Past My Time

I don't think I care for the 21st Century very much. I expected it to be better, frankly, and the sense of disappointment I feel over the lunkheaded stupidity of my own species wears me down and makes me feel old and tired. I believed the movie 2001 when it came out. I believed that we'd have moonbases and the like, but more than that, leaving the science-fiction trinkets behind, I believed that we would have triumphed over ignorance, parochialism, racism and all those other wonderful -isms (the Communists, quick to diagnose but crappy clinicians to the bitter end, claimed that Communism would in the end eradicate -isms. I always wondered if they included Communism in that calculation).

I don't really miss the flying cars that we were promised, because it doesn't take much thought to realize that flying cars would be a disaster. If aggressive impatient morons make driving on surface streets into a game of chance, imagine what flying around them would be like. I don't really miss the spaceships and moonbases either. But the realization that people are getting stupider and meaner makes me ill. You'd think that by now people would decide to vote for (or against, for that matter) Barack Obama without regard to skin color. But how many times have I heard supposedly educated people where I work announce that they couldn't vote for him because he's a n-----? One gawks at these morons as though grasping for a punchline, but it isn't there. They actually believe that, and what's more, they feel comfortable enough with it to actually say it.

This isn't the 21st Century as it should have been. Something went terribly wrong somewhere along the line. Religious fundamentalists determine the science curricula of public schools. Racists and bigots threaten to determine the outcomes of elections. For most of us, the convenience of opinion has become more powerful than the weight of fact. What is true is not nearly as important as what we deem to be true, and we can selectively redefine anything on a whim. The mere fact that we sit around arguing about whether "the surge" worked or not is proof that we don't understand the merest outline of the problems in Iraq, and is proof that we don't care either.

One of my acquaintances is a prime right-wing blowhard, the sort who imagines that he has the solution to every problem around the world, and somehow his solutions always seem to involve violence. He was holding forth on how to solve the religious problems in Iraq, and I simply had to ask him if he knew the difference between Sunni and Shia. "Sure," this mental giant said. "They wear different-colored towels." It is a testament to my self-control that I didn't follow through on my first instinct, which was slap him sideways.

But what is the alternative? To wish for a quieter and simpler time? Tempting, except I find that I am loathe to give up electricity, running water, and satellite TV. So maybe the trick is to find a quieter and simpler geographical part of the 21st Century, to find and live in a part of the world that hasn't yet been despoiled by stupidity.

Maybe things will be less unwholesome after the election, because elections often act to stir up slimy sediments that normally lie undisturbed on the bottom of the septic tank. But I don't know. Once you start to take pride in your stupidity, all bets are off.

Hellbound Machinery

Years ago I had a dream wherein I was driving a Volkswagen Bug toward Phoenix. It was night, and I became aware that the VW engine was overheating when I could see its orange glow on the guard rails and signs alongside the highway. For a while the dream revolved around how to shut off this obviously demon-possessed engine - no engine, VW or otherwise, can possibly glow white-hot and still run. And I couldn't shut it off by any conventional means, or even unconventional means (I remember pouring handfuls of pinto beans, of all things, into the tops of the carburetors).

But it didn't matter because right around then, Phoenix was nuked by principalities unknown and suddenly the overheating demon-possessed engine paled to nothing compared to the mushroom cloud boiling up over the hills to the south.

Now, brace yourself for the wrenching segue. I have been, for the last week or so, doing a bit of reading about pre-dreadnought battleships and the wars they were involved in, chiefly the Russo-Japanese War and the Spanish-American War (of You may put the steaks on the fire at any time, Gridley fame). Say, 1890 to roughly 1910, though clunky old pre-dreadnoughts remained in some inventories well into the 1940s.

The more I learn about these ships, the more I am utterly convinced that they were designed in Hell and manufactured in Hell's suburbs. There's the smoke factor, for one thing. They don't just put out a little smoke. They don't puff a bit like the Hogwarts Express. These things puke out thick opaque churning gouts of smoke that boil and churn and seem almost to be alive and malevolent. And that's just to get up to speeds of nine or ten knots! And the innards! What must that be like, four triple-expansion steam engines clattering and thumping away, tierods flying, connecting rods whooshing, governors and links and valves clattering, things spinning, steam jetting out of leaks, the whole place half-lost in a fog of steam and smoke and coal dust. And somewhere in that desolation toil men half-broken by toil and half-killed by coal dust inhalation...

I once saw a picture of a Russian pre-dreadnought battleship. It's at sea and it's making headway because it's turned up a bit of a bow wave, but not much of one. And from the funnels pour these hellish plumes of smoke, the kind of smoke that seems to blot out every finer human impulse, including probably the impulse to cook and eat bacon. "Sorry, no bacon for me, I've got pre-dreadnought battleship smoke in my soul and nothing pleases me." Anyway, barely visible in the open bridge ahead of these demonic smokestacks stands a single man in a white uniform, clutching the railing as though in terror of where this Mephistopholean nightmare is taking him. Certainly not to port, unless there are ports on the River Styx.

They're appalling. Maybe the most appalling things I've ever seen.

And somewhere therein, I'm quite sure, a novel resides.

No Country For Old Men

My wife hated the movie No Country For Old Men. I don't think I'm overstating her reaction; I think honest unalloyed hate was pretty much her reaction to it. She thought it was violent, gratuitious, and essentially meaningless.

