Atomic Nerds

First, let me again remind you all that Norwegian Cruise Lines are a blight upon all that is good in the world, and should any of our readers at any point consider a vacation with them, I propose the following: Give me one half of whatever you would spend on airfare and the cruise itself, and I will come to your house, provide mild occasional beatings, surly contempt, and prevent you from leaving your home without levels of inconvenience last seen in the Spanish Inquisition. This way, you will save money and have roughly the same experience.

When last we left, LabRat and I had just survived the first full day at sea, and were preparing to arrive in our first port of call, Ketchikan.
(more…)

For most of the U.S., the weather is warming into spring. As the seasons change, many begin to look at taking a vacation. If you are one of these fun-seekers, I have some advice I wish to pass on in hopes of sparing you from the horror and disaster LabRat and I endured two years ago: stay the fuck away from Norwegian Cruise Lines.

The important information now established, let me explain why I feel NCL is an organization comprised of floating buckets of fail and suck.
(more…)

Tattoos and the heavily tattooed have a sketchy reputation for a reason: it’s a tradition that started with various undesirable or “wild” segments of society, they’re an indelible way to immortalize poor decision-making skills, they’re painful, and they’re embraced by a lot of stupid people as a way to demonstrate their loyalty, pain tolerance, or mindless rebellion.

But they don’t really have to be any of these things. Tattoos can be beautiful, they can be a way to record periods of your life like mile-markers, they can be unique, they can be self-expression for people who are really, really sure about what they want to express. Even a bad tattoo can be expressive- it can say “I’m a jackass!” very well indeed. They can be, in a word, cool. Ah, but how to be sure of that?

(more…)

One frequent source of frustration with “science” and the scientific point of view is that in some fields, the “official” scientific line seems to change from week to week and often contradicts itself, thus leading anyone attempting to follow the recommendations to complete frustration. Psychology and nutrition are two major repeat offenders, and for basically the same reasons.

On the workaday level of research and publication, you do science by isolating one or two variables, changing that variable for one group but not for another, and then reporting what happens. Unfortunately, the reality of any complex system is that there are about three billion variables, and a lot of them influence each other all at once. Biology has this problem. Medicine has this problem. Both fields have the advantage of many hundreds of years of history over nutrition and psychology (which could easily be considered subfields of either)- and biology in particular has a few unifying theories that tell biologists what to expect generally based on some basic intuitive reasoning involving checking it against evolutionary logic and some other points of theory that have been tested often enough to qualify as “might as well call it fact”. Most biologists are able to look at that complex system and be able to make good educated guesses about which variables are important, which are incidental, and how the system is likely to behave when you add or remove them.

A nutritionist looks at food- itself a hideously complex entity, stretching across a huge variety of naturally evolved organisms, domestically engineered ones, and novel chemical creations- and looks at food’s effect on the body. The nutritionist’s problem is that he or she does not even know for sure which bits of food and which aspects of the body’s response to it are the important ones, and there is no well-shaped, heavily-tested overriding theory to tell him what he can generally expect, either. The closest thing- the lipid hypothesis- is looking to have been completely wrong, to boot. So the scientist is reduced to studying the effects of changing variables in a system that not only has thousands of variables, but the majority of which he has no clue about the existence or importance of… and he can only do work that qualifies as such by isolating one of them and then seeing what happens with no ability to control the behavior of his subjects in ALL of the other variables, including the ones he doesn’t know about. He’s “searching under the streetlight”- studying only those things he already knows about and are easy to study- because he doesn’t have a choice. In the meantime, the news media will insist on reporting a tentative conclusion (or no conclusion at all) as a new fact, and especially in cases where massive amounts of time and energy has been spent on the study, the scientists are under pressure not to complain that there was really no news to report other than “nutrition slightly less opaque, further research needed”.

The study of the biological end of psychology suffers from similar problems, and is under even greater pressure from the “consumer” to come to firm conclusions so patients can be treated, already. There is, once again, no overriding theory- though there ARE several competing schools of thought. Making the problem worse is that mental illnesses are only recently being understood on a level better than the medieval. If a normal physician’s patient’s reported symptom is massive bleeding, the problem could be that the patient has a massive open wound and the bleeding is the result of immediate trauma. Or, the problem could be that the patient has been poisoned and is temporarily unable to clot even with a minor and normally irrelevant injury. Or, the problem could be that the patient has hemophilia and is constitutionally incapable of producing adequate clotting factors. Or, the patient’s diet could be ridiculously limited, and that patient could be deficient in essential nutrients that eventually lead to that patient exhausting all stores of the nutrient and breaking down in their ability to clot because of the missing factor. Now change the nature of the problem: the patient has massive depression. It could be that the patient recently underwent some hideous life event and depression is a perfectly normal response to trauma… or….? All too often, the answer is the result of searching in the streetlight: assume the problem must be due to something that we know about- like an imbalance of certain well-studied neurotransmitters- and put that patient on a drug designed to correct those levels. Once again, not all the variables are known, even fewer are well understood, and it’s not even always clear whether the problem- like depression- is a disease in and of itself, or a symptom of another problem. Good psychologists understand this- bad ones try harder and harder to reduce the issue to something known.

Unfortunately, the reaction to this sort of invariably ensuing nonsense by an understandably frustrated public is to conclude that the scientists in these fields all have their heads stuffed so far up their asses they can look through their own mouths, reject it altogether, and reduce the issue even further to something they DO understand, usually something that fixed a problem in their own lives. All you need is to run a mile a day! All you need is this religion! All you need is to go low-carb! Anyone who has problems anyway is doing it wrong!

