this is drivel

Friday, January 1, 2010

I've got the teensy-tiniest little headache this morning, but I'm pretty sure it's because my sinuses were stuffed like the mounted head of a stag. Not that I'm denying I had a few beers last night. I did. My Darling B and I went to Harmony Bar on Atwood Avenue to partake of their world-famous New Year's buffet dinner (what? You've never heard of it? Have you been living under a rock?) and live music provided by The Jimmys (not billed as world-famous, but the lead Jimmy was apparently a member of West Side Andy and the Mel Ford band, widely known around these parts). So we downed a few pints while we noshed on snackies and grooved to the beat.

The buffet was every bit as impressive as I'd heard, and I'd heard about it from everybody because it's world-famous, don'tcha know. They threw a four by eight sheet of plywood over the pool table, on top of which they piled sandwiches, stuffed mushrooms, crackers, cold cuts, cheese and other goodies until you couldn't see the table any more. And there were a couple of chafing dishes on the side filled with chicken wings, meatballs and those little beenie-weenies cooked in maple syrup that were so deliciously good we couldn't stop eating them. Those things are dangerous.

With just a half-hour to go before the stroke of midnight they started filling champagne glasses and passed out the paper hats and noisemakers so we could bring in the New Year in the traditionally noisy manner required by law, a moment My Darling B and I recreated for you with the web cam on her notebook.

We got home at about one o'clock and that's the latest we've been up on New Year's in I don't know how long.

I'm going to have one of these ...

... if I can figure out the instructions at Instructables.

Sunday, January 3, 2010

Because I get about thirty or forty comments a day from spam robots trying to sell the stuff. The lead to this post ought to easily double that.

This leads me to the somewhat unflattering conclusion that my biggest audience is web bots and my most eager sponsor, if I had a sponsor, would be a drug company selling performance-enhancing drugs.

But just in case you're not a web bot and you're looking for a treatment for erectile dysfunction, or if you're a web bot who can't get your comment uploaded, I can point you in the right direction. So to speak.

My Darling B and I drove north to the ancestral manse of the O-Family. Mom hosted a belated Christmas dinner with a great big roast ham, mashed potatoes and asparagus spears. We brought a cheese plate, and Jim & Sue brought the pie. Tom joined us, but Tim wasn't feeling well enough to make the trip.

The thermometer on the dashboard was stubbornly stuck in the very low single digits all the way there. It was rather sobering to think that, among all the other dangers we faced driving on the interstate alongside text-messaging Nascar wannabes zooming past at ninety miles an hour, we might also perish from sheer exposure should our car break down and force us to walk to the nearest gas station.

It's a trip well worth making for the good company, though. We stayed for the afternoon, leaving at around five to make our way back under the light of a huge harvest moon. Is it still a harvest moon after the harvest has been brought in?

The book I've been reading (re-reading, actually) is Apollo: Race to the Moon, by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox. I've blathered on and on in full-blown geek mode about how gaga I am for the moon-landing program, more particularly the manned moon-landing program; Nasa landed a spacecraft, the Surveyor, on the moon three years before anybody set foot there, so Armstrong and Aldrin were really Johnnie-come-latelies, not that their job wasn't important, too.

There've been a lot of words written about how it was done, how hard it was to do, and especially why we did it. When looked at with a coldly analytical eye, the moon shot looks like one of those joy rides by adventurers who climb Everest or dogsled to the North Pole for the glory of being first, and I can understand why some people feel that way. When I look at it, though, it was a demonstration of what humanity is capable of. For most of our history, you won't find an effort the size of the Apollo program that wasn't devoted to the death and destruction of war. Here was a monumental effort, in the most literal sense of the word, that would enlarge our culture, expand our understanding of our world as well as other worlds, and bind people everywhere together in wonder at what is possible if we bend our minds to it. The moon shot is simply the most amazing human effort I have ever seen.

Which is one of the reasons I'm re-reading this book. There different reasons to read each and every book, but for any book it boils down to readability. Most books about the space program are geek-o-riffic tributes, chockablock with somewhat stilted writing and lots of gadget porn. Race to the Moon is written by a husband and wife team, journalists who are probably geeks about space flight but also know how to write about it so that anybody could understand what they're describing. I won't deny there's some gadget porn in here, but you can easily skip ahead to the next good story, and Race to the Moon has too many good stories to pass up.

The Apollo program, named mostly on a whim by program manager Abe Silverstein because he liked the sound of "Apollo," was a Herculean effort on the part of tens of thousands of people to put boots on the ground, to use a phrase easily understood by anybody these days. There's an argument to be made for sending robots to do the exploration: They're easier and cheaper to build and fly, and you're not risking anybody's neck when you send an unmanned spacecraft. The difference, though, is this: You can fly all the drones to the moon that you want and get lots of pretty pictures to hang on the wall, but until you put boots on the ground you haven't really been there, and the whole point of exploration, in my opinion, is to answer the question, Can we go there?

The Apollo program answered that question, in the jargon of the space age, affirmatively, and they did it with technology that was barely a step away from stick-and-rudder flying. When Kris Kraft and George Low, two of the program's founding fathers, floated the idea of changing the Apollo 8 mission from a earth-orbit check ride to a shakedown moon-shot cruise, Jerry Bostick, one of the guys who would have to work out the navigation for the trip, blurted out, "How do you think we're gonna do that? We're not ready to do that!"

Apollo 8 was also the first time anybody rode a Saturn V rocket, still the most powerful rocket ever built. Others have been planned, but only the Saturn V is powerful enough to hustle a spacecraft, even one as small as the Apollo, up to a speed fast enough to fly to the moon. Much more significant than that, It was also the most complex machine of its time, with so many pieces built by so many different companies that there was no shortage of people who thought it would never fly.

And it very well might have never flown if George Mueller hadn't decreed that they pile all the pieces up (the rocket was often referred to as "the stack" because it was, literally, a pile of pieces, like a Lego rocket ship) and test them together, instead of testing each piece separately. When Arthur Rudolph meticulously laid out all the problems with doing it that way, Mueller, newly chosen to head the Office of Manned Space Flight, answered, "So what?"

They plowed ahead, stacking the stages, the interstages and the spacecraft on top of the launcher, rolling it out to the pad, and running through the procedures from step one, just as if they were going to launch the thing. Every step was fraught with so many glitches that the first countdown, scheduled to last four days from beginning to end, dragged on for seventeen. When it became apparent to Rocco Petrone, in charge of running the countdown, that the staff in the firing room was about to collapse from exhaustion, he called off the test and sent everyone home.

On October 13, 1967, they finally got the countdown past the forty-five minute mark, as far as they'd ever gotten before, and it kept going. They must have all been on the edges of their seats. At the twenty-six minute mark the rocket switched to internal power and began chilling the engines. At the three-minute mark when the rocket went automatic, taking over the countdown from the launch team, Rocco Petrone asked Ike Rigell, "Are you sure we got the igniters out of there?" Forty-eight days after they rolled it out to the pad they had a full-up, ready-to-launch rocket. They had to beat their brains out to do it — "I think I've suffered permanent brain damage," one of the launch crew said after giving his report — but there it was.

Which gave Neil Armstrong his opportunity to drop an indefinite article about a year and a half later (and granted cohort Buzz his chance to be first to pee on the moon — "Everybody has their firsts on the moon," Aldrin sheepishly asserted).

Race to the Moon is the book for you if you were every at all interested in reading a history of the space program but were turned off by all the geeked-out technical writing. I'd even lend you my copy.

