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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.

Between rain showers on Saturday, I changed the oil on my motorcycle. In fact, I changed the oil filter, too, which is a rung up the ladder, and helped me begin to fulfill Airheads Beemer Club Canon number 6: “Airheads maintain their own motorcycles.”

An oil filter change is right up at the front of the
Chilton manual (“Chapter 1: easy stuff for jerks”.) However, it still involves taking bits off the engine and seeing the greasy, shiny insides. For which I got to use my new Craftsman socket set, which as it turns out is markedly superior to my old Krzygistani five-dollar tools.

I also got a chance to hang out at the local motorcycle shop, where I picked up the new oil filter and heard lots of stories about Kate’s dad. “Say, did you know I have a picture of Snuffy hanging in my living room?” the owner, Dan Maychak, says to the tall, rawboned Supercross acolyte leaning on the counter. “Yeah, that’s a trophy of his right up there!” I tell a story about practicing the Austin-Healy with Bob Smith in the passenger’s seat, Bob not grimacing every time I grind the transmission because that’s the kind of guy he is, and they nod and whistle sympathetically.

Then it’s back to the bike and my chance to make my first newbie mistake — I replace the old O-ring on the oil filter panel cover, instead of using the new one, and as a result I leave a rainbow-colored Pac-Man trail of oil droplets on the wet roads all the way across town. Which is embarassing, because the oil gets on the rear tire so I slow to a crawl to keep from sliding out, and now the Pac-Man dots lead glaringly down the center of the road straight to our driveway. Well, the good news is that the rain washes away the evidence of my thumb-fingered work, but the bad news is that it keeps me from making a second attempt at the filter cover, so the bike’s in the driveway now with a styrofoam cup under it.

I had better luck with the kitchen; in a rare freak of fate, the new vinyl floor installers made an installation appointment on the same day as the new refrigerator delivery (maybe it was my witty banter with Mohan.) So I worked from home on Friday and watched as a parade of men in Immaculata sweatshirts banged on the floor and sent the cat to a government-in-exile under the bed. Friday evening, and we had most of a shiny new kitchen, except for the ragged strips where the baseboards used to be. So I get a Google master’s degree in baseboard installation (“Quarter-round molding — the bold alternative to shoe molding!”), and Kate and I are off to Home Depot, where we buy a miter box and some freaky, extruded-polystyrene structural foam baseboard material ’cause that’s the only stuff in the right width. Cutting this stuff in the miter box is weird, like sawing at some sort of nanotech cheese, so I go back to rent a powered compound miter saw, which also has problems, but they’re easier to deal with and also more interesting (cut too slowly, and the baseboard starts to melt and run!) I fix my smaller mistakes with spackle, my larger mistakes with some structural caulk, and after two coats of paint it actually looks okay.

Meanwhile, Kate was hurrying to finish knitting a 6-12-month-sized baby sweater for a good friend in Seattle before the intended recipient outgrew his 6-12 month sweater window. I’ve been told that knitting is a binary hobby: knit=1, perl=0, and that all the cabling and popcorn stitches are the result of fairly simple (if long) recombinations of even simpler patterns. Whatever: it still looks like magic to me.

Then Kate’s parents and her maternal grandmother came over to have tea and ooh-and-aah over the new housework. Kate baked lemon squares, and Bob reassured me by telling me some of the dumb mistakes he’s still making after fifty years of working on motorcycles. So, all in all, a craft-y weekend for both of us, and as soon as I get the oil filter cover back on my bike, all will be right with the world.

We must speak with one voice against Saddam Hussein’s failure to allow opposing voices to be heard.

This has been posted many places by now, but I thought I’d mirror this commentary from NPR:

“All right, let me see if I understand the logic of this correctly. We are going to ignore the United Nations in order to make clear to Saddam Hussein that the United Nations cannot be ignored. We’re going to wage war to preserve the UN’s ability to avert war. The paramount principle is that the UN’s word must be taken seriously, and if we have to subvert its word to guarantee that it is, then by gum, we will. Peace is too important not to take up arms to defend. Am I getting this right?

Further, if the only way to bring democracy to Iraq is to vitiate the democracy of the Security Council, then we are honor-bound to do that too, because democracy, as we define it, is too important to be stopped by a little thing like democracy as they define it.

Also, in dealing with a man who brooks no dissension at home, we cannot afford dissension among ourselves. We must speak with one voice against Saddam Hussein’s failure to allow opposing voices to be heard. We are sending our gathered might to the Persian Gulf to make the point that might does not make right, as Saddam Hussein seems to think it does. And we are twisting the arms of the opposition until it agrees to let us oust a regime that twists the arms of the opposition. We cannot leave in power a dictator who ignores his own people. And if our people, and people elsewhere in the world, fail to understand that, then we have no choice but to ignore them.

Listen. Don’t misunderstand. I think it is a good thing that the members of the Bush administration seem to have been reading Lewis Carroll. I only wish someone had pointed out that “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass” are meditations on paradox and puzzle and illogic and on the strangeness of things, not templates for foreign policy. It is amusing for the Mad Hatter to say something like, `We must make war on him because he is a threat to peace,’ but not amusing for someone who actually commands an army to say that. As a collector of laughable arguments, I’d be enjoying all this were it not for the fact that I know–we all know–that lives are going to be lost in what amounts to a freak, circular reasoning accident.”
— Peter Freundlich / National Public Radio / 13.03.03

Zen and the art of SPENDING LOTS OF CIZZ-ASH!

I took my motorcycle out from under its cover last weekend, and started getting it ready to ride. Like many other things in life, owning a bike can be a source of guilt if you’re inclined that way. I *did* put my motorcycle under a cover, but I *didn’t* pull the battery and attach it to a trickle charger over the winter. Nor did I, as one site suggests, drop the carbuerator float bowl and empty the gasoline inside. Nor did I drain the fluids, put molybdenum lubrication grease on the real axle bearing, or disassemble the bike into its constituent parts, pack each part into a velvet-lined jewel case, and store the cases in a climate-controlled environment, cleaning occasionaly with a wooden-handled pig bristle brush.

My challenge now is to keep from feeling guilty about that, and at the same time to keep my aggressive not-feeling-guilty agenda from bleeding into other parts of my life, as I have a dentist appointment soon. “No, I DON’T floss after every meal! You got a problem with that, Doctor bee-yotch?”

I am, however, going to change the oil this weekend, for which I need a couple of new tools. My old toolbox, with my crappy old five-dollar socket set, seems to have mercifully vanished some time in the past five years, so I’m going to pick up a new 3/8″ drive metric socket set. “Buy the best tools you can afford!” say the experts, and boy, am I ever ready to agree. So I start out by stopping by the hardware store on the way to Penn Station after work: “do you have a three-eighths-inch metric socket set?” I ask, and am presented with a twenty-dollar shrink-wrapped package of uncertain ancestry with Engrish on the label. Turning up my nose, I go to Sears the next day: forty dollars for a Craftsman set, but it comes in a twee plastic case with a little window on the top. Humph! Surely someone like me, someone who really appreciates the importance of good tools (when working on your bike twice a year) should look for something just a little more… you know…

…yeah, I know, too. Expensive. Heavy, with, like, better knurling on the handles or something. So I go to Snap-On ’cause that’s what I hear everybody drools over, and I find the socket set I’m looking for, pictured at right a “set, general service, metric, 6-point), for FOUR HUNDRED ELEVEN DOLLARS AND NINETY-FIVE CENTS.

What’s that, Doctor? Floss after every meal? Yes, I’m very sorry. I will, I promise. Excuse me, I have to go to Sears and pick up my new tools.