Filler

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

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

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

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

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

But at least I've already got the welder.

McHugo's Navy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Atom Smasher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The End Of The World Angle

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

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

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

Cease'n'Desist, Fer Cryingout Loud

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arrrrr!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yarrr!

Literary Interview

I watched a biography of Stephen King on the Biography Channel (of all places) and was really struck by how fundamentally normal he was. Mind you, he's rich as Croesus and as one of the most fabulously successful writers of all time, he can do things that to us ordinary mortals would seem like magic. But strip away his money and success and he comes across as normal, perhaps even a bit dweebish. The biography did leave out certain less than appealing phases in his life, but that's okay - everyone has moments in their life that they aren't terribly proud of, and what's the point of dwelling on them? I used to have a mullet haircut, for example, an abomination that I am only too glad was not photographed in the wild. I would feel awful if my life ended up on the Biography Channel and I had to hear Peter Graves say something like "The mid-Eighties were dominated by hockey hair and cheap beer, desperate cries for help that were answered by..."

Best to leave such insalubriousness alone.

But even so, the normalcy of Stephen King's life seems strange. We seem to expect, perhaps even need, for him to be weird and unsettling. How could he write things like "The Mist" and "The Mangler" and not be weird and settling? So I imagined an interview with Stephen King as carried out by Lorna Doon, cub reporter for the Wittmann Windbreaker, a free newspaper whose masthead reads "Ripping good news or triple your money back!"

Thank you, Mr. King, for agreeing to meet with me.

Not a problem, and call me Steve.

Thank you, Steve. You know, as I was ringing your doorbell, I couldn't help but notice that terrible steel blade leaning against the wall. That was the blade of the guillotine that was used to decapitate Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, if I'm not mistaken, and it doubtless keens in the night as it remembers its bath in blood --

No, actually, that's my new snow shovel. I already had a good one, but Tractor Supply Company had them on sale, so I bought another one. I left it there because they're predicting snow in a week and this way I won't have to clump around to the shed to get a shovel.

Um. I see. A snow shovel... Well, what about that urn by the door; that's quite striking. Tell me, does it contain the still-living guts of a five thousand year old Sumerian priest-king? Do the guts writhe and churn with ceaseless hatred toward all those who walk the Earth? Do they --

We got that at Crate & Barrel, I think. We used to put dried flowers in the vase, but the cats keeps tearing them up, so we stopped. Shouldn't you be, um, more interested in my writing technique, or my insight as a author?

Yes, precisely. Let's talk about how you get ideas for your stories. It's said that you have a scriptorium under the house, a vile debauched library where you consult scrolls inked in blood on human skin where the blackest and most vile blasphemies are --

Actually, that's my library over there. Those bookcases.

That large book, that must surely be the handwritten diary of a Nazi concentration camp commandant, written on tanned skin torn from a Jewish inmate! Surely it must be full of the most perverse and twisted occult rites where the Nazis sought union with Wotan, the War-Father, to --

Farmer's Almanac.

What?

It's a Farmer's Almanac, published in 1903. I bought it at an antique store.

And doubtless it describes the black paleo-pagan harvest rituals used in fin de siecle New England, where dour farmers ritually crucify young women so that their cries of anguish would enrich and protect the harvest through the shedding of innocent blood --

I think it actually predicted a wetter-than-usual spring.

Floods? Tidal waves? Torrents of endless rain that drive men mad, that drive them to take up axes in sweaty, twitching and --

A wetter than usual spring for 1904.

All right, all right. Let's talk about your office, where you write. It must be below, yes, down in the cellar, the basement, the crypt, in the dank and damp realms of the earth --

It's right there. That desk. That's where I write. Under the kitten calendar.

Well let's talk about your cellar anyway. The the Unholy of Unholies. What's down there, really? Bodies stacked like cordwood? Egyptian sarcophagi looted from the Valley of the Kings, still redolent of pitch and natron? A heart in a jar! Robert Bloch's heart in a jar!

Actually, there isn't much down there except the storm shutters, some sleds, and my fishing gear. Maybe some reserve toilet paper and a box of Christmas ornaments.

Fishing gear, stainless steel treble hooks the size of pine cones that you use in your attempts to capture Neptron, who swims the icy depths hungering for human blood even as his dim consciousness tries to convince him that not all people are bad; what the high school kids did to him on that terrible night with the broom handle and the overhead projector and the can of refried beans, that not all people are like that and he doesn't need to kill them all, all --

Actually I don't fish much. The fishing gear is just protective coloration so people don't think I'm weird for just sitting on the lakeside and watching the clouds go by.

Yes, outside, the great outdoors, beneath the hard pitiless stars, where beyond angled space blind twisted entities gnaw at the stuff of of the universe, where unseeing and uncaring alien creatures and principalities go about their rounds in supreme indifference to us and our terrible fate, ants, mere ants, derelict and void beneath the pitiless stars --

Actually, most days I'm in bed by eight PM; I don't stay up very late these days.

Oh come on, Steve, I mean, make with the horror! Isn't there anything horrible around here? Anything at all?? Not even pig's knuckles??

Well, I could show you my MC Hammer phat pants, if that would help.

It's a start...

Why Headaches?

Why do people get headaches? What do they mean? Every time I've ever asked a doctor about headaches, I get the answer "Eh..." Maybe not that literal answer, but that's what they mean.

I rarely get headaches these days. Between stopping smoking, controlling my blood pressure and cutting back on coffee, most of my headaches have gone away, and if they do hang around, they're more annoying than anything - kind of like trying to watch a Star Trek marathon, after the sixth episode or so, it starts to get a bit much and you wish it would just go away.

Except tonight. I think it's a voodoo thing; someone is industriously working a quarter-inch drill bit into a voodoo doll of me, drilling through my skull just above my left ear. Why? What did I do to deserve this? Something heinous in a previous life? Something heinous in THIS life?

Oh well. It'll go away, as soon as whoever it is stops drilling. And even though it hurts, it's still better than reading mass emails about how Barack Obama is the Antichrist as predicted by the Book of Revelation.

The Five Million Dollar Saint

It's customary in most religious traditions that a person is not elevated to sainthood until they can semi-plausibly claim to have performed a genuine miracle or two, or until they've lived a long, hard, miracle-free but nevertheless entirely meritorious life of service.

This is why the ascension of Saint Justin is such a bummer, because he hasn't performed any miracles, and my tractor is older than he is, but there he is, the stiff-lipped patron saint of bull riding, looking on on the masses and probably wishing he hadn't threatened to "kill the shit out of everything".

You know me, I don't like to complain. Not me, no! The Professional Bull Riders and the Versus network have always made a fetish out of Justin McBride, apparently according to the ancient TV dictum "winners = ratings". But their performance in the first night coverage of the Grand Rapids event exceeded their already high standards of biased reporting and backwoods hagiography - they'd have claimed he was the son of God if they thought it would help him cross that magical five million dollar threshold.

Let me explain that. As of the event televised yesterday, McBride was within a few dollars of exceeding five million dollars in total earnings. My complaint isn't that he doesn't deserve the money - as far as I'm concerned, McBride earned it all the hard way, by riding bulls. I don't personally like McBride all that much, but I'm not prepared to say he's an untalented hack, because he isn't. Nor am I irked because there's too much money in the PBR these days - though I suspect that at the rate the money is escalating, before too long we'll be sainting cowboys for exceeding ten million in lifetime earnings.

You'd think that Justin McBride was being considered for Pope the way the Versus crew carried on. Justin this, Justin that, it turned into a kind of false, saccharine hagiography that was literally nauseating. My wife left the room; I muted the sound and read a book. We never got a chance to see at least a third of the bull riders because Versus decided that we needed to hear Craig Hummer gush about Justin McBride instead. When Guilherme Marchi broke the record for the number of single-season rides, the Versus crew seemed actually started (all but Ty Murray) - "What?? You mean someone other than Justin McBride accomplished something?? No! False teachings! Heresy!"

