Roman Names

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

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

Spurius Flaccus Maximian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whoops

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

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

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

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

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

251

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Epic-who?

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

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

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

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

Cardiology

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

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

Hall of Fame

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

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

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

3 AM Phone Call

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

Variety Plate

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

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

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

So Soon?

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

Thought-Provoking WHAT?

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

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

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

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

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

Naderhotep

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

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

1. Mummies don't make good Presidents.

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

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

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

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

Incentive Pants

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

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

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

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

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

A Warning from the Surgeon-General

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Killing Me!

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

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

Movies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Space Hygiene

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doh.

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe I'm just being an elitist.

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

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

Apocalypto

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Super Tuesday

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

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

Health Update

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

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

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

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

Kinetic Energy

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

Geography

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

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

Doing Some Math

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And thus, I stop doing some math.

Rail Gun

I feel much better now that I've made up my mind about politics. Barring unforseen emotional and/or ethical catastrophes, Barack's got my vote. Now I can think about other things, like this:

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/navy-tests-high-tech-railgun/20080131154909990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001

Good heavens. I'm tempted to ask "why" but I already know why: because they're Guys, and Guys think rail guns are cool. Hell, I'd love to have a rail gun!

The main feature of rail guns is the incredibly high velocity of the projectile. The projectiles are so fast you don't even need to put an explosive in them - when your RV takes a 6mm Lexan projectile up side the head at five kilometers per second, you don't need no stinking explosives; raw kinetic energy gets the job done.

But why? What can a rail gun do that a conventional gun can't?

Here's the main difference. In a conventional gun, you burn some amount of powder in the barrel of the gun, which releases a lot of hot gas that pushes the shell out of the gun. The pressure inside the gun is very high and the impulse on the shell is also quite high. And if you want to make the gun shoot farther, you have to worry that the gas pressure might rupture the gun or cause the shell to collapse in the bore.

A rail gun doesn't subject the projectile to a single momentary impulse. Instead it accelerates the projective smoothly during the entire time it's in the rail. There is no freakishly high gas pressure to deal with, acceleration loading is reduced, and all other things being equal, the rail gun will fire a projectile at a much higher velocity. (In practice, there are problems with rail guns too. The design I'm familiar with works by first vaporizing a thin layer of aluminum on the back of the cylindrical Lexan projectile. This allows the high voltage between the rails to arc over, and then by the immutable laws of electromagnetics, including that three-fingered deal that today looks like some thug shooting a gang sign, the arc sends the projectile off down the rail. But it requires good isolation, good capacitors, good switching, and woe betide the rail gunner who lets a hair or a piece of dust bridge the gap between the rails.) If you want your rail gun to shoot farther, you just charge the batteries longer, so to speak.

My sense is that rail guns may have utility in space where the projectiles are not subject to aerodynamic heating, but that modern guns are already plenty powerful enough for everyday use, thank you very much, and a 155mm howitzer is a considerably tougher and more mobile apparatus than a rail gun.

Who here remembers the old Safeguard ABM system? It consisted of two different missiles, the long-range high-altitude Spartan and the short-range terminal-defense Sprint. Sprint accelerated off the pad at 100+ gees and within a few seconds of flight the nose cone was glowing red hot and the missile itself was completely encased in a sheath of incandescent plasma caused by air resistance. That's what a rail gain would do to its projectiles, especially if someone made a mistake and set it to "11".

I think we can put that down in the "fiscally irresponsible and tactically irrelevant but oh so boss all the same" column.

This is fun!

http://www.darklyrics.com/lyrics/insomnium/abovetheweepingworld.html#9

Tis Official

I've finally decided who I'm going to vote for, and I'll tell you who and why in just a moment.

First off, I don't think Presidents have much control over the economy. The economy tends to be cyclical and there's simply not much any one man can do about it, so I don't really listen to their economic blather. "We need to make more opportunities and celebrate small businesses..." Yeah, yeah, yeah, now what do you really propose? The interlinked global economy has become so complex and has so many variable-gain feedback channels that I'm not sure anyone really understands it, let alone knows how to influence it positively. So honestly, the less the politicians (who are almost always lawyers anyway) say about the economy, the happier I am.

Secondly, it's been my observation that all of the viable candidates (and oh, how it must cheese the D-listers when I use that term) have adopted a policy of staying in Iraq. They differ only in details. So why pay attention to them? Besides, once we've made the decision to stay in Iraq, I'm of the opinion that the guys who should be in charge of the counter-insurgency effort in Iraq and Afghanistan are not the politicians with spray-varnished hair; it should be the majors and colonels in the US Marine Corps who have studied the problem. (Not that I'm insulting the US Army, but since the 1950s the US Army and US Marine Corps have had very different missions. The US Army was equipped and trained to fight the Red Army, a job that clearly required aggressiveness, firepower, and as much shock as could be brought to bear. The US Marines, on the other hand, were often asked to intervene in much less intense conflicts and had to develop proficiency in counter-insurgency and guerilla warfare.)

The politicians love to talk about things they can't really influence. They have no control over the economy, but they like to pretend they do. They've all abdicated responsibility for Iraq, so they stomp around the barnyard like roosters loudly spouting things that don't make any difference. They all have to weigh in on their Kulturkampf hot-button issues, even though it's not up to the President (any President) to enact legislation or deliver Supreme Court verdicts.

