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THINKING OUT LOUD - 2010

25 Dec 10 - The Greatest Gift: These are the times that...

It is now 0530 Christmas morning. Santa has had his milk and cookies and nothing is stirring, not even a Mauser. And I’m sitting here in the dark overtaken by a thankfulness that says, to paraphrase Thomas Paine, that, even though these are the times that try men’s soul, those of us who live in complete freedom are still the luckiest SOB’s on the planet. And amidst the bitching and moaning about our current national plight, we should never forget that. Freedom is our annual Christmas present and is not one that should be taken for granted.
 
I received an e-mail earlier this morning from my friend, Tom Cleaver, pointing out that 234 years ago today his many-greats-grandfather was one of the 1500 troops huddled in the Pennsylvania snow wishing their enlistment was up, and a week later, on New Years day, that would be the case and they could go home. As they tried to endure their miserable plight, papers were circulated to the officers to be read to their men. On the papers were the words of patriot Thomas Paine, taken from his just-finished booklet, The Crisis. Those words helped inspire the men, who, later that day, followed Washington across the Delaware, surprised and captured the Hessian troops at Trenton, and set the stage for eventual victory. We owe those troops, and to a certain extent, Thomas Paine for the freedom we enjoy today.
 
As I re-read Paine’s words this morning, I couldn’t help but see them in the context of today and the situations we’re facing. So, I hope Paine’s soul will excuse the parenthetical interpretations I’ve inserted in his famous quote below.
 
THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country (he’ll be expecting the government to bail him out, rather than rising on his own two feet and taking responsibility for his own fate);
 
but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman (our troops deserve our respect and support, but we are all soldiers in the way in which we conduct our lives and fight for our individual survival within the freedom our national framework has given us.).
 
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph (We should all be driven to rise above our individual challenges knowing the pay-off is the sustaining of our Nation, which, although a little tattered and besieged is still the shining hope of the world and is still the only one that immediately reaches out in crisis to help others, expecting nothing in return.).
 
What we obtain too cheaply, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value (No one said it was going to be easy, so stop complaining, stop expecting help and put our noses to the grindstone.).
 
Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated (have we forgotten that we have what so many others strive for? People are not trying to immigrate to China or India and their exploding economies. They want to come here, largely because they know that here they will be free to be who, and what, they want to be).
 
Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right not only to TAX but "to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER," and, if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth (Replace “Britain” with the words “political leaders” of ALL forms in ALL countries and reread that sentence. National leaders worldwide are our enemies within. Not without. And we have to get them back under control so they are running OUR country, not THEIR country).
 
Even the expression is impious (he means Freedom); for so unlimited a power can belong only to God (but the definition of “God” is open to include any God, anyone follows. It’s not only Christians who believe and it’s not only Christians who disserve freedom).
 
So, look around on this special day, gather your loved ones close and, for one day, forget the petty infighting that seems to haunt many families and glory in what we have that others do not. And then realize that just about everything each of us have is based on two important factors: health and freedom. With those, we can accomplish and conquer all. They are the ultimate gifts but we have to work for them.
 
Merry Christmas and happy holidays: enjoy and value the season, its sentiments and those you love.

 

18 Dec 10 - Just Another Old Rifle? Not to Me!

The other day someone asked me what was in my bucket list and I was hard pressed to come up with anything. Then, a little later I logged onto Backpage.com and a simple one-line ad reminded me that there are still some things in my bucket list that need taking care of. The ad read, “For sale, M-1 Garand. Stock refinished. Barrel and receiver match. Made mid-1943. Not collector grade.”

This old guy has been around the block more than a few times and has some stories to tell.

Even those of us who have just about completed our bucket list have a subtle series of wants hiding just below our conscious thinking. In my case, one of them is the urge to own a Garand that probably saw combat. Even though around 5.5 million were built in total, a WWII veteran (about 3.4 million built early enough to have seen combat) is becoming increasingly difficult to fin. This is because so many of them were rebarreled and rebuilt by the military for later service so the barrel no longer matches the receiver. And, the better ones that do match are priced well outside my price range. This one was worn enough that I could easily afford it, which isn't often the case.
 
Actually, when it comes to things like tools— and the Garand and all other working rifles and handguns are definitely tools—I don’t like them new and shiny. I prefer they show some of their history. That may have been what attracted me to this particular M-1: if it had been collector grade, its finish would have been original, its wood unblemished and the only way a military rifle stays that way for 67 years is by not getting out there where the action is. It avoided the bruises associated with combat by not playing a role in the history that the rest of its mechanical brethren helped make. As I said in the last blog: living life leaves scars, and, as someone so astutely said in response to that blog, “…scars are like tattoos but have better stories.” That’s what I see, when I look at a rifle like a tired-looking Garand and the way time has worn the finish, dulled the edges and left so many stories behind. I see history in its scars. And I wish it could talk to me.
 
This particular rifle left Springfield Armory in September of 1943. It was undoutidly issued to a new recruit before the end of the year, so, by the time he made it through basic training, it would have been early spring and he, and US Rifle, Cal. 30 M-1, serial number 1878XXX would have been on a troop transport headed for God-knows-where. If he headed east, he would have arrived in plenty of time to wade through the surf onto Omaha Beach.  Going west, he could have carried the rifle onto New Georgia in the Solomons. Or maybe New Guinea (which is a really terrible place to have a war, by the way.). No matter how you look at this old rifle, you can tell it didn’t spend a lot of time standing guard duty around a Washington monument.

You tell me: which hammer has more experience and stories to tell?

I love thinking about the historical possibilities that haunt the backgrounds of anything with this much patina. It’s the mechanical equivalent of gray hair and wrinkles and bespeaks of experiences from which we could all learn plenty. As I sit here and look around my office and my life I see that thought pattern has had a lot to do with the artifacts that have followed me home. And maybe in the friends I have made. Even the cars that I drive have more than their share of patina.

"Hey, Clem! We got enough screws and nails to put my Winchester back together?" Half of those in the photo are horseshoe nails. Very cool!!

Here in my office, two old high-back saddles sit in opposite corners of the rather large room (once a garage), both with well-worn Winchesters in time-tested scabbards. Both fall waaaaaay outside of collectors quality, no matter how they are measured. The .44-40 ’73 carbine (1881) in the Porter-made saddle (Phoenix, about 1930), is classic! Besides being terribly beat-up, at sometime in antiquity the stock was broken at the wrist and screwed/nailed back together. One of the things that made it a must-have for me is that half of the nails are square horseshoe nails. Don’t you wish you knew the history of that one? Consigned to “junker” status for most gun folk, this hardworking veteran just had to follow me home.
 
And then there’s the .25-35, ’94 Winchester hanging on the Vanco high-back saddle (1920’s). It rode through so much sagebrush, with the butt sticking out of the scabbard and facing forward, that the soft grain between the grain lines has been worn down so the stock looks like fuzzy, ragged corduroy. The blue is all gone, replaced by a pleasant, mostly-silver gray, that extends under the rear sight, where there should be blue in the protected area. Obviously the sight is a later addition: it lived its entire life with the tang sight and no barrel sight, probably because the rancher/cowboy carrying it was far-sighted and he couldn’t focus on a regular rear sight.

Think how long you have to ride through the brush to wear a stock down like this. And it stops at a hard line right where it goes into the scabbard .

A collector wouldn’t even pause to glance at this rifle at a gun show. In fact, most gun enthusiasts would ignore it. But, when I saw it, the history in its scars caused it to literally jump off the table at me. Made right after the turn of the century, here was a veteran of several hard lifetimes on the Arizona range, the first being during pre-state, territorial times, most of it on horseback. How could you not want to give this old guy a home where its experience is appreciated?
 
I love people and artifacts with experience and character. The many of you out there whom I count as friends (which is just about everybody) should think about that. It’s the divots which time has taken out of your personality and being that have drawn us together. The birds of a feather thing is stronger than most realize and I’m positive there aren’t too many folks reading this with ironed creases in their jeans or razor-cut hair. So, count yourself amongst the well-traveled, time-worn artifacts that I find interesting. I hope I fall into the same category for you.

13 Dec 10 - Stupid Moves Leave Scars

Well…after nearly 60 years of playing around with guns, I finally had my first injury accident with a firearm. It didn’t have lethal possibilities but for a second it felt as if it did. I’ll just have to put it on the list of “The Stupidest Things I Have Done With a Gun.”
 
I hang an M-1 Garand from a strap, muzzle down, for storage in a closet. As I was fumbling around looking for something in the closet, I managed to knock it off the hook. It dropped from five feet and came down like a battering ram, the end of the barrel landing squarely on the knuckle of my big toe (left toe, not that it makes any difference.)  I did the holy-crap-I-really-did-it-this-time dance for a few seconds, inventing swear words as I did:  ten or twelve pounds concentrated on a circle the size of a dime can do some real damage. Take a look at the picture: who says unloaded weapons aren’t dangerous!  Damn that hurt!  Now, 24 hours after the incident, it’s obvious I’ll live and it makes a good story, but I’ll be hobbling around for a while. Dumb, Budd! Really dumb!

The worse part was that I had to leave for another driving trip to LA ten minutes later. The trip was longer than usual. :-(

Looks like it hurts, doesn't it? That's because it does .

I’ve studied my big toe quite a bit in the last day or so and almost immediately noticed that the bruising followed the line of a pre-existing scar. That’s where I split the toe lengthwise, when about ten years old, with an ax while helping dad clear out a plumb thicket to give our burro, Napoleon, more grazing room. As I re-read the last sentence, I just realized that I’m not certain I’ve ever heard anyone say that before.
 
I’m positive that every person reading this can scan their body and find minor, and sometimes not so minor, reminders of things stupid (as in my case), tragic, and maybe even funny. The road map of a life well lived can often be read in the scars that life left behind. Plus, the lessons learned from each stay with us forever.
 
About half way up the same foot from the Gun Owie, is an almost invisible scar only I can find. My dad was tearing down his old store to build a new one and I was helping. I jumped off of something and looked down to find a 14 penny spike sticking up through the top of my sneaker. Lesson: look before you leap.
 
I don’t have enough space to enumerate the different epidermal interruptions scattered about my body that were caused while exiting various motorcycles, usually when avoiding cars. Each of those remind me that the entire world is out to get you.
 
Two wide, three-inch scars on the inside of my left arm (nearly 100 stitches…they went pretty deep and got some stuff inside) constantly remind me how stupid it is to think you can hold a piece of torch-cut, 4-inch angle iron with your hand while drilling half inch holes on a drill press. Drill vices exist for a reason.
 
The scar between my left pinky and the next knuckle remind me how important it is to check your bicycle front axle nuts before seeing how fast you can cross the railroad track at the bottom of the hill.
 
The pair of matching scars on the top and bottom of the index finger on that same hand remind me of why it’s really stupid to pick up a squirrel that has been hit by a car. That’s a hysterically funny story for another time but involves me running into the doctor’s office screaming my brains out with a squirrel firmly affixed to said finger. The nurse didn’t have to ask me what I was there for (a squirrelectomy?) and the doctor picked up a fat book and clocked the squirrel. It would have made a great U-tube sequence.
 
Although the toe mark left by the rifle may be a little unique to me, all of my other life reminders (and I haven’t mentioned even ten percent of them) are shared with at least half the male population of the world. It’s nearly impossible to come through adolescence and our teenage years without bouncing off of things and painfully careening through life, learning as we go. The lucky ones, which includes most of us, come through with nothing more than a bunch of “…oh, yeah?! Well, look at this one…” stories for the bar. But we learn something with every incident.
 
Life is that way. Sometimes, when we’re not listening, it will let a little blood flow just to get our attention. Do you suppose that’s what fate is doing with our country at the moment? Just teaching us a lesson? I hope so. And I hope we learn from it. Scars are nothing but reminders, but, if the wounds are fatal, you don’t live long enough to develop scars.
 
PS
…and then there was the time I was sliding down the roof of a pig shed at the Fenster’s. It was like a gigantic slide and I was having a high old time until a protruding shingle nail caught me in the left buttocks and quite literally tore me a new one. The only thing I learned out of that episode was to keep my butt off of pig shed roofs.

4 Dec 10 - The First Airbum Most-Influential Person Award

I was sitting on the can the other day and had a very fitting thought: I would invent an Airbum Most-Influential Person of the Decade award (AMIP). The setting seemed apropos. This would be the person who hit a bases-loaded homerun and accomplished almost every goal he set out to do.  The final winner turned out to be one of my least favorite persons, but, of all the candidates, he was the heavy hitting game changer. Of course, as is often the case, he wouldn’t have done nearly so well, if he hadn’t had the full, unintended support of the US government.
 
Am I talking about Barack Baby? He’s certainly altered the face of America, but he’s still a rank amateur compared to my final choice. If re-elected, however, he’ll be in the running for the next award.
 
Is it financier George Soros? He who buys and sells nations? Nah! He’s too public. And his methods too invisible.
 
How about Nancy Pelosi? Nah, I’m a charter member of the No Ugly Chicks Club.
 
All of these folks are pikers. That’s why my vote for the first AMIP went to none other than Osama “I don’t dress great but I really do smell” Bin Laden.
 
In terms of bang for the buck (a bad play on words), Bin Laden and his nasty little posse have achieved more of their goals, for less investment, than anyone since Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. I’d like to think much of their success was accidental and they didn’t plan on the knee-jerk actions of the US government to do much of their work for them. Now, however, I think much of what he has his people doing is based entirely on how clearly we’ve demonstrated our Pavlovian way of doing something over the top every time an Al Queda stooge passes gas. They handle us, like a good dog trainer: ring a bell and we jump.
 
Let’s take a look at what we’ve done to ourselves since 9/11.
 
Was the shutdown of all American airspace that first morning necessary? Absolutely and, all things considered, they did it brilliantly. From that point on, however, things began to unravel. And some of it shows that Osama and Al Queda are learning from each of their actions.
 
9/11 showed them we were perfectly willing to do drastic things on a national scale and would do so while totally constrained by our political correctness: in order to search an Arabic-looking individual, dressed in combat gear, with fuses sticking out of his pockets and “Death to Infidels” tattooed on his forehead in orange, we have to search everyone. God help us if we pick out those who look and act like a threat. Profiling became the leading dirty word in our thinking.
 
9/11 was barely a weekend old when the now-largely-forgotten and largely-phony anthrax attacks happened (Amerithrax to the FBI). That started the mail slow down and erected all forms of new magnetometers and such at federal buildings. Until then, for instance, you could walk up to an FAA office and ask a question. Now you need an appointment to see a federal face of any kind.
 
How much did that cost? How much did that inconvenience us?
 
Then, to deal with all of this, the TSA, one of the world’s most ill-conceived, poorly organized and ineffective organizations was created. They have become the 800-pound gorilla in our lives. The TSA is also a wonderful example of Al Queda training. Osama’s boys do something. The TSA over reacts. We suffer the fall out. Osama is absolutely genius in the way he does this.
 
Osama, for instance, sees that our airport security, although mostly a sham, is creating huge delays and inconvenience, while costing us billions, , but he knows he can do better. So, one guy bungles blowing up his sneakers. Now, we shuffle through airports, shoes in hand.
 
Another fanatic has plastique underwear (and you could spot him as a screw ball from a block away). So, we now stand naked before the TSA while incredibly expensive machines bombard us with electrons doing God knows what to us. Or, we let some overpaid cretin who has way too much authority and zero responsibility play with our privates.
 
There is an upside to this last: it has gotten all the perverts off the street and into the work force. I'm kidding. Most don't like it any better than we do. However, the never-ending push for invasion of privacy in the guise of security has created thousands of jobs building increasingly sophisticated security machines. Osama single-handedly created a gigantic security industry.
 
Okay, so, what are they going to do the first time an individual blows himself up with a bomb he has swallowed or has had surgically implanted? Will we go to full-on X-ray or CT scans? Or how about “Please drop your drawers and sit on this probe. You’ll feel a greasy, wiggling sensation as it works it’s way into your colon. Oh, wait! That’s my finger. Golly, my bad!”
 
In addition to the young, ripped jihadists, we’ll now have to fear fat jihadists because they can pack more C-4 inside them. God help the traveling overweight amongst us. And pregnant women? Hey, the TSA will recognize all of you for what you are: potential bomb-carrying jihadists that absolutely have to be X-rayed until your baby glows in the dark.
 
How long will it take terrorists to cast C-4 into fetus shapes? Or maybe phallic-shaped bombs (shaped charges?) to make their women terrorists able to pass scanners.
 
The next round of TSA intrusion devices will have to enable them to visually discern baby from bomb, intestinal contents from turd-shaped IED.
 
And so the security race goes on. And it’s costing us billions. It’s costing us our freedom and our dignity, while it is costing them pennies and a few willing participants. I can just imagine their planners sitting around hookahs, laughing their butts off, “Hey, Osama, how about we get Amir-the-Idiot to fill himself up with propane, it’ll be invisible and we can use the tank off our barbeque. How much do you suppose the infidels will spend figuring out how to check for explosive farts?”  It’s a game to them. And we are all-too-willing to play.
 
Incidentally, I don't think Osama cares about bombing airlines any more. That's just a decoy to keep us busy while he plans something much more destructive.

There is, however a solution: Let’s out-source our security to the Israelis. They really know what they're doing. Then let's pass a non-Politically Correct (PC) Act that makes it illegal to make decisions based on touchy-feely concepts. We'd have to make decisions based on the facts of a situation and then aim those decisions at the enemy, not the population.
 
The Israelis don’t profile on ethnicity. They start with appearance and overlay that with many decades of behavioral analysis: someone who looks and acts suspicious probably IS suspicious.
 
Actually, I don’t care how the Israelis do it. It works and we should, at the very least, follow their model. They cut to the bottom line and get the job done and don’t give a crap that a few noses get bent out of shape in the process. How long is it going to be before we realize that we’re being lead around by our noses and it’s killing us in every aspect of our lives?
 
Osama Bin Laden has totally reshaped much of American life. And he’s not done yet. When are we going to stop helping him? He's defintely the success story of the last decade.

27 Nov 10 - The Problem is That We're Human!

I turned the key and started backing down the drive in my wife’s car and a young, sincere female voice popped out of the radio, “…and I prayed to God to help me get out of the way I was living and he answered my prayers. He gave me cancer and I began to love my body and care for it rather than using it as a play ground and…” Yeech! I hit the station button and immediately got the flip side of the same coin.
 
The clear lyrics of the hard-driving country song went, “…God makes the rain flow, rain makes the corn grow. Corn makes whisky, which makes my baby frisky, …”
 
I laughed out loud at the contradiction in word and attitude: God make me sick and stop me from partying. God let me party until I get sick. You just have to love the human race. We are a living, breathing pile of contradictions, each one more ridiculous than the other. No wonder we’re in such deep doo-doo worldwide!
 
The politically correct description of homosapiens is that we’re all the same under the skin. That we can’t judge another because we are the same.  Therefore, what we have, others should have. What we are, others can be. If we believe the biologists, we are all built on same genetic model from the same materials, carbon and water. We are all the same.
 
This, of course, is a gigantic pile of bull sh*t!!!  There is no more divergent species on the planet than the human being and for anyone to even hint that we’re all the same means they’ve been sucking down too much cool aid lately. Yeah, skin color makes absolutely no difference and should be ignored, but the make-up contained within is far from being homogeneous.
 
I once got in an intense conversation with my wildly intelligent daughter-in-law (PhD in biomechanical engineering), whom I love dearly, in which she vehemently argued that EVERYONE has something at which they excel that makes each of them exceptional. I countered that may be the case only if you include things like the ability to suck down huge amounts of beer at a single sitting, watch soap operas non-stop or pick their neighbor’s front door lock in record time. Oh, and crank out babies faster than welfare checks can be printed.
 
Being born in the Midwest and raised by VERY Midwestern parents, I was constantly hammered with the mantra “everyone is the same”. And I believed it. But, as I left Nebraska’s borders and got out into the real world, I began to doubt it. And now, I know it for the philosophical crap that it is. I absolutely believe that everyone should be treated the same, regardless of who, or what, they are, but that’s definitely not the same as saying that everyone IS the same. Not even close.
 
You don’t have to dig very deep into the dung heap that is civilization to realize that there are some people who got severely screwed when the genes were handed out. Some just can’t perform. That’s not their fault because nature just didn’t give them what it takes. However, far more folks out there, given the choice, WON’T perform.
 
There’s a large percentage of the population that has made a conscious choice to exist by contributing the least while taking the most. Unfortunately, because of our increasingly touchy/feely, everyone-disserves-everything, way of approaching things, we’re enabling those people and promoting such behavior. They don’t perform because they don’t have to perform.
 
It’s hard to think about looking for a job, for example, knowing you’ve got unemployment coming for at least two years that is higher than any entry level job you’re likely to find. In some minds, its hard not to think about just having a little sex, cranking out another baby, knowing that baby will bring more money into the household over the next 18 years than you can possibly make. We’re not doing anyone a favor by making life unnecessarily easy for them, yet, a percentage of those in power, along with a portion of the more-gifted population, think the downtrodden are owed that kind of treatment. The downtrodden need a job and that’s where we should be focused.
 
The theology that says we should be spreading the wealth and giving everyone a house and car, and making sure that everyone has what the next person has ignores some very basic facts of nature. You can pick ANY species, take your family cats, for instance (assuming you have more than one, we have three), and you can instantly see how nature ALWAYS creates some who are more capable, more gifted, than others. Nature has decreed that some will be leaders and others followers. Nature creates “haves” and “have nots” and that’s not something our decadent society invented. That’s just the way life is. And to ignore that is simply naïve. Speaking about taking from the rich to give to the poor ignores the basic fact that you need “haves” to employ the “have nots.” This isn’t being elitist or anything close to it. It is simply being practical and facing the facts as defined by nature.
 
The moral to the human story is that extremes in attitudes and philosophies are what make the human animal interesting and to try to level them out just ain’t gonna work. You can’t predict anything about humans, except that maybe a huge percentage of us will always go for the money, the sex and the fattening food, although the exact order will change from person to person and region to region: oh, wait, toss pick-up trucks into that mix too.
 
We aren’t all the same and to think we are, or can be made so, via any governmental or social dictate, is simply going against nature.
 
HEADS-UP: Here’s someone we’re going to be hearing more from in the future.
 
This is an interview with an incoming freshman Congressman, Allen West. He’s right on point and as articulate as anyone I’ve ever seen. And doesn’t have a teleprompter. A refreshing change. I’d like to see him interviewed about economics and other issues because he has the security one nailed. You may have to cut and paste this , if it doesn't link-up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eu8dRfgNxGM&feature=related

21 Nov 10 - The Christmas Carol Curse Is Back!

I woke up this morning (the Saturday before Thanksgiving) as the clock radio went off and stabbed me in the ears with Deck the Halls. First, at 0500 the last thing you need is a bright, bouncy anything. But, a frigging Christmas carol? Oh, come on you guys! Gimme a break! We haven’t even done the Turkey Thing yet and you’re going to begin beating us up with Christmas carols? AAAARRRRGGGHH!
 
I don’t ever remember sliding into Scrooge-mode so early. And Christmas Carol Overload does that to me. Normally the radio stations don’t start on us until the weekend after Thanksgiving. But this one apparently just couldn’t contain its Christmas spirit and just HAD to slip in there ahead of the rest. Damn!
 
I think the thing I hate most about this kind of stuff is that my favorite local station, a classic rock station, goes 100 percent Christmas carols starting next week and I HATE THAT! To me, it borders on them being inconsiderate. For one thing, they don’t realize (or maybe they do and don’t give a damn), that to lots of us, having the radio on in the background supplies a sound track for our lives. It’s just always there. In fact, in my workshop, the radio is wired directly into the light switch, so when the lights go on the radio goes on. In fact, I can’t imagine working in the shop without old time rock and roll playing in the background.
 
Just this second I had a horrible thought: you don’t suppose the Christmas Carol Curse has worked its way into iTunes radio do you? Wait here a second: I’ll be right back...
 
…Whew! I just clicked on to my computer favorites and Canned Heat’s “On the Road” came on one and the other station had The Kentucky Linemen doing “Walk on.”
 
As a little aside, I’ll do a commercial here for a couple of my favorite iTunes stations. There have to be a thousand stations listed there and I’ve sorted through and found two that fit me just right. In the Classic Rock stations, I like “Cruisin” because it plays a really wide variety of songs going from the 50’s (when is the last time you heard a radio station playing Gene Vincent’s “Whole Lotta Lovin’”) to the ‘70’s and a lot of original versions of classic rock songs.
 