It's really gotten ridiculous. It's gone past hero worship. It's gone past relentless promotion of a very popular commercial commodity. It's gone beyond ratings. It's hagiography, pure and simple, and it's disgusting.

I wish to make a prediction. The PBR and Versus don't like Guilherme Marchi, the man who is likely to win the world championship this year, because he isn't fluent in English and isn't likely to translate into huge ratings. He's photogenic, but he doesn't have the swashbuckling charm of Adriano Moraes or the English fluency of Mike White or Justin McBride. So they're going to find a way to get Justin McBride into a position to challenge for the world champion by whatever means necessary. You wait, they'll give him a bonus of three thousand points for "lifetime achievement" or "multiplying loaves" just so he can compete for the world title, just so they can get high ratings, just so they can make money, just so Craig Hummer can have a journalistic orgasm over the whole thing.

And I wish to make an observation: there are alternatives to the PBR, and I've never yet seen anything even remotely approaching this level of foolishness in the PRCA.

The Most Confusing Thing Ever

I've found the most confusing thing ever. Ever.

I used to think string theory was kind of confusing, what with its Calabi-Yau manifolds and 10-to-the-bazillionth tweakable parameters and left-hand and right-hand winding. I used to think biology was confusing, what with its adenosine triphosphate and Krebs Cycle and base pairs.

But holy cow, nothing, I mean nothing, compares to the struggle for Roman succession roundabouts 306 AD, a Charleton Heston-style madhouse involving (as near as I can tell) Diocletian, Maximian, Maxentius, Constantius, Severus, Galerius, Constantine, Maximinius... Oh hell, why not, let's have Severus Snape and Albus Dumbledore put in appearances, shall we? It can't get much worse. At one point I'm pretty sure five men believed they were emperor, and I couldn't say that any of their claims were any more right (or any more wrong) than anyone else's.

I've tried attacking this problem in various ways. I tried reading about it in Michael Grant's biography of Constantine, which failed because Michael Grant readily confuses me. I tried again in Michael Grant's collection of emperor biographies, and failed. I tried various on-line resources. I tried the Essential Histories. I tried a lecture I have on videotape. It still doesn't make any sense. It's the most confusing and in many ways frustrating piece of history I've ever blundered into, and maybe the most confusing thing ever.

What really cheeses me is that out of all this madness comes a fairly simple reality - Constantine the Great - but I can't trace the historical thread. Meps!

It's a madhouse! A madhouse!

But the carpet looks a lot better. I spent most of my carpet-cleaning time thinking about this Roman matter, which is how it came to be on my blog. I didn't figure out anything about Rome, but the floor looks ever so much better.

Vires quod virtus

I'm going to need it, because it's time to dig out the carpet cleaner.

Soon enough I'm going to tear the carpet out entirely, but until I reach that point, I have to do something about the carpet.

Vires quod virtus.

How come everything sounds more meaningful to me if it's in Latin? In a way it's like being drunk. When I'm drunk, everything I think seems more profound. When I read, everything in Latin seems more profound. And Latin isn't even the root language of English! That would be some species of old Anglo-Saxon, though there are plenty of Latin words in English. How come it doesn't sound nearly as profound in Old English or Anglo-Saxon as it does in Latin??

One of my favorite examples of Anglo-Saxon versus Latin is the word "window". In everyday conversion, we say "I threw that yahoo out the window!" That's Anglo-Saxon. But in a court of law, we'd say "I was forced to defenestrate the plantiff." That's Latin.

Or horse stuff. We "equestrian sports". That's high Latin. We have "cavalry". That's descended from vulgate Latin. We have "horses". That's derived from Anglo-Saxon. Three words that all refer (more or less) to the same thing, but they come from three different languages! Man I love English!

None of which has served to do a thing about the carpet, so off I go.

Vires quod virtus.

Evanescence

Whenever someone (or even a cat) dies around me, I dwell for a while on the evanescence of it all. We're born, we live, and then we're gone. There may or may not be something after this life, but for those who remain behind, we the departed are remembered for what we did and how we acted.

So something dies and I think "I want to have a greater impact. I want people to remember me, and generally fondly. I need to treat people better. I need to be a better person. I need to live a more meaningful life."

Until a week later, when I blurt "Man, this living meaningfully stuff is HARD; can't I just take a nap instead?"

* * * *

I'm noticing a pattern at work. Any time anything heavy needs to be moved, or someone has to crawl around on the floor to connect something, or someone needs to climb on top of something to get something, I'm the slob on duty. I don't mind, because even though I'm still technically post-op, I'm still more physically capable than all my co-workers put together. But there's that phrase, post-op. The other day I was carrying a large computer from the early 1990s, one of those old-school computers that was made mostly of metal and weighed about as much as the average woman. I bent and twisted to put it on the floor and something in my ribs went "Oh no, you didn't just do that, did you?" I'm still paying for it, and if anything it hurts more now than it did at the time.

But that's the price we pay for carrying women and/or computers around the workplace. Women are more fun to carry, but computers don't scream as much if you run them into the doorjamb.

The system software people in the adjoining cubicles were carrying out a Most Excellent Jabber today. One of them in particular is extremely loud. How loud? I was listening to the song "Justifiable Homicide" by Dismember on my iPod at half-volume, and I could still hear her over the music, and that's death metal, for crying out loud! I'm not saying that she talks too much. That's a value judgment that I'm not prepared to make. But she does talk an awful lot; that much is safe to say. But it's days like these that allow me to get to know the deeper recesses of my iPod better. Today, for example, I listened to "Night Driver" from Tom Petty half a dozen times. I'm mostly neutral on the subject of Tom Petty, to the extent that I hardly ever think about him at all. But by gum I rather liked "Night Driver" and I suppose I should be thankful in a backwards kind of way to those horrendous motor-mouths in system software for allowing me to get to know this song.

Is it considered rude to suddenly stand up and shout "Shut up! Just shut up! Just shut up, for God's sake! Shut up!"? I'm starting to have giggly hand-rubbing fantasies involving tasers and duct tape, and that's probably not good.

Pie

The last week or two seem to have been really taxing, for some reason. It seems like all I do is drive and work, and the business with Poopie has been pretty draining too. I know it's chic among a certain class of trogodytic men to pretend that cats don't matter and should be killed anyway, but watching your cat die is kind of draining - almost as draining as putting up with troglodytic men who make a fetish out of hating cats. I'd go into this in more detail, but what's the point, really? The fact that he wasn't immediately struck by a bolt of lightning is proof of how little control I have over the universe, and I'll leave the matter rest there.

So tonight it's apple pie and ice cream. It's been about a decade since I had pie and ice cream, and we intend to eat a whole lotta pie and ice cream, just because. Because it's fun. Because I'm tired and worn out. Because my ribs hurt. Because I feel depressed. Because I'm sick of having to put up with troglodyte assholes. Because I want to do something other than drive and work. Because I want to do something fun, by cracky.

So if you happen to be my cardiologist and you're reading this, please permit me this one wild excessive orgy of fat and cholesterol and sugar and monosodium whatever-the-hell without laying the Heavy Brow on me.

Thank you. And now, I consign myself to a Safeway pie and a half-gallon of French Vanilla ice cream.

The Clearing

Poopie, my cat, has reached the clearing at the end of the trail today, and our lives are the more impoverished.

Requies-cat in pace.

Mailbox

Well, now we have a street mailbox - upon further review, the Mail Authorities smiled upon us, so we put in a mailbox out on the street, or road, or whatever you call it.

Mailboxes can be dreadfully expensive! One looked like a scale model of Monticello, and I imagine it wouldn't be hard to find a little figure of of Thomas Jefferson to tape to its front door as though perpetually greeting the mailman with hearty democratic bonhomie, but I think $170 is a bit steep for a mailbox, even if it does resemble Monticello.

