Bob Lutz of GM is a crock of sh*t

I have a 13 year old car that has 335,000 miles on it. It's my third car. My second car lasted about 9 years and had around 175,000 miles on it. My first car stretches back to 1981, so there's another 5 years.

My point here is that I have an increasing trend of driving cars into the ground. Part of it is that I'm one of those rare people that, even though I am a guy and a Mechanical Engineer, I'm not really torqued about new cars. Don't get me wrong, I can get excited about automotive engineering, and I appreciate classic lines, but I am more impressed by longevity than flashiness.

I got it from my father, who also had a habit of driving cars into the grave, but also from the military. We had lots of Viet Nam era equipment in my unit in Panama during the late 80s. These were big complex, rare things like 20 ton cranes, asphalt laying equipment, and two quarry crushers. I learned that you can keep anything going indefinitely as long as you maintain it. I had a friend in the Army that liked to buy and restore 60s cars. He had a 1969 Grand Sport and later a couple of sweet Mustangs. These cars were really old and beat up, but if you spend enough money, you could make any car look and drive like new.

So don't get me wrong, it's not a matter of being cheap and not wanting to make a car payment, because older cars start costing more and more to keep up. It's a matter of familiarity and comfort and connection with your machine. And, I have to admit, it's a matter of loyalty. I know that the car can't feel anything, and wouldn't care if I sold it or took it to the junk yard, but it just feels disloyal to abandon it after all the adventures I've had in it and all the wonderful places it has taken me.

My current car is nearing the end of its useful life and needs to be replaced soon. So my first priority is to get another car that will last a long time. It has to be rugged and dependable. If I'm going to be driving this car 8 to 10 years from now, one thing I cannot imagine is driving something that gets 20 miles to the gallon. When gas is $6 a gallon and rationed because we are at war with Iran and the cold war with Russia is in full swing, and Venezuela refuses to sell to us anymore, and global demand has gone through the roof with a billion more cars in India and China, 20 miles to the gallon will not make any sense. Maybe 35 or 40, but I'd really like something that has a little more of a flex fuel capability and a plug-in hybrid possibility. Don't get me wrong, I believe in global warming, and that we are responsible for it, but that's not the primary reason to look for fuel efficiency. Reason #1 is the expense, and right behind that is not to continue to enrich Muslim fundamentalist that hate us.

My dilemma is that the idiots that run American car companies (and I am one of those buy American types) can't pull their heads out of their orifices long enough to see what's coming and plan for it. They say it's impossible to get better mileage, that there is just this physical limit. I say they can't engineer their way out of a wet paper bag and they don't deserve to share the title American Engineer with the geniuses and heroes that won WWII with unbelievable productivity and innovation, invented the atomic bomb (it's horrible, I know, but it's also a triumph of science, design, and engineering), and PUT MEN ON THE MOON. My message to US Automaker Engineers: You're pathetic. You don't deserve your diplomas. We should take away your licenses and give you the only thing you have earned, which is membership in the Diaper Club. I've listened to these lame excuses for 20 years about why we can't have a more fuel efficient automobile. It's a "can't do" attitude that is so against the grain of everything American stands for that I wish the government would take away your companies and give them to someone that deserves them, and give you a baby bonnet and a jail shaped like a big crib.

OK, that was fun. That said, my dilemma remains. So while I ponder this problem, this morning I see this article: http://www.autobloggreen.com/2008/02/13/gms-bob-lutz-global-warming-is-a-total-crock-of-sh-t/ where GM chairman Bob "No Can Do" Lutz says that global warming is a crock of sh*t. Bob, I know you're just saying that because for some reason a scientific fact, a global trend that can be proven and documented just happens to also be politicized. Nowadays, if you're a conservative Republican, you're not supposed to believe in global warming because it's a fairy tale concocted by crazy environmentalists that just want to bring rich and wealthy people down, and want to stop people from doing whatever they feel like whenever they feel like it.

Hey Mr. Rich bastard, you've got about 4 or 5 more years to sell your outdated crappy cars to your dinosaur friends before your whole empire comes crumbling down around your ears. Actually, if you're like most of your rich and narrow minded friends, you'll probably be sitting in your mansion with your 9 figure severance pay and your fat pension and your immense stock dividends - completely unconcerned that you drove your company and an American icon into the ground. So I don't understand why what people think about global warming is your problem or concern. You're so insulated by your wealth an priveledge that you can laugh all the way to the bank. Maybe you feel the cold hand of reality creeping in to destroy the system that annoints individuals like yourself without brains or talent to be the caretakers of our giant American corporations.

I think I'll by a Toyota Prius. Long live the Japanese.

Arrival in Panama part one of two

I went to college on an Army ROTC scholarship. They paid my out of state tuition in exchange for 4 years in the Army when I got done.

I graduated after 5 years with 156 credit hours (ROTC electives did not count toward my BS degree, so it added up to an extra 28 credit hours above what I needed for my degree).

