Downtime

I'm very close to finishing the kiln repair on Fred. Fred is our second oldest kiln. Our oldest kiln is Albert, who is kept out-of-doors. He had a roof fall on him from a torrential rain twenty years ago. We don't worry about Albert.

My Brick Repair with tools and shit

Working on Fred required almost all of my custodial superpowers. I was electrician, bricklayer, machinist, and sheet-metal worker. Fred's quite decrepit, in need of an overhaul for some time now. Most of the insulation on his wires are burned off, which is not good, not good at all. And two of his relays went kaput. And he needed a new controller. And his heating elements were pretty much fried. And the door was hanging slant on its hinges. And his fire brick was falling apart. And the door seal, the tadpole gasket (refractory cloth and rope whose cross-section looks like a tadpole) was crumbling into dust. The metal stays keeping the gasket in place had screws that would not come out. Or rather, the screw heads would come off, but not the rest of the screws. So, I had to drill and tap the holes for new screws to hold the gasket in place. Fred needed a lot of work.

My Brick Repair and Cement Patch Job

In his heyday, Fred could easily cook a whole family and their pets to a loose fine powder in about twelve hours, if you needed a crematorium in a hurry. And... you could bisque a village-sized funeral urn afterwards. Sorry for the grisly examples, but now you got the idea that Fred's a big boy.

The Inside of Fred

I'm not sure where the tradition of giving kilns names comes from. My understanding is that they are generally named after the manufacturer, but the fact as to why they are anthropomorphized is, well, I don't know.

We have names for other pieces of equipment. We have a mustard colored band saw that could cut up a cow named Col. Mustard. We have a big blue vortex vacuum box in the woodshop named Babe (after Paul Bunyan's big blue ox). We have a drill press named Ollie, and a reciprocating sander named Sandy. We have two metal cutting horizontal bandsaws named Bart and Lisa. We have a giant metal cutting chop saw named Homer. We don't have anything named Marge, yet.

Fred is fixed and ready!

I've never named the two foundry furnaces I use outside. Perhaps because they don't have much in the way of personality. Perhaps I should name them Thing One and Thing Two.

It's the Future!

Well, here we are in 2011. As far as I'm concerned, the Future began around 1974. I say that because that was the year I was introduced to touch sensitive control buttons on a friend's older brother's stereo turntable.

Yes, a turntable is something you play records on. A record is a plastic disc with a spiral groove in it. You put the record on the turntable, and it rotates. The turntable has a needle stylus that rides on the spiral groove, and little bumps and ridges in the groove translate into noise that you can listen to called music. This is, I think, where the term "groovy" comes from. So, you might think that this is all super fucking primitive, but it is the setup aboard the Voyager space probes. One each of mankind's first interstellar space probes, there is a golden record and a stylus, and instructions to aliens as to how to operate this so they can watch and listen to sounds and images from the planet Earth.

Anyway,  so instead of having chunky, clunky push buttons for controls, this turntable had little concentric metal circle controls with a light underneath them on the front panel. All you did was touch the circle control with your finger and the little light went on or off, and the turntable rotated, or stopped rotating, a round lazy susan pedestal on an axis. It was fucking cool as hell, and it was definitely something I had never seen before. Which made it all new, and therefore, from the future.

I happened to see evidence of travel into the future over the holidays at my mother's house. On the dining room table, my brother had placed an iPhone. Next to it was my mother's cell phone, which she had had since, oh, say, 1999 or so. The cell phone was actually smaller than the iPhone, but it had a push button numeric keypad and a very small liquid crystal display for showing the phone number of whomever you were calling, or who was calling you. The iPhone was just a thick black pad with a flat plastic surface on one side. If I didn't know what it was, I'd have never guessed that the surface was actually a screen. If I had fiddled with it, I'd have finally noticed a button which turned it on. And then you did everything through a touch screen interface, which, had I seen al this in 1974, probably would have made me shit my pants.

