Kate’s dad is immensely proud of the shorts she made for him: he wears them to races and rallies, and struts around secure in the knowledge that he’s the best dressed fellow around:

Kate’s Blog

Twelve-minute pace: I must break you.

Stout-hearted woodcutters and crafty satraps may have been the cultural archetypes for Jung and Bruno Bettelheim, but where in the hierarchy of feudal Bavarian culture can we find the archetype for the Giant-Blond-Russian-Who-Uses-Science-to-Crush-America? I’ll tell you: nowhere, and that’s why Rocky IV’s Ivan Drago is such an important fictional creation.

I invoke Ivan Drago every time I strap on my new FitSense FS-1 Pro Speedometer, complete with wireless, foot-mounted accelerometer and separate radio-wave heart monitor. I asked for the whole Ivan kit for Christmas, and my gracious wife Kate obliged without even a smirk.

It’s pretty smirk-worthy, though. Before putting on the heart strap, I must lick the electrodes. Then, I push the button on my foot pod, causing it to emit a businesslike “ready” beep. Then I give the watch a three-finger salute (“SENSORS: active. LOG: clear. SPEED: reset”), and I’m off, burning up the asphalt at a twelve-minute pace and staring intently at the “elapsed distance” readout.

Afterwards, I wave the watch near the wireless upload pod attached to my laptop, and the watch sends all the data to the Web. And the data is pretty impressive. The picture on the left is of a run I took in January. I jogged for 23 minutes over a hilly course (the blue line is my pace), and then I walked for 7 minutes. The red line is my heart rate. Kate looked at it last night and complimented me on my recovery rate. Yeah!

Anyhow, if you, too, would like to compliment me on my recovery rate, you can check out all five workouts I’ve had since Christmas. Or, if you’re in West Chester, you might see me jogging s-l-o-w-l-y by. You’ll have to honk the horn, though: I’ll be staring at my watch’s readout, mumbling in a Russian accent.

You know you’re a nerd if you get the ‘control-Z’ finger-twitch in your driveway.

Just because you’re doing your own work on your bike, I’m learning, doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to do it better than someone you’re paying to do it for you. The flawed “it’s always better to do it yourself” axiom I learned from my step-brother Sam Benson, who comes from a clan of men that seemed to have been zoomed up on some kind of biological xerox copier to 120%. Sam’s dad was a SEAL before there were SEALs, was in underwater demolitions before that was a job, co-founded the Newport Yacht Museum and brought back heavy steel sculptures from the ends of the earth. Sam’s uncle Chip put together Madonna’s Sex book in his basement; he has a drum scanner in his basement, a MASH hospital generator in his backyard, and one of the only privately-owned offset presses in the country (which earned him a courtesy visit from the Secret Service when he assembled it — apparently, the only other privately-owned offset presses are owned by Mafia counterfeiters.) Sam’s other uncle owns a stonecarving operation that’s the oldest continuously-operated business in America, having apparently been carving lettering in hard things using specialized, difficult tools since the 1600s. Sam uses a TIG welder for a living, and collects ridiculously capable Mercedes utility trucks. So for the Benson Clan and their cronies, like Peter Blodgett, an ex-RISD teacher and jazz musician who retired to Newfoundland and wired our house up there (stapling each strand of wire separately and labeling every one in a precise, monospaced font with a black Sharpie marker) it’s always better to do it yourself.

Me? I greased the choke adjustment plate this weekend, and managed to strip the screws putting it back in. Oh, well.

Actually, a suspicious blob of Loctite on the screw when I took it out makes me think that the previous owner may have been the culprit. It’s a sobering notion, though, that just because you want to do a good job means that you’re going to do a good job. That’s an annoying lesson to learn, especially in the real world. Unlike Java code, just because something works perfectly once doesn’t mean it’s going to work perfectly a million times. Plus, you can’t strip threads when you’re programming: control-Z won’t help you when the ratchet makes a sickening, floppy spin all the way around the bolt head.

Fortunately, there do seem to be some real-world equivalents to the “undo” key.

I am proud to announce that I have performed a BidBoy hat trick, with my third eBay auction listed on BidBoy’s site. This auction is for one of my most prized…

…er, one of my cherished…

…one of my possessions: a software engineering textbook signed by Gary Coleman himself. I got the signature in January of 2002 [archived blog], when Mr. Coleman appeared in the office mysteriously. We’re still not 100% clear on the reason.

Anyhow, this is probably the end of my BidBoy career, unless I can start selling less-weird stuff with more-weird names. I was considering selling my Dracula medal, for example, as a “Goth Necktie”, but I think that’s grasping. Maybe I’ll just rest on my laurels for a while, and try to think of some things to sell that’ll earn more than a dollar for the motorcycle fund.

