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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.

19 Dec 09 -- Food Hangovers, Hoods and Pipe Organs
 
It’s the day after Christmas and I have a pronounced food hangover. So I’m engaging in the age-old custom of eliminating that “I’m so stuffed from yesterday that I’m going to die” feeling by eating every left over in sight. Actually, I’m eating anything that isn’t covered with hair and moving. I have munchies on steroids. Please tell me I’m not alone in this kind of compulsive behavior.
 
There’s something about Saturday being the day after Christmas that you feel as if it isn’t actually a day. It doesn’t count: it’s not only a Saturday, where even in a normal week, the weekday rules of strict behavior relax a little, but it’s the day after the big day and we’re expected to fall off of whatever wagon we’re on. But I didn’t fall off. I leaped off. Today I have successfully given myself a food-hangover hangover.
 
The good news about eating too much is that it is a problem that eventually passes. Literally! And normally, in a single episode event like this you won’t gain enough weight in the long run to even measure it: a pound is 3,500 calories that are in EXCESS of the 1800 or so you need to stoke your furnace. And 3,500 calories is one helluva lot of food! Of course, if we keep that up for the entire holiday week, yeah, we’re going to blimp our way into the New Year, which I, for one, won’t let happen. This week it’s back to the Lean Cuisines.
 
How was your Christmas? Ours was weird. Flat weird!  For the first time ever we did the gift thing Christmas Eve, which after doing it in the morning for your entire life, means Christmas morning just wasn’t Christmas morning. Since there was nothing to get up for, no one did except me. I gave myself a little one-hour present and stayed in the sack until 0600. Actually, I spent most of that hour designing my day that would run until 1500 hrs, when I was supposed to show up in the living room and make nice with the in-laws and friends in preparation for a 1700 hr Marlene Food Extravaganza.
 
I had this whole litany of things I was going to do, starting with finally storing the new Honda Civic hood that was cluttering up the workshop.  Then it was shooting primer on all the exposed steel in the roadster interior that resulted from recent welding changes including the back of all the new floorboards. I was excited: I was going to scratch some itches that needed scratching. But first and foremost on the list was getting that damn hood out of the way.
 
The hood is about four by five feet, in a carton about six inches thick and easy to ding. Where to put it to keep it safe?
 
“I know,” I said, as a light bulb came on in my head, “I’ll sling it up against the garage rafters over the garage door.” So I spent over three hours rigging sling hooks, carefully doing my best rope macramé, and inching the hood carton into position snug against the rafters.  Perfect! 
 
Then I started the garage door up and realized that, when it made the corner coming up, it was about an inch short of clearing the edge of the hood. Thank, God, I just inched the door up. If I had just punched the button, I would have folded my nice new hood up like crepe paper.
 
What took three and a half hours to get up, took fifteen minutes to get down and right back where it started. I was so damn frustrated I plopped into bed and watched TiVo’d NCIS’s and CSI’s I hadn’t seen before until it was food show time.  Bah, humbug!
 
And that was my Christmas, if you don’t count the glutinous display that launched at 1700 hrs and lasted until no one could stand up.
 
But, the spirit of Christmas was definitely present, if a little heavily armed: Marlene gave me a Glock 26 (baby Glock in 9mm) and some wonderful, unknown soul with Santa in his heart gave me a 1912, Winchester 30-30 carbine like I had been looking for for years. Santa must shop on www.backpage.com.
 
The best gift was having friends and family around that night and all of us were healthy. Compared to health, regardless of what the doomsayers say about the economy, everything else is unimportant.
 
BTW -The miracle of this particular Christmas was that we talked until the wee hours (wee geezer hours-about 11 pm) and not once did the economy or politics come up. Not once! Now THAT’S a Christmas Miracle!
 
This Week's Heads-up

You have to read this NY Times article on the recreation of an 18th century pipe organ!!  I love this kind of stuff: over 2200 pipes of wood or soldered tin and lead, completely powered by air supplied by foot operated bellows, it is every bit as much a living breathing being as a really fine guitar. It almost brings tears to the eye to think how much passion, dedication and skill went into both the creation of the original in 1776 in Lithuania and the re-creation you can hear on this web page. Don’t miss clicking on the smallish link in the left side of the page. No electronics, no wires, no compressors. Just wood and craftsmanship.  Beautiful! Click on ORGAN
 
 

19 Dec 09 -- Idiotic Self Destruction
 
Christmas? Didn’t we just finish taking down last year’s tree? These days, with Xmas kicking into high gear well before Thanksgiving, it seems as if we never truly stop cleaning up spruce needles. Still, it’s a time for family and warmth and love. Unless you’ve totally screwed yourself and your name is Tiger Woods or any of countless other idiots who had it made in the shade but decide to throw it all away just to get laid.
 
I’m not sure what it is about the Tiger Woods’ drama that is upsetting to many, me included. It’s probably that we had deluded ourselves into believing that he really was squeaky-clean. That he was one of the few good guys and wasn’t a charter member of the I’m-God-so-I-can-screw-around-and-not-get-caught crowd, which seems to get bigger on a daily basis.  It’s just amazing that we’ve come to expect, and accept, this kind of behavior out of our politicians, celebrities and, it seems, just about anyone else who has attained a higher-than-normal level of success. Nothing they do surprises us, but, when something like the Woods episode happens, we’re surprised anyway.
 
Tiger Woods and his wife/kids could be the poster family for the downside to extramarital wick dipping. The holiday season that was supposed to have them cuddled up around a roaring fireplace, laughing and loving, instead has them scattered around the globe, the kids still not understanding exactly what is happening to them and their parents dealing with varying amounts of anger/depression/regret /humiliation and a thousand other emotions that defy description. The Woods family is going through it in public, but scattered through out society, hundreds of thousands of other families are coping with exactly the same degree of pain, regardless of their levels of income or celebrity, for exactly the same reasons.
 
I know I sound wildly old fashioned, but it seems to me that when someone has a good life going, even though the marriage may not be as strong or as satisfying as it once was, that it’s better to try to fix the marriage than it is to totally destroy the entire thing and start over and that’s what’s guaranteed to happen, if we start cheating.  How smart is it to give up half our assets, ruin our kids lives and generally disrupt many years of our own lives just because we aren’t getting laid enough at home or don’t like the way our spouse squeezes the toothpaste? And if the relationship is bad enough that it can’t be saved, we should at least respect our spouse and ourselves enough to end it before we begin doing stupid things.
 
None of us know the inside workings of Tiger’s marriage, but to outward appearances, it was okay and maybe even really good. But, like all people in his position, somehow his crotch began doing too much of his thinking and screwed more than his mistress (s). Look at what he has lost: his family, his reputation, the respect of the world and a massive amount of money.
 
Generally speaking, a guy needs to think further than six inches ahead and consider the awful effects his actions will have on those he cares about. Unfortunately, to certain types their arrogance far outweighs their commonsense and compassion and they disserve the high price they’ll pay. Their families, however, don’t disserve it. And that’s reason enough to keep it zipped.
 
There’s a lesson in this for all of us.
 
Quote of the week:
Why is it that a press corps that can ferret out huge numbers of Woods’ playmates, complete with e-mails, photos and recorded phone messages, can’t find Obama’s birth certificate or collage transcripts?
 
You’re gonna love this! Click HERE for a Christmas card from Abigail the cat.

12 Dec 09 -- In The Eye Of...
 
To support my advertising graphics business I have a large, and quite complete, photo studio set up that collapses into one wall of my shop. I’m usually shooting such exciting items as aftermarket stainless steel mufflers and racing headers, which don’t exactly blow my skirt. But, once in a while I shoot something that makes for a fun afternoon.
 
My friends, and friends of my friends, know I have this studio photo capability and a couple times a year I’ll get a call “I have this old gizmo I want to put on eBay. Can you shoot it for me.” If I have the studio set up, which is most of the time, I oblige. This week I got a call that was a little different: “I’m working out a trade with a museum for a couple of their Thompsons. Can you shoot some pictures of the stuff I want to trade?” The “stuff” turned out to be some guns I’ve never actually seen, others I’ve seen and not fired, and a couple I’m old friends with. All of them were high-end, extremely high quality, fully licensed, collector’s grade Class III (full auto) weapons. And they definitely did blow my skirt.
 
Even though the majority of my time in the studio is spent shooting catalog shots, which can be pretty damn boring, I still work hard at putting quality, and maybe even a little art, into something as mundane as an exhaust header or a shift arm. I want to make them look classy. Or at least interesting. When shooting my friend’s machine guns, however, it was a different deal. They needed no help looking interesting and once again had me questioning why I like guns.

Standard Union sidearm during the Civil War, the 1860 Colt is a classic example of art and history. Look at the way the barrel curves into the cylinder and loading lever area. They didn't have to make it so smooth and artful. And talk about history: this one has a piece of paper inside the grips that identify the owner as Captain Andrew Smith of the 134th Williamstown Volunteers. Very, very cool!

I’ve often said that it’s not the shooting aspect of firearms that interests me, but the art and the history guns represent. And some of them, especially older ones, have curves and shapes that can only be called artistic. However, when you look at something like a Browning machine gun, most folks would say that you’re stretching the definition of “artistic,” if you try to apply the term. Still, when I look at them, especially some of the ones in this batch, I still see an industrial sort of art in the way they are machined and the connection to history is undeniable. How can you not look at a Bren gun, for instance, and not see a Tommy staggering on shore at Normandy with it. Or see a Browning machine gun and not connect it with desperate times for America’s warriors going back nearly a century?
 
This discussion is impossible to have using nothing but words, so just click on Photos and we’ll continue this with some eye candy. There are only a half dozen or so, but worth looking at…assuming you’re into such things.

4 Dec 09 -- Bump, Bump, Bumpin' Along
 
This week I had a really cool e-mail cross my desk that included photos of one of the latest car crazes to hit car-crazy California: driving restored bumper cars on the street. I laughed out loud when I saw that, then, at the same time, a little sadness come over me. That’s the kind of thing we used to expect from California, but the state is changing fast. And how soon will other states follow?

The bigger-than-a-bumper-car driver doesn't help the image but it IS cute!

First, the bumper cars: this is the one and only mention I’ve seen of them, and you’d think they’d pop up in one of the street rod mags, but they haven’t yet. They appear to be mounted on the chassis of those bigger-than-normal-and-therefore-street-legal ATV’s I see around here. So they’re using a motorcycle sized four-stroke engine and have full gearing and street equipment. I love it! Absolutely love it! Only in California would an oddball idea like this prosper. I predict we’ll see rumblings of it crossing the country before long.

That’s the way it has always been: California comes up with a new fad, a new technology, a new philosophy and before long, it has taken root everywhere, including small towns in Nebraska. How else did I get sucked into the hotrod culture? For a good portion of my life, I couldn’t see myself living anywhere but Southern California. Now, forty-something years later, you couldn’t pay me to live there. Something has gone awry and it’s more than just the traffic.
 
Considering that California was founded by, and is still very much populated by, individualists, how did they come to be a culture of over-regulation, over-taxation and over-spending? Much worse, most of California’s problems aren’t unique to California. In its historical role as being the leader in new movements, it is showing us all where we are guaranteed to wind up unless we get control of ourselves and our governments.
 
Some hard decisions are going to have to be made. For one thing, we can’t let ourselves be so focused on green that we don’t do the entire equation and we solve a short term problem but create a long term one (think Prius batteries, ethanol, those new twisty, don’t-break-‘em, light bulbs and farm districts that have been shut down to save a snail.). At the very least we need to come up with solutions in which we don’t kill the horse just to cure a manure problem. All it takes is a little common sense and a willingness to make haste slowly.
 
The same thing applies to off shore drilling, opening up oil leases in AK and similar controversies. Those working the North Slope say their activities aren’t even noticed by the wild life, but we need oil to buy time for us to develop viable alternatives.
 
California is being especially hurt by the let’s-take-care-of-every-living-soul-citizen-or-not attitude. It’s a simple fact of life that there will always be haves and have-nots. That’s the nature of civilization. But, we can’t penalize the haves for having and give everything to the have-nots or you wind up with a country of use-to-haves and no functioning businesses to employ the have-nots. Besides, handouts never result in higher self-esteem.
 
It’s really amazing, considering the intellects involved, that states like California and Arizona are teetering on bankruptcy. However, for the most part, we did it to ourselves by first putting too much trust in our elected officials and then demanding too much in the way of life style and infrastructure. To make it worse, we’re ignoring the needs of our citizens in favor of the needs of non-citizens. And then there’s the little matter of the debt we’re saddling future generations with. Our leaders aren’t stupid and neither are we. Still, we’ve managed to paint ourselves into a very dark corner.
 
However, even though California is struggling, it seems nothing can stifle the creativity or the wonderful nuttiness of those individualists who made the state what it is. So, before you think the world is coming to an end, relax and see how others are dealing with it. Click here, Bumper Cars.  

24 Nov 09 -- Caution: Maturity Ahead?
 
Last weekend I went to the annual Good Guys rod and custom show and knocked myself on my butt by doing something totally out of character: I saw something I really wanted in the swap mart, I had the money in my pocket, but I didn’t buy it! Holy crap! You don’t suppose maturity in the form of being able to control my desires is starting to catch up with me, do you? Bummer!
 
First, it’s important to know that the Good Guys swap meet that surrounds the rod and custom show is always a gold mine of neat sh*t. If you can walk the two hundred yards of exhibitors (that may be stretching the term “exhibitor” since it’s just a bunch of folks with truck loads of stuff spread out) and not wind up buying something, you have better self-control than most of us.
 
Truth is, I never, as in never, go to these meets with the intent of finding anything specific. I’m just looking for stuff that lights my wick. Last year, for instance, I stumbled across an oxy-acetylene cutting torch that was nearly four feet long. How can you pass something like that up? Especially when it’s only twenty bucks. And then there was the old hundred-dollar anvil (I’m still looking for a larger one). I’m just keeping my antenna up for neat stuff that needs a new home. This year that “stuff” hit me right between the eyes as soon as we walked in.
 
The very first, and I mean the VERY first pile of crap we came too really set my head spinning. Right there, where you couldn’t miss it when you first come in, was the rusty little boat. Well, not exactly “little” as it was about five feet long, but it tickled the hell out of me. It was one of those carnival boats from the ‘40s or ‘50s that floated in a tank with a dozen others and cruised in a circle with little kids in them (this one didn’t have the little kid). It was a vague cross between a PT boat and a Chris-Craft and I instantly envisioned it totally restored and floating in our swimming pool, electrified and rigged for remote control. What an incredibly cool little artifact!!  

You have to admit that this is damn cute! Picture it in your swiming pool converted to remote control.

I looked it over fairly carefully and found it had all the original fittings and lights, it only had surface rust and it would be an easy restoration project. And that’s what stopped me from buying it: the word “project.”
 
I had him down to $300 and I had the money in my pocket, but the word “project” jumped up like a gigantic neon stop sign as if saying, “Hey, dummy!! You aren’t getting anything done on the dozens of other projects you have in the hopper. Do you think you’re going to live to be 150. Prioritize! Go home after the show and do a little work on The Roadster. Or the Ruger grips. Or the 1000 yard Mauser. Or….”
 
I pulled my hand out of my pocket, leaving the money clip inside and forced myself to walk on. In a sick sort of way I was proud of myself.
 
For the next two days, I’d turn base with students right over the show and I’d purposely pull the Pitts into a tight turn so I could look down and see if my boat was still there. I was vaguely relieved, when I saw it disappear. I was also pissed: trying to act mature really sucks!

Sixteen bucks well invested: my heater and hammer

But, I didn’t leave empty handed. For fifteen dollars I brought home a rusty, but complete heater out of something that could be modified to fit the roadster (a decade or two from now, when I finish it) and I scored a really nice little mini-sledge hammer for a buck. So, it was a good day and I didn’t have to worry about where to put a five-foot boat.
 
Still…..
 
For a short photo tour of Good Guys Scottsdale, 2009 CLICK HERE.
 

13 Nov 09 -- Red Rocks, Billionaires and Antlers
 
This has been an interesting week with a wide series of fun, grueling and mildly exciting highs and lows that culminated with a hardcore reminder of what a little spontaneity can do for you.
 
Although Marlene and I pride ourselves in thinking that we’re spontaneous people, we really aren’t. I’ll say, “Hey, let’s go to a movie,” but before we ever make it out the door we both find things we really should be doing and the movie never happens. Our responsible selves almost always overrule our spontaneous selves. This week, however, the high point was when we both caved in to spontaneity and went with it.
 
Marlene had a long-standing plan to meet her sister in San Francisco on Wednesday for her birthday and they’d tour the Napa Valley wine country for four days. Then, her sister abruptly announced she had been diagnosed with H1N1. Trip was off, Marlene was disappointed and I was upset that she was upset. Then I amazed myself: with no fore planning whatsoever, I called from the airport after my first hop and said, “Call Sedona, get us into a high end spa, pack our bags and we’re out of here at three o’clock. No arguing, no discussion, just do it.”
 
I’d had been flying five hours a day (in three different airplanes, A and C model Pitts and a Skybolt) and fighting a crushing magazine production deadline and I really needed some down time. More important, she and I needed some time together.
 
You’ll never know how surprised I was to come home and have her meet me at the door with packed bags and no excuses. A half hour later we were on the way to Sedona, only two hours and an entire culture away. And it was Thursday. Wild!
 
For those who have never been, Sedona (north of Phoenix in the high country) is one of the most magical geographic spots in the US. Red rock formations and one topographical surprise after another make the place really fun to visit. At the same time, it has been discouraging over the years to watch it change. I like to think of it as the sleepy little mountain town I’d visit with my folks where they used to film westerns using the red rocks as backdrops. Unfortunately, that little town is long gone, replaced by an Aspenesque tourist and super-summer home extravaganza where, as one of the locals put it, “The billionaires are chasing out all the millionaires.”

Even the billionaires-in-residence can't spoil this kind of vista.

All that having been said, millionaires/billionaires can’t spoil the surroundings: Sedona/Aspen/Telluride will always have the mountains and the smell of pines and wood smoke to remind us what is real.
 
That night, as we sat on the edge of a stone terrace, with nothing but three feet of river bank between us and the always-babbling Oak Creek, we had one of the best meals we’ve ever had. Then we turned ourselves into silly putty as we soaked…and soaked…then soaked some more in the huge hot tub that was part of our room.
 
The next morning, just for grins, we cruised the high-rent housing district and were suitably amazed. Then we hit the few junk shops (we love rust and true junk) that still manage to survive in the cracks between the rhinestone T-shirt boutiques. We scored some silverwork for Xmas presents from a couple of Navajo artists in a roadside tent, Marlene got some petrified wood for candle bases and I bought enough raw deer antlers to keep me in the knife and tool making business for years. Another quick, and extremely good, sandwich at a small, out-of-the-way eatery and we were on the road home.
 
We rolled back through our front door almost exactly twenty-four hours from when we left. However, as we settled back into our just-barely-interrupted routine, we were both in far better moods than when we left. It was time well spent, Marlene had a terrific birthday, and I can highly recommend the concept.
 
All work and no play may or may not make Jack a dull boy, but stepping outside of ourselves for a few hours can certainly keep us from being cranky boys.
 
This Week’s Heads-up
 
Okay, for those of you who don’t know International Military Antiques (IMA), don’t hold it against me when I give you their URL. However, even though I know it’ll cost you money, I can’t help myself. I buy stuff from them periodically (I got my Lewis gun drum magazines from them, a new barrel for it, and various other goodies) and last week, as part of my new-found spontaneity, late one night I ordered one of the original Kukri’s (the really scary, big knife Gurkhas carried) they have for sale. It showed up this week and I had to share my new toy with you.

Hand forged, this particular one was issued during WWI. I ordered from the hand select menu and it's in amazingly good condition considering.

If you don’t buy anything from IMA, at least order their “Treasure is Where you Find it” book and DVD (http://www.ima-usa.com/index.php/cPath/36). They chronicle the almost-impossible-to-believe discovery and their moving of the Royal Armory of Nepal, where Nepal had been depositing weapons, when they became obsolete, since 1816. Absolutely an amazing video and story. It’ll make you believe in the concept of treasure hunting all over again.
 
IMA home is http://www.ima-usa.com/. Like I said, don’t hold it against me when you can’t control your credit card. Waaaay too much neat stuff.

 

7 Nov 09 -- Who Are You?

I’m not certain what brought this up, but in a conversation this week in which a flying student was trying to characterize me, I got to thinking: if you had to characterize yourself in a single sentence, or phrase, what would that be?
 
Most of us, when meeting someone for the first time almost immediately form a word image of how we see that person, e.g. “…quick mind and surprisingly open to new ideas but a little retiring.”
 
“…super liberal with a hard edge, so none of the off-the-cuff, redneck comments I’m famous for. And don’t mention you-know-who or we’ll get in an urinary competition.” 
 
“…very laid back and easy going, with a quiet humor. He’s broadly experienced and interested in a lot of stuff so I can use obscure references and he’ll pick-up on them. I think I like this guy!”
 
Marlene and I go through the personality evaluation, instant characterization, thing on an almost weekly basis because of the B & B that’s part of our flight training business. Most of the time, when you meet a new person, you make a snap judgment, then both parties toddle off their separate ways and we never have an opportunity to see if the snap judgment holds or gets modified with familiarity. In our case, the people we meet are standing at our front door and will be living with us for a week, so we have plenty of time to fine tune our initial characterization of them. FYI—most of the time, what we see during that first sixty-second introduction holds true for the week but gains depth and substance.
 
Incidentally, the dead giveaway as to the kind of people with whom we’ll be sharing our home (and I’ll be bouncing around the pattern with) comes from the way in which our pets react to them the very second they come in the door. For instance, if Sháhn-deen, the hyper-friendly, hyper-kinetic Pomeranian barks a welcome in her normal playful way and tries to climb up their legs, we have an instant clue to the inner soul of this person and they can’t hide it. 100% of the time, when Sháhn-deen acts that way, our relationship with the guest (s), which are often couples, develops in a softer friendlier way right from the beginning. If she hangs back, nose to the floor, butt in the air and her welcome bark has a little edge to it, we know we’re likely to have a different, not as open, relationship with this guest. You can’t hide your true self from an animal. Especially a dog.
 
An addendum to the foregoing: if Sháhn-deen tries to climb up their leg and they don’t reach down and scratch her, or otherwise recognize her, that says something vaguely disturbing about them. This is probably a terrible thing to say, but when she’s reaching out for affection and someone ignores her, or shows irritation, it pisses me off just a little. How dare they! :-)
 
What we don’t know is how our guests are characterizing us in their minds. This instant evaluation thing happens on both sides of any meeting and this week I started wondering how I’d characterize myself if I met myself for the first time.
 
I know for a fact that because my mind is often going a mile a minute, especially at airshows, I sometimes come off aloof and arrogant. I try not to, but it happens anyway and I often hear about it. A**hole is the short hand version most often used. Similarly, I often hear that I’m too intense and don’t smile enough. I’ll cop to the intense part, but the smile thing is partly mechanical: the default position for my face is a frown andI can’t do anything about it.  If I relax, I’m frowning. At least on the outside.
 
If you ever see a picture of Marlene and me and I’m smiling, it’s because she has a technique for making me smile in pictures: she reaches around and grabs my butt!  Yeah, once again, too much information.
 
So, if I look in a mirror, how would I characterize myself? Simple: “Crude but effective with barely controlled ADD.”  I thought about tossing in “…mildly handsome,” but my naturally humble nature stopped me. Yeah, right!
 
One of the most important aspects of this process is recognizing that how we see ourselves is probably not even close to the way others see us. And we’re not likely to get an accurate assessment of that image.
 
So now it’s your turn: in twenty-five words or less—who are you? This can be a good self-actualizing exercise. Or maybe a great way to get depressed.
 
PS
None of the foregoing matters because my dog loves me and, in the long run, that’s what really counts.
 
Weekly Heads-up
This is a new feature I’m going to do from time to time and this week I’m calling attention to a newly released book that came across my desk.
 
The name of the book is Empty Quarter by George Steinmetz. It’s printed in an oversize format and is what all coffee table books try to be, but usually aren’t. It is 98% photos all of which are 150% beautiful and unexpected.

Cover image shot from a paraglider (powered parachute).

The Empty Quarter in the title is the desert, sort of a smaller Sahara, that straddles the borders of Yemen, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates on the Arabian Peninsula. It is not only possibly the most hostile, nearly uninhabitable area in the world, but it has one of the longest histories of civilizations trying to conquer it only to fail. The area is littered with the ruins of long, long gone cultures while the Bedouins still thrive at its fringes as they have for thousands of years.
 
What really sets this book apart is that much of the photography is from an aerial point of view: Stienmetz is cruising around in a powered parachute (paraglider?) and that, combined with his obvious talent with a lens, makes for striking images.
 
This book is outrageous not only in its beauty, but in the way it opens a totally unknown part of the world to us armchair explorers.
 
It’s published by Abrams, ISBN: 978-0-8109-8381-6 and would make a terrific Xmas gift. Go to www.abramsbooks.com.  Or, just to let her know her press release worked, drop a note to Katrina Weidknecht, kweidknecht@abramsbooks.com, and tell her you saw it here.

31 Oct 09 -- The Internet Blues

Am I the only one who has gotten to the point that, if we see it on the Internet or the web, we assume it’s BS? I hate this!  Really hate it! What started out as this mind-boggling information and communication tool has become the playground for information manipulators and cyber-outlaws and we’re all getting screwed.
 
The Internet is a double-edged sword because ANYONE who wants to reach millions of people can eventually gain access to them. That’s its best, and worse, attribute because that includes those who want to push an agenda, sell a product or simply cause havoc for the sheer helluvit. Also, those individuals who previously could only stand on a corner talking gibberish to those who happen to walk by, can now create an international, sometimes well hidden, presence for themselves.  Let’s take this last point first.
 
This week I received a URL to a wild looking sort of mechanical contrivance that shot balls into the air and played music as the balls hit different pieces of the machine. The verbiage attached said it was a joint venture between a university engineering department and a music academy. It gave specifics of what university, the number of manhours it took to build and debug the machinery (13,201 hours), etc and was very convincing. As you watched the machine in action you couldn’t help but think, “Is this real or what?”  Still, it was fascinating to watch. So we all forwarded it. And, of course, shortly there after someone came back and pointed out that it was a selection off a known DVD of computer-generated graphics. So, why did someone decide to build a totally phony story around it and circulate it? It was fascinating in its own right. Why embellish it and point it in a different direction?  
 
And then there was the story dancing around last year about recently-released State Department memos confirming the existence of a heretofore-unknown WWII group similar to the Flying Tigers in China but they were working in Russia helping fight the Germans before our entry into the War. There were all sorts of fuzzy images of airplanes and pilots and it had the aviation history community jumping all over itself for about a week. Then someone figured out that this was part of the already existing background story for a video combat game but someone had decided to repackage for the net as just-found “…amazing new historical facts.”
 
Who does this kind of crap? We can all point to hundreds of similar such bogus packages that hit our computers all seemingly authentic and all phony as three-dollar bills. Who has the time to do this kind of thing and why? What can they possibly gain from it?
 
