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The 20th Annual Turkey Pro National

October 14th, 2005

The first Sunday after Thanksgiving, Kate’s dad Bob “Snuffy” Smith holds the Turkey Pro National, a mellow motorcycle rally featuring “hot dogs on the buns and on the bikes.” His hand-drawn flyer is a hotly-requested item each year: it contains an average of two traditional motorcycle jokes (“Pray for rain, the sissies will stay home!”) and details the itinerary of the day: a cold breakfast ride, a gathering at a local venue, then the “slow race”, in which the rider who can travel the slowest around a twisty course has to take home a huge fifty-pound trophy with tiger tails. This sounds like a joke, but being able to inch along at one mile an hour without putting your foot down is one of those hard, unglamorous skills that really separates the sheep from the goats. I’ve only finished once, but I’ve got my eye on that trophy someday. Someday!

Anyhow, you can click on the image above to get the flyer for this year’s 20th annual Turkey Pro — available for the very first time in digital form — or you can see my writeups of the 2003 and 2001 runnings of the Turkey Pro!
I Meet the King of the Galley Attendants

October 12th, 2005

I catch four Amtrak trains a day: 640 from Exton to Philadelphia, then 180 from Philly to New York, and I make a similar switch on the way back. As a train pulls in, I look down the train to find the smooth steel plate behind the number sign that says “food service car.” Cafe cars have tables, blessed tables. I don’t care how loudly the drunk guys on the way back from the dentist’s convention are yelling, I don’t care if the ventilation isn’t working and the bathroom is emitting a pungent reek of disinfectant, I don’t care if the car is leaking drips of water on the foremost and rearmost seats in the car, the tables in the cafe car allow use of the mouse, which is the difference between cramped finger-twisting on the trackpad with elbows inboard, and glorious, elbow-swinging, pixel-pushing luxury. For luxurious room, the cafe car is where it’s at.

And, very occasionally, the cafe car holds an attendant selling food.

I’m not sure what position Amtrak cafe car attendants occupy on the rung of Amtrak jobs: the conductors (kings of the train) and flags (staff sergeants of the train) seem cordial to them, but a little stiff and formal, as if consciously observing a difference in rank. On the other hand, the attendants themselves are always polite, but also VERY dignified and they brook no nonsense. It’s like being served coffee by an airline pilot. Which is excellent, I want to point out: having an attendant say in a crisp voice “and how many half-and-halfs would you like, sir? Two? Three?” then fix you with a steely stare demanding that you make your mind up RIGHT NOW or risk wasting his time… well, it adds some excitement and importance to the trip. It’s like one of the last bastions of old-school etiquette.

Yesterday, I met the king of all the Amtrak attendants, who magically appeared in one of the rare operational cafe cars. I ordered the standard Amtrak breakfast-sandwich-in-a-plastic-bag, and first realized that something was up when he did not just throw it in the microwave and punch button number 4. Oh, no. He opened the bag and disassembled the sandwich into its component parts. He put the bagel in the convection oven, which, he told me, he had had specially repaired on that car so he could do so (most Amtrak cars have let their convection ovens fall into disrepair long ago.) He separated the cheese from the sausage using a sharp knife, then microwaved just the sausage and cheese. While doing so, he told me about how his father taught him that food is worth taking time over, and he personally hates it (now he was walking the bagel from the convection oven across to the microwave, since he could only get them to repair the oven across from the microwave, not the one next to it) when people don’t treat food as food, they treat it as just a time-saver. Now he was re-assembling the sandwich, letting the heat of the sausage and egg melt the cheese, and I looked over at the condiment bins and realized that he had individually organized the packets of condiments, so that they all stacked up at neat right angles, each relish pack resting neatly and precisely on top of the one under it.

I am not making this up. Keith finished assembling my sandwich, wrapped it in a napkin, and accepted both my thanks and my tip with a crisp nod. Then, as I left, he went back to doing pushups in the aisle. Again, not kidding. I walked back to my seat in the other end of the train, and asked the conductors Ron and Nick about Keith.

“Oh yeah, Keith!” said Nick (who is a semi-professional hapkido fighter, and rides a Victory motorcycle on the weekends.) “Man, he takes you forever to get a cup of coffee! ‘Would you like cream with that, sir? Let me milk the cow!’” Nick started pantomiming plunging a butter churn up and down. “‘Would you like butter, sir? Here, let me churn the cream for you!’” I got off the train with Nick still jumping up and down and laughing.
Ad aspera, per astra

October 3rd, 2005

We spent the weekend in Avalon, New Jersey, in the rental house you can see in the background of this picture. There was some speculation as to which Smith Family Infant approach to the beach Lydia would inherit: her mom’s approach (stay on the towel, daintily brush sand off the corners) or her uncle Matt’s approach (charge directly into the surf at every opportunity.)

