I’m just back from one of my semi-annual road trips to California, in case anyone reading this blog was wondering where the heck I went. My job at Space Telescope came with a wonderful vacation benefit, but the workload now on JWST is pretty steady and taking a couple weeks off at one go is getting harder and harder to schedule. I figured the Christmas/New Year’s break would be a good time to take a road trip to California and see my brother and give the Mercedes its first taste of the great plains and the southwest. As we get closer and closer to launch it will become very hard to schedule a long road trip west.

Time was I’d take everyone who reads this blog along with me for the ride.   But these days it probably isn’t the smartest thing to let the whole world know you’re away from your house.   So the blog went silent.   But I’m back now…I have pictures to develop and post…I have stories to tell.   But I also have unpacking to do and some settling back in to my little Baltimore rowhouse.   So for now let me just jot down a few notes while the road is still fresh in my thoughts…

First, a few statistics from my car’s trip computer:

• Total Miles: 6,420
• Average Miles Per Gallon: 36.8
• Average Speed: 60 mph
• Total Driving Time: 105.59 hours
• 2917.4 miles from my brother’s house to mine, mostly along I-40.

I’ll total up the fuel chits later.   West of the Mississippi you get highway speed limits higher than 70mph and sometimes higher than 80. You cover distance faster, but mileage suffers. Still, this is absolutely the most fuel efficient car I have ever owned and that’s saying something.   My first car was a 1973 Ford Pinto with the little 1600cc engine and one barrel carburetor.   It did 35mpg tops. The little Geo Prism got high 30s and so did the Honda Accord. For a car this size and this sumptuous the fuel economy is just amazing. At the end of some days on the road this trip I was pushing 39mpg. But when I hit the high mountain passages my averages went down into the low 30s.

Bio-diesel was not a major problem. First bio-diesel pump I saw on the way west was at a Love’s just west of Little Rock. I’d put a tad over a gallon in the tank before I noticed this little sticker…

…and quickly shut off the pump. That sticker, which I saw on every pump selling bio-diesel, is not helpful. But next to it (usually) is a bigger green sticker that does specify the grade you’re pumping. I never saw anything lower than B10 on the road, and nothing higher than B15. Mostly it was B10.

So there I was with a half tank of regular diesel left, plus I’d driven from Maryland with a full five gallon spare diesel can as insurance…that it eventually turned out I didn’t need. The Pilot truck stop across the highway had the same set of stickers on it. But across from the Pilot was a Petro and it had a Chevron station attached to it that had regular diesel pumps and I was able to fill up.

That was pretty much how it went all the way to California and back. Wherever I ran into bio-diesel I was always able to find a station nearby that had regular. But it was completely random as to which brand was a problem. Most often it was the Love’s. But I ran into it at all of the truck stop chains at least once. Usually it was the Shell or Chevron stations that had usable diesel, but I ran into it there too occasionally.   But wherever I ran into it I nearly always found usable diesel right across the street.   Just once in Arizona I had to drive to the next exit.

And there was no noticeable price break on the bio. If anything, the regular was usually cheaper, and sometimes by a lot. At one location in New Mexico there were two big truck stops, a Love’s and a Pilot, both selling bio at $3.95 a gallon. An independent travel center nearby was selling regular diesel at $3.73 a gallon.

My path this time took me well south of I-70. I have no idea how bad it is further north in corn state territory. But for now at any rate, I can drive my car from the East Coast to the West. How long that remains the case remains to be seen.

Truck Stops Are Now “Travel Plazas”. There are five big chains you see all the time on the road, Travel Centers of America, Love’s, Flying J, Pilot and Petro and while the truckers are their bread and butter business, they’re all vying for the long distance passenger car market and some like Flying J/Pilot are even offering us “loyalty cards” now.   Flying J/Pilot is the chain that seems the most determined to remake itself as a general purpose highway “travel center” with a clean, uncluttered common floor plan and mini food/coffee court. I could walk into any Flying J or Pilot from Maryland to California and see pretty much the same layout and after a while you knew where everything was when you walked in the door.   Their coffee bar was especially handy and the coffee was very good, with half to a dozen or so coffee dispensers all lined up with various blends in them.   By the time I got to California I was making it a point to stop at one of these and I ended up getting a “Flying J/Pilot” loyalty card because I was stopping there so often for their coffee and breakfast muffins.

Rest rooms in the big chain truck stops are often Much cleaner than the state run highway rest stops. You need a high tolerance for country music though.

When stopping for the night, make sure your cell phone network isn’t crappy before checking in. Unless you really want to be disconnected from email and the web. I bought into the iPhone when the first one came out and that was an AT&T device only. Since then they’ve added other better carriers, but the one with the best network, Verizon, uses a digital signal that prevents their iPhone from doing both voice and data at the same time. So I stick with AT&T. But its network in the out of the way spots is crappy. The nice thing about cell phone technology is you aren’t dependent on your motel for internet service. But you need to remember to check your signal before you check in.

Almost any cheap motel room can be a good night’s sleep if you bring your own pillow and a sleeping bag that can double as a comforter. During winter travel you should always carry a good sleeping bag with you anyway, in case of breakdown. Also food and water. Take some good ear plugs (I use silicon ones) and I also bring along one of these white noise generators, because screaming dysfunctional family of five, or selfish TV volume up full jackass will probably be given the room next to yours. Note that these amenities can be found in expensive motels too, so if you aren’t as willing as I am to go with the cheap room you still need ear plugs at least and I strongly recommend the white noise generator too.With these four things, pillow, sleeping bag/comforter, ear plugs and white noise generator, all you really need to care about is is the room clean and the mattress reasonable.