Monday, January 4, 2010

It's going to be especially hard to go back to work this Monday morning. I've been feeling pretty spoiled by the short work-weeks we've had the past half-month. Now that we're back to full-length, five-day work weeks, I'm a little concerned that Thursday afternoon could find me dragging ass through the early afternoon up to Friday at about four forty-five, by which time I usually feel the weight of the week slip from my shoulders, and I go bouncing out the door. It's quite a head game.

My Darling B is not quite done with short work-weeks. When they were passing around the vacation calendar at work she snagged the Monday after New Year's Day, so she gets to enjoy the final day of a very extended weekend today. Lucky bug.

My Darling B, explaining her choice for tonight's menu: "I dunno, I just want some shrimp."

Well, darn!

First thing you do is, you buy a pound of shrimp. B asked for the medium-sized shrimp, because the smaller you get 'em, the less crap they got stored in their hump. Shrimp got a lot of crap in them, and the bigger the shrimp, the more crap they have. B can't stand it. She has to pull all that crap out. She hates doing it, but she hates the grit in her teeth way more than she hates de-veining shrimp, so she slits each and every one of them right up the hump and picks the crap out.

"If you got a pound of colossal shrimp you'd have to pick the crap out of only three or four shrimp," I pointed out. She didn't want colossal shrimp though, probably because they were scary-huge.

The teensy-tiny little shrimp have almost no crap at all, so little, in fact, that she'll happily boil them in their shells and eat them that way, but she didn't see any tiny shrimp in the showcase until the guy behind the counter had already wrapped her medium shrimp. Isn't that always the way it works out?

After forty-five minutes of de-veining shrimp, B was finally ready to throw them into the frying pan. But first, the pasta.

Yes, pasta. And garlic. It's not a good idea to serve pasta without garlic. The Vesuvian gods don't look kindly on it, that's why. Just grind up some garlic and put it in there, don't ask a lot of questions.

Once every stick of pasta was soft enough to get lost beneath the rolling boil of the pot, B dumped the shrimp into the fry pan and carefully watched over them, turning each and every one again and again so they would not be overdone or underdone, because nothing's worse than spending a lot of money on a pound of shrimp and overcooking them. You might as well try to each a pan full of rubber bands.

Voila! Tonight's sumptuous repast!

I ate my shrimp & pasta accompanied by a glass of Hop Harvest from the Central Waters brewery. It's got a name that makes it sound as if it'll blast your head off but even B liked it and I thought it went well with the shrimp. B had hers with a glass of Ponzi's Pinot Gris, a delicious, goes-with-anything white wine. A fresh salad completed the repast. Bliss!

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

I can't stay long because Mister Sandman is about to eat my brains for his dinner tonight. I couldn't sleep for shit last night and, although I managed to plow through the day on sheer willpower alone (coffee helped), I'm now so close to being asleep that I'm not at all sure whether I'm dreaming this blog post or you are. Pogo polo? An orange, because a vest has no sleeves! hfdfdj fdjskalj fdjks jfkd fdjs sfjdk freiwp nmzxcv whj fnmdisap jfie fjdks.

Okay, I'm outta here.

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Three o'clock this morning: BLAM! It was the unmistakable sound of a cat running full-tilt all the way to the back of the large paper shopping bag on the floor in the dining room. Then followed by BAM! (notice, no L), the sound of the other cat jumping smack on top of the paper bag containing the first cat. Then finally the steady Pop! Pop! Pop! of a cat on the outside swatting at the cat on the inside.

Repeat. Thankfully, only once. There was a lot of racing around the house after each "in the bag" episode, the first time from the kitchen through the living room to the hallway and back at kitteh super-speed, and the second time down the basement stairs, loud as a couple bowling balls, Plonka! Plonka! Plonka! Plonka! (Sound effects are everything.) I thought I heard them knocking over something big and heavy down there, too, but I haven't been to check, yet, so maybe they were just continuing to be loud.

It's not easy to get a full night's sleep around here.

Friday, January 8, 2010

This morning on The Twenty-Four Hour Program About The Underwear Bomber (formerly known as The News) the president declared that the Christmas Day Terrorist Attack (duh-duh-DAAHHHHHH!) was the result in a failure of intelligence agencies to connect the dots.

So how do we fix this? Well, naturally the response is to have TSA goons grab your crotch more often and spend a couple billion dollars on full-body scanners. Only makes sense.

It's hard to train bomb-sniffing dogs. You want your training to be as realistic as possible, so ideally you'd want to take your dogs to the airport, where they'd be working most of the time, and you'd want them to sniff the passenger's bags, because that's what they'd be doing every day. Probably you've already trained them to recognize what explosives smell like, but you'd want to make sure they could find them in amongst the suitcases going round and round the carousel so ideally you'd have a suitcase with at least a little bit of actual explosive material in it. And you wouldn't want to use the same suitcase over and over because the dog might learn to recognize the suitcase, and that could become a problem. Likewise, you wouldn't want to ask someone to put the explosive material in his suitcase. He might act in a way that would alert the dog. So, to make the scenario as realistic as possible, why not stuff a few ounces of plastic explosives in the suitcase of a randomly-selected passenger without his knowledge? What could possibly go wrong? Other than you might forget where the explosive are. Or you might stick two in one bag but pull only one out? Or, possibly, and this is really way outside the realm of possibility, I'm sure, but just for the sake of argument, just maybe the passenger might unwittingly somehow not only take the explosives onto the plane, and the plane might take off despite warnings from the police, and the passenger might pick up his bag and take it home with him even if the police called ahead and warned the baggage handlers at the plane's destination, and then the unwitting passenger might be arrested as a terrorist when a phone call from the police went horribly awry ...

... but that could never happen.

Saturday, January 9, 2010

Story time:

After basic training but before I began going to regular classes at my technical school I was in "casual status," another way of saying, "this guy's available to do any shit job you can think of." While on casual status, we were required to assemble in formation in front of the orderly room at eight o'clock every morning. One of our sergeants would come out of the orderly room with another sergeant we had never seen before, and he would say something like, "Sergeant Able needs four volunteers to load cinder blocks onto trucks all week."

Nobody ever raised their hands. We hadn't been in the military for very long but in that short time we had all learned that "volunteering" means something entirely different in the military. The sergeant would point and the closest four people in formation and tell them, "You, you, you and you, than you very much for volunteering."

And off we'd go to clean out dumpsters or rake gravel under the Texas summer sun. It really sucked. The worst job I had was loading concrete parking blocks onto a truck and taking them to a dump. They're only three or four inches high and maybe four feet wide so I figured that, with two guys lifting each one, it wouldn't be too hard, but it turned out each of them weighs what is technically known as a shit ton. Also, we didn't have any gloves, so by the time we'd loaded them onto a truck our knuckles were barked clear down to the bone, and we still had to unload them.

One day, Sergeant Huff came out of the orderly room with an Army sergeant following him. Huff was actually a Senior Airman, as the rank was known back then, but he acted like and had all the authority of any of the other orderly room sergeants. The Army sergeant following him had a lot more stripes than Huff, so we figured him for a hardass right away. He turned out to be a Sergeant First Class, and his name was Shiggs.

"Sergeant Shiggs is setting up a dormitory for the Army students," Huff informed us, "and he needs three volunteers to help him." No hands went up, of course, first because you never volunteer, and second because "setting up a dormitory" meant scrubbing floors and toilets and who knew what else. The particular corner of Lackland Air Force Base that we lived in was peppered by old wooden barracks they called "dormitories" that hadn't been in use for years. I'd already been roped into cleaning up two of them and was already dreading the threat of having to clean up a third, because I was standing in the front row.