My attentiveness to work — my composure on the train — yes, my very usefulness as a person has been ruined by Trogdor the Burninator. Please allow me to explain:

I recently discovered Fark.com‘s Photoshop contests. What Slashdot is for the programmers in the dimly-lit coding cube, Fark is for the creatives down the hall in the dimly-lit room with the Simpsons poster on the door. Much of it is like Plastic or BoingBoing — a message board where a moderator posts a story and the reader community comments, competing to see who can be the most cogent and/or the funniest. Fark adds something wonderful to this formula: Photoshop contests. Several times a day, a Fark-er will upload a picture: sometimes a Gulf War II news photo, sometimes a picture of their puppy, and will invite other users to, you know, mess with it. Or they’ll just issue a challenge. Other members Photoshop, the community votes, hilarity ensues. Some samples:

• Photoshop Farker el-yotcho’s puppy contest
  
• Invent an unlikely Weapon of Mass Destruction contest
  

Like with every tight-knit community of time-wasters, there are inside jokes and cliches: the squirrel with giant testicles, the 9/11 tourist, Admiral Ackbar from Return of the Jedi. Every contest will have at least one “All Your Base Are Belong to Us” picture. And then, of course, there’s Trogdor the Burninator.

Trogdor appears in many Photoshp contests. Trogdor was a man, then he was a half-dragon, and now he’s a dragon. Burninating the countryside, burninating the peasants! Burninating the thatched-roof cottages! THATCHED ROOF COTTAGES!

Marketing director: So if we can get the tracking on the clickthroughs straightened out, I think we can get client buy-off on…

John (mentally): “…and the Trogdor comes in the NIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT!!!“

Marketing director: John, why are you snickering?

John (with Mexican wrestler accent): Consummate “V”s! …Er, I mean… sorry.

Okay, enough already, just go see it for yourself. Then waste the rest of the day reading the rest of Strong Bad’s email. Or at least just waste the next five minutes watching Strong Bad answer this one.

In a weekend that would have gladdened the heart of Winchester from M*A*S*H, Kate and I went to the benefit for the Young Friends of the Philadelphia Antiques Show, where I got to see Antiques Roadshow celebrity Leigh Keno.

Saturday, we went to the Brandywine Valley Association‘s point to point race, which is a cross-country course with six fences. I don’t know how long the course is, but it takes the riders about six minutes to complete, at a percieved speed of about six hundred miles per hour. There’s really something about watching a crowd of horses round a corner, shaking the ground and throwing divots high in the air.

One thing I like about the Chester County point to point races is that they’re fairly low-key; while there were plenty of SUVs, there were also a number of farm trucks — and very few big hats with cherries on them. Unlike the main line, Chester County tends to eccentricity: Kate noticed one dapper seventy-year-old gentleman with white hair and a tripod cane seat wearing a brand-new olive drab Sean John bomber jacket.

I spent the rest of the weekend installing toe kicks on the new kitchen cabinet, and filing down the excess on the new counter’s laminate endcap, which job I will be performing in my nightmares for weeks. Also, I changed the oil in my motorcycle again (this time, using a fresh O-ring on the oil filter access plate.) Finally, I lubed the throttle cable with graphite/molybdenum dry grease. Molybdenum (pronounced mol-IB-dun-um, all run together quickly) seems to be included in every motorcycle product. I’m not sure why, except maybe because it just sounds cool, like “tungsten steel” or carbon fiber kickstand plates.

I just finished reading One Man Caravan, by Robert Edison Fulton, Jr., the grandson of the Fulton credited with inventing the steamboat, and a pretty big go-getter himself. In 1932, after graduating Harvard and spending a year stuying architecture at Vienna, Fulton brags at a dinner party that he’s going to spend a year riding around the world on a motorcycle. Unluckily (or luckily) for him, he is swiftly presented with an offer of a customized two-cylinder Douglas motorcycle. Fulton helps design the bike — automobile tires, a case for a movie camera and 4,000 feet of 35mm film, a pistol stashed under the crankcase — and spends the next eighteen months riding through the Near East, India, China, and Japan (and then home the long way around.)

Fulton is gloriously naive and fearless: he blunders into the midst of the most fiercely-protected demilitarized zone on the Khyber pass when he’s mistaken for a dispatch rider with his sun helmet, but is then put up in fine style at the British officer’s mess, complete with mahogany tables and cut crystal at the extremity of mountain desolation. After he’s knocked out by a fifteen-foot fall from an uncompleted desert bridge, Bedouin locals help him replace his lost motor oil with yagh: mustard oil. Just in time, he realizes that the tribe’s copious tears of farewell are due to the clouds of genuine mustard gas pouring out his tailpipe (he rides into the wind for the next couple of days.)

The book is well-written, funny, and Fulton is an incredible hipster: just look at the photo below. It’s very reminiscent of Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, which had been written fifty years before, but makes many similar observations in much the same tone. An excerpt from Fulton’s book below, then the Twain quote it reminded me of:

“…[T]here is one Chinese custom for which I hold a strong brief. It is the little matter of measuring distances.
The local yardstick is the “li.” Anything with a name as short as that would certainly give the appearance of
being concise and definite. But somehow the unfortunate li, according to our standards, is the farthest
thing from definite. In fact to this day, after traveling nearly two thousand miles in the interior of China, the
most I know about a li is that thirty of them put end to end constitute a notable day’s going. Perhaps its
closest equivalent is the Arab method of measure. There the question “how far” is apt to elicit an answer anywhere
between “Oh, twelve cigarettes!” and “Three cups of coffee!”

