Science You Can Do At Home!

I discovered a new effect this Christmas I am calling the Stevie-Electric Effect.

In order to repeat the experiment in your home, you will need to buy these delicious chocs and eat them. No science can be done until all the chocs are consumed, and the Stevie-Electric Effect has not yet been demonstrated effectively using cheaper packages of said chocs, nor with inferior choccy comestibles so don't waste your time and funding on economy lash-ups.

Carefully remove the now-empty inner tray from the plastic box, along with the stiff glossy paper insert that lies under it. You may notice the paper sticks to the tray with a noticeable static charge.

Rub the tray against the paper using a flat hand to support the paper and gripping the tray in the middle with pinched fingers. You will notice a slight build up of static.

Now prepare yourself for the experience of the mighty Stevie-Electric Effect, which I already called bagsies and dibs on so don't try re-labeling it in the way scientists so often do to steal other people's hard work and insight.

Aligning the paper and tray so there is no overlap, gently move the tray back and forth by no more than a half inch. You should notice a rapid build-up of a ferocious static charge, far in excess of any that can be obtained by rubbing the tray on the paper over a wider path. Eventually the tray will stick so firmly to the paper that sliding the tray will become very difficult.

You have now demonstrated the Stevie-Electric Effect and should be in awe of my science powers and like that.

Harpy No Yeast!

I'm posing thistle missile bite means of my newt Kindle Fight.

A newt ear in blotting is at hound, moored sightly by the automobile spooling collection I hive nit fatigued how to tan often.

Expectorate mope of thus sight of thing as Tim goes on; one mist move whist the tomes, I almost sat.

As I Walked Out This Winter's Day

The Christmas Tree Guy
Is gone leaving just the smell
Of pine on the air

New Look

Gah!

Last week I was at a loose end, got curious, clicked something I shouldn't have and trashed my bailing-wire and chewing gum blog markup template, replacing it with a new one supplied by Blogger that has drag'n'drop gadgets, some of which actually work.

Shame I never got round to saving the original template.

I think I've gotten most of the value-added styles back in place, or rather, I've improvised several workarounds that sort of do the same thing the old styles did.

Anyway.

The new look: good or bad? Please let me know.

The Horrible Nastiness of Unpleasantness (aka Life)

So, since I last posted life has been crashing over me like cool, wild, blue surf contaminated with sharp scrap metal, nuclear reactor linings and toxic waste.

The LIRR has periodically broken down, never so spectacularly as the evening of hell when a signal outage on the lightning-prone Babylon branch was converted into a system-wide debacle by "a techie who pushed the wrong button", but once so badly I was obliged to take a train so late that I was greeted by my boss with an unironic "Good Afternoon".

Truly these people deserve some sort of Award for Dedication to Lack of Service. I'm not blaming the crews. They generally at least are in it with the rest of us and strongly motivated to Get Things Moving. I blame the middle- and upper-management who it seems cannot find their collective backsides with both hands and a map. Disasters happen, but why do the same disasters continue to cripple the service year after year?

I finally screwed up the courage to visit the skin doctor, who hacked off some of that newly mutinying organ and sent it off for tests. Specifically a skin tag that was growing under my left eye and entering my field of vision¹ and a wart on my thumb that reacted to my attempts to freeze it off cryogenically by regrowing, and the attempt at excision by the application of corrosive chemicals by springing a number of freely bleeding wounds which got infected.

There was nerve tissue in there too, as I found when I attempted a home surgery with a razor blade and a small rubber ball, which I bit in half but managed not to swallow as I hopped screaming around the bathroom/operating theater, crashing into things and begging for death's sweet embrace. One in the win column there. And the nerves turned out to be the type that don't become numb when the skin is frozen with the old cryogenic kit as a second impromptu surgery attempt proved.

Doc Hacksaw grabbed my head and, knocking my glasses to the floor with a skillful sweep of his scalpel hand whipped off the offending growth, missing the eyeball by several thicknesses of the blade. I had to admire his technique, especially when he managed to switch out the knife for a small electric branding iron and rammed it into the wound he had inflicted, all without receiving any wounds of his own from my frantically clawing hands and thrashing legs (though I did manage to bite his nurse as she applied the dressing, which mollified me a little).

Deciding that the wart called for Heroic Measures, Doc Hacksaw first anethetized me with a hypo fitted with a blunt needle, stabbing me in many places, some of them close to the area he planned to work on. I cooperated by showing him some of my very best Words of Power and attempting to grasp him by the windpipe. Then, brandishing his scalpel, so sharp the edge gave off blue radiation as it snipped the very photons of light in half when it moved, utilizing what I call a "Jack the Ripper" grip, he began to stab and slash with gusto. Naturally this produced a very deep wound in my thumb, which bled freely.

"Nurse!" screamed the crazed dermatoligist. "The cauterizer! No, the big one!"

I encouraged his efforts with manly falsetto screams as oily red steam rose from my (formerly) good hand and the delicious smell of burning meat filled the room. Then he gave me some cream to put on it and it was all over.

The Stevieling managed to infest her computer with Chechnyasoft and was plagued with pop-ups telling her she needed to buy her anti-virus software. This helpful message highlighted the fact that the still-under-subscription McAffee software she has was turned off, again.

This makes twice in about 8 months.

I was livid, so much so that Mrs Stevie told me to stop shouting at the Stevieling but became less involved when I explained that:
      a) even an administrator has to manually escalate their permissions in order to make registry changes (which had clearly happened here) so she had quite obviously clicked "yes" on a window without reading the message in the box
     2) The last time this had happened I had taken a day off work and it still hadn't been enough time to get the machine working again
     þ) I could take no time off this week and therefore the computer repairs would take time needed to put up the decorative Arch O' Festivity and get the Pre-Lit Yule Bush down from its perch in the garage² and
     ♥) That although the Stevieling had sworn to me that she was scanning her computer for infections when I asked each week, I could find no logs to prove it, and the only log I could find was he one from the scan I ran right after I fixed the damned machine eight months before.

It was five nights of pure hell getting the basted thing free of the grip of former soviet cyberthuggery. I thought I could do it in two, but the infection poved immune to the two day fix (either that or that wretched kid re-infected the machine within minutes).

So, life as usual, really.

