April 2003 Archives

We interrupt your regularly scheduled Mexican Forklift story to bring you this important update:
I found a bike that looks good, and that I think I'll buy if the in-person inspection is commensurate with the condition and price:

1977 R100/7 on Cycletrader.com
Things in the bike's favor:

• It's in the area. Most other bikes I've seen are in Seattle, Texas, or Florida. It's possible to ship, but that costs about $500.00.
• It hasn't been lovingly restored by a famous expert, which would add one bazillion dollars to the price, and make me cry when I (inevitably) tip the bike over in the driveway.
• It doesn't have a bloody great fairing that I'd have to take off before I'd be seen outside of the house on the bike. I'm sure that fairings are great on the highway and in the rain, but I'm young enough that the fashion/function equation still is waaaaay in favor of style. Removing a fairing means you have to mess with 1970s German electrics, and I read on the Airheads mailing list that this is not the most fun way to spend three consecutive Sundays.
• It's all stock, without "improvements" added by previous owners. BMW owners tend to be engineers with a high opinion of their own abilities. Old Airhead bikes have often been frankensteined: dual plugs, shaved valve covers, or a flux capacitor. Usually, these mods are a tradeoff, swapping an improvement here for a pain-in-the-ass problem there. I like the idea of making my own "previous owner" mistakes.
• It's black. And it has fork boots. Those black rubber boots on the front fork are (I'm embarassed to admit) enormously important to me. Without fork boots, it's just an old bike. With fork boots, it's a badass Tonka toy. I know, I know: you can put fork boots on any bike. But you'll get raised eyebrows if you put fork boots on a model that didn't have them originally.

Todd Byrum, the coordinator ("Airmarshal") of the Airheads Beemer Club in Pennsylvania, has been really helpful, and even knows Kate's dad. He gave me some assigned reading to take to the bike inspection on Friday:

"Used Motorcycle Pre-Purchase Checklist", or
"How To Spend Two Hours Grunting and Shaking Your Head Over the Motorcycle,
Which May Reduce The Price."

These links are too good to pass up (both found on BoingBoing):

• The MegaPenny Project
• 1 Pixel Per Meter

You can drag the images around on the 1 Pixel Per Meter site. I had a good time making the space slug eat the Hindenberg. Go there; you'll see.

I spent the summer after my sophomore year at college in Brownsville, Texas, spending the summer working with World Servants. World Servants is a Christian organization that put together packaged service camps for American church youth groups. I was on the "Holy Sweat" team, having missed the cooler "SWAT" team appellation by a year. World Servants was the best-run not-for-profit organization I've ever worked with, before or since: new groups were instructed to arrive at the airport wearing easily identified green World Servants T-shirts, and with all their luggage packed in easily identified green World Servants duffel bags. One driver had a clipboard, and would shepherd the chattering teens from South Carolina into the vans; another driver would corral the correct number of duffel bags from the luggage carousel and sling them into a separate van.

The actual work was pretty well-organized, too: we were building small houses (very small houses, from toolshed plans) in the ghettoes of Reynosa, Mexico. The colonias were built in garbage dumps, on floodplains, so having a place to live — even an 8x12 shed — with a wooden floor off the ground meant that babies had a much reduced sickness rate. The houses were about the right size for a group of ten kids to build during a one-week work session. Any given week, we had about three hundred kids from a dozen church groups, thirty youth group leaders from those chuches, and five volunteer West Texas contractors on site. Every morning at sunrise, everyone would pile in to school buses for the ride across the border into Mexico. After a blistering day of work, we'd drive back to Texas for swimming and relaxation.

During the weekends, we did all the bits that required power tools: we ripped the plywood sheathing to width, we cut notches in the fascia boards, and cut window headers. We then (and I'm very proud of this) color-coded all the lumber, and gave out illustrated instructions to all the teams. A contractor might think "nail the pre-cuts to the sill plate on fifteen-inch centers", but he could look at the plans and say, in a drawling Texan accent, "okay, son, get five yellow boards and nail them to the blue board where the pencil marks are."

The toughest part of the job, frankly, was getting all this brand-new lumber across the border. It was worth a lot of money, and it was all donated. Fortunately, World Servants had a liaison in Reynosa in the person of Dr. Rommel Kott Cuellar, a 24-year-old plastic surgeon who was dating the mayor's daughter and drove a white Mercury Tracer with tinted windows and nitrous injection. Rommel's dad was German, and he did something with the Mexican government. I'm not sure what it was, but Rommel lived with his family in a walled compound with satellite dishes in it and armed guards at the gate.

