Atomic Nerds

We’re back, we’re just exhausted. We managed to pack about six days’ worth of stuff into the three, so we got up at six to get to the show and went to bed at well past midnight… not a good formula. To top it off, the catch-up pile looming today would have been imposing even if we’d spent all weekend working.

You would have gotten a cute picture of Kang passed out still in her show-groomed spiffiness, but when I tried the first version of this post, Wordpress’s puckish new image uploader decided a great default would be “format it so it screws up the entire front page”.

So screw it. I’m beat. Content tomorrow!

Readers lacking severe brain trauma have probably noticed we’re a bit short-tempered this week, and it appears our impatience with idiocy has been well received. Unfortunately, we’re going to have to pull the free ice cream truck over to the side of the road for a day or two. Similarly, the upgrade to version 2.fucked-up of wordpress seems to have done bad things to one of our main anti-spam lines, so there’ll be some crap floating around for a few days too.

This Friday, Saturday, and Sunday is Kang’s first show. The rest of the week building up to it has been a lagoon of chaos preparing for this (it doesn’t qualify as a sea of chaos until we cross state lines). Organizing with the breeder/handler, rushed AKC registration papers, last minute under-the-wire escapades, trying to meet up with what appears to be some sort of crazy-ass all-Akita-owner dinner (they have live music at this dinner - if anyone starts a betting pool on whether we show up on the news because of that, I want a cut of the winnings), trying to sneak a quick appointment with our tattoo guy Mark as long as we’re around, and trying to juggle all the normal shit around the labs has been, ah, “interesting.”

If anybody in the right neck of the woods wants to try to catch us, the show is being held at the Expo New Mexico center at the state fair grounds (go in gate 4 off San Pedro). Kang’s shows start at 2:30 in ring 3 on Friday, 9:25 in ring 4 on Saturday, and 9:05 in ring 7 on Sunday. Given that I have absolutely no idea what the hell is going on beyond that bare minimum, all I can offer by way of help to pick us out is that I’ll probably be wearing this shirt as an over-shirt over a white or black t-shirt with blue jeans and hiking boots. Not a lot to go on, I know, but like I said, I don’t know WTF except when the Akita stuff is, and there are what, three, maybe four folks in-state that read this?

Anyway. With all that, I’m afraid we’re going to be lacking for new content until at least Monday. In the meanwhile, here’s our little, um… champion? Hell, I’ll be happy if she manages to not get disqualified for punching a judge.

Wish us luck, folks. Maybe this won’t turn into a live version of “Best In Show” if we’re lucky.

As has been previously pointed out, most everybody seems to be suffering some fundamental delusions about the exact nature of the job we’re currently considering candidates for. Namely, the job of executive branch of our Glorious Gummint: this mostly entails ordering the military about, being the ultimate last word in pardons and reprieves, signing treaties, being an enabler or obstruction for Congressionally authored legislation, talking to Important Foreigners, nominating SC judges and various more minor government-appointed jobs, and giving us a big talk every once in awhile to remind us he’s still there. (This last function has decreased in importance since the advent of C-Span.) Nowhere in the job description is anything about abortion, the state of marriage these days, energy policy, health care, public health in general, gun control or lack thereof, or any other of a dozen issues that we demand their opinions on and then proceed to collectively pretend they might ever have any direct power over. This is a particularly silly dance with respect to the economy, which the government believes itself to be in charge of in much the same way our local county council fancies itself to be in charge of traffic: they both confuse the power to obstruct, impede, and complicate with the power to control and guide. (Memo to the local legislators in question: there are only two main streets in town, some thirty thousand more people work in town than live there, and we are on a mesa. Unless you plan on having the Lab suspend some laws of physics locally, you are not going to get rid of rush hour.)

Not only are we basically confused about what job we’re even asking our candidates to do, we are completely obsessed with the selection process, which now begins more than a year before the actual relevant election does. (I’m not even going to BEGIN to go into the people who apparently believe George W. Bush is running again.) This process has essentially become a concentrated singularity of every political tic and stammer we as a nation have collectively accumulated*, as every neurosis we’ve managed to attach to the mythical figure at the head of our schizophrenic government plays out like a multi-month version of a Miss America interview for each would-be contender. We now have to do it twice: once to pick a candidate for each party, in which the candidates must compete to please the perpetually aggravated base of their own faction, and then again nationally, in which the candidates must take back most of what they said during the primaries to avoid making the voters who don’t belong to either fringe stampede to the other guy in terror. Although this process is messy, tiresome, and ugly, it is not in any way mysterious: the rules and arcana are well-defined, if inconvenient.

Normally all of this is reasonably easy to ignore, unless you’ve recently been reading history and the actual theory and instructions behind our government. It’s one of the small indignities of living in the future; in the past, the majority may have been ignorant and confused, but there was no way for millions of them at a time to remind you of that in so many small ways every day, thanks to the inefficiencies of communication. Sometimes, though, something still pulls you up short, mostly when one of the would-bes in the theoretical position of needing to know how these things work betrays that it’s not just pandering, they really don’t have any clue.

Mike Huckabee, one-time Republican presidential wannabe and current sore loser, is one such individual:

An advocate for better health since his diabetes diagnosis five years ago, Mike Huckabee warned Wednesday that the illness may pose a greater threat than terrorism to the United States.

Nearly 59 million Americans are at risk for type 2 diabetes. The former Arkansas governor said the epidemic would be “the lead story” across the country if tens of millions were in danger of terrorist attacks.

