De Mortuis Nil Nisi Bonum

The Blog Dog died today.  That's the scruffy black thing in the photo, over on the left.  It wasn't entirely unexpected - she was getting old and was having heart problems.  But even when it isn't unexpected, it's still unwelcome.  She just laid down on the rug, and quietly, peacefully died.  We buried her in the back yard with her rubber tire toy, and now there's a big hole in my life.

The hole will slowly fill in with other things.  Holes like that always do.  But I'll always remember her, the happy little pound puppy that we saved from being put to sleep and gave a nice life to, and she rewarded us by being a happy, goofy little dog who leaned against me while I was going through chemo and never complained about anything.

So long, dog.  Rest now.

DIY

One thing I have been doing lately is watching the DIY Network.  Enough, at at any rate, to have formed some opinions about the shows.

There are shows I like.

Holmes on Homes appeals to me.  I like the way his outrage overflows when he sees some particularly egregious example of bad workmanship, and the way he sighs, throws up his hands, and says "Tear it all out.  Gut it."

Renovation Realities is also a hit with me.  Sometimes I think I'm better than the amateur renovators on the show and sometimes I think I'm worse, but I'm always pleased to see that I'm not the only person who ever missed the stud with a drywall screw.

Rehab Addict isn't bad.  I don't learn much from the show, or find it very motivational, and I just never caught the "flipping" wave.  But the woman earns my respect, and the little dog is cute.

And there are shows that I'm not a fan of.

Most of the ____ Crashers shows don't work for me.  I usually don't care much for what they come up with, and if someone stuck a bunch of red-painted electrical boxes to my wall, they'd be in for a knuckle sandwich.  And there's a desperate sameness to them, as though all of human history is driving us all toward owning exactly the same kind of cabinets.  But it's often the hosts that turn me off.  The trendy guy who constantly says Sa-weeeeet!  The woman whose schtick seems to mostly amount to look at my tits!  The overly effusive guy who bellows and blows the car horn and generally makes a nuisance of himself, to say nothing of the way he seems to hang all over the women in the show in a less than entirely decent way.

Mega Dens is pretty bad.  The woman's bizarre hand gestures annoy me, and she seems positively co-dependent, as though wrenching fake acclaim from the homeowners because she gave them a big-assed TV is the cornerstone of her emotional life.  There's an ad for the show where she says "We are going to hook this place up!"  I swear it sounds like she's really saying "We are going to fuck this place up!"  And the second is closer to the truth.  There's another ad where she says "It's like we literally changed their lives!"  Well, dearie, so does botulism, but that doesn't mean I want it.

But the worst, the very worst, is Man Caves.  I don't like the expression "man cave" to start with.  But when I look at the man caves they produce, my uneasiness turns to nausea.  A bar?  Sports junk?  A huge-screen TV?  Is that what a man cave is, a place where we sit around, drink beer, and watch the big game on TV?  How about a workbench and a lathe?  How about an airbrush booth?  How about bookshelves and a nice reading chair?  No?  Then I don't need a big TV, or a video game console, or sports junk, or a bar, or someone who unselfconsciously adopts the nickname "Goose" making such decisions for me. 

It Happens

Sometimes it happens - sometimes I just run out of things to say, even to myself, and my own "inner discourse" (to the extent that I even have one) strikes me as singularly uninteresting.

It isn't as though I'm undergoing a crisis of any kind.  My cancer is still dead, and the fact that I whimper about being overworked is evidence that I am working.  Nor have I slid into the icky, slightly moist mess of a midlife crisis.  Last time I checked, I had not begun getting tattoos, and I'm still driving the same green Hyundai, and I haven't begun consorting with women thirty years my junior.

But I DID wake up this morning and think "Maybe I've been away long enough; maybe I can write on my blog today without boring myself."  So I'm trying it on for size.

But here are a few things, up front.

I don't intend to write about politics, because really, I am so over this election thing.  I'm tired of being "mobilized" by my own side - hey, I already voted, so leave me alone!  And I'm tired of being "challenged" by the other side - hey, I already voted, so leave me alone!  And it frustrates me that presidential elections now seem to be the largest single sector of the American economy.  We spend how much on elections?  Holy shit!  We could have build the Superconducting Supercollider for that sort of money - and maybe we should have!

I don't intend to write about sports, because my lack of interest in sports has grown even more lacking.  I tried to watch an NFL football game a few weeks ago, but just hearing the music made me think of Juvenal's famous "bread and circuses" line.  And I hear enough sports blather from the guys at work as it is, thank you very much.

We'll see how it goes.

Clopped

One of the big reasons I don't care for the TV show "Chopped"...  Let me start over.  One of the many reasons I don't care for the TV show "Chopped" is the way the guest cooks (I like to call them that because it seems to irritate them) always use sports metaphors.  "I'm going to bring my A game; I'm going to swing for the fences; I'm going to dig in for a goal line stand..."

Sports metaphors, I believe, had little place in the kitchen.  This is why I like watching the Olympics.  Sports metaphors really DO have a place in the Olympics, and I'm not constantly brought up short by the sight of some hipster cook who couldn't defeat Gumby in thumb wrestling using sports metaphors he's not entitled to sling around.  Stick to micro-greens and chimichurri, dude, because your A game is laughable.