And they always go out of their way to remain suspiciously silent on some of the issues that they can (and should) influence. Such as:

1. The shameful neglect of the real central front in the war against terror, Afghanistan. How can we, years after the initial invasion, be reading newspaper accounts about how the Taliban is re-establishing itself?? Did we not defeat them utterly? Oh, no, wait a minute, we didn't defeat them utterly because politicos got in the way... Never mind.

2. The shameful lack of emphasis on moving away from the combustion of fossil fuels for energy. I personally am dubious that wind power can deliver energy in sufficiently large quantities to be worthwhile, but I could be wrong and I'm willing to give wind engineers a chance. But we're stuck with coal and gasoline as the preferred national choices, so no serious work gets done.

3. The shameful Corporate policy of exporting jobs overseas for the sake of "investors" who own pieces of paper that are about as meaningful as Magic: The Gathering playing cards. Or even better, for the sake of the CEOs that purport to run these companies. That is to say, the tax structure that makes that practice not only legal, but tax deductible (to borrow a memorable line from Deal of the Century). The MBAs think this is good clean economic fun, whereas I think it's unpatriotic and about as morally indefensible as war profiteering.


So imagine my shock when I saw this:

http://www.rediff.com/money/2007/aug/16bpo.htm

It's a pretty good article. I especially like the smug self-assurance of some the commentators at the bottom of the piece. But if Barack Obama has said enough things about curbing the exporting of jobs (I refuse to call it globalization) that he's come to the attention of the Indian expatriate press, he gets my vote. He can't fix Iraq, he can't manipulate the economy, and he won't do anything about energy policy, but at least I can support his policy on job exportation. And thus I'll support his candidacy.

Delicious Red

I'm back to my usual diet of basic red wine, better known (though perhaps inaccurately known) as "Delicious Red". I appreciate the fact that the vinyard took the bold step of naming it "delicious" so I wouldn't have to wonder. Had they not taken that step, I might have referred to it as Crappy Red, or Fair Red, or Simply Red.

And I'd rather not do that.

Last weekend I had (rather a lot of) good red wine, stuff that came in actual bottles and bore at least some sense of geographical pride. With Delicious Red, you're never sure where it's from, but these wines were more specific than that. They were all better than Delicious Red, but it's very difficult for me to say why, or in what way.

I don't, you see, know the first thing about the vocabulary and grammar of wine tasting. One of the three wines I had last weekend had a very vivid aftertaste - or was it a finishing note? - but I can't really explain it. Was is redolent of flint and tinder? Or did it sorta remind me of a high-grade hot dog? Did the wine have a tawny nose? Or was pleasantly odiferous in the manner of a freshly unwrapped Slim Jim? Was the early note light and fruity, or was it sort of in the same general flavor class as, say, chicken broth? No. But I can say that all of these red wines were not nearly as sweet as Delicious Red, which has a sweet berry-like finish that brings some manner of red Kool-Aid to mind (and here, one expects a giant anthropomorphic pitcher full of agitated red fluid to come crashing through the wall. Perhaps with a corkscrew; perhaps not).

Admittedly, I have been exposed to very high levels of wine snobbery on TV shows (clearly not shows intended for my consumption, but nevertheless still accessible to cretins such as myself). And while those TV shows generally convince me that speaking of the woody oaken nature of the mid-note of the bottom half of the last third of the swig of such and such a wine is folly, at least I now realize that wine is more diverse than (oh, let's just ride the metaphor all the way to the station) Kool-Aid.

All red Kool-Aids are alike, unless you make a serious mistake and mix in salt instead of sugar (not to belittle anyone, but my brother once made a "kit" cheesecake and used salt in the crust mix instead of sugar. I'll never forget the intense and very strange taste dislocation that caused. I took a bite of the crust and suddenly my throat shouted "IT COULD BE PHOSGENE!" I didn't know what it was. Phosgene, burnt rubber, elastomers, a light dusting of humus. Once I figured out it was salt I was okay, relatively speaking, but for a while it was very unnerving. Julius Caesar to the contrary, I always imagine the Romans to be master poisoners and my first instinct might have been to tighten my toga just a hair, and perhaps to lay off so much Delicious Red before posting.)

What was I talking about? I've been drinking Delicious Red wine and I seem to have lost control of my point. Sometimes I picture my mind as being a bit like a cowboy trying to keep a herd of several hundred head of point headed in the right direction, but not always successfully. Sometimes the trail forks and in the dust and confusion, my tired mental cowboy doesn't realize that half my herd of point has down the fork labelled "You'll Never Have That Thought Again".

I realize that judging wines on the basis of how rowdy the hangover turns out to be is like judging mini-vans on the basis of whether they explode on impact after falling off cliffs or not. It's not supposed to matter. It's not even supposed to be a subject. I sense wine fans everywhere recoiling in histrionic horror at my unseemly intoxication - "Reinhold, he drinks to excess! Fetch me my carriage!" But finer angles be damned: I find that Delicious Red equips me with a formidable hangover. Not as bad as, say, Old Milwaukee, but it's still a pretty burly hangover. If the headache were a primate, it would be at least an orangutan, and a surly one at that. But I note that higher-end red wines were less hateful in that respect. Mainly they just left me desperately thirsty, and the irony of chugging water out of a Kokopelli wine glass because of wine chugged out of a wine glass was not lost on me, but largely ignored by me because it's the sort of hoohah that only seems relevant when it's actually 5:30 AM and you're in the act.