“The greatest challenge to America may not be something from without, it may be something from within,” Huckabee said. “It’s our own unhealthy habits.”

Up to a certain extent, Huckabee can be forgiven; he’s addressing a conference on diabetes as the keynote speaker, and not the press or America at large. However, even when pandering to a very specific audience, there are certain things you expect to be implicitly recognized from a politician. Among them are these:

1. There is a distinction between a threat from a demented individual, group, or state to directly attack Americans and a threat from the moral failings of Americans. Specifically, one of them is in fact the very definition of a national security issue- which is the responsibility of government- and one of them is not, unless you want to stretch national security to include the security of cellular insulin sensitivity. (Are we to protect autosomal cells as individuals separate from and sovereign within citizens, now? Will autoimmune disorders become civil wars?)

2. We do not generally regard poor decision-making skills (or decisions made that merely disagree with our sentiments of what is optimal rather than harming us) as an equivalent threat to the body politic as deliberate attempts to blow the body politic into small and completely nonfunctional pieces. One thing may technically kill more people, but we don’t evaluate national security issues based on body count over time. If we did, the most logical conclusion would be devoting all national resources to defeating cellular senescence.

3. It is not, technically, the job of any aspect of the government to make decisions about basic daily functions for us. Unfortunately, this is the most understandable point of delusion, as so many people share it. One would think, though, that it might have occurred to him that we don’t have nationalized health care yet and saved its more blatant Big Brother suggestions for after its implementation.

Although it pales in the face of these basic failures of understanding, Huckabee is still baffled about one more thing he really shouldn’t be:

He touted an idea he floated to the U.S. Department of Agriculture while he was governor. It would leverage the value of food stamps based on the nutritional content of food.

Food stamps worth $1 would give consumers $1.25 in buying power if the vouchers were used on healthy foods like fruits and vegetables. A $1 voucher would decrease in value to 75 cents for foods with little nutritional value.

“I never could get anybody to go along with it,” Huckabee said, blaming the lack of USDA interest on government red tape.

Mr. Huckabee, the USDA knows exactly who its primary customers are, and whose lobbyists create the pressure that defines the rules and their jobs. They are the same people whose interests are behind the reasons we have soda (and everything else) flavored with high-fructose corn syrup, why corn ethanol subsidies were pushed through with such a quickness, and why official dietary recommendations for people with type II diabetes still include starchy grains as the base of the “food” pyramid even though bathing their cells in a constant flow of carbohydrates is exactly how they became diabetic in the first place: they are grain growers. Grain is easier and more economical to grow, transport, store, and process than healthy fruits and vegetables are, which is why more people farm it, which is why they are the biggest and meanest section of the agricultural lobby, which is why getting the USDA to use food stamps to twist the arms of the poor into healthy choices is like getting the Crips and the Bloods to spearhead an effort to stamp out crack. We may kid ourselves into believing the churches that are a more familiar environment for Mr. Huckabee give charity without prejudice and always work in the best interests of the disadvantage, but believing that government “charity” is impartial to its own interests versus those of the hapless recipient is roughly akin to retaining a fervent belief in the Easter Bunny’s impartial distribution of chocolate eggs.

In other News of the Terminally Confused, we have the wife of another presidential hopeful, who is apparently determined to capture the role of most obnoxious first lady-to-be from her husband’s chief political rival, even if he doesn’t get the job: Michelle Obama on how “they” are blocking Barack’s nomination. (Note: I normally don’t like to link to partisan discussions of what somebody said rather than the most direct source, but I like linking directly to long videos even less. The link to her C-SPAN recorded speech is in the article.)

According to Mrs. Obama, her husband is still not the nominee because “they” keep “raising the bar for this man”. First he wasn’t the nominee because they said he couldn’t organize, then he organized, then they said he couldn’t raise money, then he raised money, then he couldn’t win in the primaries and caucuses and then he did, and JUST HOW MUCH DOES HE HAVE TO PROVE?

Unfortunately for Mrs. Obama- or rather, obviously to everyone BUT her- is that “they” are the very same “they” that set the bar in exactly the same place for Hillary Clinton and for John McCain: the people who vote in primaries and caucuses, who will go on to be exactly the same them that vote in the general election, who are exactly the same them that have the final say in whether or not Barack Obama is going to be president or not. Everybody else is just a commentator, trying to predict what “they” will do. Campaign, primaries, caucuses, convention, nomination, general election: same they the whole time. Same bars in exactly the same places for all the same people the whole time. Yes, it’s a long and irritating process, but it’s the same one for everyone, and for a very good reason: deciding who is going to be president for the next four years is a huge one, even if that job isn’t quite as influential as most people believe it to be.

Either Michelle Obama is completely uneducated in basic civics, or she really, truly, deep down in her heart believes that, regardless of the rules, the only fair thing to do is declare her husband the nominee (and presumably also president- have you SEEN the old white dude the Republicans picked?) because it is his turn, which she thinks “they” the people at some curiously undefined point said he could have just as soon as he accomplished the bare basics of being a politician on a national scale.

That never worked on the playground for *me*. However, I learned that it didn’t and stopped trying it. Did it really work out well for her that often, or does she just not learn? Maybe it’s in the same secret manual for the presidency that details transubstantiation of enemies into allies, soul therapy, and the mass conscription of citizens as workers for “change”.

Hat Tips: Hot Air and Neo-Neocon.

*If only there were a solution to memetic load as elegant as the one so many organisms enjoy as the solution to genetic load.