Well, actually, that's not the point. The point is, there was ten years, right there on the table. From cell phone, to wearable computer, in ten years. There was travel into the future.

Now, I actually don't think that we are seeing an unending acceleration of technology, ala Ray Kurzweil's wet little dream. I think that there are plateaus and limits and boundaries and nonlinear logistic curves when it comes to social and technological progress. In fact, even progress is somewhat delusional, as there can be (and have been) reverses. Loss of technology or craft or knowledge, as when someone keeps a secret to themselves, and it dies with them. Or the rediscovery of a technique or skill lost to common knowledge. And, yes, second derivatives are important. (An analogy from the calculus, the first derivative being velocity, the rate of change of a measure of distance over a measure of time, and then the second derivative being the change of that change, or the change of velocity over time, which is acceleration). Yes, second derivatives are important, and yet we ignore the even more important third derivative, which is the acceleration of acceleration, or as the engineers like to call it, shock.

The shock of the new. That's when you know you are in the future. Or that's what did it for me.

So, I wasn't that shocked looking at the cellphone/iPhone juxtaposition. Nor was watching my nephews play video games with just their bodies using the creepy Kinect controller. These were all trends that had been anticipated. Heck, I predicted them long before they existed, and that is, believe me,  no great feat. Nevertheless, I recognize them as being part and parcel of living in my future.

What amazing future stuff exists now that makes me shit my pants? Actually, nothing comes to mind. Have I just become jaded? Have I become inured to all the futuristic advertising, all the expectations of continued and unremitting progress? I don't think so. But if I do think of something, I'll let you all know.

Oh, Happy e-vil-Eens. Glad the Fucking Oh-ohs are over.

"Dangerous Creatures Booted From Hoosier Town"

Back home for the holidays. I think I've mentioned that I grew up in Valparaiso, Indiana. If I haven't, well, that 's where I'm from. Growing up there, it's a small town. Even now, I think there's only about 30,000 people here, which makes it a small town.

Growing up in Northwest Indiana is kind of a schizophrenic experience. You've got the heavy metal industries just a few miles west of us, residing in Gary, Hammond, and East Chicago. And just a few miles east of that is the lush bucolic countryside where I was raised. As a result, I'm probably in exceptionally better health, contaminant wise, than most US citizens. True, there was a witch's brew of volatiles and heavy minerals that we were occasionally dosed with on the westerly breezes, but nothing compared to most city dwellers.

And then, given the fact that I was raised on milk from dairy cows at a local farm, with local beef and produce, living in a (then small) suburban neighborhood surrounded by woods, swamp, lakes, family farms, drank incredibly clean fossil glacier water from Lake Michigan, lived in a dead center middle class lifestyle with a minimum stress level in small town America, with an idyllic Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn childhood, I'm probably one of the most pampered, privileged, sleek, soft, stupid, happy people you could ever hope to be.

I think it shows. I seem to be younger looking than most people my age, or at least younger acting, and I have to chalk that up to having a really soft life - but not too soft. I recognize my fortune, obviously take it way too much for granted, and am finally appreciative for just how fucking LUCKY I've been. It could have gone South in ten thousand hideous ways, or four billion hideous ways, if you look at life statistics for most of the world.

So, after dealing with small, stunted, bitterly sour, withered, ruinously toxified city folk, its nice to come back to TV Land. It really is TV Land here. No difficult choices. No major crimes. Looking through the local news, its all DUIs and possession of controlled substances. Occasionally, you will see a news item like "Home Invader Eats Food, Does Dishes. (That one actually happened).

So today I am greeted with the following news item in the local paper:

"Dangerous Animal Statute Approved

Laporte outlaws monkeys, baboons, poisonous snakes, piranha, and sharks"

I see you guys hangin' around town. You just - you just get the hell right on outta here.

