That’s what my new high tech furnace-a/c system says it is outside now. NOAA is reading ten at BWI airport too. But the house is staying pretty warm. Just the usual cold spots near the front and back walls and even those aren’t really cold so much as a bit chilly. But it looks like death outside. The sun is out and bright and the sky is cloudless but the only things moving are the tree branches in the wind and the birds around my feeders. I don’t even want to think about what the wind chill is right now. NOAA says it can be as much as 5 below.
A downy woodpecker was scouting out my suet feeder a moment ago. It had itself fluffed up almost to the point its body looked like a little round ball of black and white feathers. It lit on the feeder and then for some reason flew right back off. Those things are shyer then I am. I’m going to put out a second suet feeder in a little bit. I already need to refill the thistle seed feeders the gold finches use. Just thinking about going out in that is giving me the shivers.
I Suppose This Isn’t Going To Do My Gas Bill Any Good…
Temperatures going down into the mid 20s tonight…but that’s just for openers. NOAA is calling for temperatures Thursday and Friday evenings down in the single digits. 7 to 12 Thursday night…4 to 9 Friday night.
I’ve taken some extra steps to plug up a few heat leaks this year. Casa del Garrett has a bathroom skylight that’s basically just some glass panes with wire honeycomb between them. It’s at the top of a box that goes through the ceiling and it has a vent in the middle that, though closed, isn’t really tight. So I put up some plastic sheet at the roofline, and another plastic sheet at the ceiling line. I’ve also stretched plastic sheet over the front office windows. They’re double-pane and supposed to be "weather proof" but I’ve noticed some slight leakage around them. The effect has been noticeable. The entire second floor is much warmer in the mornings now then before.
Even so, my front and back walls, which are exposed, get darn cold to the touch when the temperatures dip down. They didn’t build these 1950s rowhouses to hold in heat because energy was cheap then. My front and back walls are brick veneer, concrete block and plaster and that’s it. So I can walk up to one and not even put my hand on it to feel the cold radiating off it. Actually, that’s my heat leaking out. It’s times like this I’m glad I’m not an end of group unit.
What I probably need to do, is build an interior wall out from the front and back walls. Put up some studs and put insulation between them and put drywall over that. It’ll cost me some space and I’ll have to extend my window frames but that’s the only way I can see to keep the heat from leaking out of those walls.
Friday’s my telecommute day, so I won’t have to walk to work in that frigid air. But for kicks and grins I might take a walk out in it anyway. A heavy blanket of frigid air like that changes things outdoors. It’s like everything just…stops. Stiller then when it’s snowing. It’s like death out there…but it isn’t death, life is hunkering down and waiting it out. But everything is so…still. And it’s a different kind of stillness then when it’s snowing. It’s an empty, bottomless stillness. Almost eternal. Life is on hold…the cold winter wind finally has reign. Nothing moves, except the wind…looking for something…anything, that might still be moving…and finding nothing. Until the sun comes out a bit…and the birds…the ones that the hard freeze didn’t kill…start darting about. I’ll need to put out some extra food for them.
Geekologie points out the RealTouch, which is a futuristic sex toy for men…
Apparently, the RealTouch is like a Fleshlight, kind of, only with moving parts. The orifice expands and contracts and the interior heats up to human body temperature. And it comes with a USB port that connects you to a computer where you can watch a POV porn film that is cued to the device, so the device simulates the intensity and frequency of the action committed by the porn star on the screen. Comes in straight and gay varieties.
Lovely…
Just…lovely… Behold the total dehumanization of sex. That…thing…on the right is the innards of the heterosexual version. Please god let me be born a gay man in the next life.
A university in Germany is concerned that while some of its students are learning skills that will help them get ahead financially they might be lacking in the skills required to attract partners. Potsdam University, south of Berlin, has initiated a course in flirting and is offering the course to all Master Degree computer engineering students. So far 440 students have enrolled in the course.
Emphasis mine. Gosh…you think there’s a need out there…?
The course will teach students how to write flirtatious email and text messages, methods for attracting partners at parties and functions, how to dress and what topics to discuss while on a date. The course will also guide students in how to deal with rejection if the methods taught in the course fail to produce desired outcomes.
…The university believes that education for students should be about helping them succeed in their future private lives as well as their future careers. ‘Students that feel they are missing out on the fun that others are having are liable to suffer low self esteem and possibly depression: many IT and science students also tend to be socially shy so this is definitely a step in the right direction’ Marta, a student psychologist noted.
…Recent studies around the world have indeed shown that university students studying computer related subjects and science are most likely to be virgins and engage in the least sexual activity during their years on campus. Could Potsdam university break this cycle?
I don’t see why not. This has been a hobby horse of mine ever since my mid-thirties when, still single and lonely, I became sickeningly apparent to me that I still had no clue what I was doing, or how to go about finding a lover. School should teach this as a subject, right along with reading and math and everything else they’re supposed to be teaching kids to prepare them for life. Yet we’re still, in this day and age, lucky to even get decent sex education.
