Larry sent some last pictures of the Velorex sidecar before it begins its truck journey from Oregon to the still-smoldering plains of waterfront Philly. As well as some cryptic advice:
>
…A couple more things to keep in mind. If you are going get the car out of
> the crate before taking it home, take a sharp utility knife for the pallet
> wrap and cardboard. You’ll also need a pair of dykes to cut the cable ties
>on the tie downs.
It’s one of those days on Amtrak: oddities abound, and the common theme is, well… I’m not sure, but I bet the French have a word for it. Presented for your consideration:
All these people are within arm’s reach, literally, and I’d better push “submit” before someone catches sight of the screen.
For a better Amtrak story, go read Nicole’s blog (scroll down to St. Patrick’s day.)
My fellow BMW Airhead rider Larry in Bend, Oregon, has made final plans for shipping the Velorex sidecar. It’ll be arriving via USF Holland to an intriguingly blank area of Google Maps down by the docks in Philadelphia. If this were Grand Theft Auto 3, you would know to bring a bazooka when traveling down there. As it is, I’ll just wear a knee brace and an Australian scowl. Assuming I can learn an Australian scowl by next Monday.
This AWESOME-looking Velorex 562 sidecar soon will be mine (assuming all goes as well as it has so far.) I’m buying it from an incredibly nice, extraordinarily careful fellow named Larry in Bend, Oregon.
Oh, man, I’m excited.
Kate and I watched “I Heart Huckabees” this weekend, which I found myself really liking. Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman play existential detectives, hired by flailing environmental activist Albert Markovski to explain a series of odd coincidences in his life. The movie quickly becomes a contest between the integrative, “everything is connected” school of existential philosophy espoused by the detectives, and the nihilistic existentialism peddled by a mysterious French competitor: “Caterine Vauban: Cruelty, manipulation, meaninglessness”, reads her card.
David O. Russell (who also made Three Kings) is the filmmaker. He seems to take himself pret-ty seriously. As this reviewer points out, though, that’s not necessarily a strike against the movie, even if the crew did nickname him “David O. Asshole.” The central philosophical dilemma in the movie — in order to understand ourselves, we must become mindful of our surroundings, not just our needs, and then it’s pretty much up to us whether we want to interpret all the stuff out there as connected and meaningful or disjointed and meaningless — is a pretty well-traveled path. In fact, the way that the positions were phrased seemed pretty reminiscent of the one Buddhism survey class I’ve ever taken, with Uma Thurman’s dad Robert Thurman at Columbia, who describes the differences between mahayana and hinayana buddhism in almost exactly the same way. So I was amused to hear David Russell refer to “Bob” in the director’s commentary as his philosophical mentor at Amherst.
Which brought up an interesting dimension to the movie, for me. A big part of the plot revolves around Jude Law’s charming and smarmy public-relations director attempting to deconstruct the cult of personality he’s worked hard to build up around himself. It’s not easy for him: in one really funny scene, Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin play a tape for him in which he repeats the same self-aggrandizing story about Shanaia Twain and a tuna fish sandwich over and over again: “June 18th, cell phone call.” “June 25th: in the elevator.” This, of course, is any self-conscious blowhard’s worst nightmare (and a reminder that I need to start searching my blog harder to make sure I haven’t told the same story already before.) So it’s interesting to see a blowhard director put one of his blowhard characters through the wringer, and claim as mentor an academic figure with one of the longest shadows, both literal and figurative, on the east coast (like Carl Spackler, Thurman has lots of often-repeated stories about the Dalai Lama, except that his are true. Well, who knows, maybe Spackler’s stories were true too!)