Check the ersatz Continental Breakfast on your way out to see if there’s anything worth taking on the road with you. It’s included after all. Occasionally I am able to make a good breakfast muffin out of the sausage and egg servings. But it’s rare the cheap motels serve meat and eggs in the morning.

And…no matter how tired and irritable you are when you get off the road an into a room, smile and be nice to your desk clerk. I’ve worked late night and over night shifts a time or two in my life. They are not fun. And depending on how far into the sticks you are, that clerk checking you in may be desperately wanting to go with you when you leave the next morning.   Once in a very small town in southern Utah, I was checked in by a young girl who chatted with me for a bit about her dream of getting onto American Idol.   It was going to be her ticket out of there. I tried to suggest and tactfully as I could that her ticket out of there was to just get up and go.   But the Unknown is a very frightening ball and chain on a person…I know this from personal experience, I suppose everyone does to some degree.   Be nice to your desk clerk.   Also everyone who serves you on the road. Especially in the sticks. Notice how they sometimes look at you like you are nuts when you tell them you’d love to move out of the city someday, into some nice quiet out of the way place in the country Just Like This One.

Don’t drive long into the night.   Shift your schedule forward instead.   Get off the highway early, early…like around six or seven. Then get back on the road next morning early. That way you have no trouble at the end of a long day on the road, getting a good room on the ground floor you can back your car up to. And early in the morning traffic will be very light to non-existent, which is a better way to start your day (obviously that does not apply in Washington D.C. or L.A.).   And speaking of traffic…

Truck traffic was very heavy this trip actually.   Which is good, because it means the economy is picking up. My own private economic indicator is train whistles. Here in Baltimore, when I hear them often I know heavy bulk goods are on the move, which is good. Whenever I am stopped for the night in Kingman Arizona (it usually works out that way somehow), I go watch the BNSF main line for a while. When times are good the trains are about fifteen minutes apart. When they’re not so good you maybe see or hear only one or two in a night.   This trip the trains were running pretty constantly through Kingman, but not at fifteen minute intervals.

The new Mercedes loves the open road as much as its driver. 19 degree gale force winds in Virginia and crappy Arkansas highways barely rate its notice. And there is nothing more satisfying than hearing that muscular diesel engine sound in the morning as you repack the trunk, as though the next seven or eight hundred miles ahead of you that day are but a mere trifle on the way to its first hundred thousand miles. I chatted briefly at a diesel pump in Arroyo Grande with a couple young guys driving a very beat up old 240D. It had lost both its bumpers and its paint job was worn almost to the primer and its owner had bought it for $600 dollars and was absolutely in love with it.   Tattered and worn as it looked he said it was the most solid and reliable car he’d ever owned.   His friends he said, told him it was more like a piece of farm equipment than an automobile. But to a Mercedes aficionado, that is a complement. What most Americans don’t know unless they travel abroad, is Daimler is the world’s biggest maker of heavy trucks and buses, and the Mercedes diesel sedan is often seen doing taxi duty in other countries.

To make an automobile that is that heavy duty and substantial, yet also agile, comfortable and beautiful, is a serious work of engineering art. This is the car I’ve been dreaming of exploring the open road with all my life. I’ve owned it for just over a year now and put nearly 30k miles on it. But that was mostly on several drives down to Florida…three to Disney World and one to Key West…which were acceptable to it I suppose.   Most days it’s just sitting in front of my little Baltimore rowhouse.   I can walk to work, and to the grocery store and The Avenue and Cafe’ Hon in Hampden, and I absolutely hate city traffic. For a year now it may have been sitting there wondering if the slovenly pointless life of a computer geek’s status symbol was its fate after all.

No dear…I love you better than that…

[Edited a tad…]

Yes, the world ended, as does every night.   And the next morning a new one begins, as it always does.

So I’m sitting here in front of Bagheera, my art room computer, listening to old Don McNeaill “Breakfast Club” radio shows.   And listening I think to myself that the first childhood you get is always your parent’s childhood. Eventually you grow a bit older and you join your generation in its childhood. But the very early years of childhood are always your parent’s childhood, because that’s the one they had and that’s the one they try to give you, and my preschool one in the 1950s even though we had a TV in the house, was mostly a radio childhood and I fondly remember the Breakfast Club.

A Facebook friend’s status post and subsequent comment thread tosses me back to a memory of my pre coming out to myself days that is both funny and cringe inducing at the same time.   Funny how often memories of our teen years are like that…

A friend is posing for an underwear fashion shoot and he’s asking for advice on getting a nice pair of black briefs because black is the specified color of the shoot and all he has are a pair of AussieBums that he doesn’t like.   He points to a link to the AussieBum page and I take a look.   They’re nice, thinks I. I have a thing for briefs and find it regrettable that they’re not the fashion in the younger set anymore. When I was a kid, boxers were what the old men wore.   Now I’m getting old myself and boxers are what the young guys wear and they think briefs are old guy underwear.   But briefs are still out there, gay guys at least still like wearing them, and the AussieBums I’m looking at are very nice…except like a lot of underwear companies these days, the waistband is like a damn billboard with the company name occupying almost as much real estate as the material below it.

I can appreciate a company wanting to get its name out there…but I really hate it when the branding on clothes demands more attention then the body wearing them. I am not your walking billboard. Plus, when I see an attractive guy, and especially if he’s not wearing very much, I don’t appreciate advertising getting in the way. My Facebook friend merely replies that it’s all about the branding, and that normally it’s only a glimpse of the wasteband that’s visible. A company has to get your attention when and where it can.   Okay.   Fine.   I get that.   But I’m still annoyed by it.