BUT, and there we get to the operative heart of things, the red wine didn't make me ill. I have soft, spongy areas in my memory that probably mean that I probably tried my hand at some Gilbert & Sullivan, but at least there was none of that unsteady Force 8 business in my midsection, the feeling that I'm a fishing trawler full of aging salmon and it can't possibly end well.

Aint red wine great??

A Salmon Of My Own Making

We have three cats, Max, Poopie and Baxter. Max started to show signs of failing about six or eight months ago. He lost a lot of weight and seemed lethargic and unhappy, and it seemed that he was having trouble eating dry cat food. So I switched him to canned cat food, and he quickly settled on Friskies Senior Salmon Meal as his favorite. Oh he loves his salmon, and thanks to a can of salmon a day for months, he's put on a lot of weight and seems a lot happier.

But I wasn't giving any of the other cats salmon, because frankly it's messy and expensive and they can eat dry cat food just fine. But they can smell the salmon. Poopie is normally a pretty vocal cat to begin with, but when she thinks she deserves a bit of salmon, she says "wow" over and over with the monotonous regularity, and almost the volume, of a fire alarm. It's a psychic pressure that I'm unable to endure; I end up giving the cat who doesn't need salmon some salmon just so she'll stop making that noise.

So here's Max eating his salmon on the counter, and Poopie eating her salmon on the floor. Now in comes Baxter, the youngest cat, a healthy and lithe whippersnapper who simply pushes Max out of the way so he can take the greater portion of the salmon. So now I have to ride shotgun over the damn salmon feast to keep Baxter away... And at least twice a week I get salmon oil on my hands so I go to work smelling like a cannery.

Before I go to the store I have to inventory the salmon because almost nothing is as bad as running out of salmon. Seriously. Slamming my head in a car door is not worse than running out of salmon. Zipping a testicle up in my jeans is not worse than running out of salmon. Dropping a pizza face-down on the floor is not worse than running out of salmon. The only thing worse than running out of salmon, I think, would be actually dying.

It's a lot of trouble, frankly. But when I lie down after I get home from work, Max comes and lies on my chest and looks into my eyes and it's like he's saying "Thanks for getting me salmon." And I always think "It's nothing. Enjoy it in good health."

Then he hooks his claws in my surgical scar and makes me scream, but he's like that.

Quick Sick Of That

I'm so sick of the news. I'm sick of all of the news, but as it happens, there are aspects of the news that I find particularly fatiguing.

The Democratic Primaries: Hillary said this, Barak said that, he's touching me, she's looking at me, Bill stole my lollipop. I swear to God if they were kids in the back of my car, I'd be giving them the "Don't make me stop this car" speech. I'm not inclined to vote for any of them, frankly, and if they don't stop acting like adolescents who've been taking in too much sugar, I won't vote for any of them.

The Stock Market: The markets shoot up, the markets shoot down, experts try to tell why I should care if it shoots up or shoots down, and it's all just a charade. For all the real difference any of it makes they might as well be playing Magic: The Gathering and the analysts could breathlessly try to explain to me why tapping a swamp so they can summon a skeleton means that currency exchange rates are out of balance.

Entertainment news: What new low can Amy Winehouse sink to? Or will Britney's new low exceed Amy's new low? I don't care. Honestly, I don't. So stop telling me.

So what's left? Filter out the election news, the stock market news, and the celebrities-circling-the-drain news, what's left? Oh yeah, sports news about increasingly unappealing sports people playing increasingly unappealing sports for the behest of increasingly unappealing corporate interests.

Echo Results

My echocardiogram results are in, and it appears that I'll survive. They didn't see anything alarming, and could only produce a slightly enlarged right ventricle and left atrium as the main diagnostic finding (well, that and the entirely expected minor loss of compliance in the left ventricle).

In honor of this I tripled the distance that I walk at lunch, and I'm going to add five minutes to my exercise time at night.

More importantly, I'm going to declare victory and stop thinking of myself as a fragile, damaged heart attack survivor. One must exercise due caution, of course. I don't want to spring my chest open, after all, and the more weight I lose and the lower I get my cholesterol level, the better off I'll be. But I think it's time to declare victory and move on. There are a great many other things I can worry about instead!

Gaming Update

Well, my conservatorial efforts are complete. I've cleaned, sorted, organized, and stored my games. The games I don't intend to play any time this century have been wrapped in clear plastic leaf bags and put back into storage. Things that I might play this century have been stashed in plastic bins. Things I will definitely play are in a plastic bin in my closet. All the role-playing rules are in one spot, except for all my Tunnels & Trolls adventures, which I'm not convinced are really role-playing.

It's hard to say why I keep some of these games. Flat Top is a good example. I didn't enjoy it the few times I played it. It's fiddly and large and yet incomplete. The package weighs a ton. The ruptured box spews counters like the Amoco Cadiz. I should just throw it away, since it's damaged and incomplete and I don't even like it. But I just can't seem to get within 15 feet of the trash can with it.

Or Fast Patrol Boats. This one I did like, more than I probably should have, and I played it a lot. But now the game (which came shipped in what amounts to a double LP holder) is badly damaged. It got wet at some point, so the album has stuck together and the whole thing smells like mold. But I can't throw it away! Geez!