1. I don't have enough to spare these days to allow it to be blocked by stupid growths↑
2. That more than anything served to get Mrs Stevie in the proper frame of mind re: needlessly virused computers↑

More Incompetence and Annoyance

Even though it was election day today, and many government offices were closed, we had a mail delivery.

I was impressed until I looked at the mail.

Most was for the house ten digits higher than Chateau Stevie. Some was for a house ten digits higher than that. Not a single piece was for us.

My guess is that Mr Singh got all our mail.

Pool Annoyance Rant

All the air pillows I so laboriously cleaned and inflated developed leaks and sank, so I had to buy another and deploy it on Sunday.

The hurricane had also peeled back the cover and dumped leaves in the water I so laboriously cleaned four weeks ago. I did my best to rectify this state of affairs but was so demoralized by this foul turn of events it was a sloppy job at best. There's four hours of my life I won't get back.

While lifting the pool cover, it became apparent that it was dotted with numerous holes which will let filthy rainwater in anyway. This also explains why the water level was very low - when I siphoned off the water on the pool cover I also siphoned off half the water in the pool through the holes in the cover.

So that's all right then.

Another Day, Another Annoyance

I find I have time on my hands to post to The Occasional Stevie, a now-rare occurrence up there with lottery wins, because once again I find myself sitting on a premium-priced peak period LIRR train, waiting for an off-peak train to clear the chicane caused by a rail failure.

I stand corrected: Two trains.

It's not the failures that I mind, though they seem to be occurring more and more frequently of late, it's the witless way these disruptive events are dealt with by the clueless wuckfits who are "in charge" of the bloody Long Island Rail Road. Holding priority traffic for low-priority traffic is mindless.

Yes, I know they have to get the trains back up the other end of the line somehow, but these could be deadheaded back in the relatively slow period from 10 am onward. I am sick to the back teeth of sitting in an expensively-priced peak train waiting because some dimwit dispatcher doesn't have a clue how to run a railway network.

As I just said to the conductor - this bunch couldn't get me drunk in a bewery.

More Expensive, Time-Wasting Idiocy

I arrived home tonight to find I had been served.

I read the summons with mounting rage. Name or defendant (identified by idiot lawyer as me): Wrong. Address: Spelled wrong. The complaint claims I have not acted to compensate someone I've never heard of who was injured some time ago in a vehicle I don't own that was part of a business I have never been involved with in a place I've never been to as far as I know.

Mrs Stevie, who is part of the well oiled machine that is the New York Legal System (and that is the only explanation I can come up with as to why someone would get so many of the details of a summons wrong) said I should calm down and she would deal with it in the morning.

So I'll let her tell the idiot, lazy lawyer he isn't worth whatever the plaintiff is paying him.

Careers I Would Have Liked To Try

Apache Dancer.

Flinging some slim French bird around the place, having her clutch me tightly and get paid for it? C'est une consummation devoutment etre wished.

Sadly, a love of Mars bars™ and food in general, a genetic predisposition toward bisinistrate-rhythmoperambulation and a complete inability to gain even rudimentary fluency in French doomed me to the path more traveled than that one.

Plus: I cannot smoulder convincingly¹.

Merde!

1. Unless we count the experiments detailed here↑

Internet Rant

Those who know me know I have some issues with the current festering pile of leperous vileness infesting the World Wide Web.

Chief among these is anything that slows down the delivery of the webpage I'm wanting to look at, and it goes infinity times more for anything that is simply going to be a signpost to where I really want to be.

I sometimes (rarely) use my laptop to connect to the web while on the train, where my Wi-Fi service is spotty at best and passing between different access points as I ride. It is therefore paramount that pages load quickly, especially if they are just being loaded to grab the next waypoint on my (usually unwanted) voyage of discovery.

It should therefore come as no surprise that today I am enraged that I sat waiting for a bleeping secondary site to answer the bleeping phone in order that Google could start showing me the link for the site I actually wanted to see (one of the ad-service sites) and then the bleeping site I wanted wouldn't load because it was waiting for Google analytics to answer the bleeping phone. Naturally, by the time I had the site I wanted up and began the process of untangling the resource I needed to see from the visual chaos that passes for design, the Wi-Fi connection had been lost.

I see many angry young things arguing that as soon as more memory becomes available for a PC, Microsoft fills it with cruft. I see just about no-one complaining of the incomprehensible dash to fill bleeding-edge bandwidth with digital vomit, forcing those of us who bought our machines before last Tuesday to endure design assumptions at the web-server end that are not true at the client end. Amazon is a case in point. Get a slow connection and you might as well not bother to load their site as it wallows, trying to pre-load rollovers and banners and Azathoth-knows what else, none of which is central to the business of locating the new Larry Niven novel and buying it.

For years I had to explain to people that the rest of the world was not built around free local telephone service and that V90 dial-up was not a world standard. My father once had to face paying a three hour long-distance telephone charge in order to download an update. Does anyone here begin to see another reason other than stupidity for not applying the latest patches to Windows? I never saw a business so intent of marginalizing its consumer base.

And don't get me started on the Javascript stupidity, in which the quest for shiny website bling has opened up everyone to insidious hijacks that have one's credit card in Chechnya faster than one can say "point, click and ship".

Gah!

Hurricanes: Ban Them Now!

Well, that was fun. Oh wait, no it wasn't.

Regular reader¹ will probably be aware that Hurricane Irene blew into Long Island a couple of weeks ago. Given the fact that it was actually dying down to category 1 by the time it made landfall, I expected it would be no real inconvenience, and thus rested my head in confidence on Saturday night.

At about 2:30 am the next morning the power went out on the side street that runs along one edge of our property because a small branch snapped off the dead tree the guy across the road is cultivating and fell on the copper-clad thread of cotton that the Long Island Power Authority deems suitable for urban power distribution and strings for miles on rotten poles inadequately bedded in the sand that serves for soil hereabouts. The irony here is that the main road that runs along the front of the property, and which is referenced in our address, suffered no such interruption of power.

"Irony?" I here you sneer, digging out your Alanis Morrisette collection. "How is that irony?"
It is irony because after a warping power pole had tugged the cleat anchoring our power lines to the house off the wall twice in six months we insisted the IQ brigade at LIPA "do something to permanently address the problem" and they switched out power line to the side street's transformer².

And so, as the hurricane swept over Long Island in the early morning, we awoke to no power and a flood in the basement.