I came home from a two-day business trip to Phoenix on Wednesday night to find that Kate and her mom had edged a large flowerbed in the front of the house. This is great news. I love edged flowerbeds because I love mulch. I’m not being ironic in any way, here: I freaking LOVE to mulch stuff, because suddenly your unkempt yard can look like the manicured park outside a dentist’s office. That sounds sarcastic, so let me emphasize: neatly-trimmed, every-blade-in-place lawns and neatly laid mulch speaks to me (and probably all men) at an ancient, primordial level. I’m sure the illusion of control given by landscaping is as old as, well, landscapes: “If I can just rake the gravel outside my cave, I won’t worry so much about getting FREAKING EATEN BY SABERTOOTHED TIGERS.” “There, everything’s nice and neat. Look at the smooth ARRGH IT ATE MY LEG”
Um, anyhow, I’m not sure how crazy I will be allowed to get with the mulch. Besides, there’s plenty of work ahead before the licorice root starts rolling. Right now, the role of the sabertooth tiger is being played by a seemingly innocuous five-foot rhododendron bush, which like all bushes tries to pretend that it won’t be hard to move. Yeah, right; I’m on to its kind, now, and plan to spend twenty minutes every day this week chipping away at its enormous freaking root ball, after which I might just be able to ARRGH IT ATE MY LEG”
The weather was unbelievably gorgeous on Saturday — better than I could have hoped for. An army* of intrepid beta-testers for the Guerilla Drive-In arrived, prepared to go to any extreme to work the kinks out of the hardware. Fortunately, the extreme turned out to be nothing worse than a chilly evening and a shortage of side dishes for the hamburgers.
For the most part, projecting Ferris Bueller outdoors went off without a hitch: the Navy tripod was rock-steady, the gas generator was adequate, quiet, and lasted through the movie on one tank of gas. The film didn’t break, and at no time did the projector erupt in evil-smelling flames. It turns out that my dad had never seen Ferris Bueller(!), so that was an added bonus.
The FM transmitter was a big disappointment — it only had a range of about 10 feet when hooked up to my ipod (even with fresh batteries.) It didn’t seem to work at all when accepting sound from the projector . Wrong kind of sound output? RF interference from the unshielded projector motor? I’d love to hear from anybody who knows how to make FM transmitters put out a signal in not-strictly-approved wattages. Kate’s dad also suggested an AM transmitter, which is a splendid idea seeing as how the sound is mono already.
But I think everything’s a go for next month. For that, I have three mysterious words for you: Cato’s Freezer Attack.
* Dear Nicole and Dave: now that you have seen what I have described as an “army” of intrepid beta-testers, I am afraid that you have a quantitative metric by which to adjust the grandiose claims made in other parts of this blog. Oh, well, I knew this day was coming.
UPDATE: A quick Google search on “AM transmitters” yielded instant results. Problem solved. Check out these links for the build-it-yourself “Li’l 7” transmitter: Oh, yes. Hell, yes. I have to order a glowing tube from a place called “Antique Electronic Supply“? Better and better. Attention, nerd world: I now have a reasonable excuse to attach a rubber whip antenna and glowing vacuum tubes to an ammo can.
I got my box of parts from John at KMR electronics, and proceeded to thread up the first reel of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which arrived on Monday from Swank in Chicago. As it turns out, my Eiki RT-0 classroom projector, purchased on eBay, had more wrong with it than first appeared. However, I fixed it. Using motorcycle parts. I feel very badass. Yeah, I’m now a superbad AV geek.
So there’s only one showstopper remaining before trying things out this weekend. There’s a quarter-inch speaker jack on the projector: I’m hoping that I can just adapt that to my low-power FM transmitter, and that it will automagically all just work. But I’m feeling pretty good about things; this weekend’s showing is likely to be too cold for enjoyment, but it will be at least an end-to-end test of the whole Guerilla Drive-In shebang: projector, tripod, transmitter, generator. If you’re reading this and you want to come, hit the “contact me” link above for an invite!
After a year under a tarp in a driveway, my 1977 BMW motorcycle is (very Germanically) requiring me to prove my dedication before permitting me to ride to the train station in the morning. Now that the brakes are sorted, the headlight is acting odd. There are two switches that drive the headlights; one that allows you to turn the headlight on or off during the day; another to select the high/low/passing beam. Different combinations of switches provide different, puzzling (and very much not standard) results; it’s like a game of Mastermind with accidental blasts on the horn to liven things up. And, sometimes, blue sparks when I short things.
Fortunately, the Airheads list continues to be a fount of wisdom from people who see Airhead wiring diagrams on the backs of their eyelids when they go to sleep at night, and they’ve been giving me plenty of advice. For example, an airhead named Joe ‘Cuda says:
>> It’s dirt simple. Juice (+) comes from the battery via a Red wire to the Relay 30, out Relay 87 via a Yellow/White wire to the switch, to the headlight via a Yellow (Low) or White (High) wire, and then to ground via a Brown wire.