Well, now everything's halfway organized and sealed in plastic. I guess that's an improvement.

Crickets

I was driving home this evening and happened to catch the sport report on the BBC. I'm always particularly amused by the cricket scores. "Australia is on for 25 for 7 with 19 and 5, crossing 3 with 11 for 143, and 8. Excuse me, the 7 should have been a 6. With 2."

I engage in hyperbole to make a point, of course, which is - what? I don't remember. I actually know how cricket is played and scored, or at least as well as any American can, but still, if the announcers do - not - speak - very - deliberately during the cricket scores they might as well be reading bingo cards. I was once instructed by a pretty good Indian "spinner" on how to bowl properly. Perhaps because of my American upbringing, I apparently lack the suitable tendons and ligaments in my shoulders, for the act of "bowling properly" caused me such pain I emitted a coarse epithet. Complaining bitterly of a sticky wicket and a possible torn rotator cuff, I retreated to the patio for a gin and tonic (and I am not making this up).

There was something I heard on the radio and/or TV today that really did irritate me royally, but somehow the process of getting through the day and managing to remember to get oranges at the grocery store drove the anonymous outrage out of my head. And maybe it's just as well; given my tender state I really don't need the radio to irritate me.

But I'll bet twenty dollars that it had something to do with Glenn Beck.

Squat

It turns out that that is how much I knew about echocardiograms going in: squat.

"It's a painless procedure." Famous last words, for the Marquesa de Sade will spend twenty minutes grinding an ultrasound transducer into the center of your surgical scar, pressing and twisting until you end up with a spiffy bruise and an urge to, in the words of Justin McBride, "kill the shit out of everything."

But at least it's over with. And it's most cool to watch, even though I'm not competent to interpret the results. But how many times in the average day do you get to see your heart valves in action? Or hear the sound of blood moving hither and yon in your various atria and ventricles (ventria?)? During this test, where I could actually hear the phwish-phew-pwish-phew of my blood, there were occasional loud cracking pops. I couldn't decide if I thought they were caused by turbulence at the instant of the heart valves opening, or were artifacts that should have been filtered out by the software. So I asked her if those popping sounds were normal, and she said "Well, I'll tell you, if you didn't hear them, you wouldn't be here to ask."

So I'm confused - if you have a heart attack in a forest, does it make a sound??

Well, now I just have to wait, but I'm still a little flabbergasted by the thought that yesterday I could see my heart doing its thing. I have a hard time believing I have internal organs at all (I guess I assume that all that "stuff" in there is just wadded-up newspaper) but there it was in all of its many-tubed, artery-girded, throbbing, valve-pumping glory. I expected my valves to be fluttery little things, almost delicate, but as it happens they open and close with considerable authority. I hope that's good.

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EchoPandemonioGram

Tomorrow I go in and have my first post-recovery echocardiogram, which amounts of a fairly sophisticated ultrasound of the heart (they can even tell by Doppler analysis which way one's blood is flowing and color it appropriately).

Why does this test make me so anxious? It's not as though it hurts. The hardest part of having an echocardiogram is not giggling when they smear cold tranducer grease on your chest, and there's some cleaning up afterwards before you can put your shirt on. The worst case, if they do a contrast echocardiogram, is that they'll fit me with an IV by which they can introduce contrast medium (dye or frothy saline) into my bloodstream. So there's no risk of pain or injury, no small-but-nonzero chance of a stroke, no cutting and breaking of ribs.

So why does it make me a little anxious? Because I want a good result. I've been through a lot since the heart attack - surgery, drugs, diet, rehab, quitting smoking, exercise - and I want all of that effort to be shown to be worthwhile. I want my heart to be reasonably healthy so I can stop thinking about it all the time, so I don't have to analyze every twinge in my chest and decide if I think I'm having a heart attack or if it was just the tamales acting up. I want to stop being a heart attack and open heart surgery survivor and go back to being the person I used to be (though hopefully a thinner, more fit, nonsmoking version of the person I used to be).

I don't want them to look at my heart and find it enlarged and weak, with a poor ejection fraction and lots of regurgitation and turbulence caused by leaking valves, stricken with cardiomyopathy and about halfway down the road to congestive heart failure. I don't want that. I really don't want that. I want my heart to have shown signs of healing and improvement. I want all the stuff I've been through to mean something. It would suck if I went through all of that and just got worse.

But I don't think I am worse. I don't honestly think my heart is in bad shape, all things considered. At the very least, it's no worse than it was back before last July. But until they actually tell me the results of the test, I'm going to be a little anxious about it. I fully expect to have a good result - but until I actually hear the words, well, I'm going to fret, just a little.

And now, back to my regularly-scheduled BS.

Yikes

People* will say** that I'm liable to build just about any kind of model. Some modelers*** are pretty good at restricting themselves to specific collections. You'll sometimes hear them say "Ah, well, I only build models of US combat aircraft in 1/48th scale with two or more engines from 1929 to 1935." Or "I only build tank models because I'm a tread-head****."

I'm not able to stick to collection restrictions like that. I could build just about anything at any time.