All right, I was going to work up a whole thing explaining how luddites were the bane of all reality, that people who cry “The sky is falling” simply because they can’t follow the math required to show why the sky is staying exactly where it has been for the last few decades are just so precious and wonderful that they should be sterilized and prevented from voting, but fuck it. I’m too tired for that shit, so I’m just going to cut to the chase.

As the folks at Gizmodo helpfuly pointed out: Hey Morons! CERN is not going to destroy the earth, morons!

Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up*. I know a lot of folks have heard how size doesn’t matter. I would like to show otherwise.

There is a very simple equation to determine the radius of the event horizon of a black hole:
Radius = (2*G*M)/C^2

M is the mass of the object forming the black hole in kilograms. C is the speed of light in meters per second. G is a funny number known more formally as Newton’s Gravitational Constant.

Let’s just go hog wild and assume that rather than colliding sub-atomic particles, CERN is going to collide bowling balls. Let’s be even more generous and assume that both bowling balls are entirely consumed in a perfect collision and combine to form a black hole. I like round, easy to work with numbers, so let’s say each bowling ball weighs 5 kilograms (11 lbs), giving us a 10kg black hole (those of you in the peanut gallery who have some idea where this is going, please keep the giggles to yourselves).

The official speed of light is the mysterious number C. Translated, that works out to 299,792,458 meters per second. Amazingly, it isn’t even anything funky like “meters per second squared” like you get for the wildly confusing realm of acceleration. Nope, just plain ‘ol linear meters-traveled-in-one-second velocity. Now because that number is unattractive and doesn’t look good in a cocktail dress, we’re going to call that an even 300 million m/s. If you are bad at math and need someone to explain to you why it is acceptable to discard 207,542 meters per second (which for trivia’s sake would be mach 605 at sea level) I suggest you either show this to your physics teacher, who will then probably beat your ass for your anti-CERN Chicken Little bullshit, or give up now.

If you are afraid that CERN will destroy the world with black holes, there is no fucking way I am going to explain specifically what G is. I will instead offer a more suitable-for-luddites explanation: G is what happens when you take a “Xena: Warrior Princess” fanfic and combine it with five jars of peanut butter while on a tropical rainforest vacation to observe the rare and endangered linoleum aardvark. G is 6.672 x 10^-11 N*m^2/kg^2. If you are not afraid of CERN, G is a constant that makes calculations involving gravity (such as you might find in things involving black holes, or planetary orbits, etc), for lack of a more elegant summation, Just Work. The math isn’t that hard to follow, but it’s way more than I want to cover here. If you want to look it up, I applaud you whole heartedly. Moving on.

Now plugging everything into our equation, we find that the radius of a black hole made with two 5kg bowling balls will be (2 x 6.6e-11N*m^2/kg^2 x 10kg) / (3e9 m/s)^2. The radius (that’s halfway across the widest part of a circle, just to refresh) of a black hole caused by 10kg will thus be 1.46×10^-28 meters, or .000000000000000000000000000146 meters.

That’s pretty damn small. Now we don’t know exactly the radius of a proton for reasons that would boggle the Anti-CERN luddite even more than this black hole nonsense, but we can peg the bastard somewhere between 1.5×10^-15 and 1.5×10^-18 meters. That means that the radius of a proton, a damned large sub-atomic particle, is about TEN BILLION times larger than the radius of a black hole created by slamming two BOWLING BALLS together.

Let me restate that for clarity.

A PROTON is TEN BILLION TIMES LARGER than a black hole formed by two BOWLING BALLS.

The radius of the earth is about 6.3×10^6 meters. That means the radius of the earth is 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times larger than the radius of a black hole created very improbably with 10kg worth of bowling balls.

Now I don’t live in Geneva, or have a PostHoleDigger, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the mass of a hadron or two is just a skosh less than 10kg. In fact, a hadron will be less than 1×10^-10 kg. Hell, a proton is 1.67×10^-27kg, and as I said, in sub-atomic terms a proton is (this is technical, bear with me) Fucking Huge. Normal physics may break down inside the event horizon of a black hole, but outside that horizon it’s just one big-ass dense sphere in the best case math. Even ignoring the fact that a black hole can “eat” itself to death given enough mass or energy (they’re interchangable, remember? Wow, isn’t physics fun?) the fact of the matter is that any black holes created by CERN will be so small as to look tiny even next to the sum total of the Democratic Party’s credibility on the notion that they support gun owners. I am unconcerned for the survival of the planet where the actions of CERN are involved.

Now at this point, I’m going to be generous. Rather than use the $500 promised by WeDontGetPhysics.com LHCConcerns.com for something frivolous like an anti-dragon gun, I will be more than happy to use that prize to fund a grant to provide one femtosecond’s worth of electricity to power CERN in the name of Atomic Nerds.

Class dismissed.

*It is late, it has been a week made entirely of Mondays, and I am tired. If I misplaced an order or three of magnitude on some of the scientific notation-to-English translations, or typo’d a few 0s, please forgive (and gently correct) me. If I made any major math errors, please point them out so I can scrub the egg from my face.

You know the book you’ve picked out is going to be a winner when you flip open to a random page, and the first words you see are “Pain-emitting transducers” in a diagram.

In related news, I’ll be shouting at the surf claiming my $500 from the idiot thoughtful, concerned individual in the CERN comments later this evening. Meanwhile, we’re still hammering out the last few kinks from the upgrade to wordpress version 2.suck, so stand by. (Stephen R. & Squeaky: Thanks for the tips. The dashboard is almost livable again.