Sure enough, Huff pointed at me and two other guys. "Follow me," Shiggs said, turned and walked away without another word. We formed up in line behind him, the guy in front called out, "Forward, march," and we trailed him in lockstep down the road.

On the other side of what we knew was the tech school campus Sergeant Shiggs stopped at the front door of an empty barracks, took a ring of keys out of his pocket and unlocked the door. The barrack was typical of all the others on this side of the base: There were two entrance doors on either side of an office in the middle of the building on the ground floor. There was a bathroom behind the office and two big, open bunk rooms running the length of the rest of the building to either side. The upper floor was laid out the same way.

Shiggs took us inside and we stood at parade rest in one of the bunk rooms until he said, "At ease," taking off his hat. Iron-frame beds had already been set up along the walls of the bunk room and in the aisle between the beds there was a stack of cardboard boxes as high as the ceiling.

"You see those boxes?" Shiggs asked us. "Those are wall lockers," he said, using the military name for what you would probably think of if I said "wardrobe" or "chiffarobe." There's a closet on one side as high as the locker for hanging clothes, and on the other side there's usually a couple shelves and two or three drawers. At least one of the drawers has a hasp on it, so it can be secured with a padlock.

"A couple Army privates can put one of those together in a morning," Shiggs told us, "so I expect we should be able to get two of those built today." We didn't point out the obvious fact that the four of us ought to be able to put together four of them today, because we'd learned that we didn't question any directions that came from someone who outranked us.

He pointed at one of the other two guys. "Have you ever been a dorm guard?"

"Yes, sergeant," the guy answered. We all had, in basic training. A dorm guard stood at the door and didn't let anyone in or out who wasn't authorized to be there.

"Good man," Shiggs said. "You go stand guard at the door. Don't let anyone in or out until I've eyeballed them, you got that? Anybody comes to the door, you tell them to wait there and come get me, right?"

"Yes, sergeant."

"Good man. But first, go get some Cokes for these guys." He dug some loose change out of his pocket and dumped it into his hands. "Get yourself some, too." And off the guy went to find the nearest Coke machine.

Shiggs turned to us. "Remember, one wall locker this morning, one this afternoon. Don't rush through it. I want it done right. Understand?"

"Yes, sergeant," we answered.

"Now, I've got some work I got to do in the office, very important Army work. I don't want to be disturbed, so I'm going in there and shut the door. You understand?"

He hadn't brought anything with him, but we were pretty sure we understood the work he was talking about. I had already done the same kind of work myself, when left on my own to watch over an empty room with a cot in it.

After Shiggs left we tipped the first box off the top of the pile, tore it open and laid out the parts of the wall locker. Assembly was as simple as putting together a bookshelf from Ikea: Lay the back on the floor, set the sides up alongside it and screw it all together with hex nuts and an Allen wrench (included). But Sergeant Shiggs said this would take us all morning, so after we screwed the sides, top and bottom to the back we took a break, sitting on the edge of a couple of bunks while we drank Cokes and told stories.

Then we put the shelves in. Whew, that was tough. Better take another break. Then we put the drawers together, but took a break before we installed them because we didn't want to overwork ourselves. Hanging the doors was about the trickiest part. We really took our time with that to make sure they were straight and secure. There was some hardware to attach, door handles and coat hooks, that kind of thing, that we left until we heard Sergeant Shiggs getting up finishing his work.

"Hey, nice job," he said, looking over the finished wall locker. "Very good work. Here, go get yourselves some Cokes." And he threw us some more change. We sat on the edges of the bunks drinking Cokes and trading stories with Sergeant Shiggs until chow time when he marched us over to the mess hall. He came back to get us after lunch, and we spent the afternoon in much the same way we'd spent the morning.

The rest of the week was delightful, probably the best week I spent on casual status. We didn't even form up in front of the orderly room with the rest of the unlucky students, we just marched straight over to the Army barracks after breakfast where Sergeant Shiggs was waiting for us.

There was one afternoon when an Army officer showed up at the door. He wasn't too happy about being told to wait by the dorm guard, who rushed off to interrupt Sergeant Shiggs' work, but when he was finally lead into the bunk room by a blinking Sergeant Shiggs he was very impressed by the progress we'd made putting together the wall lockers. Apparently the Army didn't set the bar too high when it came to productivity.

The week ended all too quickly, and we returned to casual status the next Monday morning with the rest of the students to get picked out of the lineup so we could go mow the dirt. There are no lawns in Texas, but the Air Force made us mow them anyway. We never saw Shiggs again while we were on casual, but we did see him several weeks or months later in a shopette not too far down the road. It was set up like a small-town Coke stand with some tables out front, and Shiggs was having a drink with a couple of his Army buddies. He recognized us right away, said hi and bought us all Cokes. I've never met another Army sergeant quite like him.

That's my Sergeant Shiggs Story. I'm sure there are many like it, but this one is mine.

Sunday, January 10, 2010

I got what must have been the very worst crank phone call I've ever answered in my life. Not annoying, rude or obscene, just a really, really dumb crank call.

The phone rang at about ten-thirty. My Darling B will let it ring and ring because most of the phone calls we get are salesmen, so she lets them all go to the answering machine to screen the callers. We were watching a movie, though, the spectacularly entertaining Monsters Inc. that I finally found a copy of at the thrift store after combing through dozens of cassettes of crappy Disney movies for the past six months. I paused the movie and, to stop the phone ringing, I picked up the receiver and answered, "Hello?"

There was a longish pause before the voice of what sounded like an older man came on, and I mean older relative to me, as if maybe somebody at a local nursing home couldn't sleep and decided to pass the night away by picking numbers at random from the phone book and bothering people all night.

"Is Dave there?" he asked . Our number's listed in the phone book so I didn't think it was especially weird that he used my name.

I didn't recognize the voice so I asked, "Who's calling please?"

There was, again, a longish pause before he unconvincingly gave his name as "David ..." (pause, as if maybe glancing at the phone book for a name) "... Alexander."

If ever I knew somebody named David ... Alexander, I've completely forgotten him now. No offense, David.

"What can I help you with, David Alexander?"

And again there was a excruciatingly long pause. This was not only the most poorly planned, badly executed crank phone call ever, it was also the most boring.

He finally managed to mumble, "I was wondering ...," before he had to pause again to recall what he'd been wondering. Oh, yeah! "... what you were doing tonight. Or tomorrow night."

It's a question you ask people when you're thinking about getting together, but his tone of voice made it sound more like he was taking a survey. "What I'm doing tonight?" I repeated.

"Yeah," he affirmed.

"Tonight I'm watching a movie, thanks for asking."

"Okay," he said, apparently satisfied with my answer.

If they're not flat-out abusive I'll sometimes go along with crank calls for a while, just for yuks, but this one was going nowhere, and the movie was on pause, waiting for us. "Well, thanks for calling, David Alexander," I said. "Bye."

I'm very interested to see if he calls back, but if he does I hope he calls a little earlier, or waits until the movie's over.

I spent the morning atop a step ladder, painting the ceiling in one of the bedrooms, which freaked the heck out of the cats. They always get a little twitchy whenever we're not sitting on our butts or sleeping because, really, that's what they see us do most of the time.