Mrs Stevie got busy with towels and something called a "sham-wow", soaking up the water and transferring it to buckets which were dumped into the septic system so it could seep back into the waterlogged ground and thence back into the basement in a few hours. I declined to join in since I knew the power would be back on in a few hours. After all, not even LIPA could be caught so badly out of crease as to not have contingency plans well in hand.

It was pointed out to me that stuff was getting ruined by the water, but I replied that all my stuff had been systematically ruined in previous floods so there was nothing I cared about, and all their stuff had been put up on shelves after the last time surely? This was greeted with harsh words but I remained resolute in my refusal to join the basement bailing fun.

In order to assuage Mrs Stevie's deteriorating temper I offered to drive them out for breakfast at a diner. The wind was howling and rain was falling, but it had stopped falling crosswise which I took to be a good sign, so we ignored the witless idiots on the radio saying "stay home", mostly because when we were home we had no electricity for the radio and so couldn't heed their advice until we had ignored it and fired up the Steviemobile, and drove to a nearby diner.

On the way I began to get intimations that the situation might be a tad worse than I had apprehended. Bits of tree were scattered everywhere. That much I did expect. What I had not expected to see was trees ripped out of the ground by their roots and dropped wherever gravity and the prevailing wind felt was appropriate. One fallen tree had a root system that was over ten feet across. The owner probably wished that it had gone down a bit further than it did. It looked like what happens when a very young child is let loose on a scale model railway. There were trees down everywhere. Trees big enough to block whole streets, and over a quarter of the town was blacked out.

The diner was in good repair and had power (and had a backup generator, I was informed) and staff, who all looked like they would rather be at home bailing out their own basements³. That diner was to do record business that day and most of the following week. As it was, we had breakfast with coffee (my main reason for suggesting the trip), and we left to see if Mrs Stevie's parents were okay.

They were in darkness, but un-flooded, so I drove the family home and returned with one of our Coleman electric lanterns after replacing the batteries so they would at least have enough light to get about the place.

I took Monday off and, after taking a box of coffee to the in-laws⁴ the Stevieling and I went out for a drive out east along the Long Island Expressway. She drove because she needs the practice, it was time she had freeway experience and this day at this time traffic would be very light. I just sat biting my arm and screaming when it was appropriate, while offering advice such as "You're drifting to the right, honey. You're drifting into the shoulder sweetheart! Daughter! You're about to drive into a stream of traffic on your right! TURN THE STEERING WHEEL TO THE LEFT AT ONCE! ARGHARGHLEFT!" and "You see those red lights on the car up ahead? Those mean the driver in front of you is braking. So slow down a little. Slow down! SLOW! STOP THIS VEHICLE IMMEDIATELY! ARGHARGHSTOPTHECAR!"

As we negotiated roads blocked by police insisting we turn right when we wanted to turn left (because all the traffic lights were out) we could see miles of power lines lying on the ground because the poles had fallen over. I started to get a very bad feeling about the whole reliance on LIPA to get the job done quickly theory and decided to formulate a new philosophy straightway - one involving Long Island being in the electrical dark ages for the foreseeable future - while keeping up a brave face and a positive attitude in front of the women of La Famile Stevie.

Mrs Stevie had scored some dry ice to keep the fridge cold which turned out to be the last dry ice in New York, and it worked quite well, but we had no electricity so we had no stove to cook with. The fact that I get home around the time it is starting to get dark was also getting old. I was reduced to walking around with one of those strap-to-your-head LED lamps so I could see anything. It worked well, but it was so damned depressing to only be able to see things right in front of me and only see those in shades of actinic blue-white. On Tuesday the performance of the Long Island Rail Road was the icing on the cake and I came home only to leave again in the ostensibly hopeless search for a generator.

As it happened my first stop was Home Despot where it transpired they had just taken delivery of a load of generators. By the time I found where they were there were only two left, and one of those was gone by the time I had finished checking the price. I grabbed the last one and called Mrs Stevie to bring her wagon to collect me as it was far too big to fit in my car. Then it was a simple matter of paying for it, spending twenty minutes sobbing, clawing at my face, tearing my clothes, pouring dirt on my head and yelling "Why me?" and then it was back home for several hours of generator assembly by flashlight.

Once it was bolted together it was a sort of wheelbarrow affair, a wheeled frame containing the engine/alternator, fuel tank and breaker panel with electric sockets with two folding handles so I could move it with only moderate back strain. I filled the sump with oil and put some gas in the tank, then read the starting instructions and my heart fell. The instructions said to choke the engine then pull the starter cord until the engine compression came up, then to heave on the cord to start it. My chainsaw has the same start sequence and it is no picnic getting that bastard to fire up. I was quite despondent when I contemplated the size of the generator's engine, but it actually fired while I was doing the pull-to-prime thing - the easiest pull-start I've ever personally experienced.

It was also the loudest motorized thing I've ever started with the possible exception of Troll⁵. Standing next to it, the sound of Mrs Stevie's voice was totally drowned out unless she shrieked at such volumes her nose bled. Unlooked-for bonus there. The noise was magnified by the narrowness of the area between the fence that separates us from Crazy Joe and our kitchen, and the dimensions of the enclosure meant that Mr Singh, the neighbor we are on good terms with, was getting the full benefit of the sound. I shut it down and moved it behind the swimming pool, figuring the body of water would act to muffle the sound. It did, a bit, but it still sounded like a Mr Softee van was serving delicious cone-mounted treats in our garden. Oh well.

The generator has five power taps: one 240 volt, 25 amp supply and four 120 volt, 20 amp supplies, and will supply five and a half kilowatts, but it was getting late so I decided that only emergency power would be plumbed this night. This equated to the fridge and a light. Fridge compressors suck an awful lot of power, but I happened to know ours is under 20 amps at peak (when it starts) so it was just a matter of avoiding voltage drop by using a short enough extension cord, something I didn't have in the thickness of wire required for the current draw, so I used the cord I power the swimming pool pump with, which is as thick as my little finger and weighs a ton. This and another, regular outdoor extension cord were thrown through the open kitchen window and plugged into the fridge and a lamp and all was happiness in the home. I, however, went out to buy gasoline, which because I had only a small can involved two round trips to the gas station to fill the tank.