And then suddenly I’m remembering myself as a teenager, and those first confusing, thrilling times when getting that glimpse of an elastic waistband peeking out above a guy’s   belt line would make me all hot and bothered for some reason I really didn’t want to explore just then.   I touched on it in Episode 10 of A Coming Out Story…

There’s a toss-off line in John Fox’s The Boys On The Rock, where the young protagonist Billy takes note of the different kinds of underwear he and his new boyfriend are wearing as they are undressing each other.   It’s the kind of detail, that the kid even knows how some brands of underwear are different from other brands, that tells the reader this kid has been looking at guys in a sexual way for a while now. I suspect some of my straight peers back then could tell just by glancing at a girl’s tight shirt who made her bra, and whether it had hooks or snaps. They’d have probably been surprised to learn that men’s underwear differed from brand to brand in anything more then just price. Had I told them I could tell what make of underwear they were wearing just by looking at the waistband they’d have known more about me then I was ready to tell anyone. Including myself.

In the 1960s, long before they’d come out with such things as designer underwear for men, you had maybe four major brands of underwear.   There were Fruit of the Looms, Hanes, BVDs and Jockeys. Back then your choices were white cotton, high in the waist and cut such that the leg openings didn’t rise up the thigh much.   Not terribly sexy by today’s standards. All the same to a gay kid whose hormones had tentatively started percolating the underwear pages of the various catalogs suddenly became pretty riveting reading. I started ogling them when I was nine or ten I think.

I can hear the snickers now.   A catalog? Given the level of open sexuality these days, gay and straight, it’s probably hard for people who didn’t live that period to get how sexually repressed it was, and how shocking the free love morality of the Beat and Woodstock generations were to their elders.   My peers and I grew up in their shadow and in the 1960s even my heterosexual peers had to resort to the catalogs to get their fix, though they could also at least find the occasionally discarded Playboy in the trash bins.   I remember a friend finding one of those and gleefully passing it around as we gathered in one of our secret hiding places. There was an article about a nudest camp and I remember being completely riveted by the few naked guys I saw in the pictures. My companions were all making admiring comments about the women and parrot like, I mimicked them. But I never took my eyes off the naked guys. That was discovering sex when you were a kid back in those days. You and a bunch of the other guys, in your treehouse or fort or secret hiding place, passing around a Playboy someone had found in the trash.   There was no Internet you could browse alone in your room when your parents weren’t looking.

I was careful to ogle the catalogs when I knew I was alone in the house, knowing full well at some level what I was doing and yet at the same time not admitting it to myself. And true to form the budding little geek in me began around then to critically analyze the object of my fascination. It wasn’t long before I could spot the difference between a Hanes and a BVD at a glance. The catalog retailers, Sears, Montgomery Ward, J.C.Penny, used to buy from one of the big companies and rebrand them with their own names. I could tell just by looking at them.   These are made by Fruit of the Loom…these are really BVDs…

Most spellbinding of all were the Jockeys. The first time I saw another kid in the gym locker room wearing one of those Y fronts my jaw almost hit the floor. I’d never seen anything so…alluring. Particularly on that one kid who had a body that looked like it had stepped out of one of my anatomy for artists books. It was junior high and I was fourteen or fifteen.   Being careful not to gawk in the locker room wasn’t usually a problem though. It was so embarrassing to have to undress, let alone shower naked with a bunch of other guys, that I became adept at tuning everything out and just getting on with it (I joke sometimes that it’s a trick I learned in Vacation Bible School). Plus, even at that age when you are busy becoming all hormones and nerve ends my libido was very low key and persnickety. But there were close calls. When the other guys my age began rhapsodizing about advertising for bras and woman’s lingerie I knew I had to keep my mouth shut. But I wasn’t ready to admit to myself why.

In high school, in the early 70s low riser bell bottom jeans started coming into fashion and I began seeing other guys my age wearing them in school.   Not every guy who wore them really had the body for it, but those who did drove me nuts every time they walked by.   The best of these really showed off a guy’s…attributes…nicely.   And if the shirt wasn’t tucked in you might see a glimpse of elastic peeking up above the belt line.   By the time I was 17 I had become I became expert at telling the brands apart just by the waistband because the stitching each company used was different. Fruit Of The Looms had a small blue stripe with a yellow stripe below it. BVDs had a black dotted line, sometimes with a red dotted line below it.   Nowadays on a lot of brands the elastic waistband is a damn billboard.   Back then it was something you decoded stealthily, like a secret message.

How I could become such an expert on men’s underwear and at the same time remain clueless about my sexual orientation is something I’ve been trying to delve into in my cartoon, A Coming Out Story.   It was a combination of the horrible things I was taught about homosexuals back in my ninth grade sex-ed class, and the relentless stereotypes of that time. On the one hand I knew I could not possibly be a homosexual because I was none of the horrible things that I’d been taught homosexuals were.   On the other, I knew perfectly well what would happen to me if it became common knowledge that I was one.   Already through most of my grade school life I’d been tormented and bullied severely because I was small, scrawny, and I hated sports.   Faggot was a routine insult kids like me got whether we were actually thought to be queer or not.   I didn’t need the extra added threat of the other kids knowing for certain that I was, in fact, a queer.

So I kept it all inside. But sex is an instinct older then the fish, let alone the mammals, let alone the primates, let alone humans, let alone teenage boys. You can try to bottle it up inside of you, but it will find its way out no matter how much you’d rather it just went away. Even such a tame little apologetic libido as my own.   It just kept…insisting that I look at all the beautiful guys.   Especially the ones with a tempting bit of skin showing between the belt line and the shirt.   Insisting that I look as they walked by.   Oh…look over there…that one…well now, his hips move very nicely as he walks don’t they?   Long legs…   Nice jeans…   Oh look…he’s wearing Jockeys…

I count it as a blessing that I was able to avoid the years of self loathing other gay guys of my generation endured.   I fell in love and in that wonderful glorious rush of teenage first love was able to finally come out to myself and not see myself as perverted, mentally ill or an abomination in the sight of God.   But I understand completely how it is that some people, strident cultural conservatives getting caught with rent boys, politicians getting caught soliciting vice cops in parks or public restrooms, can do the things they do, things that fairly write I Am A Homosexual on their foreheads in neon lights, and still resolutely not consider themselves to be gay.   All I have to do is remember back to when I was a kid alone in the house with one of the big mail order catalogs, gawking at the men’s underwear pages, one part of me completely entranced, the other just keeping its mouth shut.