Sometimes the answers really aren’t easy ones and the only solution is to educate yourself as fully as possible and to regard the words of science reporting as being roughly akin to the words of hyperactive toddlers. And you’ll still know mostly only that which is under the street light.

But it beats being completely in the dark.

Necessarily brief, since we spent the day in ABQ stress-testing Stingray’s pain tolerance thresholds….

Sometimes, when someone refers to you by a pejorative term, such as “dumbass”, or “retard”, or “doofus”, or similar… it isn’t because you touched a nerve with your daring and probing insight.  It’s because it’s accurately descriptive and other people deserve a warning, or at least honesty in shorthand.

That is all.

Sunday mornings are nice. Sunday mornings are reserved for sleeping in until whenever the hell I feel like getting up (barring intervention by the Evil Phone), picking whatever project about the house I feel like focusing on (barring ongoing construction), and generally lazing about. Today, Kang commenced her morning song a bit earlier than normal, and Kodos accompanied with his collar-jangle-dance (he feels whining or barking to wake us up would be Rude. Why this is remains his deep and personal secret), so with all the loving compassion I could muster I did the only sensible thing. I elbowed LabRat and had her let them out. Falling instantly back to sleep and into a bizarre dream involving a two page report on Abe Lincon, concealed carry, and the kitchen of Kitchen Confidential’s Nolita, I was happy to let the hands of the clock spin along, especially since a peek outside during a bathroom run revealed a gray, drizzly, cold morning. Warm dry blankets were much preferable.

Some time later I eventually defeated the bed’s black hole-like gravity and achieved escape velocity (aka “a sleepy shuffle”). Wandering through the kitchen, I made coffee and noted that the dogs were not in their usual morning-snooze positions. After a few minutes noodling around and checking my favorite sites while the java brewed, I decided to haul the dogs in. The cold isn’t a problem for them, but they hadn’t had their daily chance to stomp on my feet in joy. Why they do this is also a mystery, but at least my feet are getting tougher. Kang, as usual, was simply thrilled to see me again, apparently convinced that I had vanished into some sort of alternate universe, never to be seen again each time I leave her sight. While she stood behind me, vibrating with anticipation of stomping on my feet, I called the ever sluggish Kodos. After a minute of standing with the door open in rather chilly air, I said to hell with it, and resolved to find shoes, shirt, and jacket and drag his butt in. Then I noticed Kang’s feet. They were rather bloody.

Since her nose had a fairly thick layer of dirt on it, I figured she just cut herself on something while digging. I stuffed her into her crate, informed the showering LabRat that she required attention, and went to take another crack at getting Kodos to come in. Luck was with me, and after a few calls I spotted movement along the main trail through the yard. Urging him on (“C’mon, move your busted ass, Stepin Fetchit! Don’t make me come out there!”), I soon noticed that he was carrying something with him. At a distance, it looked like a ball of some sort, except gray. We live very close to a tennis court, so it was possible that someone had just lost a ball over our fence, which had since become dingy from all the mud and two dogs playing with it. As he got closer, there was a bit hanging out the side of his mouth that was…. flapping.

Ooookay… maybe they just started skinning the tennis ball they found. Kodos was within about 25 feet at this point, and stopped in the small area by the side door covered in gravel. Standing there wagging and looking smug as all hell, he dropped the “ball” and came a few steps forward, and generally indicated “Hey Dad! C’mere and check this out! This is so frickin’ cool you won’t believe it!” The ball looked rather less like a tennis ball at this point. “What the {delightful surprise} is that {lovely object} you {good dog}?” I inquired of him, translating slightly here to what I meant to say, instead of what actually came out as I faced the prospect of tramping barefoot in the cold over sharp rocks to investigate. Sucking it up and marching over, my suspicions were accurate. Kodos had brought me a bunny head. While I poked it with a stick, he did a passable impression of the proudest dog in the world. I really haven’t seen him look that happy in ages. Regardless, I ushered him inside and went to update LabRat.

“No rush on Kang’s paws after all. I think I found the source. Kodos just brought me a bunny head.” I was distracted by scenery as she was stepping out of the shower, but she reports that the dog in question stuffed his head through the door crack, grinned, wagged vigorously, and licked his chops. Update performed, I gathered boots, coat, and other necessities of spring time in Los Alamos, and went to find the rest. As it turns out, they had themselves quite the wonderful morning. We managed to find most of the torso and hind legs, and after a call to the folks, who have dealt with rabbit hunting much longer than I and might know some trick to detect tularemia (a nasty little disease that killed Kodos’s dam) if the liver was no longer availible, returned our attentions to the dogs. Both were vibrating at the back door as I was off usurping their prize, chewing on each other in excitement, and making noises that would sound more at home in Jurassic Park. Once we turned them loose again, Kodos achieved speeds normally reserved for electrons in heavy magnetic fields and showed us another spot of leftovers, but still no sign of the liver. Naturally.

So now my nice, peaceful Sunday is dedicated to watching the dogs to make sure they don’t show any signs of sickness. On the one hand, thousands of dogs kill thousands of rabbits in this state every year, and a case of tularemia is still rare enough to warrant state CDC interest. On the other hand… Kang & Kodos, dammit! There will be hovering, poking, prodding, and vigorous observation. At least they seem happy (and if you’re squeamish, don’t click those links).

LabRat’s take, while of course similar to mine, did include the apt observation that between the rain, the season, and the animal, we will be dimming the lights and watching Wicker Man this evening.

(LabRat says I need a drink warning here.)