Now I have a five gallon can somewhere in the garage, but it had been silted over with crap the women put in there then moved about to find other stuff they put in there and now, with no lights, I wasn’t ever going to find it. Mrs Stevie said she’d pick one up while she was out, but wouldn’t ya know it, there were none to be had fer luvner money so she bought a Kerosene can instead. A kerosene can is exactly the same as a gas can, and a day later that same can was available as a gas can, but a kerosene can is blue and it is illegal to fill a can that is not metal or plastic and colored red at a public gas station in New York. I explained this quandary to Mrs Stevie but she announced that she didn’t care because it was my job to fill the thing each morning. It would be my problem. A frank exchange of views was held in which I lost badly, but which fortunately the neighbors were not party to on account of the racket from the generator.
And so to bed.

The next day Mrs Stevie and I had a spirited disagreement on whether we should run the generator all day while we were at work. I felt we shouldn't, mostly because of the cost (24 hours running would be around $70-80) but also because my feeling was that the thing wasn't intended for such a heavy duty cycle (the box had a list of envisioned uses and some had "standby" featured prominently in the wording and specific instructions on how to shut the thing down including a five-minute, no-load running period so that the alternator could cool down before the engine - and the cooling fan - stopped). Not only that, but there were strongly worded contra-indications on the subject of the thing failing under load and my experience has been that tools with moving parts must be watched like a hawk because those parts have a tendency to stop moving in dangerously creative and expensive ways as soon as you take your eyes off 'em. Mrs Stevie felt that if the generator was not running flat out the fridge would slag down in a pool of water and rotting food within minutes.

The discussion ranged over a number of subjects, most of them to my detriment, and then we had another frank exchange of views and I gassed up the generator and left for work, its ear-splitting "blat" announcing to one and all that our (empty) house had power not of LIPA's doing.

As my home-bound train approached Wyandanch (Perl of the East) I got a call from Mrs Stevie to inform me she and The Stevieling were going out. She later claimed that she added the fact that since the generator was still running she wasn't going to do as we had agreed at breakfast and put more gasoline in it, but if she did she said it to empty air and static. Needless to say when I got home the damned thing was silent.
Silent and red hot.

It had clearly shut down while the fridge motor was running and was now in a state engineers call "heat soak" which is a fancy way of saying that the heat built-up in the engine and alternator casing was not blown away by the fan and so was hanging around while the formerly moving parts added more and more heat to the business. The generator was actually getting hotter as it sat there doing zero.

I waited a bit, refueled it and attempted to start it, but it refused to countenance the idea. My guess now is that some sensor had shut off the electrics.

By the time Mrs Stevie got back I had hurt my shoulder trying to get the bastard to turn over so I gave her the benefit of my feelings on the matter of owning a $750 paperweight, my opinion of the headache and nausea I had suffered all day as a result of being splashed by gasoline first thing in the morning, and the exact depth of my despair at the thought of yet another night by flashlight, and then I departed in the Steviemobile for an hour's drive to cool off and revel in the air conditioning, the wide field of illumination of the headlamps on the blacktop and the soft, powerful purr of the engine as we ate up the miles going nowhere useful. I returned home to find Mrs Stevie attempting to start the machine so I went to bed.

Early the next morning I managed to get it started again and put my foot down. I explained that the fridge was capable of sustaining its temperature if it wasn't opened for the eight hours we wouldn't be there if we froze cool packs overnight and moved them into the fridge when we left for work, and that if anyone wanted TV, Internet and a washing machine this side of Christmas they had better get in line with my "only when we're in" plan for running the generator because I was absolutely not doing any more improvised electrical work in the dark by the light of an LED flashlight. Mrs Stevie argued until I mentioned the sheer cost of electrifying an empty house, and she finally agreed⁶.

That night I ran more extension cords and by 10 pm we had all the aforementioned facilities up and glowing while the neighbors gnashed heir teeth in the dark or listened to their own generators. By Wednesday most of that side street were running similar lash-ups.

One funny incident occurred just as I was leaving. I saw Mrs Crazy Joe come out and glare at the fence between us, from where the sound of our generator was making itself known to the area. This was rich. On Monday they had deployed a generator of their own and placed it about five feet from my house. Payback is a birchbark canoe as the Algonquin Wise-men say.

Of course this running of extension cords necessitated the purchase of a new, thick and hence trés expensiv one because of the previously raised concern about voltage drop over the length of the cord, since the washing machine is another amp-hog. By now I was becoming inured to the hand-over-fist costs of the blackout and so the customers of Home Despot were treated only to quiet sobbing and some pounding of my head against the robot-checkout machine as it printed my receipt.

And so we had light, TV, Internet, cold soda and clean underwear despite the Long Island Power Authority. Huzzah!

On Friday night, around 7:30 pm, I arrived home to find Mrs Stevie feeding coffee and donuts to some LIPA guys who had arrived in theater thirty minutes before and were not feeling the love on account of a crowd of onlookers whose attitude could best be described as "disgruntled" that was letting the workforce know how much they valued the chance to live for a week as their original colonist ancestors had. Galvanized by sugary foods and delicious beverages they had the power back on in a trice and gradually the neighborhood fell silent as, house by house, the generators began to shut down.
Ours was last.

1. TOS Circulation now in double digits if you count me and in binary↑
2. We had naively expected them to simply allow another foot of cable from the looped reserve at the pole, but they were feeling mischievous and decided to reward our temerity by making our back garden resemble one from Queens by gittishly draping sixty feet of power line over it↑
3. I recently got into a discussion with some non-Americans over tipping, in which some of the tightest people I've ever communed with decried the process and claimed to "not understand how to do it". Tipping 101: If the person serving you braved a hurricane so that they could have the single pleasure of serving you eggs and coffee, they bloody well deserve a tip, and a big one, and a verbal thank-you for doing so with a smile↑
4. Yes, a box. Google "Box Of Joe"↑
5. The Snowblower of Supreme Spiffiness↑
6. There’s some Scots blood in her from her mother’s side of the family that I can sometimes appeal to↑

The Great Quake Of '11

And right after I posted that the building started bouncing like unto a boat on a choppy sea.

Our emergency director (yes, we have someone who directs such things) came on the PA to say he thought it might have been an earthquake and that we should stay inside because there was no danger but if we went outside we shouldn't congregate near the buildings because stuff might fall off them onto us.

I am not making that up. We were safe in the buildings - that might at any point disintegrate and fall onto the revelers outside.