The same questions have to be asked about the sub-culture that generates computer virus’s (virae?): why? What do they gain other than the knowledge that they are causing a lot of heartburn to millions of people they don’t even know. They obviously just like messing with people’s heads, but, again, why? There are a lot of twisted minds out there. Maybe not enough of them were breastfed or something.
 
And then there’s the amazing ability the internet and web give to editorialize and/or edit pre-existing material. Maybe a press release or news story comes out that is fact, but, somewhere along the line, as it passes through thousands of computers, someone can’t help but add a little comment of their own. Then someone else down the line does the same thing. Pretty soon the original intent of the piece has been perverted to make a point that wasn’t intended. Yet it looks authentic.
 
And then are those who cherry-pick facts and package them in ways that tell a story that bolsters their point of view—but it’s almost never the whole story (think, Michael Moore). If their story is unique, controversial or makes a powerful point, they have only to send it to a fairly small mailing list then sit back and watch as it spiderwebs out and covers entire nations in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, their message has been shaded one way or the other and this is what is becoming the real problem: without research we don’t know how many of the facts are skewed or possibly flat wrong.
 
Nowhere is the foregoing truer than with politics. Both sides of the aisle have very expensive, high-caliber talent whose entire job is to create missives to launch either directly into the internet stream or through their websites. Usually it’s easy to see that these are “opinion pieces” and may have a bias but we’re so covered up with them that we lose our ability to clearly separate the wheat from the chaff.
 
The real downside to the barrage of the  “this is the truth, don’t listen to the other guys” messages is that we are all now cyber-cynics. If it’s on the net/web, we don’t trust it. And, while that’s a healthy outlook, it’s sad because we don’t know who we can trust to tell us what’s happening to our country and what’s good, or bad, for it. No one is standing right in the middle and reporting evenly from both sides of an argument and letting us make up our own minds—not even Glenn Beck,  (in Beck’s defense, he at least admits right up front that he has a decided lean to the right…not a bad thing). Unfortunately, the net gives far too many people nearly instant access to our lives and about two-thirds of them don’t have our best interests at heart.
 
Don’t you wish we had a “delete” button that in our real life will let us skip people and events as easily as we can trash spam? Think how simple life could be. However, if that were the case, you wouldn’t be reading this blog because someone would have deleted me long ago.

24 Oct 09 -- Scratching Itches

I hereby declare that today is “Prince Day” in the Davisson household: I’m a Prince and can, and will, do any damn thing I want. No work. I’m off the clock. Taking the day off. Goofing off. Screwing around. You get the picture.
 
The only reason I mention this is that it happens so seldom. Normally, even a day off includes several early morning hours on the computer doing something magazine related. But not today (if you don’t count the two hours it’ll take me to do this blog…oh, well). Further, today, the Prince that I am has officially declared that the subset of “Prince Day” is “Roadster Day.” After I put these words up on the web. I’m going out into the shop and get my hands dirty.
 
Actually, what I’m going to do is a continuation of a small trend that has been developing lately: I’ve started working on the car again and the psychological fall-out has been significant. Here’s a question for all of us: just about everyone reading this knows we feel better if a project we hold close to our heart is making progress, so why don’t we do it more often? Today, that project is the roadster.

Left knee panel: It's brushed steel that I'll clear coat.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve finished detailing most of the under-dash-sheet metal and today I think I’m going to tackle some of the engine details: make up the plug wires, make stand offs to move the coil an inch outboard for radiator pipe clearance, make up some 1⁄2” spacers to raise the engine slightly for more header-to-steering box clearance.
 
The important fact here is that all of these details have been nagging at the corner of my mind and ticking them off my mental checklist will yield a tremendous feeling of achievement.
 
All of us have a series of things lurking around the edges of our minds that fall into the someday-I’ll-get at them category. We’re surrounded by them on a daily basis. Maybe it’s a dripping faucet, a loose cabinet hinge, a friend we’ve been meaning to call, etc. We know it won’t take much to scratch that itch, but somehow we develop a tremendous ability to ignore them indefinitely in favor of doing things that are more important, more fun or are part of work. In my case, these aren’t honey-does because Marlene doesn’t even know they exist. The items are doing their own nagging and I hear them talking to me every single day. But I ignore them. Something, however, started happening a couple weeks ago that I can’t explain and “Roadster Day” is a continuation of that.
 
It started when I walked through the door to the garage and once again heard the top hinge protest and the door lock barely engaged. I had known for months that, if I tightened the top hinge screws, the door would lock perfectly. But I had been saying “next time” for nearly a year. Then something triggered in my brain and I decided that this was “next time:” I walked back to the bench, grabbed a screwdriver and tightened the screws. It was a nothing event, but it made me felt good for the entire rest of the day.

Door Pull: Doesn't look like much but it eliminated an annoyance.

The next day I had a slight gap between work projects, so I got up, fired up the torch bent some metal, ground it to shape and made a pull-handle for one of our back gates that we have to fight to close every time we let Sháhn-deen out. A half hour well invested. Then, for some reason, the same week, I glued up the split back door and ran some bolts through it to beef it up. What the hell is getting into me?
 
One of my more identifiable characteristics has always been the ability to raise procrastination to a higher art form. However, the feel-good factor attached to attacking those minor items that have been irritating me, was becoming addictive. And it’s accelerating: this week I upped the ante and scratched a really big psychological itch—I pulled the trigger on rehabilitating my old Honda. I officially made the commitment to drive the old girl for the rest of my life and began treating her accordingly.
 
I made that monumental decision on the way home from the airport, so I dog-legged over to a NAPA store and I ordered every single hose and piece of rubber under the hood, most of which were still the originals from 1990. This included everything in the ignition system, a set of half-shafts, etc. If it was worn (it has 217,000 miles so everything is worn), it got replaced including the timing belt, since I couldn’t remember exactly when it had been replaced.  Then a amazing thing: I called the Honda dealer and found I could order a new hood (a stepson brought the car back from a desert kegger with two butt-shaped dents in the hood) for $200 and a bumper for $100. So even the body is going to get straightened out.
 
And today nagging items on the roadster will be de-nagged. So, I’m feeling good. It’s amazing how doing what you know should be done pays off. This is all so cool, I can’t stand it! :-)

17 Oct 09 -- About Those Computer Games: US Geek Force?

It’s interesting that after my semi-rant last week about computer games slowing our kids down in the real world, that today I get a release from the Air Force saying  how they are going to give flight pay to UAV pilots. In addition it says USAF’s goal is to have no combat pilots by 2047. We’ll have an Air Force composed entirely of gigantic model airplanes!?
 
So, we’re moving into an era where the generations of kids brought up sitting in front of a computer playing games and flying flight sims are going to be first in line for pilot slots. If that’s what you want to call them. The fact that they will be wearing silver wings on their uniforms will say they are pilots. Their pay grade will say they are pilots. Their MOS number will say they are pilots. But, it’s going to be damn hard for them to look in the mirror and say, “Yeah, I’m a combat pilot” regardless of how many missions they’ve flown or how much ordnance they’ve dropped. Something about sitting in an air-conditioned room in Florida while your ordnance hits a hut in Afghanistan seems a little “non-piloty” doesn’t it? With no skin in the game, how can they see themselves in the same league as the thousands of P-47, Phantom, A-6, Warthog and other pilots who have gone before?
 

Somehow flying one of these doesn't seem the same as flying a Hornet, Tomcat or Phantom does it?

This brings up an interesting point, which speaks to why the Pentagon wants to go this way to begin with. The purpose of any combat aircraft is to delivery ordnance on target. In effect, when used in the ground attack role, it is super expensive, highly intelligent artillery. Increasingly, however, as missiles and bombs have grown brains, the airplane has become nothing more than a launch platform for smart bombs that can find Akhmid wherever he’s hiding. That being the case, a UAV can do the same thing: launch the missile/bomb and let it do its thing. And it can do it cheaper with zero risk to human life. Plus the “pilot” can be trained in two months.
 
But, what about the role of what is going to be considered the “old fashioned” fighter pilot? The guy who now is hustling around in an F-15 or Raptor, or whatever? What about air superiority? Are we going through another of those “the day of the dogfight is gone forever” cycles that gave us Phantoms without guns, only to be remedied when low-buck MiG 17’s and -19’s knocked down an embarrassing number of very expensive aircraft and the powers-that-be saw the light and armed the Phantom properly?
 
Yeah, right now we’re fighting nations that effectively have no air forces, but those on the horizon, the Iran’s, China’s, Korea’s will be no push-overs. I haven’t seen USAF’s approach to that scenario. Presumably they’ll still need pilots on board their birds for that mission. Assuming they think that mission is real.
 
There’s something else about depending so heavily on UAV’s that has been playing on my mind, although I’m certain there are much better brains than mine working on this problem. Basically, anything that is digital can eventually be jammed or hacked. This is doubly so for wireless gizmos like UAV’s. Right now UAV’s are a battlefield novelty and haven’t become a major factor. If, however, they are destined to become serious battlefield threats, that means they will soon represent a worthwile market for the sales of counter measures. And, if there is one place we have an overabundance of talent it is in hacking computer systems. Or at the very least, screwing them up. And that market will grow right along with the UAV.
 
I can easily see a scenario where someone hacks the computers controlling the UAV and turns it on its masters. Or jams it and renders it mindless.
 
Even if a UAV is autonomous and has no homebase link, once there is money to be made by creating something to defeat it, someone, and it could be a kid with a Mac in a back bedroom, will come up with a way to do it. Count on it. And it won’t be nearly as expensive as developing stealth-defeating radar or missiles to track and destroy fast moving targets. They don’t have to destroy the machine. Just redirect it.
 
When it comes to the missions and methods of the Air Force, the next decade or two is going to be very interesting.
 
Here’s the entire release for the details.
http://aimpoints.hq.af.mil/display.cfm?id=35999
 

11 Oct 09 -- It All Started With a Fox .35
 
Recently I’ve had a few things pop up that have challenged some of my most closely held beliefs, the main one being: “It is important to know how to use your hands in creating/repairing mechanical stuff?” But am I wrong? Are we entering the Age of the Geek, and once again I’m applying generational thought patterns to the wrong situation?
 
This thought occurred at a family gathering, which included some teenagers. At the dinner table they, and one of the other thirty-something members, started talking about how much time they spent playing games on a worldwide network. In fact, the thirty year old often teamed with the twelve year old in some of the games.
 
They went off in fits of enthusiasm about the Game Trucks and Games To Go: plush, converted tractor trailers that are equipped with huge plasma screens, satellite uplinks and the absolute latest in interactive games in which they could do battle with scores of other players in other dark rooms across the globe (Google “Game Trucks”).  They ranted about how they played at least three to four hours a night and seven or more hours a day on weekends.
 
The evening left me profoundly sad. I knew the kids at the table well and I knew how mechanically challenged they all were. I also knew that of the young adults at the table, all of whom had grown up in the computer age, none of them could explain the basics of how a car engine worked. Or could do something as simple as replacing the lockset in a door in their house. In my mind, they knew none of the basics of life.
 
The next morning I was in one of those “shop fits,” we all go through periodically: “I’m going to get this shop cleaned up today, if it kills me!” I started tearing through boxes, many of which had been in storage in NC for nearly 15 years. As I opened the smaller box on top, I felt a little corner of my soul brighten, as I saw the layer upon layer of model airplane engines, one of my really serious weak spots.

Me on the left at a local event where adults tried to get us interested in models. He who flew the most laps got one of the Walker Fire Babies. They sure got me hooked. and still am. I'd really like to still be flying U-control, but don't know where I can do it.

As picked out the ancient Fox .35, my mind instantly flashed back to the worn work bench in my family’s basement where the person I am now got its start. And this old Fox .35 was pivotal in that.
 
This was all before radio control and when you said “model airplane,” you were talking either free flight or U-control and I was an absolute U-control junkie. Starting at about eleven years old with 1/2A mouse motors and mini airplanes, I slowly figured out what my hands were for and how to craft things that flew with increasingly smaller amounts of blood on the balsa (“Blood on the Balsa”, sounds like a teenage murder mystery).

My trusty Fox .35 (circa 1954). This old boy bit the dust many, many times but never failed to start. I learned sooo much from it.

When I graduated from.049’s to the mighty .35 Fox, I had arrived! I was one of the big guys and I now realize that so many of the abilities I now possess from welding to metal working to gun building, etc., etc. all started right there with building model airplanes. More important, the joy—actually more of an addiction—of creating something out of nothing and the fun of solving problems became a part of my thought patterns that never changed.
 
This is how so many in my generation learned what we learned. Usually models gave way to a junk car or two and between them, we gained the skills that serve us well as adults.
 
After I found the old Fox .35 and carried it into the office, I sat down at the computer to do some graphics work. As I typed, I thought back to the dinner the night before: was I wrong in thinking these kids weren’t preparing themselves for the world?
 
The world today is largely digital. From our wrist watches to our work stations to the gas pumps that feed our digitally-based cars, everything is X’s and O’s, 1’s and 2s’. And this is something many in my generation were slow to come to grips with but is finally becoming part of their comfort zone.

I got back into U-control in the '70's and flew these Super Tigres. They make the Fox look super crude. Fine pieces of machining and I like to just look at them.

So, maybe I’m being too hard on the younger generations and their play really is teaching them skills that will be applicable to the world they are growing into. That having been said, however, God help them if they find themselves in a situation where it is necessary they utilize some good old analog skills, like figuring out how to get their car out of a ditch, or defending themselves from outrageous weather in a power failure or any of a million other things that demand they know more than they learned at a computer.
 
The laws of physics and the lessons taught by Archimedes, Newton and all those other guys, don’t depend on computers. Or digits. And computers can’t teach the applications of those principles. Only getting your hands dirty will.
 
Excuse me now: I have to put this up on my website (which I mostly built and totally maintain myself—not bad for a gray dog) and then go out and do some welding on The Roadster. Gotta keep things in balance, you know.
 

3 Oct 09 -- Of Anniversaries and Partnerships
 
Today is our anniversary. Number eleven. And no, I didn’t forget it. I may be dumb, but I’m not suicidal. However, as my alarm went off at its usual 0445 time and Marlene slid across the bed to snuggle a little before I launched into another day, I had time to think about us. And marriage. And what I may or may not have learned about the institution.
 
First, I have been fortunate to have been married to two really worthwhile women. However, only once have I been married to the “right” woman: Marlene. My first wife (Marlene hates it when I say “first wife” because it sounds as if I’ve had quite a number of them) was, and is, a good woman and we get along great. In fact, at my daughter’s wedding last year, the four of us sat up past mid-night yukking it up like old friends. Because that’s what we are. Old friends. I know this sounds weird, but I’ve never totally understood how you could love someone and have kids with them and then suddenly hate them for the rest of your life.
 
The reason for our divorce was that the differences in personalities and temperaments that we thought were unique and quaint at the beginning (a slow-talking, Nebraska small town kid married to a fast moving Newark street savage) , turned out to be unworkable as she matured. I, of course, didn’t mature, and we just became the wrong people to be under the same roof. Had she not pulled the plug, I’d probably still be back there beating my head against the wall trying to figure out how to make her happy, not realizing I didn’t have what it takes in so many areas to make either one of us happy. So, she did a good thing for both of us. I didn’t actually know how good a thing she did for us until I met Marlene: it was only then that I realized how much had been missing from the first relationship and what is necessary make a marriage really work.

One of my favorite shots of Marlene, AKA Grammy or the Arizona Redhead, with our grand kids.

Marlene and I came together at identical junctures in our lives. We were both going through divorces, both dead broke, both had zero credit (funny how divorces do that to you), yet both of us had huge, I mean really HUGE, aspirations. We were down, but we sure as hell weren’t out and we weren’t going to let ourselves be held down by minor inconveniences like having nothing even resembling financial security or revenue sources. And therein lies one of the factors I now know can make a marriage really sing: partnership and goals.
 
We may not have been at the bottom, but from where we were standing, we could sure as hell see the bottom. But, we were like a pair Clydesdales: we just put our heads down, leaned into life’s harness and started trudging ahead, shoulder-to-shoulder every inch of the way.   She has always had her own business (Specialty Advertising sales) and she took over the management of our finances while I was out there running around beating on trees trying to knock fruit to the ground while I worked to develop revenue sources and new businesses.
 
To give some reference points for where we started, our credit was so trashed we couldn’t rent a car except for cash. That’s bad! Today we’re in the top few percentile of credit ratings and it’s due almost entirely to her efforts.
 
We met and started lewdly cohabiting (the legal definition) 17 years ago.  And every day since then has been an adventure in moving upward, in coming up with new ideas, refining old ones and glorying in a relationship in which there is not only total love and commitment but respect and sometimes, amazement at who and what we’ve become.
 
It’s a cliché to say that we’re each other’s best friend, but clichés become clichés because they are true: there is no one I’d rather spend time with than Marlene. We laugh, we touch, we have uproariously crazy times together and it’s largely because, even though we’re black and white in some of our personality traits, we are, nonetheless, partners and can see past those differences to the things that matter.
 
I’m not sure I know exactly what a soul mate is, but I know it can’t be any better than what Marlene and I have together. We essentially function as a single being and I know how wildly lucky we are to have found one another. And it doesn’t take an anniversary to remind me of that.

Each morning, as I stumble around in the darkened bedroom, I look at the redheaded lump on the other half of the bed (surrounded by animals) and start my day by remembering where much of my strength comes from. And those of us who have good marriages should all do the same. Without the right woman, most of us would be nothing.
 

20 Sept 09 -- Be a Good Samaritan? Tough Call!
 
This thing about self defense, concealed carry and all that can, on one hand, be pretty black and white: you or your loved ones are about to be hurt. Bang! End of conversation. But what about the protection of others? And this applies whether you're carrying or not: there it can get pretty damn complicated.
 
The student I had this week recounted a situation in which I’m still wondering exactly what the correct thing to do was. There was the practical way of looking at it and the moral way, which directly contradict one another. Let me set the stage:
 
He was in a restroom in the basement of one of the major casinos in Vegas. It was a large, airport type of latrine and when he entered and unzipped there was another guy three urinals over. He had just started whizzing when someone else joined in next to the first fellow. Then, without warning, yet another individual stepped in grabbed the first guy by the neck and bashed his head into the tiled wall with such force there was blood everywhere and he went down like a sack of potatoes. He hit the floor and the assailant continued by kicking the crap out of him.
 
As this was going on, my student, without interrupting his yellow stream slowly shuffled four urinals fartheraway soiling the wall, the floor and nearly himself (for a different reason).
 
Then, an on-looker jumped on the assailant trying to break it up. That’s when it became apparent that the pee’er in the urinal between my student and the action was a plant because he grabbed the do-gooder and the two of them (both bigger than your normal bears) proceeded to pound the stuffing out of him. That’s when the conspiracy aspect of the assault became apparent and my student saw the two Neatherthals at the door guarding it.
 
He was trapped with two guys at the door and the action going on between himself and the door.
 
My student was a CCW holder but wasn’t carrying at the time, so he was defenseless and likely next on the agenda. By this time people had tried to get into the john, saw what was going on and started yelling for security, so the goons at the door evaporated. My student took a flying leap over the two cretins beating on the good samaritin and made it out the door. In this case, he probably did the right thing.
 
The real question is: if he had been carrying, which he normally did, but he didn’t realize that NV recognized his CCW, what should he have done? And this goes for all of us, when it comes to our fellow man, CCW or not.
 
We hear stories all the time about good samaritins getting mixed up in something and winding up dead or in the hospital. But, how, when something is happening to a fellow human being can we walk away with a clear conscience? At what point do we step in, and when do we back off and think about the effect such an action will have on ourselves, our family and our future? Do we walk away if, as was the case here, the victims were young men, but we don’t walk away, if the victims were elderly? Regardless of the odds, all of us would have a tough time walking away if they were wailing on a couple of old people. Or kids. Or a dog. However, the net result to ourselves in any case would probably be the same: we’d wind up hurt. Or dead. Or, if we were carrying and had to whack or wound the A-holes, we’d probably have no problem legally, but we’d spend every asset we owned in civil court defending ourselves against the family of the slime who were beating on the others.  This could be a tough call and every single situation will be different enough that you really can’t make the decision ahead of time.
 
I don’t think any of us would disagree on the course of action were it ourselves, our family, or our friends. But, where do we draw the line in helping others, when we know there’s likely to be a high cost to ourselves? I guess that’s the measure of the man and we’ll never know until we find ourselves in that situation. And I hope I never do.
 
Most of the foregoing applies to all of us, armed or not. But, if we’re carrying, we need to think about how we’re willing employ that capability because the second we decide to reach for it, we have changed our lives, and possibly those of others, for both good and bad, forever.
 
Gets your brain spinning, doesn’t it?
 
12 Sept 09 -- The Day-After Versus Today
 
Yesterday was THE day: 9/11. Which makes today 9/12 and the entire world is remembering, each region with its own interpretation. Some are rejoicing at a wildly successful blow to Demon America. The rest of us remember with sadness. But the sadness I feel today is only partially caused by 9/11. Much of what I feel is caused by the incredible change in the character of America that has taken place in the last eight years and, on this day, that isn’t what any of us should be feeling.
 
In some ways, 9/12 was harder than 9/11. 9/11 was one of disbelief and enraged numbness: furious on one hand, not knowing exactly how to react on the other. By The Day After, it had sunk in and we were dealing with realities: we were at war with an invisible enemy. We had been smacked in the nose with a brilliant sucker punch and it didn’t take long for us to get pissed. I mean REALLY pissed. Which was a good thing.
 
The next year or two was one of the best periods in American history. Flags were everywhere and everyone was proud to fly them. But what happened? Where did that America go?

From the base of the Civil War statue in the square in my old hometown.

How many flags do you see these days and what do they tell you? Among other things, far too many see an American flag on a car or hat as a political statement that clearly says where that individual stands in the current political spectrum. It is no longer the proud symbol of a nation because a significant portion of the population thinks that when someone is flying the flag, it is a single-finger-salute in which that individual is saying, “…yeah, and you can stuff your Obamacare and your czars and your entire way of running the country and, on top of that, …!”
 
I get the feeling that part of the population feels threatened by someone who is flying the American flag. The flag brands one as an overt patriot (gee, what a terrible thing), which appears to automatically put them on the other side of the fence from the reigning political party. Which begs the question, “Do Democrats fly flags?” I don’t know.
 
How in the hell did this all happen? How did we slide from being one-for-all, all-for-one, to “…you’re a flag flying, god fearing, gun toting radical who doesn’t know how to run a country, so we’re going to run it for you…with our own brand of radicalism…” The flag has become an internal political statement, not a rallying point for a nation.
 
I’ve said it before, but I think that just as Al Queda shaped much of the last eight years, they hold the key to our future. If they pull another 9/11, it’ll galvanize all of those who are on the political fringes into realizing how serious the situation actually is and how silly politics have become. Hopefully, that all-important group of independents and political fringees that stand midway between the two parties and actually decide elections, will turn a deaf ear to anything that reeks of partisan politics in favor of politics that are good for the nation, not a given party.
 
To put it bluntly, a nuke in our midst would save our country. But, I think Al Queda leadership is smarter than that. I think they look at what we’re doing to ourselves and understand that we’re doing a far better job of destroying both the character of America and our economy than anything they can possibly do. I think they are smart enough to understand that another 9/11 would work to our favor, not theirs. 
 
And, if this isn’t a sick way to be thinking on this day, I don’t know what is.
 
Still, not a day goes by that I don’t flash onto watching an airplane hit one of the towers or think about all the volunteers we lost in addition to the victims. And during those private moments, political BS flows from my mind and I’m once again proud of who we can be. And I’m convinced we can be that again.
 
In the meantime, I’m going to a gunshow today. Gee! ‘Wonder if I’ll see any American flags.

6 Sept 09 -- Homeless and Helpless Aren't the Same Thing

It has been nearly two months since I saw the two of them. They were in widely different locations: one standing at the bottom of the La Cienega on-ramp to the I-10 in LA, the other scampering down a fence line at a rest stop in the middle of the desert. One had four legs. One had two. And I can’t get either of them off my mind.
 
I was doing one of my marathon, twelve-hour power drives to and from LA in one day and, when I stopped at the light just before getting up on the Interstate for the return trip, my head was into the six hour drive ahead. Then, I saw him slowly walking down the line of cars ahead toward me. I thought I had seen him, or at least his type, before, but I was wrong.
 
From a distance he looked like the rest of the panhandlers: unshaven, gray, holding the ever-present cardboard sign. As he drew closer, however, he changed ever so slightly: for one thing, his short beard was neatly trimmed, his worn jeans and faded shirt were clean, with obvious, but very well done sewn repairs. His sign wasn’t mangled and torn, but was a clean, perfect square of cardboard, the Magic Marker words very precise, as if done by a hand that somewhere in life had dealt with accuracy and symmetry. The style of the sign said as much, or more, than the words, “Anything will help. My family and I thank you.” The quality of the sign made me look closer at the quality of the man.
 
Like everyone else on the planet, I normally deal with situations like this by avoiding eye contact—if you don’t actually look at them, they don’t actually exist. They are easier to ignore that way and our guilt isn’t as profound. This time, however, I allowed myself a quick scan and the image has stuck with me to this day. The eyes weren’t dulled by drugs, or alcohol or the life he was living. They were bright and hope was still visible in their depths. They made me believe his sign. And made me wonder about the man who was obviously new to this life style.
 
I often think of what it would be like to suddenly find yourself homeless and how difficult it would be to not only stay alive, but to return from the depths of what has to be a humiliating position in which you find yourself. Few of us are prepared for life on the streets. Once you’ve been homeless for just a week, just think about how hard it would be to get yourself cleaned up enough to even interview for a job. One day you’re sitting at a desk or otherwise going about your daily workday tasks, and the next you’re worried about keeping you and your family fed. And God help you, if you’re in your sixties like this gentleman appeared to be. Then you’re judged unemployable by most of society (ask me how I know) and are flat out of luck. In that situation, I don’t know how you avoid hopelessness.
 
I argued with myself, thought about my money clip full of twenties, thought about the traffic behind me, thought about the road ahead. Then the light changed and I found myself racing up the on-ramp. But the image of the man was still in my mind and I hated myself for not rolling down the window and handing him a couple of twenties, something I seldom do. This guy was close enough to the edge that a little help may have been all he needed to start the long road back.
 
For the next two interstate exits I argued with myself about turning off and going back. But The Road took over and I didn’t. And it has bothered me every since.
 
Then, about three hours later, I stopped to pee at a rest area out in the middle of the desert that connects the two blobs of so-called civilization represented by Phoenix and LA. The sun was down and the twilight was fading fast. As I started to get back in my car, I glanced into the desert surrounding the fenced-in rest area and saw a small shape jogging down the fence line. It was moving in the erratic, unsure pace of someone who was in unfamiliar territory. In the near-dark, I couldn’t identify the type, but it was obviously a terrier sized dog. Maybe a puppy. It probably wouldn’t last the night in the desert. And it was about as alone as alone ever gets. I started walking toward it. To do what, I’m not sure, but looking back I’m certain that if I could have coaxed it to come to me, it would have found a new home. My heart went out to it like you’ll never know. I can’t get that puppy off my mind either.
 