Of course, I don't "get" sports in general, and my idea of Hell is being stuck in a sports bar listening to guys with baggy shorts, baseball caps, and sphincter-beards roaring at the tops of their lungs about hockey, baseball, or practically any other sport.  It especially makes me wince when they say "we".  "We won six championships in the 1970s!  What do you say to THAT?"  I say, "Who's this we, Kemosabe?"  (Actually, I lie.  That's just Purgatory.  Hell, the real Hell, is being stuck in a sports bar with a bunch of guys who get weepy and sentimental about the US Olympic hockey team.  That's Hell.) 

I've just never been any good at attaching my ego to things.  Now and then I run into people who are big fans of some band, and they're so attached to the band that they can't accept that the band has been circling the drain for years.  Or people who derive some (or most) of their sense of self-worth from whether or not "their" team hit a jump shot from the baseline with 0:03 to play.

But I sort of like the Olympics, when they aren't being blatantly commercial or maudlin and saccharine.

Blackbeard

This is Elmo, or as I call him these days, Blackbeard.  He's had a rough few months.  He's on the old side, and he's been steadily going deaf and blind for a while.  But about a month ago, something evil happened to his left eye - it got all huge and bulbous, visibly bugging out of his wee little head, and when you shined a light on it, it was obvious that something had gone very wrong somewhere within.

We took him to the vet.  I was afraid it was going to be one of those "Well, it's time to think about putting him down" sorts of things, but the vet sent us to a veterinary eye doctor, who said "Oh, heck, we'll just take that nasty old thing out and he'll be fine."  And he IS.  The eye is gone, of course, and he's pretty much fully blind, but he's happy, he eats like a horse, and he's almost doubled his weight.  Plus he looks like a pirate.  Yarrrr.  What's not to like about that?  (He always greetings me when I get home from work by racing around in circles and barking, but now he isn't sure where I am - he still races around in circles and barks, but he can't tell where I'm at and whirls in front of the TV, or the refrigerator, or a chair...  It's funny and kind of sad at the same time, but I'm glad he's still around anyway.)

The timing was bad, though.  We were going on a family cruise to Alaska, and he had to have his eye out about four days before we left.  He was still wearing the Cone of Shame when we left, and nobody likes to see a dog so encumbered.

The cruise was excellent.  I'll have more to say about that later, I'm sure, but let's just say for now that it's made a committed cruise-a-holic out of me.

Where have I been, you ask?  Beats me.  Th easy answer is "I ran out of things to say", but that's crap, because while I've been away, I wrote a (bad) novel about narcotics trafficking, and a (bad) semi-autobiographical memoir of chemotherapy and cancer, and have been working on a (bad) light history of Rome, especially the transition from republic to empire.  So it wasn't like I ran out of things to say; I just stopped posting them.

Returning The Unused Portion

I'm about this close (picture someone holding their fingers about a quarter of an inch apart) from giving up on Facebook entirely.

The only application I use on Facebook is something called Booktracker, that lets you keep track of and tell people what you're reading. But it doesn't work. At least half the time, it just sits and stares blankly at me, like a dog that's slowly conning you out of your potato chips, one by one, without ever admitting that it ate the last twenty potato chips.

So great. Just about the only thing I use Facebook for doesn't work. Why am I there again? I honestly don't remember.

So, I'm considering returning my unused portion of Facebook to Mark Zuckerberg. There's something inherently pathetic about posting on the Internet that you're considering stopping using some portion of the Internet, but that's the boat I find myself in.

So - what did I read this weekend?

The first was "Idiot America", which I found amusing, even if it lacked the authority of Douglas Hofstadter's book, or the sheer bitchiness of Allen Bloom's book. But it made me laugh, and that's not a small thing.

The other was "Wishful Drinking" by Carrie Fisher. It isn't so much an autobiography as just a written-down script for her one-woman show, and hardly more than a husky pamphlet in length, but it's still pretty funny. I can't begin to imagine what it would be like to be called up out of the blue by a concerned Cary Grant!

What if he'd called me when I was going through the bone marrow transplant? On the one hand, it would be MOST creepy, because he was already dead, and one normally doesn't expect a phone call from dead people (only in sadly-misnamed "reality shows" does this ever happen). But if he was still alive?

"Oh, you didn't eat your hamburger! This is no good!"

Or something like that.

I'm Bleeding

I'm bleeding. Seriously. As I write this, my arm is emitting a stream of the red groovy, as Alex might say. I find it fascinating and somehow life-affirming to sit here and bleed.

I've done a lot of bleeding in the last few years, but it was always for some grim medical reason. When I was preparing for my stem cell transplant, I had to sit connected to an apheresis machine for about ten cumulative hours. They draw blood out of one tube, run it through a machine, take out what they want, and pump it back in through a different tube. I think they said my entirely volume of blood was run through the machine sixteen times over.

That's a lot of bleeding. Granted, it didn't end up pooled on the floor or splattered on the wall for some CSI geek to ponder, but still, it's an interesting state of mind to sit there for about thirty minutes and think "I would have bled to death by now if the machine wasn't pumping it back in."