Maybe so, but I thought it was excellent. Maybe not as good as its hype, but still very, very good. I could have watched Tommy Lee Jones for hours, playing that character in a way that didn't turn him into a gimping, mouth-foaming stereotype. And the guy who played Anton Chigurgh (sp?) was brilliant in his soft-spoken, almost dainty, and deeply disturbing way. Anton is a nightmare and no mistake, but a nightmare I enjoyed watching. I liked the way he was amused by people always saying "You don't have to do this," because to him, he did always have to do that.

It's a movie that starts out full of dead stuff, and additional bodies pile up like cordwood as Anton makes his bloody way through Texas (though Anton is far from the only evil, he is the primary evil). Meantime Tommy Lee Jones drives around, giving voice to the ineffable and never quite managing to protect anyone at all. And that scene with Tommy Lee Jones and Maurice (you know who I mean) was so richly layered I feel that I want to watch it five or six times to fully grok what they were talking about. There's that line from Maurice, something about how sometimes a man can only hope to get a tourniquet on "it", whatever it is, but we believe it to be life in general.

Striking. Very striking. But I know better than to see if my wife wants to watch it!

Who??

There's an ad for a comedy TV show, the "Supreme Court of Comedy" I believe it's called, where it appears that famous comedians take the role of judge, prosecutor and defense counsel in a People's Court sort of deal, only without Judge Wapner.

The commercial kills me because it features Jon Lovitz raising himself up to his full height and demanding in an imperious tone "Who is crapping their pants now?" Who indeed.

On A Lighter Note, Mikasa!

I don't suppose many people have heard of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, and I don't suppose that many who do really care very much. Just another filthy, muddy squabble over incomprehensible political objectives that got a few hundred thousand young men killed while the men really responsible for the war sat on their butts in Moscow and Tokyo and wrote moving speeches.

But the war did have a bit of drama. The Japanese managed to neutralize the Russian fleet in the Pacific early on, and the only chance for Russian success in the war lay in having their Baltic Sea Fleet steam all the way around the world, eighteen thousand miles, defeat the Japanese Combined Fleet, and then drive away the Japanese merchant ships so the Japanese troops in Manchuria and Korea would be cut off.

This is a bold decision, especially when your fleet consists of slow and relatively unseaworthy battleships known collectively as pre-dreadnoughts. That means all sorts of nautical goofiness, like reciprocating machinery, mixed-caliber main armament, strange notions on armor thickness, and lots of men stained pitch-black from shoveling coal.

The Russians were doomed. They had to steam 18,000 miles to get to the battle site, and without the benefit of friendly ports along the way (they mostly replenished coal supplies by transferring coal from freighters). By the time the Russian fleet got there, their hulls were so fouled with marine growth they could barely manage a speed of nine knots, their ships were in serious need of maintenance, and crew morale had fallen to about as low as it can get before officers start being thrown overboard. Meantime the Japanese Combined Fleet rested in its anchorage at Pusan, the men rested and fit, the ships clean and well-maintained, and the fleet extensively exercised in long-range gunnery.

In the resulting battle, the Japanese lost three torpedo boats, while the Russians lost pretty much the whole schmeer. Three ships managed to get through the Japanese and reach port at Vladivostok, and a few others managed to retreat to Manila. The rest went to the bottom or surrendered to the Japanese, whose gunfire on that day was accurate and devastating.

Flagship of the fleet under Admiral Heihachiro Togo was the battleship Mikasa. It survived the battle but went on to a rough life afterwards, suffering a magazine explosion and a serious grounding, and the Japanese could have been pardoned for just scrapping the goddamned thing once and for all. But they finally gave it a thorough restoration in the 1960s and remains today the only fully restored example of a pre-dreadnought battleship in existence.

But all of this is really prelude to a bad joke that keeps circulating in my head. Every time I read about the Battle of Tsushima Straits and see the battleship Mikasa mentioned, I read it as Mikasa Sukasa.

Update of Sorts

I had to quit smoking on July Fourth, 2007 because I had a heart attack. There's a commercial for Lipitor, I think, where the guy says "I had a heart attack at 57! That's a wake-up call!" Yeah, tell me about it, I had one at 48.

Anyway, as a result of this medical problem, I had to stop smoking, among other things. Stopping smoking isn't easy, even when you have the horror of the heart attack and bypass surgery still fresh in your mind (I can remember what it felt like to have the breathing tube pulled out at though it happened yesterday).

Certain activities become very closely linked with smoking, and people who are trying to quit smoking are often advised to quit or restrict those activities. For my dad, it was the quiet cup of coffee after dinner - the cuppa jo was so naturally teamed with a cigarette that he had to get up from the table and go occupy himself. Other people report that going to bars fills them with a deep urge to smoke.

For me, two activities became deeply linked with smoking, and though I didn't want to give either one of them up, I've almost been forced to. The first is model-building. I've been building models since I was about seven years old, and I've always enjoyed it. At least until I stopped smoking. Now when I sit and work on a model, I don't think about anything but how bad I want a cigarette. It's very uncomfortable and so unpleasant that it's rare for me to work on a model for more than an hour or two before I just have to stop and do something else.

I keep hoping that at some point model-building and cigarette-smoking will disentangle themselves in my mind and I'll be able to regain the enjoyment of working on a model without having to sweat out a nonstop nicotine fit. But so far, no joy. And there my model-building stuff sits, getting dustier and more disordered. I've considered just packing up all my stuff and clearing room in the garage; I'm not using it and we could park the truck in that spot.

The other thing I had to give up was writing. Well, I'll never be able to give up writing. I suspect that when I depart this mortal coil (hopefully a very long time from now) I'll still be taking notes so in the unlikely event that the afterlife has a network connection I'll be able to blog about dying. But I can't write like I used to, where I could batten down the hatches and write in a serious way for six or eight or more hours at a stretch. It's the same problem. The act of writing seems to call naturally for cigarettes, and the stress of having to fight down the cigarette urge finally outweighs the enjoyment of writing and I have to stop.