Two homeless entities, both needing help. I refused to help one, and couldn’t help the other. And even today I’ll flash back on the hopeful look on the man’s face or see the dark shape of the puppy staying just out of reach, afraid of my touch. And once again, I feel really bad that I didn’t, or couldn’t, do more.
 
I can’t help but wonder at their fates. In truth, however, I worry more about the dog than the man. And, somehow that doesn’t bother me a bit.

29 August 09 -- We Just Think We Have it Bad

As I sat down just now, big gray cat on my desk at my right shoulder, cup of coffee in the left hand and got ready to write this morning’s blog, my e-mail dinged. I popped it open and promptly forgot what it was I was going to write. A gentleman was asking me about building a particular airplane and then dropped a personal bombshell on me.
 
English is obviously his second language and, after the airplane preliminaries, he said, “I loose my wife this summer (promptly died without any sign) So now instead of scratchbuilding I start looking in advanced project or Qbkit.” My heart stopped as, just for an instant, I found myself in his shoes imagining his pain. There but for fortune goes any of us.
 
I replied saying how sorry I was and he said, “That is what life is, you born and one day you died.  Only the date we ignore.”
 
In that short exchange I glimpsed the stoic veneer covering another man’s grief. I promptly got up, walked into the bedroom and, gently, so as not to wake her, touched Marlene’s face for a moment. I’d be lying if I said there weren’t tears in my eyes.
 
We don’t have to be told that life is an precarious, dangerous state of existence. What ever that tiny kernel of “something” is that gives us life in the first place is incredibly fragile and the only absolute guarantee attached to it is that it won’t last. That’s one of life’s awful truisms.
 
The body is universally recognized as the most wonderful, mystical machine of all. But, despite its wonderfulness, it is a wildly imperfect machine with no warranty and limited spare parts availability. And things are prone to go wrong. Pieces break, they misbehave, sub-components go out of operating spec long before they should even though those around them are in pristine condition. Truth is, if we were an actual, manufactured product, something like a lemon juicer, there would be so many re-calls and dissatisfied customers that we’d all join a class action suit against the original manufacturer.
 
Now there’s something for the legal profession to jump on: The State of Mankind vs The Entity Doing Business as “God”.
 
This problem of knowing we can’t trust our body to always do the right thing would be bad enough, if all we had to worry about was our own body. But one of the characteristics of the central control unit of The Body, the Mk.1 Mod.Me brain, is that we have naturally occurring, though intangible, links with other bodies that makes what happens to those other bodies feel as if it is happening to our own. Actually, when something happens to those other body units (read as: wife, kids, friends, etc.) we often feel a pain that is different, but stronger, than that being felt by the host organism, e.g. don’t tell me that when a child is hurt that every single one of us wouldn’t rather be bearing their pain, instead of the unique pain that only a parent can feel in that situation.
 
The concept of living each day as if it will be our last is a cliché and almost none of us do it until it’s too late. Which is a shame. But it takes only a brief e-mail, like the one above, to give us a sharp little rap on the forehead as reminder of what is important and what isn’t.
 
Before life gets in the way and the feeling fades, as it always does, I’m going to call both of my kids and tell them how much I love them. I’d suggest you do the same with your own loved ones. We don't know what the day has in store for us.

22 August 09 -- Cash for Clunkers: who pays?
 
In the midst of this cash for clunkers thing I had a rather dispiriting conversation on the subject with my step-son (32 and looking for work) and I think it’s indicative of the way at least part of the population is thinking.

I have this 1990 Honda Civic that has 214,000 miles but runs like a watch. It is my do-all vehicle and mostly runs back and forth to the airport a couple times a day (18 miles round trip city traffic). I get 33.6 mpg regular as clockwork in the city with the A/C on but it’s not the greatest looking car on the road. Zero rust (this is AZ remember?) but it has caught its share of road rash. Last night he started pushing me to take advantage of the cash/clunkers thing, neither of us knowing it wasn’t eligible, and trade it in. “But, gee it’ll be new and get great gas mileage.”
 
I couldn’t get it across to him that:
    1. The car may be a clunker but was perfect for the limited mission
    2. Replacing it with a new car would mean a car payment (haven’t had one for years).
    3. The tags/insurance etc. would go up significantly.
    4. It is NOT a green solution because it would take a lot more resources to replace it then to keep it running.

All he could see was the “but it’s new” side of the equation and couldn’t get his head around the increased debt and cost of operation. “But it’s a good deal” kept coming back at me and I kept telling him you could easily “good deal” yourself into the poor house with unnecessary purchases. He sounds as if he has the makings of a politician.

If it had been our primary car and it needed replacing I may have gone for it, but it doesn’t need replacing so I refused to accept the extra debt and he thought I was nuts.
 
To a portion of the population, the concept of increasing debt doesn’t seem to mean anything, but it’s scaring the pee out of me. I see this cash for clunkers program as just another version of the sub-prime mortgage thing. It’s like those signs I still see on the highway in front of dead real estate developments “105% financing.” We’ll pay you to buy a house/car. In the long run, where’s the profit being made? And is everyone who is taking advantage of the good deals able to make the payments? We’ve been down this road before.
 
Anyone can create a numerical spike in sales by giving things away but sooner or later someone, somewhere has to pay the bills. The whole concept just doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s a make-work program that will bite taxpayers in the butt. Again. Or am I missing something? I often don’t see the subtle advantages to things and I’m willing to be enlightened. Anyone?

My dad ran an exceedingly successful and profitable business via what he called “pickle barrel accounting.” You keep your money in a pickle barrel, you pay your bills out of the pickle barrel and what’s left is your profit. If there’s not enough in the pickle barrel to buy something, you don’t buy it. Seemed to work for him and I try to follow the same concept although not nearly as successfully.  Pickle barrels are harder to find these days
 
I guess to straighten Washington out all we need to do is replace their pork barrel with a pickle barrel. Yeah, like that’s ever going to happen.

15 August 09 -- I Wanna Be Sam Elliot
 
I want to be Sam Elliot. Or, more correctly, I want to grow up to be like the characters Sam Elliot always plays. Wiry, self reliant, no-bull what-you-see-is-what-you get mindset. The ultimate westerner. No one, not even John Wayne played it better (am I going to get struck by lightning now?). And, as the gray creeps over my horizon, that’s the image I want to live up to.  Now that I think about it, that’s the image I’ve always revered.
 
I’ve probably talked about this before because I’ve thought about it often throughout my entire life: who is it I want to see looking back at me out of the mirror? Who do I want to be? And this started when I was probably ten years old. Maybe younger. I’ve always had some sort of image out there, usually not a person, but an image, that had attributes I admired.
 
At that age, I was terribly impressionable (aren’t we all), but I still had clear cut ideas of what I thought a man should be and many of those ideas came from my family (hard core Midwestern values) and many from books. Two books in particular had extreme effects: Two Hands and a Knife and The Long Rifle.
 
Two Hands and Knife was a teenage adventure novel in which our teenage hero was canoeing through the Canadian wilderness with his dog to meet his parents and somehow capsized and had nothing but his sheath knife to help him survive. It was the classic hero-learns-how-to-survive-against-all-odds story and it firmly imbedded the urge in me to know how to survive in all environments at all times.
 
The Long Rifle still occupies a place of honor on my bookshelf and it was an adult novel written by well-known author Stewart Edward White. Originally published in 1930, it chronicles the adventures of a more-honorable-and-cleaner-than-most mountain man in the 1840s engaged in the fur trade in the Rockies. Here the man’s morality and determination to do the right thing in a beyond-crude situation resonated in me. Between the long rifles, the mano e’ mano way of approaching decisions and the whole concept of a man always being ready to cope with what life hands him seriously set the course for how I conducted myself as a teenager. And hopefully, still do.
 
Today, while I’m still trying to work out the growing up thing, the world has become increasingly complex and difficult to figure out. Because of that I find my mind drifting back to the basics that I saw in my long-ago heroes. I am, for instance, tired of truth that is written in shades of gray. I’m frightened by the willingness of people, not just politicians, to say one thing and then do another. I’m depressed when I look around and find so many agendas floating just out of sight behind pleasant smiles and glib tongues. And I’m totally depressed by the way in which the first response, when something goes wrong in our lives, is to blame someone else, demand help, and not take responsibility for ourselves. This last one alone is enough to eventually bring down a civilization. Enter Sam Elliot and his characters.

Elliot in Golden Compass. I think The Sacketts is my favorite Sam flick.

The other day I bought a bunch of old Sam Elliot DVD’s, sat back with Marlene, Sháhn-deen and a couple of cats and revisited a simpler time. And I let the characters remind me of what kind of person I want to be. Straight ahead, no BS, self reliant, quietly confident, physically able, and mentally quick. All good things to aspire to.
 
Basically, when I finally do get old, I want to be one of those kick-butt guys in Sam Elliot movies who may be gray, but the gray reminds those around him that he’s been there and done that enough times that he’s not to be taken lightly. The Duke is the Duke and none of us can be John Wayne. But the traits demonstrated by the characters Sam Elliot has brought to life? Those we can aspire to.

Sam Elliot’s movies can be bought for nickels and dimes and it’ll be the best money you can spend.  I’d recommend:
 
-We Were Soldiers (with Mel Gibson)
-The Sacketts
-Conagher
-Road House (with Patrick Swayze)
-Quick and the Dead
-Shadow Riders  
There are a bunch more, all good.

8 August 09 -- Of Eyes and Sigs
 
I was trying hard not to write this particular blog because I feel as if I’ve gone into too many strictly personal experiences lately. But, as I sit here, typing while NOT WEARING MY GLASSES, I just had to mention that something as minor as cataract surgery can have major effects on your life and there may be a lesson for others here.

I also want to mention that they considered me awfully young to have cataracts, but I’m only doing that so you won’t think I’m old and creaky. Creaky, yes. Old no.  Well, maybe a little.
 
I apologize to any of my friends who are reading this because the process has been so absolutely amazing that I’ve been babbling about it all week to any who would tolerate me.
 
First, for those who don’t know, a cataract is when the lens in your eye starts to yellow and go cloudy. And no, you can’t see them from the outside. If you can, and you do see really old dogs with milky eyes sometimes, you know that dog is stone blind.
 
In my case they were generated by a lifetime of sunlight starting as a lifeguard as a teenager and continuing as a pilot. A lifetime of welding probably didn’t help matters any. I’ve always worn sunglasses, but apparently I’m predisposed to them. I’m the first in my family to have them so I don’t know how genetic the cause is.
 
Anyway, the signs, and I’m passing this on so y’all will know more than I did, is that you can still pass a flight physical (I did a couple months ago at 20/20), but that is because they use a well lit screen in a machine, so it’s much easier to see than the real world is. I began to see fuzziness in the distance and thought my glasses were wrong. But, when I had them checked against the prescription on my glasses they said my glasses were fine.
 
Then I noticed my night vision was getting worse and worse, with halos around lights and everything that was bright flaired. And the fuzzy floaters in my eyes that I’ve always had were joined by some that looked like black grains of sand. So I went for a serious eye exam, the first in four years (this from a guy who never misses seeing a doctor at least once a year). They saw the cataracts immediately and said not to worry about them for another year or so. But, that didn’t work out.
 
In far less than a year, the vision out of my left eye looked as if my glasses were dirty all the time and both were getting fuzzier and fuzzier. So I scheduled the surgery.

Here's looking at you kid. Gross, ey? I modeled for a Visine ad, but didn't get the job. This four days after.

A note explaining the surgery: they bust up the old lens with a laser and slip a new one in through a tiny incision. There are three types of lenses: one will do far vision only, one far and mid-distance and the next all the way down to reading levels. Don’t ask how they work, I don’t know. But I can tell you this: during the pre-op consults, I felt as if they were trying to sell me options on a new car, they pushed so hard to sell me the fancier lenses.  The basic lens is covered by insurance, anything else isn’t. I opted for the far and mid-distance lens and the whole procedure still cost right at $5500 for both eyes. Sounded high until I removed the bandages. Now it sounds cheap.
 
The surgery takes about five minutes with maybe an hour of pre-op stuff and, other than the guy marking on my eye with a magic marker, I wasn’t aware anything was going on because the local works so well and there’s a bright light in your eye so you can’t see anything. Totally painless, start to recovery.  It really is a non-event, but one with big pay offs.
 
A funny discussion prior to the operation:
 
Me, “Doc, will these things stand up to five or six G’s”
 
Doc, “I don’t know. You’re the first to ask the question. Why do you ask?”
 
Me, “Because I do that on a regular basis, when I’m at work.”
 
Doc, “Huh! I’ll have to check into that. People your age don’t normally do that kind of thing.”
 
Me. “What do you mean, PEOPLE YOUR AGE?”
 
Doc, laughing, “Okay, got me there.”
 
Turns out G’s are not a problem.
 
I’ve now only had one eye done, the left eye and I’m VERY right eye dominant. Still, my brain appears to be ignoring the bad eye because it feels as if I can see out of both eyes. But even better, my near vision is good enough I can read perfectly at computer screen distances. I’ll probably use low powered readers for books, though.
 
The most exciting thing was when I found that both sights AND the target on a hand gun are in startlingly sharp focus. And that’s with my off eye. It’s only going to get better with the right eye done.
 
I was so excited about the prospect of seeing the sights again that I celebrated by buying a German police surplus Sig-Sauer 225/P6, a single stack 9mm that I’m going to have reworked as a carry piece.
 
Any excuse to buy a new gun, right? And I still have one eye to go!

3 August 09 -- It's cool to be a Gray Dog

I just returned from Oshkosh, that orgy of organization that constantly astounds, delights and sometimes mystifies. This time it defied all dour economic predictions by being a runaway success. However, what I loved about it is that I suddenly realized that aviation is one place that gray hair isn’t the drawback it is in much of society.
 
I’ll be honest about it: it pisses me off that much of society, especially the business world and a few of the tech fields (and show biz, of course), view age as a detriment. As a person goes past a certain age, which is defined by the industry in question, the younger part of the company, which is often in management, begins to shove them off to the side as being irrelevant. The assumption is that there’s no way you can be up with the times or make worthwhile contributions in today’s world because you’re too — dare we use the word? — old.
 
On the other hand, seen from the long-tooth side of the spectrum, some parts of society look like grad school for kindergarten: the people are so young and faces so untouched by time that it’s hard to take them seriously. This is a big mistake on the part of gray dogs everywhere. There are lots of really smart whippersnappers, although they usually aren’t nearly as smart as they think they are. However, many of those in the whippersnapper generation really do look down their noses at those further up the age scale. How can a gray dog be cool and/or know anything? They are so…you, know….so gray!
 
Within aviation, and it’s very evident at OSH, none of the above is true. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Aviation actually values those who have logged the miles and paid their dues. There’s a subliminal feeling that gray indicates there may be a little more packed in the mental hard drive than those who appear more youthful. However, it’s not that they think gray dogs are smarter, which is definitely not the case (it’s really easy to be old and still be dumb), but they seem to understand that the more years a person has been around, the more they have seen and done, which automatically means they have that thing called “experience,” and, believe me, aviation doesn’t look down on that. Within aviation there seems to be a universal understanding that those who have seen and done the most, are the ones mostly likely to know the answer when an oddball situation comes up.
 
To those gray dogs out there reading this there ARE a few things we can do that will make us more useful, more palatable and more effective as the years go by. These hints will also keep us from punching some smart ass twenty-something in the mouth who shows attitude and disrespects us. And then proceeds to kick our ass.

Learn everything within reason that you can about computers. If you’re reading this, you’re already computer savvy to a degree, but we at least need to know how to Text and what Face Book and Twitter are all about. I say this, but you could build a fire under my crotch and I still wouldn’t join Face Book or Twitter.  I personally think Twitter is well named. However, not being as computer literate as possible really puts a wall between us and a huge segment of society.  With a computer between us, they don’t know how gray we are and we can sound just as sharp as the next guy.

Never start a discussion with “When I was your age…” They don’t care, it makes look you old, and they are right in saying, “The times, they are a changing.” (ask one of them if they know who wrote that.)

It is absolutely critical that we have at least a passing knowledge of what passes for “pop culture” these days
And don’t keep referring to Lawrence Welk as “…real music.” Elvis and Mick, maybe. Not Welk. We get left behind only because we decide not to keep up and that’s the first indication you’re “thinking old.”

Never, never use your age as an excuse for anything:
“Oh, I’m too old for that, etc.” And don’t admit to yourself that you may be too old. That becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Do, however, take the senior discounts on everything. If you don’t, you’re one of those who got old and stayed stupid. A buck is a buck.
        
Excess weight makes us look and feel old (you knew that one was coming).

Bad posture also makes us look and feel old.
Unless you have a medical excuse, walk proud. Pretend you have a string trying to pick you up by your chest (my mother’s phrase, btw). And, fer krist’s sake pick your feet up and don’t shuffle.

It's a cliche', but do a little exercise.
You don't have to kill yourself. Just walk a mile a day or so at anything more than a leisurely rate plus a few deep knee bends. It will change your life.

Don’t talk old people talk with your friends.
Nothing brightens your day more than a long conversation with your friends in which you compare aches and pains. Yeah, right! Just put the pedal to the metal and work through your pains. It’s amazing how many problems, especially joint problems, are self-generated. You don’t use it, so it stops working. If a joint doesn’t like to move, move it anyway. And don’t bitch about your condition. I guarantee you that someone close to you has it much worse.
 
Just remember: if you think old, you’d be old, and you’ll be playing right into the hands of some smart ass whippersnapper that you can probably think and work rings around. You’re only old, if you think you are. And I don’t hang with old farts, so don’t get old.

PS
For those of you too young to appreciate the foregoing: you can be sure of only two things in life—the years will catch up with you and , as smart as you think you are right now, you aren't nearly as smart as you will be in another ten years.

25 July 09 -- Daughters and Orphans

I would be remiss if I didn’t put digital pen to electronic paper right now and let the world know that just this minute I returned from seeing the movie Orphan. Okay, to be perfectly honest, I didn’t go to see the movie. I went to see “Jennifer Davisson Killoran” as co-producer in the credits. Do you have any idea how much restraint it takes in a situation like that to keep from standing up in a still-dark movie theater and yelling, “That’s my daughter!” at the top your voice?
 
A one-sentence review of the movie: Orphan takes the demon child genre in a totally unexpected direction and, even though this is definitely not my favorite kind of flick, we found it to be wildly entertaining in a really odd sort of way. It was actually fun.  Okay, that’s two sentences, but one was really short.
 
The central theme is a tired one: adopted ten-year-old kid turns out to be over competitive and unforgiving and leaves some decidedly damaged people (and pigeons) in her wake. I, however, don’t think I’ve ever seen this kind of movie so well done. And I don’t remember having to pee so badly for so long to keep from missing something in a movie. That alone shows how well it was done. Plus, the production values are so high that it has dragged what is usually a “B” genre up to “A” movie standards. It actually is an “A” list movie.

Jennifer on the set in Canada: sure looks glamorous, doesn't it?

A little background on the Jennifer Davisson Killoran credit line: As I’m repeatedly telling anyone who will listen, Jennifer (the daughter formerly known as “Jenny”) wears a couple of hats in Hollywood. She co-manages a number of “talent assets,” one of them being Leonardo DiCaprio, while the other hat is as director/manager/whatever of DiCaprio’s production company, Appian Way.
 
Traditionally, the production companies that operate with a star’s name attached don’t do much. Nor are they expected to. From the outside, they appear to be vanity companies funded by the studios as a perk to the star to keep said star happy. The studios don’t really expect the companies to do much and they seldom do. When Jennifer took over the reins, however, she brought her usual enthusiasm and ability with people to the task and probably said something to the effect of  “Hey, this is a production company, so let’s produce something.” This is Appian’s first movle and more are on the way.  So, Jen has made her mark.
 
Although Jennifer will probably kill me for saying so, because of her personality, she had no choice but to go to Hollywood, and herein lies a lesson in parenting. She was more than just a little theatrical by the time she was six.  And between the fixation on soap stars, mini-productions in high school, and her very unusual and notable last couple of years in college (outside of school, she personally produced, and eventually wrote, plays one of which was showcased on Broadway) the direction she was likely to go was already easy to see. That she would wind up at this level doesn’t surprise me a bit. Given her personality and drive I always knew she’d wind up either at the top or in jail.  No inbetween.
 
A final note about Orphan: the commercials make the movie look as if it’s going to be another physcho/chainsaw/slasher/thriller. And I suppose in a muted sort of way it is, but it’s much more intelligent than that and I’m not good enough with words to tell you why I feel that way. Once the little girl shows us her true stripes, which is early on, you pretty much know where this thing is headed. But that doesn’t stop you from wanting to stand on your seat and scream at the husband, “You dumb b**stard, listen to your wife! The girl is a conniving, manipulative killer! LISTEN TO YOUR FRIGGING WIFE!!”  Plus, this thing has a plot twist at the end that I absolutely guarantee no one is going to see coming. The fact that the acting is top drawer and the casting even better adds to what becomes gut-grinding suspense.
 
Go see it. And those of you who are raising children and have the heartburn to prove it—don’t give up on them. The internal colors that make a child challenging to raise are the very thing that builds a fire under them and makes them into incredibly interesting and often successful adults.  They’ll make you proud. Just give them time. Jennifer has certainly made us proud. 

18 July 09 -- Concealed Carry and Me

A couple of weeks ago Marlene and I took our eight hours of training required to apply for our concealed carry weapons (CCW) permit from the Arizona Department of Public Safety (DPS). It was an extremely interesting day in ways both expected and unexpected. And it raised some unexpected questions.
 
First, it should be stated that I assumed from day one that, if I were given the option, I’d always be carrying a weapon. However, one of the goals of the training is to give you lots of reasons to question that assumption. And it did. But more on that later. The group itself and the feeling about the group bears discussion first.
 
We took this at the Scottsdale Gun Club, a very high end, store/range/club that does Scottsdale proud in the quality it brings to everything it does, including the CCW classes it conducts twice a week. There were 65 people in our group and I don’t know what I was expecting in terms of participants, but what we saw was a typical cross section of the local population. It could have been a demonstration at Home Depot on how to tile your bathroom in that we had people from lower twenties to those in their late seventies and everyone was totally “normal.” No bulked up macho types, no tattoos. Nothing you wouldn’t find at your local garden store on Saturday morning.
 
What was surprising (maybe not) was that nearly a third of the group was female and only a few were there with a male/husband. The rest were mostly there by themselves and they ranged in age from late-twenties to early fifties with no common characteristics at all other than being females who wanted to carry a gun. Their numbers was probably the most profound statement of the day and say something strong about society.
 
It was of some interest to hear that one out of eighty-two Zonies have a CCW permit, a number that must be changing rapidly, especially if you figure this school alone puts 120 CCW holders a week into the system.
 
Incidentally, it was a curiously comfortable feeling to be in a room with that many people and know that everyone of them was gun friendly. That doesn’t mean we could have all been buddies, which I seriously doubt, but you at least knew none of them were going to criticize you for having a pistol laying under your chair.
 
A big percentage of the course was spent making sure we all knew what carrying a gun meant: it’s a helluva responsibility, which we all knew subliminally, but it slowly seeped in that this was serious. The end result of us carrying a weapon and deciding to use it would absolutely change our lives. Especially, if we killed someone defending ourselves. The instructor was an ex-cop and he says no one ever does that without it having long term effects, but they wouldn’t be as long term as if the bad guy had been the only one armed.
 
He also pointed out case after case where it was ruled self-defense by the police, no charges brought, but the family of the bad guy dragged the shooter into court and sued their socks off. Bad-guy-relatives almost never win, but you can plan on exhausting practically all your finances fighting it. The liability involved in carrying a weapon is enormous. However, the overwhelming opinion of the group was that a lawsuit was preferable to a funeral in which they, or one of their loved ones, were stage center.
 
The range time was very brief and almost laughable. No, it WAS laughable. They were using these bigger-than-life-sized targets at five and 15 yards. You had to put seven out of ten rounds into the “kill zone” which was about 18 inches wide. Five are fired at each distance. I was using my Hi-Power and five yards was one ragged vertical hole (I hadn’t fired a round in two years, something we’re going to change) and 15 yards was about two inches because the target had no light on it. Still, I looked at other targets and lots of people struggled to get a 16 inch group, but I don’t think anyone failed.
 
The gun safety was a little rushed, but it was all there and constantly hammered on. I just hope the newbies absorbed it or they’ll be more dangerous than the bad guy.
 
So, the question becomes: will I carry on a daily basis and the answer is probably not. I live an aerial version of Ground Hog Day (the movie): every day I drive to the hangar, fly, drive home. Or, I don’t leave the house at all. I don’t get exposed to the population from whence a threat could arise. However, knowing I CAN carry without legal ramifications (what to do during a traffic stop with a gun in the car was discussed a lot) means there will be times when I will definitely have a 9mm or .45 (I haven’t decided which) on my hip or a little .32 in my back pocket. And, before I start carrying, there will be lots of practice in getting it out and ready to go.
 
This isn’t a game where punching holes in paper is the goal. It’s a lot more serious than that and, although it’s a million-to-one that I’ll ever need a gun in my hand, how many times does it have to happen to make me glad I’m carrying it. Just once.
 
If you want to know what personal protection actually looks like, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkWgp2abM2w and listen to the voice of experience. It’ll make a believer out of you and he has some good advice to offer.
 
Here’s another important one, if you haven’t seen it: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4069761537893819675&p%20r=goog-sl
 

12 July 09 -- Return to Basics: a small town Fourth
 
It’s not often that 0216 hours on a Sunday morning finds me at the computer, but here I am. It’s the weekend after The Fourth and yesterday I spent most of the afternoon sifting through photos I shot in Nebraska last week with an unexpected result: I’ve been fighting a ferocious cold and didn’t have the energy to write my blog about the experience but a few minutes ago I woke up with words absolutely burning a hole in my brain. I had no choice but to get up and throw them down on a piece of electronic paper. What follows is an American Fourth of July, as seen through the eyes of a happy man.
 

Tractors on the Fourth. Must be the Midwest! And that's a good thing.

The Fourth of July in Seward, Nebraska is so special that the town has been nationally designated as the National Fourth of July City for its size. This year, however, it was special for the Davisson Tribe because my kids and my sister, Trish’s, kids (Trish still lives in Seward) all descended on the town and we had a family reunion at the same time. The East Coast Johnsons (my older sister, Mona) couldn’t make it because of prior commitments, which is a shame because it was a magical weekend for all of us.
 
Seward is the quintessential small, Midwestern town. However, as small towns go, with a population of 6,400 it is quite affluent and financially solid. It is fighting the same fight as other small towns in this economy, but its battle scars are not obvious. With an unemployment of only four percent, it could be said that it is winning the fight.
 
Much of the town’s history and its pride in that history will be told through the following pictures so I’ll skip that and cut right to the Fourth of July chase: because my kids hadn’t been there since they were very young and Jennifer had brought her surrogate husband, who seems to be an unadopted son for Marlene and Me, David James Kelly, with her (she drove in from LA…she’s plane-phobic…and her husband hates driving) I was seeing the experience through fresh eyes: I was once gain remembering what a small town Fourth is all about.
 