I bled when they put the tubes in. I bled when they took the tubes out. During the lethal-dose chemo, I bled continuously from my nose and lips because my blood simply wouldn't clot, at all. Every needle stick bled for five minutes, and every time I bumped into anything, masses of pooled blood formed under my skin. And I bled copiously during my bone marrow biopsies (I seem to remember someone saying "It's a gusher" during one procedure, and I never seemed to emerge from them without dried blood and Betadine all over me).

But this is different. I was bleeding because I'd stupidly gouged myself while cutting a huge limb off a tree. It wasn't for some grim medical purpose driven by some dire diagnosis; I was just cutting a limb off a tree because the tree would be better off without it. No cancer, no chemo, no nausea, just me and the saw and the tree, and the notion that I was just being a regular guy again, doing what had to be done for the good of everyone involved.

And I'll bleed for that. Sure.

Nothing On

There is NOTHING on TV. I don't mean that literally, of course, because there's a ton of stuff on TV. Just nothing I want to watch. And since I'm kind of bored and at loose ends to begin with, that's pretty sad. I should go work on a model instead, but I'm in the midst of a minor scale modeling lull - all my current projects seem to be stuck at the stage where they need interior green paint, and I'm fresh out.

So I decided to see what was on TV instead of going to the hobby shop and getting new paint (besides, it's 9 pm and the hobby shop proprietor probably has better things to do right now than sell me a couple of bottles of Testors interior green). I started at Channel 1 and finally gave up somewhere around Channel 750, and nowhere did I see anything that interested me, not even in my current mildly bored state.

Sports! Holy cow, look at all the sports! There are apparently more sports channels than there are actual sports, because some of the channels were actually replaying past sporting events - football games from 1982, especially tense putts from some golf tournament, highlights (I kid you not) of some poker championship. I had no idea there was a tennis channel, or a golf channel. There's a Major League Baseball channel, even though I'm reasonably sure they aren't playing baseball right now.

Reality shows! American Pickers! Pawn Stars! Storage Wars! Pass. How can the so-called "History Channel" executives sleep at night knowing that they're running this kind of crap? The only reality shows I watch are the ones involving hoarders, and even then, I watch with a certain reluctance. I confess that a part of me watches those shows just to see how awful the latest hoarder home really is - "Oh my god, they just found a dead cat in the clutter!" And while a certain part of me feels a certain sympathy for the bizarre psychological pathology of the victims, there's also a part of me that bellows "You've got dead cats in your glacier of litter because you're a lazy slob, not because of psychological trauma! Quit crying, get a garbage bag, and start throwing some of that junk away!"

I watched the Food Network for a while, but apparently today it's all Guy Fieri, all the time. He's okay. But after an hour of watching Guy Fieri eat enormous hamburgers and do fist-bumps with the greasy spoon chef, I'm ready to move on (and I see that the Food Network still airs "Chopped". In today's episode, some unwashed-looking guy with way too much oily-looking hair and ridiculous hipster eyeglasses was going on and on about the artistry of his work. I wouldn't have trusted that guy to cook me a Pop-Tart; I don't want greasy hipster hair and droplets of hipster perspiration in my breakfast, thanks very much, and you can pay for your tattoos yourself).

There are a lot of paranormal shows these days too. Ghost hunters, vampire hunters, UFO investigators, psychics, people who will (for a modest fee) channel the soul of President Hoover, and more shows combining Nostradamus and the Mayan apocalypse than I could shake a stick at. These shows can sometimes be unintentionally funny, like when they do their ESV analysis and mistake someone's squeaky shoe for a woman's voice saying "Which one of you bastards ate all the potato salad?" Please.

And then there's the sudden sobering realization that I really am deeply naive. I had no idea there was so much pay-per-view porn on satellite TV, such as "Hot MILFs Like It Black 3". I think what disturbs me about that show is the "3" business. Is it kind of like Star Wars, where if you watch them out of sequence they don't make much sense? Do we fail to appreciate the emotional nuances of Hot MILFS 3 if we haven't seen the backstory presented in Hot MILFS 1 and 2?

There are a couple of channels that I won't watch because of unfortunate names. Syfy, for example, which I haven't watched since they adopted the name "Syfy", and H2, which used to be History Channel International but is now just "H2". It sounds like a little-known mountain, not a TV channel - but maybe one of those hundreds of interminable sports channels will air something about a team of bearded guys with vaguely European accents trying to climb K2 and climbing H2 by accident. I see them on the summit of the mountain, exchanging weary breathless congratulations, and then someone says "Wait, wait, you wanted to climb K2? I thought you said H2! CRAP!"

The more I think about it, the more I think that I'd be better off mixing paints and coming up with my own shade of interior green paint than wasting any more time on this ultimately fruitless attempt to find something that wasn't either deadly dull or blatantly insulting on TV.