In the morning after our showers we sit down to eat our breakfast, then we disappear for the whole day. When we come home from work we sit down to eat dinner, then we sit down to read or otherwise relax in the living room, then we go to bed. On the weekends we usually go somewhere. If we don't, we usually sit and read, or sit and eat, or go to sleep.

Breaking the routine is apparently so weird they just don't know what do to with themselves, prowling restlessly and making distressed little mewing sounds.

But you gotta do what you gotta do, no matter how unhappy it makes the cats. When we moved here almost five years ago, Tim asked if he could paint his room. The walls were a, shall we say, vibrant shade of burgundy. He wanted plain old blue, so we bought him a pail of paint and said have at it. He did a pretty good job of it, too. Masked off the baseboards and put down lots of newspaper, but he never masked off the tops of the walls, so the blue ended up all around the upper edges of the ceiling.

Now that Tim's moved out, we want to use that room as an office, put a desk and some shelves and a filing cabinet in there. But before we move all that crap in there, tidying up the paint on the ceiling would be a good idea, so that's why I was scaring the cats this morning. And I got to sniff paint fumes for a couple hours, too. Latex paint, though, darn it. It's like trying to get high off watercolors.

LATER: As it turned out, it wasn't the quick tidying-up job I thought it would be. The flat white paint made the edges of the ceiling look a little too good, and now the rest of the ceiling, paint faded with age, will have to be completely repainted. Isn't that just the way?

Monday, January 11, 2010

Aha! I was right!

For years I'd listened to people tell me I should ditch the eyeglasses by letting the doctor shoot a laser into my eye, and the first thought that did not enter my head was, "Well, it must be safe or the doctors wouldn't do it, right?" Because, y'know, they would have to shoot a laser into my eye!

The people who have had laser eye surgery but avoided side effects (bumping into walls, sandpaper eye, everybody looks like Frankenstein's monster) were not sympathetic to my raving hysterics. "I don't have any problems at all," they would point out. To which I replied: "You were just lucky."

And this morning I found out I was right! Hysterical, but right! I read over my cuppa joe this morning that not only is laser surgery a bad idea for a significant number of people who get it, the results haven't even been clinically studied!

So get yourself a laser and tell the FDA you want to slice pieces off people. They'll not only approve it, you'll also make piles of money!

(You've got to click on the link, by the way, even if you're not interested in the story. It's accompanied by a wicked cool photo of what looks like eyeball torture.)

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

BBC reporter Dan Simmons breaks a cell phone less than a minute after Bob Plaschke, the CEO of the company that made the cell phone, tells him it's indestructible and invites him to do anything he wants to it. How could that possibly go wrong?

Simmons dunks the phone in an aquarium that already has several phones in it. That little gee-whiz demonstration goes just fine, but when Simmons proceeds to beat the shit out of it by bashing it against the corner of the tank, well, hilarity ensues. Or at least Plashke laughs, good sport that he is. Simmons seems more than a little embarrassed.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Pete declared that this week would be Wayback Week and challenged all his Facebooking friends to replace their profile picture with photos of themselves from way back in the day.

Here's what I came up with last night. It's from the first time I was stationed in England, but I don't remember any more about it than that, other than the name of the guy licking my face (Derrick).

"That is the dorkiest photo of you ever!" My Darling B opined when she saw the photo. "How'd you get him to lick your face?"

"I didn't get him to lick my face," I told her, "he just did it on his own." Because that's what you do when you're standing around outside eating hot dogs off paper plates. Or something.

As long as I was digging through old photos and scanning them, I couldn't resist digitizing this beauty and posting it on the interwebs. This is your favorite O-couple back in 1997 (I think) making an appearance at the local elementary school on their costume day.

My Darling B spent all week making that costume. I spent about thirty seconds digging old clothes out of bins in a thrift store. It's obvious who she's supposed to be, but I figured my costume needed a bit of explaining, so I pinned a note on the back of my jacket that read, "Tired, poor, huddled & yearning to breathe free." Nobody got it.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

I'll be using many sharp-edged power tools all afternoon. I started out with all ten fingers. I'm always amazed when I finish with all ten after repeated use of power saws, power drills, routers, and all kinds of whirling dervishes that could snatch away a digit so fast I wouldn't even see it happen.

I once disdained power tools. Anything made with power tools you couldn't honestly call hand-crafted, was my thought. The problem with that kind of snobbery is, you've got to have the talent that enables you to cut a straight line, and although I can reasonably fake a straight line, I have to admit a power saw cuts a line much straighter and cleaner than I ever could.

You would also need a set of muscles like steel cable and a bottomless supply of stamina to saw and saw and saw all day long, to say nothing of how much driving a half-dozen screws takes out of you. I used to be able to do that but I've got the limp, creaky wrists of an old lady now. With a circular saw and a power drill I can keep at the job all day long.

And that's why I've been collecting power tools lately, most of them at estate sales. I broke down several years ago and bought a brand-new router off the shelf, but the power miter saw that's turned out to be more massively awesome than atomic-powered rocket ships was something I managed to score at an auction for just forty bucks.

I used it to turn a whole bunch of perfect good select lumber into rails for a pull-out set of drawers so My Darling B could not only store her canning jars in the kitchen cupboards, but so she could get to them without having to worry about the flimsy cardboard boxes they were stored in breaking apart and getting bonked on the head by a bunch of jars. The cupboards she stores them in are way over her head and she has to stand on tippy-toe, even on her step-stool, to get the boxes out. I whacked together some durable pine drawers and mounted them on rails. Now she can pull them out and there'll be no bonking going on in the kitchen.

Or maybe that didn't come out right.

Sunday, January 17, 2010

The space shuttles are up for sale. If you're a spaceship geek the way I am, this is our big chance for us to pool our money to buy the most mind-blowing memento ever.

And in these hard economic times Nasa has been forced to offer them at a discount! Yes! They were originally asking forty-two million, but we could snag either the Endeavor or the Atlantis for just twenty-nine million!

Or we could wait. It's rumored the Enterprise will go on the market after the Smithsonian takes delivery of the Discovery. I guess they don't have any need for both of them, and Enterprise will probably be even more of a bargain because it never went into orbit.

If you go in halves with me, we'll have to keep it at your house. My garage is chock full.

One of the really great things about my job in the military was that they sent me back to tech school every once in a while, which might sound like a drag to you, but I promise it's not. Here, for instance, is a photo from the first time they sent me to tech school. I was stationed in England and the tech school was in Munich, Germany. Pretty awesome, no?

I don't remember who snapped this photo or how it came into my possession, but I remember that it was an an icebreaker during the first week we were at school. The students lived in apartments that had the look of what might have been two-bedroom married quarters with a full kitchen, bath and living area. After this night we would gather weekly in somebody apartment to party, because in Germany they would deliver beer to your doorstep the way milk was once delivered here in the States. When you're young and out in the great big world on your own, what more encouragement do you need?

The guy in the middle, believe it or not, is yours truly. There really was a time, about 4.5 million years ago according to the latest carbon dating techniques, when I was that young. It still amazes me.

The guy on the far left is Bob Brandriff. This was a guy who liked to party as much as anything else. That's not a criticism, that's praise. He knew what he liked, and he did it. And I admired him for it, because I hoped that one day I would unclench my butt and be as easygoing as he was. It could happen. I'm still hoping.

I forget the name of the guy tugging on Bob's ear. I believe he was a squid, but that's all I can dredge up from my feeble memory about him. "Squid" is what we used to call Navy guys. They called us "wingnuts."

