can hope for is her neutrality. But if he meets destruction, will be at his own hands and according to a familiar pattern.

The dream of flight was one of the noblest and one of the most disinterested of of all man's aspirations. Yet it led in the end to that B-29 driving in passionless beauty through August skies toward the city whose name it was to sear into the conscience of the world. Already there has been half-serious talk concerned the use of the Moon for military bases and launching sites. The crossing of space may thus bring, not a new Renaissance, but the final catastrophe that haunts our generation.

That is the danger, the dark thundercloud that threatens the promise of the dawn. The rocket has already been the instrument of evil, and may be so again. But there is no way back into the past; the choice, as Wells once said, is the universe - or nothing. Though men and civilizations may yearn for rest, for the dream of the lotus-eaters, that is a desire that merges imperceptibly into death. The challenge of the great spaces between the worlds is a stupendous one; but if we fail to meet it, the story of our race will be drawing to its close. Humanity will have turned its back upon the still-untrodden heights and will be descending the long slope that stretches, across a thousand million years of time, down to the shores of the primeval sea.

-- Arthur C. Clarke
The Promise of Space
Harper & Rowe, New York, 1968

I couldn't have said it better myself.

I, Clavdivs

I'm probably not alone in feeling a certain amount of shame because I haven't read this-or-that classic book. I've never read the Iliad, or any Charles Dickens, or even Beowulf, though I can't imagine how I got through high school without having to. This gnaws at me a certain amount because I think one would probably benefit from reading the books that helped to form the cultural background of the west. It's somehow expected of us that we should struggle through The Republic and Of Mice And Men and feel ourselves to be, if not edified, then at least duly chastened.

But I'm not good at reading classics. There's too much new stuff to read, and I'll just come out and say it - many classics are just flat hard to read, especially fiction. Classical histories remain as interesting to me as ever, though it's important to leaven them with more modern histories so we don't get too wrapped around the author's preconceptions. Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, for example, remains a classic, but its fundamental conclusions - that Rome fell as a consequence of "immoderate greatness" and "superstition" require a bit more thought. But classical fiction? Hrm. A while back I picked up a copy of Dickens in a Barnes & Nobles and couldn't even last through the five-minute no-guilt test-drive.

But yesterday I finally finished an old book that's been nagging at me seemingly for years. Years and years ago I watched the PBS/BBS production of I, Claudius (better known as I, Clavdivs) and liked it well enough - John Hurt makes a creepy Caligula, let me tell you, and I can't think about Sejanus without visualizing Patrick Stewart - and not long thereafter I bought the paperback of the Robert Graves novel that the show was based on. That was in, oh, about 1977. So thirty years later I finally finished reading the book, whose binding and glue were failing and which sprayed loose pages and flakes of the cover in all directions. Even more fun, it turns out that it's only the first book of two; it ends at the moment the praetorians make Claudius emperor and one has to read the second book, Claudius the God, to get the rest of the story.

What to say about it? I feel better that I've finally read this classic, though since it was first published in the 1930s it's not really that classical. And I find some of its historical assertions unlikely, such as the allegation that Augustus was nothing but an affable, easily-led buffoon who was manipulated from beginning to end by Livia. I don't doubt that Livia did her fair share of manipulating, but the idea that Augustus was a mild-mannered buffoon is, frankly, kind of silly. I also think the book overestimates the achievements of Germanicus (not his esteem, but his achievements) and denigrates Tiberius to the extent that he is given no credit for ending the Ponnonian and Dalmatian uprisings.

I guess what I'm saying is that the book hits all the proper historical notes, but the inflection is what varies. And I often disagree with the inflection. I'll cite but one example. When Augustus was very old and felt that he was near death, he started the process of transferring his authority to his adopted son, Tiberius. This was a complicated procedure that required the sending of many letters and proclamations, and once started, it could not be easily stopped. But then Augustus didn't die and started to get better! The Robert Graves version of what happened next is that Livia poisoned Augustus so that Tiberius, her son, would become emperor that much sooner. The modern historical take is that Augustus wished to die - one author once described the Roman preoccupation with suicide as being "gloomily fashionable" - and he and Livia arranged for Livia to poison him as a means of assisted suicide.

Does it matter? I guess not. Augustus is still dead either way, and Tiberius turned out to be an efficient monster in human skin either way. But it makes a difference to how one views Livia, and I just don't see her being the efficient and busy poisoner that Robert Graves says she was. But is it a good book? It's a good book. Not a page-ripper in the modern fashion, and after a while the names run together into a horrible Greco-Roman multi-car pileup and you end up being unable to determine who did what to whom (I'm pretty good with the immediate heirs of Augustus, but when you get past, say, Agrippa Posthumus, I start to lose power). But it's not bad. Not as fun to read as Conn Iggulden's historical novels about Julius Caesar, and written in a style that makes it less accessible than The Grass Crown, but it's okay.

But I do wish - oh how I wish - that Graves had not assumed that we're all idiots and changed various Roman terms into equivalent but unrelated English ones. Colonels for military tribunes, assegais for spears, captains for centurions, regiments for legions, "protectors of the people" for tribunes, gowns for togas, sword-fighters for gladiators, guardsmen for praetors, and no word at all for lictors.

But anyway.

Olympics

I heard the first mention of a boycott of the Olympics yesterday, in connection with the operations of Chinese troops in Tibet. The last time we did it was 1980, when we boycotted the Moscow Olympics because the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan in 1979 (though to hear them say it, they were "invited" in by a "friendly regime" to put down "bandits"). It took a long time for US policy to arrive at anything approaching sophistication in Afghanistan, and in some ways the fruits of our efforts were decidedly unfortunate - would a lame socialist government backstopped by limitless Soviet military resources and scant fiscal resources really be worse than the Taliban? And was playing a role, however incidental and inadvertent, in the formation of al Qaeda something we really should have done?