The other station is “The Buffalo” (it’s under the “B”s not the “T”s) and its an odd combination of fairly hard rock, lots of it seldom-heard tracks, and hard country hits. It mixes them up so you never know what’s coming next and it’s a really fun, fresh mix. I highly recommend it. Their slogan is “Music so Hard Your Dog Will Feel it!” You just gotta love their attitude.
 
Neither station runs commercials, by the way.
 
The best thing about both stations is that I’ve been listening to them while writing this and haven’t heard one Christmas carol. So, I’m safe at my computer. I am, however, afraid to go out in the shop. So I’ll go out to the airport instead. I doubt seriously if the tower will be playing carols.
 
Heads-up: A few Good Guys 2010 Rod and Custom show photos
This is not a real photo coverage but some shots of vehicles I found interesting for one reason or another. GOOD GUYS PHOTOS
 
 
14 Nov 10 - Do Gorillas Have Bad Backs?

It has often been said that the best writing is that which draws the reader into it because they can identify with the subject. Sometimes that’s hard. This time it’s ridiculously easy. The subject is bad backs and other design flaws of the human body. I feel as if I’m cheating in the reader-identification department.
 
First, I should say that the political/economic news this week, which includes pensions ending for many corporation pensioners, GE moving their CFL bulb production to China, China getting ready to buy part of General Motors, the President getting highly embarrassed in Korea, and China dropping our credit rating (no surprise there) provides lots of blog-fodder. But, I’ll tell you what: I’m damn tired of hearing about it. And even more tired of thinking about it. So, I chose, at least for this morning, to turn a blind eye to the world stage and talk about things that are closer to home: like bad backs, stupid designs like knees and other things of a more personal nature.
 
Would everyone reading this who has at least occasional problems with their back or knees (hips and shoulders qualify too), hold up their hands. Okay, that’s just about everybody.
 
In my case, the problems are a combination of genetics and a shortage of commonsense. The genetics include disks at L3 and L4 that are degenerating and bulge a little and, combined with some bone spurs scattered throughout the system, get into the nerve bundle occasionally. If aggravated enough, they will slam me down and keep there for a few days. The bone spurs may be genetic but, they were helped along by a general lack of commonsense early in life (are you identifying yet?). Between hard-tail Harleys, various unplanned excursions from said bikes and some sky diving and other youthful activities, I will periodically spend a week gimping around trying to live down the problem. This was one of those weeks.
 
Fortunately, I only had three students this week, but each was greeted with the sight of their trusted flight instructor grimacing and groaning as he struggled over the side of the cockpit and into the airplane. A real confidence builder! However, as I reassured them, and this is an absolute fact, while I’m reaping payback for stupid things done in my past, the only two positions that are pain-free, is either sitting here at the computer in my well-worn computer chair or in the front seat of a Pitts Special with my equally well-worn collection of special cushions.
 
As I look around at the population and our various back and joint problems, I’m beginning to think that learning to walk erect, which is often heralded as one of man’s most notable evolutionary achivements, may have been a wrong move. I’m not convinced it is working out. And it’s not being helped by our expanding life span: we’re out living the design-life of the product.
 
The human body is simply not well designed for standing upright. And I’m wondering if the gorilla hasn’t got the right approach. They use their long arms almost like canes in a cross between four-legged and two-legged transport. We think it’s retarded (witness liberals referring to arch conservatives as “gun toting, bible quoting, knuckle-draggers,” which I’m not convinced is an insult, but they are), but it may be a great way to protect the back.

I don’t actually know if gorillas have back problems or not. The subject doesn’t come up at the airport coffee shop very often. But, I’m assuming they don’t have the problems that evolution has foisted off on us. Basically, gorillas appear to knuckle drag their way through the jungle, eat what’s handy, lay around all day and probably don’t even know what an ulcer or clinical depression is. So, you tell me: are we really the more advanced species or are we kidding ourselves?
 
Okay, now that I think about it, and my back is improving, the fact that I’ve lived 50% longer than I was probably designed to is a good thing. So is being able to reach the top shelf. So, I’ll accept the downsides and gladly put up with the vagaries of being human, pain and all. Besides, the gorillas don’t have it all that great: their women are UGLY! And they don’t have pizza.

6 Nov 10 - Post Election Blues

With the elections over, I wanted so badly to write a bright, cheery blog this morning with only a hint of gloating evident. But, I just can’t. Yes, the American voter handed the Administration its head and a message of discontent was loudly heard. But, now what? Have we actually made a step forward or just forestalled the inevitable? Who the hell knows?
 
Oddly enough, just as I started writing this (while in a serious funk, I might add), a rock song came on the radio entitled “Only in America,” which on the one hand is uplifting but has a double meaning. Only in America could a kid with a vague background and limited experience become leader of the free world, which is just a little scary. At the same time, it underscores the fact that In America Anything can be Accomplished by Anyone. Just ask the likes of Barack Obama and Bill Gates. At the same time, only in America would the electorate let someone with that kind of background lead them. Sometimes this has worked brilliantly: Reagan, a Hollywood actor/governor, surprised a lot of folks.  I think it can be safely said that Barack has surprised a lot of folks too and last weeks election showed they didn’t like the surprise one damn bit.
 
Okay, so now the GOP is in position to at the very least, slow down what they see as a lemming rush off a cliff. But, what are their plans to fix the situation? As far as that goes, is there anyone anywhere who actually knows what needs to be done to fix our economy? This is an unprecedented situation in so many ways. The only time we’ve had this kind of recessionary/depression going on was the 1930’s and it took a war to bring us out of it: cranking up our industry to supply our struggling friends in Europe who at that time could actually pay their bills got us back on the track to recovery.
 
(I just have to interject this—blame it on my A.D.D.: I’m listening to an internet radio station named “Cruisin” that plays a lot of seldom-heard rock and roll and right now is playing Big Mama Thorton’s original recording of “Hound Dog.” It’s funny and refreshing after listening to Elvis—another “Only in America” success story— do it for so long. It’s helping my funk immensely.)
 
A major difference between today and the 1930’s is that we didn’t have a ridiculous amount of debt to offshore interests. In those days, the concept of financing the running of America with someone else’s money was totally unthinkable. Now, it is the only thing government seems to know: spend our way out of trouble with borrowed money. Somehow the contradictions that sentence contains escapes our leaders. You don’t get out of debt by using someone else’s money.
 
First, I should admit that even though Economics was one of my dual majors in graduate school, I don’t understand them one bit. I don’t know how I graduated. But, for the life of me, I don’t see a logical way to handle the short term effects of the strange combination of financial/economic factors we’re now facing.
 
Certainly, if we pulled our horns in, it would help: immediately abandon Afghanistan and Iraq first making sure they are equipped to take care of their own problems, and make it a rule that we don’t give foreign aid to any country that continually votes against us in the UN or isn’t a democracy. This would at least cut down the financial hemorrhaging we have in process. We could go back to the Monroe Doctrine and throw a barrier up around ourselves attending to only our own interests. And forget about the border fence: replace it with machine gun positions every 100 yards. Cheaper than a fence and more likely to keep illegals out.  But, of course, those are pretty drastic measures and not likely to be done, although I do think we need to realize that we can’t have a global goal of filling every empty belly or curing every ill and not have it cost us mightily at home.
 
(Carl Perkins singing “Blue Suede Shoes” the original version just came on and I’ve just about forgotten about the mess we’re in. Rock and roll has a way of curing funks.)
 
What really did me in this week was the Fed announcing that they were going to buy back some of our own debt. Huh? How does that work? We’re going to write ourselves an IOU by printing more money? We all know where that’s going to take us. Incidentally, was it coincidental that they made that announcement November 3, right in the midst of all the post-election hullabaloo? I doubt if anyone even heard it.
 
This move was prompted by China finally “balking” (the announcement’s word) at providing financing for any more of our debt because they doubted our ability to pay it back. This is very serious. But it was inevitable. China isn’t run by fools. Only we are. Sooner or later, they had to protect themselves from us.
 
When is China going to call our loans and/or demand assets in exchange? How much do you suppose the Grand Canyon would sell for? Or the Washington Monument? Mount Vernon would do a booming business as a Chinese Restaurant. How about the government’s share in General Motors?
 
I just saw a note along this line where Chicago sold the revenue rights to all their parking meters to Dubai. The term is 75 years. Will the government do the same thing? Will the tops of Chicago parking meters start to look like mini-minarets with coin slots?
 
What is really weird and difficult to comprehend is that even though we’re in deep doo doo, we still represent a huge market to the likes of China. Their economy is sagging partially because ours is sagging and we’re not buying as much. As the old saying goes, When The United States gets a Cold, the World Catches Pneumonia, is still true. So, it is in China’s best interest to keep us healthy. But, they still have to protect themselves. They are thinking as we should be thinking, but aren’t.
 
The house of cards we’ve built for ourselves is getting more rickety by the day and it won’t take a very big financial gust to blow it over and, when it does, it’ll come down very, very fast. And that vision has kept me awake two nights in a row.
 
Keep your powder dry and your pantries full. God knows what’s around the next corner.
 
And listen to old rock and roll more often: it’s good for the soul.

30 Oct 10 - Mail Order Terrorism

This makes too much sense for it to be bogus: Right now it’s Friday and the word is just hitting the airways that what are possibly bombs have been found being shipped into the USA via UPS. As if we don’t have enough worries on our plate, we now have to worry about terrorists not even bothering to show up for work. They just mail it in.
 
First: Given that it appears “someone,” TSA possibly, may be scanning e-mail traffic for threatening combinations of words like “bomb”, “mail”, “anthrax” etc, I’m paranoid enough to think I may be screwing myself by posting this blog. SO, IF ANYONE FROM THE TSA IS READING THIS, I’M NOT A TERRORIST. I’M JUST A FRUSTRATED NOVELIST THEORIZING.
 
How’s that for paranoia at work?
 
I positively hate it, when my mind takes a few facts, like those now on TV, and, with no direction from me, begins whittling out fictional thoughts that have odious overtones. The process can’t help but feed my paranoia. Those thoughts that are ricocheting around inside my head right now are based on concepts that are too dangerous, too easily accomplished and are totally inspired by today’s cargo happenings. So, I probably won’t write the book: I don’t want to be accused of giving terrorists new ideas (which is probably impossible, anyway, because they’re very creative and need no help).
 
Here’s the scenario: the terrorist nations stage a coordinated “attack by mail” of the US. Terrorists in many locations, some within the US, mail mini-bombs to various locations within the country. Literally hundreds of the packages are carried by UPS, FedEx, DHL and every one of the other carriers. A very few of the packages contain full-fledged IED’s. A few envelopes harbor a tiny amount of explosive surrounded by tightly-packed bags of anthrax. But only a very small percentage of those mailed are truly dangerous. Just enough to make the threat test as real. The rest just go bang and scare people.
 
A small bomb goes off and spreads anthrax through the UPS main freight terminal in Louisville, which immediately shuts down all package handling for that carrier. Within the hour, small bombs, most of them, but not all, are nothing but noise, go off at every other package carrier so they all shut down. Within a matter of a couple hours all priority package service, FedEx, DHL, etc., no longer exists and that portion of commercial activity worldwide stops in a heart beat. But not before packages arrive in various cities throughout the US.
 
Detonated remotely by cell phone, dozens of packages go off in mailrooms and postal boxes and at least a few include anthrax. The rest of commercial activity grinds to a halt and every mailroom, every delivery truck, every freight plane, and those passenger liners carrying packages, become suspect.
 
Is this possible? Damn straight it is. Is it happening right now? Who the hell knows? All it would take is twenty guys with a roll of stamps and the ability to make small bombs. The bombs don’t have to be big enough to bring down an airplane. Only big enough to cause us to fear the possibility and react in a predictable manner: shut down the delivery system. Old fashioned M80s and a little anthrax would do the trick. No….make that M80s in cans of foot powder that give the appearance of anthrax. That’s all that’s needed to accomplish the purpose…the appearance of a serious threat. We’ll do the rest to ourselves.
 
If there’s a perceived, random threat that’s well-publicized and widespread, instant and total chaos would reign nationwide and in most of the civilized world.
 
Huh! Now that I’ve written this, I just realized I can’t use it. It’s too dangerous and even this blog could be picked up by TSA, if they are scanning e-mails and the net. That’s scarier than the actual threat.
 
Ignore me. But, if I’m not here next week, you’ll know why.
 
Now, About This Tuesday’s elections: GET OUT AND VOTE!
 
It’s important that we all realize that this is a survival vote and, if the train we’re on right now is not derailed and redirected, we’ll all be living in a totally different country in two years. Look how much it has changed in 18 months. We were promised change and we got it. Now let’s change the change.
 
Normally I advise people to vote for the candidate, not the party, but this time I’m really concerned about Republicans splitting the vote, when we can’t afford it. A third party candidate doesn’t have a chance in this one and will hurt the cause. DO NOT WASTE YOUR VOTE BY VOTING FOR YOUR FAVORITE JUST BECAUSE YOU THINK HE’S THE RIGHT GUY/GAL. The name of the game is numbers. To regain some semblance of American thought in Congress, the majority in both houses has to change and in the Senate that is going to be determined by only a one or two people margin. I’m not a Republican, but the plan should be to first get them back in office, then wade in and kick the butts of those Republicans who aren’t living up to what ever your own particular vision of American may be.
 
I don’t expect people to see either life or our country the same way I do, but I do expect them to know when things are going wrong and make an effort to fix them. And the first step towards that fix is to VOTE!
 

23 Oct 10 - Mommies and Mummies

We just made another new-granddaughter trip to LA and came away with a number of interesting experiences and observations, some enlightening, some obvious, some just odd.
 
First about Baby Alice: the last time we saw her, she was a week old. That was nearly seven months ago because, when she was five-weeks old, my daughter, Jennifer, took her to Vancouver where she (Jen, not Alice) spent over five months producing another movie (Little Red Riding Hood: a new take on the old tale in which the wolf is a werewolf living amongst them. Set in medieval times. Production costs: $50mm. Jen is moving up in the world!). Alice was always on set so she became the crew mascot.
 
At seven months she has matured into this wonderfully bubbly, constantly smiling bundle of warmth and personality and we had a ball with her. Her mom treats her almost as an adult taking her everywhere at any time so she is totally acclimated to the real world and lights up for everyone she sees. She’s such a bundle of joy that several times I teared up just seeing how she reacted to those around her.
 
On Friday, before we met Jennifer we did our Mummies of the World thing at the California Science Center. It runs until November 28th and I can’t recommend the experience strongly enough for a lot of different reasons, some unexpected.
 
When you say “mummy” the automatic image is of King Tut and the Egyptian mummies and, yes, they were a good part of the exhibit but far from being the majority. The exhibit went out of its way to explain the many other ways a body can be mummified, both intentional and unintentional. It was an education and entertainment tour d’force in that they took you through the various processes (lots of centuries-old dried up rats, cats and birds found in attics, etc). The oldest mummy was an accidentally mummified 10-month-old child from Chile that was 6,500 years old and the later ones included an aristocratic family that died in Germany in the early 1800’s and survived to show up in Los Angeles where they nearly stole the show. The Chilean mummy was formed several thousand years before the Egyptians made mummification a major part of their existence. And even in the Egyptian thing, the dozens of mummies, some wrapped, some unwrapped, many CT scanned, showed how the processes and concepts changed with the ages.
 
I had a rather unexpected epiphany happen to me at the Imax mummy movie, which was focused on the Pharaohs and Egyptian mummies. Besides taking us through some of the fantastic Egyptian discoveries via dramatic recreations, the movie itself was a very high-dollar dramatic recreation of the society and civilization of the times. It was filmed in such a way that for the first time I really got a sense of the scope of that particular civilization, which was absolutely huge. I’ve been an Egyptian freak since a tiny child, but this movie put it all in context and, for the first time, I truly understood the extent and grandeur of Ancient Egypt.
 
The epiphany was a simple one: even though I knew that Egypt’s history was one of periodic internal struggle and conflict, it nonetheless managed to recover from misdirection, corruption and periods where the central government disintegrated for centuries at a time. The country was a viable entity for over 3000 years, which, for what ever reason, even though I’ve heard that same number a thousand times, I realized right then that it is not only a number so enormous that we can’t possibly grasp what it means but it says something about how we view ourselves
 
Today we tend to think in terms far too short and see everything as a crisis, which is made worse by our four-year leadership cycle and two-party system. Everything is in a continue state of flux. So, we’re always on a rollercoaster ride that has us gnashing our teeth and tearing our hair out because we’re certain that civilization, as we know it, is going to hinge on every election and every vote. And, in truth, it does, but, when history looks back at us, just as we look back on the Egyptians, the chances are that the ups and downs we’re experiencing will be so minor in the larger scheme of things that long term history won’t even recognize them. Still, to make the overall portrait of America look the way we think it should, every single one of the seemingly minor brush strokes must be directed with care.  It’s all in the details of how we run our country. 
 
Will the US be around in 3,000 years? Not likely. Even the Roman Empire only lasted 1000 years. But that isn’t bad and, if we could sign a contract guaranteeing that we’d last that long, we’d be fools not to take it.
 
As it happens, we do sign such a contract, but it’s not for 1000 years. Basically, we re-write that contract every two years and the next renewal date is 2 Nov 2010. And as for mummies: it’s time we rewrite the contract and get them out of office and put them where their smell won’t bother us quite so much.

18 Oct 10 - For the Love of a Dead Horse

Would you pay $265,500 for a dead horse? Patrick Gottsch, owner of RFD-TV, based in Omaha, did. He also bought a dead dog for $35,000. Why? Because like so many of us, he felt they helped set the moral standards for a generation and wanted to keep at least part of that era alive. We’re talking about Trigger and Bullet. Yeah, Roy’s Trigger and Bullet, both stuffed.

Trigger and Bullet will eventually be showcased in RFD-TV's lobby in Omaha. Trigger's saddle and bridle sold for $386,500, well above the $100-150K estimated.So, someone out there cares about Roy's legacy.

Recently the contents of the Roy Roger’s museum were auctioned off and it was a sad day for America: it was no longer feasible to keep the museum open because, in today’s world, Roy was no longer enough of a celebrity to keep patrons coming in the door and paying the bills. His audience was increasingly grey and wobbly. But, celebrity was never what Roy and his genre of cowboy stars were about. They produced a seemingly unending series of morality plays that had all us kids spellbound. Good guys win, bad guys don’t. Honesty is good. Dishonesty isn’t. And so forth.  From the late 1940s into the ‘fifties my generation of adolescents sat glued to black and white TV’s and munching popcorn in dark movie theaters being unintentionally convinced that, when it came to right and wrong, that was black and white, as well. And we all wanted to be the guys in the white hats (Lash LaRue being the exception as he dressed in black and talked like a tough guy from Queens).

Rex Allen was my favorite and he was the real deal: brought up on an Arizona ranch. I wear tight leather gloves in the shop most of the time and I still cuff them back the way Rex did.

It wasn’t until I read the auction notice that I gave much thought to what those old TV shows left squirreled away in the corners of my subconscious. But, as I scanned down the auction results, I suddenly found myself longing for a simpler time when you knew exactly who to trust, who was the enemy and you knew you’d be rewarded in the end, if you only did your best.
 
As I saw how old Nelly Belle, Pat Brady’s modified Jeep (Roy’s side kick), sold for $116,000 (auction estimated it would go for $30k), an endless stream of sidekicks flashed through my head. Gabby Hayes, Pat Brady and Pat Buttram chief amongst them. They were purposely laughable, but still possessed of character and backbones that would make sure they were at their hero-friend’s side when needed. Not exactly buffoons, but close, they still carried forward the mantra that good-triumphs-over-evil-if-you-work-at-it.

Lash LaRue was part NYC tough guy. Totally different than the rest and very cool, in a dark sort of way.

Somehow, it didn’t seem strange that my tough (but sensitive and even-handed) heroes would inexplicably burst into song for no particular reason. Or that a complete orchestral background would rise up, as if part of the dust surrounding them, as they rode along.  Or that Gene would be toting a guitar on the trail that in those days sold for twice the price of a car and today is worth more than a quarter of a million bucks. Both he and Roy used wildly decorated saddles that even at the time would have been laughed at by any true cowboy. And Roy dressed as if he were a western pimp, all color and fringe. But, again, that didn’t seem that unusual. That was just Roy.
 
It also didn’t seem strange that in many of the episodes the time/space continuum was severely bent on a regular basis. You’d have a horse-based society that was regularly visited by modern airplanes, black sedans and bad guys from New York, fedoras and all. And the occasional Nazi showed up in some plots. And, although our heroes where firing back with single action Colts and Winchesters, the bad guys never responded with machine guns or hand grenades. In a perverse sort of way, things were some how balanced.
 
Sky King and Penny were part of this same time frame and it never seemed unusual that they’d ride to the airport on horses and climb into their Bamboo Bomber (later a square tail C-310) and roar off into the western sky. And I don’t know how many times we saw him descend on the bad guys after bailing out of the Song Bird with only a main chute, no reserve, leaving Penny to bring it home. It just seemed to fit. And it didn’t dawn on me that Sky King looked like a hardware store owner or real estate agent more than he did a hero.

The West never saw such a well taylored, pimpish looking cowboy as Roy. It bothered me at the time, but I still loved him. An inseparable pair. Adios friends.

I don’t know if my own predilection towards a cowboy code of conduct, rather than something with religious or socio-political overtones, comes from my obsession with old cowboy movies or not. But, I didn’t invent it. It had to come from somewhere and there’s the possibility that being brought up in a Midwestern living room by The Lone Ranger, Hoppy, Gene, Rex, Roy and all the rest planted the seeds.
 
Although TV often does more damage than good, I’d like to think that during that one small period of time, it was teaching us something valuable and some of it stuck. I hope I passed some of it along to my kids. That way a little of Roy will continue on.

9 Oct 10 - Jerry, Woody and Me

This week the 1960’s, in their entirety, spent a night at my house in the person of my old roommate and long time guitar playing buddy, Jerry Faires. Being such a big part of my past, he reminded me of where we came from and what some of us have lost along the way.

Jerry doing one of the things he does best

Jerry is a little hard to describe because he’s such a singular personality that no category fits him, yet he fits into so many categories. Wildly talented songwriter, he has had several recorded but is still working on “making it.” Now, pushing the big seven-oh, he’s still at it and getting better by the day. His spoken pieces, poems in the cowboy poet genre without being cowboy poems, are some of the most lyrical you’ll ever read. And it’s a real hoot listening/watching him read them.
 
While we were sitting in the living room, he launched off into a…I don’t know what you’d call it…a presentation maybe… not quite singing, not quite poetry reading but wildly effective in its rhythm and honesty. It was entitled Woodrow Wilson Guthrie – Nation’s Child and told the story of Woody Guthrie better than I’ve ever heard it told. And many have tried. Frankly, it was so powerful that I got a little choked up.
 
I then realized that Marlene, who was really taken back and affected by his words too, probably had no idea who Woody Guthrie was. And two things hit me at the same time. First, it was sad to think about how few people outside of certain circles today know Woody and what he meant to America and what he left us in song and word. He was the original American troubadour/philosopher, sort of a Will Rogers with a guitar and a mission. He traveled the country by thumb and rail singing and writing songs that told the story of America and championed its downtrodden underdogs. If you don’t know his name, you probably recognize at least a few of his songs including This Land is Your Land and Pastures of Plenty. If you’re not familiar with him, you owe it to yourself to Google him and get to know another piece of hardcore Americana. Second, I realized that maybe that’s what I like about Jerry: he has a lot of Woody in him.
 
A fantastically talented silversmith, major museums and galleries feature Jerry’s work regularly. In fact, one of Marlene’s prized possessions is one of his concho belts. He’s a master guitar player, but not the kind that’s going to blow your socks off. He has an easy-going touch that exactly matches his life style and his personality: it seems as if everything about him dovetails together in a soft, caring sort of way. In fact, “caring” might be a good way to describe him.

A couple of old folkies a half century after the fact looking as if they dressed out of the same closet.

I’ve known a lot of people as long as I’ve known Jerry, something over 45 years, but not one of them can lay claim to being today exactly, precisely who and what they wanted to be, visually, physically, and philosophically nearly half a century ago. Jerry has naturally always been what every songwriter, folksinger, country singer, craftsman, you name it, want to be but aren’t. He just is! And always has been. And that kind of continuity in a person is strangely comforting to those of us who know them.
 
When we first met, around 1964, and started hilariously cohabitating, Jerry was one of many free spirits  I knew who lived life by their own rules. Today, in my life, he is the sole remaining representative of that way of thinking. And I’m glad he’s still in my life, reminding me, and everyone he touches, that there’s a helluva lot more to life than what most of us think there is.
 