I had a huge crush on the girl who appears to be checking out my neck and tried everything I could think of to make my lips say anything to her more intelligible that "beweeble babble dooble bee," but I couldn't do it. I can't remember her name now.

The guy on the far right is Seth Cochran. Several years later I ran into him again in Denver, Colorado, or thought I did. After working one or two nights with a guy who looked an awful lot like him I asked if he'd ever been to the tech school in Munich. He said no, but his twin brother had been. It's a small world sometimes, but that's positively microscopic.

Yes, that's a posable astronaut doll and he is picking my nose.

The only explanation I can offer is that, when our family packed up our truck-top camper every Christmas to leave the frozen north on our annual vacation to southern climes, my brother and I would ride in the part of the camper over that hung over the front of the truck because there wasn't enough room in the cab for all four of us. We were up there for days. We had to find some way to amuse ourselves.

The tune, if you don't know it (I certainly didn't), is "I'm Yours" by Jason Mraz, and here's his version, almost as good as the little guy's, but only almost.

There's more on his YouTube page, including a jam session as he picks out "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and a surprisingly subdued cover of "O-Bli-Dee O-Bli-Da".

Monday, January 18, 2010

Who would look at a nifty brass light fixture like this one and think, "You know, what would really make that look better is an uneven coat of crap-colored spray paint. And I just happen to have a can in the basement!"

My Darling B got this for me at the last auction we went to. I think she paid all of three bucks for it. As is, it looked like she paid too much for it, but after a couple hours careful work with a wire brush attachment in a Dremel moto-tool I got it to look like this. The paint, lumpy and old, just went poof! when the wire brush hit it. Took a while to get it out of all those little nooks and crannies, though.

She got the rest of the lamp, too, all but the shade and the light bulb. It's a floor lamp on a tall wooden spindle. The spindle looks great, only needs a quick bit of sanding and staining, but the base needs quite a lot of work. I'm not sure there's enough glue in my work shop to put it back together, maybe not in all the Ace hardware stores in Madison. But even if I throw that away, the brass was worth it.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Well, I did it again. I washed my pants last night and forgot to put them in the dryer this morning after I finished setting up the coffee pot. The whole time I'm in the shower I'm thinking to myself, "Pants in the dryer, pants in the dryer...," and the whole time I'm drying myself with a towel I'm repeating to myself, "Pants in the dryer, pants in the dryer." By the time I'm in the kitchen drying coffee beans I'm singing a little ditty that goes, "Pants in the dryer, yeah-yeah!" And what do you suppose happens as soon as I'm done plugging in the coffee pot? I go read the morning funnies on the internet, skipping the crucial step of putting my pants in the dryer! How's that even possible? I doubt medical science will ever be able to explain it.

I have more than one pair of pants, by the way. I've done this to myself so many times that I keep one dry pair hanging in the closet so I don't have to go to work wearing damp pants. Which I've been forced to do in the past. Of course.

I finally caved in and got one.

I lost track a long time ago of the number of home-improvement projects I wanted to try but was putting off till the day I stuck a crowbar in my wallet and sprung loose a few bucks for a table saw. After looking at dozens of table saws I came to the conclusion that I knew nothing about them, other than they were the most dangerous power tool invented, picked the highest-rated one on Amazon that I could afford and click on "Buy me!"

Well, as of today I no longer have an excuse to put any more projects on the back burner. Indeed, now that I've spent all that dough on a table saw I'm on a time table. "I expect to see some bookcases by Saturday," My Darling B warned me as I toted my new toy through the kitchen to the basement stairs. "No pressure."

Keep you posted.

Demolition is complete. Now begins reconstruction.

Locked in the grip of this jerry-rigged vise is the base of a lamp we bought at auction some weeks ago. It's actually carved from two pieces of wood somebody, a long time ago, tried to glue together with a tar-like, probably asbestos-based adhesive and, when that didn't work, shot three of the most jagged junk-drawer wood screws up through the bottom, which held the whole mess together passably well, for a while.

There were another three rusty wood screws that fixed the spindle to the base. They were all so old and crooked that getting them out took most of the evening and all the cuss words in my vocabulary. But I got them out. Dammit.

Then I used a hand rasp to clean off most of the tar-like glue and sanded the rest off, probably throwing enough asbestos into the air to kill us all in our sleep. I spread a thin layer of wood glue over the face of the bottom piece, laid the upper piece over it, then built this thumb-crushing vise ... yet somehow managed to avoid crushing either of my thumbs — and there was much rejoicing.

The two pieces will be forever bonded together when I take the vise apart tomorrow morning, but I'll probably shoot three or four construction screws through it just to make sure it won't come apart. Then I have to figure out how to sand the paint-splattered varnish off it without ruining the delicate curve that I won't be able to duplicate because I don't have a lathe. Yet.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

I'm enjoying a delicious bottle of Hopslam from Bell's Brewing in Michigan. Truly scrumptious.

My Darling B uses different words to describe it. If memory serves, she described it as, and I quote, "cat urine."

I'll probably have to brush my teeth, tongue and uvula if I want a good-night smooch tonight.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Although I would love nothing more than to apply for this internship so I could sit around in my socks all day living the science-fiction porn fantasy that's been playing in my head since I was a teenager (did that conjure up mental images you never wanted in your head? You're welcome), I don't think I could afford the cut in pay, which I'm guessing would be zero.

But what interests me much, much more than reading and writing about sci-porn is those goggles! Oh sweet mother I want those goggles! Those are the most awesome oculo-facial gadgets I've ever beheld! I weep, because I don't have them! I WANT I WANT I WANT I WANT!

From the web site io9.com

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present the Secretary General of the United Nations, Mister Bonky Moon!

We've called him Bonkers ever since he came home with us, but you know how it is: You get bored with saying the same thing over and over, or he does something really crazy ... actually, that's how we came to call him Bonkers in the first place. That, and he was especially prone to head-butting anyone who leaned in close enough.

Sometimes we shortened his name to Bonk, usually pronounced with an exclamation point, like BONK! That was inevitable, really, just as it was only a matter of time before somebody christened him Bonky. Not that it ever mattered. He's never responded to any name we've ever called him, which makes it easier to call him anything we like.

The Secretary General of the UN, as you may or may not know, and you probably don't ... not that I would think of impugning your intelligence, it's just that nine out of ten Americans, by my official count, pay absolutely no attention to who's in charge of the UN. That's all I meant.

Where was I? Oh yeah! Ban Ki-Moon is the Big Guy at the UN, and when they say his name on the radio news, they say "Bonky Moon," which is so much fun to say that My Darling B and I echo his name every time we hear it. We'd probably do it in a crowded elevator if you said it aloud, apropos of nothing, just to see if we would. Maybe especially in a crowded elevator.

It didn't take long, not more than a couple months, before we made the link between Ban Ki-Moon and Bonkers, and now on the days that we hear Ban Ki-Moon on the radio do the echo thing, we call the cat Bonky Moon for the rest of the day, just for the joy of saying it over and over.

Which is why I suggested to B this morning that, should we ever adopt another cat, we should call him Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a name that's just as much fun to say aloud as Ban Ki-Moon, maybe even more so.

And if we should turn into really crazy old people with a house full of cats, we could name them all after Secretaries General of the UN. I'd like a Dag, and U Thant would make a great name. Not sure that we'd have a Kurt Waldheim unless we were completely crazy-gone, though.

Friday, January 22, 2010

My Darling B must have been receiving the same signals from the mothership I was getting.