Some people are naturals at this. That’s fine but the thinking seems to be that the dating and mating game is something we are all innately naturals at and that just isn’t true or there wouldn’t be so much loneliness in the world. And violence and hate and all sorts of other psychosis. Think of how much more peaceful this poor angry world would be if everyone had an emotionally fulfilling love life. Teaching people how to date, how to flirt, how to handle rejection, get back on their feet and go on, isn’t as silly as it sounds.
We are not all naturals at this. Most of us are just plain lousy at it. Whatever evolutionary baggage we have for it probably doesn’t much apply in a modern industrial technological civilization. The village were we all used to grow up in together and get to know one another is gone. The dating environment our parents found each other in is gathering dust in the history books. And they did it by trial and error too anyway. We need to get past that, and start treating the human need for companionship seriously, like it’s just as much a matter of our long term survival as making babies. Take a look at the news headlines on any day of the week and tell yourself that the problem with this world is there is too much love in it.
My maternal grandmother was a hard woman to live with. For me especially because he absolutely hated my dad. Being his son, every time she laid eyes on me she saw him and I had to suffer for it. She never saw anything good in anything or anyone, never saw joy or happiness or fun in any terms other then sinning. I never saw her smile unless it was at someone else’s misery.
She loved her soap operas. Even more then her radio preachers. When I came home from school, one of them was reliably on the TV and it was an open question of my youth whether or not that was because they chased me out of the living room into my bedroom. I hated those things. I could never understand how someone could be entertained watching people being mean and cruel to one another. Understand, this was in an age before reality TV.
Her two favorites were General Hospital and As The World Turns. Swear to God to this day I can still hear that theme song from As The World Turns playing though my head whenever I think about soap operas.
So it is with pleasure…no…relish…that I read today that the young, cute, same sex couple on the current storyline of As The World Turns finally had sex…
The breakthrough scene on As the World Turns begins at about 3:03. Of course what we see is simply the before and after, but for a show that took seventh months and an extended internet campaign from fans for producers to have its two main characters share a kiss, the sex, or evidence of it, is a revelation.
Henry Seltzer writes, in The Daily Beast: “And you know the best part? The person responsible for getting them back together after the fallout from Luke kissing his step-grandfather was his grandmother, the show’s matriarch (played by Elizabeth Hubbard for the past 25 years), who was also the most understanding when Luke first came out. So not only is this not your grandmother’s soap, leave it to the grandmother-who-unwittingly-played-a-beard to get the boys back together. She even delights in sharing their post-sex ice cream sundae.”
Hey grandma…I just watched two cute boys having sex on your favorite soap opera while drinking tequila! Yes…I’m a stinking rotten good-for-nothing Garrett just like my Pap! And your favorite soap opera has homosexuals on it now! Just like me! Only cuter. It’s still a wicked, wicked world grandma. Cheers!
BERLIN (Reuters) – Even the most quirky of computer nerds can learn to flirt with finesse thanks to a new "flirting course" being offered to budding IT engineers at Potsdam University south of Berlin.
The 440 students enrolled in the master’s degree course will learn how to write flirtatious text messages and emails, impress people at parties and cope with rejection.
Philip von Senftleben, an author and radio presenter who will teach the course, summed up his job as teaching how to "get someone else’s heart beating fast while yours stays calm."
The course, which starts next Monday, is part of the social skills section of the IT course and is designed to ease entry into the world of work. Students also learn body language, public-speaking, stress management and presentation skills. and
"We want to prepare our students with the social skills needed to succeed both in their private life and their work life," said Hans-Joachim Allgaier, a spokesman for the institute at Potsdam University where the course is being offered.
Via the very good comic newsblog Robot 6: Bill Willingham, who is a conservative superhero comic book writer probably best known for his Sandman ripoff series Fables, has a post up calling for superheroes to act more heroic. Unsurprisingly, to Willingham, "heroic" means "conservative," and his statement that superheroes have been getting more "decadent" means that they’re acting more liberal.
It’s time to make public a decision I’ve already made in private. I’m going to shamelessly steal a line from Rush Limbaugh, who said, concerning a different matter, “Go ahead and have your recession if you insist, but you’ll have to pardon me if I choose not to participate.” And from now on that’s my position on superhero comics. Go ahead and have your Age of Superhero Decadence, if you insist, but you’ll have to pardon me if I no longer choose to participate.
Holy seduction of the innocent Batman! And…speaking of which…the post above was followed almost immediately by this one…
Slog tipper Rich, who knows that I am a Superman fan, writes:
I read about this on io9 this morning and figured that if you didn’t already know about it then you had to find out immediately.