I logged onto Google to see how long it would take to get something to show - about three minutes. The main event was in Virginia about nineteen minutes before. Odd, I always thought shock waves would be faster than that. Nineteen minutes from Virginia to here? That's one laggardly aftershock, but typical of the "just so good and no further" thinking that permeates everything these days. Bah, etc.

I signed onto the USGS website and they asked me to report my observations, so I did. They explained that the observations they were looking for were those about the Earthquake, not on the deplorable slipping standards and lack of backbone in today's youth, so I gave them a gripping tale of one Englishman's struggle to find sanity and relevance as his world bounced up and down around him, a metaphor for the current state of the world made manifest as unthinkable disaster was upon him. The poignancy of his wind-up robot toppling helplessly into the chasm formed between the Ultrasparc Workstation and a pile of unread manuals was of particular note, throwing the whole insane business into harsh relief and causing him to cry out against the forces of nature assembled against his very life in a World Gone Mad.

It took forever for the site to finish uploading my report because the servers were swamped by panicked idiots writing "What I Saw In the Quake" minutiae.

But now I join the ranks of frontline journalists, those who brave the vicissitudes of nature to get the story out to the public safe in their homes. I too, have stood on the abyss as disaster not of man's making loomed large.

You heard it here first.

The Still, Small Voice Inside My Head

Deep inside my head there's a notion stirring, something very, very scary.

I don't know when it started, but it seems that it's been with me a while now. Maybe it started with the birth of my daughter. I don't know. That's just conjecture, a bit of pop psychology, back-of-the-cereal-packet stuff. Truth is, I don't know.

I'd guess it was also born from the observation that the vast majority of people in the western world now seem resigned to the steady degrading of Standards of Anything. The rest of the world always seemed to think that the current Standard of Everything in the west was a bad idea and the sooner we got back to the stone age the better, but the current crop of Clever Young Things seems to have accepted that Things Will Get Worse and that the correct response is to just sit back, watch the TV and accept it, and the Venal Old Things with the power are only too happy to play along.

The voice in my head is whispering that I may be living in what unimaginably far future generations will regard as the Golden Age of Everything, the apex of What Was.

How utterly [Terrifying | Depressing].

Delete as appropriate.

Up Yours, Bob

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by.
Then my blasted GPS quit.
It took hours to find my way back to the other road
Where there was a chance I could hitch a ride
Out of this sodding wood.

Top O' The World, Ma!

So, The Stevieling graduated high school.

Not sure what happened. One minute she was walking around the house in bib-jeans with a pink and white cloth baseball-style cap turned backwards on her head and a stick pretzel clutched in one hand for all the world like a munchkin Oscar Madison, the next she was filing into a too-warm hall to spend an interminable time listening to people give incomprehensible speeches (Life Lesson kids; when the metaphor takes longer to convey than the plain language message it seeks to obscure, consider just saying what you mean and getting the hell off stage¹).

As she walked up to take her diploma (frame²), I couldn't help wondering why my four year old was wearing that oversized gown and standing in that line. I had to stop myself from getting up to go and fetch her out of the Big Kid line and found I was rehearsing reasons a four year old might understand as to why she couldn't take part yet.

And so a party was planned.

Mrs Stevie decided that the Church Gym would, once again, serve handily as a great place for a post-school knees-up, and the parents of one of The Stevieling's friends, upon finding out we had a hall, asked if they could wed their celebration to ours. Turns out The Friend's dad is a chef and he offered to provide the food for the evening. We considered this for about a second and a half before taking his arm off at the elbow.

And thus, a joint party was planned.

On the Wednesday before the party I had to take a day off work³ to deal with a green card issue. I was to be biometricized it seems. For all my other green card pix I was ensuited, but being as how I was within four weeks of advancing geezerhood I decided to wear a nice Hawaiian shirt. I did, however, make a concession to propriety and had a haircut, after which I wandered into Al Sands Toy Soldiers & Whatnot.

Now I used to buy my hobby supplies from Al, but he gradually reduced his stock of stuff I care about by the expedient of arguing bitterly with the suppliers over this or that. I try and give him a little of my money on occasion, because he is a local business and I, for reasons I cannot work out, have a sort of thing about supporting such institutions when I can⁴.

Anyway, Al leapt up at my appearance and yelled "I have a new line - Airsoft Guns!" His smile was alligator-like and his eyes bugged out alarmingly in his zeal.

"Wossa Nairsoft Gun?" I responded, ruining his moment of triumph.

"BB gun that looks like the real thing! Just look at this Glock!" He waved the safely bubble-wrapped weapon of individual destruction at me.

"Glocks look like that? I thought they were black. That thing is transparent. And I don't remember any gun that has a big orange ring around the shooty-end" I said, dubiously.

"Well, if they didn't do that you could get shot by a cop under the mistaken but understandable impression you were waving a Glock around" he responded, peering into the works of the weapon, which were clearly visible through the transparent casing.

"Nice exposition" I counter-responded. "Naw, I'm not interested in that sort of thing."

"I've got a French assault rifle" he wheedled.

I sucked my teeth and said "Nope. Not interested"

Al played his trump card: "I've got a Thompson over there, in the back of the shop.'

"Ooh, where? Lessee" I masterfully evaded. "How much?"

"Hunnert bux, give or take." He had come up behind me and was not where I expected him to be, but hovering about six inches from my back in vulture-like anticipation.

"Argh! Don't do that! No, not interested. It's got the straight mag. Plus, you know, it's see-through" I said as I attempted to regain control of my heart-rate.

"I have that model with a drum magazine for the same price" he purred.

"You bastard! No. Nonono. If I bring a machine gun home the missus'll kill me and jump on my body until it comes to bits. I haven't got time for your nonsense anyway. I have to get biometricized." And with that I vaulted over Al as he made to low-tackle me and ran for the door.

And I got biometricized, which meant I had my fingerprints taken again and my photo taken again. The only difference between the biometric nonsense and the non-biometric nonsense was that they no longer needed the picture to show my right ear⁵ but insisted I take off my glasses because it seems the computers that will form the first line of defense vs the terrorist masses and which are the underpinning of this bio-nonsense cannot work out what my face looks like with them on⁶.

So that's all right then.

On the day of the party I drove out to collect my dry-cleaning and stopped off at Al Sands House O' Odd-Looking Gunz and bought the damn Thompson c/w Drum Mag. Yes it was see-through with a bright orange muzzle. Yes it cost two limbs. Yes it was a 1941 model rather than a 1920s one (no forward pistol-grip, other stuff too nerdy to mention). No, I have no idea what made me do it. To this day I cannot explain the urge, which was irresistible. I mean, I've never owned a BB gun, and never wanted to.