She was walking from the car to the ATM as I came out of the office building to meet her this evening. "I'm getting some cash," she explained, "I've been thinking about pizza all day."

"That's funny, I've got lots of cash on me," I told her, "I was going to offer to treat you to dinner tonight."

She wanted to go to The Roman Candle, a pizza place on Willy Street. "Harmony's got great pizza, but I like Roman Candle's pizza crust better." There you go, Harmony. You're still our favorite tavern, but you need to work on the crust.

Ever had a day like this?

You can go to this NPR web page and listen to a song called "I'm Pretty Sure I Can See Molecules."

Why would you do that? Because it's a song with so much geeky goodness packed into the title that it makes me want to go to Amazon and order the album right now, and I thought maybe you would, too.

A TSA baggage inspector pulled a baggie of "fine, white powder" he'd planted in Rebecca Solomon's carry-on and demanded, "Where'd you get it?"

Apparently bored with his job of trying to stop terrorists from smuggling explosives into crowded airliners, the agent told Solomon, after letting her sweat it out a minute, he'd put it in her bag himself as a prank, then waved her through.

Funny guy.

Ann Davis, a spokeswoman for TSA, said the agent is looking for other work now.

Philly.com: It Was No Joke At Security Gate

NPR: TSA Joke No Laughing Matter

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Seen on Willy Street this morning. When you see a pair of toy penguins in Santa hats in the window of Grampa's Gun Shop you've just got to stop and snap a photo. I think you do, anyway.

My Darling B set her alarm clock to wake us at seven this morning so we could be among the first in line for the fund-raiser breakfast at the Dane County Farmer's Market. A fabulous spread was planned and we love to support the market.

When B's clock tried to bleep us awake, however, she shut it off, rolled over and we went back to sleep for an hour. Much as we love the market, it had been such a rough week that we just couldn't make ourselves get up.

By the time we finally did get out of bed it was much too late. Hitting the farmer's market for breakfast would have meant standing in line for thirty or forty minutes, so I offered to take B to Lazy Jane's instead, after I perked a pot of java, of course.

I scarfed down a waffle smothered in syrup and garnished with a generous pile of banana slices and crushed walnuts. B ordered the potato pancake special, which came three to a plate and were big as bath mats. Bliss!

Our regular Saturday stop at St Vincent de Paul's thrift store yielded only a few treasures this week. My Darling B didn't find one old platter or kitchen gadget that caught her fancy. I, on the other hand, found this little treasure, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Space.

I've got so many books about manned space exploration at this point that B makes fun of me whenever we go to the thrift store. If I've got an armload of books and one or more is about the space program she acts shocked, as if she didn't expect that, and if none of them were written by or about astronauts, well, she acts shocked again. I can't win for losing.

I had to take this one home because it's big and thick as a tombstone and packed with iconic photos of spaceflight through the years. It was the photos I was after most of all.

But what always gets me about this book and others like it is that they never answer the one question that everyone asks sooner or later, the one that the congressional intern blurted to Tom Hanks in the movie Apollo 13: How do you go to the bathroom in space? Looking through this and other so-called encyclopedias, you would think they didn't. There isn't a toilet to be seen anywhere.

And that's because, until the space shuttle, there weren't any. The first astronauts were in space for such a short time (Alan Shepard went suborbital, lobbed like a cannonball for a trip of just fifteen minutes, and John Glenn was in orbit just a few hours) that they just peed in their suits if they had to go. Later, when they were in orbit for days, there wasn't enough room in the spacecraft to sneeze, much less take care of hygiene, so they wore absorbent underpants — diapers, essentially — in case they really had to go. Most of the astronauts tried their damndest not to use them, for obvious reasons.

It takes three days to travel to the moon, though, even when you're hustling along at a speed faster than a rifle bullet. Armstrong and Aldrin were on the surface just eleven hours, but later missions lingered on the moon for days, so they had to finally give some consideration to The Big Question. And the makers of Apollo 13 half-answered it: The Apollo capsule had a "relief tube" that would vacuum liquid waste away with the flick of a valve. One of the details they omitted, though was that they had to be very careful when they opened the valve, lest delicate equipment get sucked away, too. The vacuum of space is relentlessly brutal.

But not even Ron Howard wanted to hint at the answer, How do you go Number Two? Because it's kind of funny and it's kind of ... not. There's no way to poop in a pot because, as the astronauts loved to demonstrate, everything floats in space. Who hasn't seen them squirting food around and snatching it out of the air with their mouths? Well, what goes in must come out, and it still floats then, too, and obviously nobody wants to go chasing that around the cockpit.

What they came up with was a plastic baggie that had a brim around the opening, so it sort of looked like an old man's hat. The brim had an adhesive strip to stick the thing to their butts and keep it from floating away while they were doing dookie, which probably sounded like a great idea to the guys who designed it. They obviously didn't have hairy butts. Using one of these, and then trying to clean up after, was such a miserable experience that, again, astronauts tried as hard as they could not to use them.

Most people know that the space shuttle has a toilet. Finally, space travel had the answer to The Big Question. What a lot of people don't know is that astronauts are specially trained to use it because it's critically important that they sit with their cheeks snug against the seat, and that they sit in the middle of the seat.

The first part is not so difficult: The toilet has a couple padded swing arms to hold down a pooping astronaut. His butt has to be firmly kissing the seat because the toilet sucks air down past the astronaut's thighs to keep doo-doo moving in a southerly direction, and a snug fit ensures a brisk flow of air.

To make sure the Merry Little Breezes will carry away every little turdlette, though, an astronaut must sit squarely in the middle of the seat. This is critically important: The point of emission must be centered pretty much exactly in the middle of the opening of the toilet.

Not too many people know when their exhaust pipe is centered precisely over the toilet bowl, because they don't have to, but astronauts do. To make sure they do (I really love this part), Nasa built a training toilet. It has a video camera pointing up from the bottom at the underside of the seat. I'll give you a moment to let that sink in.

In toilet training, the astronaut drops trou, plants his fundament on the seat and then, watching the image of his bare bupkis on a monitor, his very own hairy butthole, he walks his cheeks around on the seat until he manages to center his anus on the crosshairs that Nasa paid a technician to tape across the screen.

I don't know how many times they practice this or if they're graded, and I've never heard of anyone washing out of the astronaut corps for failing toilet training. If I had to guess, I'd say they run through it once, maybe twice at the very most. A guy can be expected to endure only so much of that kind of indignity.

To my knowledge, the toilet on the shuttle does not have a camera.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Is that the usual bored expression affected by runway models, or is her face betraying the self-loathing she feels as she asks herself whether this gig is worth the money?

[Photo: Seattle Post-Intelligencer]

Dear Mister Postal Delivery Guy: Of all the times you decided to switch from delivering mail in the afternoon to delivering mail in the morning, why did it have to be yesterday? You've never delivered mail in the morning before! You always delivered mail after lunch! I wouldn't have even asked for a re-delivery if I'd thought there was a ghost of a chance that you'd deliver a package that I had to sign for in the morning on Saturday, while I'd be picking over the books at the thrift shop. I would have driven out to the very accessible and conveniently located Main Office Carrier Annex, a place so far out in the suburbs of Madison that it's impossible to see because light traveling from it will take millions of years to arrive where I'm standing! But I thought you'd re-deliver this package at the usual time, say two o'clock, when I'd be in the basement tinkering with my toys, so I didn't think it would be a problem. Now, it's a problem. I won't be home to sign for a package until next Saturday, which is also when I'll next have the time to drive to Outer Slobovia to pick up the package my darn self. Why do you call it the United States Postal Service?