Water under the bridge, of course, but for all that, our boycott of the Moscow Olympics did annoy the Soviets. They pretended not to show it, but the "asterisk Olympics" irritated them. They didn't pour all that concrete and beautify all those drab Stalinist apartment blocks to please their own people; they did it because they hoped to look good on TV in front of all those non-aligned folk who the Soviets figured would be easily gulled by fancy new stadiums and not-so-drab Stalinist apartment buildings. I think that my favorite piece of Soviet Olympic cheesitude was the VDNKh, or "Exposition of Economic Achievement" that was built during Olympic Fever and was supposed to showcase the efficiency of socialist endeavor. Back then it was the Soviet equivalent of the Smithsonian, a glittering expanse of cars, rocket engines, spidery spacecraft, generators, diesel engines and other gewgaws of socialist endeavor, all of it assembled beneath the munificent but to my eye slightly wistful gaze of the largest poster of Yuri Gagarin I've ever seen. I'm told that nowadays they've dragged all the exhibits and displays out and they sell used cars and cassette tapes in the main hall.*

The Chinese are doing the same thing, of course. The Olympics are an expression of Chinese power, imperium, gravitas, cultural supremacy, what have you. And I have no desire to be implicated in them. I don't know if the US government (or any other government) will boycott the Olympics for any particular reason, but I believe I will. You put propylene glycol in my toothpaste, poison my dog, poison my kids, and spy on my country, and you expect me to give a rat's ass about your Olympics? I think not.

And it's a pity, because I usually enjoy the Olympics. I'm sort of a tyro when it comes to the ins and outs of track and field events, and the hyperabundance (no other word will do) of ice skating coverage in the Winter Olympics leaves me - wait for it - cold. And there are always those pointless arguments about whether, say, synchronized swimming is more of a sport than rhythmic gymnastics. But the notion of the Olympics in a general sense I support, and who can not help but by amused (at the very least) by things like Eddie the Eagle and the Jamaican bobsled team and the downhill skiier from Morocco?

But when the Olympics turn into another glittering aspect of a given country's propaganda offensive, I can find better things to do with my time. I wish them success - without me.

* Though I think the strangest bit of Olympic doodadery I saw in the USSR was in the lobby of the airport in Bratsk, one of those places where one side of the runway was a civil airport and the other side was a bunch of blue-grey MiG-25 interceptors in hardened revetments. Inside the lobby was an enormous thumb about eight to ten feet tall, made of concrete if my tappings of it were any guide, and spray-painted bright metallic gold. Just an erect thumb, nothing more. No hand, no thumbscrew, no explanation of any sort for how this gargantuan golden thumb came to be in the airport lobby looming over the passengers like some kind of bizarre Parthian phallus. When asked, our Intourist guide suggested (with notable lack of confidence) that it was "related to the Olympics." I referred to it thereafter as the Golden Thumb of Socialist Endeavour.

I Hate To Think It

I hate to say it. I hate to even think it. But I think the Clinton Campaign is slowly turning into the sort of thing I couldn't possibly support.

In the interests of full disclosure, I've been supporting Barack Obama for some time on the basis of my tactical assessment that he is more electable than Hillary Clinton, who has for years been the nexus of an "anyone but Hillary" movement in Republican circles.

But I couldn't say that in terms of policy or behavior there were many difference between the Obama and Clinton campaigns, so my preference for Obama was based strictly on a who-can-beat-McCain calculation. But lately it seems that the Clinton campaign is morphing into something I find mildly repugnant, and she (or her handlers) are becoming more and more overt about the fact that they're power-hungry politicians who'll not eschew any bit of gamesmanship or nastiness if they think it'll help them win.

I love the latest one - Hillary's cries that the voters of Michigan and Florida have been disenfranchised. By whom? By The Man? Is Dick Cheney down there throwing ballots in the trash? No - they were blocked from participating by the Democratic Party because the people that run the state campaigns broke the DNC's own rules! Gah! Your pathetic attempt to turn a technical breach of DNC rules into a human rights issue (really, a delegate issue) irritates me.

My point is that Hillary Clinton these days seems like your basic standard-issue power-hungry politician, and I know a lot of people who feel betrayed and let down by her because they had hoped for something more than a prancing ego in a power suit.

Alas. Earwax.

28 Legions

I've been gnawing on an idea for the last couple of weeks and I haven't really reached a conclusion. But nevertheless I'm struck anew by the idea every time I wrassle with it.

It is this:

We'll remember that Augustus Caesar became the first emperor of Rome (though he preferred the term princeps, or "first citizen") by defeating, among others, Marc Antony in a civil war. The army he inherited afterwards consisted of upwards of fifty legions of varying size and organization. He regularized the army at 28 legions all organized in the same way. Each legion contained 5,120 men, so the Roman army as a whole had 143,360 men. This means that during the Pax Romana, the "Roman Peace", the Romans controlled Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, chunks of Mesopotamia, the Middle East, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain, with a combined population of about 53 million people, with less than 150,000 regular soldiers.

This boggles me to a certain extent. How could the Romans control basically The West with 150,000 men under arms, while we can't seem to control Iraq with roughly the same number of men under arms? Rome had no spy satellites, no reconnaissance drones, no helicopters, no night vision equipment, no CIA, no FBI, no secret police, nothing. So how did they do it??

I think - but I can't prove - that the Romans did it, at least in part, by making people want to be in with the Roman empire. The Romans offered powerful incentives to join with them - citizenship, protection, aqueducts, baths, roads, trade, peace, orderly public administration, and a sense of being a stakeholder in the empire. The Roman empire didn't stay together because of the power of the Roman army, but because there were powerful inducements to join the empire, or least abide it in silence. The Romans were capable of extreme ruthlessness when pressed, but they were also pratical, realistic pragmatists who saw that there was a certain value in achieving their ends without bloodshed if possible.

What does this mean? I don't know yet. But I'm struck every time by the observation that the Romans maintained the peace throughout the western world with the same number of troops that we have in Iraq. There's a lesson in there somewhere, but I don't know what it is yet.

(Subsequent events proved that the Roman army of 28 legions was too small to carry out sustained field operations, and the lack of a central reserve meant that Rome was vulnerable to things like the "Varus Disaster", where three of the 28 legions were wiped out to the last man by German tribesmen. But even though later emperors raised additional legions, the count never exceeded 31 until the time of Domitian when the nature of the legion was drastically altered.)

(I also concede the point that for every Roman regular soldier, there was an auxiliary. The legions consisted almost exclusively of heavy infantry, which the Romans believed was the arm of decision. All the other types of soldiery that an army needs - archers, cavalrymen, scouts, light infantry - were supplied by the provinces in the form of auxiliaries. So it's reasonable to say that the Roman army consisted of 143,000 professional soldiers and an equal number of somewhat irregular auxiliaries, but the auxiliaries were never the heart of the army and were never (or at least almost never) used independently.)

Roman Names

I've always wondered what my name would have been if I had been a Roman. I've already reconciled myself to just three names; not being famous or victorious, I wouldn't cash in on any of that cool agnomen business (but how cool is a name like Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Majoris? I mean really).

