Hydraulic-ed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meerkat Madness

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

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

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

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

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

Hi Ho, Hi Ho

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apparently, I Have Problems

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

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

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

What Stays In Vegas

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

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

But that's not why I'm here.

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

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

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

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

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

By The Numbers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baxter!

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

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

Diet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Bad Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

Performin' Artz

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

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

Uncle Fritz

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

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

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

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

Holy Moses!

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

The Blue Max

I've always liked the movie The Blue Max.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morning Rehab

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

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

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

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

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

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

"8 Seconds"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Garbageman

My garbageman is cute!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barbarians

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

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

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

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

Middlebuster

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

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

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

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

Celebrity Bull Riding II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Principles of War

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

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

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

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

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

What does this have to do with anything?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robot Boy

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

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

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

Petraeus Report

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

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

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

So here's my weighty Iraq report:

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

Enough Already!

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

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

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

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

The What River?

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

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

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

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

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

80s Metal

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

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

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

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

The Worst Things Ever

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

1. Whitesnake.

2. Plutonium.

3. Cat poop.

Dubious Metaphysics

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe I ought not to think about it so much.


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

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

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

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

I've Found Him!

I found him! I found him! Doktor Mengele is alive and well and doling out punishment at my local cardiac rehab facility!

Well, okay, so it's not really Doktor Mengele. It's probably his grandson, Todd Mengele.

Oh, it's not that bad; I'm just being histrionic.

But is it just me, or does the fact that my EKG unit has unspecified "technical problems" every four minutes seem suspicious to you? Lemme 'splain. I'm supposed to do some set number of minutes on each exercise machine each time I go. Most of them are pretty easy - I could do the bicycle or the Nu-Stepper pretty much all day. But treadmills and I are not on the best of terms. Whenever I'm on a treadmill I feel like I'm taking part in some strange and potentially dangerous demonstration of plate tectonics. And I'm not really fond of the monotonous crash-crash-crash of my size-14 feet coming down on the belt.

So I'm on the treadmill, and I'm about four minutes into the workout, when all of a sudden there's a hubbub at the monitoring station. "We've lost your signal," they cry, which means either that my EKG unit has quit or I have died. So I stop the treadmill and Todd Mengele comes over and fiddles with my EKG unit. "Maybe it's the wires. Maybe it's the battery. Maybe it's the sideways manipulators." Time passes, and suddenly a huzzah goes up from the monitoring station - I'm back on-line! So the guy says "Well, since you cooled down, you may as well start over and do the whole duration."

Four minutes later, it happens again.

I'm so sure, Todd.

Celebrity Bull Riding

We've taken to watching Ty Murray's Celebrity Bull Riding on CMT lately, and I have to say, I actually enjoy it.

Normally I'm not a fan of reality TV, nor is CMT my usual haunt. Those who know me know that my musical tastes run in the direction of Scandinavian metal, not C&W, and there's little on CMT that would appeal to me (not even the camp appeal of the endless repeats of The Dukes of Hazzard, a show I found amusing when I was in high school but have since outgrown).

But I do like bull riding, and I've been watching the PBR for longer than the average TV fan, and Ty Murray has my respect for toughness, honestly and fair dealing - and for an extremely sly sense of humor that seems absent at first. Honestly, the idea of the poker-faced Ty Murray having a few drinks and riding the plastic cow on top the sign is difficult for me to wrap my mind around, but somehow reassuring all the same.

One problem I had with the show was that I didn't know who most of the celebrities were. I never watched Survivor, so Johnny Fairplay was a complete cypher. I don't watch Ultimate Fighting, so ditto Josh Haynes. Honestly, the only ones I'd ever heard of were Stephen Baldwin, mostly because of his membership in the bold, sprawling Baldwin clan, and the washed-up pop stars Leif Garrett and Vanilla Ice. So to me, it wasn't Celebrity Bull Riding so much as it was "Celebrity" Bull Riding.