[Edited a tad…]   I had to add the words “advertising for” to the end of one of the paragraphs there to make it clear my childhood friends weren’t transvestites.   I’m not saying any of them aren’t…just that back then they were ogling advertising for bras and women’s lingerie like a lot of boys that age did back then, not fantasizing about wearing it.   A couple wise guys here apparently thought I meant otherwise…

Here’s a little something for the (according to my server logs) fans of my sketches of cute guys in cutoffs. They’re just wistful daydreaming on my part…I had no idea anyone really liked these. But while I was on vacation my web site got Google hits from people specifically looking for my name and cutoffs. Wow. I may be no Tom of Finland (whose males I never found attractive but I was in awe of his skill with a pencil) but I could do worse then be known for drawing beautiful guys in cutoffs.

Normally you Google for images of nice looking guys in cutoffs and what you get are a lot of pictures of guys who really shouldn’t be wearing these at all, which people post as a way of ridiculing cutoffs…or at any rate, cutoffs on guys. Yes, yes…you need the physique for it…but lotsa guys have that and in any case the ridicule isn’t about guys who have no fashion common sense, it’s about reenforcing the male fear of looking too sexy below the waste because that’s teh gay.

When I was a young adult this look wasn’t uncommon even on straight guys (though admittedly straight guys didn’t usually wear them quite This short…) and I guess my emerging libido just glommed onto it. But damn I like this look and I reckon I’ll just keep drawing it…

If this means I’m stuck in the past so be it. As I said, these are just the random wistful daydreams of a single guy. If you like them then I’m happy. If you think they’re ridiculous then go away.

That’s great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane –
Lenny Bruce is not afraid…
-REM, It’s The End Of The World As We Know It

So according to both REM and our latest End Of The World prophet Harold Camping, the end of the world will start with an earthquake.   The scriptures agree!   As I write this, Raw Story is currently live blogging the rapture…

At 6 pm local time on the International Date Line, Harold Camping of the Family Radio Network believed the Rapture was supposed to begin with a tremendous earthquake and destruction the likes of which humans have never seen. Rolling westward, it was set to hit Tokyo — which has already witnessed its share of destruction this year — at 6 pm local time, or 5 am ET. Since that’s the most reasonable unreasonably early hour I was willing to get up, that’s when this liveblog began.

I feel as if I should take time out of my busy day to relax and enjoy this once in a lifetime spectacle, since according to Camping it’s folks like me who made it all possible…

Q: Why May 21?
A: Camping calculates May 21 is exactly 7,000 years from the date of the Noah’s Ark flood. In his book “Time Has an End,” Camping writes. “The year 391 B.C. is the year when the Old Testament was finished, and 2,011 + 391 – 1 = 2,401, or 7 x 7 x 7 x 7.” There you have it.

Q: Any other reason?
A: Yes. Gay Pride and same-sex marriage. Camping says God will punish America and the rest of the world for Gay Pride and same-sex marriages, just as Sodom and Gomorrah were punished with fire and brimstone in the Old Testament.

Of course, the gays are responsible.   The gays are always responsible.   A friend of mine in Kansas suggests we all leave articles of clothing here and there on the streets of our towns to mark the occasion.   Perhaps instead, it’s time for The Rapture to be reclaimed.

I have a scenario:   Instead of rapturing the one or two percent of the world’s right wing christianist nutcases, suppose God really does rapture His Own on that day and hour no man knows, not even the Angels.     Suppose He takes all the good people away.   No…the Good people.   The Really Good people.   The ones who gave a damn about this good earth, and their neighbors…all the ones who cared enough to struggle, give their lives even, to make this world a better place for all of us…all the ones who couldn’t let an injustice go past without raising their voices…all the ones who never let a friend down, even if it meant taking some personal risk…all the ones who were trustworthy, who wouldn’t cheat a stranger, let alone a friend…all the lovers…all the dreamers of a better tomorrow.   Whether they were Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Buddhist or Atheist.   All the good people…which would be a pretty large portion of the human population, but alas not hardly all of it.   Suppose in one sudden instant God snatched them all away.   What would be left behind?

Why…all the assholes.

And there’s your Tribulation right there.   Never mind the seven seals and judgement day….every day is judgement day.   The antichrist isn’t a person, it’s a mindset.   It’s living for what you hate instead of what you love.   It’s cheating someone weaker then you just because you can and assuring yourself that the weak deserve it.   It’s bullying your way though life and then whining that you don’t get the respect you deserve.   It’s scapegoating your neighbor instead of taking responsibility.   It’s looking at life with zero-sum glasses that are always telling you that whenever someone else is happy it’s because they’re taking something away from you.   It’s resenting human joy so much you just have to strangle it wherever you see it in the eyes of others.   Suppose the world was suddenly left with nothing in it but people like that.

Seven years of tribulation?   Oh, no…my guess is less then one or two months before they’ve all managed to slit each others’ throats.   Judgement.   The joy we bring into the world, or the pain and suffering we inflict upon others, is our judgement upon the world, and ourselves, and this good earth, and some people hate everything so much they pray for the world to end soon, and some of us wish it never would.   Some live in rapture, and some in tribulation and every day is judgement day.