Andromeda Strain

The other day I happened be waltzing through the house and saw that the 1970s movie The Andromeda Strain was on. So I sat and watched it for a while. It was made in 1971 and was full of mainframe computers, decidedly low-rez graphical effects, and the cheesiest plane crash I've ever seen (I guess they couldn't even afford stock footage of one of those missile live-fires, or a NASA controlled impact demonstration or anything; they just showed a guy in an oxygen mask rolling his eyes and slumping over, and then showed us a bunch of junk from the prop department scattered around to simulate a crashed plane, including the tail section from an F-100 and a cockpit section from what I guess to be an F-86D).

But I kid the movie. It isn't bad. It's probably the best of Michael Crichton's novels, and probably the best movie version of any of his novels too, with the exception of the fabulous The 13th Warrior.

But here's where the movie is at its best: any time some young punk asks "Gee, pops, what was life like before the Internet," you just point them at that movie.

Faintly Amusing

I've noticed an amusing trend lately. Amusing or annoying, depending on my frame of mind at any given moment.

When I was first diagnosed with cancer, my friends got pretty thin on the ground. A few stuck around, but most of them couldn't put distance between me and themselves fast enough to suit them. Maybe they thought cancer is contagious. Maybe they didn't want to hang around and watch me die. Or maybe I'd merely become inconvenient. But either way, with certain notable exceptions, I went through all that business almost alone.

But now that I'm apparently cured, they come flooding back in. "I'm so OVERJOYED for you!" Maybe they really are, but you'll pardon me if I'm dubious of their sincerity. They couldn't be seen with me when I was sick, but now they all want a piece of me, to rub the top of my head, perhaps hoping that some of my good fortune will rub off on them.

I don't really mind that. People going through chemo aren't much fun, and if I had had the option, I might not have visited myself either. But the part that makes me grind my teeth is when they take credit for any of it. "We got you through that," they say.

Wait a minute - who exactly is "we"?

You have the right to distance yourself from me when I get sick. But you then don't have the right to claim so much as an atom of credit for me getting better. You want to be friends again? Groovy, I'm not bitter. But the minute you say "we" in the context of chemo, your chances aren't good. I suffered the torments of the damned during chemo and hardly ever bitched about it; I just tightened my belt and got on with it. And it's a disservice to me and the people who really DID help me get through it for other people to coast in long after the fact and take credit for any of it.

Mostly, though, it just makes me chuckle.

Three Years

Let's do a quick recap on the last three years, shall we? In December of 2008, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma, stage 4, and pretty far along in the process of dying with tumors, some of them quite large, throughout my innards.

Six months of ABVD killed most of the tumors, except for several in my groin and one in my neck.

I did three months of rear-guard ESHAP chemotherapy to keep the tumors from going completely out of control again while I was preparing for a tandem bone marrow transplant.

The first bone marrow transplant toward the end of 2009. It was successful in that the transplant "took" and my bone marrow starting growing replacement blood cells, but the tumors were still there.

The second bone marrow transplant was in January 2010, a fantastically unpleasant experience, but I guess it could have been worse. This scorched-earth chemo killed the tumor in my neck and all but two of the ones in my groin.

Then I did radiation treatments through the spring and summer of 2010, concentrating on the two stubborn tumors in my groin.

And now, three years after my original diagnosis, where am I?

It's been roughly two years since I had any tumors showing any appreciable sign of life in PET scans, and for the last eighteen months, my tumors have all been dead and cold and slowly shrinking.

So today I got my final PET scan results. I say "final" because my oncologist believes that my cancer is dead and that there's nothing further to be gained from expensive and highly radioactive tests. I am in complete remission, a remission that seems likely to hold.

As of today, I'm no longer a cancer patient. I'm just a regular dude, getting on with things.

And it's pretty groovy.

Tuesday Appointment

I find out Tuesday what the results of my PET scan are. I had the PET scan last Friday, and a good time was had by all. A good nap, anyway. The only real problem with a PET scan (other than having to have one, that is) is that I'm always awakened from a nap twice. I fall asleep after they give me the radioactively tagged sugar, and then they wake me up and put me in the machine. I fall asleep again, and then they wake me up when it's done.

All that falling asleep and waking up leaves me with mental whiplash. I also think I react mildly to the tagged sugar. For a few hours after the PET scan I always feel kind of slow and block-headed.*

So Tuesday I find out the results. I'm pretty confident of a good result. I don't have any reason to believe it's back - I have no lumps or bumps, I don't have any of the weird B-symptoms that come with that kind of lymphoma, and most importantly, I just don't feel like I have cancer. Wishful thinking, maybe, but this isn't exactly my first rodeo and I don't thin I'm trying to fool myself.

I know what it feels like. In December 2008 I knew I had cancer, I knew I was dying, and I could feel it happening. I don't feel that way now. I don't even feel like I did after the tandem bone marrow transplant, when the cancer was *almost* dead, but I could still feel a suspicious (and very discouraging) lump in my neck.

As far as I can tell with the diagnostic tools at my disposal, it's still gone.

But I'm still just slightly anxious. It's a Big Deal, in capital letters; it isn't like going into Discount Tire and finding out that they can't fix the hole in my flat tire.



*Some might argue that I'm ALWAYS block-headed and slow, and am only aware of it after PET scans.