The latter, it turns out: Lydia has to be restrained or she’ll run all the way to France, never mind how cold the water is. Actually, the water is pretty warm, and the sun was warm, and the beach is wide, flat, and uncrowded, and altogether everything was Really Damn Great. We went to the boardwalk in Ocean City (saltwater taffy! curly fries! whac-a-mole! carousel rides!) and out to dinner in Cape May (ghost tours! expensive toy stores!) and a friend of Kate’s parents worked her considerable photographer’s mojo on Lydia:
   Holy cow!
   Oh my god!
   Knees… weakening!

I got up this morning at 5:15AM, folded up the playard, stuffed my dirty clothes into my backpack, and drove back up the Atlantic City Expressway to Philadelphia, where I hopped Amtrak to get back to work (Kate, Lydia, Bob, and Barb will leave the beach midafternoon.) 30th Street Stations is one of the last bastions of the leather-lunged conductor; my favorite one was standing at the top of stairway five, announcing the Keystone train home, the opposite direction to which I’m going.

“Now boarding, stairway five, track five, Keystone train 641 to Ardmore, Paoli, Exton, Downingtown, and points west. Fresh air, good food, clean living! Stairway five, track five!”
“Thee found my journal HOW?”

September 28th, 2005
I installed web-stats-package Mint two days ago, apparently in a bid to destroy my productivity. Mint is a bloggers’-eye-view of your web stats: that is, it doesn’t focus on what users are doing on your site so much as how they found you in the first place. Mint uses javascript to record data in real time, so you can refresh obsessively and find out, for example, that:
- Everything and everyone you mention by name will get googled, without exception. Mention the fried-mozzarella truck at the San Genarro festival by its brand name of “Mozzarepa”, and the inventor of Mozzarepa will read your post. The inventor of Mozzarepa will read this post about that post, too. It all gets read.
- This will happen all the time. Posts that you, the blogger, think of as old and buried in the mysterious past, will come up every day in targeted searches. Just 16 minutes ago, a post I wrote in 2001 about the magnificently surreal Paso Doble Ballroom in Levittown, PA pulled a reader. Dear God, I hope that reader isn’t the owner of the Paso Doble, or I’m going to wake up in an ice-packed bathtub missing a kidney, or something.
- My Great-Grandmother’s Grand Tour diary pulls way more traffic than I expected for the very reason that she mentions a lot of places and people by name. Unfortunately, the transcriber used “XXX” to indicate “illegible”, though, so that diary also pulls searches for “XXX Donkey.”
Back from blog hiatus

September 20th, 2005
Okay, back from blog hiatus. The events of late summer kind of built to a crescendo, so I’ll just wade in with the stuff:
1. Kate, Lydia, and I just got back from Albuquerque, where I married my brother. That is to say, I officiated at the ceremony, which my seminary degree and some internet paperwork makes me legal in New Mexico.
2. I made a ceremony loosely based on the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer version (the 1979 “Dearly Beloved” version, not the eighteenth-century “marriage is designed for the prevention of fornication” version.) We then de-God-ulated it, and ended up with a nice secular ceremony that still had some nice, rolling, rhythym to the words. I managed to pull it off without messing up my lines or dropping a cue, which was a HUGE RELIEF, and in retrospect I can see how much psychic energy was going into worrying about it.
3. I had never been in a social situation where I’m playing the role of a reverend before. During the first part of college (when I was evangelizing,) I thought it would be fun. It’s kind of not. Folks who think you’re a revererend are polite and respectful, but they’re also reserved and you definitely get the feeling that they wish you’d go away so they can get back to doing what they were doing before there was a reverend looking at them and stuff. I’m glad that I’m in no way a minister, and continue to be happy with the decisions I came to in seminary (that is, that religion is something people do, and that I don’t believe in the existence of an extra-material spiritual reality that is separate from our “ordinary” existence.)
4. My step-brother’s maternal family has ridiculously patrician nicknames. The more blue-blood the family, the more goofy and scatological the nicknames get, I suppose. If that’s the case, they should all be having oil portraits taken and dropping dead of hemophilia. I say this with love, cousin ca-ca.
5. My sister Bridget, her husband Tony, Lydia’s cousin Lucca, Kate and I went to the New Mexico State fair, which was THE RAWK. Within a hundred feet of the ticket gate, we had seen two tall indian princesses doing a stand-up routine (“so the ojibway woman says, ‘you’re cold? How about just for tonight, we pretend we’re married!’ and the chippewa man says ‘great!’ and the ojibway woman says ‘okay then, get your own damn blanket!”), and a high-diving show where a guy in a speedo jumps eighty feet off of a guyed antenna platform into a ten-foot pool, and we’d eaten fry-bread, and we saw an animal show where a goat comes out and pulls down the sign that announces showtime and a brightly colored bird flies out into the audience and picks up a rolled dollar bill off a volunteer’s hand. It was GREAT.
6. The next day, we all went to the Albuquerque Aquarium and Botanical Garden which was also THE RAWK, with floor-to-ceiling acrylic windows into a saltwater aquarium filled with colorful fish and coral and sharks. Lydia and Lucca started flapping their arms like the rays and making fish faces. We also went to a butterfly pavilion and saw butterflies struggling out of their chrysalises.
7. We went to Santa Fe and visited our Thomas cousins, who told stories about growing up at the “blue hole”, which was a quarry about a mile through the woods from the house where I grew up, and how when they were kids they would dig real tiger traps with real punji stakes and how they shot croquet balls out of drainage pipes and across the quarry using M-80s. I swear, it was all Swallows and Amazons plus dynamite and tigers in Whitford for the generation before me. I’m really jealous.
8. The sticker book Kate bought for Lydia to use on the plane was the best toddler activity ever, much better than the three Teletubbies episodes I transcoded to the PSP.
9. I’m managing to keep the weight off, though haven’t made much new progress. And I submitted the story to MAKE.
10. Congratulations, Sam and Catron! We had a great time!
some pictures
Ultimate Water Gun Pontani Adventure Photo Shoot To-Do List, Three Weeks Later:

August 25th, 2005
- Finalize copyright ownership details with Julie: not done
- Get final model release from World-Famous Pontani Sisters: not done
- Get model release from American Helicopter Museum for use of facility: not done
- Sort heap of hardware sitting in center of garage, where it was piled after the shoot: not done
On the other hand…
- Get freaking cool translucent Duratrans photo output from Duggal to make homemade UWG Pontani Adventure lightboxes: DONE
- Pitch 1,000 words and a picture to MAKE magazine: “HOWTO make a head-mounted water cannon!” along with Pontani picture and a sidebar about the Pontani sisters: DONE (editorial deadline: 9/16! woo-hoo!)
- Post pictures to website, even though they’re still, strictly speaking, preliminary: DONE!
Click any thumbnail:
Here’s the part where Kieran freaks out

August 5th, 2005

From: John Young
To: Kieran Downes
Subject: BEHOLD THE MAJESTY

I’m sorry to do this to you, my friend. I’m aware that your grief at
not being there in person for the photo shoot may break you, but I have to show you this preliminary photo:

Angie says “hi”, by the way.

From: Kieran Downes
To: John Young
Subject: Re: BEHOLD THE MAJESTY

Dear Mr. Young,

We regret to inform you that upon receiving the email
reprinted below for your convenience, Kieran Downes
was in fact overwhelmed with grief at having missed
this spectacular occasion and is currently
hospitalized at an undisclosed facility specializing
in broken-heartedness. The authorities believe that
while the photos alone were probably enough to send
him into a fit of despair, it was even the
possibility, the most remote chance, that Angie
Pontani would pass along her personal greetings that
pushed him over the edge. His condition remains
extremely serious. We will keep you informed.

The management

—————————
Oh. . . my . . . GAWD.
Pontani Photo Shoot on Saturday: primary, secondary, and tertiary missions accomplished.

July 30th, 2005

The preliminary pictures are so good I’m not even going to post them yet.

You must have time to prepare.
Do you use your powers for good, or for AWESOME?

July 29th, 2005
Since the Ultimate Water Gun was BoingBoing‘ed in June, I’ve been getting requests from Dutch photo editors for high-res pictures of the gun.

Now, I’m a sucker for European press. I was called “New York Ideas Man Johnny” in the bilinglual Dutch/English magazine Pulp after doing this photo shoot with Consuelo and Oraia; how can even outrageous vanity aspire to more? Well, it can, I guess: I wanted to do something so great, so fantastic, so blow-the-clogs-off that every photo editor wearing socks with their sandals will run the results every month for a year.