Yes, I'm a cheapskate.

We didn't get the bottom-of-the-line mailbox, the one made out of a rinsed-out gallon milk container, but ours isn't very evolved in an aesthetic sense, unless you're Dutch and you think featureless black metal is somehow engrossing. But the pole is green; that's got to count for something.

This whole thing leaves me with oddly mixed feelings, which I guess proves only that there's no pleasing me. As my grampa would say, "I'd bitch if they hung me with a new rope."

BM-24-8

I was working on a little Polish-made model of a BM-24-8 rocket launcher, which compared to the clunky old models of the Cold War era is actually pretty good. Who remembers VEB-Plasticart? I think that was the name of that outfit. I bought a model of a Tu-20 Bear that I'm pretty sure was a VEB reissue of a kit made by some grim Stalinist outfit, and it sucked! My refrigerator had better panel lines, but it was really the misshapen propellers that destroyed my enthusiasm for the project (and since a Tu-20 disposes of 32 propeller blades, bad propeller blades stick out like an infected tooth).

Anyway, while I was fiddling with this model, and determining that the spacers C17 (I think C17) are grossly oversized, I got tired of two species of TV commercials. One irritates me, the other outrages me.

The irritating one is the American Express commercial where the guy is paying for a business lunch, or buying a flight to a business meeting, and tries to pay for it with a charge charge adorned with a comic book character or kittens. The Krauts get all self-conscious and embarrassed and up and abandon the poor schmuck on the spot, despite the fact that the Germans were the ones that gave us lederhosen! What are they so uppity about all of a sudden? Or the woman at the airline counter has thugs come in and drag the guy away because his charge carge had kittens on it.

Puh-lease. Business is as a general rule grim and cheerless enough without American Express insinuating that any expression of individuality is a symptom of amateurishness. I think American Express should plan its future operations without including me, as I rather doubt I'll ever use their services again - and I just might get a charge card with kittens on it just to piss them off.

But that's nothing. That's just irritating piffle executed by business hacks, the same people who think "value-add" is an actual word. Here's the commercial that outrages me:

Some guys appears. "I owed a hundred and seventy thousand dollars to the IRS, but Peckerwood and Sloane settled my debt for only seventy-nine cents!" And there's a whole procession of these people, claiming they owed a jillion dollars to the IRS and got out of it for literally cents on the dollar.

I pay my income taxes every year, and I paid an outstanding IRS debt that wasn't mine, and I paid that thing in full. How dare these people act all excited about dodging a responsibility that everyone else in America seems to be able to manage! They might as well put on an eye patch and unfurl the Jolly Roger and exclaim "Arrrrrr, mateys, I dodged my responsibility to the tune of a quarter of a million dollars, yar, let the lubbers make up the difference, yar!"

It's possible to get into trouble with the IRS. I know people who have done it, but they were generally people at or near the bottom of the socioeconomic scale where the calculus is between feeding their kids or paying the IRS. But these doctors and lawyers and contractors? I doubt it's come to that - and how do you even end up owing $150,000 in taxes to begin with? How much do you have to make to run up that kind of tax debt in any kind of reasonable time? And how much sympathy am I supposed to feel for some schmuck who doesn't pay his taxes so he can make the payments on his Hummer and power boat? There are people who deserve some sort of tax relief, and then there are people who just don't. Liquidate the timeshare and sell the power boat and pay your damn taxes already. I do.

What's next? "I blew off my child support payments for 13 years, but Peckerwood and Sloane discharged my accumulated debt for twenty-seven dollars and a Home Depot gift card. Yar, ye lubbers!"

Isn't America great?

That's Effing Incredible!

I couldn't sleep last night, so I picked up a copy of Nostradamus and started to read. And boy howdy, wouldn't you know, I found a quatrain that prophesized that I wouldn't be able to sleep!

No sleep shall he get
Smelly dogs his place shall take
Reach for the green death,
Find it not, Bazter shall have it.

That's amazing! Not only couldn't I sleep, but every time I moved the smelly little dogs edged me closer and closer to the edge of the bed, and when I tried to dose myself with green Nyquil (the "green death" mentioned in the quatrain, I'm sure) I couldn't find it because Baxter the Cat had knocked it off my nightstand! That's amazing!

Apologia

I should apologize to someone, but I'm not sure who. Remember all my screeching about the relay being shipped to the wrong address and how this was going to lead in the end to the collapse of Western civilization and the widespread adoption of Zoroastrian funerary practices?

Well, someone stepped in and neatly slipped the box containing my relay into my PO Box without being asked to, thus short-circuiting the whole mess. And what's really sad is that he or she would probably get in trouble with the Mail Gods if this act of human charity was made public. So maybe I should shut up now, before I get someone in trouble.

Tomorrow I'll install the relay and see if that resolves the relay chatter problem the Shrieking Eel is experiencing.

Why not today? Because today I'm being officially OCD. Years ago I was reading something about Rome and found myself somewhat irritated because they'd mention things like the Battle of Graupius Mons or the Catalaunian Fields and I never knew anything about the battles - where they were, when they were, why they were fought, who won. And I said to myself "You know, I wish someone would write a comprehensive atlas of Roman military history, roughly one page per battle, that would place battles and wars into some kind of context."

So far I'm up to 165 pages of text, and that's without any of the planned sidebars, and I'm actually not much farther along than Teutobergerwald. I could easily fill another 100 pages with tedious and annoying Roman civil wars and still not be at the time of Aetius or Stilicho. The OCD aspect of it comes from the feeling that I have to add at least one battle a day to the text, and tonight it's the turn of Edessa, where Valerian goes down to dusty defeat. And THAT is why I can't install the relay tonight.

Poised On The Brink

Our house is about half ceramic tile flooring and half carpet. All the bedrooms are carpeted, and there's a trapezoid-shaped chunk of carpet in a room I imagine the architects rather snootily referred to as the "Great Room" when they were designing it. (Because the walls are white, I refer to it as "The Great White Space", consciously aping the name of the flawed-but-fun British horror novel, a book done in Lovecraft style but with bad pacing.)

Carpets and pets don't exactly mix. Maybe some people are able to train pets to never make messes on the carpet, but it seems that at any one time, at least one of our pets is incontinent for mental, emotional or physical reasons. "What's that noise?! It's THUNDER! I'm crapping right here!" So the carpets need fairly regular cleaning, which means digging out the carpet cleaning machine. It does a good enough job, I suppose, but it's a lot of work. It basically consumes the whole weekend, and you spend the weekend hunched over because the handle isn't quite long enough, and by Sunday night I feel like (and probably resemble) Quasimodo.

Then there's the piercing scream the machine makes, which is literally deafening. For a week afterwards the world sounds like it's been turned to the Jupiter channel - all I hear are leathery creaking sounds, hisses, and occasional pops. I spend a lot of time going "Huh?"

So is this really any easier that just taking up the carpet and laying tile where it once was? I have some experience with laying ceramic tile, and I know that it's neither easy nor exciting. It's a very wet and dirty procedure that's exceptionally hard on one's hands and knees, and if you aren't careful, you can create awful spacing and gap problems that will haunt you for the rest of your unnatural life. But when you do it reasonably well, you at least have the assurance that the tile will last a good long while and pet messes will not turn permanent. And the layout of our house lends itself to doing the floors piecemeal - doing the great room doesn't require that one do any other rooms at the same time.

But here I stand, poised on the edge of tearing out the carpet, unsure if I really should or not. Is my back up to the challenge? I think so. Is my sternum up to the challenge? I certainly hope so. Will I give myself tennis elbow again? Probably.

Tennis elbow. It's pretty funny until it happens to you. I gave it to myself when I was unloading a pickup truck load of carpet scraps at the landfill. I felt the tendon let go as I threw chunks out backhand, and for the next year my arm hurt. For a while it hurt so bad I couldn't even pick up a glass of water - my fingers literally couldn't squeeze hard enough to grip the glass, and trying to hammer tack strips off the floor? Agony. And once I shook a can of spray paint with my affected arm and nearly screamed.