People***** will sometimes say****** that I have a modest interest in the Old West, especially the mythic Old West and not the genuine article with its tuberculosis, bad teeth and short lifespans. So one day when I was leafing through a model catalog and saw that they were offering a 1/16th scale stagecoach model complete with four horses and figures, I said "I think I have to have that."******* The funny thing is that I was looking at a catalog from an outfit that specialized in wooden sailing ship model kits; the stagecoach seemed decidedly out of place.

I ordered it, and after milling around in Postal Limbo for a while (curse that 4th Class Domestic rate!) the box arrived at the Post Office. It made the poor Post Office woman grunt when she picked it up. It was big enough to ship an entirely family in. But I figured the size and weight came from the sailing ship model I'd also ordered; I kept thinking of the stagecoach as being not much larger than the average 1/25th scale truck and trailer kit.

Then I got it home and opened the box and saw what I was dealing with. I'm pretty sure that the stagecoach box is the single largest model box I have ever seen in my life. It's positively epic, and it's actually kind of heavy, which is not something you generally expect out of a model box. It's like ordering Skeletor for your He-Man action figure collection and getting a life-size dude in the mail complete with a personal pan pizza.

Hard to say at this point how the kit looks. Lots of parts. Lots of *big* parts. The horses aren't bad - a trifle generic, but I'll soon transform them utilizing Dr. Frankenstein's Patented Home Surgery Kit. The figures aren't bad, but they'll also pass beneath Dr. Frankenstein's Horrific Buzz-Saw of Plastic Transfiguration********. The rest I can work with. And the interesting aspect of this whole thing is that 1/16th scale is also 120mm, which is a pretty popular scale for figure modeling, and I happen to have a quite large collection of 120mm body parts lying around the place.

Further bulletins as events warrant, though I'll probably move discussion of it to my other blog.*********

* Some of them, anyway

** Go ahead, ask them

*** This footnote was totally gratuitous

**** Their term, not mine

***** Oh god, not again

****** Please stop!

******* Not my exact words, but close enough for a PG blog

******** Permit me to pull up a stool next to that joke and milk it all day

********* Did I hear you say "Thank God"?

Things Best Left Unseen

One thing that having intimations of mortality will do for you is make you look back on the good old days through a golden scrim of warm, fuzzy nostalgia. And since my interests these days lie in the general direction of gaming, I've been having wonderful warm golden fuzzy flashbacks to the glory days of wargaming and... no, wait a second, that's not a warm golden fuzzy memory! That's a horrible memory!

Okay. One thing that having intimations of mortality will do for you is make you look back on the good old days and realize they're full of horror.

Once I decided to drive all the way across Phoenix to get to a particular game store in Gilbert. I've always lived on the far west side of Phoenix, so going to Gilbert almost qualified as a pilgrimage. I wouldn't go there just to sample the tacos, if you take my meaning, and though I can't remember why I went to that game store in Gilbert, it had to be for a pretty serious reason. My personal mythology is that I went all that distance seeking a copy of SPQR, but it's more likely that it had something to do with Traveller supplements or D&D figures.

Anyway, I drove all that way, and when I went into the game store, I found a group of guys playing a game on card tables in the middle of the store. That's pretty common in game stores. Guys are forever playing games on card tables in the middle of game stores, but as I came closer to see what they were playing, my flesh began to crawl.

The guys were in their thirties, faces unshaven and gleaming in a rank sebaceous way, hair limp and coated with what looked like a thin layer of Pennzoil's finest. They were clad in wife-beaters and t-shirts and sweat pants, all of them greasy and smudged, the kind of clothing that you just know will stink up your whole house if left in your clothes hamper for any length of time. They were playing a role-playing game. Most of them were playing the game with the kind of excessive seriousness that only sebaceous thirty-something men can pull off (the only to have fun is to be serious about it, you see) but one guy had blushed to the color of cooked lobster and looked like he was about ready to start beating himself to death with a copy of Russian Campaign.

And for good reason. They were playing - and I shudder to speak it - a Sailor Moon role playing game! See the artwork at the top of this article. That's Sailor Moon. So what would possess thirty-something guys to role-play nubile fourteen year old girls?? It's wrong on so many levels I scarcely know where to have my emotional breakdown.

First, nobody should role-play Sailor Moon. Ever. At all. For any reason. That may sound harsh, but that's my stand.

Second, thirty-something guys in particular should not role-play Sailor Moon.

Third, sebaceous, unshaved guys in dirty clothes shouldn't be role-playing anything. They should be taking showers and laundering their togs.

Anyway, that image continues to corrode my soul to this day. I never even bought what I went there to get in the first place, so horrified was I. I suspect I felt a little bit like a survivor of the Titanic. After all that tragedy, all that horror, all that shipwreck and rescue business, I imagine a lot of them said "Uh, does anyone remember why I was going to New York in the first place? Because I sure as Shinola can't." I think the image of basement-dwellers role-playing Sailor Moon completely drove my mission of out my head and I tottered back out to the parking lot, spent and defeated.

Exercise

One of the things I really miss about rehab is the way they could provide me with all sorts of interesting physiological data afterwards because I was all wired up to an EKG the whole time. They couldn't tell me anything about my VOmax or whatever because I wasn't plumbed for gas, but they could discern all sorts of interesting things just in the EKG data.

When I started exercising on my own, I really missed that fountain of data, especially since the heart rate monitor built into my exercise machine is, shall we say, a trifle declasse. It varies by a good deal depending on whether you're leaning forward or backwards, and depending on which finger you put on the pad, and sometimes it just seems to pick up neutrinos from the sun. There are times when it's picking up someone's heart but it doesn't seem to be mine, which is kind of ominous.