(more to come.)

Kate's dad and I went to see a preview day at the William Bunch Vintage Motorcycle Auction in Chadds Ford. The organizer of the auction, John Lawless, is trying to get a "Philadelphia bike week" together, with lots of motorcycle events -- like Sturgis or Daytona.

Anyhow, the motorcycles were really cool, and I met a lot of Important Motorcycle Guys, like David Kirby, who started selling Honda motorcycles in West Chester in 1968. Back then, the only motorcycle dealers work black leather all the time, and were always working on bikes. If you came into the store, you were interrupting them, and they'd glare hot, contemptuous, oily glares at you. David started actually (what a concept!) welcoming people into the store, and sold bikes as fast as Honda could make them. It was a struggle to get his franchise, though -- he had to drive the Honda representative to the neighboring franchise the long way, so the contractual limitations governing franchise spacing were met.

See the pictures

You're gonna rule the world, eh?
I had a dream last night that Canadian scientists in the future had succesfully developed time travel, so they were traveling back in time to give important agricultural and industrial developments to people in order to avoid famines, plagues and war. And also to increase the importance of Canada. "Use this technique, and you'll quadruple your farm output", they'd say to a North African farmer in 150 CE. "And when you make an empire, don't forget to call it Canada, okay?"

For some reason, I stole a slip-joint wrench from them, because it was made of a "Ganadium alloy" that could be printed on a CAD prototyper, but that, once printed, was strong, tough, indestructible, light, et cetera, and would completely revolutionize industry, making high-tensile devices as easy as pushing the "print" button on your computer. (I was impressed by Bruce Stirling's ideas for the future of foamed aluminum a couple of weeks ago.)

Anyhow, looking at the wrench and imagining the future of "Ganadium alloy", I was wondering what I was gonna name my empire. Do the polite thing and name it "Canada", or just make up my own name?

Sometimes a buzz saw is just a goddamn buzz saw.
Also: Insane Japanese Miniature Knitting
There was a train derailment south of Trenton last night, which meant that I and all the other Amtrak Keystone commuters "got SEPTA-ed"; we missed our Philadelphia connection, and had to take the local train home. Like many minor hardships, I suppose, it had its bright spots: I talked to several other commuters for the first time. One woman with whom I've been on a nodding acquaintance for a year turns out to have a thick French accent!

So I relaxed this morning by going for a run in the morning and taking a later train into work. I'd like to run regularly in the mornings, but I'm going to have to cut down on the amount of time it takes me to get out the door. Today, there was fifteen minutes of sleepy, half-speed moping, in which I slowly dragged on polypro underwear, took long, spiteful looks at the outdoor thermometer, and heaved rueful sighs.

Once out the door with all my electronics strapped on, though, um... it wasn't much better. Until I warmed up and noticed all the spring buds. All the trees in West Chester are surrounded by a transparent nimbus of bright yellow-green. Except for the Norwegian oaks, which are hazed with maroon. It's really, really beautiful, and as the sun climbed over the hill, I tried to remember the lines of "Nature's first green is gold", without much success. Then, I reached home and looked at the lesser Ranunculus that I gave ZE TREATMENT to over the weekend. It's still there, but it's not looking as robust as it was. Its saucy, devil-may-care grin looks a little strained, as though it's regretting hitting the Mexican cocktail weenies so hard at the beginning of the party.
Ha!

Anyway, to the point: I looked up the poem, which I now remember is called "Nothing Gold Can Stay", and found that since I last read Frost ten years ago, my opinion of him has changed. Here's the page I found from a quick Google search. It's a little hard to ignore the icons, and the "Catcher in the Rye" discussion questions are ham-handed (Schoolteachers of the world: there are OTHER THEMES IN THE WORLD besides the progression from innocence to experience.) But I read "Nothing Gold Can Stay", liking it less than I remembered, and then I read "Out, Out-." Which I really didn't like at all.

I still like Frost's strict use of rhyme and meter, especially at a time when blank verse and experimentation were popular. That experimentation was necessary, I guess, but I don't find it enjoyable. I've always liked Frost's assertion that meaning is found in the tension between a restrictive technique and the pressure of language's limitless expression. There's a quote I seem to remember about the meter being the tension in the violin string, or the splutter in the skillet, or something, but I can't remember it now. If you can find it, I'd be much obliged.