Star Peace

I never really thought a lot about George Takei. Mind you, I didn't think poorly of George Takei. I mean, I enjoyed his work in Star Trek, and he always seemed to be a decent guy, but he just didn't really cross my mind all that often. But recently, George has slowly been working his way to the higher reaches of my geek appreciation list. His latest work, the attempt to broker peace between William Shatner and Carrie Fisher, may well put him over the top and ensure him a lifetime place in my personal geek-roll.

Let's face it, Twilight is a mess. Immortal vampires with super powers (to say nothing of sparkling) who go to high school? Oh man. Vlad would be SO disappointed. If Vlad went to high school, it would be to drain all its occupants of blood, not to sit in third period history and mope.

There's a lot in geekdom that I don't really "get". I don't "get" anime, for example. And I don't really "get" the modern take on vampires. But the fact that I don't "get" them doesn't mean I hate them. I just don't spend much time thinking about them, or watching them. My opinion is that I don't understand anime and don't really like it, but it doesn't bother me personally. I don't get True Blood, especially in its HBO formulation, but it doesn't offend me.

But something about Twilight does bother me personally. If George can get fandom in general to just say no to that brooding nonsense, I'd vote for him for President.

Dear History Channel:

You've gone in the crapper.

Regards,

Me.

I've had a whopper of a cold the last few days, and I spent most of today in bed. While I was there, I watched some of the History Channel's programming. Holy cow. I used to make fun of the History Channel by calling it the "Hitler Channel" since it was just one dull documentary about Hitler after another - Hitler's doctors, Hitler's women, Hitler's desk toys, Hitler's hemorrhoids. But the History Channel (and I use the word "history" reluctantly) has apparently retooled itself into the Whack Job Channel.

Reality shows about pawn shops. Not my speed at all, and I'd rather go to the dentist and have this troublesome tooth fixed than watch them, but at least they don't drive me mad.

Reality shows about ghost hunters, usually featuring some guy in a dark room blurting "Did you just feel that? I swear, it felt just like Elvis Presley pinching me on the ass!" Or the ridiculous EVPs that purport to be William the Conqueror muttering "Rosebud..." Stupid, but when it's a reality show about ghost hunters, you know what you're getting to.

Ancient astronauts. This is the mother lode, the thing that finally produced in me a state that I think is known to medical science as a "conniption fit". It isn't just that they're stupid. With a title like "Ancient Astronauts", you know what you're getting into. It's the wide-eyed credulity of the stupidity that gets me. Thanks, History Channel, you've put legitimate history and rational thought back at least a century, and made a mockery of yourselves.

I can't even begin to critique the shows point by point, because the lame stupidity piles on so fast I can't even keep up with it. And they have these guys, these "experts", mouthing the most ridiculous gibberish without any kind of accountability at all. They don't even get the jargon right, for crying out loud - how am I supposed to take seriously people who speak of "direct energy weapons" or "the constellation Sirius"? And that digital scale model of the Sirius star system has to be one of the most laughable things I've ever seen.

The History Channel executives will probably say "Hey, man, we don't make the shows, we just air them." Yeah? Well, you decide which shows you put on your channel, don't you? That makes you responsible.

The History Channel executives may also say "Well, we got you to watch, didn't we?"

True - but for the last time. If that's your idea of programming fit for something called "The History Channel", you can proceed without me. You've insulted my intelligence for the last time.

I used to think that TLC was the most lame cable channel - I even referred to it as "The Lame Channel". But now I'm going to call it "The Loser Channel" because in truth, the History Channel is now the lamest thing going on my satellite TV system. (Actually, the lamest moment in the history of satellite TV, as far as I'm concerned, was when the Sci-Fi Channel renamed itself "Syfy". But this retooling of the History Channel is pretty damn close.)

To The Movement

Dear Occupy Phoenix movement:

It seems to me that there are only two routes to social and economic change: revolution, or evolution. I'm not prepared to endorse a revolutionary agenda. Talking of putting the bastards up against the wall makes good copy, and it might be a consoling strategy when you're crying in your beer, but it isn't a viable strategy, and it isn't one that I support.

So that leaves evolution. Rather than destroying the entire social fabric and starting over, you alter the social fabric in little steps. To do this, you need votes. That's all. Specifically, you need the votes of moderate conscience-driven Republicans. How do you get those votes? By demonstrating that your cause is morally right to the point that people of good conscience cannot possibly oppose you, regardless of their politics.

And now do you do that? By demonstrating your moral rectitude in a public forum so that people of good conscience can see what you stand for, and be moved by it. By managing the face you display, by taking care to maintain as positive a public relations spin as possible.

I hear the complaints already. "This shouldn't be about spin, or PR, it should be about ideas!" True - and if we lived in a debating society, that might have merit. But this is the real world, and the real fact of the real world is that the average Repbulican ALREADY views you as a bunch of foul-mouthed Gen-X slackers. How do you propose to gain the votes and support of moderate Repulicans, whom you absolutely, utterly need on your side to accomplish anything, when they're already predisposed to see you as foul-mouthed slackers?

By proving that you aren't. And that means controlling the face you display to the public.

"But that's not fair! We should be judged for our ideas!" Oh, grow up. Life is unfair. Get used to it.