Salvia Divinorum

The Beginning of Louis Wain's Escape From Reality

The best toy any kid could want for Christmas is their brain. Remember kids, it's not the drug, it's what your brain does with the drug, because, when you get right down to it, it was all in your head to begin with. So... to get the experience, you don't really need the drug, right?


Okay, all preaching about "natural" highs aside, I found an interesting article on Salvia Divinorum. 


This particular phenomenon I have paid only passing interest to in the last few years. I've heard the art children at the college talk about it. Had one or two passing acquaintances mention it. But, seeing as my experimentation phase was some thirty years ago, I didn't pay too much attention to it. 


What? You are shocked that I did drugs? But I came of age in the 1970s. That's when all that shit went mainstream. At least in my uptight white neighborhood. One minute, I'm a jock, running track and field, swimming, playing sports, getting good grades. The next, I'm a doper, but, oh wait, I was still playing sports and getting good grades. (Sorry, no decent into madness melodrama for you). But suddenly practically everybody was trying out the drugs. Is that really such a shock?


Nevertheless,  don't count out coincidences. A few intrusions into your consciousness makes it just that. When the occurrences start to cue up is when the idea of synchronicity starts to kick in. Hmmmm......


So, a colleague gave me a description. Last summer he had a chance to smoke some salvia. He described it as the most intense hallucinatory experience ever. Of, soon after inhaling, his entire body turning into quicksilver, like the Silver Surfer, and becoming "the big magnet in the stereo speaker of the Universe - the woofer". And then just as suddenly, it was over - save for a "pleasant afterglow". Then another colleague mentions her experience, about how "it was like a million needles being pushed into my skin... but they were really good needles". Well, ah, ha ha, ooh-kay!


Like I said, I had my fair share of that, although never like that, never at all like that. But, you know, been there done that. But then there's that article. Here's a quote:

Johnson and his colleagues recruited four volunteers who had used hallucinogens such as LSD or psilocybin in the past. Over 20 sessions, the participants inhaled various doses of highly purified salvinorin A or a placebo while researchers monitored their vital signs and queried them about their experiences.
The effects of the salvinorin A were remarkably strong, consistent and fast-acting, peaking about two minutes after inhalation, and nearly disappearing by 20 minutes.
As doses increased across sessions, volunteers reported stronger and stronger hallucinations, which included cartoonlike images, revisiting childhood memories and contact with an entity. “With this drug, at its peak intensity, people describe popping out and visiting a completely different world. Some people say it seems like another dimension or maybe the spirit world,” Johnson says. “They report these very profound experiences in these highly altered states of consciousness.”

Cartoonlike images? Entering another dimension? Transports you to an alternate reality? I don't think I've EVER been to that intersection in my brain. Gotta admit, sounds intriguing. Actually, sounds pretty damn exciting. Another dimension? There's something about that phrase, that, well, I'll be honest, makes me want to smoke the stuff!

Plus, the study found that salvia is non-addictive, has no apparent health effects,  and, and, allows you to enter another dimension? My fears have been assuaged, and I'm ready!

Wow! Thanks, informative online science magazine article!

Troubleshooting

I'm sure I'll catch grief from chess mavens, but I think chess is a stupid game.

Oh, it's got clever moves, and strategic and tactical thinking, and planning, and all that good mental stuff that we are all supposed to value. However, it also consists, as I am taken to understand, in a lot of rote memorization of the "correct" moves, of trolling through a planning space of moves, of tedious deduction and trial and error, and not so much creative problem solving, not so much innovation or puzzle solving. Small wonder that computers can play chess so well. But that's not why it is stupid.

Unless the opponents are not horribly mismatched, the play almost always ends up with a lot of carnage, a brute force slugfest, a meat grinder of a game. A field of battle riddled with corpses. A war of attrition. Pyrrhic victories. In short, a stupid way to fight a war.