After a 4 month stint in Washington DC at Ft. Belvoir, I shipped out to Panama. The flight was memorable, because although it was long, it was over the Carribean, which had the most beautiful blue water you'll ever see.

I stepped off the plane in Panama into a very moist and unbelievably hot climate. I remember getting a brief ride from the airfield to the guest house, where I would inprocess from for the next few days. I arrived on December 27th, 1986. I only got a brief look at the city, and the guest house was in the middle of Ft. Clayton, where all I had access to was a remote part of the post, and nothing local or native. After a couple of boring days of filling out paperwork, I finally had a Lieutenant pick me up and take me to his apartment. This was a guy that had arrived a month earlier and had gotten an apartment downtown with 2 other lieutenants, one that had been there a month, and another (one or two) that had been there just a little bit longer.

They had an apartment in a heavily urban area, on the second floor of a streecorner building with a paneria (bakery) below. I was brought to the apartment, and then the inhabitants quickly left the city for New Year's Eve celebrations on some remote beach. I did not have a key, so my nervous forays into the neighborhood were accomplished by putting a block in the door, and hoping that the apartment would not be broken into. Fear of this possibility kept me out for only 10 or 15 minutes at a time. I was amazed that the storefronts of this sweltering tropical city were decorated with fake snow, snowmen, and a Santa Clause in a thick red coat. I don't know what I expected, but in a land where most people barely knew what snow was, and almost none had ever seen it, I figured the Christmas fairy tale would be different.

At some point, I finished reading all the books and magazines I had brought and I started getting very bored. New Year's Eve was a nerve racking experience, as there were fireworks all night long, and some were firecrackers thrown from down on the street level onto the balcony of the apartment I was in. I don't know if I slept at all that night.

Finally, the long weekend was over the other Lieutenants came back. I'm not sure why they did not take me with them, but in my memory, this was the start of the hazing of the newest Lieutenant that I had to endure for around 11 months before the next new Lieutenant arrived. It sucked, and I don't count many of those guys as my friends, to this day. I ended up hanging out with an older Lieutenant Turner, Mike was his first name, and his wife was Staci. They had gone to Berkley and were definitely liberal minded, probably you could say hippies, except Mike was in the military - a strange contradiction. Staci was a very happy, very smart, very non-conventional thinker. If she thought something was bullshit, she pretty much piped up and declared it for anyone to dispute, if they cared to challenge her. I never did, because she rarely said anything that was untrue, just shockingly candid. In the military, you learn that you are working within a caste system, you are relatively powerless, and you can get into a lot more trouble for simple things than you can in the civilian world. So you learn to shut the hell up when you see something that either doesn't make sense, or makes perfect sense because it is stupid. The military way of doing things does not allow for human thought or emotion, only strict adherence to the rules, no matter how obscure or retarded.

The first thing they did was send me out into the field. I was married, and I was supposed to find a house off post - on the local economy, as they said. There used to be plenty of base housing for all the troops, but this had been turned over to the Panamanians in what we continually discovered was this long inevitable course toward turning over the whole Canal Zone to the locals as well as all the bases and abandoning the country in 1999. So you had to get an apartment, and for this, you were given $1000 a month in a housing allowance calculated for the overseas area you were in. But I was not allowed to do this normal procedure, I was shipped to an area of Panama called the Chirique province.

This deployment was called Camino de la Paz (Road of Peace) and was in a coffey growing region of low mountains on the boarder of Costa Rica. The projects consisted of roadbuilding, school construction, and well digging. I was put into a vacant slot in the S3 (Operations), where they sent me out to inspect the projects. I was given two surveyors, Smith and Woldridge.

The fun never ended. For whatever reason, I was housed with the aviation officers. These deployments always had lots of helicopters attached, and they were our air taxis, as they were just there to get air time, and shuttling us around was a good way to get it. We had mostly Hueys, but a couple of Blackhawks. The pilots were all very young, mostly CW2s, which was technically below me in rank, but in this region outside of normal military protocol where I couldn't really order them around if I had wanted to. They drilled all night under the watchful eye of their senior warrant officer, who continually asked them things like "If the relative humidity is high, do you get more or less lift?" as well as the more interesting questions involving how to crash land the helicopter if you ran out of power. I did not learn how to fly a helicopter by listening in to the nighttime training, but I did manage to wrangle a lot of extra flight time by being ready and able to hop random flights when I had nothing better to do.

One day, we went out to this site, and were trying to return when a thick cloud bank rolled in. We were in the air already, and the clouds were up high, at the peaks and ridges of the mountain range we were in. Unfortunately, we were about 40 minutes out from base camp, and already in the air when the clouds boxed us into this long valley. The base camp was in a field that was at the end of the next valley over. The valley we were in just kept us to the east of the base camp with no way to cross over without going over a mountain ridge.