Nobody ever told me that quitting smoking would cripple my enjoyment of my hobbies. How cruel. What price we pay for health, this sense of slow disappointed depression that sets in every time I look at my dusty, unusued workbench, or have an idea for a novel that I know I won't finish because I just can't write in that way any more.

Is it getting any better? Maybe a little, but it still sucks.

I've been collecting parts, drawings, reference materials and other oddments for what I've come to understand as "The Model Of My Life" (in capital letters, you understand). A fully detailed 1/96th scale Saturn V with tower, based on the old Revell kit and a paper model of the LET that I bought on eBay one weekend. When I first quit smoking the thought of this project was literally repellent - I knew it would take probably a year of detailed and careful work to build this model, and the thought of attempting that without cigarettes literally made me break out in a sweat. But now, I can at least contemplate portions of the model. The whole thing is still too big, too complex, too much work, too sweaty; but at least I can think about building the Command and Service Modules, or the escape tower. Portions of the model are slowly starting to come back within reach, though the whole project remains undoable. So it's better, but still not good.

Whatever. I'm sure my chronic complaining doesn't make very good copy anyway.

B-12

No, it's not a bomber, it's a vitamin.

For about the last month I've been suffering from really severe leg cramps at night, the kind that make you get up in the middle of the night and walk around the bedroom, the kind that leave your legs acutely sore the next day, the kind that make you emit all sorts of spectacularly blue language when they start up, usually within thirty minutes of lying down, and lasting until it's time to get up in the morning.

A friend of my wife's suggested tonic water, which her husband drinks to control leg discomfort. So every night at bedtime I'd choke down a Schweppervescent bottle of said tonic water, spluttering at the quinine and throwing my metaphorical hands up into the air at my sad fate. The tonic water seemed to lessen my restless legs syndrome, but did nothing for the cramps. About the only thing it did for me was give me rich, resonant, basso profundo burps of magnificent volume - that tonic water is gassy stuff.

Then during a slow day at work I Googled "leg cramps" and found that the Mayo Clinic, of all things, reported that vitamin B-12 was one of only two substances proven to be of any value in leg cramps (the other one sounded suspiciously like rocket fuel formulations from the early 1960s, the days when they still mixed up stuff like Hydyne and Aerozine-50 and people actually knew what UDHM stood for). [Editor's Note: That would be UDMH, not UDHM, and in case you'e wondering, it is unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine.]

So I tried it. The first night my leg cramps were greatly reduced in duration and severity. The next night they were gone. Not better, gone. And they remain gone. Two B-12 tablets at bedtime and that, me buckos, is the length of its forty cubits. I'm usually a little suspicious of miracle cures, especially those offered up by supplements or herbal products. But this one is as good as gold.

Evil Anti-Debate

I'm ignoring the debate. I've ignored all of them so far, and so mark this one down as duly ignored. Not even ignored - avoided like the plague.

I think it's really the obviously wrong right-wing hate emails that soured me on debates. How many times can you read something like "Barack Obama is composed of anti-matter!" or "Barack Obama has no shadow!" or "Barack Obama has a prehensile forked penis!" before the whole political process turns into a kind of vomit-evoking sideshow? I've had to put up with years of right wing bullshit and now, when Barack wins, I'm going to throw modesty and moderation to the four wings and gloat. That's right - you guys trashed the surplus, trashed the economy, started a war you couldn't win, couldn't find Osama, made a mockery of due process, made a mockery of the principle of checks and balances, deregulated things to the point that our national flag might as well be a Jolly Roger, and you expect me to be restrained? Negatory. But the right's rich tradition of scapegoating and complaining will hold them in good stead, I'm sure; soon they'll be blaming liberal elites, Hollywood, George Soros, fluoridated water, newspapers, the Internets, Mexicans, public education, books, education, truth-in-lending statements, gays, Steven Spielberg, Bill Clinton, the Unitarians, the Muslims, the Hindus, the Zoroastrians, the Buddhists, the Gnostics, the Canadiens, Manchester United, literacy, and pocket calculators for the mess they've made.

Unfortunately, I'm too tired and ill to do much about anything. Not that I'd be able to do anything even if I wasn't tired and ill, but in this state, I don't have a chance.

Just In Case

Just in case anyone is wondering, I really hate working weekends. They're giving me Monday and Tuesday off in return for working Saturday and Sunday, but somehow it's just not the same. My body was looking forward to sleeping in this morning and it isn't the least bit impressed with this "you can sleep in Monday" business. Sometimes my body is a giant infant with balled-up fists and tear-spurting eyes that screams "Now!" over and over again. The infant, not the eyes. I've lost my ability to write a simple sentence. I blame having to work Saturday!

Enhancement!

There's an informercial that comes on late-night television for a "male enhancement". The cutting edge of the commercial is a fairly slinky woman interviewing a suspiciously well-sorted population of couples, and the man always reports that "it got bigger". We all know what "it" is - you know, der Frankenheimer, what Kurt Vonnegut once called the "Old Avenger". The info-people on TV refer to it as "that special male body part", which confuses me because a great many of my male body parts are pretty special to me. Where would I be without my basal ganglia, for example?

But what if the makers of the male enhancement couldn't guarantee which body part would be enhanced? Suppose the question wasn't "Did it [der Frankenheimer] get bigger" but "What got bigger"?