Now I confess, when I first heard of the idea I had every expectation that the bulls would make red flapjacks out of the celebrities. Even the best PBR riders are periodically trashed by the bulls, so the inexperienced celebrities? I predicted mayhem. The thought of Lindsey Lohan, Britney Spears, K-Fed, Karl Rove and certain others perched atop bulls like Gnash and Doctor Proctor and Bodacious (now retired and dead, of course, but a man can dream) simply made me smile. At the very least, I wouldn't have to read about them every damn day once the initial surge of horror and macabre curiosity died down.

But as it turns out, some of the celebrities turned out to be pretty decent, and though I still think of them as "celebrities" instead of celebrities, at least I know who they are and what they do. And how could one not enjoy the impromptu performance of Ice Ice Baby on Ty Murray's porch in Stephenville, Texas? Or see the very great difference between Stephen Baldwin and Leif Garrett and come to think that there's something primal and instructive in that? I like to think that if I had been on the show, I would have gone out the way Stephen Baldwin did - physically beaten, maybe, but still trying down to the very end, and not copping a whine from the warm comfort of my bed.

Tiresome Movie

I watched Man on the Moon (or something like that) today, a supposedly grand examination of Andy Kaufman starring Jim Carrey.

What a waste of time. I never thought Andy Kaufman was the least bit funny or even edgy, and I thought the movie was dishonest by showing crowds leaping to their feet for standing ovations or doubled up in laughter over the lamest material imaginable.

If anything, the movie made me appreciate Kaufman even less than before, because it revealed him as a petulant manipulator. I guess we're supposed to accept his petulant manipulativeness as a part of his alleged genius, but I don't buy it. Mostly he comes across as a jerk, and a decidedly unfunny one at that. Ty Murray is funnier than Andy Kaufman, for crying out loud!

Not how I wanted to spend an hour and a half of my Saturday.

When In Rome

I thought I would post something halfway educational today, as opposed to my usual palaver.

I do this not out of a sense of pedagogical duty, but mostly because I'm waiting for the rice to finish cooking and I can't really do anything food-wise until the rice cooker makes it characteristic klunk-twing sound.

Let's look at Roman names for a moment. We see that most Roman men had three and sometimes four names, but we'll just deal with three. And let's take a very famous example: Gaius Julius Caesar. What are these various name fragments all about? Without clouding the issue with a bunch of technical Latin like pranomen and cognomen, we'll say the three name fragments correspond to the private name, the tribe, and the nickname.

Here, Gaius is the man's private name, a name likely to used only by his mother, closest friends, and wife. Anyone else using it would be in danger of being altogether too chummy - it's like when a guy in an elevator calls you son; you feel yourself bristle because he's invading your nomological space.

Julius, in this case, is the tribal name, equivalent to the last name in modern America if you accept the proviso that the last name represents some kind of now-lost tribal affiliation. The Smith tribe, if you like.

But there weren't all that many tribal names in Rome, so it was possible, and perhaps even probable, that in any batch of 100 random citizens you'd have more than one Julius or more than one Pompey. And since the son almost always took the private name of his father, well, you're guaranteed to have at least people going by the same name. Since if you can't use the private name to distinguish them, what do you do?

You resort to the nickname, the third fragment of the name, which often expresses something about the individual. Caesar, for example, means "curly-haired" or just plain "hairy". Pulcher means "beautiful". Crassus means "fat". One of my favorites is Cicero, which bizarrely enough means "chick pea" (and I can't begin to imagine what about the famous orator and senator reminded anyone of a chick pea).

So if one wanted to hail Gaius Julius Caesar in a crowd, you'd shout out "Hey, hairy man of the Julius tribe!', or, in Latin, "Heyus, Julius Caesar!"

Note that Caesar never meant emperor or principate. It just meant "curly-haired" or, perhaps, "hairy". So when someone later on referred to himself as Caesar, it was to simply to wrap himself in the glory of C. Julius Caesar, whether he had hair or not. (Confusingly enough, the Roman often abbreviated the private name in inscriptions, but for Gaius they used C. instead of G. I have no idea why, except maybe that C. is easier to carve into stone than G. But I'm just guessing.)

Let's pretend that a particular President became hugely popular, so popular that his very name came to stand as a label for perceived effectiveness or greatness. You'd hear people shouting "Hey, I'm the Truman of this meeting, so you all sit down and shut up!" Or politicians would run for Roosevelt - "I'm by far the most qualified candidate for Roosevelt, so give me your votes before I burn your damn huts down."