Central to any Fourth of July is the red, white and blue theme that this is America’s birthday and it’s the one day that no matter what else we’re doing, we should remember what made America great. And that’s much of what you saw in Seward: a demonstrated pride in their country, their culture, their beliefs and themselves. And, of course, their belief in Nebraska football, you can’t ignore that.
 
To be honest about it, I was a little nervous having my kids visit. It would be easy for them, being from LA and NJ, opposite in so many ways to small town Nebraska, to snicker amongst themselves at how blatant, possibly naïve, the outward displays of patriotism, religion and social consciousness were.  But, bless their hearts, I saw none of that. Marlene, of course, loves Seward and everything it represents and she was as buoyed up by the experience as I was.

Marlene with the ZoeCat and SoccerFace (Mason).

Just as the Fourth is designed to be a celebration of the birth of a nation, the celebration at Seward has become the signal for many to come together and celebrate family. The Davissons/Johnsons (both of my sisters married Johnsons…go figure) weren’t the only families there in force: you only had to glance up and down the parade route and see the sometimes huge enclaves of similar physical characteristics to spot the gathering of the clans.
 
As I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and trying to decide whether to get up, Marlene’s hand came out of the dark to rest on my leg. We were connected. Then Sháhn-deen raised her head, gave me one lick on the nose and, having expressed her feelings, went back to sleep. And I knew for a fact that I was one very happy, very lucky man.
 
When you flip through the pictures, and there are lots of them, try to ignore the fact that you know who took them. Just use them as a window into an event, a time, a culture that tells a story. Yes, you know the characters, but what was happening to this cast was being repeated thousands of times over all around us as The Fourth Of July Experience took over Seward, Nebraska. I hope the feelings surrounding us were as intense throughout the rest of the nation. If they were, then there is indeed hope for us all.GO TO PHOTOS

27 June 09 -- Do Terrorists Brush Their Teeth?
 
As I was brushing my teeth this morning it dawned me that somewhere, maybe next door, maybe across the ocean, there were thousands of young men and women who were going through the exact same getting-ready-to-go-to-work rituals as me. I shower. They shower. I poop. They poop. The difference between us is that when they leave for work, their goal that day is to do harm to me and mine. To terrorists and criminals violence is an accepted part of their life style and preying on others is what they do. That’s their job.
 
The foregoing is a little fact of life that some people can’t get their heads around. My daughter being one of them. The other day I got a phone call from her and she was raving about how some people think and preach violence and how could they possibly think that way? But, she wasn’t talking about criminals or terrorists. Her overly sensitive, very green, very left-leaning mind had just been damaged by going to a gun show with a friend to shoot some film for a documentary. It was her first exposure to that part of the Gun Culture and she immediately kicked into anti-violence overload. And that got me thinking about some of the realities of life and what we can do about it
 
Violence and crime are so far removed from most of our lives that very few of us even think about them. We know the odds are long that we’ll be at the site of a terrorist attack, and it’s unlikely we’ll be car jacked or that out of thousands and thousands of houses, ours will be singled out for a home invasion.  A healthy dose of “it can’t happen to me” syndrome is necessary for most of society to make it through the day. However, when dealing with anything that’s based on the odds being against it, it’s best to remember that there are odds, however small, that it will happen to you. And how often does it have to happen to you for it to be one too many? A percentage of the population knows that and thinks of ways to prepare themselves for it. My daughter wandered right into the midst of those who know “it” can happen and they want to be prepared for it. They have a defensive mind set, not an offensive one.
 
In a very real way, the world we live in isn’t all that much different from when we were commuting from caves to the local mammoth hunting ground: there are those out there who want what we have and there are those that for reasons we can’t begin to understand want to hurt us. Between terrorists and criminals, we are surrounded, infiltrated might be a better word, by an increasingly viral form of potential violence. And, while it’s unlikely it’ll touch us, there is that possibility and the only downside to being prepared for it is that you’ll have wasted some effort. The upside of being prepared is that you’re ready to deal with whatever goes down.
 
Am I talking about walking around with a cocked and locked .45 on each hip? The answer is no. What I’m talking about is treating the world like we treat the desert out here during the late afternoon. We know not to walk close to bushes as that’s where the snakes will be. We know not to step over a rock or log without looking on the other side and we know not to stick our hands under a rock to turn it over, because those are scorpions favorite hang-outs. We’re aware of all the potential for personal pain and at the very minimum, we do nothing more than plot our course so as to avoid it and, in so doing, greatly reduce our exposure to risk. And so we should conduct our lives. However, no matter what course we plot, we can unexpectedly run afoul of the bad guys and those who want to be even more prepared do indeed arm themselves and those are the people my daughter ran into.
 
She thought the gunshow was a celebration of violence, when what she was actually seeing was a celebration of self-reliance and counter violence. The group of people she was condemning are extremely anti-violence. So much so, that they’ll arm themselves to protect themselves and their love ones against it. But, they’ll perpetrate none themselves unlessprovoked.
 
My wife’s friend was horribly freaked out by seeing a fat, tattooed dude carrying a pistol in a grocery store, I told her that this is the guy you want with you at McDonalds or the post office when something goes wrong. The people who are least likely to break a law are lawful gun owners. The people who are most likely to protect those around them in a crisis are the legal gun owners. And none of them are violent.
 
The world is increasingly polarizing itself into two groups: the first, celebrates life and the ability to preserve it, while the second celebrates death and the victimization of others. If it expects to survive, the first must protect itself against the second.
 
It seems as if there will always be situations where the application of sensitivity and understanding, which is so highly touted these days, doesn’t work. The ability to apply “appropriate and intelligent violence,” however, usually does.

PS
We're going to take our concealed carry training tomorrow and will report on the legalities of it in two weeks when we return from Fourth of July in Nebraska.
 

23 June 09 -- This week's short takes
 
Sorry to be late on this, but Saturday morning, when I normally sit down with my dog and a cup of decaf and grind out a few words, I was already well into wearing out my feet at the LA Roadster Show in Pomona, CA. Oddly enough, however, that was not the high point of my week. Matt Switlik’s visit from Michigan was. But the show was a close second.
 
Unless you’re heavy into vintage artillery, you don’t know Matt. It would take a long time to explain Matt’s historical expertise and even harder to describe what he has done most of his life. Yes, he was a professional museum director/manager for thirty years, but he also became one of the country’s foremost vintage artillery experts (among other things) and a first class wheelwright (among other things). And it was the wheelwright Matt Switlik who came to visit me Thursday night. And it was that Matt Switlik who was dragging a humungous trailer behind his fifth-wheel loaded with artillery stuff including the wheels for my artillery piece. These had been nearly three years in the making and to say I was a kid on Xmas is an understatement.

For scale, I'm 5'10"

Some background: there aren’t many who know me who don’t know that one of my prized possessions is a Model of 1885 3.2 Inch Field Gun. It was the first US breechloader to go into serial production (prior to that we depended on European breech loaders) and last saw action in the Spanish American war. It is in super bad shape and will require extensive blacksmithing to put the carriage back in shape, but it’s all there. But, from the beginning, over thirty years ago, I had no wheels. And it took ten years to locate even the hubs. But now, I have these two huge oak and hickory wooden masterpieces I’m trying to figure out how to hang on my garage wall (they weight 250 pounds each) and about every 15 minutes I walk out to look at them to make sure they are real.
 
Okay, I know…most people can’t say that the delivery of two gigantic wooden wheels made their week. But, they did.
 
The marathon 36 hour trip to the LA Roadster show generated at least one serious promise to myself: I’ll never go to that show again when I can’t spend an entire day, maybe two. The swap mart alone is good for a day. Four hours doesn’t cut it.
 
Incidentally, I don’t go to shows like that looking for car stuff. I go because that’s where I find odd tools, or better yet, odd stuff that tickles some part of my soul that is out of context and therefore cheap. Although this time I really did control myself. I, for instance, did not buy that amazingly complex and complete military surveyor’s transit that was mint and in its carrying case. A serious steal for seventy-five bucks.

See the attached pix for a rear view of this little cutey. It's a masterpiece in creativity.

I also passed on a complete aerial fixed camera (K25), twenty bucks, but only because I already had one. I did buy a cute little four drawer metal cabinet (about a foot square, 18” long) that was an exact match for the three I already have full of drill bits, Ten bucks. Perfect for reloading stuff.
 
Also, even though it’s a roadster meet and I’m a roadster guy, it’s the HUGE secondary carshow in the parking lot that is what I really go for. This show has become THE place to see unusual, and sometimes wildly imaginative cars. And they had a bunch. Click HERE for photos of a few of my favorites.
 
Next week I’ll be on the road to Nebraska for the Fourth of July, so I’ll put Thinking Out Loud up Sunday before we leave. I promise.
 
Maybe.
 
 

14 June 09 -- That last half-second is a real b*tch!
  
This is something of a shocker: I just found out that one of my most closely held personal mantras is wrong. For years I’ve been saying “When you’re running as fast as you can, looking at your watch is a wasted motion.” And that’s pretty much how I’ve lived my life. But, I’m wrong. Looking at your watch is not a wasted motion because, as I just found out, it’s nearly impossible to know when you’re running at absolute top speed without timing yourself. This is a major revelation to me. Major!!
 
To those of you out there who are competitive runners, drag racers, etc., what I’m about to say is anything but revolutionary, but, even though I thought I knew that fractions of seconds can decide monumental contests, it wasn’t until I introduced a stop watch into my morning walks that I learned two things: a half of a second can be a helluva long time and it’s easy to see how someone can get hooked on competition because each morning I now wake up intending to compete with myself and do better than I did the day before.
 
What follows is an engineer’s way of looking at life’s schedules and an engineer’s way of looking at progress, and it’s all based on understanding what tenths of a second can mean.
 
First, here are some basic parameters: doing two laps of my walking track (around my pool) in 54 seconds is walking at a 15.3 minutes per mile rate and my morning goal is to do two 15 minute miles while still walking, not jogging (Lumbar three and four really develop a bad attitude, if I actually jog). One standard Budd-step is 30 inches and at a 15 minute/mile rate that’s .8 second (ten steps timed and averaged).
 
Now let’s put time itself in perspective: if I hold a stop watch in my hand and push the start/stop button as fast as I can—click, click—the best I can do is .3 second. That’s right, three tenths of a second!  Let me repeat that: click-click as fast as I can is three-tenths of a second.
 
Okay so what’s so important about that three-tenths of a second? I mention it to give dimension to the following statement: I can do 54.5 second laps fairly consistently without thinking about it too hard. But to knock six-tenths of a second off and do a 53.9 second lap (required for a 15 minute mile), is damn hard to do. To just be .6 second faster —click-click, click-click, less than a full step in two laps— takes an enormous output of additional effort and mental concentration. If someone had told me that shaving off that last half second would be so hard I would have said they were nuts. However, in trying to do it consistently, I’ve discovered a couple of basic facts:
 
            -If I let my mind wander even slightly and don’t concentrate on the task at hand, I’ll slide back at least half a second.
            -I have to time every other lap because I can’t identify the rhythm well enough to hold the pace.
            -If I time at least half the laps I’ll see myself lagging and that knowledge pushes me just a little harder on the next lap. BTW-this is why I now weigh myself every morning instead of once a week: it increased my rate of weight loss 30%.
            -The only way I can tell I’m going faster is an innate feeling that I’m pushing my personal limits in every part of my body. Even though I can’t see it in the pace, physically timing the laps tells me if I’m improving or not and allows me to hold the pace.
 
The last point is the single most important factor to come out of this exercise about exercise: even though I may think I’m going fast and making hay while the sun shines, I can’t tell for sure if I’m at my limits without actually setting a schedule toward my goal and monitoring myself by the stop watch/clock.  This, to me is, if not life changing, it is at the very least, a different way to look at life.
 
Even though lots of people share a form of intense time consciousness that makes us appear to be almost obsessive about making the white space in our lives pay for itself, I wonder how many are actually running at top speed? I know I haven’t been, when I thought I was. I know I let myself falter sometimes, and hesitate during the day, wasting a few minutes here and there, unnecessarily breaking the pace and costing precious minutes that eventually add up into hours. I’m not listening to that metronome in my head that’s setting the pace and that is wasting the only resource in our lives that is actually non-renewable—time. But I now intend to listen a little more closely.
 
This all sounds as if it’s building up to a bleakly obsessive approach to life, but it really isn’t. What it is saying is that we/I need to define our goals and make sure that those things that matter to us outside of work are actually getting done. The way that we can guarantee that is happening is by making sure we make those moments, when we’re deliberately coasting (an important part of any life), matter so we’re not actually coasting. We’re accomplishing something, even though it’s not part of the grand scheme of work, work, work.
 
An example: I’m really tired but even though it’s 2300 hrs, I napped earlier and can’t go to bed. I could easily flop down and watch another NCIS or House rerun and enjoy it. But this time, I won’t. I have a vaguely dark area in the corner of the shop at the rear of The Roadster that needs more light. I’ve been intending to hang a fluorescent fixture from a couple of shelf L-brackets there so it won’t be covered by the garage door, when it’s up and, during the summer, that door is open all the time I’m working. That’ll take about an hour. I’ll be coasting, but checking off one of life’s boxes at the same time. And it’ll make me feel better, so the time is well invested.
 
Oh, and the most important thing: I’m going to be hanging the light by a stopwatch, so to speak. The goal is to be in bed by midnight. That’s not much of a goal, but it’s a goal, and I’ll be watching the gigantic clock I have on the wall so my pace matches the project and the time available.  This way it’ll actually get done and won’t join the long list of incomplete projects around the house. That’s important for my peace of mind.
 
Gotta go: time’s a’wasting. :-)
 
PS
If I have an article or shop project that needs some brain time, I’ll dedicate a walking session to thinking about it and cruise along at a 15.5-15.8 minute/mile rate, which lets my brain float off into problem-solving  while my body gets ready for the day. Works every time.
 

6 June 09 -- 65 Years of "What ifs"
 
When I sat down at the computer just now, I didn’t intend to write what follows. But, then I glanced at the calendar for the date and realized I couldn’t write about anything but the obvious: 6 June is one of two dates that changed the world. 7 December being the other. And I can’t let this one pass without remembering and postulating.
 
First, I can’t imagine the sheer terror of that day. As they huddled down behind the ramps, pounding their way through the surf, they didn’t have to be military tacticians to know that every gunner within range was zeroed in on that ramp. And as soon as it came down, all hell was going to break loose. And it often did. And then there you are on a barren piece of sand at the foot of a cliff (in the case of Omaha Beach) with guys at the top who you knew had been trained at least as well as you had been. And there was no doubt in your mind that if you were in their shoes you could pick off dogfaces down below so easy it wouldn’t even be sporting. Hitting a man out in the open at 200 yards, even one that was moving, was duck soup. And you were the duck. I just don’t know how a human being can maintain even the most basic ability to think rationally in what has to be the most irrational situation imaginable. But thousands of young men, let by slightly older young men, did think rationally. And they survived. And, against all odds, succeeded. And we are the benefactors of their ability to deal with mind-numbing terror.
 
We’re also the benefactors of some unbelievable twists of fate. Some of them pure luck, some of them brilliantly engineered.
 
First, they pulled off a complete surprise even though the enemy knew they were coming and where they were coming from. This wasn’t an aircraft carrier secretly launching a bunch of planes several hundred miles away in some indeterminate direction against an enemy that didn’t even know it was an enemy yet. This was the largest armada of ships ever assembled basically sailing from Catalina Island to San Diego and every military man in San Diego (and there were lots of them) knew you were coming, although not exactly when and not exactly where. Still, the Allies caught them with their britches, if not down, at least at half mast. Absolutely amazing planning there.
 
But, what if…?
 
What if the weather that June morning in 1944 hadn’t been so marginal? We all know it was so bad they almost had to call it off, but had it been a nice day, the Germans would have known they were coming from miles and miles away. The weather made the Germans relax and gave the Allied fleet the perfect camouflage.
 
What if Rommel hadn’t been lulled into complacency by the weather and hadn’t gone home to see his family?
 
What if Hitler had agreed to release the reserves and poured troops and Panzers into the beach area?
 
What if the Luftwaffe had made a showing in strength? They were pretty weak by that time, but considering the target rich environment, even given the massive umbrella of Allied aircover at the time, they could have easily raised hell with ships and landing craft.
 
What if Ike had decided not to go, postponed the invasion and the German’s finally caught wind of the plans, which was bound to happen.
 
Possibly the biggest question of the war in Europe is, “What if the Japanese hadn’t attacked Pearl?” Pearl Harbor galvanized us as a nation. Without that, would the separatists among us have succeeded in keeping the US out of the European war leaving Britain and the rest of the Allies on their own?
 
Britain was all alone: even with us giving them massive supplies could they have held out in the long run without additional manpower? If Germany’s industrial base, including the production of V-2 rockets, aircraft and submarines, had been allowed to continue without the US bombing offensive added to Britain’s night bombing, Germany may have whittled away at the UK’s ability to produce and be resupplied until an invasion of Britain may have finally been possible. At the very least, it would have been a much longer war.
 
The above is a moot point because we didn’t declare war on Germany. They declared war on us giving us no choice. Separatists be damned. But, what if Hitler hadn’t honored his pact with Japan and, when we declared war on Japan, he hadn’t countered by declaring war on us? If Germany had made no unprovoked attacks on us, would we have eventually declared war on them, or would we have concentrated on the Pacific Theater? That’s a good question with no solid answer.
 
And, of course, what if the earliest attempt on Hitler’s life had succeeded and someone else was leading Germany’s forces? Hitler’s obsession with eliminating Jews drained manpower and resources and his inability to take advice from what were some of the most brilliant military minds in the world turned out to be the Allies’ most valuable asset. Hitler himself shortened the war by years by being the biggest ego-maniac in history. Thank, God!
 
As I’m writing this, 65 years ago at this hour the invasion was eight hours old. A beachhead was being established but bodies were everywhere, still floating in the surf and draped over barbed wire. The outcome was still very much in doubt and the world was holding its breath. If the invasion failed, then what?
 
If the Allies expected to bring Europe back to even a modicum of normalcy, Europe was going to have to be invaded. But after a failed invasion, at what cost? Another invasion would have been immensely costly and the losses possibly unacceptably high because Germany would have been that much more prepared. The only possible way to win at that point would have been to pound Germany and all its outposts, where every they were located, into useless rubble. Civilian deaths would have soared out of sight. B-29’s would have moved into England to add their punch to the effort and it’s possible nuclear warfare would have started in Berlin, not Hiroshima. The choices would have been slim and nasty.
 
June 6, 1944: the date the world’s fate was decided by thousands of kids carrying Garands and Enfields. Every war, every battle, and every skirmish, no matter how much high-tech or aerial bombardment is involved, always comes down to one kid with a rifle killing another kid with a rifle. Boots on the ground win wars. We should never forget the basics of war and whom we owe for the life we live. Especially on this date.
 

30 May 09 -- Of Links: Missing and Otherwise
 
The last couple of weeks have really been fun. When was the last time the news was full of missing links and links-to-nowhere yet not a single politician was involved? In short: the scientific community is convinced they have found a fossil that provides that long-missing link between us and the monkeys (not the musical group) then, as an added bonus, a totally separate group discovered a tiny race of hominids that don’t fit anywhere on the evolutionary tree. Don’t you just love it?! Is my geek factor showing?
 
What is it about the human animal that drives us to find out where we’ve come from and are constantly turning over dirt in search of earlier civilizations? Do you suppose gophers spend a lot of time thinking about their ancestors? How about Eagles? Cockroaches and alligators, being organisms with a nearly uninterrupted evolutionary chain, ought to have a better understanding of their past. Do they really care? Nah! In that respect they are like a lot of humans: they just live in the moment, cruising from meal to meal. But not the rest of us! We have an almost desperate willingness to invest enormous amounts of energy digging up stuff we can’t eat. This is a clear sign that most of us have definitely evolved away from the likes of alligators and cockroaches, although some haven’t (Damn! I had to mention politicians again, didn’t I? Sorry!).
 

This little guy's head was about the size of a grapefruit and he stood three feet tall.

The first news flash (okay, so not exactly a flash, but definitely of interest to some sub-communities out there) was fascinating: Paleontologists excavating on the Indonesian island of Flores found a complete skull and skeletons of a hominid race that shouldn’t exist. Everything about it was wrong, from its age (about 1.7 million years) to its location (Asian island), it’s size (around three feet tall) and its general physiology (totally unrelated to its peer group or any supposedly before it). Everything about it says it didn’t evolve from any of the African-based hominids (Homo-Erectus, etc) that supposedly spread out and populated the world eventually becoming us. The little buggers are officially dubbed Homo Floresiensis (although even the scientists call them Hobbits) and don’t appear to be related to anything that would let them fit in the established evolutionary paradigm that paleontology now works under. Even more fascinating, they supposedly were still on the island 17,000 years ago, by which time, the North American continent was starting to be populated by what we now recognize as Native Americans.
 
There’s a huge WTH factor (What the Hell?) attached to the Hobbits that has paleontologists absolutely at war with one another. See Hobbit for the entire story.

And then there’s Ida. The fossil of a lemur-monkey, she came out of an ancient crater lake near Frankfurt, Germany that’s known for its fossils about twenty years ago but hung on the wall of a private collector’s home until very recently. He prized it for its pristine condition and completeness but missed a couple of apparently very important features, not the least of which being human-like finger nails and opposable thumbs that were combined with other monkey-but-soon-to-be-human features.

Nope! Ida doesn't look like any of my relatives either.

Typical of such finds, the twists and turns and “what ifs” (the local government was going to turn the old lake into a garbage dump but was talked out of it) is worthy of a novel. A couple of years ago, the little girl, now about 47 million years old, made her way to an academic collection in Oslo where she has had center stage while turning the scientific community absolutely inside out. The excitement is so high that there’s even a Discovery Channel special on her this week (which I managed to miss). Go to IDA for more info.
 
Yeah, I know, to lots of folks this is just so much geek stuff, but to lots of us geeks (is a gun-toting geek who flies, still a geek? I suppose so.) it is just so cool and I’m not sure why I/we feel that way. I think a major part of the fun is to see such concrete evidence that we don’t have all the answers and, in the case of the Flores Hobbits, don’t even have all the right questions yet. Not one scientist has advanced a theory that involves aliens, space travel, yada, yada. They’re probably afraid to, even though it fits so precisely.
 
We love to think we’re so smart and can figure anything out, but in this one area, figuring out where we came from,, we’re not even close to a final understanding and probably never will have all the answers. And that’s certainly fine with me. Who wants to live in a world where we understand it all? That’s the miracle of life and keeps us going. Plus, it beats the hell out of living like a cockroach.
 

23 May 09 -- Currahee!
 
Someone sent me this a few minutes ago, just as I was starting to crank out a Memorial Day blog. I watched it, I dried my eyes, and decided there was nothing I could ever write that would say more. This may be more appropriate for Veteran's Day, when we honor the living vets, rather than those we've lost, but I couldn't let the weekend go by without making sure people had seen this. Never take them for granted. You'll have to cut and paste this (they won't let it link), but it's worth the effort. It'll make your day.
http://www.theneweditor.com/index.php?/archives/9550-Currahee.html

16 May 09 -- Montana Actually Does it!
 
It turns out that the “resolutions” passed by many states insisting they have sovereignty under the 10th and 11th Amendments actually have no teeth. They are politicians once again belching in the wind. Montana, however, has, through a gutsy gun manufacturing law, thrown down the gauntlet that is going to have the feds going nose-to-nose with them over states rights. Firearms may be the subject, but this is intended to force the issue of states rights out in the open and probably to the highest courts.
 
Essentially what Montana has said is that it is their prerogative to say that the feds have no jurisdiction over something that is made, used or consumed within their borders. Only when a product crosses state lines and it becomes an interstate (as opposed to intrastate) issue do the feds have any jurisdiction and then it’s only under the commerce acts and its variants.  This could apply to sweatshirts or hamburgers, but Montana has chosen to make the test case a real hot-button affair by focusing it on firearms, which have a ton of federal statutes attached that the feds love to enforce wherever they please. Montana’s new law says that as long as it’s a Montana-made firearm and doesn’t cross Montana state borders, the feds have no jurisdiction. Even though the feds haven’t responded yet, you can imagine what their thoughts are on this.
 
Feds don’t generally like to be told that their powers have limits, but that’s exactly what Montana is telling them. 
 
The way that Alan Korwin, of Gunlaws.com, characterizes the entire thing, Montana has cleverly thought this out well in advance. They’ve gone as far as setting up several test cases around small gun makers making innocuous products (.22 bolt action youth rifles) that the feds are going to see as violations of their present laws and they will swoop down on them. But, again, Montana has thought this out and has a number of ways to go with these cases. It’s all very intriguing.
 
What makes this so intriguing is that a state government is actually being very open about tweaking the federal government’s nose to see what they’ll do about it. The nuances and ramifications of it are HUGE, either way. As Korwin says, “It will be a 9th and 10th Amendment case, and a Commerce Clause case, and a Supremacy Clause case, not a Second Amendment case.”
 
Go to Gun Law for Gunlaws.com’s concise explanation of what the status is, the ramifications and the likely outcome. And, if you don’t subscribe to Gunlaws.com, you should. It’s not a wild, raving right-wing newsletter, but a way to keep up with what’s happening in that arena in a just-the-facts-ma’am sort of way.
 
New Subject: NRA is in town
The NRA is having their convention here this week and I went down yesterday morning thinking I’d spend a couple of hours browsing all the manufacturer’s booths to see what’s new. Wrong!
 
It’s being held in the Phoenix Convention Center and I’ve been to dozens of high end tradeshows and conventions there for all sorts of different purposes, but this one blew me away. This was a Friday morning and when I stepped into the HUGE lobby I couldn’t get within 100 yards of the ticket counters. There were lines, eight and ten people wide, stretching for an easy block or block and a half.
 
I stood there for a few minutes to see how fast the lines were moving (the Convention Center is well set up for this type of thing) and they weren’t. The system was totally overwhelmed. So, I went home. If they were handing out $100 bills, I wouldn’t stand in lines like that. I’ll take another crack at it an hour or two before it shuts down on Sunday.
 
If any politician wants to sample what’s going on in the country today, they should have been in that lobby. The make up of the audience was what you’d see going to a Home and Garden Show. It was a total cross section of America with moms, pops and the kids dominating. If any part of the Administration was interested in seeing “those crazy gun loving people clutching their bibles,” in action, this was their chance. ‘Sure was a threatening looking bunch (yeah, right).

10 May 09 -- "Bringing Up" the kids: who are we fooling?
Do we actually “bring up” our kids or is our only real contribution a sperm, an egg and eighteen years of food? And, given the huge differences between kids in the same litter, maybe even the sperm and the egg thing is a questionable contribution.

That's Jen at the bottom. They don't know how to do anything small in Hollywood. Click for larger.

I’m not sure what got me started thinking on this whole thing, but it was probably a couple of pix daughter Jennifer (33) sent me where she was showing off a building-sized poster for the first movie she co-produced: it’s her first on-screen feature credit and she’s justifiably proud (Orphan – due out July 24th, it’s a cross between The Bad Seed and Lolita - Click to see trailer ).
 