The problem was that we couldn't see the top of the ridge, it was in thick clouds. We were in our own little triangular space defined by the cloud cover and the canyon walls. While cruising south down the valley, we searched for a low point in the ridge to our west that we could go through. You couldn't just plow through the clouds. Although there was no mechanical constraint from doing this, there was a huge safety concern. When you can't see the ground, you're likely to smack into the side of a mountain. While the copilot on the right was looking for a way out by scanning the horizon and reading a map, the pilot on the left was also looking for a way out of the valley. That's when the high tension power lines suddenly appeared in our front. We were on a direct collision course with the wires, and the pilot and co-pilot spotted them at the same time, about 40' in front of us, with us cruising along at about 30 or 40 mph. The first time I saw the wires, was when I was reacting to the sudden drop in the helicopter and watching my weightless legs kick in the air in front of me as I was thrust against my harness.

The wires were not on the map, a fact that was already being woven into that evening's lessons learned review by the pilots. I think the lesson's title was going to be, "Don't trust the damn outdated maps".

We saw a tiny clear triangle at the back of a small valley coming into the main valley to our right. The pilot turned up the valley, and measured the small opening against the helicopter, and found it to fit with a little bit of room to spare. The question was, does this valley end in a ridge/saddle line, or does it go up higher into the clouds just out of sight from the opening we could see. We had to know before we could commit ourselves. So the copilot's job was to look through the hole to see if it was clear, and the pilot's job was to pick the last possible point that he could ascend to before he would have to wheel around in the branch valley and head back down to the main valley.

You see, Huey's like ours could not just hover, we had to maintain some forward momentum in order to manuever and keep aloft. It was sort of like a frisbee, the spinning surface of the rotor blades acted like a big wing that gave us lift. Without the forward motion, you could still control the craft, and sometimes you could maintain some altitude, but usually, you would slowly descend under the weight of the craft.

We took our first run at the gap, trading speed for altitude until we hit the point of no return. At the last possible moment, the co-pilot shouted that he could see the other side and we were clear to go through, but the pilot had already used all his forward momentum and was already executing the abort maneuver when the co-pilot figured all that out.

The helicopter turned on its side and cut close to the valley walls as it dropped and gained speed back into the center of the big valley. We turned on our side again, lined up the saddle, and gunned it up the valley, pointed at the little helicopter sized opening in the end. We shot through the opening with our rotors touching the bottom of the cloud and dropped down into the new valley below, gaining speed and losing altitude. The rest of the flight was uneventful, and I felt as if I had just enjoyed an exciting roller coaster ride.

Only later did I discover that this was a pretty desperate and unique flight maneuver they had put me through. I was the only passenger, and they begged me not to tell their leader what we did. Which I was more than happy to do.

To be continued....

The Ghost Brigades

Book Review: WARNING! WITH SPOILERS

You've been warned. I mowed through the last of the second book in the series by John Scalzi. It was also very good. Not quite as good as the first, but that one was up in the stratosphere, so we're still talking much better than most.

You got to the point where you really liked John Perry by the time the first book finished, so for those John Perry fans out there, there is no John here.

There is a nod to other science fiction stories. Scalzi has a group of people reading war fiction, and it's really a reading list of influences on his development. Interestingly, we've read most of the same material.

This version really got into how the Special Forces troops were made. It gets into the awakening and integration of the troops as well as their training. The computer brain interface allows them to have consciousness, even as they are first awakened. They talked about how they were able to clone a full grown adult in 16 weeks by accelerated development, which was cool. They talked about consciousness transfer, which was an interesting concept.

The main character is a clone that is made to house the consciousness, stored in a device, by a mad scientist that defected from the humans and was trying to serve his own goals, which unfortunately involved the slaughter of the human race.

He has the memories or personality of the defecting scientist downloaded onto him, but it doesn't take. So he is trained as a Special Forces soldier, only to have some of the memories and emotions of the bad guy come out gradually and incompletely.

They did another space drop in this one, and they had only one really active battle scene, although it focused more one the main character than the blood & guts you come to see.

In the end, the story was more about morals and honor, conceptual ideas, rather than the mechanics of how all this works. You find that the person that is accused of having no morals or sense of humor has the best of both of these. The way he kills the bad guy in the end is a very interesting twist.

There is a third book in the series, which I think I will wait a while to read. Perhaps when it comes out in paperback. I look forward to seeing more good things from John Scalzi in the future.

Calm, Cool, and Collected

When I was in the Army, I was a young 2nd Lieutenant stationed in Panama. I got a platoon after a while and got a Platoon Sergeant a while after that that I really liked. Sergeant Gates. He seemed young. He was an E6, which is a Staff Sergeant, rather than an E7, which most Platoon Sergeants were. He was smart (although he was so cool that you wouldn't think he was brilliant when you first met him). I had just had an E8 Platoon Sergeant for a very short time, Sergeant Messer, who was a lying really stupid arrogant bullying piece of shit. I still remember the only time I almost cried was when I was getting my ass reamed by Captain Toombes over an issue where an official report I had submitted was in error because my piece of shit Platoon Sergeant, Sergeant Messer, had lied to me. I was in a horrible conflict, because on one hand, it was against my style to rat out someone, I simply wanted to go and confront him myself. On the other hand, I was being asked specifically by the Captain about this issue, and I found that I could not tell him the truth. I remember telling Messer later that he lied to me and made me look bad, and I remember it was the only time I ever saw him with any humility. I finally shamed him, because he realized that I knew he was a lying sack of shit, and the only thing I wanted from him was for him to move on so I could forget about him and try to erase the damage he had done to the platoon.