I drove home, assembled it, put the battery on charge and had a think. One thing was obvious: this must be kept from the knowledge of Mrs Stevie at all costs, at least until I had a decent story worked out as to why we needed a Transparent Fake Machine Gun C/W Orange Muzzle. I decided the perfect place to hide it was in the middle of the bed in the front bedroom.

Then it was off to help set up, disguise the gym as a not-gym and so on.

When I got there the decorating was in full swing, with big poster-sized displays of photographs of The Stevieling and her friend, one display per ex-student. I found Mrs Stevie fretting.

"What's up?" I asked

"They have baby pictures. We don't have any baby pictures!" she wailed.

"We have hundreds of baby pictures" I said, 'just not here. So go home and get some." I was feeling in manly pro-active mode, what with now owning a fake weapon of mass-inconvenience. Amazing what a little faux fire-power does for the old juices.

Decorating went on until we were all fed up to the back teeth with it. The friend put up a collection of his oil paintings, using duct tape to stick them to the walls. This meant that unless an adult went around periodically pushing hard on the frames, a cascade of art would happen about three times an hour. Tables had balloons. The food was unbelievably magnificent in both quality and quantity, and the kids whole family showed up to act as kitchen staff. I thought I was going to be washing up, but they had it covered. The guests would be eating off plates that looked like real china with real cutlery (thanks to Mrs Stevie) and one of the friend's neighbors made a huge cake as a gift for the graduates.

I went home to get changed just before things got started, and discovered a crimp in my brilliant hide-the-machine-gun plan: The baby pictures were stored in the front bedroom and Mrs Stevie had clearly been in there and seen everything!

I did The Bonehead Dance and used some class three Words of Power, then went and took the battery off charge, loaded the gun and had a few test shots in the garden, which proved a calming thing to do. Returning to the hall I found the party just beginning and everyone seemed in good spirits.

Around 8 pm or so, our best man, Jeff the Kung-Fu Accountant, accosted me and I told him about how I'd bought the machine gun, hidden it in a foolproof place only to have fate intervene and urinate down my back.

Jeff commiserated, all the while pretending to roar with laughter, then informed me that things were about to get orders of magnitude worse and pointed over my shoulder, his face almost bright red and wringing wet from the tears he was crying (obviously in sympathy of my future fate at the hands of the Vile Harridan who was bearing down on us).

I needed a brilliant plan. My mind whirled, a cascade of psychedelic creativity as a thousand options were individually selected, run in simulation to conclusion and rejected on the grounds that death by strangulation was not an option here. Only one plan would offer a chance, a mere chance of survival. It was a long shot, but I was out of options. Turning to face her I adopted my best contrite expression.

"Sorry about the machine gun" I said.

Mrs Stevie screwed up her face. "What machine gun?" she demanded.

Jeff tried to distract her by collapsing to the floor in fits of simulated hysterical laughter while I showed the world The Bonehead Dance again. That daft woman had not even seen the thing! She'd walked right by it and it hadn't registered in her brain! On the one hand, I had pulled off a brilliant camouflage in plain sight ploy. On the other I had ruined it with premature and unnecessary confession! Damn and blast!

It was about then that the Pastor of the church hove into view and spotted the balloons. These were a problem he said. We shouldn't have them in this hall he said. Every time people have balloons in here, they break loose and get caught in the ceiling fans and it costs a fortune to get them untangled, he said.

Mrs Stevie assured him that the balloons were nailed down good, and somehow got him to stop obsessing about them getting into the fans, and the party continued with the kids performing some sort of group epileptic fit on the dance floor to music that sounded like a recording of a Mardi-Gras parade played backwards and the adults alternately eating and complaining that there was no alcohol (Church, remember?) or that their hearing aids had been blown out by the fiendish Sonic Cannon being fired at them from across the dance floor. Fortunately my eardrums quit around 9 pm so I didn't have to hear any of it.

And a good time was had by all.

It was during the post-party clean-up that disaster struck. Around 1 am I was getting punchy and a balloon got away from me, floating up to the ceiling. It was dead noticeable.

Mrs Stevie stamped her foot in rage. "Now what are we going to do, idiot! Pastor can not come in here and see that tomorrow!" She went on in this vein for some time, and when she paused for breath I spoke.

"I think I can get that down" I said, peering at it speculatively.

"How?" she demanded, 4/5ths anger the rest suspicion.

"Well, I have a machine gun" I said.

"Gogeddit!" she snarled, so I did.

Carefully assessing the target with my experienced marksman eyes, I selected single-shot mode and removed the safety catch. With a quick check to see what would get hit by ricochets, I put two shots into the balloon, only to hear them rattle to the floor.

"I don't think this will work after all. The BBs are bouncing off the mylar" I said, with regret.

"Keep shooting, idiot!" she snarled.

Rarely do I get such carte-blanche permission once Mrs Stevie has assessed whatever it is I plan on doing. A few, a very few occasions in which reasonable actions got out of hand and, for example, burned the finish off her grandfather's table in a sheet of flame⁷, or dropped a tree on her new car⁸, or killed a vast swath of the front lawn⁹, have over-sensitized her to the possibility of sub-optimal outcomes and thus most times a blanket ban on such activity is pronounced "before anything bad happens".

Thus it was I needed no further goading to action. My manly juices started flowing in earnest as I selected Full Auto mode and with the traditional cry of "Top O' The World, Ma!" I put about two hundred rounds into that blasted helium-filled terrorist. A large flap tore in the face of the balloon but it still stayed buoyant. I poured on more lead¹⁰ and eventually it began to descend, slowly.

It was then that The Stevieling came in. "Dad! What are you doing?" she cried.

"I'm firing a machine gun in church. What does it look like I'm doing?" I said, pausing to give the drum spring a few cranks¹¹.

"You can't do that! Mom'll kill you" she said. It's remarkable how like their mothers girl children can sound post-puberty.

"Relax! Mom said I had to do this. Would you like a turn?" I answered, and was gratified to see her face light up. My genes are not completely recessive, then.

And so it was that that balloon was machine-gunned until it no longer looked like a balloon. A check showed it had trapped about two hundred BBs inside it. Truth be told I think The Stevieling was right when she opined it was the weight of them that finally brought the thing down.