A year or two ago we took in a bunch of foster kittens while one of the local shelters was a bit swamped. These horrid little fuzzballs were infected with… something. Whatever it was, it turned them into uncontrollable pooping machines. Not normal kitten pooping machine levels, but real, dedicated effort to spattering anything they could reach, and a few things that left us scratching our heads. Naturally, Zydeco managed to catch whatever it was they had. After a trip or two to the vet, things mostly cleared up, but his gut never quite got back to its former stability. Every so often something would set him off and he’d spend a few days exploding from both ends. Each time, right at the point where it’d been going on long enough to make us reach for the phone to get him back to the vet, he’d clear up and go back to being his normal megalomaniacal self. Well, he just went through another burst, and this time we decided to find out what the hell we can do about this regardless of the fact that he again cleared up on his own.

So this afternoon we got to the vet. We did the normal sign in, sit around for long enough to check her books and find “Four legs and meows… damn, I know that one…”, and finally the doc comes in. We brief her on Zydeco’s situation, consult his history and charts etc, and conclude that since he’s getting up there in years anyway, it would be a good idea to check some of his organ functions. This would require a blood draw. While this vet has worked on Zydeco before, it was apparently long enough ago that she successfully repressed the memory.

“All righty, I’ll just pop him in the back and we’ll have him out shortly,” she optimistically informed us.
“Good luck.” I replied.

LabRat and I went back to our books. Some time later, noises of demonic posession began to reach our ears.

“Sounds like they finally got to Zydeco,” I noted, and continued reading.
“YARAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR@#(*&#$#!@(*&%)!@&#%HHHHHHAAAAAAAA!!”
“Mmm,” LabRat replied.
“Get the kitty muzzle! GET THE MUZZLE!” cried the vet in the rear.
“HHIIIISSSSSSSSSSSSSSRTAARAAAAAAAYYYYYYYAAAAAAAAAAAYOURMOTHERSUCKSCOCKSINHELL!”
“Should we tell them he knows how to take those off?” asked LabRat.
“SHIT!”
“I think they just found out.”
“Quick! Try the cat bag!” suggested a tech.
“I don’t think he knows that one yet, does he?”
“IA! IA! CTHULHU FTHAGN! RARRRWOOOOWOOWOWOWRRAAROAR”
“Oh my god!”
At this point, we began to hear some rather non-trivial crashes. Heavy-equipment sized crashes.
“GET HIM OFF ME!”
“What the hell is he doing back there?” LabRat wondered.
“A LA TUHUELPA LEGRIA MACARENA QUE TUHUELCE PARALLA LEGRIA COSA BUNEA! {crash, thump, clatter, crash}”
“…I think he’s winning.”

There was one more resounding crash, followed by, and I swear I am not making this up, the exact stereotypical platter-spinning-to-a-stop noise you always hear after some stupendous crash in a sitcom or cartoon. A few minutes later, after a few comments like “Oh man, we gotta get that washed off…” and “How did… what the… ” came drifting up to our ears, the vet walked back in the room, looking rather dishevelled.

“Well, he’s a bit of a fiesty fella.”
LabRat and I would like to take this opportunity to accept any awards for tact and grace under pressure for not bursting in to open laughter at this statement.
“Right now he’s caged and doing a pretty good imitation of a rabid bobcat.” Again, we refrained from laughing.

As near as we can put together from the techs and vet, once Zydeco cottoned on to what was happening, he dropped into his default mode of Engine of Destruction. After some preliminary biting and scratching, he kicked off the kitty muzzle and attached himself to the vet’s thigh. Once separated, he continued his rampage until he bounced back onto the observation table, where he found himself surrounded. From there, he launched a reported five feet off slick stainless steel surface to attach himself to one of the tech’s forearms, where he proceded to inflict the worst wound the tech had ever received from an animal. According to the vet, his forearm was fairly heavily drenched in blood. At this point, they switched to a defensive tactic, and simply tried to get him back into a cage. Any cage. Once this mission of self preservation was accomplished, they came to see if he would be any gentler with us. We obliged, and found the room rather asunder on arrival, with one seriously traumatized looking Chow on the grooming table and Zydeco in the cage with the same type of pole Animal Control uses still attached to his neck. With some finagaling and further cat-profanity, the help of a “cat-nabber” which was essentially a giant pair of canning tongs with mesh netting to turn the cat into a kitty-burrito, and powerful drugs, we successfully got just about everything we needed.

So, all in total for the day, Zydeco: 1 vet, three techs, the vet’s mom, and one Chow Chow. Vet: Technically one blood draw, and one urine sample, but I’m not sure it counts if we had to do most of the work.

We just tried Gordon Ramsey’s recipie for broccoli soup, and it is damned tasty. I wish I could take credit for this (and it’s so simple I probably could get away with doing so), but I can’t.

Take two or three bunches of fresh broccoli and trim the florettes off. Chop up the stalks.
Salt (kosher please) a pot of boiling water and dump the vegitation in. Add a bit more salt to the top, and boil for 4-5 minutes.
Fish out the broccoli with a spider or some other straining device.
Do not throw out the water you boiled it in – this is now instant broccoli stock.
Dump the cooked broccoli into the blender. Add the insta-stock untill it comes about halfway up the broccoli.
Blend until reasonably smooth, add more salt if needed – about 14 seconds by the timer on my blender, including mixing in extra salt.
Garnish with a light grind of pepper. Would probably go well with goat cheese.

It took longer to get the water to a boil than the rest of the operations combined. Enjoy.