To paraphrase Jesus of Nazareth, the jerks will always be with you…try your best to deal with it.   Later today I’ll pour a little glass from my bottle of Don Julio 1942 and toast the rapture that happens whenever I am happy and realize that for all its pain and struggle, life is good.   And when 6:30 comes along and the universe is just going on about its usual business I’ll be sitting on my front porch savoring a very nice tequila, and listening to the birds in my maple tree chirping like they don’t believe the world will ever end.

Damn…

I own a house of my own.

And…a Mercedes-Benz…that I bought New…

New…! It’s mine…

And I’m working for the Hubble Space Telescope…

I’m actually working for the space program…   The fucking Space Program! Making a living at it…getting a paycheck for it and everything…   A really nice paycheck…

And I live within walking distance of where I work…and to two nice grocery stores and some nice restaurants and stuff…

And…I can just decide if I want to take a vacation to Key West later this spring…

Or go for a drive through the southwest…

And I own a house of my own…a fucking house of my own…

A house of my own…

How the hell did this ever happen to me…

The little geek whose clothes never fit right.   I was the joke of my Jr. High…   Ugly.   Crooked teeth.   Weird.   Everyone laughed…   I was a nerd…     A nothing…a little faggot…     A laugh…

Figured I’d always be a stock boy…a disposable run of the mill nothing…living in rented rooms somewhere if I was lucky…   Just struggling to survive and make ends meet…   Ugly…an ugly nothing…

How the hell did all this ever happen to me…

I was at the Williams-Sonoma near Casa del Garrett, explaining to the nice lady behind the counter that, yes in fact, a good tequila is worth not only spending serious money on, but savoring slowly, and in just the right glass.     Last New Year’s week I was served an absolutely wonderful glass of Don Julio 1942 in the tequila bar in Epcot Mexico.   American tequila affectionados seem to like Patron, but I am told Don Julio is what the tequila connoisseurs of Mexico drink.   If you think Jose Cuervo is synonymous with tequila then I am sorry for you.

Behind the bar at La Cava del Tequila in Disney’s Epcot Mexico

Behind that bar in…Disney World of all places…are some of the best, most expensive tequilas Mexico exports.   But Walt Disney believed that this world would be a better place the more we all got to know each other, and shared with one another the best of our lands and ourselves.   And as I said, if all you know of tequila is the house rot they sell at the local bar then you do not know tequila…or Mexico.   The tall thin bottle on the top row near the center (it’s supposed to be shaped a bit like a leaf of the agave plant) is the Don Julio 1942.   I spent $25 dollars for a little bit of the rare stuff served in a glass that resembled a champagne glass, but to a smaller scale.   It was decadent, and for the first time I really understood how the right glass is absolutely necessary to the experience.   When the distiller works that hard to produce perfection, and succeeds so…well…perfectly, you need a glass that captures the delicate aromas and presents them as you drink.   I walked out of there with a new appreciation for all that funny glassware I kept seeing in the wine glass section of Williams-Sonoma.

So there I was, trying to explain to the nice lady behind the counter why I’d been searching for just the right tequila glasses, and was so delighted to finally find a set at her store.   I’d searched everywhere and turned up nothing like the glasses I’d been served with at La Cava del Tequila.   Some had come close, but none of them were just right.   Then I happened on a set that, thankfully for me was on deep sale.   The normal price was $70 a glass, but they were on sale for $17 each.   I’m assuming it was a product line Williams-Sonoma was discontinuing.

The lady behind the counter quizzed me about the tequila I’d had at La Cava del Tequila that had made me want to spend so much money on a bottle, let alone go to all the trouble to get the right set of glassware for it, as if it was some sort of fine wine or Cognac.   I tried to explain but was never able to get past that slightly astonished look on her face, and I realized that the concept of high end tequila is probably a difficult one for most Americans, if not most everyone else outside of Mexico.

One tequila,
Two tequila,
Three tequila,
Floor…

If demon rum is the devil’s drink, tequila is probably Tezcatlipoca’s.   At least to the American puritan.   And the stuff generally sold to American consumers doesn’t do much for its reputation.   I told a co-worker the other day, a young collage student, about how much I liked the tequila bar in Epcot Mexico and his first reaction was to be a bit astonished that tequila could be anything but a really bad hangover.   Actually I’ve never had a hangover after drinking fine tequila.   But the house rot they sell during happy hour most places will probably give you one just looking at it.

Computers have enabled people to make more mistakes faster
than almost any invention in history, with the possible exception
of tequila and hand guns.
-Mitch Ratcliffe

So I got my tequila glasses home and discovered something else.   Fine glassware is intimidating.   Swear to god the moment I picked one up and felt its delicate perfection in my fingers (remember, these tiny little glasses originally sold for $70 each), I was a bit awed, and a bit terrified.   I have never felt glass like this in my hands before. Ever.   So…delicate…yet so perfectly made.   I had to get the stickers off and then clean them and that isn’t easy when you are scared to death you’re going to break one every time you hold one in your hand, let alone pick it up and move it.   I decided the dishwasher would not do and I hand washed them and I swear the only thing I felt safe washing them with was with my fingertips in soapy water.   I didn’t dare rub a rough dishcloth over them.   I got out the good dish rack and for the first time ever made use of its wine glass hangers to let them dry.   I am not kidding, just picking these things up and moving them around scares me.

But…if you gently (very gently!) tap the edge of one of these glasses, it sings a beautiful, perfect note.   These are just the right glasses to serve my Don Julio 1942 in.

I think this could be my first 200 point review…People give me booze for Christmas. I mean, everyone I know does it, even the ones who don’t know everyone else does it. This should probably tell me something about myself, but fuck it.