Secret Identity showcases rare and recently discovered erotic artwork by the most seminal artist in comics—Superman’s co-creator Joe Shuster. Created in the early 1950s when Shuster was down on his luck after trying to reclaim the copyright for Superman, he illustrated these images for an obscure series of magazines called Nights of Horror, sold under the counter until they were banned by the U.S. Supreme Court…
Paul Constant, the author of both posts you may note, goes on to say that fetish art is nothing new in comics, and that the artwork behind some pretty well known comic book titles was penned by guys who did all kinds of stuff on the side that would never have passed muster with the comic code authority. The creator of Wonder Woman was said to have kept a stash of S&M artwork handy so he could…ahem…figure out different ways to truss up his heroine in each new episode. Well…we all need models.
Does anyone see the problem with right wing jackasses who draw comic books for adolescent males that are full of pictures of muscular heroes and buxom women in tights that might as well have been painted on flexing their stuff in and out of the usual comic book danger and bondage scenes bellyaching about decadence? The difference between the guy chained to that table up there and Superman is the guy on the table is wearing pants.
[Update…] Look…I’m not saying that everyone who reads super hero comics is subconsciously into S&M. I’m sure not. But even back when I was a kid I knew I liked the eye candy, even if I wasn’t quite sure why. The sexuality in those comics isn’t exactly coincidental and it strains credulity light years past the breaking point to think that someone who sits down every day to draw those characters for a living doesn’t know it full well. Constant quotes Willingham as saying he was particularly proud of a recent Robin comic he did, patriotically dropping him into Afghanistan to fight the evil terrorist empire…
Borrowing some wisdom from the famous parable of the mote in one fellow’s eye, and the whole beam in another’s, it would be the height of hypocrisy for me to make any call for our industry to clean up its act, until I’ve first cleaned up my own. I’ve already made some progress down that road. In my run writing the Robin series (of Batman fame), I made sure both Batman and Robin were portrayed as good, steadfast heroes, with unshakable personal codes and a firm grasp of their mission. I even got to do a story where Robin parachuted into Afghanistan with a group of very patriotic military superheroes on a full-scale, C130 gunship-supported combat mission.
Okay Willingham…you want to clean up your industry? I have a suggestion. Replace Robin’s tights with a nice Sunday-go-to-meeting suit and see how many issues you sell. Go ahead. Geeze…even allowing for the costume change recent artists have put him through…probably because the classic costume makes them uncomfortable for some strange reason…that kid has shown almost as much thigh as Wonder Woman in his career. And speaking of Wonder Woman…you going to clean her up too? Put her in a decent womanly dress and back in the home where she belongs and not out fighting the forces of evil? Her and all the other comic book babes wearing almost as much as Hooter’s waitresses and Playboy bunnies that your industry has been waving in the faces of teenage boys for decades now? Well that’ll sure make the cash registers work overtime.
Decadence. Decadence. Right wing nutcases that babble about decadence make you just want to scream. Or laugh out loud I dunno… Decadence isn’t sex as entertainment. It isn’t violence as entertainment. It isn’t opening the door to the inner human heart, and all its passions sublime and gross and charging admission. It’s doing it without heart. It’s cheapening it. That’s what you never want to sell to kids. Not that sex is thrilling but that it’s cheap. Not that the struggle between darkness and light is exalting but that it’s vapid. It’s not making the sacred profane, it’s making it boring. That’s decadence.
I made sure both Batman and Robin were portrayed as good, steadfast heroes, with unshakable personal codes and a firm grasp of their mission. I even got to do a story where Robin parachuted into Afghanistan with a group of very patriotic military superheroes on a full-scale, C130 gunship-supported combat mission.
Gay Episcopalian Bishop Gene Robinson just got an invitation to give the invocation to the opening of the Inaugural Ceremonies Week. Which means, as I read it, that he’ll actually be speaking a prayer before Warren does at the actual Inauguration.
Some folks are reading this, rightly in my opinion, as an olive branch from Obama’s team to the Gay community after the outpouring of anger over his selecting Warren to give the inaugural invocation. But there’s something else that just happened here that I think is also worth paying attention to…
Recapping here: After sticking a fork in the eye of gay rights advocates by actively supporting Proposition 8 — which overturned the legalization of gay marriage in California — Warren compounded their outrage by equating gay marriage with incest in an interview with Beliefnet.
The hubbub lulled down a little over the holidays but today, he’s back, with an open invitation to any group displaced by their denomination. This is code for Episcopal congregations that oppose that church’s acceptance of a gay bishop in 2003. Earlier this week, a California judge ruled that a breakaway congregation, St. James in Newport Beach, cannot keep its property now that they have left the Episcopal Church.
So…to recap…Obama invited Robinson to give a prayer Right After Warren told the homophobes in the Episcopalian Church that he was standing “in solidarity” with them. Whether that was intentional or not, it’s something Warren and his neighbors in the kook pews can’t help but take notice of. And in fact the howling has already begun.