Going way back to before there was any such thing as an evolutionary theory that wasn’t laughably wrong, one of the favorite arguments for special creation was the alleged perfection of God’s design. Nothing so ideal and finely tuned as a hummingbird could- supposedly- possibly come from any natural process. (I suspect this was before people knew that hummingbirds have to enter a state of helpless torpor just shy of death every night just to avoid starving to death before morning.) It drove a rather interesting sort of amateur naturalism (“natural theology”) among the religious to seek out examples of the glory of God in the perfection of nature, which at least got people out and observing, and certainly strikes one as a more interesting and productive religious activity than, say, Calvinism.

You can still see this sort of thing among dedicated advocates of special creation (as opposed to people who think God created life but evolution still applies), but they’re far less likely nowadays to also be biologists or naturalists, because two hundred years after William Paley, we’ve seen… a little more of nature. The sort of nature that, with the mention of a mere genus name, can cause some of the well-informed to either crack up or lose their appetites on the spot.

My personal favorite, because it makes my inner thirteen-year-old giggle madly, is Xylocaris maculipennis. Like a surprising number of other bedbugs, Xylocaris reproductive process is “traumatic insemination”, or in layman’s terms, “he jumps on you and stabs into your abdomen with his penis when he wants to make a baby, and not through the vajayjay, either”. Because it is, basically, stabbing rape, Xylocaris mating leaves an insemination scar. If this weren’t wince-inducing enough… females aren’t the only ones to commonly have insemination scars. Males do too. Either the bedbugs simply aren’t picky and stab-rape everything that comes in range… or, as theorized, they do it because it forces some of their own sperm into the victim, so that the next time the victim male stab-rapes somebody, he might wind up passing some of his rapist’s genes along with his own. (This is considered possible because bugs have an open circulatory system. It’s also why the stab-rape thing works on the females to begin with.)

The evolutionary explanation is actually fairly simple; in other species of bedbugs (and not a small number of other arthropods), “mating plugs” are common. When a male mates with a female the normal way that doesn’t make the entomologist shudder, he leaves behind a plug that prevents any other male from mating with her thereafter. Good for him, kinda bad for her (it would be better for her to mate with a more diverse number of males to maximize the chances of a good gene combination), bad for other males. This would be about like the first nuclear tests: first stage of a subsequent arms race, for some species. The stab rape was next- you can completely bypass any mating plugs that might be there and just make use of whatever eggs might be there and unfertilized at the time. Good for him, bad for her (the stab rape is just another physical trauma for the female- she suffers the same consequences as for any injury, baby-makin’ or no), indifferent for other males. Most species that went the stab-rape way stopped there. If the theory behind the common insemination scars on Xylocaris males are correct, then the next step is stab-raping everybody in order to get your genes out as widely as possible. It is, at least, a level playing field for pretty much everybody except the females. (Nobody has yet reported a bedbug species in which the females have evolved carry pistols and Krav Maga, but I figure it’s just a matter of time.)

Vertebrates get off somewhat lighter on the Terrifying Sex front than arthropods, but not entirely. As Holly mentioned in the comments, male ducks have a nasty habit of forcing themselves on the females. (Link may not be safe for work. Do not click unless you think you can successfully explain why you’d be reading about duck phalluses to your boss.) This normally isn’t really possible for birds, since bird sex requires a delicate balancing act that makes this observer wish for popcorn and score cards, but ducks are unique in both having an intromittent organ at all (97% of birds don’t), and in having a mating platform- water- on which they can basically immobilize the female. Once again, it really sucks to be the female, because there is a fairly high rate of injury or death for the females- add in the fact that mallard ducks in particular have an oddly high rate of homosexuality, and you have the animal kingdom’s first recorded case of homosexual necrophilia. Kinky people, the next time you start thinking you’re such creatively bent little primates, remember that you were outdone in perversity by a duck. (And, possibly, a squirrel, but no one was able to get a confirmed gender ID on the victim for that one.)

Again, from a strict evolutionary perspective, it makes sense. Ducks, like many other birds, form bonded pairs to raise chicks; that’s the arrangement that benefits both partners. Males, however, can maximize their chances of getting their genes spread around by raping the females when they get the chance- and if they kill her, it wasn’t their partner anyway. (I do not know if it’s only males that haven’t scored a bonded partner that do this, or if some of the bonded males are simply very busy.) Female ducks have more to work with, anatomically speaking, than a female bedbug does; her oviducts can evolve to be simply harder to access if she doesn’t make it easy for her partner. And, they have- species with high rates of forced mating have females in which the lower oviducts are incredibly baroque… and to which the male duck genitalia is correspondingly specifically matched, for his side of the arms race. Also, it is incredibly cool that the theme song from “Mission: Impossible” just came up on my playlist.

Spotted Hyenas have a variety of “interesting” design that was obvious enough for even the ancients to observe: the females are highly masculinized, so that males and females both have a phallus. The ancients, rather confused by this in general, came to a tentative general consensus that the hyena must be able to change its sex. (Although how they reconciled this with both participants in a hyena mating having a phallus, my source does not say. Perhaps this was because most of this information was through general word of mouth rather than field observation.) They also, perhaps understandably given some other hyena traits, came to the conclusion that the entire beast was some kind of God-given allegory about… something. Something very, very wrong, be it gluttony, or treachery, or homosexuality.