So this year, among other outstanding bottles which will also be reviewed, a friend dropped off a bottle of Don Julio 1942, and all I can say is Holy Shit.

Holy Shit.

The box states that this tequila is the lifetime achievement of the Don Julio distillery, which may seem a bit much; but a glass and a half into it and I’m starting to see how they could make this claim. Don Julio 1942 is a perfect tequila. No, actually, it’s a perfect spirit, period.

Oak’s apparent in the nose, straight away, but it doesn’t whap you upside the head with it… it’s just a high-level whiff that gives way immediately to the heady vanilla body with just a hint of caramel. The vanilla carries over to the glass, and it’s surprising in the first taste. The agave is unbelievably balanced, the sugars so perfectly apparent in the glass, but not overpowering. It drinks like wine. In fact… it would be way too easy to drink half this bottle right here and now; though this is one I think I’m going to have to make stretch– there are just too many people I want to share it with. But don’t get me wrong here, it’s tequila through and through– this isn’t some fluffy shit– it’s just unbelievably mellow. I’ve never tasted a tequila like this. This is the kind of tequila you could serve at a meeting between the President of Mexico, the head of the Tijuana cartel and the head of the CIA and none of them would kill anyone, lie or any make covert deals until the bottle was done. In fact, they might not even talk until the bottle was done– too much of a distraction.

-Booze Reviews, Don Julio 1942

My co-workers and I at the Space Telescope Science Institute watch the launch of Atlantis in the main auditorium…

Atlantis went up right on schedule and it was just about a perfect burn to orbit.  So good they didn’t need to tweak it a tad immediately after main engine cut-off like they often do.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they’ll be able to do all the work on Hubble they want to this mission.  If they can, then the telescope may very well keep on giving us great science about the heavens for the next decade.

I was wandering through Disney-MGM Hollywood Studios yesterday when I saw him again for the first time in years. I almost didn’t recognize him.  Then I knelt down and gave him a great big hug and told him it was all okay…

The Hollywood Studios park entrance way is playfully similar to the Main Street U.S.A. walkway everyone must pass though on entrance to the Magic Kingdom…only this is Main Street Hollywood, circa 1930s and it is as if you’d traveled back in time to when everything was art deco.  For someone like me who adores the art deco style, in part I am sure because in my early childhood there were still a lot of buildings standing that were like that, it was like a kind of paradise.  For like, the upteenth time here in Disney World, I could only just wander around with my jaw hanging open.

There’s a plaque in central park that explains what they were trying to accomplish with Hollywood Studios, but by the time I had walked up to it, I already knew…

This is similar in kind to the poster for Tomorrowland which reads: The Future That Never Was Has Finally Arrived.

I entered a replica of Gorman’s Chinese Theater and took a ride through the movies.  You get on in a old sound stage set and a cast member dressed up as a 1940s stereotypical Hollywood talent scout hops on and informs you that you’ll not only be taking a tour through the great Hollywood films, but actually go inside them.  And then you’re off…first through a Busby Berkeley dance film and then into Hollywood gangster land where the talent scout is chased off the ride by a gangster who informs you that he’s taking over the ride and oh by the way, please had over all your valuables.  It goes on like that for a while and I won’t give it all away…there were the usual Disney animatronics, but of a better quality then the older Magic Kingdom rides…there was a trip through the Alien movie and for a moment you’re completely socked in a fog bank waiting for the beast to jump out at you.  Eventually you end up back at the soundstage where a voice yells "Cut…that’s a wrap…" and you get off the ride and go back out into Disney Hollywood…which is not all that different from Disney Tomorrowland.  It isn’t real.  And yet, for the moment anyway…it is.

I am not one to be easily amused, and yet the whole time I am thoroughly enjoying myself…and I find my whole attitude is different here.  I’m smiling at people.  I’m patient with idiots.  Small screaming children don’t irritate me.  Morons who block the road as if they own it don’t bother me (When did America get so goddamned fat?) I just walk around them and the happy little smile never leaves my face.  I’m living in a world that never was, that’s finally here. I can be a happy little nerdy kid here and It’s Okay.  In fact, it’s Expected of you.  All those relentlessly cheerful Disney cast members who are nowhere and everywhere with their perpetual smiles and earnest desire to make sure you "have a magical day" aren’t annoying me nearly as much as I was afraid they would.  In fact they are a blessing.  They’re my barrier between me and the world not two feet from the gates here, that voted last November to cut my ring finger off.  They’re here to keep it off me for a little while.  I wish I could give them all a great big hug.

And now the kid I used to be long ago, the one who smiled at everyone, the one with the big imagination, who wore his heart on his sleeve never thinking that people would take that as an invitation to cut it to ribbons, who trusted the world and in the goodness of people, has come back out of me.  At least for a while.  I thought he’d been beaten out of me in junior high school.

The Polaris II from The Space Explorers. Well…actually, it’s Weltraum Schiff 1 from the German film Weltraum schiff 1 startet.

Back in the 1950s, William Clayton and Fred Ladd combined several films into one they serialized and syndicated to local TV stations for use on their daytime children’s shows. I was a pre-schooler and the stars in the night sky were fascinating. Mom bought me a little “Golden Nature Guide” book on stars…

…which, as you can see, I’ve kept all these years. That book I think, was my first step into the world of learning, and what it taught me about the heavens above was a revelation. The sky above was beautiful, mysterious, and yet understandable. My world, which until then compassed only the backyard of the apartment complex we lived in, and a small shopping plaza just down the street, suddenly became huge.