If this is Obama trying to be the healer, the uniter, that Bush never was and never wanted to be in the first place, then perhaps the way to read all this is, Just so you know Mr. Warren, one American’s place at the table doesn’t come at the expense of another’s… If that’s the case, if that’s the president Obama really wants to be then we are, all of us, on the brink of some very good times to be alive and be a part of.
You knew it was going to be an easy day in class when you walked in and saw one of the school’s Bell & Howell Filmosound 16mm projectors set up in the middle of the room. If the teacher was a technologically challenged sort, they’d let the class AV geek (sometimes that was me) thread the film through it and run it. You got to sit back and watch a film, and it was a safe bet that the film would be a lot more interesting and engaging then whatever teacher taught that particular class. Or to put it another way, you knew you had a good teacher when the sight of the film projector was a bit of a let-down.
My favorites were the Bell Labs educational films. Least appreciated on my list were the Highway Safety Institute films that grossed and scared the crap out of me to the point where I almost refused to get a driver’s license. Oh…and the sex ed films about the dangers of heavy petting. Who cared about that stuff anyway?
Then there were the films warning us about the dangers of homosexuality. I think I saw this one in high school…
Yeah, I laughed. As someone who actually sat through some of those old 1950s morality films, I can tell you that whoever did that one got it just about perfect…down to the stilted dialogue and cheesy narration. All that was missing from it was the randomly warbly sound of the old 16mm projector audio.
But some of us still remember the real thing…
That’s what me and my peers all got back in grade school. They were showing this crap to us as early as 8th grade. Before the personal computer came along, before the internet, before cable TV and home video, the only things we knew about homosexuals and homosexuality, were what we were taught in films like that one.
I’m sure those 1950s film makers had no idea, no clue themselves, that some of the kids watching that film were gay themselves, or that the others in the class would one day learn that an old classmate they’d gone to school alongside of is gay, and have to reconcile the kid they’d known with the image of the sick and twisted homosexual monster that they were taught. I’m sure those 1950s film makers had no idea, no clue themselves, what it was like to be either one of those kids, all grown up now, looking apprehensively at each other.
From the No, I Didn’t Imagine It department. I took to reading at an early age…the stereotypical pastime of brainy, nerdy, only kids. Mom used to shower me with kiddy reading material, even before I entered grade school. Little Golden Books and such like. Also kids comic books. Many kids comic books. Many that I wish I still had because they are probably collectors items now. I didn’t always get the toy I wanted, but I almost always got any book I asked for, including comic books (so long as they were for kids). I remember her reading to me when I was very small, but by the summer before I entered first grade I was already reading by myself without any help.
I had my favorites, one of which was a quirky comic about three mice who had their own clubhouse in the back yard of some human family. I remember liking it because of all the clever things they did with random stuff they found in the human family’s back yard. Their clubhouse was a tin can with a leaf for a door, but they always used a secret passageway into it instead. I think its entrance was a mushroom they’d turned into a trap door, but the mushroom compartment that I still remember might have been a secret storage space for things. Understand this is about as far into my past as I can remember much of anything so all I have of it now are disjointed fragments of memory.
I haven’t laid eyes on one of those comics since I was a tyke. But it still crosses my mind from time to time because of something that happened one afternoon while we were visiting some other family. I don’t remember their names was so they must not have stayed in our social circle for very long. But they had a daughter who was a bit older then me. I had not yet entered first grade and I think she was already in third or forth. I remember her in particular because she did something to me that gave me my first taste of how being smart could make people want to take you down a notch or two, just because.
I was reading my comic book alone out in the front yard while the adults chattered among themselves inside. I think mom had just bought it for me. The girl came outside and looked at me for a while like I was a fish out of water or something. I remember feeling uncomfortable and I think I said "Hi" or something. She sat down beside me and looked at the comic book and then flatly stated that I was too young to read and so I must only be looking at the pictures.
Which was tantamount to calling me stupid to my face and even at that age it was a sure and certain way to get my hackles severely up. I promptly told her I could so read and not only that I could draw too. She smiled at me in a way that made me really uncomfortable and then pointed to the cover of the comic book. "What does that say?" she asked.
"The Three Mouseketeers," I replied.
She stared at me for a moment, shook her head and said "No…it’s The Three Mousies."
You have to picture this…I’m five, going on six years old and I must have stared at her like she was an idiot. But I remember this much of the encounter pretty well, even after all these years. For a second I thought she was the one who couldn’t read. So I parsed it out for her with my finger… "No…it’s The Three Mouse-Ke-Teers".
She gave me that discomforting smile again and looked me right in the eyes and said "No…it’s The Three Mousies." And right then I knew she knew damn well I’d read it correctly. She kept smiling at me in a deliberately patronizing way…and it shocked and pissed me off because I knew I’d just proven to her that I could read and now she was trying to make me doubt I could. Like she was trying to shove me back into the box she thought a five year old should be in. Or maybe she’d had a hard time herself learning the trick and didn’t appreciate seeing a much younger kid doing it better then she had at my age. She was trying to make me feel stupid even though she knew I wasn’t…no, because she knew I wasn’t. I think that must have been the first time I ever saw that in someone because I can still remember how shocked I was to see it.