The link above explains the evolutionary reasoning for the extreme masculinization of female hyenas- they are bigger, stronger, meaner, and more dominant than the males in addition to having masculinized genitalia- as a side effect of the female competition for dominance, supposedly sparked by the reproductive advantage enjoyed by the sons of the most dominant females. The masculinization was, in theory, a side effect of selection for testosterone-driven aggression. Unfortunately for the theory, female hyenas have normal levels of androgens (testosterone and its relations), and experimentation with anti-androgens had no effect on the development of the phallic-clitoris-extended vagina arrangement. (The vaginal passage runs through this structure.) Therefore, its development was probably no mere side effect of selection for aggression- which is interesting, as it makes for both an awkward way to mate and a dangerous way to give birth, with a female’s first cubs often dying during the birth, and subsequent births resulting in a nasty rupture that can take weeks to heal, leaving the hyena not only hurting, but open to infection or other complication. There are other nasty aspects to the hyena arrangement; intrasex competition is so intense that when a female gives birth to twins of the same sex, one will almost invariably kill the other. There is no good theory I’ve heard that can even come close to explaining how this arrangement came to be despite its many disadvantages… though despite the infant mortality and the dangers to the mothers, spotted hyenas are pretty successful as African predators go, so there must be something that’s simply been missed so far. Biologists becoming interested in hyenas rather than the much more popular lions is a relatively new phenomenon.

Next time I might talk about this using something other than exclusively twisted sexual arrangements of nature. But because this pleases both the inner child that liked to collect bones and the one that thought dirty jokes were hilarious, I wouldn’t count on my moving on to panda thumbs and stupid trachea tricks just yet. Not when there are still lesbian clone lizards in my yard.

a) The rumors you have heard are true, and the new version of Firefox is not stable.

b) I really, really should have kept that more firmly in mind before writing nearly seven hundred words without saving once.

c)  However, the new version of WordPress is awesome, because I didn’t lose a bit of it due to autosaving of drafts.

Hooray!

I think there might be an election looming or something. It’s this subtle sensation I get, mostly manifesting in the form of a ringing from the phone-al region about midafternoon. When I try to alieviate this symptom by answering the phone, it turns out that the NRA is very interested in how recently I’ve been able to get out and do any hunting.

Here’s about how the conversation goes:
Phone: {makes an annoying noise to indicate it needs attention – damn needy contraption}
Me: {colorful explitive since I undoubtedly have my hands full} Hello?
Phone: {awkward pause while the wardialer connects me}
Sales Lacky: {appox. .01 seconds before I hang up} Hello? Mr. Stingray?
Me: {sigh} Yes?
SL: Hi, I’m Sales Lacky #4982 with the NRA! How are you doing today?
Me: {Thinking: Ok, it’s the NRA. I’ll give ‘em the benefit of a doubt} Not too bad.
SL: That’s great! Boy, the weather sure has been nice lately, hasn’t it? {In the words of Dave Barry, I swear I am not making this up} Say, when was the last time you were able to get out and enjoy it and do some hunting?

The first day this happened, I was actually quite busy when the call came in so I just performed a standard issue telemarketer dismissal and went on about my business. The second day when they called back with the exact same speech, I opted to have a little fun instead.

SL: Say, when was the last time you were able to get out and enjoy it and do some hunting?
Me: Say, when was the last time the NRA did anything about the unconstitutional NFA registry?
SL: Um, wow. Ok.. um… thank you for your time? *click*

Now, obviously I fired too quickly on the second engagement. When they call back again, I do intend to drag things out a bit longer. While I do support the NRA since they’re the 900 lb Gorilla, commanding the respect that JPFO and GOA can’t quite muster, I’m not exactly thrilled with the way they tend to compromise on certain things. Also, while I do support hunting and would in fact like to get out and do some, I’m still a little chapped over last year’s Zumbo incident – not directly their fault, but damned educational about certain hunters. In a perfect world, I don’t feel there should be any sort of distinction among gun owners between the so-called Fudds, and the Evil Black Rifle crowd, but the eagerness of some hunters to throw EBRs to the wolves is a reality, and I really can’t imagine why the NRA marketing guys decided that pushing the hunting button first was going to be the best route to recruitment.

I am going to send in my membership dues before long, and I realize that the next four years (at least) are going to be pretty much spent on the defensive for gun ownership, but I see no reason not to have a little fun along the way. When they call back (presuming I didn’t scare the last one too badly), I have a few more topics I’d like to discuss. Why isn’t the NRA concerned for my safety? After all, it’s quite expensive and full of large quantities of red tape to obtain a device for my guns that is mandatory for my car, when the purpose of both is just to quiet things down and protect people’s hearing. What about microstamping? Boy, I sure would’ve liked to get out and do some hunting, but I couldn’t find ammo that was legal for California where my buddy* wanted to take me! I’m open to other suggestsions as well, providing they even bother to keep calling. The NRA is up to good works, as evidenced with their work pushing Castle Doctrine, the BATFE reform bill, anti-confiscation measures for disasters, and of course everybody’s current favorite, the Heller case, but pushing hunting right off the bat when there are all these other areas that need work as badly, if not moreso? You boys gonna sing for your supper tonight.

*This is of course fictional. I don’t have any friends dumb enough to suggest I set foot in California voluntarily.

Naturally, by the time I came up with an idea I really liked to write about, I realized it was going to be long and labor-intensive… and also that I wasn’t going to have a chunk of free time in the evening that I thought I was because we wound up eating with the in-laws’.

Watch this space.  Coming soon: what happens to a species when rape actually does become a common reproductive strategy.

It’s that time of year again. Time for high expectations, the most obnoxious commercials on television, nauseating packs of Russel Stover’s, stuffed animals toting gut-wrenching puns, and if we’re lucky, History Channel specials on gangland massacres.