It turns out that Roman name generators abound on the Internet, so I took pot luck at one. What did I get?

Spurius Flaccus Maximian.

Cripes. I mean, I wasn't really holding my breath for Marcus Tullius Cicero or Gaius Julius Caesar or anything, but Spurius Flaccus? It sounds like a Latin rendering of Accidental Fart! How would that sound in the Senate? "I wish to yield the floor to my colleague, Accidental Gas."

Let's try it again. Aulus Opsius Quiriac. Nope. No sale; it sounds like "Oopsie, I dropped my quinine." Nothing doing. One more try. Decius Sabucius Receptus. No, I don't really like that either; it's too close to Sebaceous Receptacle, but at least Decius is cool.

The problem is that the random name generator is just that: it's too random. In Roman naming, the first name, or praenomen, was sort of like a given name - Gaius, Marcus, Gnaeus, and there weren't many of them. The middle name, or just plain nomen, was the name of your clan, tribe or family unit - Julius, Claudius. There were a lot of them, but not all that many proper aristocratic ones. The last name, the cognomen, was a nickname, which was necessary because the first two names were hereditary and tended to repeat. The third name, the cognomen, was supposed to be based on some personal trait or characteristic of the person. Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, for example: Marcus was his given name, Vipsanius his clan, but Agrippa, that was all his - he had been born breech, and that's what Agrippa meant. How about a cognomen like Ahenobarbus, meaning "Bronze-bearded"? Or Cicero, meaning - for some reason - "chickpea"? Or the dreaded Posthumus, which meant that your father had died before you were born?

So what would I pick as my own cognomen? Bibulus, meaning "drunkard"? Flavus, for "blonde-haired"? Pulcher, meaning "attractive"? Or Celsus, for "tall"?

Gaius Marius Celsus*. That has a ring, don't you think? Though there are times when Titus Flavius Flavus makes me chuckle - if I were Flavius Flavus, would I have to wear a sundial on a chain around my neck? Yo!

* The real Gaius Marius, who was defeated by Cornelius Sulla in the civil war before the Civil War, had no cognomen, and I don't feel the least bit guilty usurping his name.

Whoops

Man, how would you like to lie awake at night and ruminate on the fact that you might have killed Antoine Saint-Exupery? That would bum one. But irony takes a cruel turn when it transpires that the Luftwaffe pilot who may have shot Saint-Exupery down over the south of France was - oh dear - a huge fan of Saint-Exupery's writing. Nobody is sure if the Luftwaffe pilot, Horst Rippert, really shot Saint-Exupery's P-38 Lightning down or not, but Rippert believes he did, and that's all that matters from irony's point of view.

It's akin to the fate of Archimedes during the siege of Syracuse during the Second Punic War. Marcellus, commanding the Roman forces during the siege, gave orders that the famous mathematician and engineer Archimedes was not to be killed. But after the Romans successfully carried the walls and broke into the city, some nameless legionary killed Archimedes, apparently without realizing who he was. Later, one imagines, he clapped his hands to his head and cried "shittus!" How'd you like to spend the rest of your modest life being known as the guy who killed Archimedes?

Not that I'm making light of the deaths of Saint-Exupery or Archimedes. Far from it.

When I was a kid (eight, maybe ten) I had a book on the battle of Stalingrad, and in it was a picture of some nameless German sergeant sheltering behind a pile of dirt and waving the rest of his men to come up. This was Stalingrad, a true meatgrinder and no mistake, and the odds are that he didn't survive the battle. The part that always got me was that he was an absolute dead ringer for Leonard Nimoy, and I remember being somewhat upset and confused by the strange, unhappy notion that Leonard Nimoy might have been killed before he could play Spock on TV.

It was my first realization that war might be significantly worse than had been depicted in the war movies of the day. I was just reminded of that by reading about Saint-Exupery this evening. I'd go read something cheerful, but neither of the books I'm currently reading - Lisey's Story by Stephen King and I, Claudius by Robert Graves - are the least bit cheerful.

251

This is my two hundred and fifty-first post, by the way. Kind of an odd anniversary, but I like odd anniversaries.

But I was really interested in the new Star Trek XI movie, which will apparently be produced, written and directed by the people who bring us Lost. I'm not sure what to think of that. They also brought us Mission: Impossible, and I didn't really like either of the M:I movies, and I'm not sure that anything we've seen on Lost really suits the world of Star Trek. But I'm happy to withhold judgment and see how they do.

But so far I'm not inordinately pleased. I'm not sure I care to see the life and times of the Old Show regulars before there was an old show. This is an invitation to the most dreaded words in all of fandom, the retcon and the reboot. Retcon stands for "retroactive continuity" and is what happens when the objective facts of a series do not change, but their interpretation does. The "dream season" in Dalls is a classic retcon. The death of Superman required the writers to retcon vulnerabilities into him that didn't exist originally. If they make Mr. Sulu gay in the movie, it will be a retcon, though a harmless one. A reboot is more extensive and odious; it amounts to re-launching a series and paying no attention to any of the existing material. Cynics can, and do, argue that the third season of Lost amounted to a reboot, because all of a sudden we were dealing with situations, people, and shit in a general sense that we'd never seen before - and none of the situations, people and shit we were used to were still around.

Frankly, I don't want to see a reboot of Kirk, Spock and McCoy. If they're going to do that, I'd just as soon they made up new characters. And I'm not sure I'm even in the mood for an awful lot of retconning either. I watched the "Under Construction" trailer and I have to say, I liked it - it makes a nice connection between the American space program of the 1960s and Starfleet of the 23rd Century, and I like the timeless nature of the ironworkers who hammer the freakin' thing together. And the ship looks pretty much like the original-release Enterprise. But - uhoh! - what's this??

It's built on Earth? Last time I checked, it was built at the San Francisco Shipyards in orbit around Earth, not on Earth (though I personally prefer the Utopia Planitia Shipyards, if only because the geographical names on Mars seem exceedingly cool to me). Second, what's with the enormous and obviously freewheeling turbine blades in the warp nacelles? What's there in space to either drive or be driven by a turbine? And why do they look so much like spinner hubcabs on a tacky SUV?

Oh, I'm doing it already, aren't I? My geek nature is showing. Sorry about that. Happy 251, ya geek.

Oh, I Didn't Just See That, Did I?

The Pharaoh's Tomb - so it's dusty, the size of a small trailer park, and contains jars of dessicated organs? That sounds appetizing. So by what nickname is her lover's organ known? The Sarcophagus? Howard Carter?