So you have a live feed. Good for you. But instead of using this live feed to display your best face, or present coherent arguments in favor of your cause, or to demonstrate the virtue of your cause, it's turned into an open microphone at a convention of anarchists. Lovely.

It seems that a lot of time on the live feed is spent debating whether to take the word "non-violent" out of the mission statement. Are you insane? What do you propose to do, hulk up and out-fight the police department? The authorities are already having elaborate fantasies about beating you all down with clubs and exiling you to the modern equivalent of Siberia, and you're going to actually *facilitate* that? Good luck with that.

"But there's no definition of what non-violent means!"

Sure there is. It means an absense of violence, physical or otherwise. And if you think otherwise, then you're already lost MY support, and since I'm already predisposed to support the goals of the Occupy movement, imagine how this sort of discussion plays with Republicans, who *already* don't like you and don't trust you. You think Gandhi succeeded in freeing India by screaming at British soldiers, or by scuffling with Indian riot police? Think again. He succeeded because people of good conscience were so sickened by the image of the authorities clubbing down unarmed, non-violent people that they said "This is wrong, this cannot continue."

But go ahead, change your mission statement, and get your anarchist rocks off screaming insults at the police. Just do it without me, and without my support.

Here's another problem you face. Nobody controls your live feed. Nobody enforces any standards of conduct or message, so you end up with some foul-mouthed Gen-X slacker screaming about how it's a free country and she can curse as much as she wants on the live feed. Is that really what the movement is about? The alleged right of some malaffected whiner to curse? I thought it was about social and economic justice, but suddenly it's turned into the right to say "fuck" on the live feed?

I don't care if people curse. I curse. Practically everyone curses. But the freedom to curse isn't the issue here. The issue is showing voters who don't agree with you why they SHOULD agree with you. And every time the movement gets sidetracked into some stupid postmodern rebellion against social norms and oppressive social expectations, you lose support. You hear that dribbling sound? That's the sound of you pissing away your support every time some rabid narcissist screams "It's my right to say FUCK as much as I want, because it's a free country."

It is a free country - and I'm free to choose not to support people like her in any way at all. And if she irks me, imagine what Joe the Plumber must think of her!

It's noble that you want to be fully inclusive and utterly democratic. But this isn't a debating society. This is the real world. And in the real world, money and votes matter. To get either, you need to manage your message, and sometimes that means not being democratic. Sometimes that means having someone responsible in charge of the live feed so that pseudo-anarchistic nitwits can't soil your public face with their intemperate shouting. Sometimes it means telling people "No, you can't take the words non-violent out of the mission statement, and no, you can't curse on the live feed, and no, you can't just say whatever doofus thing occurs to you, you have to think about what you're doing, and why you're doing it."

All you have, ALL YOU HAVE, is the moral rectitude of your cause, and if you don't make that the centerpiece of your movement, and if you allow yourselves to come off looking like a bunch of hardcore punk screamers, you're doomed. You'll never amount to more than a sad footnote in the big book of failed social movements.

And sometimes that means telling the screamers that they can either use their grown-up voices, or they can shut up, or they can go the hell away.

Harsh? Maybe - but this isn't a game, and it isn't some private rebellion drama where you earn points for being extreme. This is for real. This is a movement with real goals and a real moral message, and you should be constantly mindful of that.

More Of That

Whenever I start to feel that I'm becoming too bogged down in my own problems and the dull requirements of daily life, I like to think about things like the X-15, seen above not longer after being dropped from its NB-52 carrier airplane. The X-15 flew in the early to mid 1960s. Maybe that wasn't really such a great time, and it's probably dangerous to overly romanticize the whole thing, but there was a lot to be said for being young and innocent and living in a world where bold men flew these black aircraft to the very edge of space.

The X-15 was never meant to go into orbit. The engine lacked the power, and a combination of thermal and stability issues prevented it from re-entering safely from altitudes above about 360,000 feet (450,000 feet seems to have been the thermal limit, and 360,000 feet the safe stability limit; the X-15 tended to be divergent in yaw at high angles of attack and re-entry from above 360,000 feet would require an angle of attack so high the pilot wouldn't be able to maintain control if the stability augmentation system failed, which it often did).

It was really designed to perform basic research on the then-mysterious field of hypersonic flight, to answer questions like how does hypersonic flight differ from supersonic flight and are our theoretical predictions of heating, drag, and aerodynamic forces in hypersonic flight really accurate? Hypersonic flow is hard to achieve in a wind tunnel, and even then, shock wave interactions in the wind tunnel itself make it difficult to say anything meaningful about the behavior of the model. Nowadays we can use supercomputers and computational fluid dynamics to simulate hypersonic airflow, but even if they had had supercomputers and CFD in the 1960s, they wouldn't have known if the CFD models were valid or not.

The only way to test the theoretical projections was to actually build a plane that could fly at hypersonic speeds - to go that fast and see exactly what happened. The X-15 did a lot of research in hypersonic flight, of course, with a heavy emphasis on heating and drag studies. That was its main mission. But in the process, the program did a lot of other research on things like spacesuits, insulators, ablators, reaction control systems, cockpit instrumentation, energy management systems, inertial platforms, adaptive-gain flight control systems, hypersonic degradation of cameras, and other things.