We’ve finally gotten off our (my) butts and upgraded to the latest version of wordpress. So far, Squeaky is right. Everything should look the same to you fine folks dropping by, but the new command & control center sucks ass.

Anyway, if anyone runs into anything broken or fubar’d give us a shout.

A few years ago when CERN was coming online, they announced that some of the experiments would attempt to create black holes to study them in controlled and verifiable conditions (as opposed to the “Is that…y’think it’ll… huh, go figure…” method required by the distances involved in astronomy). Hell, some might even be created by accident. A great many people unfamiliar with the separation between reality and Disney naturally began to panic.

“Ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod! They will make a black hole and it will eat the planet and then there will be some confusing scene with a giant firey ball rolling around* and I think Slim Pickin’s is involved somehow! WHY IS SLIM PICKENS IN SWITZERLAND?!”

After some rather frustrating attempts to explain Hawking Radiation and Schwarzchild geometry to people who struggled through elementary school arithemetic, it looked like we had things squared away and were ready to proced with tests involving forces not hospitable to life as we know it. I for one support any operation that boils down to “Hey, what happens if we concentrate the power consumption of the eastern seaboard of the US into a space roughly the size of Barack Obama’s integrity?” You just know something cool is gonna happen.

Well, some time later we grew us a new crop of whackjobs. New fears included strange quarks turning the earth into a hyper-dense burrito, and perhaps more amusingly, that CERN was going to break causality. Russian scientists, well known for their top-notch vodka think tanks figured the planned tests would just rip a big ‘ol tear in the fabric of time and let cylons rape dinosaurs and have soulless robots running for President in the US….

Dammit, someone better check on the dinosaurs.

Anyway, moving on, we find that everything old becomes new again. Now a pair of luddite jackasses with no scientific knowledge more practical than “fire burns” concerned citizens in Hawaii are suing CERN to block the experiments (I’m so sorry that link goes to the NY Times. I’ll have a better link in a few sentences). For one of them, it isn’t the first time around trying to block experiements he has no understanding of, as Mr. (not Dr.) Wagner sued Brookhaven National Labs in 1999 and 2000 to stop them from operating the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, which has since spectacularly failed to destroy the world. A separate and shorter article cuts the sensationalism we must endure from the irrelevant Grey Lady, and wins the Title Of the Day prize for accurate reporting.

The best part of this, though, is that the folks at CERN seem to be getting a trifle fed up with having to appease folks with all the scientific grounding of Punxsutawney Phill. Responding to the allegations of the lawsuit in Hawaii:

“Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.””

You hear that people? DRAGONS. CERN is going to make FUCKING DRAGONS! Everybody better use that economic stimulus check to get an elephant gun because DRAGONS! Sagan didn’t know how right he was about a demon-haunted world, and I for one couldn’t be happier. All I need to do now is figure out how to type “iddqd” into real life and I’ll be set.

*I last saw the movie when I was about six. Cut me some slack.

FUCK.

All right, I know I promised a photo tour of Los Alamos as a whole, but we ran into some snafus there. Thanks to our normal hermit-like attention to the machinations of others, I wasn’t aware that yesterday’s car show was going to be a part of a huge town-wide Fest until we got there in the morning. Thanks to that, a lot of the more interesting landmarks around town, such as Ashley Pond, and Fuller Lodge, were obscured by a funk of hippies holding an arts and crafts fair. Not wishing to spend the day followed by an angry glowing orb, I stuck to the car show section of town. Pics are thumbnails to (mostly) 800×600 versions, since there may be a few weirdo heathens in the crowd that don’t care about Corvettes. Sick freaks.

The show was split into two groups, one group on display only, the other group for actual judging and trophies and the like. In this map, the show-only group was parked in the parking lot under the “F” of Fuller Lodge Park. The show cars were parked along Central, which was closed off from 20th to Oppenheimer. This is the view from the northwest corner of the lot around 9:30ish. A few more cars trickled in by about noon, but this is the bulk, around 50 cars total. There were about 35 cars along Central for judging.

A view of the north row, with an unintentional concentration of C5s:

Here’s a 2003 Z06 I’m partial to. Lacking my own plastic penis extension to enter in the show, one of my jobs was hot-shoe for the folks with more money than sense cars than drivers. This particular Z06 does very very nicely on East Jemez Road.

My photography does not do the color or quality of this paint job justice. This car belonged on the street for judging.

The view from the western end of Central. The roof of Fuller Lodge is visible in the background. The hippies are on the other side of the lodge.

When I was creeping up on driving age, the only vehicle we had at the time in running condition with a standard transmission was my dad’s ‘65 Stingray. The clutch was half burned out from an ill-advised entry into a parade some years earlier, so with an attitude of “Can’t make it too much worse…” my old man set about teaching me the fine art of clutch operation in a classic. I’ve had a soft spot for ’65s ever since. Neither of these, unfortunately, is the one I learned in. It’s currently garaged and waiting for new wheel bearings and wiring.

The next few thumbnails link to slightly larger images than the rest. This car is a C5 that belongs to a family friend named Lori, who lives in Albuquerque and loves this stuff more than enough to consider a hundred mile jaunt the start of a great weekend. Lori, and her husband Larry, have invested a tremendous amount in customizing her C5 for racing, both drag and regular, and the woman can drive the wheels off just about anything. The paint job on her ride is simply beautiful.