If there's anything worse than waking up and first thing in the morning reading about some celebrity's nickname for her genitalia, it must surely be having nicknames for one's genitalia in the first place. Don't you agree, Sven Veenie?

I should know better than to read celebrity news. It's a delirium of baby bumps, bad hair, bad behavior, Botox and superficiality, but I still read it. Apparently I hate myself.

But I do beg one favor: please, please, stop using the expression "baby bump". Celebrities and yuppies seem to have done a pretty good job of turning babies into accessories - they're not something you raise, but something you show off. I'm all in favor of motherhood. That's how I got here, after all. But this postmodern obsession with babies as status symbols makes me sigh. So what happens when Ms. Celebrity's batch of offspring turn 13 and start to eat everything in the house, break things that cannot normally be broken, cycle rapidly between black despair and frothy self-assurance, whine for days because they, as 13 year olds, do not understand love, and in the same breath refer to you as a Fascist and ask if you can drive them to the mall? Will there be a press conference from Ms. Celebrity where she says "Oh, my preteen rug rats stopped being the sorts of things I could lord over my friends and started to have independent thoughts, so I had them all shot. My rut rats and my friends. Meantime, haven't you noticed that I'm showing? Have you got a good angle to see my baby bump?"

I theorize that if you could somehow convince celebrities that there are adoptable babies on the moons of Saturn, they'd pool their billions and pay for scientists to design a warp drive just so they can pose for photos amid this Saturnian baby population.

Epic-who?

Today in the aftermath of my cardiology visit I was sitting at my desk eating an orange and trying to bend a paperclip into new and hitherto-unknown shapes and became gripped by a strange train of thought. When I was in high school I fancied myself to be a Stoic. Actually, my friend fancied himself to be a Stoic too, and we took turns trying to prove that we knew Epictetus's Enchiridion better than the other. What does this have to do with cardiology? Nothing, but welcome to the strange world of how seemingly unconnected things go together in my head.

Anyway, we used to have contests to see who had the better command of Epictetus, but what I remember more than anything is the way we argued about his name. How do you pronounce Epictetus? I favored "epic-tea-tus". He favorited "ee-pic-teh-tus". So instead of having a fruitful discussion about a reasonably formative school of philosophy, we fought about the poor bastard's name.

Later I lost the Stoic faith, such as it is, and had a thrillful fling with what I fancied to be phenomonology until I realized that what I really knew about phenomonology would fit in a thimble. What I had done was read a little bit about phenomonology and invent an all-new school of philosophy that should have been called dumbassology. But it was fun. Dark, but fun. Darkly fun?

And that's the point. You get out of your cardiology appointment with nothing but good news to show for it, and suddenly it's fun to think about the bullshit philosophies one espoused in high school again.

Cardiology

I went to the cardiologist today and was pronounced "excellent". I've felt pretty good heart-wise for quite a while, but it's good to have the doctors concur, what with their impressive test equipment and all. Even my EKG was good, and since it was my first EKG since I left phase-II rehab, it made me scream like a scared puppy when she tore the electrodes off my chest.

But I'm annoyed that my doctor didn't officially recognize my weight loss. What's the use of losing weight if nobody in a position of authority notices?

Hall of Fame

I see Madonna was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That doesn't move me much one way or the other; I've never had particularly strong feelings about Madonna one way or the other. Not my kind of music, and past that, I don't care. But doesn't it seem odd that someone who is still practicing, or capable of practicing, one's profession should already be in the Hall of Fame?

Apparently one becomes eligible for the Hall of Fame 25 years after the first release of one's first bit of work. So it's 2008, and I think that means that artists who came out in 1983 are now eligible for the Hall of Fame. Think about it. Eddie Money? 707?? The Buggles??? THE WAITRESSES???

It kind of makes the Hall of Fame seem irrelevant when you're competing against the Bullet Boys, dunnit?

3 AM Phone Call

Who do I want answering the "red phone" in the White House at 3 AM? Not Hillary Clinton, I can tell you that much for free, because power-hungry career politicians give me gas. No, I want Babe Ruth to answer the 3 AM phone calls. Why? Because he's dead, and everyone knows he's dead, and what could be scarier than talking to a dead man on the telephone? A dead man who might or might not have control of the US nuclear arsenal?? Nobody would do anything contrary to the wishes of US foreign policy for fear of tangling with the spirit of Babe Ruth, mean and hung-over and nuclear-capable. It would even get to Osama. "I see jowly Americans with Louisville Sluggers and hip flasks, oh it's so horrible!"

Variety Plate

New Music. I was farting around on iTunes (I think "farting around" is actually a technical term when it comes to iTunes) and found a complication album called something like NorthernBreeze II. It sounds a bit like King Haakon's yacht, but it's subtitled "Finnish metal compilation." Nice, except some of the bands are Norwegian, some of them aren't metal, and how can you possibly have a Finnish metal compilation without Children of Bodom and Insomnium? But it did have a song from an interesting new band, Mors Principium Est, which my schoolboy Latin translates as "Death Begins" or "Death is Beginning". Or is it "Death is Foremost"? I guess it doesn't matter. Carthago delenda est. Mors Principium Est sounds like blackened death metal to me, and it's not bad. It's not great - it's a bit of an acoustic mess, especially in the first minute or two of the song, and if I were engineering the thing, I'd have heavied it up just a tad (the effect we're aiming for is to make Nathan Explosion nod and say "It's getting nice and heavy") and cleaned it up considerably. It's not quite cold enough to be black metal and not quite aggressive enough to be death metal, but it'll do, for now, at least until "Dance With You" and "At the Gates of Sleep" stop getting all mixed up in my head.

New Game. I went to my mom's birthday luncheon today and had opportunity to play Rock Star for about 20 seconds before I was unceremoniously failed. Clearly I missed something, and it's probably just as well. Fun? It seemed like it, but one has to ask how I of all people ended up having to do a Hole song in Rock Star. Hole! Those whom the gods would destroy they first bemuse with intense irony. The only other option was "Orange Crush" by REM, which frankly isn't much of an option. Hole or REM. Wow. It's like having to choose between taking a sword in the groin or the throat. "I'll take hideous painful death for two hundred, Alex."

New Ailment. I haven't blogged much in the last week. I developed a low-grade sinus infection earlier this week, and its main function is to make my writing ideas seem dumb and sap my energy by about 15%, just enough to make me lazy and unproductive and to periodically awaken me with that unpleasant sense of drainage.