Gates came in after that. Actually, there was a short stint with another Platoon Sergeant, a black quarryman named Sergeant Farmer. I can remember his face, he had been in a horrible accident at some point and his head was dented above his left temple. He was not very bright about a lot of things, like speaking clearly and spelling and writing, but he was a really nice guy, kind to the troops and very good with equipment. Then Gates came in. This was the best thing that happened to me in Panama, having a Platoon Sergeant that knew what to do with the platoon and knew how to play the Army Game. He was married to a Panamanian woman, had two enormous and very scary Rottweilers, and had a tattooed biker past, probably complete with lots of drugs and alcohol. He was funny. He also treated me with a combination of respect and friendship that I appreciated, partly because it was good and right, and partly because it was the first subordinate I had that I both liked and trusted.

Things were always chaotic, confused, and harried back then. I would get rattled, trying to do what was right when the odds against being able to get anything done, much less everything done, much less correctly, approached certainty. When I would get bent out of shape, he used to say, "Don't panic, sir." It was said with a great deal of humor, and although I would not say I was panicking, more like stressing, obsessing, or fretting, the phrase never ceased to make me stop what I was doing and laugh. It was like this perfect antidote to the daily disease that was life in the Army in Panama just prior to Noreiga's downfall and the American invasion.

That's a long lead in to the real story I wanted to tell, but I haven't thought about Sergeant Gates for a long time, and it is fun to recall what a great guy he was.

The real story is about panic. I was listening to an "All in the Mind" radio Australia podcast (rebroadcast) about panic disorders the other day. The gist of the program was looking into panic attacks and panic disorders and the drugs that are thrown at them today. The main person being interviewed was a psychologist that had personally had panic attacks herself and been prescribed Xanex. She actually participated in a clinical trial for the drug and tampered with the results. That part of the interview was a little weird, but mainly the story focused on people prone to panic attacks. Apparently, it feels like you are about to die, and it's a lot more serious than just some person being a drama queen.

I can't relate to that, just like I can't relate to manic depressive disorder. I'm not saying I'm not sympathetic, I'm just saying I haven't personally experienced that particular malady, so I don't know what it's like. Just like I can't relate to childbirth - and never will.

I'm always calm, cool, and collected. I never panic.

OK, that's not true. It's one of those things that you want to believe about yourself, but if you really had to be honest with yourself, you'd have to admit the truth. In this case, I recognize that we as a society value those that can maintain a calm, even in a crisis. I wouldn't say that I panic so much as the fact that I get very irritated, almost bent out of shape. When things aren't right, particularly when things aren't fair, it really bothers me. When bothered, I sometimes expend a lot of energy trying to get things back on track, and/or ranting about what a bunch of shit the screwed up situation is. When in Panama, everything was screwed up all the time. You spent most of the day being somewhere between pissed off and furious about how fouled up things were. What we developed after a while was an attitude of humor about all the crap that was happening. You learned to laugh at everything, because everything sucked.

My brother recently was telling a story about how his boys were complaining about how things were not fair. His response was, "Life isn't fair. Get used to it." Alternately, the soldiers in Iraq come up with slang to describe what a bunch of crap a particular situation is. They've got this great expression: "Embrace the suck": Translation: The situation is bad, but deal with it. These phrases can be found at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7458809 if you are interested.

I was describing the program on panic disorders to my wife, and I started thinking about synonyms and antonyms of panic. This was a useful exercise in thinking about how this flavor or mood infects everyday society. Panic is a form of stress or distress. Panic has a flavor of being completely irrational. Anger isn't the same thing. When soldiers panic in combat, they may retreat or surrender, and it leads to a rout. The opposite of panic would be serenity. If you are calm, cool, and collected, you are as far from panicked as you can get. So what is the secret to serenity. I guess there is this happy balance where you are taking care of business, so you are engaged and concerned, but it's not bothering you. Is this the zen state we are looking for? I know that we tend to think of people like this as cool characters, not just that they keep their cool, but that they are cool.

I guess it doesn't matter if you're happy with what you are doing in life, and you're not driving the people around you crazy.

That's cool with me.

Old Man's War

WARNING: THIS BOOK REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS:

I found this book by John Scalzi by accident. I was looking for a book called The Forever War in a newly reissued version around Christmas and was told casually by the person at Barnes and Noble, who had read the Forever War, that this book was a little like it and also good. So I bought it and put it on a shelf for a month.

Then I read it in 3 days.