Like a dumbass, I forgot to snap a picture of one of the more impressive parts of the work. The inside of her hood is painted as well, depicting the back of the eagle on the hood. It sounds slightly gimicky, but the effect is truly impressive. In this next picture, we can see the results of a trip to Bowling Green for the 50th anniversary museum tour. Those signatures are the members of the team that assembled her particular Vette. And yes, that’s a big-ass supercharger sitting there as well.

For some reason, she has a non-standard shift knob and some extra switches.

Lori’s car doesn’t have as much room for luggage as other Vettes.

The paint theme continues. It also continues down the side of the car, but apparently that picture fell victim to failing camera batteries.

At last check, she reported 640 rear-wheel horsepower. Yes, she can use it all.

The show attracted entrants from as far away as Colorado Springs. Since I don’t recognize this paint job I’m going to have to conclude this is an out-of-towner. Again, my pictures don’t do it justice.

A few days ago, Skeeler from Industrial Strength Science and I were discussing the new ZR1 Corvette, and more to the point, the supercharger they’ve added. I opined that while I’m sure the huffer they used is more efficient and better suited to Corvette applications, I still prefer to see a big bug scoop sticking out of the hood when someone says “supercharged.” Fortunately, one of the folks that came up from Albuquerque was kind enough to oblige me.

And finally, a shot from the southeastern side of Central, with our still mostly-barren mountains in the background.

Now I mentioned some failing batteries a piece back. This bit of bad luck actually led to a damned fortunate discovery. While we trooped down Central an extra block to the hardware store, we passed one of Los Alamos’ landmarks, a department store roughly older than time. In its original incarnation, the building was the town movie theater during the Project. Previously known as Clemment & Benner’s (and still known as such to some folks who have been here long enough and are too stubborn to learn new things), the renamed CB Fox is basically a modern version of the general store. Selling things from furniture to luggage to suits, it’s a popular town spot. Walking by the window of the downstairs furniture section, LabRat spotted one damn cool clock.

All in all, an excellent, if tiring, day marred only by some bumbling ineptness on the part of county officials, but that particular rant I suspect is interesting only to those involved in planning the show.

Despite some fuckery from the county (above and beyond their normal incompetence! Go county!), the car show went pretty well. I’m going to organize the pictures this evening and put up some commentary on them once the dust settles a little and we’re not all drag-ass tired. In the meanwhile, I give you the search of the day:

Y’know what? Fine.

Before we moved in to our current spacious abode and black hole of time, energy, and money, we were renters.

As I have explained in the past, the nature of Los Alamos’s structure- entirely centered around the national laboratory, having no other reason for existence and damned little room to expand beyond that reason- creates some strange local market effects. Just as the employment pool is highly polarized into “fast food worker” and “nuclear physicist” ends, so is the housing market. At one end, you have apartment complexes like “the Caves” and similar hovels, suitable for grad students and other vermin. At the other, you have houses you pay seven figures for because Enrico Fermi once lived there. What there is available in between tends to be clustered pretty close to the poles. One step above the Caves are the dilapidated duplexes the government built en masse when they realized that they were going to have to set up slightly more permanent nerd-cages when the Lab simply gained momentum in the postwar era rather than closing down when the Project ended. Like almost every other young couple with our income, we lived in iterations of these until we could afford to buy a house not held together with spackle and duct tape. The duplexes cover the vast majority of the residential areas of the city and are fundamentally identical.

As you might expect from fifties-era government housing, built quickly and indifferently, “home improvement” would not be an accurate description of our efforts. Staying ahead of the rate of deterioration was. The first one we rented was only barely insulated, featured a temperamental furnace, and had a rodent problem- mostly because the walls were beginning to separate from the floors at many points. The second one was quite a bit better maintained, although we still had to put a copper rod in the backyard to ground the electrical outlets in the computer room. It also, as we discovered, had some chronic plumbing problems in the bathroom that tended to express themselves by draining into the kitchen. Conveniently, there were access panels to this plumbing at floor level on the second floor and in the ceiling of the kitchen.

One afternoon after Stingray had finished exercising his profanity range while fixing the leak for the second or third time- which required opening up both panels- it occurred to us to wonder where the cat was. Things seemed suspiciously quiet and calm; normally he’d be busy sniffing us and yattering about the unforgivable disturbance to the daily routine. Naturally, the inevitable answer to this question loomed over us more or less at once.

“You don’t think he’s-”
“Of course he is.”

We trooped upstairs to call hopefully for the cat, and poked our heads into the second-floor panel.

“Zydeco!”
Faintly and from the bowels of the crawlspace… “….Yow.”
“Fuck.”

As he was not clinging to the pipes, it was quickly determined that he was not reachable from the second floor. We trooped back down to the kitchen and opened the ceiling panel.

“ZYDECO!”
“YOOOOOOOW!”

Stingray mounted the stepladder, disappeared partway into the ceiling, and opened negotiations. I think the “Here kitty, sweet kitty, come on kitty” lasted all of thirty seconds before “STUPID CAT!”, “JUST HOLD STILL!”, and “GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING COCKROCKET MISERABLE LITTLE SACK OF SUCK!” started in. Stingray retreated and proposed leaving the cat in the ceiling until he was good and ready to leave the ceiling.

Normally, tender feminine sensibilities are something I don’t experience unless I’m on something mind-altering. I’m not a worrywart or a hand-wringer, and my supplies of sympathy are kept in a lockbox. If it had been Baby Jessica in that ceiling, I probably would have shrugged and said that she’d get bored chewing on the studs eventually and want to come down, and she could let us know then.

“We can’t leave him there! There are black widows in there! He can move around now; what if he steps or wedges himself in the wrong place and gets trapped?! We have to get him out while he can still move!”