As I was gazing at the pictures I quite literally had her life, and mine by extension, race through my head in their entirety—from birth to Hollywood—in about three seconds.  And, of course, I couldn’t separate images of her life from those of her brother and I found myself choking up just a little. I was thinking a) how proud I am of both of them, b) how glad I am I don’t have to go through the process again c) how much I wish the process had taken longer d) how lucky we were with both of them.
 
Raising kids is really a crap shoot. A big one. In the first place, when people have kids we are all a helluva long way from being full-grown ourselves. At 30 years old, I was older than most, when Scott showed up (two weeks overdue, late per usual). Still, I was going through serious changes and trying to find myself. I think of kids having kids, those 19-22 year olds, and I just can’t imagine how difficult must be because most of us are at least partially screwed up emotionally at around 21-22 years old. Growing up isn’t easy and I can’t imagine trying to guide an infant when I was still one myself.
 
In my case, Jennifer was headstrong (that’s a gigantic understatement), hyper emotional (an even bigger understatement) and totally unpredictable (and still is). And then, at the age of 13, her mother and I separated, leaving her with me: what a horrible thing to do to a kid. Still, she managed to make her way through it, although she caused a bumper crop of gray hairs along the way.
 
Scott, on the other hand, was like raising a potted plant. He was so solid and stable, we barely had to water him. I don’t know that we contributed anything at all to the process and he too has turned out to be a wonderful human being and both of them are my best friends.
 
And then I look around at others who haven’t been so lucky, some of whom blame themselves for their kids’ problems. And I suppose in some cases there may be some blame to be shouldered, but in those instances of which I have personal knowledge, I can’t see where the parents did anything other than try to guide and love a kid. Still, things went wrong and the parents blame themselves, refusing to accept the fact that kids bring their own DNA to the table and there’s only so much you can do to guide them. They are going to be what they are going to be and their own personal preferences, usually driven by their peer group, far out weigh what we can do as parents.
 
I do, however, have a bone to pick with parents who tell their kids to do one thing and then they themselves do something else. A kid who grows up watching his parents cheat and lie can’t possibly grow up any other way. A loud, abusive household generally generates kids who will do the same thing. A household that runs on booze produces addictive kids. Parents like that can’t even begin to blame their kids, if things go astray.
 
I supposed the best advice I got on raising kids wasn’t really advice: my parents gave me good parenting basics by doing nothing more than setting a good example and I was old enough, as a parent, to recognize that.
 
Still, it’s a crap shoot. Bad things happen to good parents. I was lucky. I know it. And I thank my lucky stars for it.
 
 
  2 May 09 -- The Concept of "Next" and its Therapeutic Value

 About this time last week I was in Lakeland, Florida at the Sun ‘n Fun fly-in, wishing I were home. But, at the same time, even though the crowd was down and the ash-filled dust (they’d burned the field a few weeks earlier then got no rain) was giving me black-lung disease, I was enjoying a sort of rebirth. Or at least a confirmation that the country will survive and so will I. In fact, on a personal level, I was feeling pretty good about things. And I think I know why: I rediscovered the concept of “next.”
 
First, let it be known that the week spent at Lakeland is always a terrible grind for me physically: on the road at 0700, on the field, stomping back and forth for ten or twelve hours, an hour drive home, grab a little dinner then, hopefully, some sleep. Still, even though the day I flew home stretched out into a twenty-one hour day, I was actually feeling pretty good and I think it was because I really was into “next” mode. I was looking forward to what comes next and enjoying life.
 
If you haven’t figured it out, I’m at the age where many people have said, “Okay, I’m going to act my age, retire and do what retired people do…whatever that is.” But my brain is doing anything but thinking that way and this week I had some sort of epiphany that told me I was headed in the right direction. I think part of this is because I’m listening to my own advice for a change. And I associate with the right kind of people with the right kinds of attitudes.
 
After writing the last line, I went back and skimmed some past Thinking Out Loud installments and noted that on New Years Day, I pontificated about what I thought it takes to make a life worth living and it included all the clichés we know so well: better physical health through nutrition and exercise and better mental health through goal-oriented activities. That’s when I realized that even though it took me three months to listen to my own advice, I was finally doing just that. And wonders of wonders….it actually works. Who’d a thunk?
 
Actually I think this whole redirection thing had been building since the first of the year and peaked out, when we took the trip to see my daughter, Jennifer, in LA a few weeks ago. First, I was wearing a blue blazer I’ve owned for probably 20 years and it fit me like a straight jacket. I was acutely aware of weighing more than I’ve ever weighed and every movement in the jacket reminded me and had me looking in glass windows as I walked past. Was that actually me in the reflection? The person I saw on the mirror wasn’t the person I saw in my mind. Then we met Jennifer, who had lost 35 pounds and looked terrific! Something had to give. I was miserable.
 
At the same time, I spent that weekend without a laptop and rediscovered reading and, without meaning too, I found my own next novel starting to chirp around the edges of my consciousness. That part of my soul was waking up again. Then I found myself doing something I hadn’t done for a long time: I was re-evaluating every aspect of myself and laying concrete plans on how to deal with each. And I found myself enjoying the process.
 
It has been six weeks since that weekend and yesterday I tried on the blue blazer again, a firm measuring stick of progress. It fit fine because I’ve lost nearly 30 pounds and I did it with very little or no effort. Here are Budd’s secrets to losing weight: don’t put crap in your mouth and discover Lean Cuisine dinners (toss in a little cheese and a slab of turkey and you’re still under 400 calories). Plus my morning walks have a little more intensity to them (still 1.7 fifteen-minute miles) more because I’m staving off rheumatoid symptoms in my ankles and feet (which don’t blood-test as rheumatoid) than anything else.
 
The new novel is showing life again, I don’t grimace when looking at my reflection, my back and legs are feeling good (they’ll never feel great), and I’m really in “next” mode. I’m looking forward to the next book, the next project, the next magazine issue, the next article, and believe it or not, I’m actually looking forward to the next decade. Some part of me knows that even though the socio/economic/political atmosphere positively sucks, we’re going to come out stronger than we went in and I’m going to do the same.
 
To be honest about it, I’ve always been haunted by the feeling that I have yet to do what I was put on Earth to accomplish and this next decade is going to see that happen. I think it is going to be the best decade of my life, which every one of them has been so far.
 
This is a very cool feeling! Keep reading Thinking Out Loud and I’ll take you along for the ride. But, hang on! :-)

18 April 09 -- Small Pleasures

With all the crap coming out of the economy and Washington, including the latest rather clever move to step around Congress to limit firearms through an international arms treaty with Mexico, it was refreshing to find some simple pleasures and satisfactions spread throughout my week. These included the lady at my door and the cat on my chest.
 
The tiny new feline, Abagail, has developed an early morning habit of jumping up and sleeping on my chest while I’m laid back in my chair typing. She is, at this moment, accompanying my typing with an insistent purr that I can feel all the way through to my soul. It’s nice. When she awakes, she’ll sit on my chest, fascinated at the letters dancing across the screen and will, on occasion take a swipe at the cursor. Cute!
 
The lady at the door introduced herself as our new next door neighbor. A pleasant fiftyish (I think) woman, she had locked herself out and asked if she could use the phone to call a locksmith.
 
Truth is, I’m always a little hesitant to have neighbors in and let them learn too much about us. In fact, I’ve never had much use for neighbors. Take that anyway you want. But, I have lots of stuff like antique rifles racked up on the walls, a 250 pound practice bomb in the corner, etc., and, if I let them in and they are gunaphobic, it’ll cause problems. But, she was in distress and seemed not only harmless, but likeable. She didn’t feel like a threat, so I invited her in.
 
She made her call and looked around the office, focusing on the collection of small bombs, artillery shells and miscellaneous inert ordnance on top a cabinet. “Wow, cool stuff!” she said. “Is it all WWII?”
 
I thought she was talking about the four or five 1800’s rifles racked up on the wall, and said, “Oh, no, they are all antiques.”
 
“I recognize that,” she said.  “We’re fairly serious three-gun competition shooters ourselves.”
 
I came back with “IPSC (International Practical Shooting Competition) or SASS (Single Action Shooting Society)?”
 
She immediately recognized a friend. Turns out she and her husband are indeed serious shooting competitors and own not one, but two, of Dillon’s largest reloading machines.
 
We agreed we had to get together for dinner and for the rest of the day I had this silly giggling feeling because we had a kindred soul living next door that we didn’t have to hide from.

Contrasting ceramic pencils meant for metal work great on wood, here wood from my childhood walnut tree destined for grips on one of my Ruger Blackhawks.

Just knowing they are shooters tells me a lot about them, from their politics to their general outlook on life. I know they are undoubtedly the kind of people I can count on in a pinch. I can’t tell you how much peace of mind that gives me. The neighbor on the other side has two sons who are cops, so I’m feeling really good about our neighbors right now.

Another small victory for the week was that I finally located a supply for, and bought, a box of silver-colored marking pencils that work great on metal or wood. Again, this doesn’t sound like much, but I’ve been using increasingly shorter stubs of two I liberated from a friend’s workshop years ago. Now I have a lifetime supply and it only cost me fifteen bucks. God bless Google! (that ought to be a bumper sticker).
 
Self-satisfaction doesn’t require a lot of money or a trip to a motivational guru. This week a nice lady, a sleeping cat and a box of pencils did it. I’m easy to satisfy. And proud of it.
 

11 April 09 --Commonsense and Politics: Mutually Exclusive Entities

I don't want to sound like a Republican, but when did it become bad to make a profit? Even a huge profit? And be paid accordingly? At the same time, when did failure become something the government gets involved in? When does the government say what is a fair and just paycheck? And when does a President agree that international committees have the right to intervene in American business?
 
There’s a good reason much of the world looks up to America and it’s NOT because we let other people tell us how to run our country. And how can a government that actually precipitated this whole mess by not having enough oversight over giants like Freddy Mac or Fannie May think they can possibly understand the intricacies of multi-billion dollar corporations and dictate how they are to be run? What can they possibly be thinking? And “they” is the American congress. Those yahoos we put in office. The entire 535 can’t possibly be that stupid and/or arrogant.
 
Governments are universally, worldwide, the most poorly run entities of any kind and everyone knows it. Governments are a frigging joke, when it comes to running anything. ANYTHING!!!  And now not only do they now want to run American business, but according to what is coming out of the G20 conference, our very own President is saying he’ll support the formation of international advisory committees that will help do just that (G20 Reports). WHERE IN THE HELL DOES OUR CONSTITUTION SAY THAT HE, OR ANYONE, CAN DO ANYTHING REMOTELY RESEMBLING THAT???
 
In case you haven’t noticed, I’m pissed. I try to be as even handed as I can in this column. I absolutely don’t want Thinking Out Loud to turn into one man’s political soapbox.  But, damn! How can these kinds of things possibly be happening? How can Congress stand by and let the entire concept of the way a nation and its business is run be totally turned on its head?
 
I have to be frank about it: when I read the first reports out of G20, I got scared. I got scared that an American President would feel so emboldened that he could just ignore who we, as a nation, are, and what made us great and feel that he has the power and, worse yet, the right, to recreate us in some sort of self-absorbed image that he and a very small number of political cronies thinks is the way we want our nation to look. This is freaking terrifying!
 
And what is really terrifying is that I don’t see anyone out there who is going to rein him in. Speaking as an Independent, it’s curious to me that Democrats will line up behind their man, whomever that man may be, and follow him right over a cliff as if he can do no wrong. It was amazing to me that they could say “Oh, Clinton’s personal behavior has nothing to do with running the country.” Yeah right. An entire generation of kids now think it’s perfectly okay to be getting a blow job in the Oval Office while on the phone and then publicly say “…I absolutely did not have sex with that woman.”  Give me a break!
 
Republicans are just as disgusting and maybe more to blame than the Democrats: Clinton may have pulled the trigger when he took the limits off of Freddy Mac and Fanny May (1999 Times Article), but it was the Bushes and McCains who knew full well what was happening and what was at stake and they still let a misguided snake like Barney Franks shout them down (Jennings TV Report on Crisis Time Lines ). They had six years to set it right and they didn’t. Shame on them. Actually…damn them!
 
And now suddenly, the facts of how this thing got rolling have been twisted around and failing giants like GM are deemed as too big to fail and suddenly American business is being pictured as the villains. They aren’t villains. The GM’s and Chryslers are stupid, but they aren’t villains. They forgot the basic premise of marketing. The actual definition of marketing on the first page of every Marketing 101 textbook is “Marketing is determining the needs and wants of a segment and supplying those needs and wants at a profit.” American car companies stopped doing that. They thought, “if we build it they will come” and somehow managed to ignore the fact that just about every foreign car of any kind did a better job of meeting the market’s needs and wants than theirs did, or do. They failed because of their arrogance and lack of foresight not because they are bad guys and should be punished.
 
American car companies should be allowed to fail. It’ll be a helluva shock to the economy, but nothing like the total recasting of American concepts that we’re seeing now. In a natural state of affairs, poorly run companies would go into bankruptcy, be reorganized and come out smarter than they went in. Or sink out of sight. Either way the economy would eventually adjust and we’d be the stronger for it. WE ARE NOT GOING TO BE MADE STRONGER BY IGNORING THE CONSTITUTION AND THE PRECEPTS THAT MADE US STRONG IN THE FIRST PLACE!!  Who are we kidding? 
 
I’ve been wondering why in the first quarter of this year I’ve ignored my own basic fiscal policies of “don’t spend what doesn’t need to be spent,” and have bought more ammo and firearms than I have in the last 10 years combined. I can’t stop myself and I just realized that I have let the fear get to me. And, judging from the total non-existence of ammo and the way firearms are flying off the shelves nationwide, I’m not alone (Reuter's Report on Gun/Ammo Sales ). Only a very few amongst us thinks there’s going to be rioting in the streets. But many of us feel as one of my non-gun owning friends said in an e-mail, “I don’t know why, but I just feel as if I should own a gun.” Americans are voting their confidence by arming themselves and believe me, that’s definitely NOT a good sign. There’s an irrational feeling that we need to be prepared to defend ourselves. Against what, we don’t know, but we want to be prepared.
 
I truly apologize for what I’ve just written. You get enough political BS other places, but I had to get it off my chest or I’d explode. I’m sorry.
 
PS
April 15th, there’s supposed to be a show of support and dissatisfaction by creating our own symbolic tea party and mailing tea bags to the Congress and the President. I don’t EVER get involved in these kinds of things, but I think this time I will. I can afford a tea bag or two to help get our country back on track. Can’t you? Please send tea made in America. :-)
 
Contact: http://www.AmericanSolutions.com/TeaParty
 
To send the prez his very own T-bag
 
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Washington , D.C. 20500

4 April 09 --Adios, Harry

We lost Harry Shepard last week. That may not mean much to most people but to many of us, it means our world is a little smaller. Diminished by the light given off by yet another unforgettable character. And God knows, the world doesn’t have enough of those.  Harry was just a little better (actually a lot better in many areas), a little different and a little more memorable than the rest of us.

Harry in the white Marchetti (actually known as a WACO Meteor at this point. There were only three in the country at the time), Larry Kingry flying lead. I wish I had some Redhawk scans with Harry, Carl and Bob, but my slide scanner is kaput. Sorry. They were terrific!

Harry was a fighter pilot. I could stop right there and not write another word and have most of it covered. But then, I could add that for most of his active duty USN carreer he flew F-8 Crusaders, which, to those who know, adds another huge dimension to understanding his character. To most of the hardcore fighter community, the Crusader was the last of the true gun fighters and I know of no airplane community that is prouder of their tradition and their achievements than those who flew Crusaders. I’m just as certain that no community has more ejections per capita than the Crusaders: the engine wasn’t known for longevity. As they always said, one ejection per thousand hours was to be expected.  Harry had one, that in a twisted way, is one of the funnier flying episodes I’ve ever heard.
 
Harry, however, added a dollop of his own character to his having been a Crusader jock. Actually, it was more like a shovel full of character than a dollop as he was one of the most unique individuals I’ve ever known.
 
First he was something of a banty rooster on speed: shorter than average, I’d guess around five-eight, he stomped through life absolutely listening to nothing but his own drummer, which, by the way, was a jazz drummer, as he was a terrifically talented jazz trumpeter. As such, he was welcome on stage at every jazz club near any NAS and all up and down the East Coast.  Like everything else Harry did, it was a passion that knew no bounds. And like everything else Harry did, it was done to perfection.
 
Perfection might be the one word that describes Harry’s World best.  Intolerance, might be another: he quietly (sometimes not so quietly) railed at a world around him that he saw as nothing more than obstacles to navigation.  As he got a little older, he mellowed, but not much.
 
Harry very definitely lived in his own world, a bubble of perfection that floated through society and somehow resisted being punctured by the realities around him. Harry owned the best firearms (one an 1876 Winchester was the only one I’ve ever seen that was a duplicate of that championed by Teddy Roosevelt), the cleanest, most exotic cars, had pressed jeans, etc., but most importantly, he was about as close to being the most perfect aviator most of us have ever seen.
 
From the day he hit flight school in Pensacola, Harry cut a wide swath with his abilities. Especially the abilty to fly formation. Although he was an experienced pilot before joining the Navy (crop dusting, etc.), the Navy put him in the situation to realize his destiny—to perfect formation flying to a level seldom seen anywhere at any time by anyone.  Stories about him in the Navy abound, but my personal experiences with him in the air always have him staring at me intently, with a curiously satisfied mini-grin, while I’m focusing on him through a camera: I have no idea how many times we took strange airplanes aloft to put them on film (you do remember film, don’t you?) and his ability to follow my commands to the inch made me look so good, so many times. I’d imagine we shot probably 30-50 magazine covers and God knows how many centerspreads.

The Bobsy Twins (not their official name) at play.

He was driven to do formation aerobatics, but he was also driven to only do so with the finest pilots he could find. Harry was easily the first Master Pilot I ever met and those he brought to him for his airshow teams were in a wildly exalted category themselves, or he wouldn’t have selected them. And each of them were/are giant pilots themselves. And each, because of the kind of flying to be done and the fact that they were selected by Harry, were characters in their own right.  The first, Larry Kingry, took the word “character” and gave it new meaning. At some point, I’ll do a blog on character’s I have known and I’ll regale you with Larry Stories, as there are many, each more unbelievable than the next.
 
Then there were Carl Pascarell (he of the unreal hands) and Bob Gandt (he of the successful novelist career). Character pilots of the highest level. In all cases, they were flying their beloved Siai-Marchetti SF 260s doing things that seemed impossible. Harry and Larry (we called them the Bobsy Twins) did a two-ship that included canopy-to-canopy loops and rolls with their vertical fins overlapping. I watched them dozens of times and could never whistle afterwards: my mouth dried out, just watching.
 
I could tell Harry stories for another hundred pages, but just let it be known that we’ll miss him. And we’ll draw around Marlene, his wife, and support her as best we can. And we’ll continue to spread the Harry Legend and laugh about his antics every time we gather on airport ramps and in dark bars for as long as any of us who knew him are able to talk.
 
Adios, Hairball. We’re not likely to meet your kind again.
 
PS
I can’t let Harry go without mentioning something: Harry died of what some of us are beginning to call the Hale Wallace syndrome, after another friend of ours who died a few years back. They both died because of an unwillingness to see doctors once a year. Otherwise, they’d both still be with us. Learn the lesson.

28 March 09 --Would we Really Want to Know?

Fear of the unknown: in one-way or another it drives, or at least shadows, all of us. Especially these days. How much worse is it going to get? Who can I trust? Am I going to loose my job? Will they stop making Bud Light? And then there’s the big one: how long am I going to live? If there were a way to know, would we really want to know?
 
This thought popped to the top because someone started flashing around a website that purported to have an age-calculator that worked. Usually, I instantly delete those kinds of things because I can see no way they could put together something that could include enough factors to have even the slightest chance of being accurate. For whatever reason, however, I popped this one open and was surprised: I don’t know how the insurance companies figure their actuarial tables but this could be it. It includes 34 different factors that you move a slider bar up to establish where you fit on the scale of really good to really sucks. If there is such a thing as a calculator being able to give a best guess of where you’re likely to fit in the totem pole of longevity, this may be it.
 
Before running through this thing, keep your eyes open for one really helpful factor: by playing with each slider you can see your virtual age (how old your body is in relation to your chronological age) change as well as your expectancy, so you get an instant read on how much effect each of these factors has on both. This is reason alone to take the test: it gives you a qualitative handle on how much effect different factors have on life and could actually help you shape your behavior.
 
Okay, here it is, but come back here, when you’re done. We’re not finished talking. http://www.sonnyradio.com/realage3.swf You might have to cut and paste it. It's worth it.  

How’d you do? Are you depressed? Elated? Skeptical? We should all be skeptical and not let this thing shape our mental attitude. However, the process, if not the result, of going through the process made us all aware of the many factors over which we have control that can add or subtract years from our lives. I lost three years just because of flying. On the other hand, the way in which I fly may just contribute so much to my mental awareness and emotional stability, maybe I gain part of those years back.
 
This is a fun game, but think how horrible it would be if this calculator were proven to be totally capable of accurately predicting how many years we have left. That’s a pretty damn scary prospect. How would we react, if we knew for a fact we were going to check out at 1515 hrs, April 21, 2032? Would we rejoice knowing we have 23 years guaranteed or freak out knowing we only have 23 years guaranteed? Would we put our heads down and charge ahead, making those years count, or would we become increasingly depressed and border-line catatonic as the time drew near?
 
How’d I do? Surprisingly good: virtual age 20 years lower than actual, 100.7 to the end, mostly the courtesy of having had the good sense to select the right parents: they both hit 90.
 
But do I actually want to live that long? Given good health, strong mind and Marlene still at my side, absolutely. Subtract any of those and I don’t think so. Besides, no one can financially afford to live that long.
 
This has been an interesting exercise, but hopefully it made all of us ask, “How should I conduct the rest of my life to maximize first, the quality of it, and second, its length.”   I thought about that and realized I already have a short list of internal rules of the road that pretty much guide my days and I’ll share some of them. Yours will be different, but we should all have them.
 
- Play is something we earn, not something we’re owed. Play is the reward for working hard.
 
- Don’t look at your watch: if you’re running as fast as you can, it’s a wasted motion.
 
- At the beginning of each day, set an achievable goal and make sure you achieve it.
 
- At the end of each day decide whether it was well invested and resolve to do better tomorrow.
 
- Do the most distasteful thing first. Do the most important second.
 
- Ignore the clock. 8-hour workdays won’t reshape our world.
 
- Sleep is over rated. 30 extra minutes added to our day is massive.
 
- Don’t put questionable stuff in our mouth. We hurt our health one cup of coffee, one beer, one cigarette at a time and, without health, life is nothing.
 
- Devote 25 minutes/day to physical conditioning. 25 minutes sounds much shorter than a half hour. Anything, however, is better than nothing.
 
- Devote 30 minutes to something nonsensical, e.g. Google answers to useless questions (is .25 ACP weaker than .22 LR?).
 
These are only a few of mine, but you get the idea. Now do your own. You’ll live longer because of it. Plus, I’m going to need someone to play with in my 90’s.

19 March 09 --Of Dead Cows and Baby Dolls

 I hate to admit this, but last weekend I ate a $120 steak. And no, that didn’t include the entire cow. Or a sesame seed bun. And on top of that was the $22 salad, $4 coke and the $7 pretzel bread. It was not only the most expensive meal I’ve ever had (or even seen), but was probably one of the very best. And it was part of a 36-hour glimpse into a part of America those of us in the cheap seats never see.
 
All of this was part of a grand (actually, “grand” doesn’t begin to describe it) birthday gift from my daughter, Jennifer-the-thirty-two-year-old-Hollywood-mogul. She decided she wanted to fly Marlene and me out to LA and give us a short, all-expenses-paid weekend complete with the aforementioned meal, which was only one of several experiences that clearly showed where I sit on America’s cultural totem pole. It was very eye-opening, sobering and amazing.
 
The weekend was really needed. For both Jen and me. We get very little face time and most of our communication consists of short e-mail/texting bursts, her on her Blackberry, which I’m positive is an organic part of her body, and me on my Mac, an organic part of my soul. A phone call is rare. But they do happen and I value them more than air itself. So, having her dedicate an entire weekend to us, expensive meal or not, was the best birthday gift I could have received. Like any parent, I crave time with my kids.
 
“Dad, what do you want to do? Go to the Getty museum?”
 
“I just wanna talk.”
 
“How about lunch at the beach?”
 
“Sure, as long as we talk.”
 
The best part of the weekend was several hours sitting in a Borders café just…you guessed it…talking.
              
And then there was the meal and the American Girl doll culture shock.

Cuts. Our table front and center where we watched Rolls-Royces and Ferraris being valet parked.

First the meal: Cuts is one of Wolfgang Puck’s eateries (yeah, I didn’t know who he is either) and I’m certain he’d flip out if he heard me call it an eatery. But that’s what it is. If you eat there, it’s an eatery. And it wasn’t a wildly fancy one although it’s the in-place to eat in Hollywood. I’ve been lots of places with more pizzazz but none with a menu that was priced like a Mercedes dealership.
 
Its real attraction is that it serves Japanese Kobe beef. However, I got a kick out their menu making a big deal out of serving “Grade A, prime, grain-fed beef from Nebraska.” Hey, that’s me. But I digress.
 
Kobe beef comes from a specific kind of Japanese cow that is fed all sorts of special meals and supposedly receives body massages with sake (rice wine). Mmmmm! Do they amble around the fields with a buzz on? In the end, however, no matter how happy or high a cow may be, it still winds up being a gigantic steak carried around on a platter by a fancy waiter to show the patrons its wonderfulness. I couldn’t tell if it was smiling in appreciation but I seriously doubt it. Massages or not, it still got eaten.
 
The big difference in the meat is that the massages (from Geishas?) work the fat deep into the meat so it is marbeled throughout rather than the fat being layered or streaked through it.
 
How does it taste? Fantastic! But not like steak. Its texture is so homogeneous it’s hard to tell what it is. Plus the fat supposedly begins to melt at 77 degrees, so, when they say it melts in your mouth, it literally does. Plus, because the fat is present throughout, it tastes as if butter is oozing out of every pore. Very different, very good.

What killed me (actually a lot killed me) was that we weren’t the only ones dining on exotic dead cow. The restaurant is huge, I mean really big, and it was jammed with people who were going to drop the same amount of change. Zowie!  The opulence and extravagance was mind boggling. But it was nothing compared to what I saw at the American Girl store.

Chrissa: marketing phenomena. Clothes $25, Bunkbed, $215. Shrink, call for price.

I don’t spend a lot of time in doll stores (read that as zero) but since we have the cutest granddaughter on the planet, Zoe, I found myself sucked into the latest uniquely American marketing scheme: American Girl. It’s an entire world created around a few wildly expensive dolls. For instance, the store we went into was two-story and was located in one of the highest end open-air malls Hollywood had to offer. It had a complete hair salon where you could bring your doll and have its hair done by full time stylists (be sure to call ahead). A full-service restaurant took up a third of the store where your doll could make reservations and have you as guests. I wonder what it costs if they dine alone?