The slinky woman sidles up to a couple and asks die Frage, and the guy says "Oh yeah, my Isles of Langerhans are freaking HUGE! They could beat up Pee Wee Herman all by themselves. The size of freaking raisins, look at those things." Or, "My Ampulla of Vater is toyt! Toyt like a toyger! I can ze valnuts crack mit it!" Or, "My pyloric valve can pass a Volkswagen Bug, though it's more comfortable if it doesn't have the rooftop luggage rack." Or, (one for the road) "That aint a duodenum, son, that's a veritable python. Stand back, it strikes on occasion."

All of this has currency for me because I have an unexplained bulge in my neck that could, for all I know, be the result of a male enhancement (notwithistanding the fact that I haven't actually taken any male enhancements). I noticed it about two months ago when I was shaving, a decided muscular-feeling bulge on the right side of my neck, sort of like Ahnold-Neck only on just one side, and not flared all the way down to the shoulder. But when prodded, the bulge feels like hard, taut muscle, so one can't help but wonder if I didn't somehow accidentally ingest a male enhancement that through some terrible miscarriage of medical justice went on to give my neck a powerful, throbbing erection. It would figger, wunnit?

I'm about 95% sure it's just a pulled muscle. My neck enjoys being involved in activities like digging ditches and moving bales of hay. Even though the neck muscles seem univnolved with such upper-body tasks, I occasionally pull muscles in my neck. Once I was digging a hole to bury a largish dead steer and pulled a muscle in my neck so severely I could only look out the left window of my car for weeks. So I figure this Mystery Swelling is just a bulked-up pulled muscle. It might not be, and I really should have the doctor look at it, but that's my theory.

And in case you're wondering, it got bigger.

The Way Home

On the way home I noticed an awful lot of motorcycles coming the other way. I believe a common practice for bikers in Phoenix is to ride up to Prescott for the day, and I imagine the dark thunderhead of noise that this produces over Prescott all day really pleases the locals.

I tried to imagine what a conversation between some of these people would be like.

"Don't you love the serentity and peace of the open road?"
"What?"
"I said, Don't you love the serenity and peace of the open road?"
"Man, I can't hear you, my tympanic membranes are toast."
"What?"
"I said, Man, I can't hear you, my tympanic membranes are toast."
"Man, I can't hear you, my tympanic membranes are toast."
"What?"
"I said..."

Count me in.

Feel Awful

I feel awful tonight. I'm trying to find a way to blame it on Sam's Club, but I don't think that would be fair. I should know better than to accidentally turn down the candy aisle. I should know better than to put myself in a position where I'm surrounded by huge boxes of Skittles and Mars Bars and Snicki and M&Ms. I escaped the candy aisle without buying anything, but there is so much sugar compressed into such a small area on that aisle my blood sugar goes completely haywire just from the sugar radiation.

I watched 28 Weeks Later last night. I made the interesting discovery that the movie is really no worse, and maybe even better, with the sound turned off. It's plenty gory, with each gunshot producing a nearly Plinian eruption of blood, which I don't actually think is realistic, but hey, if I know so much about gunshots, how about I make my own movie, huh? It would be fun. I bet I could write a halfway decent zombie epic, but I also bet that I'd have very little chance of getting Mila Jovovich to star in it. She's the only reason I watched (and continue to watch) the Resident Evil movies, which paranthetically feel an awful lot like 28 Weeks Later. How juicily circular. And heck, I had a part as a Russian lieutenant in someone's grad school movie project; I'm practically a Hollywood insider.

But I have to say, the bars for zombie and vampire movies seem awfully high. Even psychopath movies; I doubt I could create anything half as creepy as Wolf Creek. So maybe I need to pioneer a whole new genre of horror fiction and movies. Perhaps something about a group of people who are people by night and platypuses by day. By day they're drawn to bodies of water where they search restlessly for small fish, crustaceans and shellfish. By night they drink a lot of booze, wear scanty swimsuits, and have lots of sex, just like the opening scenes of Turista and The Ruin. And the horror angle is that they don't know that they turn into platypuses, so they blame the fish skeletons littering the floors of their apartments on their neighbors.

Ya think??

Brain Wave

I had a brain wave today. I like to picture this as the two hemispheres of my brain alternately standing up and sitting down, and perhaps throwing their hands in the air if the spirit really moves them.

I went to the bookstore, and as I was haunting the New History section looking for something salacious and juicy about the Julio-Claudian dynasty, I happened to see one of those The Politically Incorrect History of whatever books. They aren't really history. They're usually little more than pro-American, pro-evangelical propaganda wrapped up in a tortilla, and they usually throw in names like Thucydides and Polybius to try to convince us that the book is real history and not just apologia or, even more fun, polemic disguised as scholarship. My favorite cover blurb was the breathless announcement that contrary to all the liberal crap you were taught in school, Jesus was the most important man in western history. And I have to ask, are there actually historians who don't believe that? Jeez, if that's the pinnacle of this book's political incorrectness, we're in for a snore-fest. The question isn't whether Jesus was the most important man who ever lived. The question is whether he was the Son of God, a mortal prophet of God, or just some guy shucking a good story. But the objective facts of his life and the way he changed the world are beyond that sort of questioning; it's the theological ramifications of things that remain debatable.

I flipped through the book and found that it contained sidebars. There's a reason most real history books don't contain sidebars, and that's because arguments designed to make sense of historical events or movements are really hard to boil down to sidebars. Sidebars are for readers who say "Spare me the windy argument and the tedious detail; just hit me with the editorial commentary disguised as a conclusion, please; American Idol is coming on in an hour and I just don't have time for this."