I’ve linked a couple of his poems/spoken pieces including The Collector’s Gene (you have to read this one. A lot of you will see yourself in it) click Collectors' Gene. Woodrow Wilson Guthrie – Nation’s Child is on U-Tube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kduCL-Xl12Q
You can catch Norman Blake doing Jerry’s The D-18 Song here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6_3Ot6EDn4&feature=related
 
Jerry’s website is http://www.jerryfaires.com. Stop in, buy some silver and get in touch with a simpler time.
 
 

2 Oct 10 - Cabin Fever: Arizona Style

Cabin fever: now there’s a phrase with which just about everyone in any of the mid-to-northern states can clearly identify. Having spent my youth in the blizzard states and most of my adult life (until 18 years ago) on the edge the North East snowbelt, I’m super-familiar with that early March feeling that it’ll never be warm again and spring is an illusionary dream. And I’m feeling it again. Except it’s October! What gives?
 
Here in the Southwest, specifically, Arizona, we live our seasons in reverse but it wasn’t until this year that I actually felt cabin fever in reverse: Is summer ever going to be over? Damn I’m tired of being hot.
 
People who move here from somewhere up north, which is just about everybody, often complain that they miss the seasons, which, of course is BS. Everywhere in AZ has very distinct seasons except the area around Phoenix and south (the Sonora Desert). The rest of the state is a solid 3,000 to 5,000 feet higher and, if you don’t think, someplace like Flagstaff has seasons, you’ve never checked their weather reports. Last year, for instance, the ski resorts had a banner year as they got seven feet (SEVEN FRIGGING FEET!!!) of snow. That’s only about an hour and forty-five minutes north of us. So, if you want seasons, you can easily drive up and visit them and retreat to the warmth at will.
 
Phoenix and Tucson, which account for over 80% of the state’s population, are both in the Sonora Desert so we have two seasons: Summer and Not-Summer, also known as Hotter-Than-Sh*t and Unbelievably-Beautiful. Fortunately the Hot season is only about 3-4 months long. Normally temps fall like crazy starting about two weeks ago. But they didn’t. Our normal temps for today would be around 85 and they’re predicting 104. Gimme a break!  No wonder reverse cabin fever has set in.
 
I will be the first to admit that Zonies are amongst the biggest weather wienies on the planet. If temps get below 60 degrees, which it will do a few times a year (and I’m not kidding about this), people are wearing mittens and parkas. Me included.
 
God help us if humidity gets above 30 percent, which it does sometimes during the monsoon season (half of July and all of August). That’s so traumatic it’ll be the way every conversation starts, “Man, this is horrible! I’m not leaving the house today.” This is the result of humidity generally hovering around 12-15 percent with many weeks running 6 to 9 percent.
 
And cloudy days? On the first one, people are saying, “This is kind of nice, ya know?” On the second one, which happens very seldom, it’s “Okay, that’s enough, bring back the sun.”  On the rare occasion of three cloudy days in a row (I think I’ve seen that happen two or three times), Valium, Prozac and liquor sales skyrocket! We’re so accustom to sun that our internal batteries start to die from lack of charging and everything goes to hell. Drivers, for instance, are polarized with some being wildly aggressive and looking for someone to punch out while the others are moseying along at half the speed limit totally zoned out. Retail clerks can’t make change and a sizeable part of the population spends the day with their blankets pulled over their heads.
 
We are so used to clear skies that it’s not until one of our B & B guests comment on not having seen a cloud all week that I even think about it.
 
But, there’s a price to be paid for that kind of weather and this year it was a September, normally our cool-down month, that was almost entirely above 105. And no, this does not mean that Al Gore is actually right about something and global warming is punishing us. Yes our September was hot and broke a lot of records but it wasn’t the hottest on record. That was in 1885. So much for modern man causing global extremes.
 
While I was typing this, I took a break and checked the forecast. Yeehah! We’ll be down in double digits by Monday and into the 80’s by the end of the week. Then it’s seven to eight months of gorgeous weather. And that’s why so many of us live here. Still, this year it was a long time coming. Whew! I was getting so stressed even New Jersey was starting to look good. 
 
Nah, just kidding!
 

26 Sept 10 - eBooks, the John Factor, and Me

This is sort of a pivotal week for me: I finally got off my duff and made the first serious steps toward producing a series of ebooks, electronic books: got new software, replaced my second monitor and—this shows how serious I am—I cleaned my desk. This is always a sign that I’m starting something new and, to me, exciting.
 
First, I have to recognize that a lot of folks (me included) wouldn’t read a book on a computer or electric thingie if we were paid to do it. We like old fashion books, with pages and smells and all that. More important, most folks in my generation aren’t about to take any thing electronic into the bathroom. In publishing, the “john factor” has, for years been a major stumbling block to digital anything.
 
The rest of the world, however, is beginning to feel much more positive about digital readers and that is having a major impact on every form of print media AND radio/TV. All of those forms of communication are in hardcore survival mode and many of them won’t make it. Some of this is because there are so many other outlets for advertising, the bread and butter of magazines and newspapers, but also because the Internet has made so much information available via websites.
 
One of the serious stumbling blocks for the media, where websites are concerned, is figuring out how to make a buck from them. There’s so much free material out there and people are used to getting it for free. Airbum.com, is a classic example of that. As website go, Airbum.com is massive in terms of the amount of “stuff” on it and it takes a huge amount of time for me to make even the slightest addition to it. Yet, it’s free and there’s no logical way I can charge for it. That having been said, there are trends in the digital world that appear to be developing digital formats that are capable of generating income and the eBook is one of those. And I’m going to jump into that pond as least up to my knees. I’ll go deeper after I see how my first forays go.
 
I’m going to offer eBooks in graphic-heavy formats (if they were in print, they would be coffee table books) that will work only on computers and iPads. But, I’ll also offer them in text-only formats that will run on Kindels. I’m expecting that kind of book reader to improve over the next couple years so they’ll support images. I’ll change, as the technology changes.
 
I’m also investigating On Demand printing so I can offer them as hard copy books, but that will cost more than the basic $9.95 for the eBooks.
 
To get specific about it, my plans include the following:
 
Warbirds and Me
This is the one that’s cooking right now and is already written. It is a series of personal essays that takes the reader along as I fly all the primary and basic trainers, into the advanced trainers, then fighters and bombers. It’ll be accompanied with lots and lots of photos. Where a hard copy book is limited to the number of photos it can run because of cost and length, an eBook doesn’t have that limitation. Also it’ll link to audio captions and videos, where applicable. These will all download with the book itself.
 
Aviation Titles (more or less in order of production)

• Mastering the Taildragger – this is aimed at learning basic Taildragger technique.
• The Pitts Special – An updated and expanded version of the Pitts book I did years ago
• Mastering the High Performance Taildragger – as the title says, we raise the ante
• Crosswind and Severe Weather Techniques for Dummies – self explanatory

Non-Aviation Titles

• Building the Kentucky Rifle – I expand on the series I started in Airbum.com
• Making a Clunker Into a Tack Driver – I take the cheapest available, military surplus bolt guns, something like a Turkish Mauser and show how to make it shoot with the best of them on the cheap.
• Handgun Modification – I go through a series of handguns, chronicle the modification process photographically and do before and after accuracy tests.
• Hotrod Fabrication – get down to the nitty-gritty of how you build frames, fittings, and the stuff that looks hard but really isn’t and is cheaper than buying it.
• The Tiny Work Shop – show a really innovative way to have a full range workshop in an apartment (or a small garage, etc.) and not even know it’s there.

Many Titles to Follow – I have dozens of ideas in this area but the above are enough for the time being.
 
Anyway, I just thought I’d share this with you. It’s always exciting to start a new project and I AM excited. This opens avenues I’ve never had before and I’m hoping the digital trend we’re seeing will continue. At any rate, I’m not about to be left behind. Regardless of which direction it goes, I want to be in position to act. Hey, even gray dogs can learn new tricks.
 
If you have any ideas or comments, I’d love to hear them.

18 Sept 10 - I'm Looking for a Butt to Kick!

This has been a fractured week with a series of minor happenings, job related frustrations and surprises all of which come under the heading of “life.” However, it came to a head when Marlene dropped the mail on my desk and the top piece was from the “Scooter Store.”
 
The term “Scooter” can generate different images depending on the context and the background of the viewer. For whatever reason, the top definition to come to my mine is usually of the Douglas A-4 Skyhawk, or “Scooter” to generations of pilots.
 
Another definition is one of those little step-through motorbikes that are getting more and more sophisticated these days, and I see them being used alot by commuters. It’s really funny to see a young woman in her high-end secretary costume, wearing a helmet, mixed in with traffic. However, those kinds of step-through things are too far down the transportation scale to be driven by a “real” man (yes, there’s some elitism here) so, other than trying not to squash them in traffic, they are nowhere to be seen on my personal-interest radar.
 
A less common use of the word is the way a few of my friends refer to their Harley’s. “Yeah, my scooter needs washing,” which, in this case is a 110 c.i.  stage one, mildly chopped, butt kicker which is definitely a perversion of the word scooter.
 
I just had a funny image cross my mind: a guy on one of those little step through putt-putts wearing leathers, club colors, a head wrap, long hair and tattooed. Nah! Never happen. The Culture Police would nab his butt.
 
And then there’s the actual definition of “Scooter,” as it was intended on the return address on the aforementioned envelope: The Scooter Store sells those little electric chair-type things that are intended for—dare I use the phrase—old people. As soon as I realized what they were trying to sell me, I was instantly pissed. And insulted. I was also just a little chagrinned and suitably horrified.
 
A computer somewhere had identified me as being a candidate for the electric scooter brigade and I didn’t know how to handle that. I’M STATISTICALLY AN OLD PERSON?  When did that happen? And just who in the hell decided I fell into that category? I want to track him down and kick his twenty-something ass!
 
Looking for some sort of vindication, I Googled “Senior Citizen,” which was a serious mistake because this is what I found:
 
Elderly persons, usually more than sixty or sixty-five years of age. People in the United States who are more than sixty years of age are commonly referred to as senior citizens or seniors. These terms refer to people whose stage in life is generally called old age. People are said to be senior citizens when they reach the age of sixty or sixty-five because those are the ages at which most people retire from the workforce.

I’d like to find the rotten bast*rd who found it necessary to insert the terms "elderly" and“old age” into that definition. Man! That’s cold! The definition, in general, both sucks and is inaccurate in today’s world. At least I think so..

I fully realize that I’m far luckier than most folks my age in that my health is so good, but I also know for a fact that very damn few of my generation consider ourselves “old.” That’s an outside judgment call. I may be kidding myself, but I think the world looks at 60/65 entirely different than they did a decade or two ago. Of course, that may be the case just because so many people are that age now and they are making up the definitions.

I think one of the things that irritates me most about this whole age thing is that those who are younger tend to look at us as being irrelevant, or incapable, simply because we have some miles on us. I’ve got a hot flash for those smart, young whippersnappers. You need the miles to gain the experience and there is simply no substitute for having been “there.” The more life you live, the more you see things happen. Then, after you’ve seen similar things happen a bunch of times, you stand a good chance of knowing what the outcome is going to be the next time you see it happening again. It’s nothing more than trend analysis and is far superior to any kind of calculating or fancy theoretical thinking.

There is a caveat to the above, however. This assumes you live life and pay attention to everything around you so you learn from other’s mistakes as well as your own. A lot of people go through life staring straight ahead and learn nothing: as I’ve often said, it’s really easy to get old and still be stupid. Of course those folks started out that way and perfected the concept of “stupid” as they got older.

Anyway, I tolerated it, when AARP mail started showing up, but the Scooter Store?  Someone owes me an apology. I’d like to see them spend a day running in my footsteps. They’d wind up having to take a nap about 3:00 and still wouldn’t be able to keep up. Hrrump! Old age my a**!
 
 
 

11 Sept 10 - Where is the America of the Day After?

I had already written a light hearted blog for today, but, when I started to put it up on the web and wrote “11 Sept 10,” I knew I couldn’t let it go without saying something.
 
Some dates shouldn’t be allowed to go past unnoticed: Dec 7 and September 11th chief amongst them. Those are the dates that changed the world (not just the US) forever. And I’m not certain which had the most profound effects. And both are based on forms of terrorism.
 
In a seriously perverted sort of way it could be said that the very long-term effects of the attack on Pearl Harbor could be seen as being beneficial. Of course, that assumes you can look past the millions and millions of deaths that literally eliminated entire generations and the amazing amount of anguish visited upon most nations of the world. A huge, impossible-to-grasp, price was paid for the benefits that came out of WWII, the most important amongst them freedom, which itself is a difficult-to-quantify concept.
 
If the US had thrown up fences and stayed completely out of the war in every way, we’d have a totally different world today. Ignoring the massive reshaping of Europe, which would be under a totalitarian regime, and a Pacific that belongs to Japan, the US’s industrial machine wouldn’t have gotten the huge jump start that it did. There’s nothing like a war to energize technological progress (at a huge price). Also women would never have enjoyed their sudden move to the forefront and women’s rights would be many decades behind where we are now.
 
And then there’s the way Japan, amongst others, benefited from being stripped down to their underwear and rebuilt (with our money). They were brought into the new century and became major players in a mostly positive sort of way. Our today is the direct result of an hour and a half on that Sunday morning.
 
And then there’s 9/11.
 
I’m not sure what has come out of that, which is even slightly positive. For a short period of time patriotism ran rampant, but in a very typically American way, we again returned to a complacent “it can’t happen here” attitude, even though it has been clearly demonstrated that it CAN happen here. And it’s amazing how quickly politics entered the fray and it became popular to point out anti-terrorism moves as being partisan, paranoid and unnecessary. In truth, I’m severely disappointed in the US, and the government in particular, and the way we’ve handled ourselves since 9/11.
 
Somehow, the supposed “war on terror” has become a joke. In fact, most recently, the concept of a strong America, or of America as a stand-alone nation, has become part of that joke. More and more it seems as if we’re accepting our slide from a position of strength and respect as being just the way things happen. We’re no longer American-centric. Our self-esteem and pride in our flag seems to be drifting in uncertain circles.
 
More and more it appears as if we’re using Europe as a model, when it’s universally agreed that Europe is in even deeper philosophical doo-doo than we are. And much of that is because they’ve torn down their borders, both mentally and physically, and are rapidly losing the identity that made each of the countries unique. There’s a danger that the lower edge of their society is coming up and the upper edge is coming down. This process will continue until they meet in the middle as a lukewarm mediocrity that hurts Europe, and the world, in general.
 
9/11 should have galvanized us into a defiant nation not willing to accept being a target and willing to do whatever is necessary to guarantee both our freedom and our safety. It should have strengthened our backbone. And, for a short time, that was exactly what happened. Today, however, far too many of those in power are so pussified that they would do nothing but whimper “now don’t read too much into it,” after the next 9/11 attack. The examples are too many to recount.
 
The only bright spot is that it appears as if the pendulum is about to come back toward center. In other words, an increasing number of people are voicing their dissatisfaction and are going to do something about taking their country back and pointing it back in the direction it has had for the past two hundred years.
 
Now, if we can just find some candidates who are willing, and capable, of being leaders and not politicians, we’ll be just fine.
 
Huh!  That last sentence clearly spells out the impossibility of our situation. Now I’m really depressed. Damn!
 

4 Sept 10 - Food Doesn't Have to be Lethal

Dammit, dammit, dammit! The Fitness Café just shut down! I know this doesn’t mean much to most people but it means that once again, a favorite near-the-airport eating place has been jerked out from under me. But this one was different so the aggravation is much worse.
 
Fitness was, to my mind, an idea whose time has come. It was perfect. And now it’s gone.
 
Fitness was run by a middle-aged weight lifter who had apparently had it with the cuisine offered by most strip-mall eateries. No, let me amend that: ALL normal eateries. So, he got a nutritionist involved and came up with a menu that was based 100% on healthy food. On top of that he posted exactly how many calories, carbs, fat, etc., was in each entrée. And some how he made every single one of the items on his menu taste absolutely great. But, as great as the concept was, his execution had a flaw: the food was too good, too much and too cheap. He could have charged more and served less and he’d still be with us and not a single customer would have complained. Not one.
 
Let’s look at that concept, however, and broaden our thinking. Somewhere in this readership there has to be someone who is both a big thinker and who has the bucks to do food right. Just think about it: you walk into a little cafe and look at the menu board. It has columns of wraps, sandwiches, salads and smoothies. Each lists every one of the components, the exact nutritional make up and you know you can throw a dart at the board and be guaranteed of something that’s not only tasty, but each of the posted values ranges between 300 and 500 calories. Take your pick. You won’t be disappointed with any of them.
 
Doesn’t that concept sound as if it’s salable nationwide? Doesn’t it sound as if it’s something that could be worked into a business model that could be repeated place after place. Sort of a Subway that’s 100% healthy. The concept would be exactly the same, only the execution would be different. And you wouldn’t have a former fat guy as a pitchman. Or at least she’d be a good looking young lady, not a likeable dweeb.
 
You wouldn’t dare market this as a health food café because the tag “health food” turns off  “ normal” people…like me, for instance. You’d have to market it as food that’s fast but does no fast food damage. There’s no reason even a Taco Bell or Burger King menu couldn’t be redesigned with health in mind, but of course, they never will. So, there’s a market niche there that’s vacant and aching to be filled. 
 
All of this having been said, I should mention that Marlene swears that one of the main reasons I’d go to Fitness regularly was all these twenty-something hard bodies that frequented the place dressed to show off their body-building efforts. That’s not why I went, but, I have to admit that they did add a lot to the décor.
 
Bear in mind that I’m the last person in the universe to voluntarily eat bean sprouts and leafy rabbit food crap, but somehow, the way Anthony and his cook put everything together made you forget that it was healthy. Now that they’re gone, I have to start auditioning eating places and menus again. This is very disturbing.
 
I feel like an old dog that has had his food dish moved to a different corner of the room: I’m so set in my ways that I’m likely to starve to death because of it.

Heads-Up for the Week

I'd like to introduce you to James Corbett, an Australian artist who recyldes auto parts into some of the best junkyard art you'll ever see. Go to AUTO ART.

 

28 Aug 10 - Parents, Sex and Dog Poop

Last night as I crawled into the sack I glanced at the photo on my nightstand of Marlene and me walking down the aisle right after we were married. Then I flashed onto the image of us kissing like fiends right after exchanging our vows and how embarrassed our four kids were. It’s amazing how parents and other heroes are held to a different standard and there are certain bodily functions we’re supposedly above doing.
 
First, I should probably admit that we didn’t just smooch, smile and walk the aisle. We lip locked and tongue-danced like sweaty teenagers for at least a full minute and the audience started hooting and hollering in delight. As if rehearsed, we both, unbeknownst to the other, waved a free arm telling them to leave us the hell alone. We were in our own little perverted universe.

Does this look like two people who are going to hold hands the rest of the night? Damn, she's beautiful!

What we didn’t know, but were reminded of by each of our kids at different times in the course of the evening, was that parents aren’t supposed to kiss like that. And we had embarrassed them. I had to laugh. It’s a universal thing that we can’t picture our parents behaving like real people. When each of them chastised us, I was immediately tempted to ask them what they thought we were planning for later, after the party. If I had said to any of them (all in their mid-twenties to early-thirties, some married) that we were planning on screwing our brains out all night, they’d still be seeing therapists over the comment.
 
Kids do NOT like to hear their parents talking about sex, joking about it or, God help us, relating wild nights in our past, “Honey, do you remember that night in the back of the…..” Again, an excellent way to cause psychic damage to a supposedly ultra-hip young adult. I’ve seen at least one of my kids, now in their thirties, stick their fingers in their ears and start going “la-la-la-la-la…..” to avoid being mentally touched by the subject. 
 
I’m no different. I can’t imagine my parents doing “it.” Can any of us? Intellectually we know they did it at least once, that’s how we got here. But, can we see them doing it for fun more than just that one time? Oh, my, God, the images going through my mind right now are disturbing. And I just remembered how I heard about sex for the first time.
 
I was playing with some kids in our front yard, we were probably seven or eight years old (I haven’t thought about this event even once in more than 50 years, funny!) and one of them started describing the process. I couldn’t believe him! I refused to believe him! MY DAD STUCK HIS WHAT, WHERE!!!???   No, no, no! Not my parents! They wouldn’t do such a thing! Disgusting! I did my own version of “la-la-la-la-la…..” as I ran around the block totally horrified. It’s funny now, but it sure as hell wasn’t then. I’m laughing out loud thinking about it.
 
Sex is the biggest “I can’t picture” thing about our parents and others we see as heroes, but not the only one. I think I was probably twenty-five years old before I came to grips with the fact that my mother actually went to the bathroom like normal people. She was a saint and saints don’t poop. For that matter, heroes don’t poop. Can you name one movie in which our hero takes time out to ride the porcelain pony?  Take the Bourne series, for instance: Matt Damon races through three movies having stuff continually happening to him that would scare the crap out of a normal human being and not once in three movies does he need to lighten his load.
 
Did Lassie ever suddenly break the action and assume that odd little stance peculiar to Collies (I’ve owned two) when they’re dropping a deuce? Right now try to picture Lassie doing that. It’s actually pretty funny! Of course, I laugh at the wrong time in most movies so I’m not a good yardstick in that area.
 
Anyway, my kids just have to accept the fact that parents do indeed have sex. And heroes do poop. If neither were to happen, both would explode, but for different reasons.

21 Aug 10 - You've Won the Lottery! Now What?

Hitting the lottery. Now there’s a daydream worth dreaming. And, just for fun, Marlene and I dream it from time to time. Problem is I’m constantly disappointing myself with what I’m going to do with the money. What about you?
 
As it happens, I personally know two people who hit the lottery. Both in NJ. One hit it for $27 mm, my secretary’s brother. The next day she phoned in that she quit. That’s the last I heard of her. Dropped off the face of the Earth.
 
A good friend hit for $12mm, which really pissed me off because he was already a millionaire, which I thought was somehow illegal. I thought you had to be a housepainter or dockworker, pushing 80 years old with no relatives and be from Secaucus or Flatbush. My buddy kept it a total secret. Not a soul in town knew about it and he put the money into a fund that he and his brothers used to start businesses. At last! Someone with brains wins it!
 
I’ll buy a lottery ticket about once every two years. For no particular reason. When I’m getting gas I’ll just get the urge,. One time, I did that and called home telling Marlene to make up her list because I’d just bought the winning ticket. When I got home, she had this list taped to my computer screen (it’s taped to the wall behind the computer now).
 
Marlooney’s Dream Shopping
1.Trip (honeymoon to England)  - (which we have now done. Ten years later.)
2. Pitts Model 12 (You gotta love this woman!)
3. House improvements (fix up the kitchen, fix the cracks around the pool)
4. Cessna 195 (need I say more?)
5. More Nizhoni’s (that would be more Pomeranian puppies)
6. Ring – 3 tier (don’t know what this is but it doesn’t sound cheap)
7. Trusts for each of our kids (What do you think? $1000 each?)
Oh, how we can dream – God Bless America!
 
Okay, so I just won $40mm and she buys a trip, two round-motored airplanes, a new kitchen, a puppy or two, a ring and some trusts.  Not exactly a high roller is she?
 
If I were to make out my own list (and this is after giving some serious thought to it) this would be it:
 
1. Pay off the house. 
2. Repaint my Civic (1990) and drop a 2.2L CRV engine in it 
3. Barrel up two Mauser actions and two rolling blocks
4. Build 30 x 40 shop building out back
5. Used lathe, milling machine and TIG
6. Fix paint on Pitts
7. Buy ’29 Ford AA, flatbed truck from friend
8. Travel to see grand kids three times a year
9. Buy another pair of Luchesse boots
10. Buy another pair of Justin boots 
11. Travel to Machu Picchu
12. Travel to Egypt
13. Single Action Ruger modified by Hamilton Bowen
14. Send my Colt Commander (.45) to Jim Clark
 
Now I’m straining to think of anything else I really want, and/or need. And I’ve only spent $184k not counting upkeep, etc., for the airplanes.  I don’t want a new house. No new car. I might think about finding another Pitts S-2A and send it to Steve Wolf to be totally Wolfized, but probably not. Mine is just fine. I just can’t think of anything else.
 
And would I quit work? Why would I? I love doing my magazine, Flight Journal. I love writing the articles for other mags. I couldn’t even think about not flight instructing because dual-given in the Pitts scratches an itch nothing else does. As the saying goes, that completes me. I can’t think of anything I’m doing that I’d quit doing except the ad agency stuff (brochures, catalogs, etc). That’s the only thing I’d drop, so I’d be down under 80 hours a week.
 
See why I’m a lottery disappointment? Me winning $40mm wouldn’t add a single significant thing to my life except some long term financial security, which I wouldn’t know what to do with, as I’ve never had it.
 