So that's where I'm at. I stand on the edge of the tile and look at the carpet, and I think about tennis elbow. I should be thinking about measuring the room to get an idea of square footage, or comparing colors to see what tile would look good, but no. I think about tennis elbow.

But the carpet really does need to go. It may be worth the sacrifice.

Ten Worst?

I've grown weary of the "Ten Best Whatchamacallit" shows on the Military Channel. Actually I can't watch them at all because I tend to screech at the TV - what do you mean, a Tiger is better than a Comet, are you smoking crack or what? And perhaps as an antidote to them, I'll now offer my analysis of the worst production tanks ever made. Note the word production. It would be all too easy to tee off on freaks like the Tortoise or the Tsar and populate the list with one-off weirdos, so I'm going to stick to tanks that actually had a production run.

1. The worst production tank ever made: The Soviet T-62. On paper it sounds pretty effective: transverse V-12 diesel engine, hemispheric turret, 115mm smoothbore gun, torsion bar suspension. But the tank contained more design flaws than the Turbo Yugo and was so badly manufactured it proved to be one of the most unreliable tanks ever built - one NATO officer noted that a T-62 regiment tended to lose one tank every two miles during a road march, usually to clutch problems. The need to elevate the gun for reloading meant that it was constitutionally incapable of firing aimed second shots, and... Oh, that'll do, I reckon. There were certain Warsaw Pact countries that, when offered T-62s, said "No thank you, we'll stick with our T-55s, thank you very much."

2. The whole Early Cold War Heavy Tank spectacle, including the IS-3, T-10, M103 and Conqueror. At least the M103 and Conqueror were competently executed, and the T-10M arguably competently executed, but it seems laughable in light of the development of the Vickers 105mm L7 tank gun that the notion of the "heavy tank" lasted as long as it did. It bears pointing out that IS-3s were easily dealt with by US-made and Israeli-crewed M48 Pattons during the Six-Day War, and those only had 90mm guns.

3. The Convenanter. It seems too easy to pick on this drab, unimpressive vehicle. The British took the classic but under-armored A13 cruiser in hand for a redesign, and somehow the resulting vehicle, the Covenanter, was worse than the A13. Then came the A15 Crusader, which was functionally nothing more than an A13 with a slightly different shape, and... Oh, no wonder the Cromwell ended up being two years late.

4. TOG. The only sane reaction upon viewing this thing has to be "Someone is joking, right?" One variant of the TOG even had the gall to carry the excellent 17-Pounder OQF gun, which is more or less the same as serving fresh apple pie on a paper plate made of horse manure. Oh, but TOG never got past the prototype stage, did it? I seem to be a hypocrite, but I'm just clearing the way for:

5. Maus. This was a German super-duper-heavy tank that they wasted time with in the closing days of the war. They built five of them and none are believed to have seen combat, but that segment of the modeling/wargaming hobby that reveres all things Wehrmacht believes that two of them saw combat against the Russians and could have singlehandedly altered the outcome of the war if they'd only had more ammo. In fact Maus was just another in the line of overly large, overly-heavy, overly-optimistic boondoggles that the Nazis seemed to specialize in. My theory is that if the Nazis hadn't wasted so much time and money on super-heavy tanks, ballistic missiles, rocket fighters and the like, the war might well have lasted another year.

6. Pzkw-II Lynx. Oh yes, dogpile on the Germans. Here we're at the other end of the scale, dealing with a light tank that the Germans spent way too much time and effort on. A complete waste of metal, time and money? That's a roger, especially since the Lynx couldn't do anything that Germany's highly satisfactory family of eight-wheel-drive armored cars couldn't do better, cheaper and more quietly.

7. Medium Tank M3 (AKA Lee/Grant). The Lee and Grant (same tank with certain detail differences) played a major role in combat in theaters ranging from Libya to Tunisia to Burma, but the tank was really a ghastly mess. The fact that it was used in such numbers, and with such generally favorable results, speaks mainly to the lack of acceptable alternatives. The tank was huge, had limited traverse for the main gun, wasn't easy to get into defilade, and required a crew of seven men. The Soviets were so unhappy with it they nicknamed it the "Tomb for Seven Brothers", and the Americans and British used it only for as long as it took for vastly superior Shermans to arrive. (One thing one can say about it, though, is that it was pretty reliable.)

8. ARL-44. The French felt the need to resume tank production as soon as possible after the Liberation, partly as a matter of national pride and partly because they wanted to do their part to help defeat Nazi Germany. In view of the fact that the Americans would have given the French all the Shermans they wanted free of charge, the new French tank needed to be bigger and heavier and better-armed than the Sherman, otherwise there was no logic in building it. So they took what amounted to the 1940-vintage Char B chassis and plopped a new turret armed with a 90mm gun atop that. The result was a bizarre mishmash of prewar lack of mobility with postwar upgunning.

9. XMBT-70. XMBT stands for "Experimental Main Battle Tank". This technological wonder was supposed to establish a new benchmark for tank design that would last into the 21st Century, and the wonder isn't that it failed, but that it got as close to success as it did, considering the obstacles. It was a joint German-US venture, and the two sides never could agree on the gun (the Germans wanted a 120mm smoothbore gun; the US wanted a 152mm combined gun-missile launcher). The tank was a wonderland of features, including variable-height hydropneumatic suspension, a very high power to weight ratio, advanced armor, advanced fire controls, and the aforementioned gun-missile system. But it cost a fortune and eventually they killed the program before it bankrupted both countries. The Americans later "rescoped" it (as they say) and called it the XM803, which proved to be almost as good a money incinerator as the original XMBT-70.

The large amounts of money invested in the XMBT-70 and XM803 probably had a lot to do with the US Army having to soldier on with M60s for about ten years longer than they should have - the XMBT-70 probably delayed the M1 by a decade. But it must also be said that with the first-rate M60A3 TTS in its inventory, the US Army could afford to wait.

The Speed of E-Business

Don't make me laugh. All E-business amounts to for me is a pain in the ass.

Where to start? The US Post Office won't deliver mail to my house. We are apparently too far off the edge of the world for that, even though I can literally see mailboxes from my front yard. It's too much bother for the postal carrier to travel another thousand feet to my house. But in a way that's okay, because whoever delivers the mail has Herman Munster's throttle foot and is forever tearing up the road with excessive wheelspin.

Meantime, FedEx and other carriers won't ship to my Post Office Box - they'd rather find my house than find the post office, I guess.

Meantime, most of the companies I do mail-order business don't understand this critical distinction and are forever sending my stuff to the wrong damn address! Our stuff is forever being returned to senders because it was sent to the wrong address. Sometimes I can intervene if I know the tracking number, but most of the time it's just gone, as though it fell into a black hole.

Here's the latest example. I bought a relay from a company back east somewhere, and clicked the FedEx box on their website. Confident that they would actually use FedEx, I gave them my street address, because FedEx will ship to it (but not to my PO Box). So I check my email today and see that they've shipped my relay, fine and dandy, except, goddamnit, they changed the shipping method to the US Postal Service, which means my package isn't addressed properly because the US Post Office won't deliver to my house! So the relay will go back to the company, and I'll have to order a new one, and chances are that once again they'll randomly change the shipping method...

One of the reasons I do a lot of business with Squadron (http://www.squadron.com/) is that they've never screwed up the shipment method. I've never had to chase down a shipment, and they're so reliable I don't even bother with tracking numbers. They've got this e-business stuff down. But most of the other companies I do business, getting them to ship to the right address is like having my wisdom teeth pulled. Gawd. It's enough to make me scream.

UPDATE: It's official, the relay has to go back to Iowa; the USPS can't (more like won't) forward it to my PO Box. That's nice. But they never miss an opportunity to raise stamp prices, do they?