I got up and walked back inside with my comic book. She followed close behind. Maybe she thought I was about to complain to mom but I didn’t. I just sat down within earshot of mom and her friends and continued reading my comic book. I figured if the girl wanted to argue with me about whether or not I could read she could do it in front of the other grownups. But she didn’t say anything more.
That memory still comes floating back after all these years, and just a few moments ago, while I was searching Google for some other comic book reference, I thought of it again and tried looking up the comic book. It wasn’t easy because there are actually several different "Three Mouseketeers" out there now, including a Disney version. But eventually I hit it…
Let’s hear it for the internet tubes. More info on the title is Here. It was an odd one, but I remember it being a favorite, along with Space Mouse and Scrooge McDuck. God I wish I still had those old Scrooge McDuck comics. I found a reprint a few years ago of one I enjoyed so much I still remembered really well. It was about the time Scrooge, Donald and the three nephews went looking for the lost treasure of the Incas. Scrooge finds the treasure but accidentally sets off a trap that washes tons of Inca gold into a river and downstream to the city. Suddenly there is so much gold now that it’s clogging the streets of the city like mud, and even coming out of the water faucets. So Scrooge finds the gold but in the process made gold almost totally worthless. My first lesson in how inflation works. Indiana Jones adventures were never as exciting to a young boy’s eyes. And…hilarious.
What kind of person tries to make a kid think they’re stupid? Okay…kids are still in the process of forming themselves, and she was a kid then too, and I did some pretty crappy things to the other kids myself at times when I was that age…things I still cringe to remember. But what kind of person did that girl grow up to be I wonder…
A story is posted on Fark.Com, about the Somalian pirates that drowned when their speed boat capsized while carrying three million dollars in ransom money back to the lair. The comment thread turns into an argument about whether Ninjas or Vikings could take on Pirates. Stoners have nothing on geeks, I’m here to tell you.
The [Ford] Taurus is one of the top-selling nameplates of all time, for any carmaker, with more than 200,000 purchased in 1986, its first year, and 1 million by 1989.
The nation was enamored of its aerodynamic design and innovative features such as a wrap-around dash with new controls that could be identified by feel, keeping the driver’s eyes on the road. By 1992, Ford was selling more than 420,000 a year. That made it the No. 1 sedan in the country, and analysts suggested the car had saved Ford from bankruptcy.
By the mid-1990s, however, Ford’s focus had shifted to highly profitable trucks and sport utility vehicles, and its redesign of the Taurus for the 1996 model year was a disaster. Not only was it widely regarded as unattractive, but also cheaply made, with Ford skimping on quality and features such as replacing modern disc brakes with outdated, but less expensive, drum brakes.
The next year, Taurus relinquished its sedan leadership to the Toyota Camry, which has held the position ever since…
Drum brakes. Drum brakes. I remember drum brakes. The Pinto had them and so did the two junkers that followed. Drums don’t last very long and they fade horribly because they can’t shed heat as well as discs. They just don’t have the stopping power. But Detroit would sell people cars with Flintstone brakes if Washington didn’t require cars to have brakes that actually work.
This model uses the most efficient and reliable braking system known to mankind…your own two feet. Consider that while walking we stop and go hundreds of times a day and yet our feet last an entire lifetime without needing to be replaced. Here at The Large American Car Company, we have gone back to the basics in order to bring you a car that not only uses the amazing power of the human foot to safely bring your car to a halt, but at a cost that is only slightly more expensive then last year’s model. Full loads no longer tax your brakes because the more passengers you carry, the more feet are available for stopping and the greater your stopping power! Dad, Mom, and all the kids can enjoy a far safer ride then in other vehicles equipped with antiquated mechanical braking systems…
They would do it. I remember how they hollered like their teeth were being pulled out when Washington told them to put seat belts in cars. And it’s not just the technical qualities of their cars that they allowed to suffer, but the aesthetic ones as well. Sit down in an American economy car and run your fingers over the plastic in the dash and the center console. Work the buttons, knobs and the shifter. Then do the same in a Honda or Toyota. The American car just feels cheaply made, the Honda and Toyota more solid to the touch. I don’t think the cost differential between the plastic they use in Japan and the plastic they use in most American cars is much, if any. It might even be the same basic kind of plastic. They’re just not thinking about the impression it makes on the buyer just to touch the finished product. That may seem trivial, but it’s the mindset and it’s ruining them.
I’ve woken up from vivid dreams where I was doing a lot of things, but never laughing so hard I was in tears. But that’s what happened a few moments ago. I guess my internal state of mind must be pretty good.