So I read one of these, which purported to explain how Darwin led directly to Hitler. It was really a sad attempt to discredit natural selection and by extension evolution, but the way it read, it seemed to say that Darwin was a closet eugenics fascist who was the actual ideological forefather of all that Immutable Points gibberish the Nazis came up with (though I have to say, I don't remember "Natural Selection" being one of the 25 Immutable Points). It was just an attempt to get Darwin and Hitler to stick together in the minds of uninformed people.

Now, let me sidestep for a moment. I like drinking games. You can draw from that statement whatever conclusion you like, but I enjoy drinking games. I've been in some doozies too, including one that resulted in me wearing a red satin bra on my head for a while.

But it struck me (hence the brain-wave) that this sidebar linking Darwin and Hitler was really an excellent drinking game. Name two historical personages, and then invent a Bullshit Analysis linking them. If your Bullshit Analysis seems convincing, everyone else drinks. If your Bullshit Analysis won't carry water, you take a drink.

So you start out saying "Natural selection leads to eugenics, and THAT is why Darwin presaged Hitler." And all the rational people say "No, your Bullshit Analysis is complete bullshit; let's see you down that tumbler of Popov."

So someone else says "Because they both look horrible in shimmering blue sequined gowns, THAT is why Ethel Merman led to Wesley Snipes." And the crowd thinks about it and says "Yes, there is potential truth in your Bullshit Analysis, so we're going to down our drinks."

Ix-nay on the Ebate-day

I didn't watch the debate. I didn't watch either debate, and it's extremely unlikely I'll watch any future debates, mostly because they aren't debates at all. I already know who I'm voting for, so why subject myself to smug, irritating, stage-managed propaganda? I believe in the strength of American values... Oh, spare me the smooch; just tell me what your stand on public policy is.

Besides, for the time being, I'm going to be a one-issue candidate, and that issue is what do you propose to do about our dependence on foreign oil? Like T. Boone Pickens, I believe there is no larger question in America. It is an issue that distorts the value of the dollar, drains the economy, involves us in foreign wars, exposes us to foreign manipulation, and generally irritates me. I wasn't old enough to mold public policy during the Arab oil embargo in the mid-1970s. I was barely old enough to mold ice-cube-tray Kool-Aid popsicles. But I remember the embargo, and I'm aware of the fact that not only did we not learn anything from that embargo, but the situation is actually much worse than it was then. We are a lot closer to the edge now.

And it's not, in my opinion, a matter of drilling. Drill today, drill tomorruh, drill forevuh, you all sound like George Wallace, only you're talking about a different failed policy. The question isn't finding more oil. It seems to me that replacing oil is the issue. With what? With everything. Wind power, solar power, natural gas, Canadian tar sands, nuclear power plants, whatever it takes to eliminate our dependence on imported oil. I'd rather have to figure out how to safely deal with a small mountain of nuclear waste than constantly bankroll certain regimes who are, for all their pretensions of friendship, no fans of the United States.

I believe that if we can achieve energy independence, a great many problems that today seem utterly intractable will suddenly become more solvable simply because we will have more money and greater freedom of action. And I believe that if we cannot achieve energy independence, we're screwed.*

T. Boone for President? That's taking it a little too far. But I do think we need to listen to him.

Meantime, what about the bailout? I have to admit that I am deeply, deeply suspicious of this thing. I understand the arguments that the credit markets are freezing up and without easy credit, the economy itself will freeze up. But I can't get over the feeling that the bailout is somehow absolving business decision-makers of culpability for driving their companies into failure. I can't get over the feeling that the bailout is being engineered by and driven by CEOs and stockholders who don't give a wet slap for anyone not in their immensely high tax bracket. I can't get over the feeling that it's a bailout of incompetent and greedy CEOs and board members and not the economy in general.

It may be a case of holding my nose and giving it my approval despite the way it makes my stomach roil and heave.

* I find it amusing that the vehicles most likely to be covered with patriotic stickers and slogans are also the vehicles that get the worst fuel mileage and make the Saudi royal family and Hugo Chavez smile the most. Nice work, guys.

400

This is my 400th post. I'm susceptible to nice round numbers like that - if I'd kept track of the numbers, I probably would have celebrated my 400th hot dog or 400th headache or 400th bottle of Newcastle too.

A lot has changed since the days I first started writing blog entries. Unemployment, heart attack, open-heart surgery, quitting smoking, depression, physical rehab, bizarre disturbances in my temperature regulation and sleep schedule, slow recovery; but as I reread my old posts, I sense that the main thing hasn't changed. I'm the same dumbass I was way back then, and I think that's good.

Filler

This post is mostly just filler. I'm coming up on my 400th post and since I am by nature impatient to achieve milestones of that sort, I'm burning this post (#399) with a cheesy discussion of nothing at all so I can move on to 400.

So what's new? My tractor has a flat tire, which is a bummer in that I don't have a jack that will allow me to safely remove the tire for repair. A few years ago some company took over the Saguaro Janes building here in bustling downtown Wittmann and set up a tool sale. I can't remember if this was before Harbor Freight had opened its tool store or not, but even if it was after, these guys were a mile and a half away, and Harbor Freight was something like forty.

So I bought a bunch of stuff. As I was waiting in line to collect my stuff at the tractor-trailer that served as the warehouse, I saw that they were closing out their farm jacks for twenty bucks a pop. All I needed to do was go back inside and pay the woman $20 and get a slip, but I decided that that was too much trouble.

Now here I am, some years on, wishing I'd just gone inside and gotten the slip, because now I need the dang jack.