But the Chinese method possesses one distinct advantage over all others. It does not deal in distances but rather
in “going-conditions.” Thus often the answer to “how far” between two given points will vary according to the end
from which it is asked. For example, the distance from Kaifeng to Tungkwan might be two hundred li, while
from Tungkwan to Kaifeng measures only a hundred and fifty. The reason? Simple enough. It’s down-hill coming back.
While other systems worry about the footage from point to point the Chinese worries only about the footing.”

…and here’s the quote from Mark Twain:

Chapter 50

“WE descended from Mount Tabor, crossed a deep ravine, followed a hilly, rocky road to Nazareth — distant two hours. All distances in the East are measured by hours, not miles. A good horse will walk three miles an hour over nearly any kind of a road; therefore, an hour, here, always stands for three miles. This method of computation is bothersome and annoying; and until one gets thoroughly accustomed to it, it carries no intelligence to his mind until he has stopped and translated the pagan hours into christian miles, just as people do with the spoken words of a foreign language they are acquainted with, but not familiarly enough to catch the meaning in a moment. Distances traveled by human feet are also estimated by hours and minutes, though I do not know what the base of the calculation is. In Constantinople you ask, “How far is it to the Consulate?” and they answer, “About ten minutes.” “How far is it to the Lloyds’ Agency?” “Quarter of an hour.” “How far is it to the lower bridge?” “Four minutes.” I can not be positive about it, but I think that there, when a man orders a pair of pantaloons, he says he wants them a quarter of a minute in the legs and nine seconds around the waist.”

Yeah! I r0x0r! I made it in to BidBoy again! This time with a set of “Caution: Radioactive Material” bags. You know, maybe I’ve discovered my true calling in life. Assuming that my calling is to make one dollar every two weeks.

Thanks to [My employer]’s very own Samar H. for modeling the bags for me, complete with Beyond Thunderdome attitude.

And, speaking of Beyond Thunderdome attitude, more Airheads Beemer Club worship: Keg Rack carrier for an R65. Keg carriers that also look like JATO rockets are a Good Thing.

This is my new blogchalk:
United States, Pennsylvania, West Chester, College Park, English, John, Male, 31-35, Motorcycles, Heavy metal music about European history. 🙂

I read Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead last week; it’s a memoir of his time in the First Marine Expeditionary Force during the Gulf War, and also a more general account of how he became a soldier.

It’s a good book. Swofford is very honest, both when it reflects well on him (he was an excellent, dedicated soldier) and when it doesn’t (at his wits’ end, he threatens a soldier in his command with his weapon.) The word “searing” is used too liberally on the book jacket, but I think that has more to do about the other authors who were recruited to deliver blurbs for the publisher, and their reaction on reading about some fairly standard boarding-school mayhem during boot camp.

What I really respected about Swofford’s story is that he doesn’t tie it into a neat package, or simplify his experience to make a point. Before the war, the Marines are excited to go kill some Iraqis. During the war, ditto. After the war, he has doubts. It really underscores to me that each of our motives, our drives, and our psychological makeup are to a tremendous extent molded by our surroundings, and molded by the community we’re in. The Marines are a strong, strong community, and any eighteen-year-old you put in that environment is going to become submerged, is going to become, in Swofford’s drill instructor’s words, “…part of the iron fist Uncle Sam uses to crush injustice and oppression.”

Fine. Young men are mold-able; that’s news to nobody. Here’s what stopped me in my tracks, though: another of the dust jacket quotes:

“Jarhead tells us about why boys go to war, and how they return as men…”

This is a lie. Boys go to war, and they do twisted, fucked-up things, and they come home twisted, fucked-up boys. And by “fucked-up things”, I’m not talking about dropping ten tabs of benzedrine and making a necklace of human ears: I’m talking about the normal pursuit of military objectives, the systematic destruction of life and property, the reclassification of human lives as enemy, and the elimination of that enemy.

Violence and power is cheap. It’s cheap, and easy, and there’s no honor in it. In my own experience as a karate instructor, it’s the easiest thing in the world to teach someone to be an ass-kicker. After two weeks in class, you know enough to gouge eyes, break arms, kick someone straight and hard in the crotch. You’re never going to get more dangerous than that. The next five years is spent learning how to control your power. Most of all, you learn that your physical prowess, measured against another person, is pretty unimportant in the grand scheme of things, and that no matter how much of a badass you are, it’s really better for everybody if you just run like hell when confronted.

It’s the control of power that is hard, and in my opinion, it’s the learning of perspective and balance — that messy, complicated, unexciting formula — that makes a boy into a man. I think that Swofford’s unvarnished account of his experience demonstrates this: the hardest work he does in the book is in the ten years following his tour of duty, and it’s the questions that he raises at the end that seem to me the clearest sign of his maturity.

Taking that struggle and cramming it into the old, old, lie that weapons and conflict make a man, that struggle is inherently noble, that violence has ever embiggened anyone, anywhere, at any time ever, is a damn shame, and I wish that Jarhead‘s editors had kept that quote off the back of the book.