I was dreaming I was with two friends in one of the music rooms at my old high school. One was the old friend from my grade school days who I just visited last week. The other is a newer, younger, mostly online friend who I met on MySpace some years ago, through the Love In Action protests. They are both Uber geeks and fun to be with, but they have never met each other. In the dream we all ended up together at my old high school and got to giggling over the kind of arcane pop culture in-joke that only techno geeks would get and we were all laughing ourselves silly and I woke up.
I don’t think I’ve ever woken up from laughing in my dreams before. Something’s changed inside of me. I wonder what.
A Junker Is A Car That Gets You Through The Rough Times
Via Fark, I stumbled across a post in Spike titled 10 Signs Your Car Is A Beater. After a while I realized I was laughing because I’d owned some of those cars myself.
10. Your Trunk Looks Like a Pep Boys Exploded
My first car was a new car. Looking back on it, I was unreasonably lucky in that regard. Most kids on my side of the railroad tracks, fresh out of high school, were lucky to get hand me downs or well worn junkers. I got a brand new 1973 Ford Pinto. I had to make the payments myself, but Mom willingly co-signed the loan. I guess I’d proven by that time that I could be responsible about money. The drive it off the lot price was $1997.48. It had a 1600cc overhead valve four with a tiny one barrel carb and a four-speed manual transmission. I got the most bare bones one they had on the lot: it didn’t have a radio, it didn’t even have a cigarette lighter above the ash tray…only a metal plug where one would have gone. I later found that the wiring for the lighter was there anyway when I added one so I could power things off it.
Ford and GM and AMC had just decided to get into the sub-compact car market, and the big selling point of the Pinto back then, was it’s basic simplicity. In the sexist climate of the times, one of their ads was of a group of airline stewardesses standing around a Pinto with its hood up, holding various tools, demonstrating that even stewardesses could do the maintenance on one. The great thing about that car for me was that even a kid fresh out of high school could work on one. That was important, because I had absolutely no money to pay anyone to work on it.
Over the years I learned to do the maintenance on it myself, even to the point of replacing brakes, clutches, water pumps and exhaust pipes and mufflers, even the radiator at one point. That bought me a familiarity with automobile basics, and over time an appreciation for good mechanical design, which the Pinto had in some regards, and didn’t in others. It also got me started on assembling a good tool collection.
I made a decision early on, influenced by the Uber geek crowd I’d already fallen into at that age, to only buy the very best tools. Since I was in no position to be buying expensive tool sets, I simply bought one of what I needed, when I needed it. I could skimp on food and clothes if I had to, but if I needed a tool for something I would buy the very best Sears Craftsman or Snap-On. The thinking was that a tool was something you didn’t just buy, but invested in because they made you self sufficient. It’s a strategy I pursued the rest of my life. When I moved into Casa del Garrett back in 2001, I came well equipped with tools (and spare parts…I’m a pack rat after all…) for doing all sorts of Harry Homeowner tasks around the house, many of which, particularly the hand tools, had been bought back in my teens and twenties.
I kept that Pinto for an entire decade, pampering it as best I could. Back then you were doing good if you got over 50k out of a standard American made car. They only made them back then with five digits on the odometer, which tells you right there what they expected the life span of one of their cars would be. I got 135k out of that Pinto. But age took its toll and the car began to fall completely apart in ways I simply could not cope with and I had to give it up.
3. Starting Your Car Requires the Hood to be Open
That was the Pinto toward the end of its life. The little one barrel carburetor had some sort of vapor lock going on inside of it. During the hot summer months I had to open the hood unscrew the air filter lid and stick a paper clip, I swear, into a hole near where the float lived. I’d hear a slight swoosh of pressure being released. Then the car would start. If I didn’t do that…forget it.
There were other problems. The plastic in the dashboard and the steering wheel was severely cracked, as well as the vinyl in the driver’s seat. I patched the driver seat with duct tape, I thing I reckoned I could get away with since I lived on the white trash side of the tracks anyway. One of the windshield wiper arms was prone to popping off, as was the rear view mirror occasionally. The gear shifter would come off the trans like a gecko’s tail in my hands while I was shifting if I wasn’t careful. I’d added an oil cooler, a nice stereo cassette deck, a set of gauges including a Heathkit electronic tachometer, and an electric rear window defogger, and I’d religiously changed the engine oil every 2000 miles. I pampered that engine and it never failed me, but by 135k everything around it was pretty much falling apart. If mom and I had a house I’d have kept at it, but we lived in an apartment and while I could get away with the occasional oil change landlords tend to frown on tenants doing clutch work in the parking lot.
I had no money for a new one, and since I didn’t have steady work then I couldn’t ask mom to co-sign a loan for another one. I couldn’t promise her I’d be able to keep up the payments. A friend stepped forward and offered me his mom’s old Chrysler Newport. It was a tank. It had a 450 cubic inch V8 under the hood and bench seats front and rear. It was so big the dashboard had two ashtrays, one on the driver side, and one on the passenger side. Having driven a Pinto for ten years, I felt tiny and lost inside that thing. I named it The Blue Wale.