“*sigh*”

Stingray re-mounted the stepladder and prepared to Take Charge of the situation: he stuffed his upper body as far into the ceiling as he could get it and tried to grab the cat. From the view from the ground, things suddenly became very animated as dust sifted down and the ladder began to vibrate and tip dangerously.

“C’MERE!”

“rrrrrrrAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!”

“SONOFABITCH!”

“RREEEEEEEOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWW!”

“OW, GODDAMMIT!”

As the soundtrack escalated into what sounded like a pitched battle between a drill instructor and a cobra in a blender, I tried to figure out whether I wanted to cry, laugh, call Animal Control, or call the police. Eventually, Stingray descended the ladder, covered in blood, dust, and insulation, and declared that the plan was now definitely leaving the cat there until either Zydeco was ready to leave, or he could get a shop-vac to apply to the problem, whichever came first. He stomped upstairs, and I engaged in some mid-level fretting and tried to figure out how, exactly, you wring your hands. Eventually it occurred to me that if the cat did not, actually, want down, there was no way in hell he would ever be close enough to the borders of the panel to be within clawing range. Obviously, my poor baby was just waiting to be saved, he just didn’t want to be grabbed. I climbed the stepladder.

“Hi, sweetie.”

*mournful howl*

Yep. Just out of reach, but constantly prowling around the opening. He’d had enough ceiling, but being seized and dragged down by some hominid oaf was obviously out of the question. Feeling silly but willing to try anything, I dismounted and grabbed the nearest appropriately-sized cardboard box. We always have a ton of cardboard around, since we buy nearly anything more esoteric than groceries by mail order, and the cat loves to nest in them. I climbed the stepladder and held the box up to the opening. To my everlasting shock, this was apparently just what he wanted: he squeaked gratefully and settled himself into the box, letting me carry him down in style. I carried my prize upstairs to show to Stingray.

For reasons I cannot fathom, he didn’t seem remotely pleased by my problem-solving skills, although he did threaten to let the cat sleep with the coyotes that night. And after all that blood shed on his behalf, too.

He did eventually forgive Zydeco, which was how he wound up on the roof trying to figure out how one lunges safely on shingles, but that’s a separate incident.

Oh god they’re all watching us… too much pressure… can’t think… can’t write…

Welcome, new arrivals! Always good to know there’s a few folks out there with the same warped sensibilities that years of exposure to what hippies would assure you are abnormal levels of radiation have instilled in us. Unfortunatly, we are currently busier than a one-eyed cat watching nine rat holes. Y’see, tomorrow is the Corvettes In the Jemez Car Show. While I don’t have a plastic radar magnet of my very own just as yet, I have been dragooned by the show organizers into helping out. Tomorrow we’ll have real content, with pictures galore of a great many examples of America’s favorite sports car (there are entrants coming from as far out as Colorado) and a brief photo tour of Los Alamos for those of you who have always wondered what the secret city looks like, but today is being spent mostly in chaos. LabRat is working up a post on one of Zydeco’s antics, but given the muttering coming from her direction about flow and tone, that may not be out today.

In the meanwhile, help yourselves to a drink, there are chips in the cabinet, and the archives are just right over there if you just can’t hold out until tomorrow.

“A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.”

Most days at camp, we managed to break every one of those before we even got out of our sleeping bags.

Like most kids, when I was younger I was occasionally packed off to some summer camp or another. Sometimes, this was utterly frickin’ awesome as hell (sorry about the auto-start clip there - might want to mute the speakers before heading over). Other times, it was somewhat less so. There are several Boy Scout camps in our general neck of the woods, and I don’t remember exactly which one the following occured at, so we’ll just call it Camp Wannaweep.

Before I press on, I should explain that my troop was not what you would call average. Mostly we were a daycare for some local brats, despite the best efforts of the four or five of us that gave a damn. One member left the troop in order to spend some quality time under supervision at juvie, for example. Between those of us who cared, and those of us with a more ambiguous moral bent, things were interesting, to put it mildly. Even though we weren’t quite in line with all the policies of the Boy Scouts of America (our troop didn’t care if you were an atheist, for example), I think we got the overall spirit of Improvise, Adapt, Overcome fairly well.

Meanwhile, back to Camp Wannaweep. This was the second summer our troop went there, despite the protests of the scouts who had gone the previous summer, myself included. While there before, the term “clusterfuck” would be the most accurate description, though it wouldn’t really do the situation justice. For example, when our troop got to the orienteering class, I wound up taking over for the camp counselor (several years older than I, despite that I was either a freshman or sophomore in high school at the time) who could not pronounce the word “declination,” let alone explain the concept. Who knew having a high school orienteering team would pay off?

Being of a crafty, if unscrupulous bent, we decided to make the best of a bad situation once word came from on high that we were stuck with Wannaweep. We pooled our memories from the previous summer, and came up with a plan. First up, we had to secure the proper campsite. The way everything was laid out, there was the obligatory meeting area, chow hall, and canteen at the bottom of a shallow valley. The campsites were all arrayed on one side of this valley, the other side being too steep to inhabit, and more importantly, there was one campsite on a chokepoint shortly before which every trail merged into the main path to the center of camp. The previous year, we were assigned that one site, and the sheer traffic through our area was a non-trivial factor in why the experience sucked. Boy Scouts are supposed to be clean and helpful and all that, but young boys are young boys no matter what. We were infested with litter not our own, and assailed by loud traffic from dawn to lights out. We may have had the shortest hike to chow and activities, but it was like camping in a fish bowl.

