Where Are My Teeth?

About those Olympics

Whenever I hear the opening bars of the olympic theme, I'm transported back to the summers we spent in Germany when I was a kid -- in particular, watching TV in the upstairs dining room of a hotel that no longer exists. It was back in the days when the whole country had two, maybe three channels, and one of them seemed to show nothing but badly dubbed british and japanese science fiction and the original trash sports game show, Spiel Ohne Grenzen. Except for events like the moon landing, almost no one else at the hotel watched television (one couple had been coming since 1928 and didn't need any such newfangled entertainments), so it was mostly me and one or two of the other youngsters.

But to the point: from the mid-60s forward, the Munich broadcast center used the opening bars of the olympic melody as its call sign. Come the summer of 1972, I was a bit taken aback to learn that the music had a different association -- not to mention that it went on much longer.

Of course, that's not what most people remember about the Munich olympics. I was too young to understand what was going on or (in those days of hijackings and bombings and kidnappings for one cause or another throughout the supposedly civilized parts of the world) that it was particularly unusual. Reading about the massive (although apparently not all that effective) security surrounding the Athens games brought some of those memories back. And some of the coverage -- all us, all the time -- made me think about why people might imagine that committing such an atrocity was a good or even a conceivable idea.

The Things We Think About

For a little while when you start working, Parker's Perfect makes it almost as hard to see through your goggles and glasses as if you hadn't applied any anti-fog solution at all. Until you've built up enough moisture in the enclosed space just before your eyes, the surfactant catches only a speckled film of droplets. It's like looking through a very personal drizzle.

Then, of course, the view clears and you get to see what crappy work you were doing when you couldn't see.

Thinking about trivia like that was a good way for me to keep my mind occupied while I was sanding the new sheetrock inside the closet this morning (with the door closed to keep the cat out and the dust in). Pondering the fact that sanded joint compound is far smoother than the paper surface of the gypsum board kept down the internal voice that would otherwise have been shouting, "Hey! It's almost 100 degrees in here, and between the shopvac and the power sander you're going to go deaf even with those earplugs" or "If I fell off the step-stool and hit my head I wonder whether Julie would hear anything".

Or "You missed a spot."

Anyway, that's done, and better yet, the 80-degree air in my office feels positively cool.

Ugliest Shop Cabinet Ever

But at least it gets rid of most of the scrap plywood that had been lying around ever since I tore up the old shop floor during the fall we moved in. And it replaces, with playload space to spare, an eight-foot-long table that was shoved up against the garage door (back when there was a garage door on that side of the shop instead of a spiffy new well-insulated wall with a real door and two real windows) to catch all the crud that didn't go anywhere else because there was no storage space. (And each of the four drawers -- gosh but I love glue and nailguns -- has 20" full-extension slides rates for 150 pounds.)

All of this in turn means there will be enough room to walk between my workbench and the table saw and walk around the other side of the workbench. All of which is good because I have a huge pile of plywood to cut into pieces and glue up in the next couple of weeks, and a few days ago there was barely room in the shop to turn around carrying a 2x4.

Eventful

So today was blood day, and darned if I didn't start to fall over again. I had filled up my bag (after a little uncertainty with finding the vein under the skin and some extra pulling and pushing of the needle) and was wating for the nurse to take the needle out of my arm (she was busy with the donor on the next couch over, who had also gone faint) when things started to go grey. Eventually someone lowered my head and raised my feet.

When the needle came out, I kept leaking for a while even though my fingers were clamped down pretty tightly over the puncture. Pressure bandage solved that, but I must say that having another patient right there being fanned and elevated slowed the staff's reaction just a bit.

Then things got weird: both of my hands felt as if they were swelling up and vibrating in time with the fans positioned all over the room. It might just have been circulation starting back up, but still a very strange sensation. Someone else told me to breathe deeply in through my nose and out through my mouth, and eventually that calmed things down.

At the refreshment table there was a consensus that this was the worst day in quite a while for people falling over. The screened-off section was full. Could have been the heat, or the humidity, or the extra stress from doing history and preliminary sticks in a hot room crowded with ten tables instead of a nice cool basement.

This session's prize drawing, meanwhile, was not only for free Red Sox tickets but a $75 gasoline gift certificate. More precious even than blood.

Repetition Compulsion

Maybe it was already cracked when it came from the factory and merely got worse. However it started, every time I came to the bottom of a left-foot stride on the elliptical there was a thump that ran up through my knee. It wasn't the squeal just past the top of every right-foot stride as the wheel dipped back into its track, nor the grinding squeak on every revolution of the flywheel as some interior part failed to clear another. It hurt.

So I checked the bearings and the lubrication, readjusted everyting I could think of until I finally took a close enough look at the wheel to see that part of the hub was missing. Oops.