As I’ve said a million times, I don’t need to win the lottery. That would be redundant. I’ve already won it in the way the fates have worked out my life for me and the way in which Mother Nature has let me keep my health. Past that? Who needs anything else? I’m one lucky SOB and I know it.
 
Alright, so maybe just a little lottery win would be okay with me. A measly half-mil and I’d be in fat city. Any big winners out there want to drop some of their chump change on me?

14 Aug 10 - I've Never Met a Mummy I didn't Like
 
Okay, I’m now officially excited: The exhibit Mummies of the World is coming to LA and we’re going to go see it! Yeehah! This is even better than Body World, the stripped-to-their-muscles-and-bones corpse display! And that’s saying a lot. I am your basic mummy freak. Don’t ask why. I don’t ask myself that question because I’m not sure I want the answer.
 
Their website says, "Mummies of the World, the largest traveling exhibition of mummies ever assembled, presents a never-before-seen collection of both accidental and intentionally preserved mummies, presented with reverence and dignity." How could anybody NOT want to go. I can hardly wait! 

I love the x-rays they take of mummies showing us what's inside of them.

For whatever reason, from the time I was a teeny kid, probably in Kindergarten, I left nose prints on glass cases across the Nation (my dad loved museums), if they contained human remains (oooh…when you say it that way, it sounds bad).  Skeletons that had been dug up were cool, but mummies, especially those that were partially unwrapped really set my old hotrodder heart pounding. And accidental mummies? Folks who fell asleep and a hundred years later found themselves on display after going on a really serious diet? Forget it! I love it!
 
At one point I thought I must be a little weird. Maybe even a little sick, but now I know better. They wouldn’t have shows like this and hardcore mummy stuff on various cable channels if I were the only ghoul in town. Mummies and plasticized cadavers are big business in the entertainment world. Which sort of irritates me: I was there first. I was the guy who would have been an archeologist, if there had been any money in it.
 
About ten years ago, when I was back in my hometown in Nebraska, I went to the library to check out a book I practically wore out as a kid. It was one of three or four that I absolutely loved: Digging in Yucatan by Ann Axtell Moms; Published 1931. It chronicled their life excavating Chichen Itzá, the huge Mayan ruin with the sacrificial well. I couldn’t get enough of it. Ditto for anything written by Roy Chapman Andrews, an inveterate archeologist/paleontologist/explorer in the late 20s, early ‘30s, who traveled to places like Mongolia’s Gobi desert in search of dinosaur eggs and other neat sh*t.
 
The really funny thing about the Digging in Yucatan book: I checked it out last in 1959, when I was still in high school, and the check-out card had my name on it going back into junior high. In the 40 years since, it hadn't been checked out a handful of times. Apparently, there haven’t been a lot of frustrated archeologists come out of Seward, Nebraska.
 
The whole what’s-under-the-ground thing is something that I know infects a lot of people. Including at least one of my old hometown friends. Nothing would fire either of our imaginations as much as finding something as simple as an arrowhead. As I used to tell school kids, when I’d take a selection of flint work to give a lecture, “When you kneel down and pull that carefully shaped piece of stone out of the ground, the very last person to touch it was the Native American who had lost it. There is absolutely zero personal history to that artifact except his and yours. And there might be as much as 5-8000 years between the two.” Talk about reaching across the ages! If you think about it, it’s a little humbling. Sobering at the very least.
 
Being on an excavation crew on an undisturbed site, especially one with burials, must be incredibly exciting. I know, it’s hours and days of dirt and backbreaking work, but the first time an eye socket, or an exquisitely shaped flint point, suddenly breaks the surface and is looking up at you, it must send shivers down your spine. Again, you’re the first to lay eyes on it since the person who put it there.
 
The closest I’ve come to anything like that, other than a few arrowheads, was being in Chicago’s Field museum late one night when they were rearranging the Egyptian display and I got to squat on the floor right up against a wrapped mummy. I felt as if I could smell the history. It’s at times like that that you wish the artifact could talk to you and tell you their story. At one point they had been alive and a walking, talking part of society. A society that we only know from piecing together what thousands of years of artifacts tell us. But we don’t really know their day-to-day life. The worries, the joys, the tears that the person inside those wrappings knew. Like I said: humbling.
 
 So there you have it. I’m stoked about going to see some more dead bodies. This is another of those “…don’t ask, the answer would make no sense, even if I could give one, which I can’t” type of things.
 
I forget: have I introduced you to Agnes, my spare skull?  That’s another story for another time.
 
Heads-up for The Week
I love it when people do projects that are not only way out of the ordinary but speak to craftsmanship, an interest in history and things that go boom. Sorta. Get a load of this terrific bigger-than-a-model, smaller-than-the-real-thing German Battleship, the Graf Spee. This guy has not only a terrific sense for building but a sense of humor and adventure as well. Go to Graf Spee.

7 Aug 10 - Dead Cats, National Health Care and Reality
 
Epilogue to Corki’s passing: it has been a week since we had to put him to sleep and images of those final moments, the warm words, the plaintive meowing, the I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening nature of such a final decision refuse to leave my mind. But what keeps playing around the edges of my thoughts is that I was watching one segment of the national healthcare scenario being played out in miniature.

What if that was me, or Marlene, laying on that table? I hate to admit it, but I began to see where those whom the Internet is telling us are threatening to ration healthcare, get their logic. More horrifying, I now understand some of that logic.
 
When we took Corki into the animal emergency hospital, it was Sunday night and he was in serious pain with a hugely distended belly. A quick needle, some lab work and it was obvious something had ruptured or penetrated his GI tract and peritonitis was running wild. Could he be saved? It was doubtful. The options were few and expensive.
 
At this point in this sordid tale, substitute one of your loved ones for our beloved cat. Then move the decimal points in the following costs at least three places to the right to reflect real life healthcare costs. Think people, not cats.
 
The surgeons could go in blind, with no sonogram to tell them what they were dealing with. To go in at that moment in an attempt to save him would cost $3,600 but there was a very high probability it was too late and they couldn’t save him anyway. As a second option, we could wait until morning, do a sonogram ($400 plus $150 for overnight healthcare), which would tell us more about what was happening in there and then do the surgery. Unfortunately, Corki had gotten so much worse in the three hours since we brought him in, that it was obvious he probably wouldn’t make it to morning.
 
We went home, sat across from one another with tears in our eyes, and vacillated back and forth, the anguish building with every syllable of conversation. I was ready to throw any amount of money at the problem to save our buddy, but we had an even bigger problem: yes, we could have come up with that amount of money, but it would have cut our financial reserves to the bone. And for what? What would plowing our savings into that big orange ball of love do to us and what would we gain? A week? A month? It was too obvious that the odds of getting Corki back, as we knew him, were very, very long.
 
In truth, I couldn’t make that decision on someone I felt that strongly about. Besides, he was Marlene’s soul-mate. It had to be her decision. Not mine. She, being the stronger and more practical of the two of us, decided to save Corki the pain and, tangentially, save us the massive cost.

Even thinking about finances is a really sh*tty way to have to make a decision about someone you love. And that’s when I imagined myself laying on that table and began to view the situation as a microcosm of the national healthcare problem.
 
Remember: think people, not cats here. Marlene and I were playing the role of the government. Or an insurance company. We weighed the benefits of saving a life against the costs and what the outcome was likely to be. Corki was at least eleven years old, we’re not sure. However, even if we had spent the money, would his quality of life have returned in its entirety? The odds very definitely said probably not. The patient was going to live a half-life for a short period of time and generate even more medical expenses during that time. In our role as the insuring/controlling agency and looking at it in a hard and very cold light, it made more sense for us to cut our losses and end the patient’s pain.
 
Right there, in a nutshell, is the end-game healthcare predicament and one of the controversial aspects of what we hear future healthcare may include: when does it make sense to pull the financial plug and let nature (maybe aided by Kevorkian measures) take its course?
 
This is a terribly complicated issue: as long as there is even a glimmer of hope, we want every loved one to live as long as science can keep them alive. Period. But, if we had to pay every dime out of our own checkbook, would we see a point of diminishing returns and let dollar signs enter the picture? If we had no choice and couldn’t hide behind the way in which most hospitals continue to give care, paid or not, if we couldn’t hide from the bills through bankruptcy, if we didn’t have insurance to buffer us, would we decide to cut our personal losses?
 
The foregoing is the way government may be forced to approach this thing under government-controlled healthcare: their checkbook is only just so fat. How much healthcare can they give before they have to say, “Enough is enough,” just to save themselves? Better question: how will our loved ones react, when they’re told it is the decision of the government, or insurance company, that they are on their own? Only hospice care will be given until it’s over. It is euthanasia by omission.
 
The solution is in insurance that is—please note the following adjectives carefully— self-sustaining, compassionate, intelligent and affordable. And in that one sentence I’ve said something that apparently is beyond the scope of both government and insurance companies to create. Yes, a bad economy makes this even tougher to accomplish, but you can’t tell me that with all the brain power floating around this country we can’t come up with a logical plan that doesn’t bankrupt us.
 
I don’t have a solution. But, I do have a request of government: think about the people who put you in office. Stop focusing on keeping yourself in office or controlling those who put you there. Take partisan politics completely out of healthcare, stop writing unreadable laws (2,400 pages, give me a frigging break!) that legislators never read and cut to the chase: simplify the issue by removing all non-medical, unrelated factors and concentrate on the problem at hand—providing for your citizens. Stop playing your power games at our expense!
 
FYI-Marlene and I are not going to be backed into a financial corner again on a furry member of our family that we love dearly: we bought healthcare insurance for Sháhn-deen. $30/month. We can do that because we can afford it. Many can’t. Again, the national healthcare issue in miniature.
 
And by the way: if that was me on that table and I knew what the odds were, I’m fairly certain I would have opted for the needle. I’d much rather have a quick, clean exit than a long, drawn-out one, filled with discomfort and expense. Of course, when I’m faced with that, I may be willing to do anything for just one more breath. None of us know how we’ll react until that moment.
 
If you think about it, there’s something to be said for winding up in a deep, smoky hole in the ground with a tailwheel sticking out of it.
 

1 Aug 10 - Four Bowls: Adios Corki
 
As I stepped back in the kitchen after my walk this morning, I noticed with a start that I’d automatically put out four bowls of food for the cats. And I immediately choked up. I had forgotten that when I came back from Oshkosh last night our lead cat, Corki, was definitely in trouble. Three hours later, we were holding him when he was put to sleep. The images made for a very long night.
 
Losing a cat usually affects people differently than the loss of a dog. In fact, the relationships most people have with cats are far different than those they have with dogs. Part of that is because of the way dogs, versus cats, interface with people. Universally dogs seem driven to pour every ounce of love they possibly can into their owners. They do that to the point that “owner” becomes the wrong word. You don’t own a dog any more than you own your son, daughter or wife. They are an integral part of your life and emotions. And, when you lose them, the effect is exactly the same as losing another member of your family. Often worse.

Corki was hands-down the finest dog-cat I've ever seen and we'll miss him mightly

Cats are different. Generally cats are more aloof and they’ll love you on their own terms, when and how they want. And different cats have radically different personalities: from being warm and friendly to being the pair of eyes that live under the couch. And this is why many people don’t care for cats. You tend to love those people and animals that demonstrate an overt love for you. But that’s not the way most cats are. And that’s what made Corki such a wildly special cat.
 
Once in a while you’ll meet a cat that combines the best of both species, dogs and cats. What you wind up with is a warm, loving animal that becomes your constant, best buddy. Just like a dog. And that was Corki. A huge, orange tabby, you present an unoccupied lap and he’d be in it in a heartbeat. You move from room to room and he’d be right there close to you. One hundred percent of the B & B guests who stayed with us wanted to take him home and we were only half kidding when we threatened to do baggage checks on their way out.

Corki never slept without at least one paw touching Marlene. I always loved that.

Marlene and Corki were one soul in two bodies. Totally inseparable. For the last eight years it has been a joy to watch how they’d sleep curled up together, how they bonded in so many goofy ways, right down to Corki hitting the litter box every time Marlene headed for the bathroom.  The breaking of that connection may be one reason last night hit me so hard. My tears are as much for Marlene as they are for me.
 
I fully realize that dog lovers reading this are going to be hooting and laughing at the concept of crying over a cat, but you can take this to the bank: people who don’t like cats just haven’t met the right cat. Corki was the cat that cat-haters love.
 
He left us with Marlene’s arms around him, her breath in his nostrils and her warm words being whispered in his ears. I was scratching his back the way he liked it. He was in acute pain, but the arms around him meant he was home, and he didn’t stop purring or wagging his tail until the very last second. He was just that kind of guy.
 
As king of the house, Corki was always the last to eat in the morning and I’m going to keep putting out four bowls. I’m not ready to say good-bye quite yet.   

24 July 10 - The Digital Death of Mathematical Intuition
 
I’m constantly harping about those mileposts in time that mark the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it: recoil pads on Browning shotguns, automatic transmissions in street rods, a nosewheel on the Cessna 170 and the last roll of Kodachrome film. As of now, I’d like to add one more: the day the ability to approximate was replaced by digital everything.
 
I decided to add the digital death of the decimal point to my list when I glanced over and saw my little six-inch Post slide rule sticking up out of my pencil cup (actually an 1880s, leather carbine loop from a McClellan cavalry saddle: thank you Clyde). I was on the phone and started playing with it and the thought occurred to me that my generation was the last to cut their mathematical teeth on a slide rule (or abacus or something like it). In so doing, we made the skill of approximating part of our intuitive bag of tricks. The ability to estimate the answer is something we don’t teach any more and modern generations have become so digitally dependent that they don’t have a clue to the answer until it shows up in an LED window. This not only leaves them open to big mistakes but robs them of a handy way of thinking.

There was a never-ending Chevy vs Ford type of rivalry between the Post and K & E sliderule guys. Looking back at it, Post guys would today be Mac-heads and the K & E, PC troops. I bought the little 6 incher as a get-well present for myself, when I got dumped by a girl friend. It was a good trade.

When we graduated from the basic 2 x 2 = 4 math tables to slide rules in college, we started working bigger, more complex problems and every single time we started slippin’ and slidin’, we were also guesstimating about where the answer would fall. We had to because nothing we did with the slide rule would tell us where the decimal point should go in the row of numbers. If we didn’t have at least a basic idea “about” where the answer was going to fall, we could be off by factors of tens or hundreds and never know the difference.
 
I will be the first to admit that there is nothing wildly accurate about a slide rule. In fact, it’s actually pretty damn crude (although it got us to the moon) and you’re working with mostly whole numbers. But when working out a problem that way—where your mind is always well ahead of the calculations—you’re never surprised by the answer. And that way of thinking becomes part of your everyday life so you just naturally keep up with things.
 
Most people in the pre-calculator generations have developed funny little tricks to figure out everyday things without thinking about it. 15% tips (same as knots to miles by the way) is .10 plus half of that. Celsius (when and why did it stop being centigrade?) is plus .8 plus 32, and on and on.  Because calculators have removed the need to think in terms of numbers and give us precision right down to a gnat’s heinie, we’ve moved away from mathematical intuition: we no longer intuitively know when and how big/fast/expensive something is going to be so we’re constantly being surprised.
 
Also, most of us who came out of the technical fields tend to like things quantified. We like to know size, distance and all the other parameters that help us put things in perspective in relation to the world around us. And that too is based on the ability to approximate numbers.
 
I know this is a little thing, but I wonder, if a study were to be done that analyzed the way technical types see and react to what’s happening in today’s world, would it show that we’re a little more alarmed than the average Joe. Ha!  That’s it! The curse of the slide rule generation: it makes us intuitively paranoid because we can sense when numbers and trends are getting nuts.
 
No big deal. The rest of the world has caught up with us by now and is just as paranoid as we are. And it’s about time!
 
FYI –Beginning today I’ll be at Oshkosh for a week (where reality is temporarily, and pleasantly, suspended) so I’ll miss putting out a Thinking Out Loud next week. Don’t think I fell in a hole or something.

17 July 10 - Healthcare, Upclose and Personal
 
This has been an “interesting” week, although not particularly enjoyable. It started with Marlene having a belly ache on Sunday and, as of today, Saturday, she’s been in the hospital for five days and is slated to spend at least another two or three. And, just so you know upfront, things are okay, but we learned a lot about the health system that most folks probably already know, but we didn’t. And my summation is that the system may be broken, but it works. At least for the time being.
 
I’ll keep this as short as I can but there are some lessons to be learned here.
 
For the last month she has been going through tests to find out why she pees so often (yeah, I know, too much information). She’d gone through X-rays and sonograms and cameras poked places you really don’t want them poked. The bottom line, however, is that the doctor thought a CT scan should be done and in less than a week, that test would be done. Little to no delay anywhere.
 
Marlene has a middle of the road, independent (we’re not employees, remember?) medical plan with a $2000 deductable, which we used up in the first ten minutes. The plan costs us $440/mo. Other than finding services that take that particular insurance, it has been seamless with little or no hassles. So, other than being expensive (she’s not as old as I am, but she’s up in the costs-more category), it works.
 
None of the tests showed anything bad about her bladder and the CT Scan was to be done on Monday.
 
Sunday she was gripped with really severe abdominal pain and probably should have gone to the ER. Marlene has an irritatingly high pain threshold and an even more irritating tendency to procrastinate on stuff like this and no amount of browbeating on my part can get her to move. Come Monday, the pain was down just a little but still too much to go get the CT scan, so she postponed to Tuesday.
 
When she got the scan on Tuesday, I insisted it go right to her doctor and we get an appointment for as soon as possible. Later that evening the doctor’s assistant called and said the CT scan showed a golf ball sized abscess on her colon (not bladder, colon) as the result of diverticulitis, which Marlene didn’t even know she had. She called in a ‘script for some high-powered antibiotics that I picked up posthaste. So, from the time of the scan to her having antibiotics in her mouth, was about four hours and she hadn’t seen a doctor yet. Pretty damn quick!
 
Note: they found all of this accidentally as the result of a CT scan that our doctor had to beat up the insurance company to get them to pay for. Based on her other bladder tests, it wasn’t really necessary for that purpose, but she had mentioned her poop had changed shape (again, too much info) and he just wanted to “…make sure…” Thank, God he did. If this had gone another day or so, the abscess was likely to perforate, start running the infection throughout her body and cause peritonitis. We’re sensitive to peritonitis because that’s what killed her brother due to a burst appendix while in the Army.
 
We’re not done yet. Hang on. It gets better.
 
She sees the doctor the next morning, he calls a surgeon friend and the surgeon insisted she run right to the ER and be admitted. An abscess that big shouldn’t be walking around outside of a hospital. That got our attention! She rounded up her stuff at the house and checked into the ER with a note from the surgeon to be admitted.
 
Point of information: whether or not the hospital recognized her insurance was a moot point because going in through the ER means they have to accept it. I think this is universal, but not sure.
 
The initial ER experience could have been faster, but compared to my other ER experiences, it was lighting quick. In an hour she was in an examining room with doctors looking after her. Six hours after showing up, she had an IV in her arm pumping antibiotics in and a couple hours later was in a private room that rivaled any motel room, complete with a view of the city.
 
Initially, they were going to try to go in microscopically and drain the abscess, but found they couldn’t. So, as this is being written, they are hoping to avoid surgery by killing the infection in the abscess with very high-octane antibiotics. We’ll know in a couple of days. If that fails, they go in and physically remove it.
 
So, what we have here is a fast moving tale in which a number of different entities (imaging facility, doctor’s assistant, doctor’s office, surgeon’s office, ER, hospital), although covered up with other patients found a way to expedite the process to avoid serious consequences. I doubt seriously if this could have been done in any other country in the world.
 
The system has its definite flaws, but is it so bad that it needs to be totally reorganized just to bring in 15% of the people who don’t have insurance? Is it necessary that we saddle the entire country with massive debt and totally disrupt a working system to cure something that is really not that terrible? It’s analogous to Marlene’s situation: knowing she had a belly ache should they have blindly cut her open to see what’s wrong, or should they have tested and probed to determine the exact physical flaw and then treat it with the least invasive method possible, resorting to surgery only if absolutely necessary?
 
Obamacare is whacking open the patient and tossing organs left and right while trying to cure a pulled muscle. It is overkill of the highest order that has lethal potential for the patient.
 
November is going to be the Nation’s last chance to come to its senses before we’re steamrolled by the massive debt and the huge deterioration of medical services most professional predict. This is all reversible. We’re at a lot of different crossroads this year and I just witnessed what we’ll have if we make the right choices. I shudder to think how my week would have been under a different medical system. God bless America!!
 
PS
As I was writing this, Marlene called and said they’re probably going to release her tomorrow so surgery appears to be off the table. WE’RE SO DAMN LUCKY TO BE LIVING IN THIS COUNTRY!!  All of us.

10 July 10 - Reunions, Wrinkles and Polkas
 
I just returned from 1960. Not the decade. The year. And a majority of the cast that populated my personal 1960 was in attendance: I was at my 50th high school reunion, which, as concepts go, is something of a head wrecker to even think about. However, I’m pleased to say that the Class of 1960 is, to a large extent, still kickin’ butt and takin’ names.
 
btw - I’m sorry about the length of this one. Some things just take time in the telling.
 
First, it’s important to understand that 1960 is not part of the ‘60’s as you think of the ‘60’s. In fact, the 1950’s didn’t actually end until about 1963-64. It took Viet Nam, Elvis getting fat and the Beatles to end the ‘50’s and start the decade that became known as the‘60’s.
 
The Class of 1960 was born in an odd little wedge of time. We were too early to be bomb babies or baby boomers, but too late to be part of the ‘40’s. And later on we were too old to be hippies because the ‘fifties infused us with lots of Mid-West commonsense and, if you had too much commonsense, chances are you wouldn’t go the tie-dye route. By1965 we were 23 years old, so most of us just danced around the edges of the ‘60’s culture, taking what we wanted from it without being absorbed by it.
 
Our music was also born in an odd, but wildly interesting, time. When we were originally learning to dance, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman and their peers were still very much in evidence and our early sock hops (we were actually jitter-bugging in our socks with sawdust on the gym floor) featured an esoteric combination of polkas, big band and a little country. Then, just as we were going into high school, Bill Haley and Elvis rolled over us like lighting bolts and we became active participants in the birth of rock and roll. The net result of being teenagers in the ‘50’s and coming of age in the ‘60’s was that we had a grandstand seat for watching the world change before our very eyes. It was a really exciting time.
 
Of course, the world wasn’t the only thing changing. Whether we wanted to or not, we were changing too. So, fifty years after the fact probably the biggest concern, when walking into a reunion of any kind, is not recognizing someone we knew well in high school, which would make us feel like idiots. No…cancel that. Although we try to hide it, the biggest concern is having someone we knew well, not recognize us.
 
Half a century is a helluva long time and the person I see in the mirror these days is a dried-apple caricature of the person I see in my yearbook. But, what can you do about it? Absolutely nothing. It is what it is.
 
Those were my thoughts as I stepped through the door and into the crowd but something happened immediately that changed my mindset. The face of our Norwegian exchange student, Tove, leapt out of the crowd at me and I called out to her. At the same time, she blurted my name. Instant recognition on both sides. And at that moment I realized that, if you looked into their eyes, you instinctively knew everyone in the room, although a few totally fooled you. Who ever thought Dick Zavodny would get that tall?
 
The curse of high school reunions, for the first few, anyway, is that too many worry about how they’ve aged, how their life stacks up against everyone else’s, and how to look and sound better than they really are, which results in a lot of bellies being sucked in. By the time you hit the 50th, however, no one really gives a damn about any of that.
 
At a 50th reunion we are all travel-worn souls who don’t have to explain where we came from or who we are. Everyone in the room knows everyone else’s story. We remember who lived in what house, what their parents did and whom we dated. We understand the myriad of long-ago factors that combined to form the soil in which we all took root. And because we don’t have to explain ourselves, such a reunion gets very comfortable, very quickly. Which is really nice.
 
I suppose the size of our class had a lot to do with how quickly the reunion comfort zone developed. We graduated 68 people. We’ve lost 13 and, of the remaining 55, no less than 39 or so showed up. That’s a huge percentage of the surviving class but it’s also a small enough group of people that no matter where you used to fit in the kaleidoscope of high school society, you knew everyone else. And, when the passing years have hammered the old high school social system flat, we find that we’ve all arrived at the same place at the same time and what went before melts away leaving nothing but friendship.
 
I could write thousands of words about what happened during those two evenings, but they would have meaning to no one but the members of the Seward High School Class of 1960. Still, everyone reading this will eventually attend high school reunions of their own, so they can, or will, identify with this. However, if there is one word of advice that I can give to anyone who is thinking about NOT attending one of their own high school reunions, it is “go.” Don’t blow it off. Go back and revisit your roots. It’s more important to you than you know.
 
