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To-do list for the Guerilla Drive-In:

March 15th, 2008

First, get the bike fixed. Something’s wrong with the clutch: the adjustment bolt on the release lever has to go in farther than the locknut will allow it, before the clutch will disengage. After reading up in the Clymer manual, I think I have to THRUST BEARING PUSHROD LA LA LA not really sure what I’m doing, except I think some of the pushy bits in there have worn shorter than they should be. So far, the bike has rewarded ~~intrepid~~ foolhardy investigation and poking. I hope my luck holds.

Second, figure out how to get the sound out of the 16MM projector and into the Emergency Backup Sound System. The sound coming out of the front of the projector isn’t line-level, it’s too “hot” for a line in, and so I need to get some kind RESISTOR OR DIODE LA LA LA definitely don’t know what I’m doing here. I stopped by the local TV repair shop, but told me to try Radio shack. No luck at Radio shack either. I really REALLY need to find a local electronics guru.

Third, post these flyers around West Chester, so I can find some musicians to play three-minute gigs between reels. Or variety acts; fire jugglers would be good. Or someone to play Lady of Spain on the Muppaphone. Anyhow, if you know someone whose ideal gig consists of three minutes outdoors, maybe in the rain, with the added possibility of getting lost in the woods, then please make sure they know to go to:

http://www.guerilladrivein.com/music

…before I get the clutch fixed and the impedance figured out on the projector! The first movie is coming up in April.

Hmm, do you suppose there are any variety booking agents in the area that also do soldering and clutch repair?
When Men Were Men and Fish Were Nervous

March 7th, 2008

I stole from my father. When I was house-sitting last summer, I saw, hanging up in his closet, the jacket that he wore when salmon fishing with my grandfather in Reykjavik. My grandfather would go up there and fish with his buddies, and they’d read Flashman books and generally have an incredibly stylish Male Fish Safari. At least, that’s how I imagine it.

I’ve stolen from my dad’s closet before — in 1989, I think I pinched a pair of baggy Girbaud Hammer Pants, which I then wore to every college dance. And I think I nabbed some sort of sand-colored unstructured linen blazer thing to be rumpled in back in 1994. But I can’t even tell you how excited I am about this jacket. I LOVE THIS DAMN JACKET.

I think I love it so much because it has lots of special features, and I love special features. It has a sheepkin patch on the left chest pocket, for sticking flies into. It has a leather patch sewn in for holding your folding scissors. It has a wide pocket ON THE FOREARM, which in unbelievably commando.

And it’s made of canvas, not nylon, and it has contrasting threads, and it has just the right amount of small D-rings hanging off it, for clipping your gear onto (your landing net clips onto the neck; your scissors clip onto the chest), and the labels are made of satin and have stylish faded colors, and the fish patch is sewn with some tinsel thread so the fish’s belly glitters.

I think the thing I like so much about this jacket is that it is clearly a special-purpose commando jacket, but the special purpose is not “going out and shooting people.” It’s totally badass but does not have a “LOOKIT MY NUNCHUCKAU” vibe about it. I think you could base a whole Internet business around how cool this jacket is.

Actually, I plan to do exactly that. Stay tuned!
Announcing the West Chester Gorilla Suit Construction Workshop

March 4th, 2008

Dear friends, I invite you to learn more about the West Chester Gorilla Suit Construction Workshop, where participants will create their very own durable, stylish, and functional gorilla suit.

Now, most of the people I tell this about want to know why I’m doing this. Which is why I’ve tried to enumerate my reasons on the gorilla suit workshop dot com website.

Quite frankly, though, the biggest reason (besides owning an outfit that’s equally stylish and appropriate at an embassy party, at a jewel heist, or in a high-speed chase), is that by sewing a WaveTrend Active RFID chip into each gorilla suit created at the workshop, I can create the world’s very first actual, functioning gorilla detector.

Creating a working gorilla detector has been a lifelong dream of mine:

Anyhow, tell your friends! Mark your calendars! This October!
We miss our large loud cat who peed on my stuff every chance he got.

February 17th, 2008
Squeaky the cat from a couple of years ago

Kate and I woke up this morning to a thumping, tumbling noise that usually means that Squeaky has cornered a mouse, but then we heard some yowling that definitely wasn’t “check me out, I got a mouse” yowling. Things got rapidly worse — we realized that his hind legs weren’t working, and the noise we heard was him falling off the arm of the sofa.

We put him in his carrier as quick as we could, got him to the emergency vet clinic. It was what we thought — Squeaky has had a heart murmur for the seven years he’s lived with us, and he had congestive heart failure, plus a blood clot in his hind legs, and was in a lot of pain. So we petted him while they gave him the drugs while he was struggling and yowling, and then he froze and made what I am sad to report was a “bill the cat” face. Poor guy. But he relaxed soon after that, and now he’s gone.