It's dangerous to say that any one airplane was the most significant airplane ever flown. But I think it's safe to say that the X-15 program was probably one of the most fruitful aerospace research programs in human history.

But once you dispense with all the jargon and technical palaver, it speaks powerfully to me of a time when I was young and anything was possible.

Redemptive Engineering

I find this picture pretty striking. This is what NASA calls the "Common Extensible Cryogenic Engine." It's really a variant of the fairly venerable RL10 rocket engine, built to test various methods of modifying the RL10 to achieve wider throttle ratios.

Maybe the most striking thing about this picture is the lack of overall rumpus. The thing is running at full throttle and yet it seems as placid and harmless as the burner on a gas stove. No smoke, no roiling clouds of flame, no explosions. This is what a well-controlled rocket engine should look like.

Another striking thing is the blue color of the exhaust plume. I believe the blue color is produced by what are called "Swan bands", bands of light at specific colors produced by highly excited hydrogen atoms. Unlike the orange glow of a campfire, which is produced mainly by black body radiation coming from glowing bits of soot, the color here is atomic in nature and not any kind of black body radiation. It's the same blue color as a blowtorch flame, the characteristic blue of highly efficient hydrocarbon combustion.

But let's look a bit deeper. At high magnification, one can see that there are actually icicles hanging from the skirt of the nozzle. The nozzle is so well cooled that the superheated steam in the exhaust plume condenses into water and then freezes into ice, even though the temperature of the exhaust plume is on the order of several thousand degrees. That's some serious regenerative cooling.

The heat flux staggers the imagination. The temperature in the exhaust plume is high enough to melt the engine, but the cooling system can draw heat out of the metal nozzle so fast it not only doesn't melt, but it actually runs below room temperature.

Another striking feature of this engine is its "deep throttling". Throttling a rocket engine is exactly like throttling a car engine - making it produce more or less power as circumstances dictate. But unlike car engines, rocket engines are notoriously difficult to throttle. On the one hand, if your throttling system goes haywire on the high side, the engine can over-pressurize and blow up (though RL10s and other expander-cycle engines don't really have this problem, as the square-cube law means that even with the propellant valves thrown wide open, the engine can't really run away and blow up). On the other hand, reducing the engine's power creates all sorts of complications, like flow separation in the nozzle (bad), and periodic combustion instabilities like "chugging" and "screeching". Screeching isn't really a combustion instability; it's a regenerative acoustic effect, but it can happen by accident (it's always by accident) as you throttle an engine.

The X-15 rocket plane was designed to have a pretty wide throttle range, from about 30% to 100%. But the mission logs of the X-15 program reveal that the XLR99 engine just didn't like to run at low throttle. It wouldn't start reliably at low throttle, and would occasionally just cough and die when throttled back (and the X-15 fell so fast after drop that you didn't get many restart attempts before it was time to start dumping propellant and get ready to land the thing).

But this engine has been run from 8% to 104% throttle. That's pretty amazing to me. 8% is particularly striking - I can't begin to imagine how they do that without employing exotic variable geometry in the nozzle throat (my understanding of de Laval nozzles is that the gas flow rate through the throat must be sufficient to cause sonic choking. How they can keep the flow sonic at 8% throttle without necking down the nozzle is a mystery to me - either that, or the engine is seriously underexpanded at full throttle - or something...)

My point is that this photograph shows off some very advanced rocket science. Whenever I start to feel that modern life has turned into a cornucopia of dung designed to appeal to the least common denominator, I look at pictures like this and think "Man, we really are pretty smart, aren't we?"

Well, I'm not that smart. But I'm smart enough to recognize staggering engineering achievements when I see them, and be cheered up by them.

The Fate of the World...

I accidentally watched an ad for an NFL documentary a few weeks ago. Only now, weeks later, have I calmed down enough to bitch about it.

I'm really tired of professional sports in general, and mostly because they won't just let me enjoy the sporting event for what it is. Instead, they have to try to make me believe that it matters who wins, and I just refuse to believe that. As a result, I am ridiculed. "You aren't a true fan!" Nope. I'm not. I was never really a "fan" in the usual sense of the world, but now, I'm even less of one.

The documentary: "NFL Turning Point" or some such nonsense, and the subject being the turning point when the New York Jets defense "got their swagger back". Maybe there was more to it, but the sheer gall of the line "got their swagger back" made me cough and splutter and almost pass out and I may have missed the larger message, if there really was one.

You know the style of documentary I mean, I'm sure: the narrator with the grave voice, the portentous music, lots of super slo-mo of guys digging down deep, reaching for the last 1%, putting on their game face, or engaging in any of a thousand other dumb sports cliches. Like any of it mattered. Would the Jets get their swagger back? Would the Commies win the Cold War? Would the 5th Guards Tank Army fail to stop the 2nd SS Panzer Korps at Prochorovka? Would all of Western civilization indeed slide right into the crapper???

For the record: I don't actually give a shit if the New York Jets defense has swagger or not. And I really doubt that it makes any difference if they do or not.