A lot of people hate the hell out of Valentine’s day. They point out- and they are absolutely correct- that it’s a completely artificial and commercial creation designed to milk the bucks out of couples looking to prove something for food, booze, candy, cards, flowers, and jewelry. They point out that it makes single people feel like shit for being single. They point out that it puts a big ol’ anxiety hammer on couples, especially those who haven’t been together too long, to suddenly become psychic in order to figure out what their partner’s expected level of acknowledgement is. And, of course, it creates a great big land mine for anyone with a tendency to date-related absent-mindedness that can lead to tears, rage, and bad backs from sleeping on the couch. All of these things are true.

All the same though, I can’t really work up a hate-on for Valentine’s day. The truth is that I like getting a little extra romantic affection, even if it’s not out of the blue. So what if it’s not? I don’t see a damn thing wrong with setting a predictable date for a ritual acknowledgement of something important- be it your mother, your significant other, or even yourself. It gives people time to prepare and an assurance that you’re going to be on the same page, instead of one of you thinking they’re going to spend the day off somewhere else working or indulging in a hobby. If it’s an empty gesture? Then yes, that’s a problem, but just because it’s scheduled doesn’t mean it has to be empty- if it’s empty, you’ve got another problem that’s absolutely not Hallmark’s fault.

Rachel has managed to tap into a vein of rage on the expectations some people have of men plunking down ridiculous sums of money for what amounts to a woman-mounted shiny object in order to “prove” his love or his status or what the hell ever. Watching even one of this season’s commercials from Jared or Kay or DeBeers makes me feel pretty much the same way- especially the slogan “Every Kiss Begins With Kay”, which takes the whole “sex for jewelry” implied message present in all of them and amplifies it into even the smallest gesture of affection being rooted in the regular supply of shinies. (I’ve always been rather puzzled about the whole sex-for-jewelry message anyway. Honey, if you need precious metals and gems to get excited enough about him to have enthusiastic sex with him, why are you with him?) I’d be a hypocrite if I sneered at the idea of a gift being expensive but worthless except aesthetically- with me, it’s paintings- but it’s not that that bothers me, it’s the idea some people have in their heads (and these commercials exploit) that diamonds and other jewelry are some sort of universal currency exchange that equate in direct dollar values to love and devotion. The message: if you ply her with the magic rock, she’ll come instantly unglued at the knees and adore you. Sure, it’s expensive, but it’s a can’t-lose proposition!

I don’t wear jewelry that’s not permanently attached. If Stingray brought me home a diamond tennis bracelet, or a big rock onna ring, I would definitely have an overwhelming reaction: I’d be pissed off. That would be saying- with a big waste of our money- that he didn’t know me, he didn’t care to try, and that he thought I was both stupid and could be bought. Give me a diamond- sleep on the couch.

But, the thing is- and the reason I enjoy Valentine’s day despite the mountain of bullshit served alongside- is that he does know me. He’s blunt, cynical, can be rude, can be very crude, would never win a prize for slick charm or qualify as a screen heartthrob, but he knows me very goddamn well. When I was a college student, I found a first-edition copy of Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior of the Human Male in a used bookstore. I put it back on the shelf because at the time I was often living mostly on Ramen and Wonder Bread and couldn’t quite justify the price to myself, but I always regretted the missed opportunity. I mentioned this, in passing, probably while we were both several beers in, to Stingray. Once. Much later, when I was having an epically shitty day, he surprised me with a first-ed of not only Human Male, but Human Female as well. My reaction was roughly on par with what DeBeers seems to think it should be to several-carat finger-mounted monstrosity. It wasn’t a terribly expensive gift, but it was one that said he knows exactly the kinds of things that I treasure- and cares enough to make it a priority for himself, too. Needless to say, my lousy day was instantly and completely redeemed into a very happy evening.

It wasn’t a one-shot deal, either. When my father died, my stepmother, who is the sort of stepmother that would feel right at home in a German fairy tale, took the opportunity to hurt me in as many ways as she could. Tying up the estate and leaving it in limbo for years was easy enough for her, but that didn’t hurt so much as aggravate since we weren’t hurting for the money much. The other thing she could do- make sure I never got my hands on any possession of his that would have any sentimental meaning to me- that did hurt. In particular, the loss of the comic book collection we spent most of my adolescence building together- one of the few things we could bond over during an otherwise tense time- was painful. We liked a lot of obscure and independent titles that other comic book collectors didn’t, so I never could find most of them when I looked through the stuff that comic shops kept on hand. I wrote it off as lost. Once again, a few months after I mentioned this (once, in passing), I found a good-sized chunk of the lost collection- not the originals, but books he’d somehow found through an obscure comics-collector service- sitting on the coffee table. No occasion, he just knew it would make me happy.

That’s romance. It’s the reason I wouldn’t feel anything other than mild disappointment if he DID forget Valentine’s Day or any other of the calendar-set occasions. But, perhaps naturally, he never does- although I’m prone to it. (Embarrassingly, I’m not half as good at this stuff as he is.)
In the meantime, we’ll be, yes, going out to dinner. He loves fine food, I love fine food, it will make us both happy- and the place we’ve picked is downright designed to feel intimate even if it’s at full capacity.

There’s nothing left to prove.

To celebrate the annual Purchasing of Flowers, Chocolate, and Maybe Carbon day, and because it’s an easy target, I present the following rejected and stolen ads:

And now is where I gloat about how LabRat vastly prefers things like 1911s for romantic gifts to over-rated chunks of charcoal.

Grow

Once I discovered this thing, my entire day vanished in a Flash. There are several versions, progressively harder, some longer or shorter than others, but they all kept me muttering to myself angrily until I figured them out.