Absorbed is kind of a light word for my reaction to the book. I might also say entranced or enthralled, but that doesn't quite cover it either. Let's just say that I have not one critism of the book, it's excellent in every respect.

Probably my favorite aspect of the book, after the concept, is the dialog. Probably my favorite dialog is the part where John Perry talks with the Consu, a superior alien species, in order to find out information about humanity's enemies. It's not a negotiation, but a one sided conversation with a species that hates humans and doesn't care much what they say. The funny part is that John Perry has nothing to lose, so he talks with the irreverence of a high school kid with an attitude. It's fun.

The character development is very good. You really feel like you are getting to know John Perry well, and you really get to like him and feel some strange pride in his accomplishments.

The technology is very interesting. Cloning, consciousness transfer, integrated personal computers in your brain, the Skip Drive to get you around the cosmos without having to slog along in a straight line, nanobots, and advanced weapons spice up the story nicely. The space drop onto a planet is a cool touch, similar to a halo drop by our combat forces in real life.

The story builds nicely, because you know of some important things without knowing about them. The whole mystery of what is going to happen to them as their age is reversed is a wonderful mystery until it happens. Another favorite thing about the book is their time in basic training. The drill sergeant character is another high point in the book.

Threading through the book is the love story of John and his dead wife. It's poignant, believable, and interesting without weighing the book down with melancholy. I like the way the believability of the book is enhanced by this aspect of the story. You know that the character understands why things have to happen, and even understands what it is that he is feeling without being rendered useless by his feelings. That in itself makes John Perry a hero, but his matter of fact way of dealing with each new twist, shock, or surprise is what you really come to like.

I'm half way through the sequel, The Ghost Brigades. Not as compelling as the first book, but still head and shoulders over most books I've read. I'll write about it when I'm done.

Dune Series

CAUTION: Book Review with spoilers:

I can finally say I've finished the Dune series.

I read the original some time in High School. My brother and I read the original 3 books (Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune), as well as all the later ones done by Frank Herbert's son, at roughly the same time. I had read the continuation of the classic line (God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse) by Frank Herbert years ago, and my brother read them more recently. I remember thinking that it was becoming more and more incomprehensible as Frank Herbert put out his last three sequels.

But that didn't stop the story from being intriguing and interesting. I like the way that the son stepped in and backfilled the original story, as well as taking the old storyline forward.

The continuation of the series was a collaborative effort between Brian Herbert, Frank's son, and Kevin J. Anderson. I just found out, after finishing the series, that Kevin J. Anderson did a lot of the Star Wars books. I'm glad I didn't know that. Most Dune purists probably think of Dune as being an intellectual exercise, and the Star Wars series is more like the pulp fiction branch of science fiction. Heavy on the action and adventure, light on the science and philosophy.

There was a different flavor to the continued series. The original series made the characters seem too complex to completely understand, while at the same time, more respectable and less human. The new series had the characters feeling more human, but also more shallow and superficial. It wasn't a major flaw, just a minor distraction.

The major draw of the continued series, both the backstory and the continued thread of the main story was all the background and explanation as to why things were the way they were. What was the real motivation of people and peoples - this is what made the whole saga more detailed, coherent, and complete.

That said, there were a couple of annoyances. The Deus Ex Machina of having the Oracle of Time simply fly in and solve the problem with the machine invasion and Omnius at the last second was a little too convenient to be satisfying. The fact that everyone simply stopped struggling and got along once Duncan Idaho merged with the machines and was found to be the ultimate Kwizatz Hadderach was not very interesting (it was satisfying, but not interesting). The entire conflict went from coming to a head to being resolved so quickly that you get literary whiplash.

So, in truth, what does the completion of the series accomplish? There were no loose ends left to tie up that I can think of. There is no reason to write more backstory or continued narrative. I have no curiousity about things, it's all been explained. I'm glad I read the series, it was interesting and an epic saga with many interesting characters and concepts. I'm left not feeling sad or nostalgic about the book, as the original three books of Dune left you feeling sympathy for the tragedy of Paul Atreides life. This one leaves you feeling like things will go on, only better now.

The conflict and messiness of the original core of the series is what made it interesting. Like a splinter in your brain, there's always some pressure and a little bit of pain, the issue never goes away completely. I think that I would have always felt that way if I hadn't read the series to the end, but now I find that I miss that feeling.

I hope that's not a comment on life in general. You think you are striving toward completion and contentment, but what does it mean when you're not satisfied being satisfied?

Ill Wind

Book Review WITH SPOILERS

I was loaned Ill Wind by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason by my brother, who recommended it. I'd read Anderson before, particularly his collaborations with Brian Herbert in the extended Dune series. A quick search shows that he was also the author of "The League of Extroidinary Gentlemen" which was made into a movie. He also wrote a lot of Star Wars books.

This book has a great premise, but it falls flat. There was something both unbelievable and incredibly irritating about the characters. I kept waiting for something very dramatic or very heroic to happen, and it didn't. Some characters had fatal flaws, but kept mucking around. Other characters were full of honor and purpose, but couldn't get their act together. While you could argue that this is a fair description of real life, the result here is a story you can't believe.