What I didn't remember about Frost, though, was the heavy payload of Christian-style animistic and fall-of-the-material-world themes. Nature's first green is gold (but it's doomed!) Material objects are invested with animistic meaning! Watch out for the buzz-saw, it's EEEE-VIL!

When I was last reading Frost ten or twelve years ago, I also was freighted with a heavy payload of Christian "the world you see isn't the real, REAL world" themes, too: spiritual warfare was a big theme in the missions groups I worked with, and in that company it's natural to invest the material world with some kind of animistic importance. I once asked a pastor if God had an opinion about EVERY choice I made—did god care if I read the Newsweek instead of the Time magazine? Does God care, even a little bit, if I have the rye instead of the pumpernickel? Did each and every one of my choices have a good or bad repercussion?

I eventually managed to slow my spiritual record player down to 33RPM, and I'm now drawn to thinkers and writers that let the material world be what it is (whatever that is.) In his book Young Men and Fire, for example, Norman MacLean does a wonderful job of describing a highly-charged and emotional event—the accidental and avoidable death of thirteen bright young men in a forest fire. MacLean does it in a way that is compassionate, that respects the depth of pain and loss involved, but does not make the fire a parable, nor does he try to tell the story behind the story. The story is the story: what happened, happened, and we can take our own meaning, or no meaning, from it.

And so, back to spring. My own feeling is that nature's first green is gold, but it doesn't fade away: it gets stronger incrementally, until one day in early June, spring has turned into a seven hundred pound gorilla sitting on your chest, looking soulfully into your face and breathing hot, muggy breath on you. And sowing lesser ranunculus all over your lawn.

This article from the Atlantic Monthly in 1951 counteracted my new opinion of Frost somewhat, though it seems to have its own Cold War agenda (it mentions strife as a good thing an awful lot, doesn't it?)

Okay, that was what Alejandro's sister would call an "unfunny essay entry." As an antidote, go look at fisheye pictures of Moab, or INSANE JAPANESE MINIATURE KNITTING! Wow!

It's like matching your bag to your shoes, except different, because...
...okay, it's like matching your bag to your shoes.
I have a five-day road trip window in July. Also, Kate's dad and I are going to ride up to a family wedding in Bar Harbor this August. So, obviously, it's time to purchase the highest-quality, most bombproof, so-much-Cordura-and-Goretex-you're-practically-an-astronaut-in-this-suit riding gear out there. That's right, ladies, and gentlemen, I'm talking about the Hasselbad of motorcycle gear, the Aerostich Roadcrafter suit.

So, your thoughts about colors, please. I pinched the excellent Aerostich color selector from their site -- roll over the colors below, then hit the "comments" button and let me know what you think. Remember, I'm going to be riding it on a teutonic black uber-bike with (hopefully) white pinstriping.

Roadcrafter Suit Colors

(move cursor over color to view)

Suit Colors						Ballistic Colors
Blue	Black	Red	Gray	Hi-Viz		Blue	Black	Red	Gray	Silver

Standard suit colors: Mix & Match a red, black, gray, Hi-Viz yellow or cobalt blue shell with either red, black, gray, silver or cobalt blue set of ballistics patches.

Custom Ballistic Patch Colors [are available] Custom Color Viewer

Like a Tom Clancy novel, but all the details are about suburban life:

I am now the proud owner of a Scotts SpeedyGreen®1000 Broadcast Spreader, which I used on Sunday morning to distribute 20 pounds of Agway Greenlawn 31-3-5 Weed Control and Fertilizer. In order to combat an outbreak of Ranunculus Ficaria L. Which is rather pretty, but our neighbor Jerry is rabid on the subject of Ranunculus ("That damn stuff'll take over! I'll get rid of it if I have to kill the whole lawn!"), and we have to be seen doing our part in the Coalition of Willing Weedkillers.

The spreader was a lot of fun to operate, sending pretty cascades of waxy white pellets in every direction. Though it's going to take up a much-begrugded couple of square feet in the shed.

Mister Kurtz Barnes, he dead
A few weeks ago, Kate suggested that we visit the Barnes Foundation before it closes, moves, sells its collection, or otherwise ceases to be the cloistered entity it is today.

Things I knew about the Barnes (which wasn't much):

• It was founded by an eccentric visionary who believed that his gallery walls should be crammed with art and sculpture, all mixed together;
• He collected an incredible breadth and depth of Impressionist paintings;
• He had a *huge* chip on his shoulder (he was constantly snubbed by the established art world),
• He wanted the gallery to be used by "the common man", and not by all those damn toffs in beaver hats, and
• The gallery is harder to get into than a Catholic dormitory.