Weekend Update with Dennis Miller

No, not with Dennis Miller. Anyone but Dennis Miller.

I think my cat Poopie is dying, but I've thought that before, haven't I? She has new symptoms in that she's apparently gone stone deaf. She doesn't seem to be suffering and she still eats me out of house and home, so I don't feel that I'm at the point where I have to decide if I should have her put to sleep or not. Her deafness is kind of a bother, actually. She doesn't realize how loud she has become, and you can't shut her up with a strategic hissing sound either. But you can sneak up on her from behind quite readily, and send her into the lower troposphere by poking her. That's dirty pool, but so is waking me up at 4:30 in the morning with earsplittingly-loud yowling sung in a minor and sort of flattish key.

Poopie was my third cat. My first cat, Oberon, was handed to me by my friend's mom when I went to visit her. Then someone at work gave me another kitten that I named Hobbes. After a few years Hobbes developed Valley Fever. We (the vet and I) kept him alive for about six months with various anti-fungal medications, and he actually seemed to be getting better, but then the bottom fell out. He grew horrible granulomas on his legs, he went blind, and within a day or two he died of encephalitis. I didn't take that very well. It was my first pet death in many years, and I was fairly devastated. So the next day I went to the Humane Society and vowed to adopt the first kitten that approached me, and that happened to be Poopie. And now she's failing, and the cycle will renew itself. Max, by the way, was rescued from the Safeway. He was sheltering behind the bike rack, just a tiny little puffball of a kitten, and we brought him home. He's not doing so well himself, but he's pretty elderly too. Not as old as Poopie, but a respectable old age for a cat. Before long the cat banner will pass to Baxter, I think, and then we'll have to decide if we want to replenish the cat population or not.

After having vacuumed up about three and a half tons of cat hair over the years, I'm inclined to say "One cat is plenty."

Network Repair Checklist

"Hello, my DSL isn't working."

"Have you tried rebooting your computer?"

"Yes."

"Have you tried resetting the DSL modem?"

"Yes."

"Have you tested your local LAN?"

"Yes."

"Have you paid your bill lately?"

"Yes."

"Have you removed the wreckage of the burned car from underneath the fried main trunk phone line, replaced the charred telephone pole, and replaced the fried telephone cable?"

"Umm... Let me call you back on that."

Geez

I sometimes wonder where people get their senses of historical perspective. I was listening to a guy on Nova-M today... It doesn't matter who he was or what group he was representing, because my argument isn't with what he believes in, but the larger meta-point about the world in general. He argued that 1968 was a turning point in the world where we suddenly as a people took a turn toward progressive policies and humane government, and he basically wants to try to recreate the "success" of 1968 in 2008.

I can appreciate the sentiment, but let's look at just two of the cases he cited. One was the Prague Uprising, which apparently brought enlightened government and human rights to the people of Czechoslovakia. Or at least until it was crushed flat by Soviet tanks. Gee whiz. I was eight years old at the time and even I remember Soviet T-55 tanks with white recognition markings rolling through the streets and transforming the "Prague Summer" into the "Politburo Fall". It was such a basic part of world history that it was part of the Saturday Night Live "Wild and Crazy Guys" sketch, for crying out loud!

The other example he cited was the United States itself. But wait a second, didn't we elect NIXON in 1968? And again in 1972? And wasn't Nixon followed (except for the troubled but laudable tenture of Jimmy Carter, and Ford the Nonentity) by eight years of King Ronald?

And he wants to recreate these things? Best to let them lie, I say, because if this guy's mistaken ideas about 1968 become part of real life in 2008, we're in for a McCain presidency and escalation of US military operations around the world.

Yeah, the world changed in 1968 - for the worse. Cripes.

Shadows Fall

I have to confess, the Shadows Fall album I bought (Threads of Life) is starting to grow on me. I'm not normally a huge fan of metalcore, and the rap on Shadows Fall was (at least among the few metal aficionados that I know) that they were basically a somewhat-more-artistic-than-usual metalcore act.

And it must be said that there's metalcore, and then there's metalcore. Avenged Sevenfold I can generally get behind, but Hatebreed is a little too metalcore, if you know what I mean. After a while that hoarse tuneless hardcore shouting gets a little old, or a lot old, and even righteously metallic music isn't enough to keep me interested when that happens.

But Shadows Fall, it turns out, isn't really metalcore. What is it? It's an interesting mix of things. In my Bullshit Analysis (c), the music seems very strongly influenced by death metal, but the vocals tend to wander around. Sometimes it's a little deathy, sometimes it's straight metalcore, sometimes it's right on the edge of Hammerfall-style power metal, and sometimes it's its own thing entirely.

But it's good. Musically it's plenty hard and metallic, but the varying moods and vocal styles lend the overall album nice variety. It's neither entirely death metal nor hardcore nor power metal, but it's pretty much all good.

I also bought a straight death metal album, Slaughter of the Soup... no, make that Slaughter of the Soul. It's by At The Gates, and if you like Amon Amarth, you'll probably like this. It seems to be more crunchitudinous than Amon Amarth, but it's definitely in that class of metal. It also brings to mind In Flames, but a sort of alternate-history version of In Flames that didn't get all poppy (or poppy as death metal acts go, anyway).

But the song I wish to highlight tonight is "Going Under" by Devo, off the album The New Traditionalists. Devo doesn't get much credit these days for much of anything. They're widely (and perhaps properly) dismissed as a novelty or gag act, and I remember an interview with one of the founding members of Devo who confessed great surprise that they'd managed to pull off the joke for as long as they had.

So you think about Devo and you think of goofball gag dance songs like "Canary in a Coal Mine" or "Slap your Mammy" or "Whip It" or "Through Being Cool". But there's something strange, surreal and almost sinister about the song "Going Under". Devo songs always have a certain lightness of spirit, but not this one; it's like Devo under the influence of huge quantities of Vasopressin, or an extremely bad mood. I can't say I know what "Going Under" is about in a lyric sense - it's one of those things, like the novel VALIS by Philip K. Dick, that I always think will start to make sense if I just think about it a little bit harder, but even though it doesn't seem to make any objective sense, it's still weird and sinister.

Fooled Mother Nature

Today I fooled Mother Nature - I had a headache at work! Woohoo! That's much preferable to having a headache on the weekend.

I've mentioned, I'm sure, that I've gotten fairly serious about losing weight again, and one of my tactics is taking fruit to work for lunch. Now, I'm not a big fan of apples, and I never have been, but they're so convenient they're hard to pass up as lunch fodder. No peeling, long shelf-life, reasonably filling, not very messy, they're an excellent lunch fruit except for the fact that I don't really like the way they taste. I really like bananas, but they go bad within 20 minutes of purchase. I really really like apricots, but they're too small for lunch duty; I'd need to eat 25 of them, and that sort of defeats the purpose. Pears are too juicy, or too hard, one or the other. Oranges are good and refreshing, but a bit messy and sometimes difficult to peel.

My point is that I usually take two apples to work. Normally I buy Fuji apples, which I find palatable, but the store ran out and I bought big green apples instead. Turns out they're Granny Smiths, and they're not suitable for lunch consumption at all. They have an odd chewing texture that I don't like - the nearest I can get to describing the texture is that it's like chewing underwear, but since I've never chewed underwear, I've clearly gone insane. And they're tart, and they have a strange taste that is actually made worse instead of better by the addition of salt. I'm sure that with some sugar, cinnamon and baking, they'd be wonderful, but as casual lunch food, they suck.