ELEVEN FACTS ABOUT SQUEAKY THE CAT:
1. We got him from a shelter in October of 2000. We briefly considered another extremely extroverted cat, but then Squeaky, who was shy, climbed right into Kate’s lap, clearly choosing her.
2. Squeaky was the size of a young puma. At the shelter, they said he was “two”, which I guess means “I dunno, he’s grown up.” The vet later said he was six or seven when we got him.
3. Our vet, who is clearly a dog person, always seemed to treat Squeaky like an honorary dog on account of his size. “He’s a big one, isn’t he?”, she’d say admiringly.
4. He was kind of dandruffy on his rump where he had a hard time cleaning himself.
5. The name they gave him at the shelter was “Willy Winkie”, or something equally horrible. He had been at the shelter a few months, suffering under that GODAWFUL name. We tried to name him “Hugo”, but he renamed himself soon afterwards to “Squeaky” on account of his loud, high-pitched and persistent Aaron Neville meow.
6. He liked very much to sit on Kate’s lap, but he would hardly ever ever sit in anyone else’s lap.
7. We had to promise when we got him that he would be forever and always an indoor cat. He escaped three times. Each time, he made a lap around the house, and then slunk somewhat apologetically and with relief back through the front door. We think he was okay with the “indoor cat” arrangement.
8. Given a chance, he would pee on my things, but he never ever peed on anyone else’s stuff. Things of mine that Squeaky has peed in/on: two jackets, a sweater, a sleeping bag, my workbench, and two suitcases (one with my suit in it.) I did not discover that last one until I arrived at my destination on a business trip.
9. If I spent a night away from home, Squeaky would sleep on my side of the bed.
10. I fed him three-fifths of a yogurt cup of cat food every night, and changed his water. I scooped his litter, and gave him fresh litter every two weeks. Yet he still continued to pee on my stuff.
11. We had him cremated, after we realized that digging a Squeaky-sized hole in the back yard in February would be a Herculean job
So long, Squeakers. I already miss you.
The good news is we’re warm. The bad news is we’re dry.

February 13th, 2008

The new furnace is hooked up, the heat’s back on, and the house is warm. Hurrah! So now I have to point the camera at the other corner of the basement:

In July 2004, I described some problems with the house we had bought, including…

"…a rusted water service coupling BELOW the main shutoff valve. That coupling made a strong plumber turn pale, tiptoe slowly to his van, and roll slowly and carefully away, not starting the engine until he was a quarter-mile from the house. "Sweet Jesus, I was just two days from retirement!"

Well, three and a half years later and our time is up. When I came home, the connection was leaking copiously BELOW the main water shutoff in our house — which means that the water had to be turned off at the street. Dan, our head plumber from Swisher, came out with his son after dinner and turned our water off at the curb, using a long T-handled thing called a “curb key.” So we don’t have any more babbling brooks flowing into our basement… but we don’t have any water, either.

The service coupling was just a few molecules away from rupturing this whole time, so maybe the vibration of putting in new furnace pies did it. Or the stress of an unheated house overnight. Or maybe, you know what? MAYBE THE CAT DID IT FOR REVENGE. Anyhow, it’s time to replace all the pipe between our basement and the street.

All things considered, this is a pretty good time for this to happen — we knew it was gonna go SOMEtime, and so it went now while there’s a crowd of fellows all ramped up on the layout of our basement. And when you’ve got two spare houses full of grandparents on the street, we’ve got NOTHING to complain about. I am a little nervous about the prospect of backhoe-ing out the hill in front of our house. Gulp!
It doesn’t look that clean in person

February 13th, 2008

The first thing our plumber did when walking into the basement of our house three years ago was enjoy a hearty laugh at our thirty-five-year-old natural-gas furnace. It seemed to bring him genuine joy and delight, like maybe if you went over to a friend’s house and found that all their heat came from a gigantic Rapa Nui monolith in the basement.
Anyhow, “Replace Furnace” has finally come up on our to-do list, so I took a before (left, yesterday morning) and during (right, yesterday evening) picture. We spent last night at Kate’s mom’s house. The fellows are still hooking it up. Our cat is planning Dire Revenge.
This is for my parents who don’t read BoingBoing:

February 12th, 2008

Oh, man, you can see the gags coming A MILE AWAY and I’m still helpless with laughter (reposted, since the original Youtube source was taken down):
http://www.collegehumor.com/moogaloop/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1801688&fullscreen=1
Stylish greetings from THE PAAAAAST

February 11th, 2008

I just this moment got the following email from a very decent fellow named Doug Patteson:
"John:
I am part of the 316th FS Foundation, and I do a bunch of historical research on all three Squadrons with in the 324th Fighter Group. I came across your web page on a Google search and pulled this photo for you from our album, which I assume you have seen, but am forwarding in the event you have not. I believe this is your grandfather."