The store could have been a Hollywood jewelry store, complete with concierge desk, roving customer service types and the doll clothing and accessories (beds, laptops, etc) were show cased just like a jewelry store. The dolls started out at $95 and went up. The whole experience was like Barbie on acid. Worse yet, the store was jammed with what I saw as normal working stiffs like me with a kid dragging them around the store buying this and that. Haven’t they heard there’s a slowdown/recession/depression/catastrophe under way? Gee, maybe we really can spend our way out of this. Hollywood is certainly trying.
 
Through all of this, Marlene, Jennifer and I (with Johnny occasionally available) were constantly talking except when Jen was off in a corner on a cell phone doing her Hollywood thing. Leo and Justin were constantly calling her or vice versa.
 
I’ve never had a better birthday present. Never!
 
PS
 
For the first time in probably a decade I purposely didn’t take a laptop with me. WHAT A HUGE DIFFERENCE!! The result was that in the dead spaces (waiting at the airport, on the plane, etc.) I read two complete books. The Watchman by Robert Crais, one of my favorites, and the Pulitzer-winning The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, which I highly recommend, but only if you’re not prone to depression. It’ll have you stock piling canned goods. He wrote No Country for Old Men.
 
PPS
My daughter’s great success in losing weight in a bad atmosphere for such an endeavor has inspired me and made me finally commit. I’ve lost five pounds since we returned. Twenty to go. Hoooraaaay

7 March 09 --Pets: The Good, the Bad and the Nasty

When growing up, we never had a dog. In some sort of foggy memory I seem to remember my parents saying something about dogs going after chickens and dad had a hatchery. So we didn’t have a dog. Or a cat. But we did have a bunch of other bizarre pets every one of which was a nasty SOB. But, they didn't eat chickens so I guess they were okay. They included a Mexican burro named Napoleon, a Shetland pony, and a Java monkey.

Meet Abigail. That's her on the right. It's very seldom a picture shows me smiling this much.

What put me in mind of this was that recently we somehow wound up with another member in our furry family. My eldest stepson, who is staying with us while looking for work, came home with an 8-week old kitten. I responded with “No way, it has to go, we already have three! No freaking way, get it out of here!” Then he handed it to me. And you know the rest of the story. Her name is Abigail (Abby for short). If you watch NCIS and look at the cat’s picture you’ll get the meaning of the name (she’s very Goth and a hyper character).
 
Anyway, I woke up this morning with Abby under the covers snuggled up against my bare belly (actually wedged under the overhang of my belly as I lay on my side—I’m on an overhang reduction program). Smoki was laying across both my feet, Sháhn-deen (the only non-cat) was wedged between Marlene’s pillow and mine and Corki was purring away draped across the top of Marlene’s head. Meezer (Siamese - Meezer - get it?) was off running around the house. Now you can see why we really didn’t need another cat, but who can refuse a kitty that wants nothing more than to burrow into your heart and be loved?
 
At this stage of my life I can’t imagine life without our floor-bound (more or less) family. They absolutely complete us, each in their own special way, and my own kids know well that they rate above Sháhn-deen and Corki, but not by much. But then there were the pets of my childhood: with them as background, it’s amazing I became such a strong pet person as I slithered my way into adulthood.
 
Dad was always into the unusual in all things (it must be a genetic thing) and his store, although actually in a residential neighborhood on the edge of town, sat on something like ten acres (and still does). And, since his entire being was aimed at enjoying life while promoting his business, he decided that it would be a good idea if…no...actually I’m not sure what he was thinking…to get a Java monkey and have it in a gigantic cage in the store. This thing was NASTY!
 
It would scream at customers and we were constantly having to go into the cage to retrieve a customer’s glasses or pens or anything they had on the front of their person when getting close to the cage. We had him for what seems like ten years and I remember him getting loose in the store one time, which is huge by any standards. We gave up trying to find him when the airconditioning unit kicked on and we heard “bump-bump-bump.” He was in the blower and getting pretty raspberried up. He was much more controllable after that.
 
Then there was the Shetland pony. That SOB would rather reach around and bite you in the leg than walk ten feet and it was a never-ending challenge trying to saddle him and get a ride out of him. Finally, he ran away one day and on dad’s daily radio show he let people know it was loose and running around. A listener called in and said he had caught him and we should come pick him up. Dad solved the nasty-pet problem by saying, “Forget it, he’s yours.”
 
The burro would let us ride him but he’d do his best to rub you off on every gate you went through. He didn’t bite but wasn’t all that happy about carrying people. We’d have two aboard (we were maybe ten years old) and he’d get moving at a pretty good clip, then suddenly stop, plant his front legs and drop his head to the ground, very smoothly unloading the two of us in a heap on the ground in front of him. I don’t remember how dad got rid of him, there not being a lot of call for burros in rural Nebraska, but dad’s stock-in-trade was being able to sell virtually anything. So, the burro went away.
 
So, today, as I sit there in the pre-dawn light and listen to all the breathing and purring surrounding us in bed, I have to laugh. Life is good. Very good and all our little guys and gals make it that way.
 
If you don’t have a pet, get one. It’ll make your life better.
 
PS
Cats are the easiest, avoid burro’s and be aware that the snuggle-factor of goldfish is pretty low.

1 March 09 -- Let's Cowboy Up!

One of my favorite things about society is that there are so many sub-cultures that often live for generations without the rest of us knowing they are there. From Trekkies to live steamers (trains and stationary engines), they all have a serious passion for what they do and I love ‘em all. Yesterday, for instance, I dropped out of the 21st Century just long enough to visit one of my all time favorite sub-cultures, the Cowboy Action Shooters at their national match, Winter Range, here in Phoenix.

Horseback shooting is great fun to watch. Their ammo is loaded with crushed walnut shells.

Boiled down to its barest essence, cowboy action shooting is exactly like police or military tactical shooting: you’re working your way through buildings and scenes and are expected to knock down a series of metal plates in a given, and unknown sequence. You’re timed and the shortest time with the least misses wins. The difference here is that it is all done in 1880’s style. You’re a cowboy and your arms are two single action revolvers, a Winchester or suitable 1800 rifle, and a shotgun, each being used in different specific stages or tasks, sometimes together.
 
Each year and event is different (there are dozens around the country, but Winter Range at Phoenix is one of the largest) and they are always trying out new, sometimes nutty ideas for shooting stages. I remember one year they duplicated a scene out of an Eastwood movie, The Unforgiven, in which they had to fish the keys off a table into a jail cell, get out, club a dummy with a shotgun, then shoot through the windows and knock down a series of steel plates. It’s nothing but fun.
 
The sport has given rise to a really massive industry to supply the arms and various accoutrements from boots to truly authentic clothing of all kinds. There’s an unreal variation in gun belts, holsters. And then there’s the cowboy hat. The hat makes the character and not only are there dozens of off-the-shelf suppliers but more custom makers than you could believe.

Playing cowboy/cowgirl is a lot more fun with live ammo.

The reason character is important is because cowboy shooting is more than just the shooting. Everyone who joins the Single Action Shooting Society (SASS) has to create a name for themselves (Evil Roy, Mogollon Monk, Bodacious Kate, etc.) that is registered and no one else can use. Some, like Evil Roy have become famous characters because of their shooting prowess and actually give endorsements to various cowboy products.
 
When you go to the events you’re surrounded with hundreds and hundreds of western characters, but not just cowboys. You’ll see Mexican vaqueros, very proper British “shootists” UK Boer War troopers. The only thing you can be guaranteed is that no matter what kind of adventurous 1880’s character you can think of, it’ll be there (see the attached pictures). You don't see a lot of flaming liberals in the crowd since every single one of them is wearing at least two real pistols.
 
At the heart of any shooting event is the hardware and that’s where cowboy action shooting has really done something significant: you can judge the size of the activity by the fact that there are at least a half dozen companies (almost all in the same valley in Italy) making every single US firearm of any kind from the Civil War on in absolutely faithful form but in both vintage and modern calibers. The well known Single Action Army Colt leads the pack, but little known weapons like Schoefield revolvers and Spencer carbines are there in all their case hardened, brightly blued glory.
 
Replicating something like an 1873 Winchester is no small undertaking: we may have modern machining centers today, but there’s still a high degree of precision involved. And then to make it in a dozen or more model variations (different barrel lengths, stock designs, checkered, etc.) means someone has spent a lot of money on the project. In the lever action rifle category alone there are dozens of totally different models from the Civil War Henry to the 1892 Winchester and beyond. This is a serious market seeing serious money changing hands.
 
What I love most is the atmosphere of a bunch of people whose interest in both history and fun have banded together. My friend came with me for the first time and commented on the quality of the people:  no one thought anything of leaving their gun cart, with their revolvers hanging from the handle and their rifles in the cart, sitting outside a tent while they are eating or went shopping.  What we have here is a whole lot of people coming full circle: we’re all back playing cowboy again but this time with live ammunition.
 
For more information on the sport go to the Single Action Shooting Society (SASS) http://www.sassnet.com/.
 
And here’s a couple of URL’s if you want to start shopping for hardware. And don’t come complaining to me that reading this cost you a lot of money. You’ll make it back in fun and come back to thank me. Now, go to PHOTOS. This will take a little time to load, but I hope you’ll enjoy it.
 
A couple of replica firearms distributors and manufacturers:
 
Cimarron Firearms Co.
http://www.cimarron-firearms.com
 
Taylor’s & co.
http://www.taylorsfirearms.com
 
Shiloh Sharps
http://www.shilohrifle.com/

21 Feb 09 -- Keep your pants zipped: big bro may be watching

Did anyone see Enemy of the State (Will Smith-really good flick) where “They” were constantly following him via satellite video? And how many movies have we all seen where “their” real time surveillance is so good they make wise cracks about a guy’s physical endowment, when they catch him taking a pee in the desert? That’s all BS, right?  Yeah, most of it is. Isn’t it?
 
Okay, let’s see a show of hands. How many of us think that we are NOT showing up on someone’s video screen somewhere? If so, do this: log onto http://maps.live.com/. It takes a while to load, so be patient. Also, it's picky about browsers so you may have to cut and paste the URL. Now, start double clicking on Phoenix until you can see the street layout. Now click in the northeast corner of town (just inside the bypass) until you see Scottsdale Airport (big, single runway). Home in on that and switch to “Aerial View.” That shows you some hangars north of the runway that look like the Cingular “More Bars in More Places” commercial. Switch to “Birds eye view” and click between the two bottom rows of hangars. Yes, sports fans, that little red airplane is mine and that’s me closing the hangar doors. Does life get any spookier? Maybe Big Brother really IS watching. But, if he is, he must be getting really bored watching me go in left hand circles.
 
Actually, he’s not watching us. At least that wasn’t him up there with a Box Brownie snapping pictures of me doing what I do. The fact that my little bird and me wound up in a digital photo is the definition of “coincidence.”  However, it is weird to see yourself in a picture taken from space. Okay, so you couldn’t get close enough see my bald spot (thankfully, I don’t have one…yet), but that’s only because they don’t put the “good picture stuff” up on the web. If you can believe TV, when they crank up the juice, they can count our freckles.
 
Actually, that’s not entirely true either. From space they aren’t that good, but zip your pants and watch what you’re doing if you spot a model airplane circling your house at high altitude. Some of the video they are getting from the UAV’s (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) really is that good.

The RQ-4 Global Hawk is not your normal model airplane. Besides having a 44 foot wingspan, it can loiter at 60,000 feet for days taking pix of your bald spot. One recently flew the Atlantic, take off to landing, completely on auto pilot.

But, should we be worried about it? I don’t think so. “They” are entirely too busy chasing after bad guys and coming up with silly financial plans and the silly reasons to explain why they didn’t work (they develop the excuses at the same time they develop the plans) to watch us common folk. However, I’d hate to be a bad guy. Between helicopters, UAV’s and satellites it’s getting increasingly difficult to find a place to hide. Still, we’re coming up on eight years and they haven’t been able to find Osama B. (Damn! I just realized what happens if you change the S to a B. Another coincidence—I hope), once again proving that this is a big damn world and finding one man isn’t easy. Especially if he and his hosts don’t want him to be found.
 
I suppose I should have a profound reason for writing this. But I don’t. I just wanted to share my fifteen minutes of fame.
 
PS
If LiveMaps.com would let you magnify me closing the hangar doors two more times, you’d see I was looking up and shooting the satellite the bird.  Screw “them,” who ever “them” may be.

17 Feb 09 -- States tell the feds to butt out!

Believe it or not, but there actually are some good things happening on the governmental stage these days. Granted, it’s not the federal stage, but it’s good anyway: eight states, soon to be followed by others, have apparently lost their patience with the Big Brother, we-know-what-is-best-for-you attitude of the federal government and in a very polite sort of way have told them to stuff it.
 
You don’t have to read very many of our founding father’s writings to know that they thought the less government there was the better off the Republic would be. In fact, most of them say that we need a revolt every so often to clean out the Nation’s sinuses, as it were. They were so concerned that the states be independent entities that they wrote two amendents to the Constitution that, in effect, say the powers of the federal government over the states is limited by statute. And eight states have run resolutions through their local governments recently that say they aren’t going to let the federal government do things that Amendments 9 and 10 to the Constitution say they can’t.

These amendments state:

Amendment 9 - Construction of Constitution. Ratified 12/15/1791.
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Amendment 10 - Powers of the States and People. Ratified 12/15/1791.
Note The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

As I read these, they say that just because the Constitution names specific rights, doesn’t mean other rights, not mentioned, are not held by the people. Parallel to that, if the Constitution doesn’t give a specific right to the government and doesn’t prohibit a right to the states, it is then understood that the states and the people have those rights.
 
The states that have resolved to bind the government to their constitutional limitations are listed below along with a link to their legislation. At the very bottom is the text of New Hampshire’s. Read it and see if they aren’t fairly clear in telling the government to butt out. They take their state motto, “Live free or die,” pretty damn serious. They sound ready to secede from the Union. One of the original thirteen saying this isn’t what they signed up for. I love it! This is going to be such an interesting four years.

Washington
http://apps.leg.wa.gov/billinfo/summary ... &bill=4009]

New Hampshire
http://www.gencourt.state.nh.us/legisla ... R0006.html

Arizona
http://www.azleg.gov/FormatDocument.asp ... r2024p.htm

Montana
http://data.opi.mt.gov/bills/2009/billhtml/HB0246.htm

Michigan
http://www.legislature.mi.gov/(S(sjgu5x ... 45imuuysrm))/documents/2009-2010/Journal/House/htm/2009-HJ-01-22-002.htm

Missouri
http://www.house.mo.gov/content.aspx?in ... /HR212.HTM

Oklahoma
http://axiomamuse.wordpress.com/2009/01 ... ral-power/

Hawaii
http://www.hawaii-nation.org/

New Hampshire’s Bill:

(New Hampshire) HOUSE CONCURRENT RESOLUTION 6
A RESOLUTION affirming States’ rights based on Jeffersonian principles.
“That any Act by the Congress of the United States, Executive Order of the President of the United States of America or Judicial Order by the Judicatories of the United States of America which assumes a power not delegated to the government of United States of America by the Constitution for the United States of America and which serves to diminish the liberty of the any of the several States or their citizens shall constitute a nullification of the Constitution for the United States of America by the government of the United States of America. Acts which would cause such a nullification include, but are not limited to:
I. Establishing martial law or a state of emergency within one of the States comprising the United States of America without the consent of the legislature of that State.
II. Requiring involuntary servitude, or governmental service other than a draft during a declared war, or pursuant to, or as an alternative to, incarceration after due process of law.
III. Requiring involuntary servitude or governmental service of persons under the age of 18 other than pursuant to, or as an alternative to, incarceration after due process of law.
IV. Surrendering any power delegated or not delegated to any corporation or foreign government.
V. Any act regarding religion; further limitations on freedom of political speech; or further limitations on freedom of the press.
VI. Further infringements on the right to keep and bear arms including prohibitions of type or quantity of arms or ammunition; and
That should any such act of Congress become law or Executive Order or Judicial Order be put into force, all powers previously delegated to the United States of America by the Constitution for the United States shall revert to the several States individually. Any future government of the United States of America shall require ratification of three quarters of the States seeking to form a government of the United States of America and shall not be binding upon any State not seeking to form such a government; and that copies of this resolution be transmitted by the house clerk to the President of the United States, each member of the United States Congress, and the presiding officers of each State’s legislature.”

7 Feb 09 -- Was There Life Before Computers?

Hell has now officially frozen over: my best friend, Jim Clevenger, finally has a computer. And he actually sends and reads e-mails on it! My heart be still! I now have only one other computer hold-out in my life, the designer of the Bearhawk (who probably wouldn’t appreciate me naming him here even though we all know who it is).  And I think even he is moving closer to the shoulders of the information highway.
 
Information highway! Now there’s a buzzword we haven’t heard recently. I wonder if it’s because everyone is on it, so it doesn’t need to be mentioned. We now take it for granted.
 
The concept of being able to reach almost anyone at almost any time and to corral almost any fact instantaneously has become such an integral part of life’s fabric that even those of us who were adults PC (pre-computer) can’t really remember life without them. In fact, it’s hard to remember that the Internet and the computer weren’t hatched at the same time. After the personal computer became common, there was about 15 years that they were nothing but word and number crunchers. Thank, God, the genius of Al Gore was there to tie them together and change each of our lives forever (surely you don’t think I mean that, do you? What a pompous clown!).

Apple IIe. There are now entire generations that have never seen a 5 1/4" floppy disk (they actually were floppy) or a computer that can't run two applications at a time. Crude, hey?

For whatever reason, when I finally got a computer, I felt as if I was one of the last people on Earth to do so. That was in 1979 and it was an Apple IIe. I had held on to my old IBM Selectric (it still sits just the other side of my printer where I use it for labels) for my writing waaaaaay too long. The Apple was crude beyond belief, although we thought it was terrific in every way: for instance, every time you wanted to do something using a different application, you had to insert the application disk, save your project, then insert another application to move on. We didn’t know it, but when doing graphics it was wildly Jurassic in nature. Still, we thought we’d moved into the space age.
 
Looking back at it, I can’t believe how hard it was to produce articles and such before computers. Absolutely the biggest boon of computers to writers is that we suddenly didn’t have to worry so much about making mistakes. Before the big C showed up, if we screwed something up or wanted to change it later, we had to retype the entire freaking page. What a pain in the butt! The upshot was that we’d often send stuff to editors we knew wasn’t perfect but we didn’t have the energy to retype it.  I did my first book, The World of Sport Aviation, for Hearst on a typewriter and, today, there’s not enough money in the world to get me to go through that again.
 
Then I flashed through a series of Apples, first the LISA (pre-Mac) then the little Mac 128, that didn’t even cursor keys. You did everything with the mouse. Then about every other Mac model until today. I have a computer museum on a shelf in a back bedroom.

Remember these? This is a Mac Plus, which was a much improved version of the old Mac 128. That's a 128kb of memory! That's hysterical!

What made me think about this is that this week we put yet another hard drive in my present machine, a MacPro 2.66 gHz dual processer monster because my main drive was filling up. I would have said it was impossible to fill up a 500 Gig drive, but I did it in a year and a half. So, including the new terabyte drive, I now have 2.2 TB’s spread through four hard drives in this little hummer. A couple of years ago a Gig was an unheard of amount of memory but now even my RAM is 6 Gig and will probably be expanded soon. And I’m running 8 Gig cards in my trusty Canon 40D’s. It’s insane!
 
The one area where I’m still a hold-out is my phone: All I want to do is talk on it. I don’t want to play games, get the weather, baseball scores or watch movies. I want it to be a nearly invisible part of my life that is just there for communication and is impossible to lose (having lost phones, that is one of my biggest fears). So, I have a Motorola Razor in a Verizon case that clips INSIDE my pants pocket where it can’t get hooked and I don’t even know its there.
 
Still, we were at dinner the other night and a question came up we couldn’t answer. My stepson whipped out his phone, Googled the question and answered it in about 15 seconds. Gheez I wish he hadn’t done that! Now he has me thinking.

31 Jan 09 -- Puppy Kisses and Other of Life's Basics

As with most of society, my days are a hustle to stay ahead of the economic undertow headed our way. Much of it is very real. Some of it is media hype that is causing most of the I’m-not-spending-a-dime attitude, which is making things worse. We all worry about it a lot and it’s hard to escape it. But just last night I had a little island of serenity and fun suck me in and remind me that’s not all about money and security. It’s about what’s closest to us.
 
This may well fall into the category of too much information, but, at the same time, I’m positive the same sort of thing exists in most households. Or at least it can, and therein lies the lesson I learned.
 
Even though I work out of a rather expansive home office and we’re always in the house together, Marlene and I actually don’t really “see” each other all that much. In each of our lives, we are the other person we pass while whizzing down the hall or have a business/financial crisis discussion with. But, even at night, we really don’t spend much time together because life and work gets in the way. Last night, we decided to remedy that for at least a short period of time and eat in bed while catching up on some TV shows we’d TiVo’d, notably The Unit, the opening segment of 24 (where is Jack Bauer, now that we REALLY need him?) and an NCIS and House or two. Since we could race through the commercials, you can watch an hour show in less than 40 minutes. It was to be a TV orgy.
 
As we settled in bed, the rest of our family decided they had to be part of it too and in a minute or so they had us surrounded: Corki the big orange tabby snuggled up against Marlene on the other side, Sháhn-deen the clown snuggled between us, and Smoki, the gigantic, long-haired, gray-not-quite-black panther (17+ pounds of muscle) settled between my feet. These are their standard nocturnal positions: we never sleep alone and, this night, apparently we weren’t going to watch television alone either.

This is where we find out whether Marlene ever reads this blog. She'll kill me, when she sees this. Smoki is just out of sight to the left. And, yes, I sleep with three redheads. That's not all bad.

Sháhn-deen is such a loving, yet wildly exuberant, character that our TV watching was a combination of gunfire and plot twists intermingled with puppy kisses, ball chasing and her burrowing around under the blankets like a gopher on acid. She’d pop up from under the blankets every so often with this silly/mischievous grin on her face, give one of us a lick, and either bound off the bed in search of her ball or disappear back under the covers. It was past being hysterical and I laughed so hard I had tears in my eyes.
 
At some point, I looked around and realized that for the first time in months I was totally relaxed. And happy as hell. Because of the hassle of making a living, it’s not often that emotion bubbles to the top so clearly because, like so many other people, I don’t think I let it. It is as if the pressures around us force those kinds of thoughts to the side because they aren’t helping us solve problems or accomplishing something that needs to be accomplished.
 
There, sitting in that bed with two huge cats, a little dog barely two-thirds their size rocketing around the bed, my lovely wife sitting next to me, I realized that life is actually pretty damn good. I had temporarily forgotten how incredibly lucky I am. More important, the situation I was enjoying didn’t cost a dime. Nothing politicians could do would affect it. Nothing the economy would do could take it away from me because we could be doing the same thing in a tent and still be loving it.
 
In the best of times, life is complicated. Or at least it seems that way. It takes a only few puppy kisses and a purring warmth snuggled against you and your loved one to remind us that, as long as we’re healthy, we’re the one that’s making our life complicated. The basics are always there waiting for us, when we finally give in and settle down to enjoy them. 

24 Jan 09 -- Fine Tools Versus Those that Work

It’s a pretty safe bet that most of the folks reading this are, if not toolaholics, at least they appreciate a fine tool.  And most of us yearn for a work shop equipped with the finest of anything. After all, haven’t we always opined that we need the best, if we’re going to do our best work?  If that’s the case, please explain the many times we’ve seen outstanding work done by what appear to be crappy tools.
 
Case in point: my urge/search for a highly accurate handgun (more in later months). I’m always daydreaming of building the ultimate in accurate handguns, this despite the fact that I’m such a bad shot I’d have to use a two-hand hold to accurately shoot myself in my foot. That’s beside the point. The point is, I’ve had my Browning Hi-Power tuned and tweaked, sought out a super-fine Smith .22 target pistol, I’m getting ready to have a Ruger Blackhawk .357 modified to the hilt, etc., etc. None of this is cheap, but I can’t help myself. The search for accuracy, for finding the finest tool of its type is something of an addiction, albeit a silly one.
 
Enter a 1944 Polish Radom Vis.

The Radom Vis M35 has a lot of designer John Browning features, e.g. grip safety and internals of a Browning Hi-Power.

When designed and built before the war, the Radom was actually a high quality 9mm pistol. Mine, however, falls into the piece-of-crap category. It was produced by slave labor at the very end of the war and is one of the crudest firearms that I’ve ever seen. Machine marks everywhere. Truly lousy finish. When some of the Nazi proof marks were stamped on it, they hit it so hard they actually bent the frame. All the ear marks of a piece of crap. However, I’ve owned this thing my entire life so it’s a nostalgic piece of crap.
 
I was around 12 years old when a vet sold it to me for three dollars, which was twice what it was worth then but no more than half of what it’s worth now. But it has Wiermacht markings, so that makes it worth owning, then and now.
 

How's this for crude? Look at all the machine marks. The marks behind the maker's name are Wiermacht eagles and the shiney spot lower left on the slide is where they bent the slide, when stamping the eagle.

I decided to have my local pistolsmith, Nelson Ford (a character in his own right), check it over to see if it was safe to shoot because it looks God awful. When I came in to pick it up, he started laughing as he laid it on the counter. It seems he took it out to shoot it. It kept jamming because the barrel shroud was a hair too long (worker sabotage?), so he machined it down just a little so it would feed reliably and tried again. And that’s what he was laughing about.
 
He laid the 25-foot test target on the counter along with those he’s shot with other guns during that test period. All of the others were high-end shooters, some of them expensive, heavily modified combat pieces. Ha! The old Polish crap had out-shot them all by a wide margin.  With non-existent military sights and a raspy, as-issued trigger you could cover the shots with a half dollar (do they still make those?) and point of impact was Almost exactly on point of aim!
 
So much for needing high-end, expensive tools. 

Not bad for a piece of crap. The flyer upper right is operator error. 25 ft.

Actually, I can think of a dozen craftsmen I know who turn out masterpieces with tools that don’t even look like tools. One produces free-form aluminum panels using a gnarly log and a piece of oak as tools. Another welds everything, aluminum included, with a bare wire driven by an ancient arc welder. A designer I know designs and builds unbeatable airplanes in a clapboard barn with a dirt floor and nothing but handtools. Another uses a hatchet, rasps and a myriad of hand-crafted chisels to produce $20,000 muzzle loading rifles and he’s backed up over five years.
 
The list goes on, but you get the drift. I suppose there is a lesson here, something about making do with what you have and knowing how to use it.
 
And no, the old Polish POC isn’t for sale. Not even twenty bucks could make me sell it.

17 Jan 09 -- Meet Tom Fritz: He portrays good times, long gone

We just returned from this year’s Barrett-Jackson automotive extravaganza and, once again, economy be damn, it was a helluva experience. Yeah, the number of cars was down, as were prices (while we watched we didn’t see a single $200k Corvette. Gee!). But, that’s okay because the highlight of the show to us was yet another chance to gawk at the incredible paintings of Tom Fritz in his small exhibit booth.

Tom Fritz at Barrett-Jackson. He calls Ventura, CA home.