I just couldn't face the Granny Smiths today. Some days I'm tough, and some days I'm not. There they sat on my desk, the glistening green Granny Smiths of death, daring me to pick them up and eat them, and my morale collapsed. I was going to go to the cafeteria and get a (vastly overpriced) salad, but difficulties arose in the environmental lab that required me to work through lunch. Then I had a meeting, which kept me occupied until the cafeteria had closed for the day. By this point I was so famished I was tempted to start eating bugs and twigs, and since I hadn't had a chance to drink much of anything all day, I had a colossal headache from not getting enough water (at least that's my Bullshit Theory).

Meantime, other time pressures had begun to manifest themselves, and it wasn't about going out and having an unhurried lunch. I went to McDonalds and got two cheeseburgers and a drink, and learned that I could choke down two cheeseburgers in the time it takes to drive a mile. Healthy? Decidedly not, but it beat eating twigs and bugs, and eventually the drink took the edge off my headache, enough that I could work late without giving voice to a series of inarticulate screams of pain and rage.

For what it's worth, I've already lost about ten pounds. Of course, I'd gained those same ten pounds in the last couple of months so at best I'm back to square one, but it's better than nothing.

Nobody Likes A Whiner

Especially not Phil Gramm, but I don't care what he thinks, and I'm going to whine.

I woke up this morning with a devastating headache. Put your finger in your right ear canal, then move your fingertip forward until you leave "ear meat" and touch skull. That's where it hurt(s), like someone driving a 3/8ths-inch drill bit into my skull with one of those old cast-metal drills that runs fairly slow and produces a strong smell of ozone. This was at about four AM, and I figured as long as I was up and suffering, I might as well try out the bag of strawberry-flavored mini-wheat cereal I bought.

It's kind of a disappointment. It's not very strawberry-flavored and proved to be nothing at all like the Strawberry Quik indulgence I was hoping for, but it was better than lying there in the dark and being hungry. Trouble was, it attracted Baxter, the orange cat. Turns out he loves strawberry-scented milk. He loves it a lot. He was all over me, purring and making soft little "can I have some milk" sounds, digging his little feets into my surgical scar, sticking his head into the bowl, even licking droplets of said milk off my finger. He wasn't even driven away when all this hoohah attracted the attentions of the Stinking Black Flobberworms, AKA the dogs, who normally give Baxter the creeps. Eventually I sank to the level of feeding Baxter the milk one spoonful at a time until the milk was gone and my usefulness had ended. I haven't seen Baxter since, in case you were wondering.

So I determined the cereal wasn't much good, but I got some quality cat time, and that's always worthwhile.

My headache has been coming and going most of the day. It remained gone as long as I was in the swimming pool and drinking beer, but not long after I got out it came back. It went away again as I napped through TV coverage of the Olympics, but then Poopie (another cat) decided to start yowling from under the bed. She used to yowl from the bedroom door, but we started driving her away with squirt guns. Now she yowls from under the bed, where she's safe from squirt gun fire, the hussy. So she woke me up and my headache came back...

Suffice it to say that I think headaches on a weekend are singularly unfair. It wasn't that I had much planned for today - working on a model, writing, playing on the computer and swimming, mainly - but man I hate it when my important leisure activities are crimped by a headache.

Oh well. Time to end this boring post and go back to bed, I guess.

Oy

I can only surmise that there is something fundamentally wrong with my psychological makeup, some deep and abiding flaw that puts me on the same level as serial killers and pamphlet writers.

I can't stand it when they show "family reaction shots" during sporting events. There, I said it. I revealed my inhumanity. I showed off my thickened, crusty psychological scar.

But really, honestly, I can't stand that shit.

I haven't watched much Olympics in the last ten or fifteen years, and none at all of the current Olympics, but last night as I struggled with foot cramps and a headache and general gleefus, I flipped to a channel carrying the Olympics. Almost immediately I was forced to watch the mother and sister (wife? I confess I had the sound turned off) of Famous Swimmer Person twitching and gyrating while he swam.

It's not that I dislike them, but I really don't want to watch them either. Let them enjoy their Olympics in peace, without a camera trained on them, and let me "enjoy" the Olympics in peace without having to watch what amounts to random people in the stands. It's a bit like having to put up with news about Britney Spears's sister just because she's Britney Spear's sister - even one degree of separation is enough to make me not care.

Somehow the Olympics don't seem as interesting to me as they used to. I don't think it has anything to do with commercialization in general, or with Chinese pretensions in this case in particular. They just don't interest me as much. "Oh look, some people running their asses off. Oh look, more people running their asses off. Here's something new; it's a bunch of people running their asses off. Whee."

Ho-hum. When do the fairly novel sports get TV coverage? Things like fencing or kayaking or the equestrian stuff? Because frankly I've already had all the running, swimming and beach volleyball I can stand. And moms and families in the stands hopeful during the event and exultant afterwards; I've had enough of that too.

Drivingest Dawg

Well, I tried it again, I dressed Dawg in my clothes and sent her off to work with a little paper bag carrying a large dog biscuit and a bottle of water. She got as far as the freeway interchange at I-17 and the 101 before she got confused and ended up in Tucson.

Potpourri

I tried dressing the Dawg in my clothes and sending her to work in my place. The attempt failed because she can't quite reach the pedals in the car and she sat in the driveway for ten minutes flailing her scrawny legs trying to hit the gas pedal. But she's willing, at least I can say that about her.

I thought it was extremely cool that the man-eating flower blossoms in The Ruins were capable of imitating sounds. If you're a man-eating plant, you'd find auditory mimicry pretty handy too, I bet. But I think I'd want to be able to shoot hypodermic seed pods shaped like minature golf tees, as seen on Star Trek in the episode about Va'al where a great many Redshirts cashed in their studio parking chits and went to the sandwich line in the sky.

The only thing worse than finding a huge rotten spot in a banana is not noticing it until you bite into it while reading the Reuters news website. Blech. I'm trying to eat fruit for lunch and exercise every other night at home on my Gazelle. The exercise is going well, but the fruit diet is a bit of a trial - sometimes you just feel like burying your face in a huge vat of Spaghetti-Os no matter what the Surgeon General says. The problem with fruit is that fruit never tastes like meat (and, upon thinking about it, maybe it's best that it doesn't; the confusion caused by meat-fruit might be more than I can endure). Fruit also contains imperfections - rotten spots, cysts, bits of fibrous whatnot; it lacks the smooth predictability of, say, a McDonalds cheeseburger. Every McDonalds cheeseburger looks alike, tastes alike, and eats alike; the only uncertainty is the exact location of the pickle slices.

For about the last six or eight months my back has hurt, sometimes so bad it's crippling. There was a time when bending over to pluck a tomato out of the garden was beyond me; no amount of grunting and snarling would get the job done. But I've altered how I sit (no slouching and no leaning back), I've started elevating my legs in the evening when I get home from work, I take little walks when necessary, I don't stand in one spot for any longer than necessary, I sleep with fewer pillows, and I've started exercising again. My back, I am pleased to report, seems to have returned to normal. I haven't taken a Tylenol in three or four days, and that's a major improvement. Whee!

I don't know why Bush et al spend so much time blaming Russia for the war in Georgia. The Georgians seem to have started it, or at least grossly underestimated Russian resolve, though it's also true that the Russian reaction was disproportionately violent. The Georgians should have known better than to intervene in South Ossetia, and the Russians needn't have sent in the whole damn Fifth Guards Tank Army either. It takes two to make a mess like this, though it does tend to serve notice that the epoch of Russian timidity is probably over.

Barack Obama is starting to piss me off. His lack of reaction to the stupid, annoying, juvenile and often downright malicious campaign ads coming from the McCain camp is starting to remind me of Kerry and the Swift Boat Veterans. The Democratic pundits tell me "Just wait till after the convention; it'll be a bare-knuckle fight then!" But I'm not so sure. It should be a bare-knuckle fight now and I don't understand the wait-and-bleed strategy. Maybe Democrats just don't have the guts for a hard fight... Either way, as the most visible Democrat in the land, Barack gets the blame.