So Soon?

I had cause to look at my butt in the mirror yesterday. Or let's say that the whim to look at my butt and a mirror happened to coincide in time and space, and I made a shocking discovery: my incentive pants are already baggy in back. I don't know whether that's good or bad, mostly because I'm too startled to think about clearly, but there it is.

Thought-Provoking WHAT?

I was not at my best this afternoon. In the post-lunch phase I found myself inattentive and distracted, and for at least five minutes I stared at the back of a model magazine that happened to be on my desk. It was upside down, but I can read upsidaisium, up to a pointium.

It was an ad from a company that was selling pre-assembled, pre-painted military models. This has always seemed strange to be because most of the enjoyment I get out of modeling comes from the assembly and painting thereof, and the actual gazing-at-the-finished-model part is usually pretty banal. But, what's true for me isn't true for everyone, and it turns out that pre-built models are actually pretty popular these days.

So I was staring at the ad and saw that they were selling, among other things, prepainted historical miniatures of German soldiers (the dividing line between "toy soldiers" and "historical miniatures" is that what I own are historical miniatures; what you own are toy soldiers). The ad copy was a tissue of lies and misstatements, but what really amused me with the notion that the soldiers had been sculpted in "thought-provoking battle poses." I am not making that up. Thought-provoking battle poses. To me, a thought-provoking battle pose is General Patton going to war in a Carmen Miranda hat. Or Julius Caesar arriving fashionably late at the Battle of Pharsalus aboard a mutant five-legged goat. Or Terry-Thomas leading the troops ashore on Gold Beach while trying to keep his feather boa out of the surf.

But what have we got, thought-provoking-battle-pose-wise? One guy looks for all the world like Julia Child gripping a yam that is ever so slightly sexually suggestive. One guy looks like he just hit his head on the cabinet door, really hard, and is afraid to probe his scalp lest he find blood. Another guy has the kind of spooky dead-eyed aspect that I normally associate with Little Orphan Annie and her cadre of brain-dead zombies. Of the Germans bears an expression of bland hopefulness, as though he expects the war to be called off as a mistake any minute now, and I'm sorry, but GI Joe with Kung-Fu Grip had more convincing hands than any of them.

Well, maybe they really are thought-provoking. Just not in the way they hoped.

Naderhotep

And so, every four years, Naderhotep emerges from his dusty sarcophagus and lumbers across the landscape in his shuffling, arm-crooked pursuit of third-party Presidential victory, tanna leaves, and Princess Ankhesenamun, though I'm only guessing at the latter. After chasing the princess for 4,000 years, he may have decided that what Flo over at the bowling alley lacks in nobility she more than makes up for in accessibility.

"He's going to split the Democratic vote!" the pundits and Egyptologists cry - the Republicans with glee, the Democrats with wails of outraged déjà vu. And yeah, Naderhotep will probably cause a certain ruckus in the electorate as he brews his tanna leaves and tries to clip off the dangling threads on his mummy wrap. But in my role as amateur Egyptologist, I offer this handful of thoughts.

1. Mummies don't make good Presidents.

2. As much as I wish Naderhotep would remain in his sarcophagus and let the electoral process go on without his wretched tanna leaf tea and inarticulate groans, the Constitution gives him the right to run and I'd be about the last person to say he positively can't run. The two-party system isn't in the Constitution, after all. It's convenient (mostly for the two parties) but it isn't a founding principle.

3. Naderhotep is a man of impeccable moral standing and the argument that he comes out of the dusty desert as some sort of Republican stooge is silly. He has no use for Democrats or Republicans; he sees them as two manifestations of the larger "Business Party" and thinks they're all corrupt. And it's a tempting conclusion, but I'm of the mind that there are just enough differences between Democrats and Republicans for one to be preferable to the other. So there is value, I think, in going after limited but achievable victories instead of betting the whole Upper Kingdom on a third party home-run play by a shambling mummy who, regardless of his moral fiber, can't win because every time he moves his arms, his followers are overcome by the smell of camphor and scarab beetles.

4. I think it'll be harder to split the vote this year. Naderhotep will still win some votes - I think Anubis will swing his way, but the Nubian vote may be hard for him to hang on to - but I don't foresee a big split this time around. My memory is that last time it was largely "green" issues that gave Naderhotep traction, but I think this time around "lucid foreign policy" and "somewhat less exploitative economic policy" and "at least a token stab at health insurance reform" are going to be bigger issues than mere greenness, and I don't see Naderhotep getting anything done on those issues. The big unknown is what he'll do with the rising tide of American anti-globalism. Will he court it? And if so, will he be able to do anything with it, or will it just snag in his linen wrappings and make him wave his arms in useless inarticulate rage? The matter awaits scholarship.

But in the meantime, stay close to your cats and if you smell tanna leaves or mothballs, head for the exits.

Incentive Pants

I happened to find myself at Target on Friday. I like phrasing it that way because it makes it sound like I rolled on the wind like a tumbling tumbleweed for weeks and just happened to end up at Target. It seems more interesting than saying "My wife and I went to Target to buy pants." Because I could just as easily ended up like a tumbling tumbleweed at Cabela's, or Andy's Hobby Headquarters, or somewhere in Belgium.

Yes, pants. I don't really need pants that badly. What I need more than anything is a nice suit - I lean toward charcoal grey - but I figured at long as low-end Wrangler jeans could be had for less than twenty bucks per, I might as well try something. I've been losing weight since July (total score is about seventy pounds) and I decided to buy pants that I knew I wouldn't quite fit into. Size 42s if you must know. The idea was that not quite being able to wear them would motivate me and renew my dietary and exercisory vim. Incentive pants, in other words.

Trouble is, I didn't read the label. It turns out they're "instant gratification pants". I can not only wear them already, but wear them well, and I could probably wear 40s with some discomfort and a certain Mickey Mouse tone in my voice - "Hi, kids! Wow, are my testicles ever experiencing a positively insalubrious level of torque right now! Whee!"

I appreciate the instant gratification pants, but now I have no incentive pants.

I guess 38s are the incentive pants now. I guess I (wait for it) need to put a pair of 38s in my closet - and you can interpret that however you like.

A Warning from the Surgeon-General

I was listening to my iPod at work yesterday and made an interesting discovery.