There were other kid’s space shows on TV back then, but The Space Explorers stuck in my imagination…largely for the beautiful imagery and background music Clayton and Ladd chose. One of the films they used was a Czech Russian educational film titled, Universe, which lent The Space Explorers some absolutely riveting (to my pre-school eyes) artwork of the stars, planets and moons. I have tried for years to get a copy of the whole, thing, but I suspect all the various copyrights to all the pieces Clayton and Ladd used to make The Space Explorers are just too hard to get all in a row and still make it worthwhile to put on DVD. But I am stumbling across more and more of the parts on YouTube now, and what’s impressive to me at age 55, is how detailed my memory of that cartoon serial was, compared with other things I watched from that period in my life.

In my scrap books are some of my earliest sketches and drawings and that little art deco spaceship is there among them. I tried for years to find a model of it somewhere. Finally, a small enthusiast shop, Fantastic Plastic, has come out with a model you can build. If this is the sort of thing that strikes your fancy, then you might want to explore their online catalog, as it is full of all sorts of spacecraft, well known and obscure, from science-fiction films past and present. I ordered two…one for practice since I haven’t built a model anything in years. For most of the 1980s I worked as a freelance architectural model maker and built custom models of new buildings and parks from scratch. So I’m not entirely without some skills in that regard. But by now they’re probably very rusty. The kits came in the mail last week and unpacking them, and examining the pieces, I could feel the seven year old boy inside of me get all wide-eyed and excited again.

I won’t paint them quite like I see in the shots on the Fantastic Plastic page, but it’ll be close. I want to try for an effect that’s more like smooth aluminum metal then silver paint. That’s what’s going to take some time investigating and practicing and why I bought two kits instead of just one. And the windows should look like they’re being illuminated from within, not dark. But as I can’t install lights in this thing that’ll be a trick to accomplish with paint. But with the right touch of the brush I think I can do it. Eventually one is going down in the art room, and the other in my office at Space Telescope. I’ll post some shots of the finished work here.

One more thing: As I was composing this post, I decided I wanted to include a scan of that old book on stars mom gave me back in my pre-school days, because it was one of those small but important things, a touchstone, for the direction my life would eventually take. I’ve said before that I was blessed in a way, to have entered school shortly after Sputnik scared the hell out of The U.S., because suddenly there was an emphasis on getting America’s youth a good science education. When I went to scan the book, I took another look at the back cover. Here it is…

Each guide has been written by an outstanding authority on science education… A lot of the information in that book, printed in 1956, is dated now. But the spirit is even more relevant now after decades of republican party and religious right assaults on science, reason and knowledge, then it was even at the height of the cold war. Science is not a dry collection of facts on display in a museum or a textbook. Science is a way of knowledge, where knowledge is understood to be something you actively discover, not something you passively receive. A science textbook is not a bible. It is not a political diatribe. It Wants to be challenged. You are Supposed to have questions when you finish it. And you are supposed to be unafraid to ask them.

My little golden book of stars. A relic of the cold war. It was a time in America of stifling, absolutely stifling conformity. But for a moment, for one brief and shining moment, the nation understood clearly, in the shadow of a nuclear, not biblical Armageddon, that the way you fight totalitarianism is by teaching your young to how to think for themselves, and that the pursuit of knowledge is a great adventure.

I was only five minutes out of Disney World and moving down the Interstate when I decided to tune in OutQ on the car’s Sirius radio, and happened to get the hourly news, and hearing about the ongoing fight over Proposition H8 was all it took to make me angry, livid even, all over again.

You know…there was more to growing up with Walt Disney’s Wonderful World on the TV then the cartoons and the Disney-esq storylines. There was a sense to much of what Disney did, that, yes, it’s a small world after all, that the future was bright with promise, that technological progress was a thing to be embraced and that the study of science was good for us, part of a well balanced education.

I spent most of my time in Epcot, but a little also in Magic Kingdom, in Tomorrowland. There was a cute little Tomorrowland poster at the Main Street U.S.A. entrance to the Magic Kingdom, that read The Future That Never Was Is Finally Here. Tomorrowland is one great big nod to the retro-future of the 1950s and 60s. But at its core is this almost childlike sense of progress, grounded in knowledge, leading to a wonderful tomorrow. It was the sense of the future I grew up with. And I’m here to tell you, after eight years of George Bush and the religious right and their Republican enabler’s cultural war on reason, knowledge and science, it was exhilarating to have it served up to me again, unselfconsciously and unapologetically….like it was just everyday common sense.

I rode the Spaceship Earth exhibit at the entrance to Epcot. You get on a set of moving carts that work pretty much like other Disney “people mover” technologies. The step-on station is a platform that moves along with the carts. The carts never stop, but the access platform moves along with them so it’s a simple matter to get onto one. Once in the cart you sit in front of a touch screen video display which asks you for your language and place of origin, which it uses to tailor the narrative guide specifically to you. Each seat in the carts has its own set of speakers, and you only hear your own guide. The ride chronicles the progress of human communication, and the sharing of knowledge, from the stone age to modern times. The most soul-satisfying moments of my stay at Disney World, where those moments spent seeing the grand arc of the human story laid out before me as a great adventure, without concession to fundamentalist demands for biblical correctness. Time and again I walked through Disney World stunned, absolutely stunned, that here in the United States of America in the 21st century, kids are more likely to see in an amusement park then in their own schools, archeological and scientific facts not only told truthfully, but the pursuit of those truths seen as a great and wonderful adventure. I don’t think it’s just Disney’s gay friendliness that has the fundamentalists pissed off.