The Ruin: My Review

Last week I bought a DVD copy of The Ruin, which was helpfully billed as "too extreme for theaters". Maybe it is and maybe it isn't - I don't know what passes for extreme in movie theaters these days - but I can say that the movie wasn't an overt waste of time. It had some extreme moments, and some moments of reasonable creepiness, and in the end plenty of blood and gore. Plus it had trust fund babies suffering inordinately, and who doesn't like that?

The upshot of the story is that four fairly annoying empty-headed Americans on vacation in Mexico decide to stop drinking and having sex long enough to go out into the jungle with a faux German named Mattias to cast eyes upon a "VIP" Mayan ruin. They get there, and are presently surrounded by a large number of people armed with (among other things) bows and arrows and Wyatt Earp's Buntline Special. Seems the Mayan pyramid is covered with man-eating vegetation, and the locals, who grunt and gesticulate like the "Flavormundo" native, force the Americans (und Mattias, ja) to hunker down on the pyramid and die so they won't spread the deadly vegetation.

As someone who has spent an appreciable fraction of my life trying to keep Bermuda grass from invading gardens and flower beds, I can fully grok their thinking in this matter.

Anyway, soon the festering and dying begins, and the Blood Quotient goes up accordingly. Parts of it could actually qualify as squeam-inducing, like when the annoying blonde girl (as opposed to the annoying dark-haired girl) elects to carve upon herself. But this scene also violated a basic rule of common sense, which is that you never approach a crazy person with a knife who is busy hacking off a major thigh muscle. Odds are you're going to get your palm slashed or, worse yet, take the knife right in your aorta... And I did have to give a hearty Oh, no way when they amputated Mattias's legs, which truth be told had already more or less fallen off anyway. I mean, why bother?

It goes for the avant-garde ending by having the dark-haired girl escape even as the deadly vegetation starts to take her over. Next time you select hair shampoo that contains phytochemicals or botanicals, think about evil vegetation that grows under your skin.

But in one respect, the vines are pretty helpful. They never seem to drag living people away, or even sleeping people. But the minute you die, in they come to drag the body away. That's handy, isn't it? Better than having a bunch of stiffs cluttering the movie, especially awkwardly shaped ones like Mattias.

I didn't like any of the characters. The girls were all sluts and the guys were all BMOCs out having a little fun in Mexico, except for Mattias, who was simply not to be believed. And so it didn't much matter to me that they all died; the main reason I watched it was to determine not if they died, but how. So, that's it in a nutshell. A bunch of unappealing characters die in various ways amid a Vegetable Nightmare, with plenty of blood and a certain amount of squeam. If you're a fan of bloody horror movies, you won't be too disappointed. If you're a fan of Fred Astaire, you may want to give it a miss - but you probably already knew that.

Really Moving Out

If you look in a dictionary under the phrase moving out, this is the picture that should appear. The aircraft is the Bell X-2, which had the ill fortune of being just fast enough to fly itself inertial coupling at the bottom of the thermal barrier, killing Captain Mel Apt in the process. I believe the pilot in this picture to be Iven Kincheloe, the Air Force's golden boy and Original Astronaut, and what makes this picture for me are those gawdawful mach diamonds in the exhaust plume. We also note with a mild thrill that the XLR-25 main engine has been fitted with expansion nozzles.

That's moving out, when your two-chamber over-and-under XLR-25 is producing more mach diamonds than you can count. Yikes!

But there's another kind of moving out.

Today was payday (technically, the day after payday) and I decided to spend some time and money on iTunes. It was a good haul. One of the albums I bought was the "remastered" album Bridge of Sighs by Robin Trower. Normally the word "remastered" has about the same connotation for me as the word "colonoscopy", but in this case they either flat skipped the remastering or managed to keep the changes down to a bare minimum. It sounds like I remember it sounding, remastered or otherwise.

And now we get to the other sort of moving out. Holy crap Robin Trower can jam! I forgot just how fast he could be when the mood was upon him, and how tasteful he could be even when moving out. But he doesn't always move out. The song "Bridge of Sighs" itself is almost a dirge, and it's hard to describe "In This Place" as speedy. But then he smokes the paint right off his geetar with songs like "Little Bit of Sympathy" and "Too Rolling Stoned" and "The Fool and Me." Heavens.

I haven't listened to Trower in a serious way in at least a couple of decades - I didn't much like the album Victims of the Fury and sort of wrote him off. But as I come back this album after twenty years, I can only shake my head because if anything he seems to have gotten better with time. I wish I could say the same thing of myself.

What else did I buy?

Billy Joel, "We Didn't Start The Fire" and "Movin' Out"

Thin Lizzy, "The Cowboy Song"

Eddie Money, "Gimme Some Water"

Bruce Springsteen, most Born in the USA

Brujeria, "Marijuana"

The Vapors, "Turning Japanese"

Neil Young, "Old Man"

Alan Parsons Project, "Genesis Ch. 1 V. 32"

Shadows Fall, Threads of Life

Pink Floyd, "Comfortably Numb" and "Mother" (I figure I'll chip away at The Wall)

Authority Zero, "Mexican Radio"

Meredith Brooks, "Bitch"

And finally, At The Gates, Slaughter of the Soul (the expanded version, no less)

Well, that's not too bad. One death metal album (At The Gates), one metalcore album (Shadows Fall) and one piece of peculiar metal (Brujeria). The rest is actually normal, kinda sorta.

A - Free Zone

Remember when it was popular to declare areas to be something-free zones? Schools set up drug-free zones and weapon-free zones. Various establishments were smoke-free zones. New Zealand and Japan, among others, declared themselves nuclear-free zones. Well, I've decided that I should also declare myself to be a zone free of various things. So let it be known that I am:

A Judd Apatow-Free Zone. His movies never pleased me inordinately and I thought The Forty-Year Old Virgin was overrated, but Stepbrothers? Yeech. Then again...

A Will Farrell-Free Zone. I have nothing against Will Farrell. I just think he's grossly over-exposed; just the other day I had a Hollywood agent call me to see if they could book Will Farrell for my recurring nightmares about cracks opening in the ground and things crawling out.

A Cyrus-Free Zone. Either one of them, though in Miley's defense it must be said she hasn't produced anything akin to Achy Breaky Heart yet.

A 300-Free Zone. The more I think about it, the more I think 300 is among the worst movies ever made. We have little ground squirrels here that I now call 300 squirrels because they move in the same curious combination of fast and slow motion as the Heaped Pectorals did in the movie.

A Bill O'Reilly-Free Zone. I don't know where Nova-M got the clips of him reading from what is apparently a novel he wrote, but they're positively chilling. Each time I hear them, my will to live wanes.

A Sean Hannity-Free Zone. I could actually extend that and declare myself a Right-Wing Blowhard Free Zone. Whatever happened to thinking conservatives like George Will and William F. Buckley? I guess thoughtful conservatism doesn't get good enough ratings; you have be extreme and shrill, like Savage on the subject of autism, to get noticed.

An Asparagus-Free Zone. 'Nuff said.

A Smoke-Free Zone.

A TapouT-Free Zone. I don't know if this is the worst TV show ever made - The Tyra Banks Show probably gives it a run for its money, if nothing else - but it's still pretty damn bad. I wish them luck with their search for the next "MMA badass" and I hope that their search takes them to a very distant continent from which it proves impossible to broadcast a TV signal.

And I think, for now, that that'll do.

Afterparty Aftertaste

In the aftermath of the 2008 PBR event in Glendale, Arizona, my wife and I debated going to the PBR after-party. It never seemed like a good idea, necessarily, but the more we thought about it, the more like an interesting idea it seemed. Soon we were off, crawling through downtown Litchfield Park (such as it is) at 15 miles per hour looking for the Wigwam Resort.