Granted, I may be biased as I've always sucked at chess. On the other hand, I've always been slightly above average when it came to the game of Go. Ah, now there's a game that requires some creative thinking. Not only forward planning kind of thinking, but a global scope, a big picture puzzle, a sideways associational type of thinking, with not so much a deductive search and elimination of less than optimal moves as opposed to lightning strike moments. Eureka moments. Or, as the Japanese say, when they are unfortunate to be on the loosing side of such an event "ear-reddening moments". I've experienced both sides of that. Even though I may have been on the losing side of that moment, the flash of insight that occurs when I recognize that the placement of a single stone has wrecked everything is still a rather exhilarating feeling.

In short, Go is a much more complex, much more interesting game than chess.

For most of my adult life, when I had a real job, my job title was that troubleshooter. Actually, more like glorified janitor, tending code that is now hysterically obsolete, on computers that are now anchor chains and bicycle parts in China. But that was basically what I did. Solve problems.

Actually, not so much trouble shooting, which usually has a more hardware than software connotation. And it also kind of implies a chesslike approach to problems - isolating a problem source by a tedious process of elimination.

Puzzle solving, debugging then, was more of what I did. The logical deduction technique was my backup plan, and I was not necessarily that good at it.

Good thing I was very good at intuitive solutions. It really was more about knowing who was the idiot that coded the program, or who was the last idiot who modified it. (Yes, dearies, you may think computer programmers are on the high side of the bell curve, but my experience was that they were, uh, not so smart. Or maybe it was me who was a little smarter, although, I can remember on one occasion rewriting a truly brilliant program authored by a very clever young man. I had to. It was too clever, and I knew, in the future, that it would be maintained by fucking idiots who would not have the first clue as to what the code did).

In fact, much of what I did required more like inference, imagination, associations, a little zenlike subconscious processing, a little backburner thinking, and then, lightning strike. Not only to find the problem, but to come up with a clever hack to fix the problem without creating new ones.

Thinking back, I think a lot of my success stemmed from the fact that I maintained a casual, even cavalier, attitude in the midst of a crisis. A sense of humor, more than anything, was probably the reason for my successes. My brain was relaxed in playful mood, and ready for that dopamine reward of the "Aha!" moment.

Now, there is some evidence that comedy and problem solving go hand in hand.

And let's face it, there's room for comedy in a game of Go, not so much in chess, I think.

Crime Jazz

Film Noir

It is a limited genre of music, that's for sure. It's inextricably linked to film noir, but I think you have to credit Otto Preminger (trivia note: Mister Freeze on the Batman TV series) for its genesis. Granted, he didn't write the music, but his city dramas of the late 1950s certainly provided the vehicle for it. That's just for starters. The songs extend into the comic book TV era of the 1960s, with theme songs for shows like Mission Impossible, Man from U.N.C.L.E., the James Bond films.

You had composers like Count Basie,  Henry Mancini, Quincy Jones, John Barry, Lalo, Schifrin, David Amram, Elmer Bernstein. Songs like Arabesque, Frankie Machine, Peter Gunn...

Who cannot listen to Peter Gunn as a personal soundtrack and not strut down the street shouldering aside grandmas and small children, feeling like a complete hardass?

Speaking of which, the reason I've been off the air lately is I've lost my home internet service provider. I've been piggybacking off an unsecured wireless router of one of my neighbors for the past three years. They finally secured their router, and wouldn't you know it, it's the Albanians.

Oh, fucking hell, the Albanians.

We've had a growing colony of them here in my shitbox apartment complex. At first it was one family whom I thought was French, don't ask me why. Maybe it was the two plump but incredibly sexy dark-eyed daughters that just seemed to have an aura of sexy Frenchiness about them. But soon enough, more families moved in, until there were a good two dozen of them. All lean, hard-looking, hungry, lupine men, and lovely women with raven black hair and alabaster skin. And all of them driving BMWs and Mercedes. How can they afford those kinds of vehicles, unless...