I'm not saying that I reject sports because I think it's frivolous. I like lots of things that are totally frivolous - Star Trek, building model airplanes, Mystery Science Theater 3000, canned pork and beans (okay, canned beans may not be frivolous, but they're often rather unwelcome). What moves me to object is when they want me to believe that something that is fundamentally frivolous really matters. Do I care where LeBron James went? Nope. Do I care if the Jets have swagger or not? Nope. Do I care if there's going to be an NBA season or not? Nope. In fact, I increasingly anti-care about such things. Do I care if there's going to be an NBA season or not? No, and I actually sort of hope not. Do I care if there's an NHL or not? Nope, and frankly it would make my life easier if there weren't any hockey games on TV to ignore.

But not because it's frivolous. Because it's frivolousness pretending to be important. If it was just a game again, I might be inclined to enjoy it.

Sometimes the sports fans tell me it matters because "it's a huge business!" Sure it is. But so was IG Farben. My point is that just the fact that the mere fact that something is a huge business doesn't make it right. And on a more libertarian note, I get a little cheesed every time local sports fans think I should pay higher taxes so they can have a professional team in Phoenix. If it's such a huge business, why do the taxpayers always seem to have to pay for everything? Why don't the people with a vested interest in sports - the "true fans", the owners, the players - pay for a new stadium? The county can't afford to fix the potholes in a public road, but we're all supposed to chivvy up so hitherto-frustrated sports fans can have a team?

I think back to the days before the Cardinals came to Arizona, and then I compare them to the days after they came to Arizona. Nope. My penis is still exactly the same size. Can't say it did anything for my swagger, one way or the other.

So then the sports fans say "Well, if you don't like it, don't watch it!" Fair enough. And they don't have to read this either.

New Album

Insomnium has released a new album called One For Sorrow. Every time I look at it, I think "one for the show, two to get ready, three to produce yet another decent melodic death metal album."

It's good. I don't think it's their best work, but it's good. My personal opinion is that they need to turn the "melodic" dial down a hair, and turn the "metal" dial up a hair. And the guitar sound is less pronounced; it has a more compressed and Marshall-y sound than usual - hence the need to adjust up the metal dial a tad. I happen to like the guitar sound on the album Sterling Black Icon by Fragments of Unbecoming. It may or may not be a good album, but I really like their guitar tone, especially on the song "Dear Floating Water." It's kind of thin and edgy, and I like that. (But apparently I'm a colossal hypocrite, because I also like the guitar sound on the Carcass song "Corporeal Jigsore Quandary", and there isn't anything thin about it. It is, in fact, the sound track of the apocalypse.)

But any new Insomnium is better than no new Insomnium, and the album is still worth a listen.

Every band produces a disappointing album at some point in their career. Some bands produce a great many disappointing albums. Some bands are just flat disappointing period. My benchmark for disappointing albums is the extremely disappointing The Great Burrito Extortion Case by Bowling For Soup.

And hey, here's good news: I didn't hear a single pinched harmonic on the entire album. Pinched harmonics, I contend, are to metal what trucker hats are to headgear, and always make me think of crappy 1980s hair "metal" like Bullet Boys or... oh, I can barely type it... Whitesnake...

Total Invasion

I happen to like the Polish metal band Behemoth. They play "blackened death metal", as cognoscenti call it, and it isn't bad. It's considerably more spare than the melodic death metal I usually listen to, but not quite as thin and abraded as classical Norwegian black metal like Darkthrone. It's just good.

The lyrics are generally indecipherable, and that's good, because I'm sure the lyrical message isn't all that savory. Let's see, an extreme metal band that does a song called Lucifer... Gosh, I wonder what it could possibly be about... You don't have to be The Amazing Kreskin to guess what those lyrics are going to be like.

Some of the singing seems to be in Polish. Some of the singing seems to be in some other language. Latin, maybe, or Aramaic, or who knows what. And some of the singing just amounts to roaring and screeching. It reminds me of a classic Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode where they were mocking a song by Motorhead.

"Oh, must they scream so?"

"Because it's rage, dear."

I could go to www.darklyrics.com and find out what the lyrics really are, but I just don't want to. I enjoy metal music, but I don't give much of a hoot for the metal lifestyle, and all that palaver about left-hand paths strikes me as a bunch of weary adolescent rebellion (you want to experience real metal? Try chemotherapy. That's real metal).

I just like the music, and prefer to make up my own lyrics to the songs. For example, the song Total Invasion, a bonus track on Behemoth's album Evangelion. It's a pretty good song, right down the middle of the blackened death metal turnpike that happens to work for me. And I'm sure that the "total invasion" referenced in the title is something evil and diabolical. But since I can't make out what they're saying, I'm free to think it's a total invasion of bathing beauties bearing trays of iced tea and cucumber sandwiches. Oooh, don't mind if I do!

(Postscript: In the Behemoth song Lucifer, there's a long section where someone is chanting in some language unknown to me. Polish? Latin? Klingon? Well, probably not Klingon, but that gives me an idea for my own blackened death metal band... Anyway, at the end of the chanting in that song, the guy says - and I swear I'm not making this up - "Here comes Bogart." So in my mind, the song is no longer about the Foul Deceiver; it's about Humphrey Bogart. It's much more palatable that way.)