I don’t know what they put in the water in Japan, and it’s something that’s been questioned over and over, but things like this make me kind of want some even if I DO wind up wearing sailor outfits and giving long, speculative looks at giant squid.

Y’know how sometimes you hear a deal on a car involving a little old lady who only drove it to church on Sunday? Frustration is the mild version of the feeling you get when that car packs 405 horsepower, a fiberglass body, and a price tag to make you start shaking the bejesus out of the piggy bank only to realize when the lust-rush wears off that for a number of reasons, now is not the time to buy the toy you’ve been lusting after since pre-pubescence.

Thanks, Chris. I’m gonna be spending the rest of the week eyeballing the bank statments.

Do the Russians have too many bombers or something? It’s awfully nice of them to give our jet jocks a chance to do a little live fire practice, but it’d be even nicer if Vladdy would send a note first, or at least would be a little less persistant when we strangely refuse to fire.

Edit: And the quote of the day goes to Chas S. Clifton in the comments: ““Buzzing” an American carrier battle group in a relatively ancient lumbering aircraft like that must be an adrenalin-pumping experience for the Russian crew — sort of like taking a ‘57 Buick into the Indy 500.”

Rachel and Dr. Helen have both posted about this rather nauseating article by an author exhorting women who are getting older and still unmarried to “settle for mister good-enough”. Rachel has already ripped it to shreds for its hugely offensive assumptions that the female hive-mind is in complete and utter agreement that being unmarried at thirty is an eternal long dark night of the soul for any woman, and Helen has already quirked an eyebrow at exactly what the author and commenters apparently define as “settling”.

What really bothers me, though, is the overall tone implicit in the article that a husband is much like a car: an important life accessory that one shops around for until you find just the right combination of utility, reliability, power, and affordability. And if you can’t get that super-sweet highly-engineered, high-class Teutonic tank? Settle for a used Chevy at your local dealership, it’ll get you there well enough.

I don’t believe in “soulmates” or great and effortless romances much. Marriage is damned hard work; it has all the problems of a close friendship, where you step on each other’s toes, sometimes have different goals and priorities, accidentally hurt each other’s feelings, fight over stupid shit because the person next to you is much more available to sink your teeth into than whatever’s really making you angry, sometimes feel rejected because the other person wants to spend their time on other things and people- AND all the problems of a roommate. Not only have you got to get your emotional lives more or less lined up as well as you can, you’ve got to work out some system for running the household- and your finances- so that you don’t wind up with your hands wrapped around each other’s necks. That’s really not easy when you have radically different upbringings, priorities, and ideas about what should be done with money, what constitutes an acceptable standard of “clean” in the house to live in and what’s acceptable for company, what should be done automatically and what you should ask for as a quick favor, and so on. There is no such thing as a partner with whom all of this will be easy or effortlessly empathic- and any man or woman who is holding out for one will be dooming themselves to a lifetime of loneliness, yes.

On the other hand, the people with whom you can do all of this and still want around- the ones that you can fight with and clean up after and forgive their annoying habits and still love- are damned few and far between, and you SURE as hell can’t force it. People talk about how (opposite sex) is too shallow and should be attracted to things that really matter- this is the classic lament of the “nice guy” who is bitter that girls “only like jerks”, and the woman resenting “looks-obsessed” men- but have you- any of you- EVER been attracted to someone because you should be? God alone knows my “type” where men are concerned is and was narrow as all hell- I’m just plain uninterested in someone who doesn’t fit a ridiculously large number of basic traits (and no, “rich” was never one of them), and the first lesson I had to learn where relationships were concerned was that leading on perfectly nice, funny, good guys because they “deserved” a chance with me was wrong, because I was never suddenly going to develop an attraction in addition to an approving fondness for them. It might have been the right thing to do by romantic-comedy standards, in which a man or woman will always eventually notice the awesome qualities of the hapless main character by the end and suddenly fall for them, but it was cruel as hell to do to guys who made great friends but I just plain didn’t want to sleep with and wouldn’t ever have. If I were to have married one of them because he would have made a perfectly adequate husband, in my book that would have been just short of evil. What would it eventually do to the self-respect of any man or woman to know on an instinctive level that their partner merely found them serviceable?

Do these people pick friends this way? By job, class, religion, a checklist of personality traits, family background, and interests, Consumer Reports-style? Of course not- and most people would laugh if you put the question to them. You pick friends based on compatibility; is there chemistry, do you laugh a lot with them, are they fascinating to listen to, are they comforting when you need it, do they push you when you need it, can you spend time in their company and feel happy and refreshed instead of tired out. On a basic level, this is what a spouse needs to be first and foremost- someone you can still get along with even when you’re exhausted, cranky, or otherwise not up to spending much if any energy on being sociable, and it sure as hell helps for them to be a source of comfort or support when you’re low rather than yet another sink for your energy and sense of well-being. So far as I can tell, the people with the Consumer Reports mindset are under the impression that this sort of instantly pops into reality with the wedding vows. Even friendship is not enough- I have lots of friends I could never live with because they would drive me crazy and vice versa. People that I may love, but want to kick out of my space as soon as I get tired and cranky enough, or people whose habits I could not put up with for longer than a weekend. I’m not under any illusions on this- the main problem is me, I’m hard to live with. One of the biggest reasons my marriage works is that Stingray can figure out when he needs to just plain leave me be, and can do that without getting his nose out of joint or acting sulky later about how bitchy it is for me to act that way. Even with friendship and that basic understanding, it STILL wouldn’t work if we had radically different attitudes toward money and financial priorities rather than nearly-identical ones. None of this is covered or remotely predicted by financial status, age, political affiliation, profession, aesthetic sense, or mechanical aptitude.