While that doesn’t really fit my description of “dirt simple”, the instructions I’ve been getting have been helping me to sort out the electrical connections. It’s a definite contrast to pushing pixels for a living: while it may look like a rat’s nest inside the headlight shell at first, it resolves to a rational (if complex) system of color-coded wires, each bit of which can be individually checked with a multimeter. So I think I’ve got it narrowed down to a bad headlight relay, which means another call to the Amazon of BMW parts.
Update: Just to fully illustrate the detailed, descriptive, and entertaining nature of the help the Airheads provide, here’s the response I got this morning from “Airhead John”:
Nice photos! I can see what you were talking about. In the first photo the headlight shell looks quite clean and the wiring and fuses look to be in good condition.
In the second photo I agree that the mystery wires are going to the turn signals. Rather than fuses, it looks like 2 into 1 connections. I imagine a previous owner (we’ll call him Sparky) put on an ugly fairing of some sort and spliced into the stock turn signal wires to hook up the fairing turn signals. When the next owner (we’ll call him Rico Suavay) bought the bike he wanted the wind blowing through his hair, so he took off Sparky’s ugly fairing and stuffed the turn signal extensions into the headlight. You don’t need that stuff. I would return it to stock. It appears Sparky snipped off the spade connectors on the blue/red and blue/black turn signal wires and crimped on his yellow bodges. If you leave it like you found it, it
won’t hurt anything (except my feelings).In the third photo, the yellow/white (gelb/weiss) wire should be getting power with the ignition on. It supplies the headlight switch. Although the headlight relay and all the connections look quite clean, they do fail after a few decades. I concur with your diagnosis of a faulty headlight relay.
Good work.
I swear, can you imagine getting this much and this quality of help in other aspects of life?
As a kid, there were plenty of things that I swore — SWORE! — that I wouldn’t do when I became an adult. Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten what all of them were, so I’m probably doing them all the time. Oh, yeah, I remember now; I swore I’d never exclaim to my young nieces and nephews how BIG they’ve gotten! I was a pretty literal kid, I guess, and the exclamation that I was much bigger seemed excruciatingly obvious and tautological to me. “Yes, auntie, it has been a year since you’ve seen me, OBVIOUSLY I’m bigger. Sheesh!”
Well, too bad, young me, I’m gonna be an unrepentant cheek-pincher. I shall make the obvious, dorky observations, embarassing my young relations, and they will seethe. And then, someday, they will make those very same observations. It’s all part of the Great Wheel of Embarassment.
More insidious is the urge I’ve been feeling to bother expectant mothers. I used to be scared of babies. For one thing, how do you hold them? They’re wriggly! What if you drop them? What if they explode, or pee, or something? Of course, that all changed with daddy-hood; now, I view babies as a kind of highly entertaining bean bag, usually with good smells and laughing (usually.) If it’s your baby, you know what to do when the baby starts crying. If it’s not, you can jolly well just hand it right back again. So that’s good.
So I’m not scared of babies any more, but I also have stopped viewing expecant moms as an atomic unit and started seeing them as a molecular collection of units. When Kate was pregnant, I pretty much just saw her as Kate, but with a new, pregnant shape. But still all Kate. Seeing Lydia born changed all that: “holy cow, there’s ANOTHER PERSON in there!” So now when I see a hugely pregnant woman in the train station, it’s a lot easier to realize that there’s a little upside-down, curled-up person hanging out on the station platform, too.
Which, coupled with my newfound strongly baby-positive attitude, is giving me the urge to say “hi!” to the mom, and then plant both hands on her belly, lean in, and exclaim “hi there!” to her baby. I’m not saying I’d ever do it in a million years, but…
…well, actually, I guess I am saying that I’d do it in a million years. In fact, it’s pretty hard to resist not doing it, since babies are such a happy little bridge across social boundaries. Hey, babies are pretty much overjoyed to see any smiling face, right? How’s about I just go ahead and say “hi?” “Hi, baby! HELLO IN THERE!”
What the hell is wrong with me? Maybe nothing, since that seems to be a common horrifying behavior, the complete-stranger-handplant-and-shout. Dear God, I hope I can exercise some restraint in this regard. I’ll go pinch some cousin’s cheeks instead.
tikaro.com 