The first thing you have to make with your new table saw is a table for your saw. Sounds like one of those No shit, Sherlock, answers, doesn't it?

"So what's the first thing you made with your new table saw?"

"A table, duh."

It doesn't have to be pretty, as you can plainly see, but it does have to be stable. I wonder if the word "table" is a truncation of "stable?" I think I'll make that my weekly e-mail to Grant & Martha at A Way With Words. Anyway, a wobbly table would defeat the whole purpose of spending all that money on a table saw in the first place, to say nothing of how quickly you'd lose the end of at least one finger as your table saw table started walking across the work shop floor.

I knocked this together in about an hour, after an hour spent cleaning enough crap from the center of the work shop so I had room to go at it. That's what sucks about starting a new project: Preparation always takes at least as long as doing the actual job.

It took me all friggin day to cut that board in half, but it finally happened. And about time, too. I was getting pretty tired of cutting up all that wood just to build tables and jigs so that I could build something.

It's going to be a book case soon; probably not today, maybe not until sometime next weekend, but now that I can see it's going to happen I feel a little better about blowing all that money on a table saw.

And it worked perfectly the first time! I made a clean cut exactly down the center of the board, accounting for the width of the saw blade, and both pieces came out the other end exactly the same width, just as if I knew what I was doing! Weird.

Monday, January 25, 2010

"The first oncoming thrust of manhood"? How'd that get past the censors?

My Darling B had a bad dream the other night. She dreamed that she woke up and saw somebody standing in the doorway. It was one of those dreams where she knew she was dreaming, and she knew that if she called out to me I'd wake her up and everything would be all right, so she managed to murmur my name in a wan little voice ...

Most of the time, B sleeps on her right side, facing away from me, but when she had this dream she was sleeping on her left side, facing me. I was sleeping on my back. And, as luck would have it, her face was just an inch, maybe two, from my ear, so what she murmured came to me as a howl. I woke scrambling to get untangled from the blankets to see who was yelling at me, and that woke B, and we both woke the cats, so that everybody was jumping around, throwing blankets everywhere and raising a wild ruckus.

When my heart slowed down to about 120 beats a minute from about a thousand, I managed to catch my breath and ask B, "What?"

"...I had a bad dream," was all she could say. And all she needed to say, anyway.

I am me. He is Rick. The other he is Jim. We are the Biomutants.

We're wearing pillow cases for shirts. I made the emblems by cutting a stencil out of card paper and spray painting the designs on. With spray paint. From a can.

I don't know what we were supposed to be about, other than freaking weird.

I suppose it goes without saying that we had a little too much free time on our hands back in our college days.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Our Toyota Camry fits in our garage with perhaps three feet to spare, and I've always thought of that as a close fit.

This guy's Fiat Panda fits in his garage with two and a half inches to spare! The best part of the video is how he gets out of the car!

I've got a whole trunk full of these. A trunk full of old photos, not full of kids.

This is me in grade six. Second row, second from the right, next to Linda Kons.

What really freaks me out about this photo, after the hair (have I always needed a haircut?), is that I'm pretty sure I remember almost everybody's name. Starting from the upper left: Judy Wiesner, Wendy Pohlman, Pete O'Brien, Mary Jean Sorensen, Tom Schuelke ... okay, I'm not sure who that is in the upper right corner, but except for her the names just keep tumbling from my memory. I can't recall what I had for lunch last Friday but I can remember nearly everyone in my sixth-grade class. Bizarre.

[click on the photo to see a much bigger version]

Remember photo booths? Plunk a buck and a half's worth of quarters in the slot, climb into the crowded booth with every single one of the people you were out drinking with and poke each other in the eye while the flash went off at the worst-timed moments. Three minutes later the machine barfed up a slimy strip of black and white photos in which you might be able to recognize maybe one face in your party.

It seemed to me that a lot of the goofiest faces we made were wasted while one of the guys was running to the cashier to get change for a dollar.

My brother and I used to duck into these things wherever we found them. A lot of the time we went out of our way to find them, prowling the farthest corners of a forgotten Kresge's store until that Eureka moment. Most of the time, though, we didn't have to look much. You couldn't help tripping over one of the damned things wherever you went. There must've been one in every department store in Wisconsin.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander said on NPR this morning that everyone who paid taxes last year ought to receive stock in General Motors in order to get the federal government "out of the automobile business."

This is what's wrong with the federal government. Dorkwads like Alexander think we want them to shower us with shit. Like I want some worthless stock in a crappy car company.

Now, offer me stock in a good car company and maybe you've bought my vote.

OMG! OMG! OMG! Rickie Lee Jones is coming to town in February! OOOOgah! OOOOOgah!

I'm gonna go get tickets TOMORROW! Do not wanna miss Rickie Lee Jones!

Only thing is: She's coming to the Barrymore. That could be a problem. The Barrymore has famously fucked up the sound when some of my favorite performers have appeared in town, most notably Susanne Vega. They didn't do Zooey Deschanel any favors, either.

On the other hand, the night we saw Leon Redbone and Leo Kottke at the Barrymore was one of the most memorable performances I've ever attended. And they did a pretty decent job putting in JoCo with Paul & Storm ... so this could turn out okay.

Chuck E's In Love

Thursday, January 28, 2010

I keep finding these guys here in the morning, just sitting, like this, as if they're waiting for something.

They can't be waiting in line for the bathroom. We have two cat pans and two cats. There is no line, ever.

All I can think is, they're doing that spooky cat thing where they sit and stare into space, as if they can see dead people.

Friday, January 29, 2010

Here's a photo for my Mom, who's a little worried about me using a table saw. See that gadget in the middle of the board? That's actually three separate gadgets, two of them made out of cold steel, that have the sole function of keeping my fingers away from the blade. I'm not saying it's impossible to cut myself with this thing, it's just very, very improbable.

Now this monster is the one you have to worry about:

I've been listening to misty-eyed Salinger fans sobbing about what an All-American Novel Catcher In The Rye was and feeling more than awkward about my guilty little secret: It's not my favorite Salinger novel.

It's good and all, but honestly I thought Salinger was a much better short-story writer than a novelist. And the only reason I say that is not that I have some kind of cutting insight or I hold the all-seeing knowledge of what makes a good short-story writer versus a novelist. It's simply that I like his short stories better. I don't think I've ever read a more delightful story than A Young Girl in 1941 With No Waist At All.

And that's as may be, but as for his novels (although probably it should be considered a novela) I just love Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters. I read a review of it in The New York Times today, because everyone's venting their opinions about Salinger this week, that was none too kind, and I had to wonder how closely he'd read it. Or how many times. I don't think you can appreciate Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters until you've read it at least a half-dozen times, and you shouldn't be writing a review of it for any newspaper, and especially not The New York Times, until you've taught a class on it. Or maybe I've just gone over the line. Yes, I see I have.

Obviously I haven't taught a class on it or I would be able to pin down just why I like it so much. I love it mostly for Buddy Glass, the person I most wanted to grow up to be, a hermetic writer living in the woods with no phone, penning novels using a fountain pen and occasionally emerging to teach humanities at a local university.