I may also need to do some welding on me tractor - I think I either produced a new crack, or aggravated an existing crack, in the mount for the three-point top link, this from trying to uproot a poorly-placed desert broom bush by attacking it in reverse. That bush is one tough peckerwood - no taller than my waist, but it brought my tractor to a screeching halt and when I tried to raise the scraper to get some hydraulic boost on the matter, I proceeded to hoist the front tires off the ground.

But at least I've already got the welder.

McHugo's Navy

One of the predictable outcomes of the mess in Georgia is that the Russians, peeved by what they saw as US involvement in their bowl of chili, would proceed to mess with our bowl of chili. They decided that Hugo Chavez was the right man for the job, being easily impressed by small numbers of airplanes and possessed of enough oil money to make for a reasonable arms buyer.

God knows Hugo loves it. This latest news must have made him utterly speechless with self-important joy, the news that the Russians were sending a flotilla of four warships on a "goodwill cruise" that would just by happenstance include a visit to Venezuela. One imagines Hugo putting on his skipper's hat and begging the Russians to let him take the helm of the Peter the Great.

I detect a minor ripple of consternation out there in Fear-Land. Back in the 1970s someone (I think it was William F. Buckley) started the "Pearl Harbor Association for Keeping Our Eyes on the Soviet Fleet." The fear factor isn't as high today, but this Russian flotilla is causing altogether too much underwear-bunching, in my opinion.

Only two of the ships have been named in news reports. One is the Peter the Great, a hulking nuclear-powered Kirov-class battlecruiser. Another is the Admiral Chabanenko, one of the Udaloy class of anti-submarine ships. The other two are not named, which suggests that they are fairly minor in nature. I like to think they're a couple of old, worn-out ships from that bizarre K-named jungle of Soviet warships from the 1960s and 1970s - Kynda, Kresta, Krivak, Kara, Kanin, Kashin... But since they aren't named, I don't know.

The Udaloy ASW destroyer is pretty fair as ASW destroyers go, but it's not the sort of thing that's liable to upset the balance of power in the Western Hemisphere. It's probably a little better than a basic Spruance, but not in the league as any of the Arleigh Burkes. Its main defects on a worldwide cruise of that sort would probably be relatively short range and no particular area AAW or ASuW capability.

The Kirov doesn't suffer from those weaknesses. By any standard, the Kirovs are powerful surface combatants with an excellent mix of long-range anti-aircraft, anti-submarine and anti-ship missiles. They're huge by modern standards, the size of smallish battleships, and unlike the majority of Soviet warships that were suited only for the "Battle of the First Salvo", they possess a degree of durability and staying power that no other Russian warship can touch. Let's put it this way: Peter the Great could single-handedly defeat the combined navies of all of South America, and probably in a single afternoon, and without having to reload.

This isn't hyperbole. The ship is huge for a modern warship - 25,000 tons - and large size (really, large displacement) means that the ship can carry mutiple weapons systems that provide overlapping capability. The ship is extremely well-armed, to say the least - I won't recite the numbers because they're meaningless to most people, but suffice it to say that the Peter the Great can attack aircraft, surface ships and submarines alike at long range.

So why doesn't it bother me more than it does? All of a sudden there's this heavily-armed Russian behemoth cruising around in our hemisphere, and it doesn't bother me?? No, not a bit. And I'll tell you why (you were wondering if I would, weren't you?). Because, like every other surface warship built since about 1920, this mighty nuclear battlecruiser can't protect itself indefinitely against air attack. The list of mighty warships that have gone to Davy Jones's Locker courtesy of air attack is long and distinguished: Ostfriesland, Arizona, Oklahoma, Hornet, Prince of Wales, Repulse, Yamato, Musashi, Tirpitz, Sheffield, Ardent, Arrow, Coventry... And a US carrier task force would quickly add the Peter the Great to the list.

Mind you, it would be an interesting tactical problem. What is the best way through the ship's interleaved and overlapping air defense systems? Would a program of steady but low-count standoff ASM (e.g. Tomahawks) attacks eventually expend its missile ammunition? Or would a much more intense attack with weapons like Harpoons overload its fire control systems and lead to quicker neutralization? Or would a regime of jamming and anti-radiation missiles eventually blind it and leave it vulnerable to close-in attack? I imagine this is the sort of problem that would keep a group of US naval officers amused for an hour or two, discussing various ways into and out of the tactical problem, but at the root of the matter is the basic fact that given halfway competent leadership of the carrier, the Russian ship is doomed unless the battle starts with the carrier already within range of the Kirov's missiles. But that's why we stipulate "halfway competent leadership".

So it doesn't worry me. It might even be an interesting tactical problem for the US Air Force, which I don't think has had much opportunity to bomb boats since the glory days of the Fifth Air Force in World War Two.

Why, I ask, would the Soviets have bothered building a ship as large and expensive as the Kirov if they were that vulnerable to air attack? I think there were three reasons for them.

First, the Soviets wanted prestige. They wanted to match the US Navy's impression of power, but lacking aircraft carriers of their own, they concluded that maybe a novel nuclear battlecruiser would be good for prestige. Lousy for the budget, but good for brochures.

Second, the Soviets wanted a ship that could survive the Battle of the First Salvo. It was easy to imagine, in the 1970s, the entire deployed Soviet fleet either being wiped out or missile-expended in a single afternoon, leaving them with basically nothing but submarines. These big new battlecruisers would give Soviet surface action groups a measure of stamina and durability they didn't have up until then.

Third, I believe that the Soviets intended for the Kirovs to serve as dedicated escorts for the proposed Soviet aircraft carriers, but when the carriers were never finished, the doctrinal purpose of the Kirovs went away too.