But I remembered that I have a Polar heart rate monitor and I started wearing it while I exercise. It's not as groovy as a strip from an EKG, but it seems to chart my minimum, maximum and average heart rates pretty well, and one of my favorite statistics, heart slow-down time, can be determined by studying the thing. Yesterday I lost 1 beat per second for quite some time, but I don't know if that's good or bad. Better than before, I can tell you that, when I sometimes didn't lose more than two or three beats per hour and had a resting heart rate that was downright frightening.

By the by, I continue to be pleased with my Gazelle. The heart rate monitor doesn't work terribly well (or I don't allow it to work terribly well) but the rest of the machine does work well. The difficulty level seems to drop a bit when the shocks get hot and the oil thins out, but A) I can't be sure if that's really happening or if it's just my legs getting into the swing of things, and B) I don't mind a reduction in difficulty level at around the 15-minute mark. One shock has started to make a soft hydraulic wheezing sound as it goes through its range of motion, but that's it. No squeaking, rattling, loose parts, cracks or anything else.

Dag Nabbit!

I've got five or six games of various sorts heaped up on my nightstand, all of which I intend to play "sometime soon". The problem is, about the time I pick one of them and start to brush up on the rules, the next one down in the heap calls to me, so I pick it up, and then the third one calls to me...

Seriously, the top contender right now is Avalon Hill's rather choice "Gunslinger" game. I have a soft spot for the Old West to start with and the use of cards rather than dice takes the game out of the strict wargame category. I think the combat system is very strange - it's so disorganized I'd swear Richard Hamblen was suffering from a fever dream when he wrote the rules - but once you play it through a few times, you at least get to the point you can work with it and appreciate the rest of the game. It's a fun game to play, and it gets even better when you go the whole Mythic Old West route. "A man's got to make some kind of living..." "Dyin' aint no kind of livin', boy..."

Then I have Great Medieval Battles, or at least half thereof, the Decision Games reissue of the venerable (and very spendy) SPI version. I'm not too interested in Bannockburn, but I am interested in Angorra. Just to look at the units, though, I fear that Sultan Bayazid is liable to lose his turban pretty regularly in this game; Tamerlane brought The Package and outnumbers the Sultan about 2:1 by thumbnail estimate. I thought it was pretty close until I realized those marks on the hillside weren't bushes but more of Tamerlane's units! Cricky, my flank is overflowed! I like the Great Medieval Battles system; I think it has good feel and detail for minimum outlay in cranial smoke, but it's a two-player wargame and not the sort of thing one springs on house guests.

Then there is Car Wars, a late addition because it was hiding in a different box. It can handle as many players as can sit at the table, but obviously the more players you have, the clumsier it gets (imagine 600 people playing one game and you'd have a pretty good scale model of the 101 at rush hour). Car Wars is sort of like Star Fleet Battles: it can be made as complicated as you like. I like the simple early version, myself. We don't need no steenking hoeveorcraft... houvourkraft... heoorvorcarft... Hovercraft, he's saying hovercraft...

And what's this? Boot Hill! Not much of a tabletop game in the usual sense of the word, and kind of disappointing as an RPG, but it's got great bones and deserves to be better.

Then there's SS Panzer, a game that dates from the upper strata of my collection. Why this game appeals to me remains a perpetual mystery, but it does. It's sort of like Across 5 Aprils meets Mein Kampf, or PGG with chit-draw activation, but the system is weird, more like Yahtzee than anything else, though I am perpetually reminded of Risk and/or Kaiser's Battle every time I wonder how many dice I should throw. And those mystery Russian battalions make one question the accuracy of it all, not to mention the fact the game only lasts FOUR turns! (Mostly, one darkly suspects, to factor out the arrival of powerful Soviet reinforcements in the afternoon - heaven forbid the SS should be shown having a hard time, I guess).

But hey, at least they can spell "Leibstandarte". That's sumthin.

And then there's the Task Force classic Prochorovka, described by its creators as a body-slam at the hands of schnapps-breathed geeks. Sounds like fun. I'll have two, please.

Yet curiously, the game I most want to play right now is a game I no longer own: Inkerman, an installment in the Crimean War Quad. Why did I ever sell that? Only the good are sold early.

So a little while ago I was out in the garage doing preservation work on my collection and realized that I was subconsciously building another "to be played soon pile". I knew what it was when I saw that it included Red Star/White Star 2, Mechwar '77, Napoleon's Last Battles and Little Round Top. But NO! Just say NO to more games on the to-be-played-pile! If this madness doesn't stop, I'll wake up one morning and find The Next War, Drang Nach Osten and - oh crap - Campaign for North Africa on my pile. And that game alone is good for about seven and a half years of playing time...

What was my point? I didn't have one. Sue me already.

Cart Wars

I've been going through my collection of old games lately. It's actually much larger than I had originally thought. I offhand estimated it at "fifty or sixty" games, but at last count, it's up to 239 games, and that's without counting about twenty role-playing games (D&D, T&T, DQ, and other cryptic things). The website I use to keep track of my games doesn't consider D&D and other games of its ilk a game, while other RPG websites don't consider my other games games... Can't we all just get along? Apparently not. You got D&D on my PGG!