The premise is an interesting. I remember hearing about oil eating bacteria years ago as a solution to oil spills years ago. The intersting premise here is what if it gets out of control. They manage to make this very extreme, unbelievable, and not very interesting. Connoisseurs of the end of the world genre know that society breaks down pretty fast. They just sort of gloss over this effect. In all, I didn't care if the noble scientists trying to save the world succeeded, and I didn't believe either their triumphs or setbacks. Too bad. It's worth exploring in better detail later.

Ironically, there was an oil spill in the San Francisco Bay the week I started reading this book, and another in the Black Sea the next week, as well as a minor spill off of Israel, if I remember that last one properly. So it was a timely read, but not at all satisfying.

Big Barns to Big Box Churches

There used to be big barns here. When I was in high school, a little over 25 years ago, I drove down my street to 50 Highway and turned to go the last 4 miles into town. We used to be "out in the country". Near here was all farms and cropland for as far as you could see.

On the way into town, and come to think of it, on my street, were these huge barns. We're talking 4 story high monstrosities, grand old monarchs of the golden age of agriculture. Big wooden structures with enormous doors on either end. I remember driving by one that was open one day and looking inside and seeing two combines side by side in the middle lane. That's only about a third or a quarter of the width of the building, and they were side by side. The barn was BIG.

As the 90s progressed, I still noted and admired the barns on my drive into town. You could tell they weren't being used any more, but they were still majestic icons of a bygone era. There was something permanent and comforting about them. They linked you to a simpler past.

My favorite one grew more obscure each year as a grove of small trees grew up around it.

Progress marched our way, and the cursed developers kept gobbling up the farmland to fill with their big box stores and car dealerships. Then the barns were torn down. I don't remember the exact day, or if they were knocked down suddenly or slowly. I remember I had been thinking that the biggest barn could be made into a clubhouse for the housing development that was sprouting up behind it, but that didn't happen. It was simply destroyed. And it wasn't destroyed so that something else could be immediately built in it's place. It was simply discarded as if it had been a blight on the landscape instead of a welcome beacon. The grove of trees is still there, taller now, and the small pile of rubble that remains is probably still in there as well.

Next to the grove of trees marking the big barn's final resting place is a new church. If you got a quaint Little House on the Prairie vision of a little white church with a cute steeple, forget it. This thing can probably hold a couple of thousand people. It looks like a spaceship landed in a field and is waiting to take over the city after it gets instructions from the mothership. Next to it, another enormous big box church went in, and next to it, I just noticed that the enormous building being constructed right now is another giant church. How many people are going to be going to these churches? It used to be that people went to church for a sense of community and connection. How much connection can a person feel in a crowd 4 times bigger than your high school graduating class?

There's something sterile and sinister about the big box churches. Just like there's something soulless and impersonal about the big box stores, these new churches feel like a commercial endeavor, fuel by tax increment financing. I wonder if they told the city council that they would bring lots of revenue to the city in exchange for locating here? Really, will they be filled on day one? Are people in this country really that busy out there shopping for a church? Is one's piety now measured in the size and grandure of the church you attend, rather than how good you are to your fellow man? Can people not connect with God unless it's in a really nice, new church? I suppose God doesn't want to waste his time in tiny dingy run down churches. Those people probably aren't even going to be saved. I guess when the Rapture comes, all the big box churches will be empty and nothing else will be touched.

That's why they call it Rapture. It'll be good for those of us that are left.

Billboard Blight

I hate billboards. That's my position, so if you're an owner of a billboard conglomerate, or if you are so everything-is-beautiful crazy that you like them, you can skip this.

I remember driving in the Missouri Ozarks, down around Branson some years ago. When I left on this trip, I was interested in seeing the natural beauty of the Ozark Mountains. These are "mountains" so worn down by time that they really are more like hills. But the region is beautiful, heavily forested with big springs and wild rivers. However, this vision of beauty is blotted out around Branson by what almost amounts to a highway wall of billboard advertising. I was angered and saddened then, and things have not gotten any better in the meantime.

If you've ever travelled down I-70 in Missouri, you know what it means to completely mar a landscape with these nuisances. We're not talking quaint little signs that some guy on a ladder could go out and resurface in an afternoon. We're talking enormous expanses that are so huge that they need skyscraper grade support columns. They are equipped with a blinding display their own spotlights, and I think they should have aviation warning beacons, if some of them don't already.

A few years back, people in the state got fed up and finally tried to make a law that no more new billboards could be put up. They didn't even try to address the blighted ones already in existence. The Billboard Lobby (you wouldn't think there would be such a thing, much less an enormous and effective one) went into action. First, they blanketed the state with a huge increase in billboards that would be grandfathered in if the bill passed. Then they tried to get the courts involved, saying that this bill would limit their free speech. In the end, they won and defeated the bill, probably filling the campaign coffers of the legislatures that "supported" them.