Every time the thump came in pretty much the same place. And why not? The wheel rolls up, the wheel rolls down, and every time the broken part of the hub faces bottom at the same point, the point of maximum pressure. (Well, that's not entirely true. I tried rotating the wheel a quarter or half or three quarters of a turn so that the thump came somewhere else, and instead after a few minutes it had slid minutely, stride by stride into its preferred position. Ouch.)

Did you know that when you try to order replacement parts there are at least 20 different models of elliptical machine with the same model number? And five of them with the same letter designation as well? Luckily they all use the same wheel...

Not as bad as it might be

If this story is accurate, things on the energy front aren't quite so bad. Although using waste cornstalks and such for conversion to fuel poses some problems in terms of not returning nutrients to the ground (and I wouldn't want to think about what happens when huge swaths of marginal land get put back into production) it's certainly better than just living on nonrenewables.

10 Hours worth of cash

could fend off starvation for millions of people. It would have been 2 hours worth this spring, but the attention of the international community has been directed elsewhere. Go figure.

Hail and Farewell

The equipment that accounted for 30% of the Hubble Space Telescope's current observation schedule has just shut down. It was installed in 1997 and designed to last through 2002, so I guess we got more use out of it than we deserved. One of the power supplies failed a few years back, and now it appears the other one has gone south as well.

"The STIS instrument, which went into a suspended mode Tuesday, was not slated for replacement or upgrade as part of any future servicing mission" says the press release. Translated: nothing quite like this instrument will be available to astronomers before the beginning of 2012 (when the Webb Space Telescope will start producing results if nothing untoward happens to its schedule between now and then). And if any of the other instruments on the HST fall over between now and then, that's just too bad. We've got a mission to Mars to spend the NASA budget on.

Did you ever get a feeling about trend lines turning in the wrong direction?

Nominative Determinism

What is it about roads named 17?

This afternoon on the way to the house of someone I knew slightly, I took the route recommended by Yahoo maps -- a simple jaunt from Vermont route 2 to 100B to 100 to 17 to 116 south and half a mile on a little side road. Fastest possible way, the mapping software said. What it didn't say was that it's fast only if you like roads that have big warning signs posted saying "NOT RECOMMENDED FOR WINTER TRAVEL BY TRUCKS OR BUSES", which translates to 2000 feet of rise from valley to pass and 180-degree switchbacks piled uphill until you lose count. Well, until you get over the top and the intermittent rain turns driving and you catch a bare glimpse (quite enough, thank you) of a beautiful gorge a few yards the other side of first hairpin turn on the downslope.

Then again, maybe I'm badmouthing the California version, which is only scary because there are alwayshalf a dozen multimillionaires in muscle cars trying to pass on the right and three or four trucks that think lane markings are purely advisory. What you should really be thinking about in California is this.

Sharp Claws

Skillet's claws seem to grow at different rates. Sometimes they're all sharp at the same time, and it's a bother to clip them because you can usually only get through most of one paw before he wakes up. (He goes back to sleep on laps easily enough.) Sometimes only one or two and the dewclaw have hooked flesh-tearing points while the rest are still blunt.

A few moments' thought reveals that it doesn't really matter how fast the claws grow; what matters is how fast they shed. When Skillet paws the carpet or some other scratchable surface, the top layer of a claw comes off, carrying with it the blunt surround and leaving behind the sharp new point beneath. Ingenious, really.

Only Three Months Late

So last night, a little after midnight, I finished a project I've been working on since late winter, a web site for our local chapter of the National Writers Union. (Somehow things like that just call out to go live in the early morning hours -- not to mention that the ad for our annual meeting, which appears in print today, points people at the site for directions.)

It's the little things that get you -- for example, if you only have FTP access to a site, it's a real pain to move files from one place to another (say, from the development directory to the one visible to the world at large). You have to rename each file or directory to its new pathname individually. If you want to copy a bunch of files rather than moving them, you pretty much have to download them all and then upload them to the new place.

Things like that stick out for me because I know almost nothing about building web sites. When the real geek who built the site for us exhausted the billable hours in our budget it was a major triumph just to figure out how to change the introductory text on the home page or cut a superfluous apostrophe out of the title illustrations. When one of our testers found out that he couldn't write book descriptions with apostrophes in them, it took three days to work up enough courage to cut and past a dozen lines of code from some other page to fix the problem. I now know just enough about PHP and MySQL to be dangerous.

Very dangerous. Because as soon as a site is up and more or less running, you see all the things that ought to be different. Book listings should have provisions for multiple authors. Writers ought to be able to say a few words about themselves, and read one another's work without going through multiple login screens. All these things and more will require messing with the database that undergirds the whole site, quite possibly blowing 1s and 0s all over the subether. Good thing it'll take me a couple of days or weeks just to download a new copy of all the files.