It’s an old saying, but the best way to know where we’re going is to understand where we’ve been. And there’s nothing like having those gathered around you who were there at the beginning to put a renewed perspective on what made you who, and what, you are.

Random Nebraska Thoughts

While traveling around with my old high school friends, Dean and Carol Hillhouse, Marlene and I had several epiphanies.
             We Found We Really Love Nebraska. Physically, emotionally and philosophically it has an interesting, clean, unpretentious way about it. And we love the people. Too bad the Nebraska winters can be so fierce.
             The State Capital Building is Awesome! Finished in 1934, it is a stately, sometimes-Greco, sometimes-byzantine structure that will catch people who have never been to Nebraska flatfooted with its grandeur.  See Capital!
             The State Constitution Limits Debt. It prohibits state-held debt in excess of $100,000 (that’s not a typo—a hundred grand) although there’s a mechanism that permits the issuance of $10mm in bonds (not held by the state) for infrastructure construction. A state government with very little debt! What a concept!
             We Need a Week to Explore. People gloss over Nebraska not realizing how much happened (and is happening) there.
             A Financially Solid State. The current state unemployment is 4.9% and my old hometown is around 3%. Still, you see A LOT of empty retail buildings everywhere. No place is safe from this economy.
             Some One is Actually Reading This! It was a shock to find that my kid sister, Trish, in Seward and her daughters often read this blog. Also, a couple of folks at the reunion read it. Crap! I’ve assumed I could say anything I wanted about them and they’d never know. Oh, well.
             Polkas and Beer. Why is it that the majority of the world’s songs are about love but polkas celebrate beer?
             Marlene Discovered Polkas. Dick Zavodny and his accordion had her three-stepping around the room having a grand old time. Dick has been a polka superstar for decades and I’d suggest you Google him for his many U-tube performances.
 
I fully realize that none of this is Earth-shaking, but I thought I’d share it. Also, too much of the weekend, and life, in general, is spent thinking about the past and age. It has made me begin thinking more about “today” and dig in on projects I want to get finished. First, the roadster will be running before fall, second, the next novel will be half done by Christmas, third, the artillery piece will move to a front burner by next year. You have to admit that sounds good in theory.

27 June 10 - Running Away Is Good For You
 
Alright, the world finally got to me. Between the idiocy involved with every aspect of government, immigration, the economy, the high price of .380 ammo and having to work so hard to stay below 178 pounds, I decided the best course was to simply give up and run away. To go find a world untouched by the BS of what we laughingly call civilization. So, I tossed some carrots and a six-pack of diet Dr. Pepper in the cooler and pointed the Maxima west. I made it as far as the Fairplex in Pomona, CA and, wouldn’t you know it, the LA Roadster show was in progress. Who knew?  I’d finally made the right decision for a change. My brain is still thanking me.
 
I have found myself getting entirely too serious lately. This is probably because the entire world seems to be coming overly serious. It’s really hard to get through a day without some kind of new “Did you know what they want to do, what they did, what they are doing” revelation about the world around us. This is absolutely driving me nuts and I don’t think it’s doing my health, or that of the world community, any good. Isn’t there somewhere that it’s okay to lay down the seemingly requisite burden of paranoia for just a little while and have some pure fun?
 
I, of course, know that there are lots of little oasis’s of mechanical joy that seem as if they are either unaware that the world is going to hell or flat don’t give a sh*t. At least for the time being. One of those places is the LA Roadster show.
 
I know I’ve talked about the LA Roadster show before but to recap: it is a father’s day event that has been going on for over 60 years. It started out as a place where the California hotrod faithful, meaning those who build and drive open top hotrods, would gather. Nothing else is allowed in the show area.  But time has morphed that small meeting into an orgy of mechanical treasure hunting and automotive creativity (and partial insanity) that covers a gigantic, impossible-to-cover-in-a-day extravaganza where the outside world is the only participant NOT allowed through the gates. Thank, God!
 
The original participants, the spit and polished (they won’t allow flat paint or primer in the main exhibit area) roadsters, now occupy a smallish corner of the show. Maybe two blocks square. And I spend a surprisingly small amount of time there, even though that’s what I’m building (and have been building for 53 years this summer) because it’s only the occasional car that shows me anything new. The swap meet (a trivializing title if there ever was one) on the other hand is a treasure hunting ground of the highest possible order. You absolutely never know what you’ll find in the next “exhibit”, which is usually just a short stretch of asphalt covered with something that may be automotive, may be not, spread out over it.
 
The non-roadsters and those lacking the required spit and polish (read that as having “character”) comprise a show all their own that dwarfs the official show.
 
The entire event covers an area that has to be three-quarters of a mile square.
 
I don’t go looking for car stuff, although I did give-in and violate my old-stuff-only-for-my-roadster dictum and bought a horn for the roadster that was new because I haven’t been able to find a working old one. However, in my own defense, I had the vendor, who had obviously had his outdoor display at a lot of carshows unbolt and sell me his demonstrator horn because it had a little rust on it.
 
As I wandered around the swap meet, I could feel the paranoia, the concern, the overt planning for, as the new shorthand terms it, the SHTF time (sh*t hits the fan…it’s sad when we have shorthand for something like that) leave my thoughts as they were replaced by pleasant ones.  So, the carshow therapy had worked.
 
There are so many events that can do more good for you than a years worth of psychotherapy: any major cowboy action shoot (Google SASS to find them), Oshkosh, Sturgis, Knob Creek (machine gun shoot), and on and on. Just Google what ever you’re into: put the interest and the state after it, “Civil War Reenactors Ohio”  and you’ll find a gold mine of psychological oasis’s where you can go hide from the world for a day.
 
Hey, it’s cheaper than going to the shrink and a helluva lot more fun. Bring walking shoes and sun block.
 
Click Here to see what I DIDN’T buy.  
 

20 June 10 - The Final Hug
 
Today is Father’s Day and one of the first thoughts to hit my mind after waking up (right behind having to pee) was that I didn’t hug my father until I was 47 years old. Then I thought about my own kids, both grown and both huggers, and I marveled at the difference between our relationship and what I had with my own dad. And I’m certain what I perceive as a generational difference applies to far more than just my own family.
 
My dad was from a generation that loved and cherished their offspring in an intense, but very quiet, sort of way. However, most of them didn’t, or couldn’t, show that affection.
 
My experience may, or may not, have typical because my father was just a little older than most, so I’m not really a bomb baby, unless the bombs you’re talking about fell on Pearl Harbor, not Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Still, as I looked around at those whose fathers were WWII vets, I don’t remember ever seeing them greet or say good-by with a hug. I didn’t think anything about it at the time because that’s just the way things were. It wasn’t until I had kids of my own that I started thinking about it.
 
When I had young kids I absolutely loved it when they’d crawl up into my lap for the sole purpose of wrapping their arms around my neck and squeezing as hard as they could. As a young father, I couldn’t imagine life without hugs. Lots of them.
 
At some point, as I was drifting into my forties and my kids were going into their teens, there was a short period of time when I sensed a reluctance on their part to give the not-quite-old-guy a hug. Fortunately, that period passed quickly and we were back to hugging, but not before I had time to think about it: what if my kids got too old for hugging? How would I handle that? Then, I thought about my dad and how long it had been since we had hugged.
 
I hadn’t hugged dad for several decades because he gave out a vibe that made me feel as if that wasn’t the kind of thing grown men did. In typical Midwestern fashion, that thought had never been verbalized, but the vibe was there nonetheless. I knew that if my kids ever stopped hugging me, I’d hate it. And as I thought about it,I instinctively knew that my dad must have felt the same way when we stopped hugging, but he didn’t know what to do about it. I, however, did know what to do.
 
The next time I saw my dad and he stuck his hand out, I bypassed it and went straight to a hug. The instant my arms went around him, his body felt as if I’d plugged him into a fence charger: stiff and uncertain with a barely-contained urge to break and run. After a few seconds, however, I felt him relax and a kind of warmth invade his seventy-something muscles. He was once again the father I’d known as a child, and it felt good. And for the rest of his life, a bear hug was our greeting and our parting.
 
The last time I hugged him, he was in a coma. And I like to think he felt it. And liked it. I did, and no, it didn’t feel as if I were saying good-by. It just felt like the natural thing to do at the time.
 
There will always be a final hug and none of us should ever forget that. So, if you’re a kid, regardless of your age, or, if you’re a father or grandfather, search the other out, if only by phone, and give them a hug. Both of you deserve it.  I only wish I could.
 

12 June 10 - Sidewalks, Paranoia and Preparedness
 
I’d never considered a sidewalk to be dangerous until just now: about fifteen minutes ago, during my morning walk, I fell off of mine. I don’t mean I stepped off. I mean my right foot missed the edge during my hellbent-for-election pace and I came down like a sack of cement on the pavement. In a heartbeat I found myself curled up in the grass next to a dried dog turd. Now what? Well, for one thing, in a matter of a few minutes I learned a lot about the national crisis, survivalist thinking, paranoia, priorities, the downside of the internet and stupidity.
 
First, understand that my sidewalk isn’t even an inch higher than the surrounding grass, so it was a weird combination of moves that somehow curled my left leg under me and dropped me incredibly hard. I was in total free fall with no resistance on my part. Fortunately the damage was minimal (a patch about the size of your hand cheese grated) and I hadn’t impacted any joints or boney places. Very lucky.
 
I lay there for about 30 seconds making sure none of my joints or backbone, all of which are made out of glass, were damaged and, during that 30 seconds reviewed how I’d gotten myself into that less-than-dignified position. Thus began a crash course in life planning.
 
First, how had I managed to fall off a sidewalk? What was I thinking? Well, for one thing, I was taking a drink while caught up in trying to sort out my thoughts about what I was going to talk about in this blog. This was not an easy task because lately my thoughts have been an all-consuming jumble of vague paranoia, a subtle fear of the future and a general uneasiness about where just about every facet of life is going. As I rolled onto my back in the grass (after first clearing the area for dog doo) and rested, I realized that A) I was worrying about too much stuff I couldn’t control B) whether the Administration is trying to destroy the US meant nothing in terms of my current situation C) you can’t eat ammo and I’m stock piling the wrong stuff D) much of my mental state of unrest was because of the Internet and E) sooner or later I was going to have to get up out of the grass, assess the damage and do something about it.
 
It was at this point that I found that one of my most closely held personal mantras, “Be Prepared” (I was an Eagle Scout, remember), had some holes in it.
 
First, the only bottle of hydrogen peroxide I could find was empty and I couldn’t find the Neosporin: it was 0545 and I hated to wake up Marlene but did anyway. The peroxide was in another bathroom and the Neosporin in her purse. And we had no gauze or tape. Just tons of Bandaids. “Damn,” I thought. “Here I am worried about feeding my family after the end of civilization as we know it and I’m not even prepared to take care of a skinned knee. I have enough guns and ammo to fend off an entire rifle company and don’t have one of the very basics of life covered. I'm worrying about the wrong stuff!”
 
Right there my priorities changed: I’d been caught up in the hyper-paranoid, civil-unrest-run-for-the-hills-with-as-many-guns-as-you-can syndrome, which is rampant amongst part of society (my part) and is fed daily by the Internet.

Inasmuch as an increasing amount of the so-called “information” being fed us by the Internet e.g. the one about the President refusing to support the Boy Scouts of America, is turning out to be bogus, or at least severely biased, we don’t know what we can trust. Also, some of that stuff is being planted by people in support of the President to make the other side look bad. The Internet is causing as much paranoid thought as it’s curing, so everything should be checked and double-checked. Better yet, ignore it.
 
Then there’s the question of preparedness, which, even though I preach it, I’m obviously not.
 
And then there’s the question of what you prepare for and I’ve thought about that a lot in terms of what is likely to happen and what we can do to prepare for it.
 
Are we likely to have a total breakdown where anarchy rules and we’re sitting on our rooftops with assault rifles protecting ourselves? Anything is possible, but I seriously doubt that one. Still, a little household protection is called for: a pump 12 gauge loaded with No. 2 buckshot, and a hand gun, is plenty for most.
 
Are we likely to experience service interruptions (water, power, etc.) whether from natural or manmade causes? Quite probably. Those can happen regardless of economics or world situations. Whether it’s caused by civil unrest, a hurricane, tornado, earthquake, floods, whatever, makes no difference. The way we prepare should be identical: water, food, shelter, protection in that order.
 
I’m fond of saying that the veneer of civilization is paper thin and very, very fragile. It takes nothing to disrupt the tipsy house of cards we’ve constructed: we’re so dependent on so many interlaced infrastructure factors (trucking being the main one, as that’s how our food supply travels, with electricity right behind it) that a minor hiccup caused for ANY reason could have major personal consequences AND THAT IS WORTH PREPARING FOR. That’s not paranoia. That’s commonsense.
 
The Mormons are right: be prepared to exist on your own for a year. Now I’m going to actively do something about that.
 
FYI, the best source for emergency survival goods and advice I’ve found so far, with the minimum amount of paranoia attached to it, is http://www.captaindaves.com/index.html. Their survival guide http://www.captaindaves.com/guide/ is an especially good outline for preparedness. I’m certain there are others and would welcome hearing about them.
 
 I refuse to turn into anything even remotely resembling a survivalist, but I AM going to do my best to increase my level of preparedness and decrease my level of paranoia. So, as I run across info that I think makes sense in regards to preparing (canned goods shelf life, etc.), I’ll pass it along.
 
And, no, I’m not going to put guardrails on my sidewalk. But, I am going to watch where I’m going. Both while walking and in life in general.  
 

5 June 10 - Exactly who are we? 
 
 You know what? As much as I preach about America and wear my pride in our country on my sleeve, I should have my butt kicked for doing such a lousy job of passing that down to my kids. I, we, have let America down by letting our kids down.
 
At the end of this mess of words you’ll find a link to a U-tube presentation by news commentator Dennis Prager in a Q & A session at the University of Denver. I’m only going to rant for a short while. When I’m done, sit down and watch this video. Yes, it has a political message (without being waaay out there), yes, it has a get-out-and-vote theme imbedded, but mostly it is talking about how we view America and how badly we articulate or pass that view along. In the meantime, stay with me for a moment or two.
 
The underlying theme of Prager’s speech is that Americans, especially those who are proud of being American, don’t know how to explain their feelings/beliefs to others and so we have raised generations of kids who know their parents love their country but don’t know why. At first, I thought Prager was missing something. Then I realized he’s right. I’m the one who’s missing something. I’m the one with highly intelligent kids who don’t know what it means to be an American because I somehow neglected to pass that along. Because it was innate within me, I didn’t give it a thought. I must have assumed they’d pick it up on their own. But, I guess it doesn’t work that way.
 
This is another of those I-see-the-problem-but-don’t-have-an-answer things. As I’m sitting here, I have lots of random thoughts scurrying through my mind about what it means to be American but I can’t boil them down to a single theme. YOU try it! It isn’t easy to explain what it means to be American in a way that can be clearly understood by kids, liberals, foreigners and others who don’t “get” America. And America is definitely something you have to “get.” It’s more than a country. It’s a philosophy, a thought pattern and a complex culture that is the result of the many cultures it contains.
 
It is this lack of a clearly agreed upon image of ourselves that scares me the most. How can we determine our future, when we don’t even agree who we are or who we want to be? Far too many people today worry about “ME”, not “us.” What can the country do for “me” and how can “I” get the most for doing the least? And that is having what I fear are going to be far reaching effects. All of them bad.
 
To make things worse, newly arrived cultures don’t want to assimilate and become part of the whole. They want to transport a little part of their country into this one and let it live it’s own life, like a growth within a host organism. The net result of that kind of arrangement, whether physical or cultural, is that the host organism almost always gets sick. The most damning thing about the way we’re beginning to see America is that far too many people see no harm in putting their past country first and America second. Unfortunately, our government policies encourage that.
 
My take on cultures is that yes, their traditions and identities should be maintained, but they should be mentally “hyphenated” as has always been done: Italian-American, Japanese-American, etc. Too many cultures that are now coming in don’t “get” what it is that made the country they fought so hard to get into desirable and refuse to become part of the whole. And part of that is our fault for not having a clear understanding of what makes America what it is, which makes it impossible to translate that thought to others.
 
So, what is America?  Unfortunately, I’m still at a loss to articulate that clearly. It’s obviously different things to different people but I personally believe that one of the things that has made us a great nation is the ability to see our personal interests and goals within the framework of the greater good for the nation. And, among other things, the greater good for the Nation means protecting its original personality as set forth in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, not perverting or interpreting them to fit political/personal agendas.
 
In my view, these documents are NOT “living” documents to be continuously modified to fit the way society is developing, as many would have us believe. It’s actually just the other way around. For our country to continue to be the America we’ve always envisioned, society itself should strive to fit within the loose guidelines laid down by the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
 
Maybe that’s where I’ve fallen down, in regards to my kids. And where we’ve fallen down in passing down our legacy: as individuals, schools and a nation, we don’t reread the Constitution or Bill of Rights enough so they aren’t part of our everyday way of thinking. I suppose that’s not too surprising, considering that other guidelines, like the Ten Commandments and the Boy Scout Oath (which is a formalized form of the unwritten cowboy code I try to live by) have drifted far from the center of our consciousness.
 
Is there a fix? I doubt it, if nothing else because there’s no logical way to impress upon all the new arrivals and younger generations that believing in, and following, our founding documents is of critical importance to the continuance of the promise land they were seeking.
 
I guess our homework assignment for this week is to sit down and decide what makes America what it is. 25 words or less. Send them along and we’ll discuss them next week.
 
Class dismissed.
 
Here is Prager’s speech. It’s maybe five minutes long, but will get your attention. Guaranteed! This guy can really articulate complex ideas.
What Is America? ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNUc8nuo7HI)

6 June, 1944 - Don't forget what date it is. Give our boys, mostly now gone, the 60 seconds of silence they deserve.

31 May 10 - On Consideration and Dealing With Idiots

On 5/23/10 6:24 PM, "Frank" wrote:
 “I read that your plane has no mufflers. Have you given ANY consideration to the thousands on the ground who prefer peace and quiet? You get some enjoyment at the expense of many others suffering. Find a quieter less selfish life.
Frank"

Well, Frank. It’s not as if I took the muffler off. It was never certified with mufflers, nor does any Pitts Special have mufflers. However, in recognition of my noise foot print, I get as high as I can, as fast as I can and run at greatly reduced power, 100 feet over pattern altitude and fly some very peculiar, inefficient patterns to avoid noise sensitive areas.

And, as for someone making a remark like … “find a quieter, less selfish life”… I’d have to say the obvious....get a life, Frank. Or go back to your knitting or whatever skill it is you are working on at the moment. And stay off my website: it’s not meant for people like you.
bd

Then I had pangs of remorse: I’d done something I NEVER do and fired a smartass reply  at a reader.

Frank,
I owe you an apology as that’s the very first time in over 50 years of flying that I’ve let my temper get the best of me. I don’t know you, I don’t know what you do, and I don’t know what your connection to aviation may be. However, when someone “reads” that my airplane makes noise and busts my chops about it, it hit me wrong.
Sorry,
bd
 
“Budd, now watch your blood pressure! Just remember that just because the plane was built without mufflers, does not mean it has to be flown! Frank.”
 
Frank,
That’s a classic comment! And I’m certain you thought about it before you wrote it. Truly classic: just because it was built, doesn’t mean it has to be flown. Classic!
I’m curious. What were you doing on my website in the first place?
bd
 
“I go on soley to send you the message about selfish noisy planes. Frank”

So, there we have it: someone is on my case not because I flew low over their house and knocked their canary off its perch, but because they read somewhere that my airplane doesn’t have mufflers. So, never having even seen my airplane, they jumped on the internet and took me to task about my “…selfish, hobby.” Which, of course, isn’t a hobby but a career/passion/addiction.
 
I think what irritates me most about this is that he has a valid point. My airplane IS an irritant to many people. As far as that goes, just about everything many of us do is deemed social unacceptable by someone. And I don't know what to do about it.
 
I’ve written about this subject a number of times because I’m constantly running into folks like “Frank.” At some level I’m pissed and would like to tell them to screw off. But, I’m also conflicted. I really don’t like irritating people. I see myself as the good guy who is just doing his thing and bothering no one, which, of course, is BS. Everything every one of us does is pissing someone off, somewhere. It’s unavoidable.
 
Most of us try really hard to be considerate of others. That’s the way society gets along, but when I look around at the kinds of stuff that attracts a lot of us, I honestly don’t see how we’re going to keep from bugging those “other” folks. There’s a mile-high communication barrier between the two camps and it seems as if there will always be friction at the interface.
 
A lot of us are drawn to things that burn lots of gas, go fast, are loud, have tons of recoil, blow things up and generally challenge us to get better at what we do. Other parts of society are repulsed by the same things. However, I’m told that the challenge of getting good is one of the attractions of golf (and we all know how I feel about golf). So, I guess we could look at exploding watermelons at 1000 yards with a .300 Win Mag as golf with a little more testosterone involved. And NASCAR could be visualized as tennis with the volume turned past ten and ice tea/lemonade replaced by gallons of beer. Of course, periodically someone gets killed, which seldom happens in tennis. So, there’s that skin-in-the-game, testosterone thing again. It seems as if an unspoken attraction to risk also separates the two groups.
 
Probably the major difference between the two groups is that there are those who get out and actually “do” stuff and those who don’t, but seem driven to stand on the sidelines and criticize those who “do.” The result is that one group is constantly defending themselves against the other.  In fact, that pretty much characterizes many of our lives. We’re constantly defending ourselves against the Franks of the world and I see no possible way that the myriad points of conflict are ever going to be resolved. And most of us are getting tired of the entire process.
 
Okay, Frank, and all others of your mindset, since there is no logical solution to our conflicts, here’s the deal: we’re going to do our level best to be considerate and not make life worse for you and we ask only one thing: stay the hell out of our lives! And don’t expect us to become someone else just because something we do irritates you. The way to solve that is for you to either join with us—we’ll be happy to take you flying, or shooting, etc— or walk wide around us. Very wide. We’re running out of patience with you trying to tell us how to live our lives.
 
Washington, DC? You listen up too!

The Real Reason for Memorial Day
Before going out and cruising the local Memorial Day sales, take a look at the below and remember a) why we have the day off and b) why we have the freedoms we have. Those freedoms aren't free! A lot of young men bought them for us.

The Price of Freedom
 

23 May 10 - Racism (or something like it): in two acts
 
I really didn’t want to get into immigrationagain because it’s definitely NOT an enjoyable subject and I’ve been talking about it too much in the recent past. Unfortunately, the last couple of weeks some stuff has happened that is driving me nuts. Just bear with me because I have to vent before my head explodes!
 
Shake a fist in a man’s face and he has no choice but to respond in kind
The radical Hispanic movements, RAZA and others pushing ‘La Reconquista' are doing more widespread harm to Hispanic relations than they realize. They love standing in front of cameras and beating their chests and shaking their fists thinking they are moving their people ahead, but just the opposite is happening. These are but a few from MSN:  
 
Augustin Cebada, Brown Berets; "…  Go back to Plymouth Rock, Pilgrims!  Get out!  We are the future…  Leave like beaten rats.  You old white people.  It is your duty to die. Through love of having children, we are going to take over."
 
Professor Jose Angel Gutierrez, University of Texas; "We have an aging white America.  They are not makingbabies.  They are dying.  The explosion is in our population . . . I love it.  They are shitting in their pants with fear.  I love it."
 
Mario Obledo, California State Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under Governor Jerry Brown, awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton, "California is going to be a Hispanic state.  Anyone who doesn't like it should leave."
 
It is a given that numerically the Hispanic portion of the country is going to overtake the Anglo side in the not-too-distant future. And that’s not a bad thing. That’s just the way immigration (legal or otherwise) and birthrates work. But, the radicals should give some thought to what it is they are going to “take over.” And what that entails.
 
They migrated (or sneaked into) this country because it offered something much brighter than where they came from. Tony Blair once said “You can judge the quality of a country by whether people are trying to get into it, or out of it.” The Hispanics are going to become the majority in this country, but if the statistics we see concerning crime, school drop-out rates, teen age pregnancy are even close to being true, the country they inherit will not be the country that was their golden ideal when they moved here. By the time they are the majority, the country will begin to bear an alarming similarity to the one they left. There’s more to “taking over” a country than just making your women into baby factories.
 