So I've been going through my collection, partially to inventory it, partially to undertake some simple preservation measures (some of my games, like Atlantic Wall, are worth some fairly serious money) and partially to skim off the groovy games that I'd like to play in the near future. My primary preservation technique consists of shoving things into plastic Ziploc bags and storing the bags in plastic totes. Had I done this five or six years ago, my game collection would be worth a good deal more than it currently is.

But enough sniveling. I didn't get tipsy so I could snivel!

As I was going through my collection, I found things that frankly astonished me, like the game charts and CRT for Prochorovka, printed on a half-sheet of blood red paper and half-eaten by cats (I'm pretty sure it was cats). I've been trying to play Prochorovka again for years and couldn't because I didn't have the CRT, but ask and the flying spaghetti mass (or whatever) will deliver. I thought I'd lost the magic rules for Dragonquest, a rival to D&D, but I found them too! With the critical hit table from the first book tucked into it! A double-score.

One game I've always regretted giving away was Car Wars. It has a strong Mad Max kind of flavor where you haul ass in various kinds of cars and motorcycles and get involved in all sorts of mayhem. Normally most of the mayhem is supposed to come from car-mounted machine guns and the like, but I always liked leaving the shooting irons at home and doing it demolition derby style, bumper-to-bumper and may the best-protected radiator win. But the point is that I really missed that game, but as I was going through the Richthofen's War box, I found my copies of Car Wars, Sunday Drivers, Truck Stop and at least one expansion. Crikey. What's going wrong with my brain? I have such strong memories of having given that game away, but there it is, and I know it's mine because it's got my handwriting in the rules...

So now I have strange delusions of hosting a Horrendous Car Wars Tournament someday. It's one of those games that actually gets more fun with more players, and if you assign an arbitrary limit to complexity, it plays reasonably quickly.

Car Wars suffers notoriously from "Second-System Effect", where the original clean and tidy system was stretched and expanded to the point it was about as comfortable as chain mail underpants. The original Car Wars was great fun. Sunday Drivers was a good expansion, since it was more about the town and pedestrians than the cars. Truck Stop was good because how could one possibly not like crashing through a flimsy roadblock at the wheel of a Mack RD-688? Even without a gravel trailer full of concrete blocks for momentum?? But later expansions got a little goofy when they started to add things as distant from the car motif as hovercraft, helicopters, tanks and the like, and it got so complicated it was less fun than filling out the 1040 long form. By then it was all turrets and heavy weapons and was dangerously close to turning back into Ogre, a game that I half-suspect it was distantly derived from in the first place.

You're welcome, by the way, to insert a mental image of Toki and Skwisgaar trying to pronounce the word "hovercraft" at this point. God knows I did.)

What was I talking about? Oh yeah. I hope to someday get a proper D&D session going, but if that fails, I hope to get a decidedly improper Car Wars session going. If that fails, well, I suspect I'll have another beer and evaluate my options.

Homo Williamensis

I'm thinking of having myself designated an Endangered Species. Can I do that? Do I have the power? I guess I can go ahead and do it; the question is, will anyone honor it? But I think it would have enormous advantages in the long run, being an endangered species. A great many of life's minor annoyances would suddenly turn into potential species-threatening events and my elite team of lawyers would descend on the miscreants like, I don't know, like my cats having a feeding frenzy at the Salmon Bowl.

Consider:

Professional evangelizers appear on my doorstep and ring the doorbell. Alarms go off and Kevlar-clad attorneys descend from the rafters via ropes, shouting "The Endangered Species is taking a nap and waking it suddenly could prove harmful to its health! Now hit the road, Oral, and don't come back."

I go into Taco Bell and order a bean burrito with sour cream. The GBC ("Guy Behind the Counter") says "Why don't you just get a Burrito Supreme; it works out the same." Suddenly my crack staff of nutritionists grab the guy by the collar and say "If the Endangered Species had wanted a Burrito Supreme, it would have ordered one! Now get to pumping the sour cream before we send a chrome-plated subpoena right up your..."

I'm being driven home through heavy traffic, but since I'm in my sound-insulated trailer, I am hardly aware of what's going on. Then, what's that sound? The dull monotonous thumping of pop music?? The radios crackle with commands: "The E.S. is being annoyed by that monotonous thumping; we have permission to fire. Weapons hot!" And a sniper puts a series of bullets through the speakers of the offending car, and peace returns to the Endangered Species Trailer.

The sight of that grim-faced Captain CEO on the Bose TV commercial (you know the one, the one that looks as grave as Teddy Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore as he says "wow") causes me to rise out of my half-sleep, irritated and annoyed at this monstrosity invading my dreams. An elite team of sleep specialists leaps into action. "The Endangered Species is threatening to wake up! Execute Emergency Sleep Plan!" Personal specialists massage my scalp and feet. Someone toasts a cinnamon and brown sugar Pop-Tart to the perfect degree of toastedness. Someone gently wafts cedar incense smoke into the room. Others put on a six-hour Mystery Science Theater compilation and turn the volume down to the perfect level. The Endangered Species drifts back off to sleep while a highly trained Away Team tracks down Captain CEO and, as they say, puts the boots to him "medium-style".

Oh, but I suppose that's all too much to ask for!