I enjoy marriage because I enjoy my husband. When I was single, I enjoyed filling the need for male company (not remotely the same thing as sex) with male friends I enjoyed being with but, for whatever reason, weren’t options for a mate. “Settling” for someone so I could have someone else in the house with me helping to manage my life- and presumably impregnate me- sounds a lot more like hell than solitude was. People who complain about being alone and people who constantly complain about their less-than-suitable spouse aren’t missing any crucial life revelation, they are both complaining.

Well, I’ve been hit up officially with a meme, courtesy of MattG (who I note hasn’t posted his own version yet ). I think this is his subtle way of telling me the content around here of late has been a) slow b) boring c) in need of standardized formatting d) all of the above.

What Do You Think When I Say:
1. Beer: Really close to making my own.
2. Anorexic: Easier to pick up and use as a weapon in case the fashion brigade charges.
3. Relationships: Everybody’s something to someone.
4. Purple: A poor choice of car color, especially on lowriders where it becomes Statutory Grape.
5. Power Rangers: They gave the army exoskeletons?
6. Weed: D.A.R.E. told me that if I’m ever in the same room as weed that I’ll be shooting heroin into my scrotum and homeless within a week. They wouldn’t lie about something like that, right?
7. Steroids: Waste of money when there are things like CrossFit availible.
8. Cartoons: Indespensible. From web comics, to The Venture Brothers, to the dailies in the paper we’d be much worse off without them.
9. The President: I’ve still got a bone to pick with him over stem cells, but he beats the hell out of what we could’ve had.
10. Tupperware: Did you know they’re just giving it away with some lunch meats now? How awesome is that? Meat and a place for leftovers in one go!
11. Best vacation: A hypothetical concept that has yet to occur. May involve sinking Norwegian Cruise Line ships for good measure.
12. Santa Claus: I will build a suit containing all San-Ta knowledge!
13. Halloween: The only kids we get at the door now look like they could turn tricks themselves.
14. Bon Jovi: Ranges from utter drek to pretty good.
15. Grammar: I’m not always as obsessive about it as I should be.
16. Facebook: Not only no, but hell no.
17. Worst fear: Running out of ammo.
18. Marriage: I am extremely married.
19. Paris Hilton: Isn’t she dead yet? She isn’t even doing anything entertainingly crazy these days.
21. Redhead: For preference.
22. Blonde: Excuse me, Miss, but you’re blocking the view of the lovely redhead over there.
23. Pass the time: Video games, home improvement, books, scotch, beer, coffee, cleaning guns, pointless math, obsessing about anything listed so far…
24. One night stands: See 18.
25. Donald Trump: One day that dead squirrel on his head is going to sit up and beg for a peanut on national television.
26. Neverland: Horrifying concept, horrifying execution.
27. Pixie dust: In grade school I discovered that the big sticks of pixie dust (the 2 foot long plastic straws, not the little paper packets) could be pressed into excellent service as a playground implement of war, when combined with cactus needles and dandelions.
28. Vanilla ice cream: Needs hazlenut, but goes so well with so many desserts.
29. High School: Who’s been fiddling with the calendar? It is way too early to have to start ignoring reunion fliers.
30. Work: Inside the company, fairly rewarding. Dealing with the clients, I may start strangling people with red tape.
31. Pajamas: Depends on the weather.
32. Woods: Playground.
33. Wet Sock:

34. Alcohol: The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.
35. Love: It does not in any way make the world go ’round, but it certainly makes most of the world easier to deal with if you’ve got enough coming your way.

So pretty much everyone agrees we’ve got just around a year to get any fun toys we want before the legions of hoplophobic twits heading to Washington get a chance to start doing anything. People are stocking up on ammo, Larry Correia is going to do his damndest to get an evil black rifle into as many hands as possible before they get banned again (though it’d be nice if he’d quit mucking around with the CZ group buy and do the EBR thing since I’m already set for CZ ), the VPC is already going after deer rifles, and things are generally looking less than sunny for those of us who love the things that go bang.

One aspect of all this that I haven’t seen covered yet is Type 03 FFLs, commonly known as curio & relic licenses, designed to enable collectors to obtain older or particularly interesting firearms without the hassle of a regular FFL transfer. It’s sort of a neutered version of the standard type 01 FFL; you can’t use it to get that spiffy new Model 70, but it will let you get an 03 Springfield. Now on the one hand, this handy little pice of unconstitutional BATFery will make it considerably easier to get a great many firearms, and some steep discounts at various shops like midway usa, aimsurplus, etc, on non-firearm stuff. They’re also cheap, with the licensing fee coming in at a measley $30. There are some rather neat pieces of kit on the C&R approved list that I wouldn’t mind having, to put it mildly. On the other hand, there is every possibility that C&R licenses will no longer be valid by this time in 2010, and having one puts you a bit more directly in the crosshairs of the BATFE than just filling out a 4473 does. There are record keeping and paperwork requirements that, while not as stringent as for the 01 FFLs, are still a damn fair sight more involved than just keeping your receipt in case you need to send the gun into the factory for work. In a severely gun-hostile environment such as the post-election world most gun lovers are anticipating, this paperwork would probably not be your friend.

I’ve got the application filled out and sitting in front of me, I just can’t quite decide whether it’s a good idea to send it in or not anymore. Anyone else have any thoughts on this particular aspect of the coming four years?