Best party ever.

1. And for Azathoth's sake try and understand that listening to Robert Frost get lost in a wood is only interesting and pithy the first time you hear it↑
2. For some arcane reason the actual diploma was sent through the mail weeks later. All she got that day was a book-like mount for the thing↑
3. Which again, was a tortuous decision that consumed about half a jiffy↑
4. I am regarded variously as an eccentric or an idiot by the younger people whom I meet as a by-product of my hobby. I try to point out that saving four bux by buying something from Amazindeal Dot Com just moves the owner of the hobby store we are standing in that much closer to shutting up shop, but they don't understand. They cannot process the chain of cause and effect, and are incapable of acting in their own long-term interests. The Internet Generation. We has one↑
5. A bizarre requirement of Green Card pix of Yore↑
6. It is a mark of my growing maturity that I didn't "innocently" ponder out loud what would happen if I shaved my beard, or carved it into a new shape. I wish politicians wouldn't use Star Trek episodes as the basis of their yardstick on how great technology will be in a given situation. What a dangerous waste of money this whole biometrics scam is. Now a well-educated terrorist can steal your passport or whatever from a distance without ever seeing the damned thing because it will blurt out its innermost secrets (like your fingerprints, photo and bio-history) to any properly formatted radio request. And lest you think this is American Nonsense At Its Best, I was biometricized for my British passport years ago.↑
7. The Mamod Live-Steam Traction Engine Fiasco↑
8. The Foolproof Maple Pruning Method Debacle↑
9. The Maladjusted Lawn Fertilizer Spreader Screw-Up↑
10. i.e. Plastic. This thing fires 6mm plastic BBs rather than .45 caliber bullets like the original↑
11. The magazine on the original Thompson was spring-fed, and the firer needed to wind it up before spraying lead everywhere. The BB version requires the key be turned to keep the supply of BBs in the vertical feed constant. You get about thirty shots before you run dry↑

Idle Thought

The Space Shuttle has been declared officially obsolete, 30 years after the design was first used to get people into (low) Earth orbit.

Not before time. We don't want our brave Astronauts zooming around in antiquated 7-seater spacecraft designs.

No, what is needed is a (hypothetical) new (as yet undesigned) replacement (as yet unfunded). Until then, our International Space Station-bound Astronauts will take advantage of the generous (and costly) help of our Russian friends to ferry them to and from the floating junkpile of science in the well-tested 3-seater Soyuz spacecraft.

A forty-five year-old design.

Pooled Resources

Oooooooh

De skimmer gate's connected to the - leaky hose

De leaky hose's connected to the - debris exclusion colander thingy

De debris exclusion colander thingy's connected to the - pump rotor

De pump rotor's connected to the - short hose

De short hose's connected to the - base of the cylindrical tower of fossilized diatoms

Or is it the top?

No, it is the bottom

De top connector of the cyl - or is it the top?

De instructions were around here - somewhere

Where de hell did I put those damned - instructions?

I'll figure it out from - first principles

Gah!

Oh wait, De instructions are written on a sticker on the - cylinder of fossilized diatoms

De top of the cylinder of fossilized diatoms's connected to the - long hose

Ha I knew I had it right - all along

De long hose's connected to the - pool water return gate

De power cord's connected to the - timer

De timer's connected to the - pump motor

Argh! De top of the debris exclusion colander thingy chamber has - blown off!

Bugerbuggerbuggersod - bleepingsonuvvableep!

De valves! Close them before the pool floods the - neighborhood!

Bugerbuggerbuggersod - bleepingsonuvvableep!

De liquor is kept in the - left kitchen cabinet.

Another day in paradise

Another Perfect Commute

Just when you think things are as bad as they can get, they prove your imagination is not up to the task.

I'm writing this from my morning commute. At Farmingdale a couple of young men got on the train. The very large one sat next to me and almost crushed my laptop bag. The one with the jailhouse tattoos sat opposite me and has been steadily picking his nose all trip.

I've managed to keep my gorge down so far, but he just wedged a wad of chawing tabackee in his mouth and so I will now be treated to him spitting the juice into a coffee cup when he can spare a hand from digging out nose excreta.

I can't wait to see what awaits me when I change trains at Jamaica.

Enraptured

Thank Azathoth for The Rapture

I finally get some much-needed elbow-room and no longer have to share breathing air with those smug beggars with their turning the other cheek¹ and all that nonsense about living forever in my father's kingdom. Take one look at what people have done with the kingdom they had to start with and take a wild guess at what a past few thousand years² of their occupying The Afterlife will have done to the place.

Odd thing: It sounded for all the world like Mrs Stevie and The Stevieling were stamping around this morning in their usual pre-church opening barrage. It is unthinkable that they would get "left behind" since Mrs Stevie holds a black-belt in Lutheranism and The Stevieling is perhaps the only truly good person left on the face of the planet (as of pre-rapture yesterday). A bit too spacey, but that won't hurt her if Lutheran views on How It All Works are right. I must have been experiencing waking dreams.

I'll miss the kid.

1. As long as it's your cheek↑
2. The numbers will vary depending on whether you regard the Word of God as literal or clever allusion³↑
3. Or as I have it, "mostly bleep"↑

What's Up? Doc?

So, last month I took some advice I've been offered many times over the years by friends, acquaintances, total strangers and family and got my head examined.

It wasn't my idea I hasten to add, but I had reported to Doc Rubberglove complaining that the cough I hadn't shaken since Thanksgiving was leaving me with day-old headaches and in one case almost made me pass out.

I've been serially sick since mid-November and spent every holiday in bed begging for an end to it all. every time I was starting to feel well some twillup would come into work hacking like a Dickensian consumptive and it would start all over again¹.

The coughing would cause violent headaches which would, as I say, last all day. I would also get disoriented, at one point having to sit down for a few minutes while the world stopped spinning.

"It could be an aneurysm just waiting to blow!" screamed the doctor, driven mad by the thought of a procedure that he wouldn't be able to perform himself (and therefore bill for). "You need a head MRA."

"Wossat?" I asked, highly suspicious and still sporting bruises from the last round of "tests".

"It's like an MRI, but with an 'A' in it where the 'I' should be. It detects aneurysms. Mostly".

And so, after An Interlude With Insurance Paperwork it came to pass.