And I loved it for the rest of the characters, too, outrageous caricatures that they were, I just loved them. As much as everyone mentions the tiny top-hatted man, I have no idea what he's supposed to be in the story. I love him but he's a mystery to me. My favorite character, after Buddy, is the loud-mouthed Matron who dominates the dialog. Every time I meet someone like that, and goodness there are an awful lot of people like her, aren't there, my imagination sucks me into a limousine with no air conditioning stuck in traffic on a New York street, and I blank out on everything else but the hell of what it would be like to spend an afternoon trapped like that.

Oh, I can see I'll be up half the night reading it now. But that's all right, it's Friday. I can take a break from my must-finish book and re-read a little Salinger tonight.

Saturday, January 30, 2010

We're talking about what we wanted to do with our morning.

The night before, we had a plan to go to breakfast at the farmer's market, a traditional breakfast of scrambled eggs that sounded pretty good, then make our usual stop at Saint Vinnie's to browse the book shelves, then drive to the farthest reaches of the suburbs of Madison to visit the very oddly-named central post office so I could pick up a piece of registered mail that I have to sign for but they will deliver only when I'm not at home to sign for it.

But this morning B pointed out, "I don't really need anything at the farmer's market, and I don't want to go all the way downtown for breakfast because, you know, it's all the way downtown."

What to do?

Well, we still need breakfast. Need it. And there's this diner on Willy Street, Willowbees or Wallaby's or something like that, that we've wanted to go to forever, ever since we were both zygotes. And Saint Vinnie's is on Willy Street, and we have to stop at the co-op on Willy Street for shampoo ... see how this is all fitting together? It's a convergence of needs.

An article in The Isthmus announcing the release of Mai Bock seasonal lager from Sprecher Brewing.

Sprecher beers are not my favorite, but I'm a huge fan of all Wisconsin beers, so I think you should go and find it and drink it and enjoy it.

This is yours truly, and My Darling B, at the first annual Beer and Cheese Festival sponsored by the Isthmus. I managed somehow to snap this photo of us one-handed after drinking beer for three hours. You might infer from this that we were sober and steady-handed. Appearances can be deceiving.

The Isthmus is a local advertising newspaper (and web site) that is all-knowing, as far as local social events are concerned. We refer to it often to find out what's going on where, and at what time.

Beer and cheese are Wisconsin staples, so it's only natural that we would have an annual festival devoted to their adulation. I'm only surprised that this is the first annual such festival. A wonderful idea. I hope they can pull it off again next year.

You might think that I, a lactose-intolerant person, might be a bit rash going to an all-day festival to imbibe beer and nosh on cheese, but I had a bottle of pills in my pocket that have done wonders for me. I popped one pill about a half-hour before we left and another pill every hour on the hour after that. I'm happy to report I passed the afternoon accident-free, although I have been a little aromatic throughout the evening. They're great little pills, but they're not magical.

We are blessed here in Wisconsin with an abundance of cheese makers and beer brewers, so the festival was a success. Had to be a success, really. It's just impossible to put that many foods and drinks together that taste so good and not have it turn out to be amazing. They even cheated a little bit and invited Gail Ambrosius to bring some of her chocolates to pair up with some of the beers on hand.

All in all a wonderful day that My Darling B and I enjoyed immensely, as you can see from the photo. I'm sure we'll go back again next year.

Sunday, January 31, 2010

Hot Chicks With Storm Troopers is a web site dedicated to posting photographs of, um, hot chicks posing with geeks dressed up as Star Wars storm troopers. Or, on Fridays, hot chicks dressed up as storm troopers. Storm troopers with fully-armored boobies. Really. I couldn't make up stuff like this.

Back when I was a lad I was geeky enough about Star Wars and all other kinds of science fiction movies that I would have happily spent all my lunch money piecing together a storm trooper uniform, if I'd thought that I could've gotten away with appearing in public without being shoved into a hay baler.

Now "cosplay" (geeks dressing up as movie characters) is considered a bit of weekend fun that seems to be socially acceptable, plus it's even possible to find any number of seminaked young women who will pose for photographs with geeks dressed up as storm troopers. This just was not happening at any time in the ten years or so after Star Wars was released in 1977, at least not in Wisconsin.

The longer Star Wars geekdom goes on, the more surreal it becomes. The interwebs seem to be a big help, too. Are we all born thirty years too soon, or does it just seem that way?

Willalby's. The name of the diner we were trying to remember yesterday is Willalby's Cafe.

Sandwiched in between a tattoo parlor and a Vietnamese restaurant, it's easy to overlook, as we'd done for so many years. Yesterday while we were looking for a place to eat breakfast, though, we remember and made a beeline straight for it so we wouldn't have to keep saying, "We really ought to go there one day."

The place is smallish, maybe four or five booths along one side of the room and a counter with ten stools at the most. One guy seemed to be running the whole show, and he was in the back washing dishes when we came in, so we grabbed a seat in a booth and waited five or ten minutes for him to finish up before we could give him our order.

While we waited, a boom box played some kind of music that sounded like half a dozen guys playing their guitars by giving them a sound thrashing with lawn rakes. They sang, if we use the word very broadly, by screaming a pretty good impersonation of the Cookie Monster. It reminded me of the howling destruction going on during the scene at the Do Long bridge in the movie Apocalypse Now.

When the song was over, the guy came out of the back room, put in a new disk, and the mellow sounds of someone like Nora Ephron began to fill the air.

"Eclectic music selection," I remarked to B.

We each ordered the French toast special. When we told him what we wanted he answered, "Cool." He said "cool" in answer to everything, instead of "okay." It was perfect for a cafe like Willalby's on a street like Williamson.

He was quick in the kitchen. We were enjoying our food in just a few minutes, and he kept our coffee mugs filled all the time we were eating. A few regulars came in after us and the place settled into a quiet buzz of conversation. One couple came in after they got tired of waiting in line at Lazy Jane's, waited about three minutes for the guy to take their order and, when he didn't show up quick enough for them, they got up and left. They were probably the same people who tailgated me through DeForest on the way to the auction this morning.

The latest post over at Texas Pete's blog reviews The Fantastic Mister Fox, calling it "the best movie I've seen lately." He also reviews Love Happens ("Crap"), The Proposal ("El Crapola"), Confessions of a Shopaholic ("Super Crap"), New In Town ("C.R.A.P") and Julie & Julia ("Fun, light, insightful.")

Don't you think it's a crime that you have to watch six movies just to see one or two that are fun. light, insightful, never mind the best movie you've seen? Well, you don't have to, of course. You can avoid movies with Sandra Bullock in them, for a start. Has she been in a good movie? I'm trying to come up with one and I'm getting zilch. Same goes for just about any movie with Keanu Reeves.

And you can any movie with a title that sounds like a blog or blog entry. "Confessions of a Shopaholic" might be a pretty good blog, and "Love Happens" could possibly be a post worth reading, but if they turn out to be crap you can just click away from them, no worries. Pay for a movie ticket and buy a tub of popcorn, though, and you've pretty much got to stay for the whole thing.

I'm not sure how you find a movie like Julie & Julia, though. It pairs up the story of how Julia Childs fell in love with French cooking, and how Julie Powell wrote a blog, and then a book, about cooking all the recipes in Julia Childs' book Mastering The Art Of French Cooking. Sounds like a yawner, doesn't it? It did to me, but it got rave reviews and I just love Meryl Streep, so I gave it a shot and I loved it. Pete hit it just right: It's fun, it's light, and yet somehow it's insightful. It's a very sweet movie.

Lucky for me I haven't seen any of the movies described variously as crap, crap and crap. And I won't be, not even at rental prices.

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