I don’t have a single doubt that the long-established Hispanic community in this country agrees with me that the “nouveau immigrants” are going to have to clean up their act, as the rest of the Hispanic community did generations ago, and make education and career training their goals if they are going to succeed as the power base they expect to be. At this point, too many immigrants of all backgrounds, not just Hispanic, think just being here guarantees them welfare, medical coverage, etc., etc and they don’t understand that those services are the result of solid work, not entitlement, as the more radical amongst them (and the highly liberal politicians who support their immigration in exchange for their votes), would have them believe. The services to which they think they are entitled (and this doesn’t just apply to immigrants) is funded in only one way…by tax payers. And that means careers, businesses and hard work. I’ve seen too many interviews with those on welfare who don’t have the foggiest idea where welfare money comes from. They think it just “is.” They don’t understand how a government works or is funded.
 
If they want a future in this country AND they want this country to have a future, it will depend on them taking pride in themselves that goes beyond the color of their skin and their national heritage. They will need to mold themselves into useful citizens, first through education, then through the personal pride that comes from a job well done. Not from getting someone else to take care of them or pay their bills. And this is true for far more than just the immigrants. The future of the country depends on more people giving and fewer taking.
 
Calderon and Obama agree that we aren’t treating the illegals that cross our border fairly  (msnbc.com <http://msnbc.com/> news services, updated 11:41 a.m. CT, Wed., May 19, 2010)
 
 WASHINGTON - During a White House visit, Mexican President Felipe Calderon on Wednesday condemned Arizona's tough new immigration law, calling it discriminatory to Mexicans.

Calderon said the Arizona law criminalized migration and could encourage discrimination.

Now let me get this straight: The president of a country that has its population flooding across another nation’s borders illegally is condemning a state in that nation for making it illegal. WHO THE HELL DOES HE THINK HE IS, TELLING ANOTHER COUNTRY HOW TO HANDLE ITS TRESPASSERS? Mexico has some of the toughest immigration laws in the world and he DARES to tell us we’re being too tough on illegal immigrants?  Give me a frigging break!  

"We can do so if we create a safer border, a border that will unite us instead of dividing us, uniting our people," Calderon said. "We can do so with a community that will promote a dignified life in an orderly way for both our countries."
 
Borders aren’t meant to unite people, dip sh*t!  That’s why they’re called borders! Your people are your people, our people are our people. If someone wants to immigrate here, go through channels and we’ll welcome them. Otherwise you respect our border and we’ll respect yours.

Obama also stepped up his criticism of Arizona's controversial immigration law Wednesday, calling it "misdirected" and warning that it has the potential to be applied in a discriminatory fashion. He has Attorney General, Eric Holder investigating AZ to see if they can be sued or the law over turned. Holder admitted in Congressional Hearings, that he hadn’t yet read the ten-page law when he turned his Justice Department dogs loose on AZ.
 
WHO DOES THE PRESIDENT THINK HE IS TELLING A STATE THEY CAN’T IMPLEMENT THE SAME LAW THAT ALREADY EXISTS AS A NATIONAL REGULATION?
 
AND WHERE DOES HE GET OFF AGREEING WITH A FOREIGN LEADER THAT YES, INDEED, WE’RE NOT TREATING HIS ILLEGAL TRESPASSERS FAIRLY. BULLSH*T!!!
 
The latest is that it appears the government may refuse to process illegals that AZ turns over to them. In other words, the US government isn’t going to support it’s own laws, which in this case, is another way of saying they aren’t going to protect their own country’s sovereignty, as represented by its borders. If they do that, then there is almost no reason to have, or enforce, borders and they have just ceded AZ, CA and parts of TX to Mexico by default.
 
THIS REALLY PISSES ME OFF!!

Okay. I’ve ranted enough. Sorry. I feel better. But I’m still wildly frustrated.

15 May 10 - Tattoos, Belly Buttons and Dirty Old Men
 
I was getting gas at a 7/11 and a sweet young thing skipped out of the food mart. She had about two feet of skin showing between her hip huggers and her tightly squashed, falling-out-of-her-halter, boobs. Then the tramp stamp flowing up out of her butt crack caught my eye. A well-done tat, it looked almost EXACTLY like the “Kilroy Was Here” drawing from WWII: a face with a big nose peeking over the edge of her jeans. She caught me eyeballing it and, in a highly indignant voice, said, “Well, dirty old man…you got your eyes full yet?”
 
For a fraction of a second, I was embarrassed, then asked myself why should I be embarrassed, and said, “Young lady, you didn’t get that tattoo, the belly button ring or dress like that hoping people wouldn’t notice you. You wanted people to look. So I looked. And, by the way, there’s a reason they’re called a ‘tramp stamp’.” She huffed, got into her car and squealed away.
 
First, I wasn’t sure which bothered me the most, the “dirty” part of her comment or the “old” part. But I decided what I really objected to is the obvious contradiction of women not wanting to be seen or treated as sex objects and then working so hard to dangle bait out there by purposely acting, dressing and smelling sexy. And the world encourages that in every possible way. Not a bad thing, but…
 
Think about it: when was the last time you saw a commercial about ANYTHING that had a “normal” looking female in it? Or guy, for that matter. If you can believe advertising, every single woman in the world is 26 years old, a perfect 36, weighs 118, smashingly beautiful and doesn’t have a wrinkle on her body. Ditto for the guys.
 
And then think about the enormous industry that is aimed at A) losing weight B) building the perfect body C) finding the right make-up/war paint to make them look perfect (sort of an Earl Scheib approach to beauty, Bondo and all). The name of the game appears to be making yourself sensual and seductive (some of us are already, but that’s another story) so the other sex will sniff you out of a crowd and make you theirs. Of course, answer that siren call just one time and make a pass, crowd or not, and you’ll find yourself standing in front of a judge for A) sexual harassment B) indecent behavior C) behavior unbecoming a gray dog. Which brings up another point, I may have missed somewhere along the line.
 
Why is it dirty for a gray dog to look but, when a young buck does, it’s socially acceptable and expected. This is age discrimination, you know. Or is it age disappointment? I’m not sure which.
 
One other observation: the kinds of ads we see now, from Victoria’s Secret (which is no damn secret by the way), to auto-erection pills, to miles and miles of tight tummies and belly buttons are the kinds of images we used to find on the back of the magazine rack in the bus depot. And they were always in tightly sealed plastic bags. While paying the cashier, it was common to mumble something about buying it for your older brother. So, again, we’re dangling it out there on a daily basis, but women still get pissed if we comment on it. They work-out really hard, find just the right, tight fitting blouse/sweater and we say, “Hey, sweety, boobs are looking great today!”  Yeah, right! Or, “Tusche exercises are really workin’, girl!” That would keep your attorney busy.
 
About the safest comment we can make in any situation involving any of these subjects is, “Have you lost some weight? Changed your hair?”  Let them know we noticed but don’t let them know what we noticed. And, most guys can’t say even that to a woman/girl, when their wife is around. That’s a suicidal move if there ever was one. Compliments of any kind are meant to stay within the well-defined boundaries of your marriage. Fortunately, Marlene is tolerant of my wise cracks like that. I hope.
 
I can be absolutely certain that every single male reading this appreciates the female form and knows what I’m talking about. The reason I can make that statement and know I’m correct is because, if you’re reading this, you’re not dead. And if you don’t appreciate beauty, then you’re dead and probably not reading this.
 
Dirty Gray Dogs Unite! 

8 May 10 - The Anniversary Burger: you really CAN go home again!
 
I’m not sure the first time I saw Tommy’s Burger, on the corner of Beverly and Rampart in Los Angeles. I’m guessing 1964. Maybe ’65. But I’m certain it was probably three in the morning and I was in the company of other, longhaired, commie pinko, guitar players (oops, forgot—commie, pinko “fag.” That was popular at the time too.). We’d been up playing somewhere late and someone said, “Come on. I’m going to buy you the best burger in the world.” And he did. And he was right.
 
Last week I once again proved that if you want the world’s best cheese burger, you only have to drop off the Alvarado Exit on LA’s Ventura Freeway, turn west on Beverly and stop when you hit the crowd that’s standing on the corner.
 
First, let’s talk about why I’m talking about burgers in the first place. To me, a really good cheeseburger is God’s gift to mankind (we’re excluding Mickey D’s from this). Or at least a blessing for your stomach. It’s as if he presented us with the C-burger to make up for tossing us out of the Garden of Eden. Of course, the Garden didn’t have burgers, so it’s just as well we got evicted.

This just looks like another burger but it definitely isn't! I wouldn't drive 793 miles for just any cheeseburger

Describing the perfect burger isn’t easy. In fact, it’s very much open to personal opinion but Tommy’s hit me right between the eyes the very first time I had one and I’ve gone to great lengths since to get them. In fact, last week we drove 793 miles round trip to get one. But, then, it was a very special event for me so that kind of effort was to be expected.
 
A year ago March, when I decided to overhaul my body, my mind and my life, burgers were put on the verboten list. This should show anyone who knows me how damn serious I was about losing weight and getting in shape. The only thing more serious than me giving up cheeseburgers would be giving up air.  Oddly enough, however, it wasn’t hard. I had this image of who I wanted to be and burgers were going to keep me from matching that image. So, they just disappeared from my life.
 
Even as I started changing my habits, I knew I wasn’t going to go burgerless for the rest of my life. I mean, let’s get real about this! In fact, at the time, I was already planning on how I was going to celebrate getting back on the burger wagon. For a day or two, I thought about the various burger stands in Phoenix where I’d get my anniversary burger, which, with 3.7 mm people certainly had lots heart-attack-on-a-bun emporiums. Some of them pretty good. Which would I chose? I didn’t know, but I thought about it a lot.
 
The answer to the lingering question came one morning when the alarm clock went off at 0500. I automatically pivoted up to sit on the edge of the bed, and, as my feet hit the floor, I heard myself say out loud, “Tommys Burger.” My subconscious had kicked in and made the decision for me. My celebration burger would be a T-burger. How obvious!
 
It should be pointed out that in my mind, even though Tommy Koulax expanded his franchise and opened burger joints all over LA and parts of the west, only one of those counts and that’s the original that he opened on Beverly and Rampart in 1946. It’s a tiny, open-air stand perched on the corner with parking on two sides and reeks of character. And is ALWAYS surrounded by people who feel the same way I do about burgers. How successful is that stand? He eventually bought three of the four corners of the intersection for parking and remote stands, although when we went back, I saw he had sold one corner to a Taco Bell and probably made a ton of money.
 
When I first became addicted to T-burgers, the main character behind the chest-high bar may have been Tommy, I don’t know, but he had to be the inspiration for Sienfeld’s “Soup Nazi.”
 
“Wha ‘chu want? Come on, you’re wastin’ my time! Come on, come on! Okay, Get outta line, you’re outta here, NEXT!”  He was rude, crude and more than once I hesitated too long and got ejected. It was irritating and hilarious at the same time.

The picture of a happy camper. The original Tommy's hasn't changed one bit in the 45 years since I first became a Tommy Addict

What’s in a Tommys Burger? I’m not sure, but lots of good meat, onions, chili and something that makes the taste unique enough to draw people like me back again and again.
 
Here’s a serious request that I want my friends and family to honor: when I finally check out, I want someone to contact Tommys and have burgers FedExed in for the memorial service. That will have a two fold effect: first, it’ll guarantee someone actually has a memorial just so they can taste a T-burger and second, it’ll mean I’ve actually passed along something worthwhile: a taste of the best burger on the planet.
 
PS. Don’t leave me out: toss a double T-burger (heavy on the chili) in with me when I’m being cremated, so I’m satisfied for an eternity.
 

1 May 10 - Immigration Solution: a major glitch

Okay, so now that half the nation thinks AZ has storm troopers running around cramming cattle cars full of Hispanics, what have we accomplished in the past couple of weeks other than bringing out all the high-end nut cases and giving the media lots of phony fodder (they love to twist the content of the new law)?  Well, for one thing, we have the average guy examining how he actually feels a about the immigration issue AND we have a few folks putting a pencil to the problem in a way that I, for one, hadn’t given enough thought to.
 
Here are some simple numbers that that bear some examining. They are based on information that came from the US Strategic Perspective Institute. At the moment, there are an estimated 13 million illegals in the country. Of that number 570,000 are in AZ at any given time (a lot are just passing through). That’s about 13% of the total population. That’s a formidable number. Those of us who are in favor of law and order say they’re illegal and should be rounded up and shipped out. That’s what we say. Now, let’s get practical about it. Let’s say we successfully routed out every single one of them and had them corralled. Now what?
 
To transport 570,000 customers to the border, at 30 passengers per bus, would take 19,000 bus loads. Let’s say it’s four hours round trip to the border: that would be 76,000 man hours just driving them south. For a twenty man driving team working five days a week, that would be 95 work weeks or just short of two years just to drive them to the border. At twenty bucks a driving hour that’s $1.5 mm, which isn’t too bad until you figure that’s just the driving labor. What about processing the paperwork? What about housing them until transported, and no, Sheriff Joe’s concertina wire enclosures won’t work. You’d have to have one the size of Rhode Island.
 
Even if it was spread out over many months and you weren’t dealing with more than 10,000 at a time, think of the enormous infrastructure in the way of judges, courtrooms, guards, housing, etc., etc. Now, look at the other 12.5mm spread around the rest of the country. Even if the Congress suddenly said, “you all have to leave and we’re going to take you to the border” and every single illegal in the country went along with it, we simply couldn’t do it. The resources and time required would be out of the question. .
 
The bottom line is that there’s no practical way, regardless of how we feel, to get rid of the illegals, even if we have made it a crime to be illegal (there’s that contradiction again). We can’t do it at the national level and we can’t do it at the state level.
 
So, what’s the next possible solution?
 

At least some folks have a sense of humor. And I can see why many would be apprehensive about the new rule until we see how it works

Anything that we do ABSOLUTELY CANNOT include any form of instant citizenship through amnesty. That spits on the laws of this country and in the face of the millions of immigrants who came in legally and went through the system.
 
Okay, so let’s say we make them all go through the green cards application process then on to citizenship. The upside to that is that we bring them out of the shadows and they start paying their own support in the form of taxes and social security. But, the numbers work against us there too. The manpower alone that it would take to process that many people through the system would be massive. Huge!
 
How about we do this: instead of forming a new department staffed with government employees, why don’t we let the illegals process themselves? As an illegal is snagged for one reason or another, we give them a choice: deportation or training and working for the Immigrant Processing Corps (IPC) AND WE BUILD A PROCESSING SYSTEM THAT IS STAFFED ENTIRELY BY THE SAME PEOPLE WE’RE TRYING TO DEPORT. By paying them minimum wage, we have an economical work force that can solve a problem that they are causing. Plus, this could be an outside contractor who is paid by the head, with some sort of quality oversight, so the profit motive would motivate him to be efficient.
 
I’m not smart enough to work out the finer points of the system required but it seems to me, it would included something like this:
 
1. Anyone who wants to stay has to apply for a green card and actively work towards citizenship.
2. The application would generate an ID card that is linked to their progress in the application process and would function as a work visa.
3.  The ID number would also function as a social security number so they can pay taxes but they would accrue no benefits.
4. The application process includes several required actions:
 a.Attend citizenship classes
b.English proficiency classes must be attended or proficiency proven.
c. Attend traffic/driving school.
5. If any of the application process items are skipped, such as missing classes, the applicant would be judged a non-valid immigrant and tossed out.
6. Anyone caught committing a minor crime who is in the application system or is an illegal is deported.
 
I don’t pretend that I can come up with a workable system. It’s too complex for me, but I love the idea of using those immigrants that are English-capable as the labor to man the system.
 
The bottom line is that since we can’t physically ship them out, we have to come up with a way of A) making it undesirable for them to stay here (making it a national crime to employ a known illegal is good for starters, and B) design a green card system that moves faster and starts putting them in a position to pay their own way via taxes faster. This, however, does not mean cutting corners on citizenship. What worked for our fathers, should work for them. But we have to do it in a way that doesn’t break our piggy bank. The rest of the tax payers shouldn’t have to pay the freight to give those 13 million illegals a better life.
 
Oh, yeah, we absolutely have to get the fence up and the military to guard our borders. The violence is starting to come across with the immigrants and has to be stopped. I don’t know what Washington can possibly be thinking. Do they think the border will heal itself? The longer we wait, the worse the illegal immigrant problem becomes.
 
A real problem to be worked out is handling medical requirements of those in the country. We’re just not the kind of people to turn someone away who needs help. At the same time, however, we’re good Samaritaning ourselves into the poor house. That’s the problem, but I don’t know the solution.
 
All of this is waaaaay over my head, but there has to be some way we can use illegal labor to help solve the illegal problem. I came up with the basic idea. Now, someone else has to make it work. Sorry.

24 April 10 - Arizona: Unintentional Maverick

I had an entirely different blog written for today (Belly Buttons, Tattoos and Dirty old Men). It was full of the kind of BS philosophy you expect on this web page. Then I saw a headline: AZ Gov Signs Immigration Bill: Obama Goes Ballistic. And I didn’t feel so philosophical any more.
 
Let’s review what has happened here in AZ in the last few weeks and what is likely to happen in coming weeks:
New Legislative Resolution: Under the Tenth and Fourteenth Amendments, the Federal government shall not impose its will on the state past what is spelled out in the Constitution.
New Law: Feds have no jurisdiction over firearms made and kept in Arizona
New Law: Permits are no longer required to carry firearm concealed.
New Law: It is a crime for a company to knowingly employ an illegal alien.
New Law: Brandishment spelled out and weapon can be displayed any time a reasonable individual fears for their life or bodily harm
New Law: As of today, it is a crime under state law to be an illegal immigrant
New Law Now in the Legislature: For a presidential candidate to be put on the Arizona ballot he must present a standard, approved birth certificate as proof of citizenship.
Old Law: Castle Law spelled out and applies everywhere and not just in the home, plus it doesn’t require the person threatened to run away before applying lethal force and the simple presence of an uninvited individual on property is enough to be deemed threatening.
 
There’s some pretty heady stuff here and over the past couple of nights Arizona has been front and center on TV with both its now-signed-into-law Illegal Immigration law and the pending Presidential birth certificate goody. In both cases, the media is making the state out to be the home of idiots, or as one CNN commentator said, “Lots of stupid people,” all of which is making me, for one, uncomfortable and just a little pissed off.
 
On the one hand, I agree with everything the governor has signed, if nothing else, because I think the federal government has over stepped its bounds in so many areas that the states absolutely have to start putting their collective foot down. On the other hand, I can “sorta” see why those outside of the state get so rattled when we do things like make being in the US illegally a state crime. We’ve made being illegal illegal. Although, when I say it that way, it makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?
 
The critics say that making it a state crime to be an illegal alien will legalize racial profiling and every Hispanic-appearing individual, anyone wearing a turban, any woman with her face covered can be stopped and their citizenship papers demanded. In that light, it smells a little like Nazi Germany, a comparison the opposition loves to make. More important, and something I think has to be worked out, is that it puts yet another layer of regulations on our citizens, legal or other wise. And I’m basically against regulations, although I am definitely in favor of supporting the letter of the law. And an illegal alien, is an illegal presence that clearly breaks the law.
 
There are still some very serious practical issues that have to be worked out concerning the application of this law, but its intent is good, the governor has said she won’t tolerate racial profiling, and I’m certain we can work it out.
 
All of this having been said, I want to once again make something absolutely clear about Arizona: in the 18 years I’ve been here I’ve not once heard a racial slur about a Hispanic. Not once! And I’ve not once sensed any kind of local animosity towards them. That’s because Arizona has a hugely diverse population: we have Hispanics, many of flavors of Native Americans (reportedly close to half of the Native Americans in the US live in AZ) and even a few Yankees (we didn’t close our northern borders quickly enough). And I’m not aware of anyone who differentiates between a Hispanic and any other state citizen. That’s because we’re all Zonies and a lot of the State’s cultural flavor comes from the diversity, most of it Hispanic.
 
I say the above to make certain it’s understood that we’re definitely not anti-immigration. But we’re violently opposed to illegal immigration. We have hundreds of miles of border with Mexico, most of it very rural desert populated almost entirely by ranchers, one of whom was recently murdered. Illegal immigration is a reality here. It’s not a headline in a newspaper or Geraldo shaking his head and saying “Oh, what a shame.” It’s a very real deal here.
 
Phoenix also has the second highest kidnapping rate in the world (Mexico City is first). This is because the drug cartels are only two hours away and do business up here too. The good news, however, is that not one of those kidnappings has happened outside of the drug community. The instant they cross over into the rest of the population, you can count on Sheriff Joe rolling over them like a Marine division. It’s a powder keg being fed by illegal drugs and illegal immigration where people are smuggled and traded just like drugs and we’re all holding our breath waiting to see when, or if, it’ll all boil over.
 
And just to put this all in perspective: Phoenix is the fifth largest city in the US, not the bumpkinburg-in-the-sun a lot of people think it is.
 
To those politicians and media types who love to judge us, they need to realize this is not inside the Beltway and the area is unlike like anything they’ve known. It’s not nice and cozy and easy to understand. And much of the population still harkens back to old time western ideals of what is right and what is wrong, what is legal and what isn’t. Equally as important, we have a very clear-cut idea of who has a right to tell us what to do and who doesn’t. We don’t have the shades of gray most big urban areas do. We’re much more black and white.
 
Given the amount of media hoopla over what’s going on down here, it’s looking as if AZ may unintentionally take over the role of “most maverick state” that has been held by Montana for years. Maybe we should think about incorporating a symbol into our flag that is a fist with the middle finger raised.   Maybe then the federal government would get the message. :-)

 

17 April 10 - A Dying Breed: Mechanical Fun Stuff

It was at the spring Good Guys car meet and I wished I had a camera to capture the moment because it said so much about where certain segments of society are headed. A severely chopped ’50 Merc custom slowed in the grass, its driver reaching out and grinning like crazy as he tightly grasped the outstretched hand of the driver of the fenderless ’32 Ford highboy roadster headed towards him. Two good friends excitedly greeting one another. And both were nearly eighty years old! Increasingly, gray is the dominant color of narrow niche interests.
 
When I say “narrow niche” I’m including all of those usually mechanically-based interests that include model airplanes, guns, hotrods, antique cars, tractors, airplanes in general, and the list goes on and on. If it is an interest that is mechanical in nature and appeals only to a small segment of society, chances are it is in the process of “graying out.” The participants are dying and taking the interest with them. So, where are the youngsters?
 
It is the rare individual who gets into guns or airplanes or hotrods or —you name the interest—late in life. Our interests generally start early and stay with us until we suddenly realize that we are all gray dogs. At the same time, if we look outside our own group, it’s easy to see that our activities are getting gray because kids today just don’t have the same interests. Or any interests at all.
 
I’m not in any position to judge kids in general because ours (two hers, two mine) are thirty years old or older. Still, in looking at our kids’ wide circle of friends, I’d say that they are very representative of younger folks in that they don’t seem to have any specific interests past socializing (and sports). This is clearly demonstrated when looking at the entry level of each of my fields of interest: there are no kids clustered around the bottom of any of them trying to get in.
 
Hotrods originally came from kids. Model Airplanes were once the world of the young. And aviation was built by youngsters hanging over the fence at airports hoping to get a ride. I don’t have accurate info on hotrods, but I know from readership surveys done by model magazines and surveys done by my own magazine, Flight Journal, that our readers average in their mid-fifties and higher.  And it’s not likely to get any younger.
 
One of the real tragedies of the lack of young people in any of these fields of interest is that we forget how much we learned building models, keeping our first junker car running, etc., that we now apply to life on a daily basis. At this point, several generations of kids have come along that don’t even think about fixing something because they haven’t the slightest understanding of how things work. They are totally ignorant of mechanical stuff of any kind.
 
Why aren’t see seeing them coming into narrow fields of interest? Cost for one. Barriers is another: many of the fields have hidden themselves behind fences, membership fees, regulations, etc. making it difficult for a younger person to weevil their way in. This is a moot point, however, because kids don’t seem to care about any of this stuff.
 
It’s obvious that every member of the younger generation can run anything digital. That’s because they were brought up with computers, cell phones, etc. and have always had them available (over-indulgent parents). Unfortunately, most often their experience with the digital world has been through various forms of socializing, from texting to Twittering to iTunes. It’s all about fun with nothing productive being accomplished.
 
I wish I had some brilliant observations about how to bring young people into the various fields, but I don’t. I hope I’m wrong, but I think we’re experiencing the golden age of a lot of special interests: the gray dogs have the money, so they’re spending it on things they couldn’t afford to do as young people. However, this bubble has a finite limit, which is another way of saying that during my lifetime I’m going to see the areas in which I’m passionate, slowly grind to a halt. And I can do nothing about it. Very frustrating!

10 April 10 - Surviving the System

I’ve been circling the computer for an hour trying to figure out how to tell this tale without naming names and hurting someone. But this is a tale that has to be told because I’m positive there are untold thousands of parents in the same boat: through the grown son (32 years old) of a close friend I’ve now witnessed how incredibly destructive social programs can be on a personal level.  
 