Needless to say, our scoutmasters were a bit flummoxed as to why we wanted the same site we complained so heartily about the previous year. Chalking it up simply to laziness and playing on the natural inclination of middle aged men to prefer not charging up and down hills all day, we managed to secure the site. The campsites were semi-permanant affairs, with rather spacious wall-tents set up on platforms. Had we been in cabins, things might have worked out for a little longer, but the setup was large and permanent enough to justify bringing several coolers for food, and many more supplies than we would have taken on any other sort of camping trip. This let us bring the other equipment and gear we needed with only minimal suspicion from the scout masters.

So being stuck in the middle of nowhere with adult supervision vastly outnumbered by the young and bored, how better to spend two weeks than by trying to drive the camp canteen out of business? The day after we arrived, Pancho Villa’s Cantina and Casino was open for business directly on the busiest path in camp. Having bought in bulk before we left, we sold sodas and candy at a huge profit and still undercut the official camp store. In the afternoons and evenings, we ran poker games, shot craps, and ran numbers rackets for candy. With a bit of creative explanation, we convinced our scoutmasters that the Cantina was the only business venture running, and were thus able to keep the casino under wraps for the first several days. Apparently they found our entrepreneurial spirit a welcome improvement from our usual MO of “burn it, tie it up, tease it, go find something else to burn.” After word about Pancho’s leaked, however, we started getting camp counselors looking for a hand of five-card draw.

We were of course happy to oblige, but in retrospect it was probably a mistake to take every last cent from the dork running the arts and crafts program. While it was not our fault he tried, repeatedly, to draw to an inside straight, the camp was scandalized, scandalized I tell you, to learn of our operation. The number of counselors quietly inspecting their shoes during the cease-and-desist lecture was impressive, however. Some of the less ethical members of our troop very quickly set up what remains in my memory as a surprisingly efficient money laundering operation, and we only wound up losing a small portion of our take from the casino. To this day, I’m not sure how they pulled it off. Our earnings from the cantina were grudgingly untouched, as no one wanted to punish honest capitalism too harshly. Never the less, we were still ordered to shut the cantina down as well. We were a rather credible threat to the camp store’s profits, and the operation wasn’t a charity camp after all. This worked out rather nicely since we underestimated the draw we would have, and were low on supplies.

With our camp-mandated “shut down,” we were able to quietly re-open the cantina and stretch our limited supplies the rest of the second week of camp under the guise of “sorry, can’t sell you anything. Ordered to close and all. Try around 5:40, wink wink.” We even managed to increase our profit margin to cover the risks of staying open and still be cheaper than the camp store. The last day of camp, rather than pack up our remaining stock, we took the entire remenants of our inventory and simply gorged ourselves at the tables in front of the camp canteen as a final raised middle finger to The Man. A friend in the camp staff dropped by and quietly informed me that thanks to our little stunt, this had been the first session in which the camp store had failed to break even.

We may not have been quite the moral pillars Robert Baden-Powell envisioned, but damn if the rest of the summer wasn’t surprisingly well funded.

It just struck me that you could probably divide the solid majority of Americans into people who primarily get their dose of news, politics, and opinion from The Daily Show and those who get it from South Park.

And then I couldn’t decide if this is another sign of the Decline and Fall of Western Civilization or, getting down to the numbers and the historical quality of news sources, actually an improvement.

It seems that if I’m going to go with the will of the people, I have no choice but to write about the all-time most popular search string we ever get. So be it.

Although they have been a truly enduring fixation of humanity, the presence and purpose of the female breasts remain something of a puzzle and a source of speculation to evolutionary biologists and anthropologists. While all mammals have mammary glands and most of them have nipples that swell into teats when there are nursing young, the female human is the only one that has permanently swollen teats from puberty on. There are plenty of reasons for women NOT to have breasts; they’re unwieldly, metabolically expensive (as completely unnecessary fatty tissue), and when they’re particularly large, they cost their owners a good deal of pain due to the back strain of having what amounts to a pair of weights up front day in and out. They don’t even need to be larger than average to make running more problematic for a woman than they are for the average man. What’s even worse, they’re prone to cancer- and there isn’t even a nursing advantage for offspring in large breasts; it makes things only more awkward for the infant and mother alike. The question of why we’re saddled with them is therefore more compelling than it would be for a feature with fewer costs. It’s trivially obvious that breasts carry a large sexual selection advantage for the female, but why?

(more…)

It’s a warm, happy spring day, the birdies are singing, the lumber is arriving, and where my thought process should be is the same sound you get when you hold your ear up to a seashell.

So, since I tend to work better when given some form of guidelines, because what I thought would turn out to be more read/commented on than others never is what actually IS, and just for the sake of trying a new way to punt: what SHOULD we write about?  Ranting or wonking improv on demand… at least, as best as we can muster.

Think of it this way- the next inevitable step if this doesn’t work is us dressing Kodos and Kang in humiliating outfits and photographing them, which is more likely to lead to our untimely deaths than wild success…

*And for the purposes of this experiment, I’m going to pretend that it’s NOT simply because she’s a thousand times more popular than we are… and justifiably so.

(Inspired by Tam. Also, it may say I posted this, but it was a collaboration with frequent changes in manning the keyboard.)
*click*

“Tonight on “Retarded Jobs” watch as Jim-Bob swims naked through the Bering Sea while chained to a prime 100′ tall tree to shovel pig shit in Russia and pick up crab traps with his pecker on the way to - ”

*click*

“And if you leave before my arms, which are WAY too muscular for a guy who stands around and waves all day for a living while shouting, drop, then the other guy gets the race and this giant vein on my forehead will jump out and beat your ass until Nate decides if the race was - ”

*click*

“Hi, I’m Redhead McDouchebag and I’m here to embarrass the chefs of your home town!”