The situation for Roman women was both simpler and more complicated. They only had one name, and it was almost always the feminized version of the father's private name. C. Julius Caesar's daughter, for example, was named Julia (generally speaking, if the name ends in an "a", it's in the feminine or diminutive form).

But what happens of the man has more than one daughter? Since they're all supposed to be named after the father, how do you conduct orderly household affairs when you've got for daughters all named Julia? Here you give them unofficial nicknames, unlike the "official" nicknames given to men. And they're much more prosasic. First Julia, Little Julia, Big Julia, that sort of thing.

Oh, it must have been grand to be a woman in ancient Rome. "Hey, Big Julia, get over here, C. Julius the Hairy wants to talk to you."

And one final thought: the word Caesar is not pronounced the way we pronounce it. It is pronounced the way the Germans pronounce it: Kaiser.

Ready for the Apocalypse

I've just cleaned the litter box and scrubbed and mopped the floor.

As far as I'm concerned, the Apocalypse cannot come quickly enough.

Still, there's something wonderfully humbling about cleaning the litter box. We humans strut around with our fancy cerebral cortexes and language skills and abstrast reasoning, imagining that we're the apex of evolution or the pinnacle of God's design, whichever way you want to view it, but either way, we're hot stuff. We can reason! Yeah! We can design things! Yeah! We can create lovely music out of nothing! Yeah!

And then, all of a sudden, we're on our hands and knees scrubbing cat poop off the floor of the laundry room, cleaning up after animals who don't give a wet slap for abstract reasoning, music, or much of anything else except for stealing the last iota of what passes for my dignity.

What's In A Name?

As an aspiring novelist, I spend a lot of time working on critical aspiring-novelist skills. And by that, I mean I spend a lot of time thinking about how I want my name to look on the dust cover of the imagined book.

It goes without saying that I don't want my real name on the dust cover. For one thing, my name consists of two words of similar length and is desperately devoid of hard consonants. It sounds like the kind of name you'd associate with French literature, not the hard-hitting but suavely smooth name you'd associate with modern American crap... I mean, fiction. And for another thing, if I wrote any sex scenes, I'm not sure I'd want my family and neighbors to trace them back to me. I dread the phone calls like "I liked the novel a lot, but don't you think the line spank me you crazy Visigoth was just a little over the top?"

In picking names, it seems to me that there is much room for error. It would be a mistake, for example, to adopt the name William Jefferson Clinton, because I could reasonably expect broad-shouldered mooks from the Clinton Presidential Library to show up to sort me out with meat tenderizers and tommy-gats. It would be a mistake for me to adop the name Burl Ives, because some people would expect me to sing, some people would expect me to be dead, and some people would get me confused with skin rashes ("I'm sorry, but I can't come to the cotillion; I've come out with a nasty case of Burl Ives!"). If I adopted the name Rupert Grint, people would arrive at startlingly inaccurate estimates of my age, and I would go through my literary life sounding like a wrestling move ("Soulfly is putting a Grint on Savage; mother of God have you ever seen anything so beautiful!")

So what's a writer to do? Obviously I need to pick a name that suggests action and decisiveness, but not at the expense of human warmth. Something with a pleasing combination of hard and soft consonants so there's something for everyone.

How about - Rocky Shaft?

Yeah!

Last Supper

I recently found out, mostly through a process of trial and error, that the last meal I ate before having my heart attack was generic "beef pasta" flavor hamburger helper. Aint that the beans? You always think your final meal will be something memorable - Beef Wellington served in Sigourney Weaver's limousine, perhaps - and instead it turns out to a box of two-for-a-dollar hamburger helper scarfed down in front of the TV, and not even the name brand, just the generic store brand.

It's like going in front of the firing squad and finding that your last cigarette was a Merit, one of those non-cigarette things that smells like burning socks. Come on, guys, make it a Marlboro 100 and snap the filter off, would you? I can take it.

The Stand

I've been rereading The Stand of late, the full and uncut version. I can't decide if that makes it sound like tobacco or a male porn star. I guess I shouldn't even say "rereading", since I first read it Way Back When (early 1980s) and I remember basically bubkes about it.