During this period, we were thrilled to be presented with two new billboards at the end of my street where it ends at Highway 50. I don't need to reiterate that they are ugly and a blight on the landscape and produce serenity spoiling light pollution at night. My point here is that they are not even being used. As you can see by the picture, the only thing they advertise is that someone needs to put an ad up on them. They're basically advertising that they are not only an ugly nuisance, but unneccessary too.

And that is the real tragedy of the story.

Giving Up?

I freely admit to spying on neighbors.

However, I'm not sure you should even call these ones neighbors. House flipper realtors don't really count as neighbors.

I saw a couple in a white SUV on the driveway, talking to the "owner" flipper. I watched from my window. The conversation did not look congenial.

At first, I thought maybe it was a potential buyer, then I started wondering if it was the realtor. The couple was a man and a woman, but the woman was a lot older than the man, so I didn't think they were husband and wife, but maybe colleauges.

It looked like the owner was sort of arguing, maybe not in a contentious way, just trying to get his points across, and the couple looked like they were utterly unconvinced.

Later, I noticed that their footprints in the snow showed that they went to the front doors of the house where the electricity disconnection notices were still posted. I also noticed that the owner backed into our yard and made a mud rut with his back tire.

The next day, the real estate agent's sign was removed.

News of the housing markets just keep getting worse. I went through the back yard around the pool last night, looking for a cat and noticed that there was 2½' of water in the pool equipment room. Obviously, the drains are clogged with leaves and debris. It's possible that the cabana that they removed used to keep the water out and the deck that they replaced it with does not. I wonder how much damage the water is doing to the pool heater and filter? More money just evaporating away.

I wonder if we'll see a foreclosure sale sometime?

Postscript:

I called the realtor. It was another exercise in unreality. The secretary had a guy call me back that didn't even know that their company was listing the property. He kept trying to engage me on the phone, even when I figured out that I needed to talk to Pamela. Truly Dave, you are an idiot.

Pamela is his kindred spirit. Maybe they are brother and sister, their mental processes were certainly a match. Pamela said that they were going to "re-list" it. This is another meaningless buzz word that can mean anything they want it to mean, similar to the way they would tell us that the house was "under contract", which we were supposed to interpret as meaning that they had someone interested in buying it, when it really meant "I don't want you to think we are losers".

Pamela (if that is her real name) said the house is now $900,000 (down from $1.2 million - 25% off! that's a real sale!). They would be willing to take $875,000, as is. That means that for $900,000 he'll finish working on the house. Then she proceeded to tell me about the granite counters they are going to put in the guest house.

If this isn't like putting makeup on a pig, I don't know what is.

Fear and Control

When Heath Ledger died last week, it was unexpected. I remembered him mostly from A Knight's Tale, where he was pretty funny. Everyone remembers that Heath was in Brokeback Mountain. No one I know watched that movie. I didn't even know what it was about. The movie got awards and recognition, so that usually tells you that it's good, but I wasn't about to walk up to the counter at Blockbuster video rental and plop down a "gay flick".

I heard the scenery in the movie was beautiful, but I thought it was a gay romance film. When Heath Ledger died, I decided to rent the movie. My wife and I watched it last night.

Spoiler alert. You may want to skip the next 3 paragraphs if you haven't seen it. It was a good movie. It was sad. I kept thinking that it didn't seem realistic that they were really in love, it seemed just like actors playing a role. That's true for most Hollywood movie romances, as far as I'm concerned. We kept waiting, wondering where the movie was going. I did not know it was set in 1963 up to the late 70s/early 80s. The movie was about suppressed romance. The two characters were gay, but couldn't come out of the closet, or truly express their love for each other or live together.

Then, Jake Gyllenhaal's character Jack Twist dies. When Heath's character Ennis Del Mar contacts Jack's widow and parents you see the true cost of their actions. They denied themselves their whole lives until it was too late.

It wasn't clear to me what happened to Jack. Earlier, Ennis had told a story about some gay ranchers being tortured to death, possibly by his father, that set the tone for the whole movie. Ennis was scared to go public because he had seen clearly what can happen to gay people in his world. I missed a brief part where they showed Jack being beaten by some guys in a field. Before my wife told me that, it was not clear if Jack actually died by accident or was killed for being gay. It seems clear that Jack's parents knew their son was gay and his mother at least was sympathetic about her son's plight and Ennis's grief. I guess that's part of what made it so sad. This guy loses his lover and can't even properly mourn for him. Jack's parents even told Ennis that Jack wanted to live with him on a ranch out there, so they knew that Ennis was Jack's true love. The father wasn't very pleased about it, but he also was not overly hostile toward Ennis.

It's odd that in the movie, Heath lives, and in real life, he died. Some of the tone of the movie, the tragic death of someone before their time, parallels real life. Who knows what Heath Ledger would have been like if he had lived.