Oh…and it had a pretty big hole in the floor in front of the driver’s seat. I kept it covered with a floor mat.
I did my best to take care of it, including replacing the motor mounts after one broke loose. But a reckless driver in a Mercury Capri hit me head-on and totaled what was left of it. I was really grateful for that massive hood in front of me when I saw that Capri careening toward me. It slammed my Newport backward three feet and pretty much creamed the front-end, but I walked out without a scratch. Getting my face slammed into the all metal dashboard of a Rambler American one day when I was seven years old, had taught me the value of seatbelts long before I’d even heard of such things.
I entered a period of carlessness. I was utterly dependent on public transportation to get around any further then my own two feet could take me…which wasn’t a trivial distance since I have always loved to walk. But don’t ever ask me to depend on public transportation again. At least not in America. New York City and Portland Oregon exempted.
The last junker I ever owned was another 1974 model. It was fall of 1991, and I’d just gotten my first good job as a software developer. Problem was I had to commute to Baltimore from Rockville. I tried taking the metro to Union Station in Washington, and the MARC rail to Baltimore, and the Baltimore Light Rail to Timonium. Once. It was three hours each way. So I needed a car. Another friend stepped forward and arranged for me to buy the car owned by the mother of another one of his friends.
Common attributes include a gaping hole where a stereo might’ve once been, a stench which demands that the windows never get rolled up, and interior which constantly sheds various bits of material on anyone unfortunate enough to be within its confines. A thief looks at your car and says “man, sucks to be that guy” and moves on. Criminals pity you. That’s where you’re at right now.
It was a white 1974 Ford LTD panel wagon. She’d used it to service her gumball machine business in West Virginia. It had 240k miles on it, and was powered by a 400 cubic inch V8 with a collapsed hydraulic lifter in it somewhere. I could make the tap, tap, tapping of the lifter go away for a few hundred miles after a fresh oil change, but it always came back and fixing the lifter would have meant serious engine work I was unwilling to put into it. The interior roof cloth was delaminating and sagging to the point where it had started to block the view out the back window. So I cut it all down. The foam lining then began to flake off and I’d get out of the car with my hair full of it. Big as the Newport was, the LTD wagon was immense. I named it The Great White…as in great white whale.
After driving it for a year and a half to and from Baltimore I was at the place where I could finally believe that this earning a living as a computer programmer thing wasn’t a fluke and I moved into my first apartment of my very own. I was thirty-eight years old. Having that station wagon was a big plus during that move. But shortly after I’d settled in, I wandered into a car dealer to see, just out of curiosity, if I could talk myself into a new car too. That evening I drove home in a brand new 1993 Geo Prism and felt like I’d hit the big time. I named it Aya. The dealer took my LTD in for a hundred bucks trade-in and I felt grateful they hadn’t made me pay them to take it.
Aya was the size of my first new car, the Pinto. But technologically it was light years away. It had the same size engine but it was an overhead cam fuel injected little goer. I could do 85 in it no sweat. The Pinto labored at 60. I did the Rocky Mountains in Aya and it just hummed along. The Pinto gasped for breath in those mountains. I owned Aya for twelve years, put just a tad over 200k on it, and the main reason I sold it was I was ready then to step up a bit.
Two junkers, and one Ford Pinto that became a junker simply because Ford hadn’t built it to last even if you took care of it. But they encouraged me to buy good tools and learn how to take care of a car. They taught me to keep emergency stuff in the trunk, jumper cables, flares, this and that for quick repairs, and not to panic if the car broke down and left me stranded somewhere miles from anything. In retrospect for all that I am grateful.
After the Prism came a brand-new 2005 Honda Accord which I named Beauty because it was just so lovely to look at. Beauty had all the options…it was the first car I’d ever bought with a shopping list bigger then "whatever I can afford that rolls off the lot under its own power". It had leather seats, fake wood trim, satellite radio, a power driver seat, seat warmers. Seat warmers! The rear seats folded down so I could transport large items. I had to unbolt the back seat to do that in the Prism. And after the Accord came a brand-new 2008 Mercedes-Benz C300.
A Mercedes-Benz… I stood there just staring at it after I got it home, thinking of all the places we would go, and I named it Traveler. I’d dreamed of owning a Mercedes since I was a teenager, when an uncle had driven down for a visit in his new 220D. By the time I was thirty-five I figured it would always be just a dream. But I never thought I’d ever have a house of my own either.
Almost eighteen years passed from the first time I laid eyes on The Great White to the first time I sat down in Traveler. It wasn’t that long. It was twenty between the time I bought the Pinto and when I was able once more to afford another new car, the Prism. I was eighteen years old when I bought the Pinto. Thirty-eight when I bought the Prism. The time between them were some of the worst years of my life. For eight of them I had no car at all. When I finally did get a car again, the insurance companies wouldn’t touch me because I hadn’t owned a car for so long. I had to get state funded insurance, at drunk driver rates even though my license was spotless.