BEHOLD THE INGREDIENTS OF THE PONTANI SISTER ULTIMATE WATER GUN SIDECAR/HEALEY/HELICOPTER PHOTO SHOOT OCCURRING TOMORROW:
- The Ultimate Water Gun, with its shiny silver jacket.
- The fabulous World Famous Pontani Sisters. The last time the Pontani Sisters’ paths crossed mine was when they graciously judged the results of Mustaches for Kids NYC in 2002.
- My 1977 BMW R100/7 and Checkoslovakian Velorex 562E sidecar outfit.
- Kate’s mom’s 1960s Austin Healey 3000 Mark II convertible.
- Maybe a Bell 47 bubble-canopy two-seat helicopter, if Rob from Lancaster Helicopters consents to fly out to the runway where we’ll be shooting.
- A new Ultimate Water Gun helmet made from a new-old-stock Shoei Rebel stars-and-stripes Eval Knieval-style metalflake helmet.
- Various imitations of 1970s action-adventure toys, like the Fisher-Price Adventure People “Daredevil stunt plane” pictured — that’s by way of a stylistic anchor.
- Photographers Julie and Viva.
- Helpers driving down from NYC, for which I am everlastingly grateful.
I’m driving all around West Chester today, trying to gather parts and get stuff lined up in time for the shoot tomorrow. I’ve already managed to locate some back boards at Dudas’ Diving Duds in West Chester; I’ve got a long list of other stuff to round up, too!

Update: It’s now 2:52 PM, and so far I’ve met a woman who runs a fire safety company and a macaw rescue foundation (one macaw, after three years in a small cage — responded to a year of TLC and revealed the ability to sing the Mexican Hat Dance) and local fire-safety destination The Fire Store, where I found some AWESOME rescue supplies. The Fire Store sells cool-looking vinyl alphabetic stickers for your vehicle, but only in the letters “A C E L R N T” and “S”. I’m sure there’s a good reason, but I haven’t a clue what it is; it’s not a store for newbies. Though if you want radio holsters, hatchet holsters, gun holsters, barrack pants(?), locker organizers, or brightly-colored hundred-dollar flashlights, it’s the place for you. Now I’m off to see about those scuba back boards, and get lots of garden hose supplies.

Update Two: 6:25 PM. This has been a magical day. After gathering lots of clear tubing, hose nozzles, crimping ferrules, and pop rivets at Maxwell’s Hardware, I pointed the GPS at Dudas Diving Duds, a familiar brand name in West Chester, but a place I’d never been to before.

The trip to Dudas Diving was… incredibly awesome. it’s located in a suburban development, but you roll up the driveway past a thick screen of trees, and it turns out to be the original house that used to go with the land. The shop is on three levels in an old, sprawling barn, and it’s filled with friendly, sunburned dive instructors. I used to walk past Dudas’ driveway several times a month in boarding school, and I never suspected that it was actually a HUGE HIVE OF COOLNESS. I mean, seriously: you think high school is boring, and there’s this whole cluster of, like, salty wreck divers and their specialized equipment just steps from the path where you used to mope back and forth to the strip mall. What’s the lesson there?

A high point so far, while gathering various backplates and webbing from the parts bin in the repair shop in back: “So, what are you going to do with this stuff?”
“Oh, you know, three dancing girls and maybe a helicopter.”

Update Three: 8:20 PM, and we’ve gotten the baby to sleep. Now I’ll go out and start working on the blocks that hold the hoses and hardware on the helmet.

Update Four: 11:49PM, and garage contains two shiny new ULtimate Water Guns. Better. Faster. Stronger. First thing in morning, must get up, load van with changing-room tent, other odds and ends, drive to Helicopter Museum. Great tiredness stealing definite articles. More to come tomorrow.
“It’s dollars… to doughnuts… that our state fair… has the most vehicle-mounted surface-to-air short-range aircraft suppression systems in the state!”

July 25th, 2005

This afternoon, Kate and I visited the Kimberton Community Fair, where Kate had entered a quilt — which won a red ribbon! Hurrah! And that’s without sneaking any whiskey into the mincemeat. There are pictures on her blog. Congratulations! And congratulations too to Kate’s cousin Dina, whose lemon meringue pie took a blue ribbon. This is part of a knit- and quilt-blogger movement to get involved in state fairs, which I think is awesome!

On the way in to the fair, there was a National Guard Avenger missile system set up, which is a pod containing eight surface-to-air Stinger missiles remotely controlled with a pair of joysticks and a gun camera, all turret-mounted on a humvee. There was, of course, a line of nine-year-olds waiting to swivel the turret around, rocking the humvee on its suspension, and look through the monochromatic green display (number one question: “what happens if I push ‘fire?’”) This was a piece of technology that was, at once, really cool and horrifically menacing, and the juxtaposition of this war machine with excited fairgoing kids was a total Verhoeven moment.

In the picture at left, you can see that the kid has swiveled the turret around to point directly at himself, and is checking out his portrait in the gun camera. In the picture at right, his younger brother is attempting to track an airplane(!)