On the appointed evening I presented myself and announced that I was there to get my head examined. I was made to fill out some paperwork, which by some miracle of twentieth century technology had finally been mostly done from the extensive computer records that get sent everywhere except to the clipboard with the ballpoint pen, usually, giving the patient something to do in the four hours before they actually see a doctor. This paperwork was mostly a survey of the metal I might have in my body. Then I was told to lie down on a platform, a plastic gridwork mask was fastened over my face and I was slid into the magnet for the most boring ten minutes I've had since the last time I was in a Magnetic Resonance Scanner.

These machines are basically a huge magnet with a radio source and some really smashing computers hooked up to them. They put you in the magnet, which is really strong, and all the rotation axes of the hydrogen atoms in the water in your body line up along the lines of magnetic force like a bunch of bar magnets. Then they shine "white" radio noise through you and all those atoms suck in exactly one photon of a given frequency of radio "light" and flip over to point the other way. The frequency that each atom likes to suck on depends on the local geography, who its neighbors are and stuff like that. Then they switch off the radio waves so that - and this is the clever bit - the atoms can flip back. When they do that they take their own sweet time, again depending on local factors, and they spit out an identical photon to the one they swallowed. See, it's hard to sort photons out from the sort of radio sources we can make cheaply, so you catch and detect them on the way back. Clever, like I said.

Where was I?

Oh right. You do this over and over, varying all sorts of stuff I left out, and then you let the computer have at it using Fourier Transform techniques, which is a hard sums way of taking a gazillion goes at the same thing and averaging them out so they make a lot of sense. Then more computers and clever software use that data to draw the pictures.

A true miracle of engineering and science. An object lesson in what the human race can achieve when its cleverest minds get cracking, given enough time and money³.

While I was lying in the noise and boredom I suddenly felt my wedding ring and the silver ring I wear on the matching finger on the other hand begin to jiggle around. I would have taken off these items of jewelry⁴ but they shrank a few years after I put them on and now they won't come off. I alerted the technician to the situation by falsetto shrieking, thrashing around and other restrained and manly methods of indicating All Was Not Well, but he told me to calm down and not to worry.

Easy for him to say. I didn't mind having the rings melt under the influence of Extreme Applied Science⁵ but there were two reasonably good fingers inside them that I use, off and on, on a daily basis.

Still, it wouldn't do to not be seen to have confidence in the man behind the big desk o' knobs and dials - I was British and in danger of letting the side down in front of an American who deserved to see the legendary British Stiff Upper Lip in the Face of Adversity at work, so I relaxed and let the test proceed with only an understandable amount of minor whimpering and the odd bladder leak any time the machine went "clonk" too loudly.

Eventually it was over and I was about to leave when the technician asked me if I wanted the pictures.

"Doesn't my doctor get those?" I asked, my face contorting as I attempted to parse any hidden meaning from the technician's question.

"Of course" he answered, "but you get a copy too if you want it."

This was a first. Normally getting a look at the pictures medical technicians take of your insides is marginally more difficult than getting a look inside Fort Knox without an invitation. Of course I said I wanted the pictures, and so I had to hang around another half hour or so while they were burned to CD-ROM along with the viewer to properly display them.

This was boffo on many levels. I would get to take a look at pictures of yet another of my organs, always a joy unless it's the skin - I've grown a little tired of that one to be honest⁶ - I would get to see any problem with the pipes and conduits before Doc Rubberglove could sell me on any bogus "brain transplant" procedures that were not needed and it would prove to that vile harridan Mrs Stevie that contrary to her Theory of Me I emphatically do have a brain in my head.

I rushed home, booted my laptop and inserted the CD-ROM. Then I figured out the viewer software and it was all aboard for a quick journey through the hippocampus with stops in the medulla oblongata and visual cortex.

The first thing I noticed was the old brain was less wrinkly than in pictures I saw in school textbooks. "This not look good" I thought, then realized that I was thinking it with the brain in question. The recursion of that had me crossing my eyes while I tried to figure out if I was on safe ground, rationalization-wise here. I had no desire to blow out part of the damned thing in a stupid accident because of inadequate warnings on the CD-ROM or "everyone knows" precautions I was unaware of due to not having been to medical school and having an education that didn't include MRAs because they hadn't been invented yet then.

I eventually sorted it out and went on to find the part where the arteries show up. They looked OK to me, but as I said I have no formal medical training, just what I picked up from watching "E.R." on the TV, and most of that made me feel unwell.

This was the point when Mrs Stevie came home and in-theater.

"Excellent timing, wife!" I said. "Come and see the pictures of my brain." Boy was she in for a come-uppance.

"It's see-through!" She said. "That doesn't look right. Where everyone else has brain cells all you have is what looks like two lengths of cable TV wire hovering in the middle there. I'd get that looked at if I were you"

"What? No you daft woman! That's just the way that picture came out! Those "wires" are the major blood vessels! Look, here's a picture of the outside"

"Looks a bit smooth to me. I've seen one on the internet. It's supposed to look a bit like a big pile of sausages, all wrinkly. That looks like an odd-shaped balloon"

"What?" I screamed incredulously. "The only time a brain looks like sausages is if you make one out of sausages! You can't use the fake brain from that How to Haunt Your House at Halloween website as a baseline to assess brain wrinkliness! These pictures show a brain, a real brain mind you, in the very pink of health! The only surprising thing is that nowhere are there old pan-shaped scars on it or bruises that spell genuine copper bottom! That brain is in excellent condition and will go for years yet!"

"Pfft! You'd be better off with the sausages if you ask me." And with that she went out to do whatever she does when she isn't harassing me.

The whole thing gave me the worst headache I'd had in months.

1. I was close to murdering one of our consultants who refused to leave his post no matter how much phlegm he vented into the office biosphere and who kept the circle of adult→child→rest of kindergarten→child (again)→adult+world going relentlessly the entire time²↑
2. This stratagem has backfired somewhat inasmuch as the budget has expired and all consultants are now being furloughed for 10-20 pay-free days.↑
3. Of course, most of the money belongs to one kind of person and most of the vision lives in the minds of another sort, but that is just another symptom of The Human Condition↑
4. Especially the gold one. I can't tell you how many times that has ruined a blooming romance over the years↑
5. Especially that gold one. See comments above↑
6. It's too big for one thing, gets too red in summer and has little tags sticking out of some of it that I have to get taken off sometimes↑