Dan has essentially been part of my own family since he was probably 12 years old. He’s always been fairly high-profile, loves a good time, etc., etc.. And now he’s paying the price: for most of this week he has been in an induced coma while doctors worked to bring him down off of alcohol and drug addiction. It’s been pretty ugly. And damn scary! And painful to watch.
 
Dan will be the first to tell you that he brought this on himself, but what he doesn’t fully realize is that he, and people with his kind of personality make-up, can be severely damaged by the very programs that are aimed at helping them. Dan was the victim of social outreach programs, of a medical practice that has no conscience and of his own addictive personality. And there are some lessons to be learned here that can be applied on a national level.
 
 About a year and a half ago he lost his job in CA and has been on CA unemployment since. He moved back to AZ and quickly found that the nearly $2000/mo in unemployment was more than he could logically hope to find in a job here. So, until quite recently, he wasn’t exactly busting his hump looking for a job. Why should he? He’s single and he’s getting nearly $500/week for just being alive. The motivation to work just wasn’t there and that played to his personality.
 
When a person knows they are going to be taken care of, even though they know that will eventually end, it’s easy for procrastination to become a way of life: I’ll look for a job tomorrow. I don’t feel like it today.  Besides, I’m having too much fun.
 
Dan’s group of friends includes a few, including a girl friend, that were part of his have-a-good-time way of thinking. Since he had the income and not much expense, why not have fun and lots of it? With no structure in his life, which gainful employment always provides, he had entirely too much time on his hands and he filled it with the wrong pursuits. And he knows it.
 
Early on he went to a doctor because of a back injury. This was when things really went down the tubes. The doctor was one of those feel-good docs we hear about: his concept of medical practice was to throw painkillers at the problem, lots of painkillers, until the pain goes away. He would routinely write scripts for Dan of more than 120 Oxycodone, 120 Oxicodine (this name isn’t right) and 120 Xanax tabs a month, plus similar amounts of other equally strong stuff. The net result was that in a short time, the drugs, which were prescription, and free, because of his insurance, had him by the throat. We didn’t know any of this, because we’re not around him all the time. But, he was a true abuser, of both drugs and alcohol.
 
This thing came to a head, when his girl friend (also an addict) stole his drugs and he started to come down. In severe pain and disorientation, he called 911 and had himself admitted. Unfortunately, he then found he couldn’t get into a detox or rehab unit because his insurance had lapsed two days earlier. They’d only keep him two nights.
 
We visited him continually during the weekend while the insurance thing was sorted out and that’s when we saw how bad he really was. He started wildly hallucinating, cowering in the corner hiding from snipers on the rooftops, hearing voices plotting to kill him, and on and on. It was an absolute nightmare and so painful to see him this way.  We finally helped get him into a hospital detox unit but the only way they could handle him and his hallucinations was to induce a coma. Fortunately, they were able to successfully awaken him last night. Most, but not all, of the hallucinations are gone, but he’s in for a long, hard road.
 
I’m not sure at whom I am most angry. Dan for being so stupid, the Unemployment Administration for taking away motivation by making it too easy to exist above the poverty level, or the doctor, who clearly needs to have his butt kicked legally because he’s basically a drug dealer and many of Dan’s friends use him just for that reason (he doesn’t take insurance and is cash-only).
 
So, Dan is a severely damaged young man. A true addict. Yet no laws were broken. There were no guys in dirty raincoats standing on a corner selling drugs. No dark alleys. None of the stuff we normally associate with addicts. And I’m certain Dan isn’t unique in his experience. Between booze and prescription pills (which he smoked or snorted, btw), the addict doesn’t have to go to the street to support his habit. He can depend on the social cocoon that surrounds him. And this is tragic.
 
The whole concept of a system where no one needs to worry about where their next meal, TV, iPhone or medical care is coming from does more harm than it does good.  We’re now into the second or third generation of people who view working the welfare system as their job. And it’s hard to blame them because that’s where their bread and butter has always come from, so why look elsewhere? But the people who are scamming the system have doomed themselves to a life devoid of personal achievement and true self worth. And the rest of us pay for it. An occasional helping hand is one thing. An on-going guarantee of sustenance is quite another.
 
Society doesn’t do people any favors by making things easy for them.

5 April 10 - Sports and Holidays
 
I’m late getting on this one.  Not enough me to go around.  You know how that is. As I just now sat down to do some digital musing (digital as in fingers), I can hear the game on in the living room with my stepsons watching it. Figures!  It’s Easter and that’s how I remember holidays at home: regardless of the holiday, everything was done to the sound track of a football/basketball/baseball game.
 
One of the first things you learn early in Nebraska is that regardless of what’s happening elsewhere in the world, unless the mushroom cloud is within sight, it is of secondary importance, if a U of N football game is on. Of course, I went to school at Oklahoma University, where the exact same thought pattern prevails. This was not a good thing: being from Nebraska, when I was served food in Oklahoma, I had to eat it out on the curb. They didn’t want a Cornhusker taking up space meant for a Sooner. And having gone to OU, means I still have to get special dispensation from both the U of N alumni association and the governor to cross the Nebraska state line to go home. The alternative is wearing a bag over my head to avoid being chased out of town.
 
The frustration in all of this is that I’m totally sports challenged. I just don’t care about them. Does that make me a bad person? Or some sort of deprived (maybe depraved), testostorone-challenged guy? Further fueling a possibly demeaning evaluation of my manhood, I don’t drink either. ‘Had just enough of my first beer to decide if something doesn’t taste good the first time, there’s not much reason to do it again. As I’ve said before, the concept of acquired taste makes no sense to me. Sports, however, isn’t an acquired taste. It seems to be something that is either in, or not in, your DNA. Somehow, even though I’m from a family of football junkies, my DNA doesn’t have a big red “N” mixed in with it. DNA does not mean Determined Nebraska Athletics.
 
Still, as I look back at my upbringing, I somehow miss the homey feeling of walking through the living room while doing my own thing and seeing the tableau that mean “hometown holiday:” my Dad was slouched back in one recliner, my late brother, Gary, in another, my younger sister Trish on the floor, each of them going nuts in their own way. Mom would be in the kitchen doing I’m not sure what (I never really knew what she did in the kitchen: a long story for another time) but it somehow supported the football nuts in the other room. Me, I was usually just a drifter, going from workshop to kitchen and back again and the holiday game existed in the far fringes of my being. Even so, somehow the game soaked in enough (probably through the yells and screams) that when it was over, I knew the score, the important plays and other stuff I didn’t care about but had magically etched itself into my mental hard drive.
 
To this day, the only sports contests I’ve ever sat through, end to end, were those in which someone named Davisson played. At first, it was my awesomely-talented-constantly-grinning brother, Gary. Then it was my not-quite-as-talented-but-terrifically-determined son, Scott. Then, my I’m-not-sure-why-I’m-out-here-but-I’m-going-to-win daughter, Jennifer. Now, it’s soccer games with either of my two I’m-having-a-great-time-and-trying-to-kick-butt grand kids scurrying around. So, I guess I’ll have to admit it: yeah, I like sports. But only when I know I’m cheering for someone who will hug me when it’s over.
 

28 March 10 - Politics, Confusion and my Father
 
The day after the healthcare vote I sat down and wrote a two part, heartfelt diatribe about how I felt about it. It was done and ready to go on my blog this morning. Then, as I was just now doing my 2.5 miles, I started thinking about my dad, his life and times. And mine. And Obamacare suddenly didn’t seem that important. Besides, by now everyone on the planet has had their say about it. I’ll make a couple of comments at the end of this thing, but right now I feel like talking about my dad.
 
If you scroll down to 30 August 08, you’ll see a lot of the incredible and wonderfully weird things my dad did, including his Time Capsule that put him in the Guinness Book of World Records. But, I don’t want to talk about that. I want to excise some sort of demon…no, that’s too strong…I want to mention a memory, an image in my mind, in the hopes it’ll, if not go away, at least take on a different feeling.
 
My dad died ten years ago last month at the age of 90. To say he had a fantastically productive, interesting life is an understatement. And even his death had an interesting twist to it. He and mom were married for 66 years and went through life shoulder-to-shoulder as the ultimate partnership. We kids always said that if mom died first, dad wouldn’t last two weeks. When mom died, he was in fantastic shape and had just written his weekly column for the local newspaper. Two weeks later, to the day, I was holding his hand as he died.
 
He went into what was apparently a self-induced coma five days after mom passed and I came home to be with him at the end, even though he may or may not have known I was there. I slept in a vacant room in the hospital for two nights: they said it would be any minute, but it took three days. As I was sitting there holding his hand, a stethoscope on his chest, it was incredible how hard some part of him fought. Towards the end heartbeats were thirty seconds apart and that went on for quite a while. As his doctor said to me, “You’d better hope you have his heart, I’ve never seen one fight this hard.”
 
The memory I’ve not once mentioned to anyone, and I’m not sure why I feel driven to mention it here, happened about five minutes before he died. For the entire time, he had laid there totally tranquil, his face peaceful, as if ready to go. I was holding his left hand, my sister, Trish, his right. Then, for a fraction of a second, his facial expression changed: he furrowed his brow as a person would who was having a dream they didn’t like. Then the expression was gone. And shortly after so was he.
 
That twinge has stayed in my mind for ten years: what was going through his mind? Had some part of him changed his mind and decided it really didn’t want to go? Or was he irritated with himself, which wasn’t unusual, because that persistent heart refused to give up and stop beating?
 
At times dad was an impatient sort. He always wanted things to happen the way he had envisioned them, to fit to his plan and work out. I like to think that’s what I saw on his face for that micro-second: he knew mom was waiting and he wouldn’t be complete until the two of them were together again. He was half of a set and didn’t like that feeling. Being left behind wasn’t his idea of existing. So he had started the process of ending it and it wasn’t going according to plan. Get it over with! I want to see Claire.
 
And soon enough he did.
 
His kids all felt better knowing they were together. The lost soul was no longer lost. His passing was a poetic ending to a life and an even more poetic continuation of a relationship.
 
And then there is Obama Care – I’ll keep this short
Yeah, I know, smarter people than me think it’s the best thing since tabs on beer cans. And smarter people than me think it’s the end of civilization, as we know it. My gut says it truly sucks, plus it’s a really rotten time to be spending money. But I’ll have to wait and see what happens. What I do know is that I’m saddened, and scared, not by the legislation, but by the process that rammed it through. It shows that by spreading enough cash around in enough backrooms anything can be made to happen.
 
Okay, I know, I’m being naïve: backroom deals have always been part of politics. That’s their thing. But this time, the blatant behind-the-back, we-know-what’s-best-for-you-because-you’re-too-dumb-to-understand attitude at first angered me. Then depressed me. And then there’s the we-have-the-majority-so-you’re-screwed attitude. Where and how did the elective process get so perverted that no matter who is voted into office, they are going to play the party card, regardless of what is actually good for the country?
 
There are about a million thoughts I could put here, but others have said it already this week so no reason to beat a dead jackass. I’m fed up with this subject and tired of talking about it and the following is an old line but it fits, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more.”  And come November, if we expect to have a future, we’d better all feel the same and do something about it.

20 March 10 - Presidents, Motorcycles and Good Deals
 
Dear Diary, as I sit back and look at my week I see a jumble of cool happenings and thoughts, all of which come in a poor second to seeing our new grandbaby Alice on Sunday. Still the week had some high points and epiphanies that definitely made it worthwhile.
 
Epiphany: you heard it here first: we have a kamikaze President
With all the yelling and screaming about how some people in the country (a majority it is beginning to appear) don’t like how the country is being run, it occurred to me (this probably isn’t an original thought) that our President has no intention of running for a second term. Why should he? What’s in it for him other than the ego-satisfying thought of being a two-term President. If he bails at the end of this one, he can live out the rest of his life as a super-star, already a multi-millionaire ultra-celebrity with his name in the history books and he’ll barely be fifty years old. The prime of life.  Not worrying about re-election relieves him of some serious constraints.
 
If you don’t care if you lose your job, you’ll approach it entirely differently especially, if you have an agenda. Think about it: you don’t have to worry about who you piss-off politically and can ram through any kind of legislation you can talk the Congress into: damn the torpedoes (and constituents), full speed ahead. Every favorite dream of your party, of your special interest friends, of your close colleagues and czars, can be made to come true. The Constitution and every closely-held tenant of the population can be challenged and turned over because you don’t care whether they approve or not. 
 
On top of the foregoing, of course, you can pander to those who can make your post-presidential life go smoother (read that as, unions, Hollywood, the rich and famous, etc.).
 
Another thought: after the November elections expect a hard push to overturn the Second Amendment, especially if the Democrats don’t get soundly trounced at the polls.
 
There is absolutely zero personal upside to this President seeking another term and, since many of his decisions are beginning to have personal, rather than political, overtones, I don’t think he will.

The world of custom bikes is weird and wonderful

Motorcycles in the Key of Weird
How’s this for an abrupt segue: Politics to motorcycles?  First, if it hasn’t come up before, I’m totally captivated by the custom-built motorcycle as an art form. It can be one of the ultimate expressions of personal taste (along with hotrods and lead sled customs) in transportation. It can also attract some of the wildest free thinkers in the world.
 
This week I had an e-mail cross my desk that was loaded with free-thinking, two-wheel (some three wheel) fantasies. Click here, for to see some really cool/weird bikes.
 
Buy What You Don’t Want and the Right One Will Appear
This has happened to me seemingly hundreds of times: I’m looking for something specific, a tool, a gun, a parking place. I give up looking, accept second best and first best shows up almost immediately.
 
For years I’ve been watching for a Model 41 Smith and Wesson .22 target pistol to surface at the right price to replace one I had stolen nearly two decades ago, but they are priced way out of my range, so I wasn’t about to buy one. Then, ten days ago, I stumbled across a Ruger Mk. II target .22 that is a very close second at a very good price. However, I was “settling” and I knew it: one of the obvious facts of life is that a Ruger isn’t a Smith: it’s perfectly functional but has none of the class. Then, this week a M41 Smith shows up on Backpage.com (go to the sporting good section and most areas have guns in it). It was new, in the box from the 1980’s. I tossed an idea at him about trading a bunch of these commemorative Colt .22 deringers I’ve had laying around for years and which I hate. I was ready to trade straight across, my junk for his Smith, but I came out with his pistol and a ton of cash. Better yet, that big box of crap guns is out of my office. Another itch scratched and it didn’t cost me a dime.

His flying leg is on the left with the brake handle on the top. He has to push with his hip to get rudder movement

Peg Leg Pitts Pilot
One of my students this week was my old friend, Peter Loeffler, whom I checked out in a Pitts several years ago. He came down to get a little brush-up training. This is nothing unusual but I get a kick out of the reaction of the fuel guys, when they see him getting in the airplane: Peter’s right leg is amputated above the knee and he flies his own single-hole Pitts with a mechanical prosthesis. So, the next time you hear someone talking about how hard a tailwheel is to fly, think of Peter. Go to Pitts Pilot for an article we did on his training. It’ll inspire you.
 
So, it was a good week. Now, about that new grandbaby...

14 March 10 - Of Daughters, Gray Dogs and Babies:
a father's tale in three parts
 
Part 1:
As this is being written, I’m sitting in a semi-dark office, late in the afternoon, reading e-mails from my son-in-law, Johnny Killoran. I’ve been sitting here a long time waiting. It’s a big day for us. His last, of many e-mails said, “She’s being prepped and just got the epidural. Any time now!” He’s talking about my daughter and the granddaughter-to-be, already known in the family as Baby Alice. My little girl is about to have a little girl and her husband is literally Johnny-on-the-spot. God bless iPhones.

Alice at 8 months in the womb. Isn't that amazing detail!?

For a number of mechanical/medical reasons Alice is coming into the world on a precise schedule via C-section. She’s all cozied up in my little girl’s belly and apparently in no big hurry to come out. So, they’re going to open the door and bring her into the world the easy way (easy for her, long recovery for Jennifer). Frankly, I’m relieved they’re going the C-section route: it’s more controlled but just a little weird. My kids arrived in the traditional way: timing and gender were both surprises. The way it’s supposed to be. This time, however, it’s supposed to happen at precisely 1730 hrs and it’s a girl. No surprises. We even know what she looks like courtesy of modern sonograms. Absolutely amazing!
 
It looked as if the wait was over, when another e-mail arrived.
 
We're getting pushed back because the woman scheduled before Jen broke the rules and ate a Twinkie.  Jen (nor I) has eaten since 7, so it doesn't seem quite fair that she gets penalized for Twinkie Lady's gluttonous behavior and resultant wait.
 
  Sent from a mobile device so cool it hasn't even been invented yet
 
Frustrating. Come on, guys. Alice has an audience waiting for her to arrive.
 
Then, came:
 
“She’s here. Baby and mom doing great. Pix to follow.” And it did. You really do have to love iPhones.
 
A few groggy phone exchanges with Jennifer and that was that. I’m now officially a grandfather for the third time.
 
Part Two:

Alice Willa Killoran about thirty minutes after being unwrapped.

Right now, we’re somewhere in the Arizona desert. Our hood is pointed at LA and the sun is just starting to break the horizon behind us and turn my rear view mirror into a solar flair. Baby Alice is not yet 12 hours old and we’re on the way to LA to officially greet her. Marlene is driving, I’m typing and a thought keeps going through my mind: how am I going to feel seeing my daughter with a daughter?
 
This may be my third grandchild, but believe me, this is different than when Mason and Zoe joined the clan. When it’s your daughter having a baby, it has an entirely different feel to it than when your son has one (okay, so technically, our daughter-in-law, Twana the Wonderful, had them). Sons grow into men and, if you’re as lucky as I am, they become your friends and companions. Daughters, however, never stop being your little girls. You never stop flashing onto images of them missing their front teeth, or them looking in the mirror at the bare forehead where their bangs used to be before they discovered scissors. Or the image of them screaming up the driveway with a bloody hand and wild tales of a ground hog attack (long story). You treasure the memories of them burrowing up your chest under your old work sweater, their head popping out of a hole in the well-worn sweater like a warm, grinning alien.  And in Jen’s case, the dozens and dozens of evenings spent sitting in audiences watching her prance across stages, or direct her own creations. At no time do images of her as an adult play in my mind. And I’ll bet every father is the same.
 
To a father, at some level, regardless of age, their little girls never grow up. But, in a couple of hours I’ll be seeing my daughter on the first day of a very grown up period of her life: motherhood. I can hardly wait, but….
 
Part three:
The girl/woman sitting in the bed looked, acted and talked like my daughter, Jennifer, but, in her arms she held a tiny miniature that could have been her at the same age. Ok, maybe eight pounds eight isn’t tiny, but she had Jennifer’s color and Asiatic appearing eyes (which Johnny also contributed) but thankfully she has the Killoran nose, not the Davisson schnoz. She was as perfect and as beautiful as a newly-minted human being could possibly be. And, as she settled into my arms, her face tranquil in newborn sleep, I glanced up at my little girl. Then down at my newest little girl. And smiled: they’ll both be my little girls for the rest of my life. It absolutely doesn’t get any better than this. Ever.

6 March 10 - Given a Choice...
 
It’s a fair assumption that the majority of those reading Thinking Out Loud love things mechanical. And hand made. And objects with patina and shapes that identify a time and a thought pattern, whether it be art deco, military surplus or whatever. That being the case, let’s pose a question: if the usual time/money limitation didn’t exist, and you were allowed to focus on a single object, what would you chose to restore. Not own, but restore.
 
About this owning/restoring limitation: I maintain that there is a wall a mile high that separates those who want to own unique objects and those who want to help bring them back to life. Exactly what causes that difference I’m not sure, but I, for one, would rather take a rusty old “thing” (car/tank/airplane/gun/etc.) and invest my time into breathing life back into it rather than easily plunking down the cash and having the object magically show up in my garage/shop/office/living room. I can’t explain that and shouldn’t have to. You either intuitively understand or never will understand. It’s just one of those kinds of things.
 
Implicit in this decision is the assumption that the same magic that gave you the time and money to pursue your dream project also gave you the workspace and tools. It did not, however, give you the requisite skills. If you don’t have them, you’ll have to learn them. And therein may lie one of the underlying motivations to tackling projects of any kind, especially those that stretch us: the urge to learn a skill we don’t already have.
 
Okay, remember no limitations on the type of project with the possible exception of life span. Some of us have to keep that in mind. No, forget that: if you starting thinking “do I have enough time left to finish a project” you’ll find you limit yourself to painting plaster figurines and putting new shelves in the hall closet. Big projects for which we have an inordinately strong passion will prolong our life span because that passion won’t let our brains dry up, our hands become stiff or our willpower be beaten down by life’s obstacles.
 
So, when we presented the concept, what project jumped into your mind? An old airplane? That dilapidated old Victorian house you’ve always wanted? The rotten old Hudson two-door you know is sitting in a neighbor’s fallen down garage? What?
 
In my case, four projects jumped into my head all at one time: none of them hit brain central first and they are an airplane (surprise!!), a tank (yet another surprise, right?), a building and a boat.

A good percentage of the Hawk 75's (our P-36) served in the French Air Force (for about a week). It's reported to be a wonderful handling airplane.

The airplane that has haunted my dreams since a little kid is a little known fighter, the Curtis P-36A, the round-motored precursor to the P-40. I’m not letting the fact that there are only about a half dozen known airframes to exist anywhere in the world deter me. There’s just something about the airplane that lights my wick as no other, even though I’ve never flown, and will never get to, fly one. All reports are it’s a delightful, pilot’s-airplane.

I nearly bought one of these in the early '80s, when a bunch were imported from Portugal, but procrastinated too long. I kick my own butt often for that.

The tank I’ve mentioned often as being my WWII favorite: the M3A1 Stuart. A tiny little thing (by tank standards), it’s powered by the same 220 hp Continental W-670 radial engine that powered PT-17 Stearmans. I’ve always loved its early, transitional styling, rectilinear with lots of flat planes that clearly show early designers didn’t know how powerful their enemies’ guns were going to be. If a tank can be “cute”, this is the one.
 
Wooden boats have always driven my gotta-build-one meter right off the scale. And every time I see a decaying “little” (again, speaking in relative terms) fifty-foot cruiser, either sail or power, it’s all I can do to keep myself from asking “how much,” which is the first indication I’m hooked. I’m fully aware that those kinds of projects own you, you don’t own them. However, any kind of a 20-30 foot barrel-stern runabout is almost doable by one guy. God help me, if I ever run across one of the little sub-20 foot Chris or Hacker Crafts. I won’t stand a chance.
 
Those of you who have read my novel Cobalt Blue already know the building I’d love to restore. Only its location (rural NJ) works against it. It is a stone building (what is it about stone houses and buildings that hook so many of us?) and in Cobalt Blue, it is Sam Tipton’s unique copper mine cum living quarters. In real life it’s a scaled down version of Sam’s place but still rambles down a steep hillside where it is one story in back where you enter and three stories in front. I’ve always daydreamed rebuilding an industrial building into a house (this will come up in another blog, so be forewarned) that incorporates work shop space into living space with little or no differentiation between them.
 
So, what’s on your list? Don’t wait to make it up. Who knows? Maybe the lottery ticket you bought yesterday is the magic one.

28 Feb 10 - Small Snowbound Victories
 
Alright, I know: I’ve been late or non-existent for the last couple of weeks, but it was for a good reason. Or two. First, I was working 17 hours a day finishing projects before I had to leave on a trip East. Second, I got caught in last week’s East Coast snow storm. But, as grueling as some of the trip was, it was one of the most satisfying I’ve taken in years. Again, for a couple of very specific reasons.
 
First, bear in mind that I was born and raised in blizzard country: Nebraska invented horizontal snow (along with ND, SD, KS and a few others). And I lived in the high country of far-northern NJ for 23 years, where we didn’t have blizzards, but it could still have very respectable snowstorms of the vertical variety. I was cured of the snow craziness within a few weeks of moving to AZ eighteen years ago. I don’t care if I ever see another snowflake and, when I found myself trapped in heavy snow on the New York Throughway this week, I was once again reminded why I live in Arizona. Still, the snow gave Marlene and me some really warm memories.
 
 “Warm,” however, was definitely not the operative word for the two days we spent with my son, daughter-in-law, and my grandkids after their furnace crapped out (it was a weekend and parts weren’t available). Still, it was strangely enjoyable. Sweaters, blankets and lots of snuggling can go a long way toward keeping your temperature in the comfort zone. Then, after we slogged back down to their house from CT  in the middle of the storm, we spent a really cozy snowbound day watching movies, and just being together (I highly recommend last summer’s Star Trek and this season’s Blind Side-Sandra Bullock). There’s something about being in a toasty environment (furnace was fixed), with grand kids tumbling all over you and watching gigantic snowflakes fall outside that can’t be duplicated in the desert. And it’s more than just the snow. Being temporarily snowbound has a unique feeling to it, as if the world has been shut out and you’re in your own little bubble. It is actually very cool (figuratively speaking). This will be one of those memories I will return to often.
 