It's a beefy book. As Professor Noble would say, it's a "stout read". My wife was going to throw the book at me for some imaginary transgression before she realized that the book boasted actual poundage and would likely have killed me on impact. And that's the paperback. I imagine one could use the hardcover for a wide range of things. You could throw it in your trunk to serve as ballast on snowy days. You could attach a bench vise to it. You could use it to hold down Lineoleum until the glue grips. You could use it to tamp the fill in a major highway construction project.

I'm prone to a certain pattern when it comes to reading in bed. At first I'm alert and attentive, then I start to drift, then I'm just looking at the words because I'm actually asleep even though I'm still holding the book. Sometimes the book falls out of my nerveless hand. Today The Stand fell out of my nerveless hand and landed on my sternum, which since the surgery isn't very happy with having large heavy books land on it.

Most of the time the books don't fall on me, and instead of being jolted awake, I drift off into blessed slumber, where I usually roll on top of the book and crease it horribly. And the dreams start.

The other day I dreamed that I had killed, butchered and eaten The Stand. I can't remember if it was tasty, but I'll bet it was plenty filling.

Plastic

Anyone who's read much of my blog in recents weeks will know that I've quit smoking, and I continue to be off cigarettes. But that's not what I really wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about the things that make me want cigarettes, the situations that seem to trigger the cigarette urge.

I've mastered most of them. One of the hardest in the early days was the coffee trigger. I'd get a cup of coffee and sit down and the urge to smoke would swarm over me, because coffee and cigarettes are two of the main food groups or something. Another toughie was the red light urge, which happens when you're driving and you hit a red light and the next natural move is to light a cigarette, I guess to keep your hands busy. This one hasn't been too bad because I didn't drive for six weeks, and when I started driving again, I'd already defeated the physiological craving.

But there's one that I still haven't quite mastered. If I go out to my workshop and sit down at my workbench, within about five minutes I'm having a full-blown nicotine fit. Every time. It's the weirdest thing. I don't think it's a case of having old nicotine on my tools or bench. I don't smell smoke or old ash trays. I just sit there, fiddle with my latest model (or would-be model, in this case) and my hand sneaks up to my shirt pocket and fumbles for a cigarette that isn't there, and it does it over and over. Somehow sitting at my workbench and smoking have become very closely interwoven.

I hope this isn't a permanent condition, because I really do like building models, but if working on a model is going to make me long for a Marlboro 100, it might be time to find a different hobby.

Anyone up for petroglyphs?

Mama Mia!

Why do I have this craving for Italian food? What kind of Italian food should I have? And where should I have it?

I have a "Lean Cuisine" spaghetti dinner in the freezer and maybe it'll suffice. They usually aren't too bad, though they almost always need additional garlic and salt. But somehow they just don't give me the same feeling that I get when I look down at an immense plate of spaghetti with a fork in one hand and a spoon in the other.

Sigh... I'm guessing my bowl of corn flakes didn't satisfy my hunger this morning.

Decimation

I was reading something the other day - it doesn't matter what, because this error is quite widespread - where the author said that a group of people had been "decimated" when he really meant "annihilated."

Decimation has a terrible reputation. "They were decimated! Oh, how horrible!" But it really means nothing more than the loss of one thing in ten. Think, folks! Think about that "deci" business! If you have ten trees in your front yard and you cut down one, you've decimated your front yard. The word actually comes from a disciplinary technique used in the Roman army, where every tenth man in a military unit would be executed if the unit had dishonored itself in certain specific ways.

Not that I want any group of people I'm in to suffer decimation, by any means, nor am I arguing that we should he happy with decimation because it only represents a 10% casualty rate.

But I do wish people would stop saying "decimation" when they mean something else. It's like going into a restaurant and asking for "tire tread" when you really want "spaghetti".

Stress Test Redux

I haven't heard anything from my cardiologist about the results of my stress test, which is actually a good thing. They never call to say "Healthy! You bet, you bet!" (Can you tell that I watch "Doctor-ology"?)

But there's something about stress test that, in retrospect, annoys me just a little.