I was listening to the song "Dance With You" by Bowling For Soup, which has lyrics like this:

You go up and down
turn around
merry go round and round
shake it shake it two times dose doe cotten eyed joe
run around pull me down never gonna come around
I’m never gonna forget you


Then I listened to the song "To End the Rapture" by Avenged Sevenfold, which has lyrics like these:

The wind of life and air from above smells of death.
Angels sing of the end.
Nothing you say and nothing you try can change time.
Human race prepares to die...

If you switch back and forth between these songs often enough, you'll eventually experience a strange psychic phenomenon where you literally come to believe that you're literally losing your mind and you're turning into a toaster oven.

My advice: not so much Avenged Sevenfold, thank you very much. There's a time and a place for it, but not as a chaser for Bowling For Soup.

PS: All lyrics presumably copyrighted by Bowling For Soup and Avenged Sevenfold.

Killing Me!

Man, these three-day work weeks are killing me. Just killing me! I was off for three days. Now I'll work for three days, and then I'll be off for three days again. And I have the gall to gripe about it! My nerve knows no bounds.

I keep thinking that during my three days off, I should do something about the weeds that the rain has raised from the ground. But the thing is, I actually kind of like the weedy look! It makes me think that we live in a temperate clime and I like the sense of greenness and lushness. And since there's no HOA (excluding Roger Ramjet from up the street) do I really have to do anything about the weeds? No. So I'm torn. I may leave them till they stop looking green and lush and then pull them up - or is that a rationalization for inactivity?

Movies

I feel that I am coming down with what scientists refer to as the "creeping crud". I don't know if it's the flu or just a sort of corporeal ennui, but it's not pleasant. I can see myself spending some time watching movies today in an attempt to throw off the creeping crud. And that got me to thinking about my favorite movies.

I used to really like science fiction movies when I was a kid, but they were different then. They were goofy, almost joyfully stupid, and fun to watch. Aliens come to Earth. Aliens want our (pick one) oxygen, water, women, '32 Fords, brainwaves. They take some and leave, or, the plucky scientist figures out how to defeat them using nothing more than a can of Dinty Moore beef stew and a radio antenna.

Now science fiction movies seem different to me. They seem heavier and more formal, like I was supposed to read a briefing before watching the movie. I tried to watch the X-files movie and was mystified throughout, but perhaps someone who has never watched the TV show is not the audience they were trying to appeal to. I still watch them, but really, there hasn't been a science fiction movie made since roughly Empire Strikes Back that I've genuinely liked.

And my favorite science fiction movie? Five Million Years to Earth. It has everything. Psychic energy, paranoia, not-so-subtle references to McCarthyism and the other isms of the day, enigmatic metals, Cockney accents, tower cranes, electrical discharges, devils, chunky bearded Englishmen, and best of all, slowly-frying British officers. It's a classic, and it's no surprise it was made in 1967. If they made it today, it would feature 1,203,394,094 computer-generated special effects shots and no slowly-frying British officers. It's actually an interesting cross between horror and science fiction, sort of like a 1960s version of Event Horizon. If you mental edit out the fact that it's a Martian spacecraft, it could easily be a demon-possession movie.

I also like "modern Westerns". I don't much care for the Westerns from decades prior to about 1980, but I generally like Westerns made since Silverado. The older ones are either intolerable on racial grounds or too schlocky, if you can imagine such a thing, but the modern Westerns like Tombstone and Silverado sit pretty comfortably with me - especially Tombstone, which is on my list of desert island movies. "Skin that smoke-wagon and see what happens" indeed!

And then there are horror movies, which I have an apparently endless taste for. I confess I don't really watch the "serial" movies like Nightmare on Elm Street or Freddy Versus Jason or even Jason Versus The Argonauts. They're too straightforward and predictable, and I don't much care for the way anyone who has sex in them is rewarded by being butchered. Why is it always people who have sex are the first to die? Why not people who rob liquor stores or spin doughnuts in the grocery store parking lot at 3 AM?

But I do like the Saw movies, though I've found them to be trending generally downhill since the first one, and what with no Amanda, I may not be back. I don't know what the trade name for movies like this is - Saw, Hostel, Wolf Creek. "Detailed Slashers" maybe? I don't know. But I usually like them in my toe-curled grimacing way. What's interesting about these movies in particular is that there are no aliens, no radiation-induced mutations, no evil spirits, just very sick and twisted human beings.

I'm also quite fond of demon possession and to-the-devil-a-child movies, like (cough) To The Devil A Daughter and Prince of Darkness. Ghosts of Mars gets in under the bar in this category because even though it's technically science fiction, it's written and filmed in such a way that you can just sort of ignore the Martian corn smut and imagine that it's evil spirits doing the deed. And then there's The Exorcist and its various spawn, and even the Omen movies, which I like more than I should. And even that flawed classic, Event Horizon, fits in here. It's sort of like Marooned meets Hellraiser, and that's an interesting mix, and Sam Neill persecuting (or being persecuted by) the woman with no eyes and flipping back and forth between nerdy scientist and demon-possessed hardass, that's pretty cool!

And then there's the greatest horror movie ever made: Raising Arizona. But I kid Nicolas Cage.

Space Hygiene

I see the US Navy has been "requested" to shoot down the disabled US spy satellite before it finally comes out of orbit on its own. Yeah, I'm sure they had to ask the Navy more than once if they wanted to cue up an SM-3 missile and light the fuze...

The expression "shoot down" doesn't make any sense in this case because the SM-3 missile uses a so-called "hit to kill" warhead, also known as a "kinetic kill vehicle". It doesn't contain any explosives; it just smacks into the target at a very high rate of speed and causes damage by kinetic energy. As someone who was struck in the head with a brick (well, technically, a cement shingle, but the same spirit) I can attest to how much impact energy inert projectiles can generate.

But it's not like Star Trek, where we shoot the offending spacecraft with a blue-green beam, we listen to a restless whirring sound, and then the offending dingus simply vanishes. Would that it were so, but it aint. Instead we smash the equivalent of a high-tech brick into it and try to smash the target as throughly as possible.

And I have no doubt than an SM-3 KKV will do a very thorough job on the satellite, which I'm sure was designed to be only just barely stout enough to withstand the stresses of launch; the KKV will probably go in one side of the satellite and right out the other and convert big chunks of it into confetti.

But let's be serious a moment. This has nothing to do with the sudden fear that the satellite's monomethyl hydrazine fuel might accidentally land in a public school cafeteria. The satellite is going to break up at very high altitude - 400,000 feet or more - and as it tears itself apart, the fuel tanks will come apart, all the source gas will vent, and the relatively small load of MMH will dissipate into the upper atmosphere.