Talking about the movie afterwards, I remarked that fear of homosexuality wasn't always around. The Greeks were fairly open about male homosexuality, and there was no stigma about it. My wife pointed out that Christianity imposed the restrictions. It's all about fear and control. You're supposed to be afraid of the consequences, and that's how the church maintains their control over you.

On one hand, things seem to be changing. There seems to be more understanding and a greater tolerance by society at large about homosexuality. However, the church is fighting back, as they see their control slipping. The ability for men to be openly gay gains ground a little bit each year.

I was also thinking about female heterosexual sexuality. Islamic fundamentalism has sought to suppress this aspect of life, with little true success. We in the west don't have much problem seeing this as restrictive, against human nature, and inherently wrong, but we turn around and apply the same restrictions to gays.

I guess we still have some growing up to do.

Amy & Janice

Is it just me, or does Amy Winehouse (self destructive Brit pop star) look suspiciously like Maggie Wheeler (who played Chandler's annoying girlfriend Janice in Friends).

I'm just saying.

Tobacco & Alcohol

In order to buy Tobacco and Alcohol, you have to be 18 & 21 years old. In the grocery store that I went to this morning, there is a litte tear-off calendar that states "You have to have been born after this date..." in order to purchase either tobacco or alcohol. The dates were 1/18/87 and 1/18/90.

The cash register (which nowadays are computers) was being rebooted when I was buying lottery tickets, so I had the tickets in hand, but not the change. So there was this pause where I had to stand there and wait. At first, I didn't realize we were waiting for anything, and I was just standing there spacing off, staring at the date calendar. Then, when the cashier explained what we were waiting for. By then, I had latched onto the dates and was trying to remember what I was doing at the time.

I mentioned it to the cashier, and she said she had gotten married just before the 1990 date. I remembered that sometime around mid December, we had record cold that year. I was driving my brother's old Chevette, and there was snow in the street in front of the Batallion. I thought I was being smart when I drove through the snow, pulled a u-turn, passed the parking spot, pulled another u-turn and parked in the ruts. I saved myself being stuck in the snow, I thought.

I had just gotten back from 3 years in Panama and was not used to the cold yet. I did not have adequate cold weather clothes, and I was wearing an Army uniform, anyway, which wasn't the warmest choice you could make to begin with. The temperature dropped to -25°F with the wind chill below -40°F It was a record cold day. When I left the office to either go home or go out to lunch, the car started, but would not move. I was surprised, because I had specifically planned for this problem and taken actions to prevent it from happening. After digging the area around the tires out, it still wouldn't move. Somehow, I figured out that the brake pads were frozen to the disc. I had to jack up the car, remove the tire, and get a small blowtorch and heat up the pads to get them to release. I had heated up the brakes and packed them with snow with my fancy maneuver, and the melted snow refroze and held the brakes tighter than if I was standing on the brake pedal. I drove home for Chistmas that night and heard on the radio that the U.S. had invaded Panama, just 2 weeks after I left my 3 year tour there.

As for 1987, that was right after I first arrived in Panama, on December 28, 1986. The first thing they did after New Year's and inprocessing was to ship me out on a deployment to the Chirique province of Panama, up on the border with Costa Rica. I spent 45 days there, inspecting construction and flying around in helicopters. It was very cool, except for the fact that I was newly married, and my wife was cooling her heels in Manhattan Kansas, waiting for me to tell her to come down to Panama with me. I stayed in a tent with the aviators, and each night, they would quiz each other about flying helicopters. It was like extended school. They would ask questions like, "do you get more or less lift on a more humid day?" And about 7 variations on that theme. They verbally practiced loss of power, autorotation, and all the other tricks of the trade.

To me, it's not about fretting about how old you are getting, but more about remembering all the things you've done in your life.

So happy birthday, youngsters! Have a beer and a cigarette for me, because I'm staying away. That stuff will kill you.

These Colors Run

I have a visceral aversion to seeing the flag on the ground. My noexistant neighbors can't pay their bills, so I don't know why I would expect them to respect the flag.

This house kind of reminds me of the current fascination with "The World Without Us". A fascination that I will admit that I share, which answers the question, if humans suddenly vanished, what would happen to all our buildings and works? This is the scientific equivalent of the Left Behind series, where people suddenly vanish in the rapture.

The house next door appears to be an experiment trying to figure out what this would look like in my neighborhood. My favorite part of the experiment is when the animals come back. Thank you foolish house flipper for the the deer and wild turkey.

House Next Door - Unplugged

It has seemed that the person that bought the house next door and the strange contractors that worked on it were complete insane, but they talked up a good story about how great! they were doing, and on some level, you want to believe them.

Apparently, they were not doing that great, as evidenced by the fact that last month their water was shut off, and this month, their electricity was cut off.

With the looming housing crisis, you have to wonder what will happen, and just how bad the place will look when it finally gets sold. I had a handyman/contractor come by last week to look at a busted storm window, and he said it would only be worth about $500,000 if it was in perfect shape, but he thinks $350,000 would be more likely, given the amount of work that needs to be done. I wonder if they still want $1,200,000 for it.