They wanted me to stop taking my blood pressure medication about two days in advance of the test, so I quit taking the metoprolol. Then I go in to take the test, and they snivel at me because my blood pressure is high! What did they expect? Do they think I take blood pressure medication because I enjoy swallowing small expensive pink things? So they decided to give me nitroglycerine to regulate my blood pressure, so the rest of the day I had the familiar and quite unpleasant nitro headache (which feels like having a very large hose clamp tightened around one's head, by the way).*

Would it not have been easier to just keep taking the metoprolol?

But for what it's worth, as long as I'm on metoprolol, my blood pressure continues to be very low and very well regulated.

Now I get to deal with a more serious stress test. I'm cleared to start working on September 4th, and I know I could start working now as long as I didn't have to lift much. This means that I have to start looking for a job, and though I have connections and insiders willing to help, nobody likes going through interviews. The prospect of starting a new job doesn't bother me; I have sturdy faith in my competence. It's the interview that worries me, but at least I have a good answer when they ask me "How come you haven't worked for two months?"

*Not to go off on nitroglycerine, but it seems to me to be very a "devil and the deep blue sea" situation. Angina, or a headache? Tough choice. Can't I just have a cramp in my foot instead? Or better yet, a cramp in Frank Zappa's foot? (Yes, I know he's dead, and that means he won't mind the foot cramp.)

Pull Cord

I made an interesting discovery the other day - I have a tiny, delicate little suture hanging out of my chest. I thought it was a hardened sniglet of super glue left over from my surgery, but finally the glue fell off and there it was, this tiny knot. I talked to my cardiologist's office and all they said was "Leave it alone; it'll come out on its own." Unable to actually leave it alone, I managed to grasp it between my fingernails (no easy feat) and managed to pull it out to a distance of almost an inch before I chickened out and let go. It retracted smoothly into my body until just the knot was visible, and that's when it struck me.

It's not a suture at all; it's a pull-cord!

I wonder what I'll say if someone pulls my string and lets it go. ZIP-"Math is hard!" ZIP-"Skipper! Look out for that tree!" ZIP-"By the power of Grayskull!" Knowing me, it'll be a few bars of the "Manomanah dah-dee-dah-dee-dee" song. And I'm absolutely positive that everyone who reads this knows exactly what song I'm talking about!

I also have another piece of much heavier string hanging out of my leg, out of the uppermost of the three incisions they made to harvest veins. It's thicker and almost looks like a drain tube, and it also hurts when I pull on it, so it's probably not a pull-cord in the traditional sense of the word.

Stress Test

I go in for a nice stress test today at Boswell. I'm not sure what I want the outcome to be. There's a part of me that wants the doctors to say "Get out of the office, you healthy bastard, and go have a normal life." But there's another part of me that wants the doctors to say "We found some slight abnormalities and we need to monitor you monthly just in case."

The urge to be an independent monolith versus the crawly late-night anxiety of having had open-heart surgery...

Morphing

It's a good thing morphine is a prescription drug, because morphine became my friend when I was in the hospital.

A lot of people I know seem to have problems with morphine, or at least say that morphine doesn't do anything for them, and I think that's a pity because I personally found morphine to be a tremendous boon. I wasn't sure what it would feel like, never having had it before, but what it did for me was make me feel warm, safe, happy and sleepy.

During my night in telemetry, the nurse came in to see if I needed pain medication. I hurt, so I said sure, hit me with some Percocet. When he brought me the pills, he said I could have morphine if I wanted it; it wasn't any particular sweat on his brow. So I said sure, hit me with the narcotics.

Soon I was sitting up in my chair, warm and peaceful, leaning slightly to the right and drooling, and it was groovy to be sitting up, leaning slightly to the right, and drooling. Oh yes.

There are really two things I miss about the hospital. The first is the way that being in the ICU places you firmly in the center of the universe. It's a comfort to know that all those people - doctors, surgeons, nurses, therapists, visitors - are there to make sure that nothing bad happens to you. Mind you, it's not comfortable being in the hospital and I never developed much gusto for urinating into plastic jugs, among other things, but as long as you're in the hospital, it's nice to know the whole organization is determined to make you healthy. The other thing I miss about the hospital is sitting up in my chair, leaning slightly to the right, and drooling, man. Oh yes.