What this SM-3 shot is really all about is trashing the "sensor" in the spy satellite so thoroughly that Country X (pick your adversary) will be able to learn nothing from it even if they get their hands on all the debris. The National Reconnaissance Office and the various intelligence agencies want the "sensor" (they never call it a "camera") thoroughly wrecked, and what better way to wreck the camera than by A) pretending that they're doing a bit of orbital hygiene, and B) teaching the Navy's SM-3 missile system a new trick? I have no problem with that, especially if they wait until the absolute last minute so reduce the load of debris the test will produce.

The Russians used to put a self-destruct system in their spy satellites in case they fell into Yankee hands, but as far as I know, the system was never used. All it ever seemed to do for them was cause their spy satellites to blow up prematurely when the self-destruct systems got confused during launch.

Doh.

Why?

I was reading a news story about Barack Obama defeating Hillary Clinton in another primary today, and veteran readers of my blog will probably correctly surmise that this pleased me. As it did.

One of my worst habits as a person, other than public intoxication and licking myself in inappropriate ways, is clicking on the Read Comments section at the end of AOL news stories. Why do I do that? Why? Is it malignant self-hate? Why can I not break that perfectly wretched habit?

It's not that I disagree with the political or cultural views of the people who post the comments, though I often do. America is a democracy and people are free to believe what they like, and I'm okay with that. I'll even extend that courtesy to Dinesh D'Souza, though I'm not always convinced that he would reciprocate. And in any event, the odds are they wouldn't agree with me if I posted comments, so it balances out nicely.

But what really scares me is the almost unbelievable display of pure blockheaded stupidity most of the comments demonstrate when it comes to simple things like writing complete sentences, punctuating in a half-assedly right way, and employing dictionaries when it comes to spelling simple words like "country". Sometimes I can't even make out what the commentator is trying to say because his comment is so poorly written it might as well have been produced by a player piano. I'd copy-and-paste some notorious examples, but it's probably illegal and certainly unsporting to reproduce some private citizen's writing without permission.

But seriously, folks, there's the news story right above the comment box, so there's really no excuse for "McCaine", is there? You just read the story, didn't you?? And how seriously should I weigh the opinion of someone who believes (as demonstrated in more than one instance) that there is an "s" in "country"? Or, the one that really makes my jaw ache, the profligate apostrophizer who turns an ordinary expression into a gruelling death-match like "it's the word's of god". Every time I see this I hear sheets of plate glass breaking in my head.

I'm not talking about so-called "spelling flames" or wars between specialists over whether it's appropriate to split an infinitive (I hew to the Star Trek model, myself), or whether one needs permission from one's elders before creating an ad hoc gerund. I'm talking about the ability to write even the most basic of sentences, and I worry that not being to write the most basic of sentences means that the commentator can't even support the most basic of thoughts.

Maybe I'm just being an elitist.

But here's an interesting finding. The comments associated with AOL sports stories are very often better written in a technical sense, less inclined to hysterical hyperbole, and more inclined to admit that one's opposite number may have a point, than the comments on AOL's political and general news stories. What does that mean? I think it means "Al Michaels for President", by cracky (though honestly I don't know if Al Michaels is still working or, for that matter, still alive).

(Just to close this out, the worst comments by far are found following entertainment stories, especially ones featuring the latest celebrity who is circling the drain and about to take the plunge. Reading more than one or two of them in a row makes me feel like there's someone punching holes in the sheet metal of my soul with a rotary hammer.)

Apocalypto

I didn't sleep well last night. I seem to be developing problems with my back, which seems singularly unfair since I've lost 70 pounds. Maybe my disks and whatnot are decompressing and changing shape; maybe I'm just a whiner.

The point is that I couldn't sleep, and I ended up sitting up and watching Mel Gibson's movie Apocalypto, which is about, generally speaking, the waning days of the Maya civilization in what I presume to be the Yucatan region of Mexico. I went into this movie with certain misgivings, most of them revolving around the figure of Mel Gibson himself and his anti-Semitic rants. More of those I don't need, and support of those who make them I don't give. But it's hard to see the hand of Mel Gibson behind the movie. Impossible, maybe, since it strikes such an alien tone.

Alien. That's a good word for it. The bulk of the story revolves around the lives and times of a Maya hunter-gatherer village in the jungle. The dialog is entirely in Mayan, and the actors all appear to be Mayan. I'm no expert on the Maya by any means, but the combination of Mayan language, unmistakable Mayan facial features, and fairly realistic Neolithic living conditions produced a feeling of strong authenticity in me. I entirely bought the premise that these people were Maya in the 16th Century living the way Maya actually did.

Presently the village is overrun by slave-hunters, who are realistically brutal. They drag the surviving men and women off to an unnamed Maya city (actually, the movie doesn't even claim that it's a Maya city; it's just a "stone-built place"). The women are sold into slavery and the men are dragged up to the top of a pyramid and sacrificed. It's a literal assembly line of death - human raw material going up the ramp at the back; blood and severed heads going down the steps in front. I don't know if Gibson was accurately depicting what historians believe the mood in Maya cities to have been or if he was just winging it, but his interpretation seemed incredibly real and frightening to me. It's as though they know their civilization is failing and they sacrifice more and more people and slowly work themselves into a state of desperate terrified blood-glutted brutality.

The story turns more personal again once the hero escapes from the madhouse of the Mayan city. He's pursued by about eight Mayans, and in the end he prevails, but it isn't easy. But his victory is hollow, because a new threat appears on the coast, an enemy that in the end he will not prevail over.

The mood of the movie is dark and rather depressing. It's very bloody and violent, but what makes it depressing isn't the pumping blood and screaming but the sense of impending doom that follows everyone like their own personal storm system. And you don't need to have much of a grasp of Meso-American history to know that in the long run the hero is totally screwed.

It isn't a date movie. It isn't a family movie. It isn't even a fun movie. But it is a singular viewing experience, an immersion in a convincing Maya world with all that that implies. It may be a while before I watch it again, but I'm glad I watched it. It reminds me a little of Schindler's List in that it's also a masterpiece of film-making, but it's also very hard to watch.