First, let’s get something straight: I know absolutely nothing about art. Maybe less than nothing. And I’m certain the art connoisseurs reading this are going to scoff at anything I say, but I can tell you this: when I look at a painting and something about it brings tears to my eyes, I judge that to be art, no matter how you measure it. I only hope that someday some of my words will have the same effect on people.
 
On the surface, it would be easy to describe him as a “thing” painter because he specializes in mechanical “things,” hotrods (usually old ones), classic cars, motorcycles, etc. But, that’s not actually what he’s painting. What he’s painting is the era and the experience these machines represent. He is actually doing a portrait of the times, the forties and fifties, andthose who lived it.
 
In many, the driver, who always has a middle-America, down home feel to him dominates the painting even though he’s a small part of it. The personality of the individual, as seen by his image and the car/motorcycle he has crafted, comes through so strongly the effect becomes a partnership between the car and its driver/creator.

I love the way one guy is partially in shadow and the other isn't. And the detail doesn't scream realism. Click for Larger View

It’s really hard to describe how Fritz’s work so accurate portrays the times. It’s sort of the way Woody Guthrie’s simple lyrics and tunes let us feel the 1930’s and dustbowl days with every line (Google him, if you don’t know him, and every American should). Fritz’s work is clean, subtle, and somehow warm to the heart. Like I said hard to describe.
 
Just this second I took a look at his website (http://www.fritzart.com/index.php) and was suddenly overwhelmed by the impossibility of adequately describing his work because looking at his paintings on the web and seeing them in person are two entirely different experiences. On the web, they just look like paintings. In real life, they have a subtlety of color and shadow that makes them something of an impressionistic photograph: the detail is softly perfect and the aura, at least to me, is very, very powerful.

I suppose I could carry on about the simple honesty and all that, but the truth is I'm not sure why I like it. I just do. Click for larger

I think I should also tell you that this isn’t a paid political commercial. I don’t know Tom Fritz, other than to tell him how much I enjoy his work. There had to be twenty other painters and art representatives in the gigantic tent, but, after looking at Fritz’s work, the rest look like paint-by-number products. Believe me, there’s that big of a difference.
 
I’m telling you this because his paintings had a real effect on me and I’d love to see him make a good living. That way he can continue producing eye-candy that, even though I can’t afford it, I can at least appreciate it.
 
DO NOT LOOK AT HIS WEBSITE AND JUDGE HIS QUALITY FROM THAT. Just take my word for it. If you like the subject, buy the print. I absolutely guarantee your first response upon receiving it will be that you got much more than you paid for.
 
I’m fully aware that art is in the eye of the beholder, but to my eye, his guy deserves to be a giant.
 

10 Jan 09 -- An ancient Elvis: YEEECCH!!!

I heard a simple fact a couple days ago that, for just an instant, stopped me dead in my tracks and made the passing of time very palpable: Thursday was Elvis’s birthday and, had he lived, he would have been 74! The thought of a 74 year old Elvis is wildly…I’m not sure what…depressing? Curious? Difficult to get your head around?

This is the Elvis we want to remember. The '68 "Comeback Concert" He'd never looked, or sounded better.

I suppose it depends on your generation, but those of us raised in the fifties, who then came of age in the sixties, were part of the Elvis Generation. Until the Beatles came along to take center stage, Elvis WAS the era. Young, vibrant, shaking his ass at convention in an age when anything even slightly out of the norm was frowned upon, it’s impossible to think of that time without hearing his voice, seeing his crooked grin, sideburns and on-stage antics.
 
Truth is, although I personally was an Elvis addict right from the beginning. I burned out quickly. I somehow stumbled on to him before the public got a hold of him and somewhere I still have my Sun labeled 45 of That’s Alright Mama backed up with Blue Moon of Kentucky, his first record. He was hardcore rockabilly, a phrase added later, since we didn’t know what he was doing, but we liked it. By the time he was sold to RCA Victor and started making movies, he’d somehow lost the rough edge that had attracted me in the beginning. He was being groomed for bigger and better things than small town, garage band rock and roll and it was obvious Vegas was in his future. So I went off in other directions.
 
I should probably mention that if you happen to drift through my office, when I have a guitar in my lap, I almost guarantee you’ll recognize the Scotty Moore influence that came from listening to him backing up Elvis. Scotty Moore, Chet Atkins and Merle Travis live on in both of my hands (although greatly dumbed down in my interpretation).

At 62 Stephen Tyler is still plain nuts, but fun to listen to and watch. And I love his off stage persona. He's nuts there too.

But, a 74-year-old-Elvis? Gimme a break!! I’m not too sure but what death can sometimes be a good thing. I can’t imagine him even attempting to cope with old age. It’s highly possible that his seemingly suicidal life style at the end was exactly that: suicidal. He was born to be a young terror. A forever coal black ember of life lived to the fullest. He was one of those who just couldn’t age well, as was obvious at the end. And he was smart enough to know that. Aging was obviously an agonizing process for him. And an aging Elvis wasn’t helping those of us who grew up with his younger image either.
 
Still, look around at some of the other aging rockers. Steven Tyler (Aerosmith) still makes me grin and he’s 62 (and still painfully skinny, so he can pull it off). Mick Jagger is something of a cartoon, but still manages to rock in his prissy sort of way (although Keith Richards and his dried-walnut face makes wrinkles look painful. I’ve seen mummies that look healthier).
 
Elvis was meant to stay young. And nature has seen to it that his memory will do just that.
 
Happy Birthday Elvis. Rock on!

1 Jan 09 --Today is the first day in the rest of...

It’s a little after 0530 on the first day of the new year. It’s dark as an auditor’s heart outside and cold besides (cold for AZ, probably 45). I’m sitting here, in something of a funk trying to figure out what I want 2009 to be. What kind of year do I want for Marlene and me and what is an appropriate way to start it?
 
I’m tempted to say that what I would really like for this year is for it to be anything but a disaster. I’m tempted to say that all I want is to end the year still owning what I own now. But, that somehow feels hollow. As if I’m not looking at either my life or the future carefully enough and have gone so solidly into defensive mode that I’ve forgotten that the best defense is a good offense.
 
Okay, so the very concept of a new year and all its impossible-to-predict possibilities scares the socks off of the entire world. As I sit here, the tiny tentacles of wakefulness starting to weevil their way into my brain, I don’t see all of this a negative. Yeah, the future certainly holds negative possibilities for all of us, and I’m sure as hell seeing it impact major portions of my life already (the magazine industry is basically in the toilet and fate is reaching for the flushing handle), but there’s something to be learned from all of this, assuming we’re smart enough to look at it that way rather than jump into bed and pull the financial covers over our heads.  
 
Regardless of what kind of survival we’re talking about, and that seems to be the basic thought pattern these days, most of the rules are the same. That being the case, we should probably look at ourselves as if we are a form of social warrior (in a good way): we have to be prepared to cope with what ever the future hands us, both physically, financially and emotionally and this in turn, tells us that we can’t take the word “prepared” lightly. But, what does it mean in this situation?
 
In the first place, we have to be able to cope physically, or nothing else counts. We’re talking about health, and as we stand here, most of us tossing familiar New Years resolutions around, knowing full well we’ll probably fail on most of them, we have to be practical about the health resolutions and realize exactly how serious all of that can be. To younger readers: don’t take the health your youth has given you for granted. It will, at some time in the future, start to slide downhill and the best way to deal with it is to start right now separating out the “I know this isn’t good for me, but I’ll take care of it in the future,” thoughts and taking a good look at them. No one has ever told you that drinking too much won’t hurt in the long run. Warning labels are on cigarettes for a reason. Shooting paint without the proper respirator is stupid, and you know it, but we all do it thinking “it’s just a little part and I’ll try to hold my breath.” Our life teems with little things we do that we know aren’t right, but we do them anyway.
 
Let me spell out one concrete fact about the aging process: every frigging thing we do in the first 25-30 years of our lives comes home to roost in the last 25-30 years of our lives. This ranges from getting sunburned at the pool as a teenager (future skin cancer) to ignoring advice and welding zinc coated conduit (future bronchial problems, ask me how I know) and beating the crap out of your joints and back doing stupid stuff (motorcycles and skydiving have left their marks on me). Regardless of what we do at that age, we have to ask ourselves if it is worth the price we’ll pay in the future. And don’t kid yourself, that future is a helluva lot closer than you think it is.
 
As we sit here looking at 09 survival resolutions, we should aim the very first one at our health, but do it in small, easily digested chunks. Don’t aim at losing 30 pounds. It’s too big. Go for five. That will inspire you for the next five. Don’t say you’re going to start running five miles a day. That’s BS and you won’t last a week. I’m such a time freak that putting in more than a half hour doing anything that doesn’t produce revenue or solve an existing problem, will never happen. So, three or four years ago, I began walking first 15 minutes, then 20, now I’m at 25 very hard minutes. 25 minutes doesn’t sound like much time to me. 30 minutes does. Walk 12 minutes in one direction and 12 back. Take a different direction every day, so it doesn’t get boring. I hate exercising of any form so bad, I’d rather take needles in my eyes (well maybe not quite, but you understand), so I tell myself I’m going to think of one particular subject (an article, solving a fabrication problem on the roadster, etc.) during the entire walk, so, a) it doesn’t feel like wasted time and b) I’m ready to rock and roll and have made headway on a problem, when I’m done.
 
My health resolution for 09 includes doing a better job of watching what I put in my mouth, both quantity and quality. I drink too much soda, eat too much bread (it’s available and I treat it like M & M’s), and I give in to chocolate too much. I’m such an icecreamaholic, I’d stuff it in every body orifice, if I could. I know none of this is good for me, but I do it anyway. What kind of behavior is that for an intelligent human being? I can stop that and I will. And that’ll take care of the first five pounds. The rest will follow.  
 
We have to be emotionally fit to face the next couple of years and, most often that starts with our family relationships. If they aren’t working, we have to sit back and ask ourselves “how much am I contributing to those problems? Am I being self-centered or bullheaded, saying ‘I’ll teach them and I’ll….’?” Emotionally, our families and, even more important, our friends (we pick our friends but not our families), are our best support systems. If there was ever a time to cure problems within our circle of family and friends, this is it. We’re going to have to gird ourselves by pulling our emotional wagons into a circle and prepare for some really mind-bending times.
 
It does no good for me to try to pontificate on financial preparedness because I’m still trying to figure that out myself. It was, for instance, an eye opener to find that paying off all my credit cards could hurt my credit score. What the….?? I will, however, offer one bit of advice that may sound counter to the concept of financial preparedness: identify something you’ve wanted to buy for a long time, and I’m not talking about something ridiculously expensive, but something attainable. In my case, it’ll be a $400-$500 revolver (and yes, I’m going to do it even though I know there is a good chance Barry O will have his goons follow the paperwork right into my underwear drawer). Every night start tossing your loose change and the occasional dollar bill into a peanut butter jar. This is you doing something you “want” to do, not something you “have” to do. Given our situation, this action makes no sense. It isn’t going to pay an electric bill or keep the wolves away from the door, but it is you doing something for you, commonsense be damned. Every time a few coins tinkle into the jar, we feel as if we’re making progress on something we really want to do. This is important for our well being too. Once in a while, we have to have a little jam on our bread to remind ourselves that we’re alive and there is still sweetness in the world. In the big scheme of things, it isn’t going to sink our ship.
 
The eastern sky has turned blue-orange, which means it’ll be light soon. So, I’m going to sign off, take my walk, do some snuggling with the redhead, then drag her out to the airport. Our airplane is a business tool, not a toy, and I can’t remember the last time we flew in it together, but this seems like a good way to start off the year. And remember the oft repeated line (credited to Jerry Garcia), “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” And that pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it? So, don’t end this day, or any other, without feeling as if it was well invested.
 
Sorry to have rambled so long. Adios and happy New Year.

21 Dec 08- Tis the season to be....desperate!

It would be so easy to write something about how Christmas has become so commercialized that its meaning is obscured. So I won’t. Instead I’ll write about something I personally know and understand about the Xmas season that affects us all: desperation.
 
As I’m writing this, my entire herd of in-laws is in the other room getting rowdy. I’m in here desperately trying to avoid them, even though I know in a few minutes I’m going to have to put on a happy face (you’ll never know how much effort that takes), saunter in and “mingle” (what a silly word). Even though I’m pretty much your basic bah-humbug type of Christmas guy, I’ll do my best. It’s not that I dislike them even slightly. In fact, I actually like them. It’s just that sometimes I’d like to flop down in front of the TV and soak up some tube, while snuggling with my wife, dog and two cats. I’ll never understand why my yearning for that is strongest when a family get-together is scheduled. Coincidence I guess. 
 
I’m back. I just floated out, threw a couple hugs around, sat in a chair chatting about…actually, I don’t know what we talked about…and slithered back here. No one will know I’m gone. Love this season!
 
And then there’s the desperation illustrated by Marlene’s limp. It’s a constant reminder of how nuts normally intelligent people get this time of the year. First, to appreciate what I’m about to say you have to understand a basic and incontrovertible fact about The Arizona Redhead: she doesn’t do mornings. Never. And then the Holidays came around and I get a call from her at 0700 hours: she’s standing in line at Target because the night before they told her they had an electronic game named Wii. So there she was, standing in the dark with a couple dozen other crazy strangers waiting for the doors to open.
 
Apparently, the doors opened and Marlene put all she had into sprinting down the aisles, determined to beat both the 19-year-old track star and the old lady in the walker (who won, by the way, but fortunately, wasn’t after the Wii.). Marlene screeched up in front of the counter and a sweet young thing smiles and says, “Oh, dear. It looks as if our computer was wrong. We don’t have one. Sorry!” Sweet smile, quick turn to another customer, slight residual smirk.
 
Marlene limped for three days. That was her reward for trying so desperately to get our youngest son what he wanted. Holidays are good for that kind of thing.
 
Incidentally, the primary reason I’m on speaking terms with desperation is that I’m feeling it myself. It’s a guy thing that has to do with finding the right gift for the one we love. My desperation got another shot in the arm this afternoon, when I ducked into a high-end jewelry store on the way to the airport. I walked about thirty feet into the store, looked around at the acres of glass cases overflowing with sparklies and was totally overwhelmed. I didn’t know where to start. And none of the stuff had price tags on it! Aw come on! Do I have to say, “What can I get for my allowance,” as I hold out a handful of crinkled one-dollar bills and embarrass myself? I beat a quick retreat to the door suitably cowed. And definitely desperate.
 
I’m not having a wonderful time this season and the primary reason for that is that I haven’t found what I know she will love. I’ll try again tomorrow, fully aware that the clock is ticking. Four days and counting. 
 
Desperation reigns.
 
I guess that calls for more ice cream.  Bye.

13 Dec 08- Two Days in The Tank Museum

If you’re not into neat nuts and bolts, you might consider skipping this installation of Thinking out Loud. This one is primarily an excuse to show a few of the photos I shot at The Tank Museum in Bovington, England a couple months ago. This is me indulging myself. If you’re into this kind of stuff, come along. Otherwise, I’ll see you next week.
 
The one time during our trip to England that we did things right, was at The Tank Museum: I spent two solid days in it with tripod and camera, for which I thank them profusely, since they don't usually allow tripods on the floor. The Tank Museum (their official name) is located on the south shore of England in the tiny hamlet of Bovington. There are some seashore resorts in the area and a killer castle (Coerfe) and some other typically English sites and experiences, but, when I told one of my English friends I was going to Bovington he said, “Why are you going down there? That’s nothing but tank country,” and he knew nothing about The Tank Museum. He said that because that’s where most of the UK tank training takes place. You’ll be driving down an idyllic country road and a tank will be coming the other direction and no one even turns to look. It’s all very cool.
 
The Museum itself is a huge, sprawling facility located on a multi-use military facility (some civilian stuff on it too) and “sprawling” is hardly adequate to describe it. Originally comprised of a number (about six I think) huge hangar-like buildings crammed right against one another, it now has a new section up front that was still being fitted out when we were there.
 
The Museum is unique because they have something over 100 tanks and armored vehicles on display, but they have another roughly fifty that are their “runners” that they take out during their annual armor orgy, Tank Fest, and run them around the adjacent track that is part of their grounds. They also take select runners out of the Museum, like their Tiger I, which is the only regularly operating Tiger tank in the world, and give the crowd a brief exposure to the sights and sounds of the legendary Tiger in action.
 
It’s hard to build a museum around something like tanks and not have the aura of a warehousing facility, but The Tank Museum (TTM) has largely avoided that. Although it’s mind numbing to wander through the maze of machinery, they’ve done an excellent job of putting them in context as well as building displays around them. I was there shooting pix for two solid days and I was most of the way through the first day before I could reliably find my way back to the lobby. That’s how big it is.

This is Little Willie, supposedly the world's first tank, first ran in 1915.

They have what is supposedly world’s first tank, “Little Willie”, right up to the most modern from almost all nations. I’m far from being an armor expert, but I have no doubt that their claim of this being the most complete collection of its type is absolutely true.
 
Incidentally, it’s a privately funded museum. Look them up on the web, www.tankmuseum.org. They are one of the most serious repositories of armor information and artifacts in the world.
 
In the mean time, cruise through the pictures. I made the enlargements bigger than usual, so be patient while they load. They’re worth it.
 
Click Here for Pictures
 

6 Dec 08- Dust Bunnies and Desk Treasures

Sit down. I’m about to say something shocking: I just cleaned my desk. No, really! Are you okay? It was a shock to me too, But, what was a real kick was the huge amount of treasure that had been literally buried right there at my elbow. If I’d known it was going to be that memorable, I would have cleaned it earlier, rather than waiting for the avalanche to get out of control.
 
The source of all the strata covering my desk, which is sixteen feet long, is that I don’t dare file anything or I’ll forget about it. It has to be out where I can see it. So, I stack everything on the north-south leg of my “L”-shaped desk. Bearhawk stuff goes near the south end and other stuff flows in drifts to the other. If I’m looking for something, I know it’s somewhere in a three-by-eight foot space.
 
I’m not a total slob, as evidenced by the mounting revulsion that periodically forces me to break into a frenzy of cleaning activity. It may take half a day, but soon there are garbage bags by the door and a few places on my desk where the top actually shows through.  This time, the work was often interrupted by a loud, “Holy,…! Look at this.” Marlene would come running to see if something had jumped out of its just-disturbed nest to bite me.
 
Here and there in the stacks, you'll normally find a number of unopened packages. If I recognize the return address, I generally know what’s in it, so I don’t open it until I have the time. Often, however, it slowly sifts deeper into the piles until it’s forgotten. One of those packages yielded a little treasure.

I've never known when Mauser made tools like this, but I think it is very cool.

The return address was my old buddy Clyde Laughlin in Seattle. He’s always sending me stuff in an effort at reducing his own clutter (there’s an underground railroad of clutter collectors that has a non-stop train of “stuff” going from one to the other). This time, as the aged, flat cardboard box slid out onto the desk top, nothing jumped out at me as unusual. Then I slid the tray-like box open and the top of a finely crafted vernier caliper came into view. What made that moment special was the magic word engraved into its head: Mauser! I was holding one of the fabled measuring instruments made by the equally fabled arms manufacturer.
 
I suppose it probably has some collector’s value to someone, but to me it was a tiny victory orchestrated by a good friend who knew my soft spot for such things. I had been keeping my eye open for one of these for a long time. It was the thought, as much as the tool, that touched me.

In my eyes, Bob Herendeen was the finest Pitts pilot to ever fly an airshow or a contest.

Then I was flipping through a stack of papers, brochures and stuff I’d liberated from a long taped-up moving box. Out came a promotional brochure that the late Bob Herendeen, whom I have always considered to be the epitome of Pitts airshow pilots, had signed for me. I’m not sure when I got that particular brochure—somewhere between 15 and 30 years—but it fired off some warm memories so, I sat for a few minutes with the brochure in my lap and remembered another time.

One of the more unexpected surprises was an envelope containing $450 in cash that had been my mad money for working on the roadster. I assumed I had spent it several years ago. Surprise!!

To put things in perspective: I'm 5'10" so both Gary and the killer bike were very tall.

The photo of two young men, boys actually, bearing a family resemblance and standing next to an ancient high-wheel bicycle brought tears to my eyes. The shorter one was me at about 19 years old. The taller one was my late, kid brother, Gary. I’m choking a little as I type this. He’s been gone nearly 25 years (heart attack at 42) and I miss him on a daily basis. In the pix, I’m wearing shorts, which means I just came back from my job as a life guard at the local pool. And the absence of any bandages on my arms means I haven’t tried to ride the high wheel bike yet. That happened after the shutter was tripped.
 
The ride was very, very short. I discovered an anatomical difference between a Nebraska kid of the 50’s and people of the 1890’s the first time the pedal came around: the distance between their feet and their knees was much shorter than mine. My knee came up and locked solidly against the handlebar, stopping the pedals instantaneously. I, however, did not stop. I went right over the front of the five-foot-tall wheel and landed on the gravely pavement like a sack of chicken feed. I wore bandages for a couple of weeks from that one.

Cleaning does have its up side but I think you have to wait about five years between cycles for the treasures to accumulate. So, I’m marking my calendar for December of 2013 for another go at it. Gee, five years doesn’t seem that long.
 

28 Nov 08- Carolitis: has anyone ever died from too much Xmas music?

I hate Christmas carols. I didn’t until this year, but it is now the day after Thanksgiving and I’ve already suffered through a solid month of carols on my favorite oldies station. When did the “The Holiday Season” get redefined to mean the entire last two months of the year. Bah! Humbug!
 
I am a creature of habit. If I were a dog and you moved my food bowl, I’m so entrenched in doing things the same way, I’d probably starve to death. This applies to my radios too. I have four buttons set on my car radio: oldies, classic rock, jazz and country. The other two are blank. Starting around November first, three of the four went Christmas on me. Totally Christmas. Not a single real song all day long. Net result:  I'm starving musically .
 
For three specific reasons, the radio in my work shop is the biggest problem: the first and most important difficulty is that it has been a tradition for well over half a century for me to listen to rock and roll while building stuff. This is important at this stage of my life because I’m listening to exactly the same songs I did when I was in my teens and building the roadster the first time. But, they weren't oldies then. The station's play list is light on the Everly Brothers, Gene Vincent, etc., but it’s close enough.
 
Another very specific problem is that my radio is old and beat up and no longer has a dial. If I go searching for another station (which is the equivalent of moving my food bowl), resetting back to 94.5 Kool FM after the holidays will be nearly impossible.
 
The last, and most heartfelt factor, is that I get out into my shop very, very seldom. A few hours a month, absolute tops. So my shop time is precious to me because, like so many other folks, having my projects move ahead is unimaginably important for my psychological wellbeing and a big factor in that is the music.
 
When I step into my small and chaotic shop (I’ve crammed a million pieces of Neat Sh*t into every nook and cranny—I need to give a photo tour someday) and hit the master switch, the bench light springs to life and the radio immediately starts kicking out oldies. Right at that instant, it is as if I’ve snuggled down into a warm little cocoon where the world and its problems don’t exist. For a few wonderful minutes, I can lose myself in creating something that is strictly my own and time stands still. It could be 1958, 2008 or anywhere in between. The continuity-of-the-shop is unbroken and I can lift my problems off my shoulders and be who, or what, I want to be. Christmas carols are, at the very least, screwing up the kharma. And who want's screwed kharma in their work shop?

24 Nov 08- The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

I was a junior at Oklahoma University in Norman, OK. It was just another sunny November day and I was returning to my apartment. I had a guitar case in each hand and I leaned them against the wall to open the door. As the door swung open, my roommate, Dave Atwater, was laying on the couch, his head next to the door listening to the radio. He turned over to look at me and, in an incredulous voice, said, “Kennedy has been shot.”  That was 45 years ago last week. Absolutely amazing!
 
It’s hard to put that decade into perspective and make anyone who wasn’t functioning as an adult at the time truly understand. And that’s a sizeable portion of today’s population. Do the math: right now you’d have to be 60 years old to have been even 15 years old at the time, and, although you would have felt the chaos and the sorrow, I’m not sure how much you would have understood. However, at that age, you were perfectly poised for the decade that followed, which was, in so many ways, the most difficult in American history, with the possible exception of the Civil War.
 
First, a note about the assassination, and I’m just presenting facts here, not making a case for a conspiracy theory. I’ll just let the facts speak for themselves. The day after the assassination, my dad, who was a gun dealer amongst many other things, ordered the exact same rifle Oswald had used from the same supplier, Klien Sporting Goods in Chicago. Same scope, same everything. I’m an above average marksman (came in 12th in the nation in AFROTC matches) and I can say unequivocally that the Italian Carcano carbine is the kind of rifle that gives boat anchors a bad name. It’s a first class piece of crap. I could barely keep its groups under six inches from a rest at 100 yards. Plus the action is ratchety and hard to work, as bolt actions go. One of our local gun experts and I both tried to cycle the action and fire the same number of rounds in the same number of seconds as Oswald did  (5.6 by most accounts) and we couldn’t do it consistently. And we were doing it from the hip, not trying to hit anything. Yet, Lee Harvey O. was able to put his rounds dead on at 80 yards at a target that was moving 30 mph or more in almost no time at all. Some master marksmen later tested the rifle and they could do it, but I still have my doubts.
 
The shots fired in Dallas were the opening bells on a decade of violence and social upheaval that are hard to explain. Because I was a little older and continued on into graduate school, I saw most of the 60’s from a campus perspective, which wasn’t necessarily typical because when you’re on a college campus, neither your life nor your career has taken off, so your mind is free to concentrate on these kinds of events. The rest of the population doesn’t have that luxury because they are busy trying to make a living.
 
For a time, it seemed as if assassinations happened as regular as clockwork and they had become an accepted part of the American Scene. Although five years separated JFK’s killing from that of his brother, Robert, only three months after RFK, Martin Luther King was assassinated. Civil rights killings were sprinkled throughout the decade (Medgar Evers just before JFK, Goodman,Schwerner and Chaney, etc.). Then there was Kent state in 1970. In barely, a decade we had a bushel of assassinations and killings and we finally finished off the ten-year string when a president resigned in disgrace. And, of course, there was the incredibly screwed up way the government conducted the Vietnam war (never did let the military do its job), and the government intervention with students. Everything around us was in shambles and no one trusted the government. No one. And for good reason.
 
A great line fits here (not mine…obviously): it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
 
A million positive things came out of that decade, but at least one disturbing fact was driven home: it takes only one nut with a hunting rifle to change the lives of millions of people. And the individual nuts are still out there. They will never be gone. And they can never be disarmed. I’m not a praying man, but if I were, I’d pray that this generation escapes the types of tragic events that made so much of the ‘60’s so horrific.

16 Nov 08 - Rods and Customs at Scottsdale: What Recession?

Yesterday I walked my feet sore at the annual Good Guys rod and custom show/swap meet at Scottsdale and thought I’d share a few random thoughts and put up a slew of photos. Some of you might find this interesting. For those not into cars, just scan through the pix to see what that part of America is doing. It’s a super-strong subculture and is one of the few American art forms many parts of the world have chosen to import.
 
One interesting thing at Scottsdale was that considering that the entire world is running for economic cover and hunkering down, you certainly couldn’t tell it at Good Guys. I’ve been going to this show for the last eight or ten years and this year it was quite a bit bigger than years past, which I view as a good thing. At least that part of the economy has said, “Screw it, we’re all going in the crapper, but I’m going to do it in style.”
 