I also knew that the foundation is in serious financial trouble, after having fought intense litigious disputes over parking in their rich, residential neighborhood, and installing a bazillion-dollar climate control system. And that the board may, in the next few years, decide to break the will — sell some pieces, move the collection, or re-hang the art. They've done it before; a traveling exhibition of Barnes pieces was organized in 1993, which was explicitly against the terms of the foundation. Many are watching the board's decisions carefully, as it will set a precedent for other oddball billionaires who wish to lock up their art with byzantine, restrictive clauses in perpetuity.

So the little history I knew, combined with the rules Kate and I received after her three-step faxback "Mother may I" gallery reservation procedure, were (to say the least) somewhat off-putting. No heels with diameters less than two inches. No bulky jackets. Visitors will be searched at the door. No photographs, sketching, or drawing. Whew!

When Kate and I finally got through the three gatehouses at the Foundation's estate, after we'd been commanded to strip, don Tyvek jumpsuits and lock all our clothes in a locker, after we'd been through the de-lousing and had our heads shaved, the impression we got actually wasn't that eccentric. Or, if it was eccentric, you could see where Barnes was going with his vision.

Think of the Appalachian Trail, an ambitious idea begun roughly at the same time as the Barnes. THe Trail's titular founder, Benton MacKaye, was an oddball who envisioned a series of mountaintop enclaves populated with philosophers, artisans, and intelligentsia; each bastion connected to each other with footpaths. Sure, it was a little grandiose. Now imagine that MacKaye had enough money to buy all the land, build all the mountaintop retreats, and endow the trail with operating capital and rules that kept hoi polloi away. Substitute Impressionist art for footpaths, and cast the art establishment in the role of the riff-raff, and there you have the Barnes: an educational institution meant for those "who toil with their hands", and in which each room is organized by an educational theme.

In the master gallery, for example, one wall is devoted to the use of complementary colors in the French color system of the thirties. Yellows are paired with violets in two Renoir nudes, a Cezanne still-life, three landscapes, and assorted other drawings and sketches. The paintings are all hung together on a burlap wall, none with cards showing their title or date. Bits of bright ironwork are hung between the paintings, echoing the themes presented.

Frankly, it works. I quickly stopped looking for titles, and almost as quickly stopped missing the dates and other information. Barnes was self-taught, and some of his arrangements didn't click. Plus, his infatuation with Soutine was misplaced. But some were real eye-openers: there was a display on the influence of El Greco on both Renoir and Modigliani that got a real "a-ha!" from me. And, jeez, how can you argue with 180 Renoirs and a stack of Van Goghs?

Kate and I left the Barnes feeling much more positive about it. So Barnes was an eccentric; it was his money, and his paintings, and ever since the state of Pennsylvania threatened to revoke the foundation's not-for-profit status, the access rules have been relaxed. The collection is magnificent, though it contains a lot of dreck. The cluttered walls weren't as off-putting as I'd thought they'd be, and I actually liked the absence of informational cards. Kate and I will go back in the fall, and I'm looking forward to spending more time in front of the Van Goghs. Next time, though, we'll wear skintight unitards with no pockets, in order to smooth out relations with the guards.

The devil finds work for all hands
It's been slower than usual at [My employer], with Passover and Easter: many of our clients took off early on Wednesday, and won't be returning until Monday morning. So, naturally, my cube-neighbor Jeremy Fain decided to put on his bunny suit and distribute candy around the office. Jeremy didn't participate in Mustaches for Kids; he usually sticks to the activities when he can be sure that he'll have the women in the office eating out of his hand. At which he invariably succeeds, and today was no exception. (Kieran took the pictures.)

Meanwhile, new [My employer] hire Todd Bender was bursting with ideas on how to make piles of money using The Ultimate Water Gun. Todd's immortal soul is in danger, I'm afraid: he was babbling on about how to create synergy and generate piles of money using "brand awareness." We politely explained the flaws in that business model using the example of the "Underpants Gnome" scheme, then politely and firmly convinced him to appear at the Ed Sullivan Theater this summer wearing the UWG and a shiny, padded pair of Boy Wonder tights.

The results of Todd's screen test are encouraging. Also, you can see the wireless helmet-cam now mounted to the UWG; it's the blue box on top of the nozzle. Ideas for deploying the helmet cam are welcome.

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.