Endorsement

I've decided to endorse Bill Richardson for President. Of all the candidates that I've had to suffer through listening to, he's caused me the least suffering and seems the closest generally to what I personally believe. Plus I don't get the feeling from him (as I do from most of the others) that he'd say pretty much anything to get elected, though he very well might. He might even say "I'll get that fish fer yeh, college-boy." I don't know.

But since he's running 93rd in the polls and is about as likely to be elected President as Cord McCoy*, my endorsement can be thought of as a "protest endorsement". But somehow none of the others do much for me - it's a maelstrom of hoarse voices, immacute coifs, gleaming teeth, and insincerity, and I'm tired of them all.

*Cord McCoy, the Amazing Helium-Filled Cowboy: when he talks, he sounds for all the world like he's been inhaling helium.

CAS

Ilyushin Il2m3 Sturmovik

I've always been interested (if "interested" is really by the right word) by close air support operations in World War Two, and especially with two aircraft that were pretty good at it. Everyone did close air support, of course, and most everyone was pretty good at it. Just as the sad-sack German tankers in the Falaise Pocket how effective Royal Air Force Typhoon fighter-bombers were, and USAAF Thunderbolts rained on many a Wehrmacht party.

But only the Soviets and Germans built dedicated close air support machines in the modern sense, aircraft that sported heavy armor and were designed to take the fight to enemy tanks and vehicles at treetop height.

The primary German machine was the Henschel Hs-129, a twin-engined ground attack airplane whose chief defects were that it was not built in large quantity (less than 800 total) and its French-made engines were never terribly reliable. But the Hs-129B2 variant armed with a 30mm MK-101 or MK-103 cannon in a ventral pod proved to be extremely effective. The 30mm gun wasn't so big it prevented the aircraft from carrying its normal MG-151 "secondary guns" and it could even carry 50-kilogram bombs on wing pylons. Later versions replaced the compact-but-effective MK-101 with bigger and less graceful weapons, culminating in the colossal 75mm BK7.5 semi-automatic gun based on the Wehrmacht's 75mm PAK-40 anti-tank gun.

The Soviet equivalent was the Ilyushin Il2 "Sturmovik", an aircraft that enjoys relatively little exposure outside of Russia. Every nation came out of World War Two with an airplane that in some way exemplified its resistance to the Nazis. For the British, the symbol of resistance was the shapely and effective Spitfire, victor of the Battle of Britain. For the Americans, it was the P-51 Mustang, the fighter that took the war all the way to Berlin and broke the back of the Luftwaffe in the great fighter battles of 1944. For the Russians, though, the symbol of resistance was the big, brutish and heavy Sturmovik.

There's not a lot of point in listing specifications, because they aren't that interesting for most people. But the Sturmovik was a pretty effective flying tank, armed with a pair of 23mm cannon or 37mm cannon (depending on the version) and able to drop PTAB anti-tank cluster bombs and carry 82mm or 132mm rockets under its wings. The Soviets ended up building about 36,000 of them during the war, making it one of the most widely produced aircraft of all time. Sturmovik crews suffered horrendous casualties, but in the end, as the Soviets closed in on Berlin, they were led as much by the clouds of snarling Sturmoviks overhead as by the obdurate courage of the Red Army's soldiers.

The Future

So this is the future... Hmm... I think I'm disappointed. Where are the flying cars and the space stations (the round kind) and the women wearing shimmering pink and purple Rayon wigs who would whisper in soft, breathy tones things like "The accessway to Sector Gamma is now closed for de-ionization..."

When I was a kid, say, in 1968, I believed that the future should be spelled The Future. Capitalized, you know, because Big Things were in store. We were going to the moon, we were tackling difficult problems like understanding the nature of base drag and wave drag in hypersonic flight, we were starting to make computers that could actually do things instead of those ENIAC-style things that just sort of sat there and got hot, and there was a sense that The Shit was about to happen. There'd be robots so we wouldn't have to clean our own houses and garages. Manual labor would be a thing of the past. People would, if not actually fly to work, then at least go to work in impossibly quiet and unobtrusive vehicles (the real sturm und drang of transportation would take place at altitudes of 80,000 feet and above, where scramjets would accelerate wedge-shaped lifting bodies out to Mach 15... but I'm digressing)... Diseases would be not just cured, not just eradicated, but destroyed so utterly that whole families of related diseases would die too out of sheer despair. And any day now, any damn day, Allis-Chalmers was going to work the bugs out of the HD-41 super-bulldozer, and then by God watch the dirt fly!

I guess the real future as opposed to The Future is okay. Computers are cool, and I like my X-Box, and who in 1968 would have predicted that top fuel dragsters would exceed 300 miles per hour? And the HD-41 is considered moderately puny by super-dozer standards. And we still have Cheez-Whiz, and we haven't nuked ourselves into a wasteland of ash and ruined dreams. And I have to say my off-pump open-heart surgery was highly successful and MOSTLY free of complications, and that isn't something they could have done in 1968. But still, I can't help but think that the future should have amounted to more than "Twittering" on cell phones and downloading reruns of The Family Guy and - uhoh - blogging.

Still, I suppose I shouldn't complain. Even if all that Major Matt Mason wide-eyed The Future nonsense petered out and died like a gladiola in Death Valley, at least I didn't personally peter out and die like a gladiola in Death Valley.

And please tell me that that's an improvement over what might have been.