On the one hand it's an amazing technical achievement - the level of detail in the scenes in the Mayan city, for example, commands respect. And yet it's also a brilliant achievement by the actors. Though they're speaking Mayan, they act and emote in a very real and human way, all of them. Jaguar Paw and Flint Sky were particularly good, but the real stolen scene in the movie occurs when a seven-year-old Mayan girl curses the slave-hunters. Now that was creepy, but what's perhaps even more creepy is the fact that the seven-year-old girl came from a nearby village and had never acted before... She's going to appear in my nightmares, I'm sure.

Anyway. An excellent movie, but not one I'll watch often, and not a movie for the squeamish.

Super Tuesday

I don't know who's going to come out of Super Tuesday with the lead. Well, McCain seems like a done deal for the Republicans, but I don't know which Democrat will come out ahead. I know who I hope will come out ahead - Barack Obama, because I frankly think Hillary can't win the general election even against the Goofy Talk Express. But will Barack actually win? Beats me, and at this point, I don't even really care. I'm so fatigued with the whole business I've decided to to a proper bang-up job of learning about the First Punic War instead of listening to pundits. At this moment, I'll accept any change as being for the better, no matter who it involves.

The Romans, now those were people who knew how to take politics seriously. You only have to take that delenda est stuff to heart once before people start giving you a very wide berth indeed. (Yes, I know the delenda est stuff was from the Third Punic War, but throw me a bone here.)

Health Update

I haven't talked about my health much lately, and I'm not going to start. But I did decide to gloss over the high points, not so much because it's Big News but because it bugs me to not add something to my blog just about every day.

Mainly, it's this. I keep losing weight. Not rapidly, but steadily. I gained about pounds over Christmas and had to lose them before they took up permanent residence, and I'm glad to say I've managed to expunge them and then some. I'm going to cross a major weight threshold in a few weeks and I'm very excited about it. I'm also very excited by the fact that I no longer recognize myself on closed-circuit TVs.

Now if I could just get excited about apples. Partially to save money, partially to save packing time in the morning, and mostly to save calories, I've taken to having an apple and two pieces of string cheese for lunch. It leaves me pretty famished in the afternoon because it's just not enough to please my vast doughy midsection, but every time I get well and truly sick of apples and cheese, I remember the weight threshold I'm about to cross and I gain fresh motivation.

Oh, I might as well say it. I'm about to drop below 300 pounds for the first time in a long, long time. I shouldn't even be THIS heavy, but I'm doing what I can. You try losing 70 pounds and quitting smoking at the same time and tell me how easy it is!

Kinetic Energy

One last rail gun related item. Here's a photograph of a cast aluminum (aluminium to our friends in the UK) that was struck by a seven-gram Lexan projectile moving at 23,000 feet per second. Note that the hole in the metal block is over four inches deep, and the block has been visibly deformed by the impact. Note that 23,000 feet per second is about 15,700 miles per hour, or 4.3 miles per second. Obviously this test had to be performed in a vacuum to avoid turning the Lexan projectile into a puff of incandescent gas. An example of the disk-shaped projectile is visible mounted in a wire in the hole.

Geography

I've always liked geography. When I was a kid I wanted to make a profession out of it before I realized there was no profession as such. But here's an on-line geography quiz that I found rather amusing.

http://www.lizardpoint.com/fun/geoquiz/index.html

Doing Some Math

I'm not necessarily very good at math, but sometimes I get drawn into strange mathematical vacations at work. I remember once years ago I was trying to calculate roughly how many beans it would take to construct an actual hill of beans. The answer depended strongly on the angle of repose of said beans, and since I had no way of determining their angle of repose by empirical means, I concluded that my calculations were as unscientific as string theory. Don't like the answer you got? Well, just perturb some variables and try it again!

My boss came by and caught me in the middle of this furious pinto-bean math-fest and asked me what I was doing. I replied (and the trick, really, is to reply with gusto): "I'm doing some math, Jefe!" He assumed I was doing important math and proceeded to stammer "Oh, well, in that case, um, carry on, I'll leave you alone..."

So I did some math today about the Navy rail run described below. And wouldn't you know, I believe I found something wrong with the article. I happen to know, courtesy of http://www.fas.org/, that a 5-inch/54 fires a 32 kilogram projectile at 808 meters per second. By my math, using the infamous ke = 1/2 mv2 bruiser, I come up with a bit over 10 MJ. In fact, reverse-calculating the muzzle velocity based on a 10 MJ of energy and a 32 kilogram projectile yields a muzzle velocity of 790 meters per second - close to 808, but a hair below. So I'm not sure why the article insists that these guns produce 9 MJ when a bit of elementary physics suggests that they produce over 10 MJ.

Now, let's assume that our 10 MJ rail gun is 100% efficient. That is, it produces no heat, has no friction and no electrical resistance. I happen to know that there are 3,600 Joule in a kilowatt-hour of electricity, so a 10 MJ gun would consume 2.8 kilowatt-hours of electricity per shot (Editor's Note: there are in fact 3600 Joules in a watt-hour of electricity. A kilowatt-hour is 3.6 million Joules. The math is right; I simply cited the wrong number.) Electricity was going for about ten cents per kilowatt-hour in 2001, so per shot, the gun would cost 28 cents. That's pretty economical, considering you can't even get a Diet Coke for 28 cents.

However, we know the gun can't be perfectly efficient, if only because the rails aren't superconductors. Let's say it's 10% efficient, once you add up all the various sources of inefficiency. That means it uses 28 kilowatt-hours of electricity per shot, at a cost of $2.80. That's still pretty reasonable - I mean, I'd pay $2.80 to pull the trigger on a ten million Joule rail gun! Darn tootin!

But that 28 kilowatt-hour number is starting to get sizeable. That's a lot of power.

Let's go back to our 100% efficient rail gun for a minute and assume that we want to fire it every ten seconds. That is, every ten seconds we have to cram 2.8 kilowatt-hours of power down its throat. Conversion charts seem to tell me that that's roughly the equivalent of 135 horsepower. Double that because no generator is 100% efficient and it would seem to require the services of a 270-horsepower generator to keep a 100% efficient 10 MJ rail gun in power if it was going to fire six shots a minute.

But multiply by ten because the rail gun is really only 10% efficient, and suddenly you need a 2700-horsepower generator to run thing. That's getting into a size and weight bracket rarely seen in home generators. It's not, to put it mildly, the sort of thing you're going to be able to power up with your Homelite or Honda generator. In fact, I'm not sure but I think we're talking about engines the size of those found in very large mining trucks like the Caterpillar 797.

Well, maybe a rail gun isn't such a hot idea after all. At least not until room-temperature superconductivity becomes real.

And thus, I stop doing some math.