I can sit here and close my eyes and with very little effort remember, vividly, struggling under the Pinto with the transmission, trying to get it threaded back through the clutch pack after replacing the clutch because yet another new clutch they’d sold me turned out to be a crappy rebuilt clutch instead which had failed after only a few miles. I can recall sitting in the Newport with the hood open and the engine idling, tapping the gas pedal ever so slightly, and seeing the engine try to jump out of the car because one of the motor mounts had just broken off. I can recall driving to Baltimore on a sunny February morning up I-95 listening to the loud tap, tap, tapping of the collapsed lifter and wondering if I had enough money that week for another six quarts of fresh oil or should I just let it rattle.
If it seems sometimes here like I never stop gushing over the Mercedes, there is a reason for it.
I posted This a little while ago about a lecture I’d attended at Space Telescope on the nature of the first stars. Folks I talked to afterward indicated that while the upcoming James Webb space Telescope might, just might, be able to see their explosive ends, it would be only by pure unreasonable luck. They are just too far back in time, too red shifted, too distant and faint for anything we have in the works for the next twenty years or so.
But from this New York Times article, it looks as though maybe, just maybe, they’ve already been spotted. Accidentally…just like the cosmic background noise was first spotted…
When the universe was still young, they were already dying.
The first stars ever to grace the cosmos with light were brutish monsters, so the story believed by most astronomers goes, lumbering clouds of hydrogen and helium hundreds of times more massive than the Sun. They lived fast and bright and died hard, exploding or collapsing into massive black holes less than a billion years after the Big Bang, never to be seen again.
But they might have left something behind, a buzz of radio waves emitted by high-energy particles spit from the doomed gas swirling around those black holes.
They were looking at the cosmic background radiation at wavelengths not previously studied in detail. What they saw were large magnetic whirls that were so energetic they’d be expected to come from the so-called radio galaxies…that is…galaxies that are very energetic in the radio frequencies due to the active and massive black holes in their center. Active because they are still sucking in nearby matter. You don’t generally see these galaxies in the visible light spectrum much, if at all, because they are so far away they’re red shifted. But in the infrared, and in the radio spectrum there they are, bright as can be. Hence they are referred to as radio galaxies.
But if these signals were coming from radio galaxies, then there should also be an equally strong infrared signal to go along with them, from the heat generated in their massive accretion disks. But there is not much of a signal there. There should be much more. But that’s assuming the signal is coming from a massive center of a galaxy black hole.
Even the first galaxies would have already had lots of recycled matter in them…matter that had already gone once or more though stars, and was seeded with heavier elements then hydrogen and helium in the process. But if the black holes at the center of these accretion disks were surrounded by nothing but hydrogen and a little helium, and perhaps only a trace of heavier elements, then the infrared signal would be a lot weaker. The only way that could be happening, is if the black hole in question is the ash from a first star.
All the first stars had to burn with were the original hydrogen and helium left over from the big bang. There was nothing else on the menu for stars in the newly born universe. The first super-massive black holes would have lived in the same environment, as the heavier elements created by their star would have been blown far away in its final collapse. So it’s possible that what they are seeing now, while not the light from the first stars, is the footprints they left behind.
I have wondered for years now which comes first, the galaxy or the massive black hole in its center. My layman’s hunch for a while now is that the black hole is the seed that starts it all. But where do the first super massive black holes come from? When I heard the story of the first stars I thought I had an idea where. And then it came to me that the importance of the first stars isn’t that they started the process of generating the heavier elements, but that they generated the first black holes which were the seeds around which the galaxies could form. Without those first super-massive black holes I don’t think you could get the galaxies as we see them now. Maybe you’d get the kind of stars we see now, but a lot fewer of them and scattered around in a clusters and swarms in the darkness maybe. But that’s just a layman’s guess, basically.
I was noticing in the server logs this morning that someone came in from an ip address at the University of Maryland on the following Google search string:
coming out comic garrett
Well…that made my day right there. Someone went looking Specifically for my cartoon series, A Coming Out Story. They didn’t know or couldn’t remember the title exactly, but they knew what it was about and at least the last name of the guy who did it.
Nice. Cartooning was the first love. I gave up hope that I’d ever make a living at it for pretty much the same reason I gave up on being a professional photographer. I’m just not competitive enough, and when I was younger too timid, shy and scared to try making a go of things as a freelancer. Ironically, I ended up spending most of my life freelancing in other fields, only one of which, architectural modelmaking, even remotely touched on my artistic skills. But there it is. I gave up dreaming about seeing my cartoons in print anywhere. Then along came the internet and I could just put up my own web site and see if my stuff attracted anyone.
It does. I have put zero effort into advertising anything I do here and yet after just a few years I get hits on my cartoons from all over the world. Not a torrent of hits. But the steady nature of what I do get is more rewarding then you can imagine.
Which is why I’ll be spending the weekend down in the art room…
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