I'm thinking of the movie taken, when Liam Neeson is informed that his daughter is being held by the Albanians "not even the Russian mob will mess with them". And, given that the Albanian mob has a reputation for being especially violent and unpredictable, I'm hoping they don't find out I've been stealing internet access through them. Because if they did, I've a feeling I'd soon be typing out this electronic journal with prosthetic hooks.

But nah, they're just families. I see them out there, being gentle with their children, hugging and kissing each other on the cheeks when the clans get together. And they wave and say "Hi" to me, when I see them.

Nah, nothing to worry about.    

2011: The Year of The Incompetent Fuckup

Let it be known throughout the land that I hereby declare the year 2011 as The Year of The Incompetent Fuckup.

So let it be written. So let it be done.

My understanding is that - starting with December 20th, 2010, South Carolina's secession from the Union - that the sesquicentennial anniversary of the Civil War is to be celebrated with varying degrees of asshabberdashery and dipshittery.

Dueling Banjos from "Deliverance"

South Carolina always struck me as the distilled and concentrated essence of the southern stereotype: the Deliverance Banjo Boy, the halfwit inbred cousin kept in the attic or the cellar, the bugfuck ignant, close-set-eyed, gappy-toothed, flatheaded, stoop-shouldered, undernourished, ill-clothed, pig-fucking, parasite-infested, subhuman, albino CHUD blinking stupidly in the light of day. And some would argue that's probably being generous.

Well... well, no. I'm sure they are very nice folk once you spend time with them. Once you get past the fact that they elect silly little cocksuckers like Jim DeMint to the Senate (ah, but Kentucky's got 'em beat!). Still and all, celebrating the advent of the Confederacy strikes me about the same as celebrating the time your Aunt Mable developed that strawberry growth on her face that sprouted ugly looking boar bristle hair and then metastasized into a disfiguring condition that eventually slowly and painfully killed her. In other words, it wasn't exactly a good occasion.

Don't get me wrong. This is part of our history as a nation. We cannot ignore it, nor can we afford to look at it with anything other than clear eyes and honest admissions. It's a Greek Tragedy in capital letters. And even though my families were still back in the Old Country having their faces shoved in shit-turned mud by local aristocrats, I, by mere presence as a contemporary citizen enjoying the fruits of liberty share no small responsibility in - well, I'm not entirely sure. National guilt? Shame? Something.

Well, let me get to the fucking point. What I DON'T want to see celebrated is some kind of horse-shit from the State's Rights crowd down South or elsewhere. The idea that the Civil War was all about state's rights is just such pure and unmitigated horse-shit that I am surprised anyone who holds this opinion is sane or smart enough to hold a steady job. Really, these cocksuckers should be shipped back to whatever shithole in Europe they sprouted from, and room made in the US for decent and more deserving citizens from India or Africa or some other less fortunate place. Many in the South would prefer that this not be about slavery, that the war was never about slavery. Ignore, please the fact that in the Confederate Constitution, the word "slave" is used TEN TIMES! (In the original, in the REAL Constitution, the one time the word "slave" comes close to being used: Article 1 Section 2, the 3/5ths compromise, the Founding Fathers are either too cowardly or considered it in bad taste to refer to slaves and so use the weasel phrase "other Persons"). It was never about States Rights. Anyone who tells you that is a fucking liar.

I just as soon these state's rights buffoons do us all a favor and find some embarrassingly public way to fuck off and die in a slow and painful manner, you know, visibly and audibly shit their pants, fall over, squeal like a pig, drop stone dead and become extinct like the reptiles they are.

(Was that..? Was that over the top? No matter).

But of course, they ARE going to celebrate. And therefore, I think other anniversaries of other incompetent fuckups should be pooled together for a celebration. And it just so happens, by coincidence, that 2011 provides that.

So, along with the rise of the Confederacy, I celebrate other great fuckheads: the military administration of the Empire of Japan (1941); L. Ron Hubbard (born 1911); Jim Jones, Jonestown (born 1931); the Deutsches Kaiserreich (1871); many, many, many others.