Understand that my formative years were spent in the dusty environs of Avondale, Arizona, and we’d certainly heard of the Wigwam. It was supposed to be so ritzy and luxurious that it didn’t quite belong on planet Earth any more; we thought maybe it floated six inches above the ground and was patrolled by elves and cherubs. None of us had actually been to the Wigwam, but everyone knew the friend of a second cousin who’d been there and had seen – whoa, check it out! – people wearing tennis bracelets therein. It was so ritzy that I was quite sure that the moment I, a mere dust-encrusted scion of blue-collar roots, tried to step onto the Wigwam property, bat-wielding mooks would emerge from the impeccably trimmed undergrowth and instruct me on the fundamental error of attempting to rise above my social station.

On the off chance that the Wigwam’s attorneys are reading this, permit me to point out that the Wigwam is doubtless a fine and upstanding establishment which has never engaged in any kind of exclusionary behavior at all.

We eventually found it, or what we presumed to be it, in that we found a parking lot that offered valet parking. You don’t see offers for valet parking in someone’s driveway, so we were pretty sure we were on the grounds of some sort of resort. Then my wife saw people with cowboy hats walking across the parking lot. It had to be the place. Nobody but PBR fans would show up at the Wigwam wearing the official Arizona summer-issue white straw cowboy hat, after all.

The Wigwam seemed… Well, it turned out it didn’t float six inches above the ground and I didn’t see any cherubs, so I was a little disappointed. It’s nice, sure, but not that nice, not nice enough to justify bat-wielding mooks. We wandered around for a while, seeking both a handicapped access ramp (the Wigwam, for whatever it’s worth, possesses more steps per capita than any other building in west-central Arizona) and the PBR after-party itself. The place seemed deserted and the only sound I could hear was my own torturous, wheezing breathing as I pushed my wife’s wheelchair across what seemed like several furlongs of deep, practically impassable carpet. Then, just as it seemed that I must surely perish from overwork, we spotted a PBR sign, and were quickly vetted by the Deputy Sheriff and banded by the guy who looked like Dr. Kevorkian, and we were in.

In what?

It was a large rectangular room. Scattered around the room were about three sit-down tables and about five stand-up tables (and what, really, is the purpose of the stand-up table? Everybody knows that “Let’s get a table” is a euphemism for “Damn! My feet hurt! Let’s go sit down” The table is more or less irrelevant; it is the chair that is the primary operational element). Scattered around the outside were three bars. The whole effect was decidedly underwhelming, and my attention was quickly drawn to the big-screen TV in the corner that appeared to be showing Versus coverage of some PBR event (it was the event where Robson Palermo got helicoptered and bludgeoned silly, but I leave it to those with better memories to figure out which event it was).

Now, I don’t know how much money the PBR spends on promotions and whatnot in the course of a year. Nor do I have any idea how much the Wigwam charges for the use of a large, barren banquet room. But it just seems to me that somehow the two could have come up with something a little more inviting – a few more chairs and a six-foot party sub would have been a good start. I bet the PBR spends more on propane each week (to fuel the FBHs, or Flaming Bull Heads) than it does on the afterparty.

The first cowboy spotting was Cord McCoy, who was easily recognized by his Enterprise shirt and the fact that he couldn’t go anywhere without an official bevy of young women. Most men don’t travel the world with bevies, so when one sees such a procession, one can only assume that it’s a Big Cheese of some sort. I don’t know that they were buckle bunnies in the traditional sense of the word, but I do know that they were young and not at all the sorts of women who would have given me the time of day when I was that age. Not that I’m bitter, but gee whiz, I’m 6’4” and Cord has to stand on tiptoes to see over the tops of his boots... While we watched Cord danced with at least four of the bevy, though it was always the same dance regardless of the music. First he’d take his wrap, then hunker down with his left arm out and forward, chin tucked and riding arm cocked slightly at the elbow, then once the dance started, he’d commence to spurring with his outside foot… what on earth am I saying? No, mostly he twirled them.

I caught a brief glimpse of JB Mauney, who acted like a man who was preoccupied by the fact that his hat didn’t fit right. But then we started to lose our visibility of one whole half of the room because a very large man began to invade our field of view. It was a bit like watching an eclipse – you never saw him move, but every time we looked up, more and more of the room had been blotted out by his immense back (and, I regret to say, backside).

The wife sent me to the bar to get a Jack Daniels and Coke, which at $8 seemed like a pretty poor investment. For same eight bucks I could have bought a case of Milwaukee’s Beast, but I guess at PBR events one either takes tight-lipped swigs from longnecks (I believe the characteristic swig is designed to avoid flushing out one’s Copenhagen) or has mixed drinks, but Milwaukee’s Beast would be horribly déclassé.

There seemed to be very little actual cowboy participation, so I amused myself in a detailed study of the wallflowers (half of them guys who clearly wished they were cowboys, and the other half girls who wished the guys were cowboys too). Then the wife made a Significant Spotting: Guillherme Marchi, or a guy we were pretty sure was Guillherme. He wasn’t wearing his sponsor shirt and as a sartorial specimen he looked like any other Saturday night cowboy looking for something to do. We weren’t even sure it was Guillherme. He had the jaw, to be sure, and was about the right size and seemed fit, but no, surely Guillherme wouldn’t be standing by himself against the back of the room, would he?

Why, the poor guy even had to shell out for his own drink! I watched him pull out a wallet and hand green to the bartender, which seemed like a ridiculous thing for a PBR cowboy to have to. Surely the PBR would comp the world number one bull rider a few drinks, wouldn’t they? I mean, the guy goes to the after-party for the sake of fan enthusiasm and the PBR and the Wigwam stiff him eight bucks for a drink? I call no way! When Brett Favre goes to a Packers party, do the Packers make him pay for his own Pabst Blue Ribbon? I bet not!

Still, it sure looked like him. So I slipped into my secret identity, Sooper Spy, and pretended to walk right past him en route to the bathroom. Yep, definitely Guillherme. Now, understand that we’ve been fans of Guillherme for a while. He rides well, and unlike some of the knobs and yokels that inhabit the PBR, he seems to display a certain amount of dignity and character. And when he flashes that I’m not sure what Leah Garcia just asked me smile, well, he’s hard to beat. But such was my skill as Sooper Spy that I also recognized Renato Nunez, another one of the Brazilian riders, and walked right past Mike White without recognizing him.

That’s kind of embarrassing. There are some PBR cowboys that I just flat don’t like, and in most cases I couldn’t even tell you why. JB Mauney and Travis Briscoe just flat rub me the wrong way, for example. But there are a lot of cowboys that I do like, such as Mike White, Luke Snyder, Dustin “How Hard Can It Be” Elliot, Zack Brown, and even good old Cord McCoy. I walked right by Mike White without recognizing him, and this detail will come back to haunt my narrative.

Upon my return to the Great Barren Room, I grabbed the wheelchair and told my wife we were going to go meet Guillherme Marchi. I hate to say I finally resolved to meet him while straddling a urinal, but that’s about how it played. In the words of my grandfather, it aint a purty thought, but it is a thought. Guillherme, blissfully unaware of the events in my life in the immediately preceding few minutes, saw us coming and shifted his drink to his left hand and smiled as he shook my hand. I had the whole speech worked out in advance: “I’ve been a fan of yours for a long time, and I feel that this is your year and I wish you the best of luck.” But what came out? “Errr, haberdashers, you know, nine-iron woodsman poker handle! Crumpets!” And Guilherme, being a pleasant and affable sort, smiled and nodded and clapped me on the shoulder and said “Thank you very much.” My wife managed to say “We’re going to eat at your restaurant” before she was overcome by his apparently quite delectable eyelashes.

So we staggered away from Guillherme, and decided that it would be best to leave the afterparty on that note, before we staggered up to the next Famous Cowboy and blurted “Origami spheres truly tingle my benefactors! Argentina!”

Oh, and sorry, Mike. Had I seen you, I would certainly have stopped to shake your hand, but – alas, earwax. Blame it on the Bossa Nova.