Blood Pressure

For most of my adult life my blood pressure had been on the high side. I don't know how high, exactly, but high, on the order of 160 over 100, that sort of thing. But since quitting smoking and going on metoprolol, my blood pressure is now about 120 over 70, as measured by the automatic blood pressure measurement stations in Safeway, Walgreens and Target. My cardiologist was initially a little worried that my blood pressure might slip a little too low, especially since she prescribed an additional pill for my consuming pleasure, an ace inhibitor that reduces blood pressure and helps damaged heart tissue heal. The threat of having blood pressure that is too low is new to me - it's about as alien to me as the prospect of being pregnant.

So at this point, I haven't smoked in a month, I haven't had a cup of regular coffee in a month, and my blood pressure is just about right. How do I feel?

1. I haven't had a headache since the heart attack. Not a single one, and I was renowned for having headaches virtually every day. This is a major boon, believe me, and the savings in Excedrin alone are not to be ridiculed.

2. Normally I suffered from Restless Legs Syndrome at least every other night, and often every night, and usually bad enough that I either couldn't get to sleep, or was awakened after sleeping for half an hour. My RLS hasn't entirely gone away, but I can report that I've had only one episode in the last month. It was a doozy, sure, but it was still just one episode, and I think it was triggered by Tylenol PM.

3. I used to keep an over-the-counter asthma inhaler handy because taking a shower usually caused my lungs to tighten up to the point that breathing became difficult and uncomfortable. So I'd take my shower, take a honk on my "air thing", as I called it, and then have an Alka-Seltzer to wash the residual "air thing juice" down, which if not washed down with a bunch of sodium bicarb caused me fairly serious heartburn. But I haven't had to use my "air thing" since the surgery. Not even once.

4. I used to feel my pulse pounding in my head. Now I don't.

5. I used to feel my heart misfire several times a day. I think these are called PVCs, little breaks in the normal sinus rhythm of the heart, that in my case anyway are perfectly perceptible without instruments, because I can feel the lurch in my chest when it happens (and when it happens three or four times in a row, the sensation is uncannily like having a mouse trapped inside your chest). I've been paying attention to these PVCs or minor arrythmias because I read that they can hint at deeper pathology, and thus far I have to say I haven't had PVC one since the second day after surgery. I remember feeling the PVC in the ICU and looking up at the monitor and actually seeing it, which was kind of eerie, but I haven't had one since. And remember, in the old days, I had them three or four times a day.

So, no headaches, a sharp reduction in the severity of RLS, apparently no PVCs, no pulse pounding in my head, and no need for the old inhaler. Is this the result of properly managed blood pressure? Smoking cessation? Elimination of caffeine? Cool drugs like Plavix and metoprolol and ACE inhibitors? Restoration of coronary blood flow?

I don't know, but I feel so much better I almost wish I had had my heart attack ten years ago.

Has It Been A Month?

Has it really been a month since all this started? Apparently so! I can now drive again. Yay! Not being able to drive isn't the worst thing that's ever happened to me, but it's not exactly a picnic either because "going for a drive" was often my final answer to boredom. Either that or running down to the store to get a roll of paper towels, just for something to do.

Sometimes it seems that I'm never getting better, especially first thing in the morning. But I am. I swam for some hours today, and though none of that swimming was vigorous, I was in the pool for a long time without getting too bunged up. I was a little sore, sure, and I had to take a Vicodin, but compared to my level of physical competence a mere two weeks ago, I might as well have been Conan.

Things get easier, a little at a time. My shoulders don't really hurt any more, and I think I'm down to only one major pulled muscle in my neck. If I overdo things my sternum hurts, something halfway between an ache and a burn. But when I first got home, three weeks ago, I couldn't do anything at all. Just sitting up in bed was a struggle.

Boy, it's all about me, isn't it? I read something on "the Internets" a while back about how blogs were all crap because they were all about their authors. I think I remember the phrase "navel-diddling" being tossed around, which I took to mean that the author of that screed was pissed off because nobody was talking about him. My point is that I'm going to continue talking about my surgery and recovery for as long as I feel like doing it, because I strongly believe all of this to be a life-changing event.

A full month without cigarettes! Crikey!