The swap mart is easy twice as big as normal and, like an idiot, I violated one of my own rules of swap meet/flea market conduct: if you see something you want, buy it, don’t vacillate. In this case there was an old 120-pound anvil for $100 and I’ve been looking for a big anvil forever (a long story suitable for another blog). I dickered on it a little, walked around for a while, then decided to go back and get it and, as you’d expect, it was gone. Oh, well, one less heavy piece of crap to move around the shop.

Very classic, 29 highboy roadster. It could be all catalog parts, I didn't ask, but at least he did it with restraint. Note no chrome on the front end.

One of the problematic aspects of the true hotrods (as opposed to customs, classics, etc.), the 32 highboy roadsters, etc. is that there’s such a strong support industry for parts (frames, bodies, etc.) that there’s little need for someone to spend years trying to save an old body (this assumes they can find one) or building a frame (assuming they are capable). There are thousands of true catalog cars, which means there’s an unavoidable sameness to the cars that aren’t built from scratch. And frankly, the world doesn’t need another $75,000, absolutely perfect, chromed to the hilt, ‘32 highboy or chopped ‘33 three-window coupe. There were so many absolutely perfect (no bugs, no rock chips, no soot in the tailpipes) cars at Scottsdale, that after a half hour, a visual numbness set in and you didn’t even turn you head to look at many of the rods.

There's no doubt that this guy is doing it the hardway, though the frame looks new.

There were some notable exceptions that broke a few rules and were fun. And there were some homebuilt cars in which the guys did it their way. And those stood out. At least in my mind. They weren’t as perfect as the rest, but they showed the builder’s taste and individuality. I asked quite a number of guys if they had built their car and too often the answer was “Yeah, I had it built,” and their obvious thinking was that because they told someone what to build and paid for it, they were the central part of the creative process and that qualified them as “builder.” Wrong! That’s not hotrodding.
 
Hotrodding, as I got into it in the mid-fifties was making do with what you had and figuring out how to stick it together in a way that didn’t kill you. There were no “new” bodies, ready-to-roll chassis and no one would have had the money to buy them anyway. We had plenty of speed parts for the engines, and dropped Ford axles were available, but that’s about it. Everything else you either built yourself or scrounged from the junkyard and then modified to fit. That mindset still exists, but it’s very much in the minority. And that’s pretty much the way I think. If I can’t build it or scrounge it, I don’t need it. This, incidentally, seems to apply to just about everything I do. This doesn’t mean I’m right and they’re wrong. It’s just a characteristic. Or a character flaw.
 
To be completely fair, part of the problem is that vintage tin is getting harder to find and it’s not cheap. However, that having been said, there were two ’29 Model A roadster pick-ups for sale in the swap meet, complete with original rust and all the parts. One was $5000 and the other $7,500 and that one was a runner that looked as if it had just come out of a barn. If I had any thought of starting another car, I would have figured out how to buy that one. I probably should have anyway. Hopefully, there’s still at least one car project left in my future.
 
Anyway, I had a great time and I hope you’ll enjoy the pix. Now, I’m wondering how long it will be before my feet stop hurting.
 
Click Here to View the Pictures

8 Nov 08 - The Other Shoe has Dropped: Now what?

I’ve started to write this particular blog about a half dozen times because I really didn’t want to do another politically charged one. But how can I let the last week go by without saying something? At the very least I want to share an epiphany of sorts I had that hopefully will redirect my thought processes over the next four years.
 
Although we hear a lot of moaning and teeth-gnashing (and ammo and gun sales are through the roof) concerning the end of civilization as we know it, the truth is, our country is going to die only if we let it. So, before we start briefing a missing man formation or blowing taps, let’s look around and see how much we contributed to this ourselves and then figure out what to do about it. And I’m not talking just about the election. I’m talking about the mess the country is in.

I, for one, feel as if I’m to blame for some of this because I trusted my future to someone else, which has been proven time and again is never a good idea. And I did something incredibly stupid: I stopped monitoring what those who are in control were doing. I decided I couldn’t be bothered and crawled inside my own little cubby hole to do my own thing. And I think many others did exactly the same thing. And now we’re paying for our inattentiveness. I’m a right-leaning Independent and even I have to admit that the GOP was the architect of it’s own demise. It’s the same way I feel about Ford and GM: they stopped listening to the market and are now in dire straits.
 
Incidentally, what we’re talking about applies to everyone, not just Republicans or those who feel they lost this one. Democrats are affected by the same thing and everything I’m going to say applies to them too.
 
We, more correctly, I, am the political market place and the Congress has been ignoring us. Again to correct myself, they have been ignoring us because apparently we haven’t been saying anything. We haven’t been communicating our displeasure. That’s our fault. Not theirs. Although I could point at tons of stuff they’ve either passed or ignored that have contributed to our current financial/political state, I won't. Bottom line, it’s their performance that beat them at the polls. Can the new administration do any better? Not if we don’t let ourselves be heard.
 
First we should look at some facts:
The voter turnout was approximately 3.1mm less than it was in 2004 and Obama (to be known as BOB from here on out) got slightly more than Bush did that time around (400K more) and McCain got slightly less than Kerry did.
 
The actual numbers are:
Obama:    65,285,166    53%
McCain:   57,317,302     46% 
 
The difference is 6.3%, hardly a landslide mandate, but certainly bigger than we’ve seen in recent elections. Regardless, it goes in the loss column for the so-called “right”. Of more importance is the shift to a Super Majority in Congress, which effectively makes BOB king, at least until the mid-term elections and maybe for the entire term, and it’s the Congress that is the important change and problem here, not the president.
 
We have a tendency to think there’s no way we can sway the President. But there is and that’s through Congress. The President is just a figurehead, not a king. He can only do what the Congress lets him do. And while we can’t easily reach the President in meaningful ways, we can sure as hell get to our people in Congress and effectively kick the snot out of them. Plus, through local activism, and BOB was really good at that, we can affect who gets in the Congress much more easily than we can effect the presidential races. Plus, we need to keep an eye on these guys because that’s where the mistakes were made over the last two administrations that got us where we are.

The financial crisis started way back when, but the Congress has had plenty of time to see it coming and prevent it. Ditto every other problem you can think of from immigration to the wars in Iraq/Afghanistan and how they are being conducted to the energy crisis. Congress isn’t doing their job, as elected officials, and we aren’t doing our jobs as citizens. Every solitary soul on The Hill is worried more about keeping their job than they are about doing their job and it’s that insecurity that we can use to our advantage.
 
Every one of us, regardless of which party we favor, should have the e-mail addresses of our Congressional representatives in our address books and every time we see something going a way we don’t  like, we should tell them so. We absolutely have to let them know that their job is at stake, if they don’t start listening. If we keep that up, sooner or later, they’ll start caring about the Nation and their constituency as much as they do their political perks.
 
In the meantime, those of us who feel we lost and are threatened are going to have to suck it up and soldier on. It is what it is and it’s essential that we support BOB and his people where it makes sense, and oppose "them" where it doesn’t. We’re all in the same boat and we can’t let our own political views make us act like politicians and forget that The Nation needs us now more than ever.
 
Here are some websites that will help hook us up to our local congressional types as well as the Oval Office. Spend a few minutes getting the info and let’s let them know we’re paying a lot more attention now than we have in the past.
 
Hopefully, this will be the last political blog I have to do because I HATE political rhetoric, whether it’s mine or theirs.
 
The best place to find out about your local people is
here: http://www.azleg.gov/MemberRoster.asp?Body=S
This one is for Arizona, but there is probably a similar one for your own state. Unfortunately, many Federal Senators and Representatives have gone to e-mail that can only be sent to them on their website with no addresses revealed, but the sites below give you most phone and fax numbers. Most of these will be updated in the near future as offices get new inhabitants.
 
Here is the Senate listing:
http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
 
This is a good source for the names of your Congressional reps: http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/
 
And this is the White House:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

If a link doesn't work, cut and past it into your browser.

My thanks to Bruce Frank for ferreting out the websites for me.

1 Nov 08 - Skunk Hollow, Peace of Mind and the Election

It’s Saturday before The Election. Yeah, that one. And I’m going to be so unbelievably glad, when it’s over, regardless of who wins. I just want to get it behind us so we can get back to dealing with everything that is facing us.  I’m tired of thinking about it and all of the “what if” scenarios that are floating around, most of which are BS with only a few being plausible. Let’s throw the cards on the table, show all the hole cards, and move on. Or maybe move to Skunk Hollow.
 
Skunk Hollow is six acres our family has owned in the country for over sixty years and now, is technically mine—a long ago Xmas present. Originally, it was to be a weekend getaway place, but, when the old farmhouse burned down the day they finished it in 1948, it became my hiding place. If, as a teenager and a young man, everything was going to hell in a hand basket, I went to Skunk Hollow.
 
First, it’s important you understand the place. It’s essentially a small peninsula bounded by the Blue River and attached to the rest of Nebraska by a narrowish neck at the top where the crumbling remains of the house’s foundation are sinking into the asphalt-black dirt. Now totally covered with big oaks and cottonwoods, I spent literally hundreds of nights there camping and even more days just sitting on the river bank banging away at leaves and floating twigs with my trusty .22. It was, to me, a state within a state, and a refuge from the real world.
 
Growing up in the ‘50’s meant the “real world” included the Cold War, Russia, the Minute Man silo a few miles south west of Skunk Hollow and SAC headquarters with its never ending supply of B-47’s 80 miles east at Offutt AFB. We were located on the 8-ring of Moscow’s targeting computers. Our house had a concrete bomb shelter and we had bomb drills hammered into us via television and school programs. The impending war was everywhere. But, at 15 years old, I was ready for it.
 
Under my work bench in the basement was an old footlocker that contained my camping gear and everything I needed to catch and eat everything from blue gills and carp to rabbits, squirrels and the odd feral cat or two. There were a1000 rounds of .22 for my Marlin 39 lever gun and clothes for every season. Everything was in a tidy box I would throw in the back of the pick-up the second I heard that the dirty Russkis had crossed the Missouri River into Nebraska. I’d make my home and my stand at Skunk Hollow. The movie Red Dawn and Montana survivalists had nothing on me. I was waaay ahead of that curve. When the world went crazy, I’d be living like Grizzly Adams at Skunk Hollow, guarding the perimeter of my kingdom with the unerring aim of a vengeful sniper. Invade Nebraska will you? You’ll pay for it! At that age, that all seemed so very real. And plausible. I didn’t let reality get in the way of my daydreams.
 
This week, as some of the “what if” scenarios began to nip away at my peace of mind (“Ah, he’ll go door to door, taking your guns, force all your cats into servitude, make eating with your right hand illegal, etc., etc.”) I’ve found myself thinking like a fifteen-year-old. Skunk Hollow is looking pretty good.
 
I hate thinking this way. I want to trust my government. Especially, I want to trust it to leave me and mine alone and not change the rules in the middle of the game so that part of my life is automatically illegal. As one of the most law-abiding people on the planet, I don’t want to start thinking like an outlaw, just so I can live my life.
 
Mostly, I just want to find out what we’re dealing with but, regardless of which side wins this week, I don’t think we’ll have the answers to that for many, many months. My dear old mother used to say, “Don’t borrow troubles from tomorrow,” which is exactly what many of us are doing. Too much conjecture, not enough facts. At this stage of the game, all we can do is wait and watch. And get out and vote. This time, it REALLY counts.
 
On the subject of voting, here’s a fun video my Hollywood mogul daughter put together with some of her clients and colleagues. The message is clear: Get out and vote or you can’t bitch about it later. http://www.youtube.com/user/5friendsvote
 
28 Oct 08 - The Great Toilet Paper Conspiracy of 2008

When I first ran across it, we were in England, so I thought it was some sort of quaint, Old World thing: I’d never seen 3 1⁄4” toilet paper before. As I sat there, I thought they were recycling adding machine paper, since those have gone the way of the digital do-do bird. Then, this morning, after wending my way out to the airport to use their facilities because our main sewer line was clogged (again), I found myself sitting there looking at 3 1⁄2” paper. Ah come on guys! The world has enough problems without shrinking toilet paper. Some of life’s basics are not to be screwed with. This is just another milepost marking our sure slide downhill. Damn!
 
This whole slide into mediocrity goes back years and each milepost marks a change in the fundamentals that have made us what we are. Take Browning shotguns, for instance. They were the quintessential hunting tool every kid worth his oats lusted after. I wanted a Browning sweet sixteen. It was beautiful, purposeful and, as I saw it, made for a man. Then, I saw my first one that was equipped with a recoil pad. A RECOIL PAD? On a Browning? Oh, my God, have we been taken over by girly-men?
 
A few years later, I saw my first ’32 highboy roadster with an automatic trans behind a hairy-chested small block and, right there I thought the world could go no lower. Hotrods and other real cars are supposed to have three pedals. Not two. Much of the fun of being able to smoke the tires is seeing if you can get rubber in all three, four, or now, five, gears. No wonder the human race is in trouble. Recoil pads and shiftless hotrods. I’m overwhelmed with sadness thinking about it. The world has a testosterone leak.
 
Don’t get me started on nosewheels on airplanes. As soon as we gave in to the girly men and put nosewheels under perfectly good airplanes, we signed the death knell of skill. Cessna called their nose-dragger gear “Land-o-matic” boasting, “If you can drive, you can fly.” That’s a helluva big “if”, Bub. I don’t want to be flying with the same people I’m forced into driving with, do you? We’re messing with the fundamentals of life here.
 
And then there’s the toilet paper thing. Why, in a world where it has been proven over and over that the population is getting taller and bigger, would you want to shrink toilet paper? I have to tell you that today there are more, and certainly bigger, assh…oh, wait….that might be a little too crude, even for Airbum.com. Just let it be said that our civilization was founded on 4 1/4” toilet paper and for “them” (the TP Mafia?) to think they can pass the 3 1⁄2” stuff off on us, just shows they don’t know how tough we can be.
 
As much as we’d like to, we can’t blame shrinking toilet paper on Democrats. Or Republicans. And probably not even on Nazis, Gypsys, Greenies or the PTA. These trends are our fault for giving in too easily. If we let them know we won’t accept lesser toilet paper by refusing to buy it (the market has the final word over everybody and everything, in case you’ve forgotten) we can regain control of our own porcelain destiny.
 
Huh! Interesting concept. I wonder if the same thing will work with our political leadership? Of course, to do that, we’ll need much, much bigger toilet paper.

The England Odyssey Part Four:
Two Hours in the Imperial War Museum

This is another of those "We should have allowed a complete day" types of things but we only had a couple hours. What a frustrating pity.

One theme I seemed to see in every UK museum is that they worked hard to put everything in context, rather than just presenting artifacts in cases. They tell you the background, in this case the background of the conflict, what lead up to it, how it developed and how the hardware was adapted. Very educational, but you miss most of it when you to tearing through, as we did. Click Here for More

18 Oct 08 - Caution: Media-Free Zone Ahead

Wow! As I sit here trying to talk to my computer, I’m finding it difficult to think about anything but the economy and politics.  It has crowded every other sane thought out of my head. The What-If’s just won’t go away. And I know why: every single form of media is serving it up to us in gigantic portions and you can’t avoid being totally inundated by it. And I think it’s unhealthy for both the Nation and the individual.  I’d give anything for my brain to go back to normal.
 
I grant you that this is a hyper-interesting time we’re in. In fact, it’s possibly financially fatal. Damn! I didn’t mean to type that, but the thought is rattling around inside my head and it fell out. I’m not naturally pessimistic (okay maybe a little), but I keep getting so hammered about the seriousness of what’s going on, that I’m losing sight of how serious the effects of thinking about it too much can be. I’m losing my optimism. I’m losing my faith in The System. And this is something I’m not sure our people in congress fully understand. And it’s something I don’t think the Media realizes—they are complicit in making the problem worse.

For our foreign readers, substitute your own flag for the above, as each of our countries is all that matters and partisan politics is killing us all.

Fundamentally, the congress is to blame for our loss of faith in The System. In the current crisis there is too much finger pointing: EVERYONE in government screwed up on this one. No one president owns the fault, as it started many decades ago, but the congress is at fault for letting it continue. If the congress is really doing its job, the president is essentially a figurehead. He can make suggestions, but he can’t enact anything without them. But, they have been so busy making certain those on the other side of the aisle don’t get a leg up on them that the country was sliding down the drain while they playing party politics. I keep looking for a way to totally rebuild the congress but don’t have a clue. They aren’t doing their job and we need to shake them up somehow.

Here's a thought: eliminate the aisle. Have them sit in alternate seats so a Republican has Democrats on both sides of them and vice-versa so they won't always be drinking the same conversational Cool-aid. Well...it's a start.
 
One fact we seem to over look is that the media, in all its forms, is a business. Period. It’s there to make a profit. It appears to be a service that lets The Nation know what’s going on across the country and the world, but, it’s a business and, like any business, it has to fight for market share to survive. And competition is tough. Broadcasts profits have been falling for years. So, they have to make their particular broadcasting package more exciting, with brighter labels and made of ingredients that appear better/flashier/tastier than their competition's. They might as well be marketing cake mix. The same principles apply. So, for that reason, they have to pick on those tiny morsels of a story that look sensational and will draw the public to them more than others and splash them across the screen and the airwaves. Subliminally, we know all of this. And because of that we’re losing our faith in our news services because in so many cases they are biasing the reporting and cooking the facts to make them more saleable.
 
Unfortunately, the Internet is rapidly becoming part of The Media and is doing the same thing, but without FCC restrains. There you can say any thing you want, using any words you want, true or not, and it’s out there for the world to see. It’s easy to put together what looks like a legitimate website but be a total wacko. Plus, increasingly, we’re seeing it used for guerilla marketing of candidates, often in a negative way. It may come in looking like a simple e-mail, but it’s really propaganda/advertising from some special interest group or individual. This kind of thing has pretty much killed our faith in anything we see on the web. It’s too easy to lie and get away with it.
 
The net result of all of this is a national funk. A sort of fundamental depression that has dimmed our spirit. Yes, we have a huge crisis on hand, but I wonder if we’d all be so crazy, if the media and the net would stop ramming it down our throats.
 
As I was having the above thought I suddenly realized, “Hey wait, they aren’t ramming it down my throat. I’m opening my beak like a baby bird and begging them to ram it down my throat.”  The media comes equipped with something we/I seem to forget about: an “on-off” button. I can shut them off at my leisure. So, I think I will.
 
Effective right now, I am hereby declaring Davisson Weekends to be Sanity Zones. From this point on, they will be Media Free. If the networks want to tell me Sarah Palin belched in public or yet another bank has gone under, they are going to have to knock on my door and do it in person. And even then, I probably won’t answer.
 
I think the nation would be better off if we all did the same thing: shut the media off and live within our own lives for a few days to give our emotions a rest. The reality of Monday will come soon enough.
 
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go do something that IS of some importance to me: I’m going to lace some wiring bundles on The Roadster and give my brain a little vacation.

11 Oct 08 - Cousins, Paxton Tours and Friends

I went back and re-read my rant about how you can’t do even a cursory tour of all of England’s history in anything less than a lifetime and I realized that I forgot one very important ingredient of our trip that made the entire thing worthwhile (two ingredients actually): Marlene’s cousin, Linda Paxton, and her husband Peter. Together, especially for us, they became Paxton Tours (not really…well, maybe) and they absolutely made the trip.

Our tour guides and chauffeurs: Linda and Peter Paxton, AKA Paxton Tours

I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but almost as soon as we started talking about coming to see them, Peter and Linda took us under their wing, and quite literally took over nearly all of those things I was concerned about. Like driving on the wrong side of the road. And figuring out where to go. And driving on the wrong side of the road. And picking hotels. And driving on the…..you know the rest.
 
Upon arrival, they tossed us in their BMW (it’s really weird sitting on the left side with no steering wheel) and wouldn’t let us out until we’d covered over 1200 miles. That’s an unheard-of amount of mileage on an island that’s 20% smaller than Arizona.
 
I know it’s no big deal to most people, but I’m certain part of the reason I’ve dragged my feet for so long on actually taking this trip was the backwards (from my perspective) driving thing. When I drive, I’m borderline unconscious most of the time and if I drove in England, I knew I’d have to treat every minute behind the wheel like I do when I’m in the Pitts: totally focused on the job at hand with no time for lolly-gagging (were do words like that come from?). And, because of that, I knew my sight-seeing would consist primarily of watching the yellow line and trying to remember which way to look for traffic at stop signs. Peter eliminated that entirely by doing all the driving. I spent the entire time looking every way but straight ahead. That’s the first time that’s ever happened to me in a car and it was an intoxicating experience: who knew there was so much to see, when you’re not doing the driving?
 
Although we’d met Linda and Peter a couple times when they vacationed in AZ, we’d never spent an extended time around them and a big question hung over the entire adventure: “Can we get along with someone for an entire week while trapped in a car?” Actually, I wasn’t positive I could get along with anyone for that period of time, much less someone I didn’t really know. Wow! Was I ever wrong! Linda and Peter proved to be not only the easiest people to get along with that I’ve ever known, but they were delightful in so many ways. Both are funny as can be and Peter is a real stitch. And they wanted so badly for us to see England. And we did.
 
We laughed our way down tiny little one-way roads lost between hedgerows and thatched roof stone cottages, hoping the GPS wasn’t lying, and we gawked at crown jewels, castles and tanks and enjoyed ourselves immensely.
 
Marlene and I both agree that getting to know Peter and Linda was the high point of the trip. I only hope that when you take trips like this that you can be as lucky as we were in having the perfect guides/friends/traveling companions.
 
And I hope your GPS isn’t so set on taking every detour it can find, although that turned out to be an adventure in itself.

The England Odyssey Part Three: Edinburgh and the Little House on the Hill

Edinburgh is just across the border in Scotland and is what you expect a major Scotish city to look like: old, classic, anything but rectilinear street layout with history oozing out of every cobblestone. We saw our first, and only light drizzle of the trip and, for some reason, I didn't take as many pictures as I should have.Click Here for More

4 Oct 08 - There IS Life After Politics...I hope

A few minutes ago, the battle of the vice-presidents, which didn’t reach even verbal abuse standards, much less battle standards, wrapped up. And once again, I’m glad it’s over. In fact, I’ll be glad when the entire election thing is over. That way my kids will talk to me again and they can stop trying to explain me away because of the way I’m likely to vote.  You see, I have a daughter in Hollywood and a son in New Jersey, so politically I’m something of an embarrassment.
 
Actually, what I am mostly is misunderstood. My daughter said , “Face it dad, you’re a Republican and your son will probably have to go through therapy because of that.” She said it shaking her head and checking both directions to make sure no one heard. A Hollywood mogul with a Republican father: how can she possibly face her friends and colleagues? Except I’m not a Republican.
 
In reality, I don’t know what I am. I’m liberal in some areas, conservative in others and I’m registered as an Independent. But, because I don’t get goose bumps when Obama is mentioned and I don’t spit on the sidewalk when Sarah Palin is mentioned, they say I must be a Republican. And, when they say “Republican,” it comes off their tongues as if they’re spitting out a gerbil. I think the rule is, if I don’t think like they do, I must be a Republican, which apparently is a lower life form of some sort. It’s all so black and white for them. Ah, to be young again.
 
What started this whole line of politically-charged family rhetoric was the release of my daughter’s (well, it’s not exactly hers, but she produced it) election video. It featured people she manages and lots of their Hollywood friends. Boiled down to terms this country boy can understand, it says “You can’t bitch, if you don’t vote, and you can’t vote, if you don’t register and the deadline is coming.” To see it, go to http://www.youtube.com/5friendsvote
 
Considering the source (Hollywood—truly on the left coast), I was impressed that she could keep it from automatically having a left-leaning orientation. I sent her an e-mail, copying everyone on her family list, that said, “…you were so even handed, that even my machinegun toting buddies loved it.”
 
Instantly I got an e-mail from my ex (her mother), “I can’t believe you’ve become such a super right-winged conservative. I’m SHOCKED. You were never that way!”
 
Hey, what did I say? I thought I was paying her a compliment, saying that even my hardcore conservative friends thought she was fair. But, nooo! I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to convince that part of the family circle that I’m not a Nazi. It was frustrating.  Why is it the left is always trying to convert the right, but the right just wants to be left alone?
 
And this is why you’re always cautioned against talking politics and religion with friends and family.  It ALWAYS breeds bad blood.
 
I can hardly wait to hear their take on the Vice Presidential Debates. Surely, they’ll talk about how shallow Sarah Palin was (they love that word, “shallow”) and how brilliant Joe Biden was. Actually, Biden was excellent, although I later found out some of his points bordered on fantasy. And Palin totally redeemed herself: she did great! But, I still wouldn’t want her in the oval office. Not yet anyway. They both did their jobs well and, I personally wish Biden was running instead of Obama (I think), although I still wouldn’t vote for him. Palin surprised a lot of folks and showed how she handled stress and what an incredibly quick study she is. They’d been force-feeding her information since last week and she made it sound as if it was part of her.  However, 90 minutes of second bananas saying how great their top banana is gets old quickly.
 
I’m going to be sooo glad when this thing is over. We keep forgetting there’s a country to run.  Now, if intersted, hang on for the sub-blog.
 
The Davisson England Odyssey, Part Two: Two Hours in the British Museum
The British Museum is their Smithsonian, but under one gigantic roof. Like idiots, we showed up around three o’clock and it closes at five. Can you do the Smithsonian in two hours? Like I said—idiots. But I did enjoy our frantic rush through what we could get through, which was mostly the Egyptian rooms. Click Here for More

28 Sept 08 - The England Experience; Doin' it the Wrong Way

Yes, we just returned from our 12-day trip to England. Our first vacation ever. And yes, this is going to be a “This is what we did on our summer vacation” essay. Sort of. What it is likely to turn into, however, is “This is how we did England, so please try to benefit from our mistakes.” If we learned anything about England, it is that while, when compared to the US, it, may not be very big area wise, every thing about it is too damned deep to be done in 12 days. We tried it and it can’t be done.
 
Actually, there were some eye-opening revelations along the way that I really want to wrap some words around and pass on, but to keep “Thinking Out Loud” from degenerating into a long-winded, many months-long travelogue, we’re going to do a blog within a blog: starting this week, at the end of each of my weekly cases of verbal diarrhea, I’ll plug in a short paragraph and a link that, if you so desire, will take you to a second, continually expanding, blog that focuses on what I learned, and experienced, over the past ten days including a bunch of pictures. If you want to share in some of those thoughts, click on the link. If not, just party on, dude.
 
First, a quick itinerary, beginning with the absolute worse routing possible to England. We were using Frequent Flyers’ miles and heading for Marlene’s cousins outside of Manchester (Southport), so we wound up going Phoenix-LAX-Frankfurt-Manchester. 16 hours of flying in total, but 11 was on Lufthansa, so it wasn’t too bad. The trip back was worse, beginning with a four-hour delay that had us sitting on the ramp at Heathrow. After well over twelve hours in the airplane we missed our connections in Philly and had to over night there.
 
As much as we’ve traveled, I&rsqu