So here we are. The Cold War is over, most of the Kirovs aren't in commission any more, and the best of the lot, the Peter the Great, is propping up the macho pretensions of Hugo Chavez. One imagines that Admiral Gorshkov is spinning in his grave.

Afterword: Why Kirov? Why that name? There is a city of Kirov, but it's an inland transportation hub and I can attest to the fact that it's pretty grey and bleak and doesn't in any way call the ocean to mind. I think the ship was actually named after Sergei M. Kirov, the party boss of 1920s Leningrad who proved to be too charismatic and popular for Stalin's taste. Stalin reportedly had him assassinated, then marched as the chief mourner in his funeral - a touch that would have made Trotsky wince if in fact Stalin hadn't had him assassinated at well.

Atom Smasher

I was watching the morning news last week when a pair of elaborately-coiffed newsreaders (one hesitates to call them "journalists") had a bit of a yuk-yuk over those dumbassed coneheaded scientists who had already broken their new toy, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. They thought this was quite funny, drawing all sorts of conclusions about how highbrow scientists can't be trusted with expensive equipment, unlike (say) elaborately-coiffed newsreaders. Excuse me, dear newsreader but do you even know what a goddamned hadron is? This streak of American anti-intellectualism kind of irritates me. No, it doesn't "kind of" irritate me; it just flat-out irritates me, and I simply can't see why people would be proud of their selective ignorance.

But what, really, is the Large Hadron Collider all about? What does it do? At its heart, it is a giant circle some 27 kilometers in diameter. It passes a beam of protons around this circle, accelerating them to the highest speeds possible, before steering them into head-on collisions with fixed targets or (even more fun) a beam of anti-protons circling the opposite direction. Let's not worry about that latter business too much for now.

What's a hadron? Physicsts divide the dizzying array of subatomic particles into several general categories based on various physical characteristics. In this case, we're using weight. Light particles (like electrons) are called leptons, which is Greek (I think) for "light ones". Medium-weight particles (like pions) are called mesons, which is Greek (I think) for "medium-weight ones." Heavy particles, like protons and neutrons, are called hadrons, which is Greek (I think) for "heavy ones." So that's all a hadron is, a heavy particle with a rest mass somewhere in the ballpark of the proton and on up from there (some hadrons get really heavy indeed).

(Update: I was lying in bed last night after my dosing with tonic water, spluttering and shuddering, when it struck me that I'd confused hadron with baryon. In the preceeding discussion, this business of light, medium and heavy particles, what I called hadrons are in fact baryons, and the distinction has really nothing at all to do with the LHC. Nay. Hadrons are a class of particles that are bound together by the strong nuclear force, chiefly protons and neutrons.)

Why are we colliding hadrons? What's in it for us? What, fundamentally, is the point of all this? One point would be proving or disproving the validity of the "Standard Model" of quantum mechanics. Fundamental to this model is the existence of the so-called "Higgs field", along with its associated "Higgs particle". These are required to exist by the Standard Model because they enforce symmetry breakages at specific energies, but nobody's ever actually seen a Higgs particle. Proving or disproving the existence of the Higgs particle would have major consequences for particle physics and cosmogony, to name just two areas.

The "Standard Model" of quantum mechanics also predicts the theoretical existence of other particles, most of them fairly exotic, like gluons and quarks. Proving that these particles really exist (or proving that they don't really exist) would have a major impact on quantum physics (if we can't prove quarks exist, well then, we've got a lot of work to do).

So how would we prove that quarks, gluons, Higgs particles and other exotic particles exist? The basic problem is that they can exist only in very high energy situations, such as the first few milliseconds after the Big Bang or in the heart of a thermonuclear weapon, neither of which are entirely feasible experimental apparati - there's only been one Big Bang that we know of, and one imagines that a grant proposal that includes the line "...then we detonate the hydrogen bomb..." would likely not get past the National Science Foundation safety people.

So that's the problem. To detect these exotic particles, we first have to create them, and to create them, we need to jam an awful lot of energy into a fairly small area. In particle physics, the easiest way to produce high energies is to slam atomic nuclei or subatomic particles at high speed into targets of various sorts (some of them as ordinary as chunks of aluminum). We remember from our high school physics that the kinetic energy of a moving object is a product of the mass of the moving object times the square of the speed - KE = 1/2 MV^2. The easiest way to increase the energy is to increase the speed of the collision, but if you're already pushing particles as fast as you can, the only way to increase energy is to increase the mass of the particles.

Think of it this way. You're standing at a table covered with ping pong balls and steelies, and ten feet away is a pane of glass that you'd like to break. So you throw a ping pong ball at the glass, and it bounces off. So you throw a ping ping ball harder, and it still bounces off. Eventually you're throwing ping pong balls as hard as you can, hard enough to dislocate your shoulder and produce that funny sensation of recoil up your neck and into your brain. And still the window doesn't break. Conclusion: we've gotten all the speed we can out of the accelerator (your arm) so to increase the energy we're going to have to increase the mass of the particle. Grab a steelie and throw it, and it shatters the window.

That's exactly what the LHC hopes to do. It hopes to move the heaviest practical particles, protons, at the highest practical speed, just shy of the speed of light, and by so doing pack enough energy into collisions to crease a few of these Higgs particles and gluons and quarks and whatnot that are predicted to exist at high energies. It is different from other particle accelerators simply because it is larger and operates at higher energies - it's the Ferrari of particle accelerators, one could say.