Another factor that made this a great trip is that after nearly two years of gut-wrenching frustration, I was finally able to bring my two favorite guitars back from the hospital at the Martin plant in Nazareth, PA. You cannot possibly imagine what a victory that represents. Not because of the rehabilitation they went through (which was extensive), but because of the ridiculousness of not being able to solve the transportation problems to bring them home. Yes, the simple passing of the over 45 years since I bought them has increased their value to where they represent a sizeable chunk of change, but that had little to do with my transportation problems. It was what they represent to me that caused the concerns.
 
One of the instruments (a 000-28S, in Brazilian rosewood for those who care) was custom made for me in 1963, when I was still working clubs and it happened only because C. F. Martin, III (himself) offered to do it for me as part payment for coming to the plant to consult on the design of their then-new 12-string line. At the time, they were refusing to do custom instruments because they were buried in orders by the folk boom. By the time I stopped touring they had re-fretted that instrument twice, so that old guitar and I have spent literally thousands of pleasant hours together.
 
The other guitar is a very high-zoot replication of a 1936, 12-fret 000-45 (again for those who care) that is one of the last, possibly the very last, Brazilian rosewood guitars they made. This is a very, very big deal in the guitar community. They went to Indian rosewood around 1969 yet crafted this instrument for me in 1971 and it was the realization of a dream. In my eyes, that specific type of guitar had always been the ideal instrument. There was no way I was going to entrust either of these guitars to baggage handlers. I wasn’t about to let them even carry them across the ramp.

Photo of a very happy camper. Marlene is one row ahead with the other one.

Many schemes involving airline pilot friends bringing them back, shipping via custom indestructible crates, etc., were hatched and scrapped. It was all very frustrating but centered around one fact: they absolutely couldn’t ride in the belly of an airplane. The risk was too high. So, on this trip, I simply bought each of them their own seat. I stumbled on some unbelievably low fares, fooled Orbitz and the boarding pass computers into validating Guitar One and Guitar Two Davisson as legitimate passengers and we wended our way home. The US Air gate agents and in-air folks (stews) couldn’t have been more helpful. Or funnier (“would your companion like a drink?” etc.).
 
When the gear left the ground at Newark a wave of relief came over me that’s hard to describe. I had finally won! Yeehah!
 
As I type this in tourist class, I’d have to say that as enjoyable as this trip has been, I’m still going to be the happiest guy on the planet to get home.

14 Feb 10 - A Valentines Day Blog: Is The Heart Overrated?
 
Between Valentines Day and graphic artists substituting a heart for “love” (I heart New York), the heart has been elevated to an idol-like stature that I, for one, don’t think it disserves. It’s a muscle. Period. It’s not much different than your butt but with more plumbing. The emotions, the attachments, the physical functions of the heart exist in the brain. The heart is a peripheral that takes its orders from the CPU that is the brain. So, why isn’t the brain the symbol of love?
 
The origin of the heart’s wildly exaggerated reputation goes back to the beginning of civilization. The brain doesn’t make much noise when it’s doing its thing. No whirring, no clicking, nothing to indicate anything is going on up there. That’s because it’s mostly electronic. Solid state, as it were. A bunch of Nature’s integrated circuits embedded in mush.
 
The heart, on the other hand, is very theatrical in what it does. Lot’s of thumping and bumping and, if monitored closely, the vague sewage sound of blood can be heard coursing through the pipes. Even Lucy, that 3.2 million year old homo-erectus recognized that there was something special about what was going on inside her chest. I’m certain they figured out that those without that internal activity almost always laid down in the bush and didn’t want to get up. Ever. She couldn’t possibly know that the goo between her ears that sometimes squeezed out when one of her tribe/clan/herd got stomped by an elephant was what kept her running. She couldn’t understand that all her fears and hopes, emotions and logic was goo-based.
 
It’s easy to see why a thumping/jumping organ gets top billing over solidified goo that just sits there. Of course, not all of this would have happened if realism had been part of the symbology that gave rise to the heart’s popularity.
 
The heart, when laid out on a table, is not even remotely a pretty organ, like say, a kidney. Or a brain. Or a butt. In fact, the butt would make a great symbol. Of what, I don’t know, but it’s certainly better looking than a heart. That svelte, graphically pleasing heart we see on T-shirts and bumper stickers, ignores all the intestine-looking pipes, the messy looking striations and generally grossness of the real organ. If we were going to go for “honesty in packaging” think how boxes of chocolates would look. Yeeeech!
 
The brain, on the other hand, is a pretty clean looking organ with a vaguely pleasing, if unspectacular, shape. Still, we’re not about to undo millenniums of heart worship, no matter how misdirected those thoughts may be. Things like “I gave her my brain” don’t roll off the tongue like the original. And “He has a brain as big as all outdoors” doesn’t really convey the thought, does it?
 
And we’re too far into the graphic heart thing to make a switch. T-shirts and bumper stickers have seen to that. Try to picture “I (brain) New York.” And carving “BD Luvs MD” within a heart outline on a tree or a school desk is a helluva lot easier than whittling out a brain.
 
Okay, since we can’t replace the heart as the symbol of emotion and love, we can at least give the brain it’s own day. The Cerebral Celebration. Cortex Convergence. Good Goo Day. The government seems willing to support anything that makes no sense, so I think we have a good chance of getting this going. Who’s with me on this?
 
Don’t bother answering.
 
Incidentally, it’s a tradition in the Davisson household that I write a poem, however, crude or silly, and make up a card for Marlene. I’d better get my butt in gear or a butt will indeed be the symbol for me today.
 

6 Feb 10 -- Highway Day Dreams
 
Last week, of the 80 hours starting Thursday morning and ending Sunday afternoon, I spent 28 of them in the car: a marathon 14-hour drive to LA and back (400 miles each way) on Thursday, to have lunch with my daughter. Then back to LA again on Saturday for her baby shower (It was a serious party: Hollywood doesn’t do showers like us common folk do) and back Sunday. So, blasting through the 350 miles of desert solitude that connects two endless lines of cars with their brake lights on, I had plenty of time to indulge in one of my favorite pastimes: Highway daydreaming.
 
Being brought up in Nebraska, where everything was 500 miles away, I, like most Midwesterners, don’t blink an eye at 800-1000 mile days. So, I get to do a lot of daydreaming. I’ll be blasting down a two-lane in Iowa and, as I pass a farm that’s a little unique, either because it’s pristine or because it’s just the opposite and is run down, I try to imagine what it’s like to step into their kitchen from the back porch. I remember my grandparents’ black dirt farm in southeastern Nebraska and I picture these kitchens having the same fresh scrubbed feeling to them. Or the cracked linoleum, worn-paint feel of some of the less fortunate farm families I’ve known. I imagine the familiar bang of the wooden porch screen door slamming shut and the warm, homey feeling of the kitchen that rolled out and embraced me, as if my grandmother was holding me without ever touching me.
 
I imagine the musty smell and Earthy kharma of the old barns, with generations of dirt and sparrow droppings on top of every beam and loft joist. I look at a leaning barn on the far side of a farm field and imagine the layer upon layer, like archeological midden heaps, of old implements, tools and miscellaneous rusty iron that fills every corner and is under every bench. It is the universal old barn feeling. And I miss it.
 
As I scream through the west, I’m constantly looking at the far ridge, wondering what’s on the other side. A sharp-edged arroyo has been cut through it by spring thunderstorms and I imagine myself walking its rocky bottom to the other side, just to see what I can see.
 
I try to picture what it must have been like to be out here on horseback, wife and kids in a creaky wagon as we hope to find water soon. We were heading for a new life some where in the far future, but right now just surviving to nightfall would be a victory.
 
I look at the abandoned houses, some at the edges of fields gone fallow, others a ragged fringe of decay around the edges of just about every small town I pass. What is each of them saying? Did their owners toss in the towel? The decaying house a signal of defeat? Or did they turn their back on it as they took steps upward into a new, and better, life? Don’t you wish vacant houses could tell their tales?
 
And what about those who came before? The Indians? Being an absolute arrowhead/artifact freak, I know for a fact that every single mile I drive down every road has me passing hundreds of thousands of artifacts left behind by thousands of the land’s prior occupants, most of whom were gone a thousand years before Anglos ever set foot on this continent. They, and their marks, are all around me as I drive. We are only the latest to leave our refuse behind. We just do it in a more spectacular manner.
 
A few hundred years from now, travelers will be running across the same desert, probably by different means of transportation, and I wonder…will they look out and daydream of me and mine? I hope so.
 

Heads-up for the week
Hemmings Motor News is to the car hobby what Trade-a-Plane is to airplanes and Shotgun News is to firearms. I pick it up not to look at the cars, but because of the “Non-Auto Related” section in the back. You find the neatest things back there. For instance, one of my friends found a complete engine and firewall forward there for his Focke-Wulf FW-190-D13 (a real one). The latest issue had two of my favorite ads of all time. I’ll quote them here, word for word. I absolutely love these and almost bought the one item but couldn’t afford the other. You figure out which is which.
 
REAL human skeleton in antique 6-sided wooden coffin: old medical school skeleton, complete, perfect prop, pictures $1,195 215-536-0598 PA
 
Steam train, 10 1/4G “Flying Scotsman” complete park/estate setup, built (England) 1939 by Thurston w/Bullock components. NY 1945-52, Greenly Const drawings for 10-1/4G “Royal Scot” (1938) included. Partners force sale. 717-786-3761, PA
 
FYI, the 10 1⁄4 gauge locomotive would be about 12-feet long. Just exactly the right size to putt around the backyard. And, although I have a human skull, I’ve always wanted a full skeleton. Especially in an old coffin. I am, however, smart enough not to suggest it to Marlene. She already thinks I’m nuts. And I’m not…not really, anyway.
 
Hmmm…both of these ads are out of Pennsylvania. ‘Wonder what the connection could be. Trains and skeletons. I think I like these folks.
 

 

22 Jan 10 -- Curbside Shopping Mall

Today is the first day of “big pick-up”, that orgy of curbside shopping that signals the city’s quarterly announcement that we can put our “big” junk out and they’ll pick it up in a week or so. This stuff is expected to go to the landfill, but less than half of it makes the trip due to curbside shoppers. This time I had a ringside seat to the action.
 
There is a tall, narrow window (about six inches wide, floor to ceiling) behind my computer that looks across the street at the side entrance to my neighbor’s yard across the street. He has been doing a lot of remodeling, so, when the appointed hour arrived, a steady stream of the aforementioned “big stuff” began streaming out of his gate onto the curb. There were tons of used cement blocks, miles of musty carpeting, bedraggled furniture and heaps of  2 x 4 cut-offs. My paltry pile—a dead Xmas tree, some closet crap and a dented Honda hood—made me look as if I wasn’t really trying.
 
In less than an hour, a pile of his remodeling cast-offs the size of a small school bus had accumulated. Minutes after that, the scavengers began arriving like vultures that smelled a newly-dead democrat (sorry…couldn’t resist). It was amazing to watch.
 
I’d been noticing pick-up trucks cruising the neighborhood all morning, but he had no sooner closed his gate than the first one pulled up and the driver rifled through the stack, coming away with a bed load of cement blocks.
 
The next truck claimed every single piece of 2 x 4 and all other lumber in the pile, which was a lot. My neighbor had cut the eaves off the entire back of his house so lots of circumcised wooden trusses wound up in someone’s truck headed someplace else.
 
The entire morning was an endless parade of people making his junk, their junk. Truth is, even before the first scavengers hit, I walked across and spied a nice little two-foot square worktable/toolstand and had to force myself not to wrestle it out of the stack and take it home. If I had the room for it, there would have been no discussion. The first pick-up vulture grabbed it, so we both had good taste.
 
This kind of scavenging—some would term it dumpster diving—is a time-honored form of recycling that some of us, who are actually more muddy brown than green, are constantly engaged in. The metal cabinet in my hangar actually did come out of a dumpster. A tall, very narrow cabinet from the same dumpster was refitted with a birch door and became the reloading cabinet in my shop. The heavy metal base on my bench grinder came from a big-junk-day drive-by.
 
If you were to look across my part of civilization, the part with dirt under its finger nails, you could easily see that we keep a portion of all unwanted junk constantly in play: it’s moving from this garage to that garage to the next. It never makes it to the landfill. So, I think the environmentalists need to stop looking down their green noses at those of us who make smoke and noise. If it weren’t for us keeping junk out of the landfills, the world would be awash in cast offs. As it is now, we keep that stuff safe and secure in our garages waiting for the next guy who is looking for junk.
 
 
This Week’s Heads-up
 
This is so cool! The yellow tube Rutgers researchers pulled out of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Spain earlier this month is not only a breakthrough in undersea data collection but also represents an incredible form of UAV (Unmannned Aquatic Vehicle). The Scarlet Knight "flew" through the water with neither a powerplant nor a propeller, becoming the first robot to cross the Atlantic. Amazing stuff!

Scarlet is more similar to an airborne glider than a submarine. Like the former, it has no engine to provide forward thrust or motion. It descends by pumping a small volume of water -- about a cup -- into its nose, causing that part of the glider to sink relative to the tail. Because of the unequal buoyancy along the fuselage and the action of its two stationary wings, the glider makes headway as it "flies" downward in the water column. To ascend, the reverse occurs: it pumps the water out of the nose, which then floats upward, pulling the rest of the glider with it.
 
For more info go to: Scarlet Knight Robot

 

16 Jan 10 -- Scammed! How to get screwed over the Internet

We all think we’re so damn smart. We read about little old ladies being scammed out of their savings and all the complex ways scumbags can defraud us over the Internet. But we’re too smart to fall for the “…my husband died and I need someone in the US to help me unload five billion dollars in quarters”, or anything similar.  Well, I’m here to tell you that we’re not as smart as we think we are. Ask me how I know.
 
Bear with me. This is going to be a long one because I’m going to go into the details of a scam that sucked Marlene and me in hook, line and sinker in the hopes that we can pass along a little of what we learned.
 
First, understand that we do a pretty fair amount of business with foreign students in our flight training. So, we’re constantly wiring money back and forth across the pond and working with people we don’t know while ironing out the kinks in the financial side of flight training. So, when I started getting e-mails from a Mr. Roland in some undisclosed country about him sending his son over for aerobatic training, I didn’t think a thing about it.
 
First mini-alarm: I thought it was weird that his 19-year-old and his wife would stay 13 days but only fly 11 hours. Normally, we’d do that in five days.
 
Then we booked a specific set of days.
 
Another alarm: he didn’t directly answer any of my pleas to give me their exact arrival times. But I figured, he’s just a flake.
 
We made arrangements for one of his “colleagues” to send me a cashiers check in advance of their arrival. All well and good. We’ve done this before.
 
A couple of days before they were to show up, the cashiers check arrived along with three mini-alarms:
             First: it came in an envelop with no return address
             Second: it was for an amount that was $3000 more than we had agreed upon.
             Third: you really had to strain to make out the name of the person sending it.
 
Again, not totally out of the ordinary and we once again snorted, “…flake! Who would send that amount of money with no return address?”
 
I e-mailed Mr. Roland about the mistake and his return e-mail should have raised some alarms but didn’t because we’d seen similar before. He apologized and said his colleague had made a mistake and had included money that was supposed to go to the travel agency to pay for the tickets for his wife and son.  Could we please return the extra $3000 via Western Union? And here is a list of the three Western Union outlets closest to you.
 
This came back to me almost immediately and I thought, “Huh, he sure found those addresses in a hurry. I’d think he’d be too busy. Oh, well.”
 
We immediately set about squaring up the financials. Marlene deposited the cashiers check, which immediately showed up in our bank balance, and took out $3000 in cash to go to Western Union.  While she was gone, I looked at the address where the money was supposed to go: The Republic of Benin.
 
I mentioned the country to some friends on the Bearhawk group and they gave me links to the country. I looked it up and found it to be a tiny, absolutely dirt-poor new democracy on the west coast of Africa.
 
Tiny alarm: wow, a country that poor so this guy must be one of the rich ones to spend this amount of money. I began to get uncomfortable.
 
By this time Marlene had called from Western Union to say the girl there was having problems bringing up Republic of Benin and, oh by the way, the girl keep asking if we really wanted to send this money over there and were we sure this was real. Marlene responded that it wasn’t our money. We had deposited a cashiers check and it had cleared so we were okay. With that she came home and would try it tomorrow. 
 
I sent a note to my buddy, Mr. Roland, saying we’d had problems and he said to try another Western Union outlet and here’s a list of three more. Damn this guy has all the info right at his fingertips.
 
Another alarm: Wait a minute, it would be like three in the morning in the Republic of Benin.
 
The next morning, Marlene made another trip to send it and called to say she had gone to the wrong outlet and was headed for another. By this time I had been talking about it with some of the Bearhawkers was becoming very uncomfortable, so I made a decision: I called Marlene and caught her as she was in the parking lot of the next Western Union outlet and told her to come home. I was going to wait until I was convinced that the cashiers check thing was okay, even though I had no reason to believe it wasn’t okay other than increasingly strange vibrations.
 
I sat around and reconstructed the entire chain of events in my mind and became convinced that this whole thing was bogus even though I didn’t realize at the time that a cashiers check is NOT the same as cash. I later found that, yes, the bank will deposit it and put it in your balance, but, if several weeks later they find it’s phony, they can, and will, come back to you for the money. In effect the bank is loaning you money against the value of the check and is backing it with their money. If it’s bogus, they take the money back. And this happens A LOT!
 
FYI- the only way you can be sure a check is good is if it is a “certified” check where the bank certifies that there is indeed that amount of money in the account it is drawn upon and they reach into that account and set aside enough money to cover the check. Even then, crooks have a way around it.
 
I called the bank and told them what had transpired and they agreed that it was undoubtedly bogus but the issuing bank wouldn’t be able to look at it for a couple of days.
 
An hour later I got a call from Mr. Roland. In a heavily French-accented voice he wanted to know why I hadn’t sent the money back.
 
Me, “I’ve decided to wait until the bank is certain the cashiers check is good.”
 
Him, “So you’re having them certify it.”
 
Me, “Yes.”
 
Him, “click.”  He hung up without a word. And I had my answer.
 
In short we came within a few minutes of being scammed out of $3000! Some one had been looking after us and gave us three chances to save ourselves. First, when the Western Union couldn’t make the connection, Second, when Marlene went to the wrong outlet and third, when I caught her in the parking lot.
 
FYI- It took nearly a week for the issuing bank to decide it was indeed bogus and take the moneyout of our account. They commented that the cashiers check was one of the best forgeries they had seen.   We are lucky SOB’s!!
 
Bottom line: go with your gut. If it doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t.
 
After the fact I did a little research and I think everyone should. Here are some good links. Take a look. Screwing our fellow man has become a profession for a lot of people and the Internet is the perfect tool for that so all of us have to become educated.
 
Required reading:
 
http://www.craigslist.org/about/scams
 
http://banking.about.com/od/securityandsafety/a/cashierscheckfd.htm
 
http://www.carbuyingtips.com/nigerian-scams.htm
 
http://www.ic3.gov/crimeschemes.aspx  (reporting it to the FBI)

9 Jan 10 -- Manaromas: the nose knows
 
This morning I opened a brand new bottle of Hoppe’s No. 9 and realized two things: it had been too long since I cleaned a firearm and I suddenly remembered what a fine aroma it has. It has such a totally unique, thoroughly pleasant smell that I think I’m going to periodically uncap the bottle and leave a little in the shop just because it smells good. In fact, there are a bunch of smells that make me feel good.
 
First, I’m making the assumption that because you’re reading Thinking Out Loud, that you know Hoppe’s No. 9. If not, I’m not sure how you got to your age without running across it, since it is the universal gun cleaner and has been since the forties. It has a sort of sweet smell that belies its mechanical nature and it’s difficult to describe (all smells are difficult to describe). 
 
It was while opening this bottle that an entire list of favorite, mostly male-oriented smells, manaromas, if you will, rolled out of the back of my mind, reminding me of pleasant times and favorite things.
 
80 octane gas, for whatever reason, smells different than 100 octane and we’ve now raised an entire generation (or two) that has probably never run across it. It is the smell of little airplanes: Cubs, Champs, Luscombes and other, mostly-crappy, little birds that lived on the back tie-down line with flaking, cracked covering and soiled interiors but solid little A-65 Continentals just waiting to give you a cheap hour of flying fun.
 
Then there’s the way a military airplane smells. I’m not sure what it is, but the combination of oils, hydraulic fluid and whatever is totally unique. You can be dropped into the cockpit blindfolded and know exactly where you are and what kind of flying you’ll be doing.
 
I always get a kick out of a true Army surplus store (not the khaki boutiques that try to pass themselves off as one) where stacks of long-stored web gear and clothing give off a vague mothball smell mixed with water proofing that identifies their origin the instant you walk in the door. You wish that some of those piles of “stuff” could talk and tell you where they’ve been, what they’ve done and what happened to the young men that used to wear/carry them.
 
My adrenaline valves are guaranteed to be involuntarily kicked wide open by the smell of nitromethane, whether it’s coming from a heart pounding, high-compression drag motor or an old-fashion model airplane engine, the kind that has never seen, and never will see, a muffler. The neat, old non-PC kind. The smell brings out the “screw the neighbors” vein in me: the smell of nitromethane is always accompanied by a form of raucous music that no one should even think about complaining about, but almost always do.
 
And what about walnut being cut or sanded? It sends off images of creativity. Some of the projects shoot, others become an artifact in my life. All are living beings.
 
And rosewood? Once you’ve walked into someplace like the C.F.Martin factory in Nazareth, PA and smell the birthing of high quality guitars, you’ll be forever touched by the combination of lacquer and rosewood that tunnels through your nose into your heart.
 
Lots of other smells, too many to list, fill our lives and mark our favorite moments. The smell of a freshly washed baby. Or maybe better yet, your dog after you’ve soaped him down and he’s dried off (my kids will love hearing that!). Or your wife when she steps out of the shower. A just-right pipe or cigar smells inviting even though I don’t smoke. The different smell of blackpowder just after it’s sent a ball down range.
 
Make up your own list. The nose understands where we’ve been and what we love and, at the oddest times, can, without warning, take us on a free trip to a pleasant place. Yep, the nose definitely knows.

1 Jan 10 -- Chronology of the First Day: can I save it?
 
How's your First Day going? Mine sucks! 2010 is barely eight hours old and I’ve already screwed the year up. I had all these grandiose plans for the First Day, but Marlene dragged me out to a club last night at 2230 hrs. It was a long night and I’m barely functioning this morning. Can't rock and roll like I used to and I’m pissed at myself. Am I going to going to be able to save the day and get the year off to a good start?
 
If you’re reading this on the First, keep coming back and we’ll see if I pass the New Years Test and get 2010 off on the right foot or fall back in an easy chair and watch NCIS reruns. A repeat of Xmas day. I feel like Punxsutawney Phil (see Phil if you don’t know him): am I going to see my shadow and scurry back for a longer nap or get my butt in gear and make things happen?
 
I’ll do updates throughout the day. My version of 2010 hangs in the balance. Pray for me. Or at least hoist some left over eggnog in my direction. Or, get off your butt and make your year happen.

1300 HRS - 2010 is thirteen hours old and is looking better!
The salvation award for the year, so far, goes to Ace Hardware for being open and having all the studs and stainless steel and grade 8 bolts and nuts that I needed to mount the carburetors and fix the broken aircleaners. The carbs are now mounted permanently, which is a big deal!

I bought the manifold, carbs, aircleaners and heads used from Speedy Bill at Speedway Motors, when it was just a store front operation. It is now a HUGE mail order business. That was around 1958.

Carbs and headers are mounted for good, wiring's done. Really minor stuff left to crank this thing. It's getting exciting! :-)

I have two hours before a new student/B&B guest shows up with his wife. Let's see what I can get done.

1600 hrs - Waiting for guests to arrive: 2010 is going to be OK
Cleaned the shop, since all I'd done all day was make a mess, then final detailed the tray affair that goes under the right floor board and holds the regulator and starter relay. I put some rivets in some stray holes and will have it powder coated gray, like the frame work in the body. Considering the time available, not a bad day's work. And got some magazine stuff done inbetween so I'm no longer pissed at myself.

Tray that goes under the right floor board and mounts the regulator and starter relay. I'll powder coat it.

Happy New Year, y'all. Most of all I wish everyone health because past that, everything else is gravy.

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