*click*

“Tonight on Bullshit History, did aliens build the Pentagon? Did the Reptilians have a hand in the creation of 9/11 Truthers? Did Katie Couric really shove -”

*click*

“Next on Wild Reality, we’ll be sending a celebrity and a few dozen nameless sidekicks to find the last unpestered big cat in this branch of the Milky Way. Join us for this never-before footage and speculation about whether the Jewel-Spangled Pouncer can survive having its home address broadcast globally-”

*click*

“Coming up next on Places You Can’t Afford To Go, we’ll be sending this hot chick to enjoy drinks on the beach, and this stringy middle-aged guy to eat lobster nostrils and contract a tropical disease for your amusement. Tonight only, featuring a special clebrity guest chef to bitch about the depressing existential ramifications of drinking with hot chicks and eating lobsters halfway around the world.”

*click*

“Welcome to the Rugged Channel. This afternoon, we have these guys we paid to go hunting, these other guys we paid to go fishing, and one or two more that we paid purely to make sure the sponsor gets mentioned at least fifty times per half hour. In the evening, we’ll have young men on angry livestock.”

*click*

“Now you might think a stand mixer is a complicated and expensive piece of kitchen gear, but with a little science and this disposable ballpoint pen I’ll show you how you can avoid the unitasker and build your own planetary gear -”

*click*

“As he’s dropped into the wilderness with nothing more than an insane credit limit and a film & safety crew of dozens to survive…”

*click*

“..and unless we get this profile perfect down to the color of shoes he’s wearing our writers may have to actually learn something about guns or the culture outside of major cities because - ”

*click*

“Woo! I’m a dumbass!” “I’m a hot chick!” “I’m a dumbass!” “I’m a hot chick!” “I’m a dumbass” “I’m - WOAH FREAKY SHIT!”

*click*

“We find once again that judicious application of hipness and dramatic camera cuts to the problem immediately reveals a solution…”

*click*

“It’s time for Young Adult Hour, where each and every show has been carefully focus-tested to meet the attention span and continuity needs of stoned college students.”

*click*

“Welcome to the Metrosexual Network, where we show YOU just how stressful and dramatic it is to be rich and incredibly attractive!”

*click*

“These yuppies are about to learn that breaking a sweat sometimes produces profitable results. Will their manicures and relationships with their therapists survive?”

*click*

“And when elected, I will TAKE those profits and -”

*CRASH*

Here are some simple signs you might recognize to note that your wild-eyed days of thrill-seeking youth are dwindling:

1. When the bank informs you that you’ve paid too much into escrow for the last year and sends you a check, your shopping list has fewer battery-operated gizmos from EOTech, or heat-generators from nVidia, or even go-fast gizmos from Jeg’s and more things like “32′ of chainlink, 15 2″x4″x8′ studs, 100′ rabbit fence… ‘Hey honey? If there’s anything left over do you mind if I finally get some new boots? These are getting some holes big enough to read through.’”

2. You realize that you deal with the bank that much and have an escrow account.

3. It occurs to you that you couldn’t waste the check on hookers and blow even if you wanted to, because you don’t know where they are anymore.

Oh well. Once we finally get a roof on the wood shed and plant some grass in the dust-bowl out back maybe there’ll be enough left that I can run Cat6 cable to every room like I’ve been planning…

Remember the hilarious Onion video in which an Al-Qaeda representative gets pissed off at a 9/11 Troofer for stealing the credit from AQ and giving it to the U.S. government? No? It was really funny; here’s a refresher:

9/11 Conspiracy Theories ‘Ridiculous,’ Al Qaeda Says
Anyway, it turns out satire has already been outrun by reality. AQ is accusing the Iranians (Shiite) of spreading conspiracy theories that Israel is behind 9/11 in order to undermine AQ (Sunni).You can’t make this stuff up, folks. It’s also a good illustration of how profoundly self-centered- dare I say it, parochial and arrogant- the Troofer outlook is: it automatically discredits the poor little brown folk as not being capable of doing something that clever and effective. Therefore, WE must have done it… in the outlook from over the sea, the finger falls on the other all-powerful boogeyman, the JEWS.

Via John Ringo.

So in the process of working up a good head of steam about the RailRunner and anything else stupid at which I could turn a few hostile brain cells, it was noted that our Friday Night in Los Alamos Kit (beer) was rather low. By luck of the draw, today I happened to be wearing one of my favorite shirts for when I don’t give a damn if someone is offended (or when I give even less of a damn than usual). Standing in line while the soccer mom ahead of me gathered her uterine dumplings kids and reassembled her overnight bag purse I hear a question directed at me from the bag boy not involving “paper or plastic?”

“Hey, are those Colts?” he asked, gesturing at my shirt. I looked down.

“Some of ‘em,” I replied, “but there’s something for everybody.”

“That’s cool. I thought I saw some 1911s on there.” At this point, I was caught off guard.

“Well of course there are!” chimed in the early-20s cashier, a petite female who couldn’t weigh more than 115 soaking wet as she gestured at the appropriate locations on my chest. “How can you have any sort of decent collection of pistols without at least one 1911?”

Y’know, after the rest of that conversation I think I can hold off with the scorched-earth mindset for a while.