Will it work? It'll probably successfully liberate quarks and gluons. Indeed, they've already been claimed to have been seen in other particle accelerators, but in such densely packed messes that they've been hard to study. The LHC might produce them in an environment that is easier to work with. Will it find the Higgs particle? I hope so, but I'm not entirely sanguine. For one thing, the theoretical predictions of the mass of the Higgs particle are awfully one-sided. They say "It has to be at least this heavy, but it may be a lot heavier." Meaning, if we don't see it with the LHC, it might because there's no such thing as the Higgs particle, or maybe because the Higgs particle is just a hair too heavy for the LHC to produce. Things like this drive me crazy.

The End Of The World Angle

People have been worrying a lot lately about whether the LHC will create "quantum black holes" that will eventually cause the destruction of the Earth. The theory is that the quantum black hole, once generated, will slowly settle to the center of the Earth, where it will slowly consume the crystalline and liquid iron at the core and become a not-so-quantum black hole, whereupon it will either (choose your poison) consume the Earth entirely, or blow the Earth to smithereens with high-energy gamma rays.

It's possible, I suppose, but I think it's unlikely. My reasoning goes like this. The Earth is constantly bombarded by cosmic rays, which are basically nothing more than protons and other charged particles from deep space. Some of these particles are most impressively energetic, to coin a phrase. One of them, referred to as the "Oh-My-God Particle", had roughly the energy of a baseball thrown by a major league pitcher. In fact, some of these particles pose problems for Special Relativity in that they seem to exceed the GZK Limit, a sort of "speed limit" imposed by interactions between the particles and the photons of the background radiation; above a certain velocity they would interact and bleed off energy in the form of pions. But we occasionally detect particles well above the GZK Limit, which seems to hint that either Special Relatively is wrong or is inconsistent at large scales (leading to formulations such as "Doubly-Special Relativity").

My point has nothing to do with GZK limits. It has to do with the idea that very high energy cosmic rays fill space, and there are uglier things out there too, gamma rays and x-rays, and all of this shit (no other word will do) flies around and collides and never seems to produce quantum black holes, at least not that we've ever seen. Not even supernovae seem to produce the beasts. If the universe itself seems disinclined to produce quantum black holes with all of the energies and particles at its disposal, I can't really see the LHC making any either. If the LHC were closer to the Planck energy I might be more worried, but it's nowhere near that level of performance.

Cease'n'Desist, Fer Cryingout Loud

It's no great secret that I'm fairly liberal. I don't even feel the need to hide behind the label progressive. I occasionally refer to people who do that as chicken liberals, in the same way that agnostics often end up called chicken atheists.

I'm also something of an environmentalist, or at least which I like to think of as a sensible environmentalist. I accept that we will practically always have to have mines of one sort or another, and the best you can do with mines is make sure the mining is done responsibly and proper reclamation takes place afterwards. I accept that we will from time to time have to build flood control and water reclamation projects that will involve a good deal of environmental disruption. But I'm not so sure that we need to tear up another fifty square miles of desert just so we can put in more suburbs, strip malls and golf courses, as though we don't already have a great plenty of them already (and please, God, if they do put in more subdivisions, and someone names them stupid things like Whispering Timbers or Eagle Creek - in a goddamned desert - please to smite them with lightning).

That paragraph got totally out of control, but its main thrust is that I'm an environmentalist and I think that the more we do now to limit the damage we inflict on the planet, the better off we'll all be in the future. But there is one area where I have to part ways with my uber-environmentalist friends and dig in my heels. I can't - I won't - watch that business involving Tommy Lee and Ludacris on Planet Green. I just can't.

Why? It's not that I don't approve of the spirit of the thing. It's not that I disapprove of the individuals involved. No. My complaint is based on the number of limp, meaningless, and completely out of place metal-horn salutes that are thrown around on the show. Abuse of the metal horns is already widespread in our society. It's as though they want to make the touchdown sign, but doing it with one hand is easier than throwing up one's arms. It's bad enough to watch some numbnuts sans clue making the metal-horn sign with his thumb hanging out, as though he can't decide if he's a devil-rocker or the Big Kahuna. It's bad enough to see the metal-horn sign become part of suburban life, where guys wearing Crocs get the lawnmower started on the second pull and flash the horns - "Score, got it running, yay me!" But when the metal-horns morph into an environmentalist symbol, oh, that's just too much.

Stop it already! Here's a proper metal-horn evil-eye deal as delivered by Dio.

If you cannot manage this level of intensity, don't bother making the metal-horn sign. Period!

Arrrrr!

For is it not written in the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster that every Friday is a religious holiday? And is it not also written that International Talk Like A Pirate Day, September 19th, is among the most important of religious holidays?

Of course it is so written; I read the book just last night and I oughta know.*

So have ye some grog, scalawag, and say "Arrrr!"**

*I bought the book at Barnes & Nobles last night and thought I detected on the face of the middle-aged woman cashier, doubtless a Sarah Palin clone, a sneer of contempt. Or maybe she was merely responding to my animal magnetism. Either is possible, though one is more likely than the other.

**The original meaning of "grog" was apparently a mix of about four parts water to one part rum, done mostly to make nasty spoiled stored water palatable enough to choke down aboard old-style sailing ships. Since then, the word has expanded to include practically any kind of alcoholic beverage, though one would perhaps be reluctant to suddenly shout "Yar, slosh me some more of ye grog, matey!" at a wine tasting. Reluctant, but not completely opposed. Go ahead, dare me.

Given that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is pretty accommodating, I don't think there would be a problem with wine, beer, or anything else being temporarily reclassified as "grog" for the purposes of today. Me, ye lubbers, I'm having me yon Mike's Hard Lemonade.

Yarrr!