It sure is! "Slim" Young is there in the front, looking suitably suave in what appears to be a WHITE SILK ASCOT. Damn. Also: “Hell’s Belles”? Best. Fighter squadron name. EVER. How can a fellow compete with that?
My grand-dad had awesome stories about almost getting lost between tents in North Africa during a sandstorm, and about how after the war, when they were in France awaiting demobilization, they had their hands full keeping the pilots from hot-dogging by flying UNDER the bridges on the Seine. All that, plus a white ascot. Sheesh.
If you want, you can read about JRY’s dad, my great-grandfather, the even-skinnier General Charles Duncanson Young and his runaway spaniel Moppet.
My Dad, the UFO Hunter

January 26th, 2008

1976, at an unpublished location in the hills around Austin, Texas:

In the background, my dad and the other members of Project Starlight International are readying the UFO/VECTOR system they created for a night of UFO hunting.
The “UFO/Video Experiment Console for Transitional Overt Response” system assists Project Starlight in detecting, recording, and communicating with extraterrestrial spacecraft. The team members are wearing white jumpsuits — to better protect from flash burns — and green goggles. Besides looking cool, the goggles protect from the laser, which is transmitting information at 300 baud along a joystick-guided path. There’s a magnetometer that can detect the movement of ferrous objects overhead, and a 100-yard circle of computer-controlled spotlights flashing “pi pi pi” into the Texas sky.
The team’s white jumpsuits have “PSI” logos embroidered on them. They look damn sharp. Who says science on the fringe of respectability can’t look good?
Meanwhile, that’s me in the foreground, gathering rocks in my hat. My mom is taking the pictures, and made the smiley-faces on my knees. I think she was taking pictures that would appear in a Texas Monthly article.
You can some more photos of the hunt for alien life. My favorite is when Ray Stanford, the leader of the project, would stand on his platform, making hand gestures into the sky: “we have no weapons”, he would sign to the stars. “Land over there!”

PROJECT STARLIGHT WEIGHS IN!

About an hour after posting those pictures to Flickr, I heard from Ray, who clarified some of my anecdotes (see comments on this post) and let me know what he’s up to now.

I’ve also heard from other members of Project Starlight International, who — in addition to sending me pictures of the kit-build stunt aircraft they’re making in their garages, the R&B groups they’re playing with, and their online rabbinical ministries — and that’s all in one email message — who, I say, have linked me to more information about all the Badass Seventies Technology they were using. Pictured at right: the ring of spotlights used to draw attention to the landing site. I think, but I’m not sure, that the white dots are actually paint carefully added by my mom with a retouching brush.

You can also read about the

UFO-VECTOR SYSTEM:
Communicate with UFOs by transmitting signals along a joystick-guided laser.

RECORDING MAGNETOMETER:
Track and record moving ~~ferrous objects~~ (see comments for correction from Ray) magnetic fields overhead. It’s pictured below — check out the tape drive! And the big capacitors!

Other tech articles are on the main PSI tech page here.

Ray Stanford, the head of the project, urges that UFO to stop begging the government to “WAAH give us the truth”, and instead go out there and GATHER it. Using awesome instrumentation, with giant capacitors, naturally. He needs to be given some kind of Doc Emmett Brown award, especially since he’s now a successful dinosaur hunter(!!!)

What’s the term for stylish seventies science?

“Steampunk” is the name applied to mustachio-ed, waistcoat-ed gentleman scientists of the Victorian age, who were half science, half showman, and ALL AWESOME. Project Starlight clearly falls into that mold: Kitty Bo (Hello, Kitty Bo!!!) just weighed in in the comments that they used to be called “Ray Stanford and his Lilly White Space Cadets”. What’s the term for seventies steampunk, done in embroidered jumpsuits?
Mellow Greetings from THE FUUUUTURE

January 23rd, 2008

Will (in Boulder, CO) and Sebastian (in metro New Jersey) wave hello from THE FUTURE in almost-actual size:

I’m surprised how well videoconferencing — in particular, videoconferencing with the latest version of iChat AV — works. Like many managers, I’ve developed the habit of tuning out during conference calls, noodling away on something else and only playing back my mental buffer when I hear a note of confusion or anger creep into the call (“uh-oh, the vendor just started beating their chest about how it’s probably OUR fault, lemme see what they said…”) Videconferencing makes you feel like you had an ACTUAL GODDAMN CONVERSATION with someone, albeit a little bit slow and laggy.

What’s funny is that the people in the chat window, when maximized on my Enormous New Display (you can see my 15″ MacBook below the screen for size comparison), are pretty much actual size. So that gives me an excuse to say “Forgive my lack of bodily disposition, Simon Phoenix, but I do have an entire city government to run.“.

PROJECT STARLIGHT WEIGHS IN!