Update of Sorts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

B-12

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

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

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

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

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

Evil Anti-Debate

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

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

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

Just In Case

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

Enhancement!

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Way Home

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

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

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

Count me in.

Feel Awful

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

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

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

Ya think??

Brain Wave

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ix-nay on the Ebate-day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

400

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

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

Filler

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

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

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

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

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

But at least I've already got the welder.

McHugo's Navy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Atom Smasher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The End Of The World Angle

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

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

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

Cease'n'Desist, Fer Cryingout Loud

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arrrrr!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yarrr!

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.