Sniff at all the staff (excuse me…Cast Members…) walking around the park in character costumes if you like. But that It’s A Small World After All mentality pervades everything in Disney World and after so many years of relentless scorched earth republican party assaults on tolerance and diversity, it was wonderful to stay for a while in a place where those things were just taken as a given. There was no preaching of diversity, it was just always there in the background, especially in Epcot. But even in Downtown Disney, which is more like a shopping plaza then a park, there was a holiday display that showcased all the different ways different cultures celebrated at this time of year. Yes, there was also “Christmas” everywhere. I went to “Micky’s Christmas Party” in Magic Kingdom Thursday night, a special event with a Santa parade and a spectacular fireworks display over Cinderella’s Castle (see below). But it was more a celebration of the holiday spirit, and believing in your own dreams, then any particular religion. There were in fact, no references to religion at all. Anywhere. Except to acknowledge, respectfully, even cheerfully, that different people have different beliefs. It’s A Small World After All. James Dobson would have hated it. He’d have joined hands with Maleficent onstage to try and tear it all down so that people won’t believe in their dreams anymore.

Walt Disney was a man of his times, and his magic kingdom was born after the second world war and at the beginning of the first American space age, when we were just learning how to launch humans into space and bring them back alive. There was so much we were going to do, and that we still haven’t. So much Walt Disney wanted to do too. Epcot wasn’t originally planned as a theme park. It was Walt’s Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow. Having finally had my first hand look at what he accomplished with his theme park, I find it tragic he didn’t get a chance to realize his original dream for EPCOT. Cigarettes killed him before he could. But I think he would have done it had he lived.

And…thing of it is…had he accomplished EPCOT…so many many years ahead of its time…it would be a city today, perfectly, absolutely perfectly positioned to withstand the impact of rising energy costs. Here (in three parts) is a film that Walt produced to get investors to buy into his planned city of tomorrow. The quality on this copy is not wonderful, but it gets it across. These days you hear a lot about making cities and communities “walkable” and investing in more and better public transport. In EPCOT as originally planned, the pedestrian was going to be king. Various Disney developed “people mover” technologies were to be employed to get you from one place to another. The only reason you’d need a car in EPCOT, would be if you wanted to go visit someplace else.

“…their schools will welcome new ideas, so that everyone who grows up in EPCOT will have skills in pace with today’s world.”

I haven’t heard anyone seriously talk about schools and ideas and living in today’s world like that since Reagan began putting the knife into the New Deal. I was fortunate to enter school sometime just after Sputnik scared the hell out of the U.S. and suddenly giving kids a good science education was a vital national security thing and to hell with the fundamentalist vote. I grew up in a world where science and rationality and the pursuit of knowledge and understanding had respected and valued places in school and in society and in our dreams of tomorrow. It was either that, or let the Soviets plant their flag on the moon, and in effect, declare their ownership of space. You know…that place where all the missiles fly on their way to our cities.

Maybe it wasn’t all do-able exactly the way it was envisioned back then, but the spirit of the times is what matters more then its vision of what tomorrow would look like. Tomorrow is always different then you imagined it. But once upon a time we were all allowed to dream about making tomorrow better then today. We could envision a better world someday. The fundamentalists hate that dream. They want to take it away from us. All of us…not just gay people. We can’t be allowed to dream that dream. Because their dream is about the world coming to an end.

So I spent a while in Disney World. I saw Cinderella’s Castle and Micky and Donald and the Genie and I rode Spaceship Earth. I saw planet Earth float over the world showcase lagoon while its continents told in pictures the story of life, and the human journey from African savannas to the seas…and then the skys…

We can see a new horizon
built on all that we have done
and our dreams begin another
thousand circles ’round the sun

And I rode The Carousel of Progress…

There’s a great big beautiful tomorrow
Shining at the end of ev’ryday
There’s a great big beautiful tomorrow
And tomorrow’s just a dream away

…and I was able to remember the old dream once again. Sniff at the Disney-esq sentimentality all you want…I used to…but I swear I won’t anymore. I have lived through decades of this culture war and it is precisely this sentiment that the fundamentalists want to make us all forget, kill in our hearts forever, so they can get back down to the business of bringing a world they have always hated to an end.

I am so glad I went. And not just because I got to see a certain someone I haven’t seen face to face in decades. Got to see him smile too…

One of the absolute best spiffs in the world, working for Space Telescope, is the monthly "popular lecture" series.  They’ve had them pretty much ever since I started working there.  Once a month one of the scientists at the Institute, or someone affiliated in some way with the work we do, gives a lecture targeted to a general audience, on the work they’re doing.  The lectures are open to the public and all are welcome to sit in and listen, and ask questions afterward.

It’s really great getting a chance to hear the people doing this work speak for themselves, and hear firsthand the latest thinking about what makes our universe tick.  Tonight’s lecture was about the very first stars to appear after the big bang and it really made me realize just how very…different…the early universe was.

It’s counter-intuitive that generating stars is hard when all you have are the vast tendrils of gaseous hydrogen in the early universe to work with.  But that was the problem facing the theorists.  As it turns out, getting nearly pure hydrogen gas to collapse enough to form a star isn’t easy.  It doesn’t really want to.   It will collapse, but then as it does it heats up slightly and wants to expand again.  So it achieves a stability well below the threshold for generating a star.  To go the rest of the way, the gas needs to cool by radiating off some of its heat, and that’s something it turns out hydrogen isn’t good at.

But molecular hydrogen is…and there’s the key ingredient.  The random motion in a hydrogen gas structure will eventually form molecules and those will radiate heat much more easily.  That will cool the structure down enough that it can collapse some more.  Then it becomes a question of how big it got…and here is where the early universe shows its strangeness. 

Remember…these are the first stars.  They can’t be formed from the shock waves of other stars dying or coming to life, because there are no other stars yet.  And all they have to work with is hydrogen gas.  There are no metals yet, no elements heavier then helium, because those are formed in stars and there aren’t any stars yet.  The presence of metals in the interstellar medium actually makes it easier to form stars.  The way star formation works now, just doesn’t work back then.  The hydrogen structure (gas cloud…whatever…) has to collapse on its own, due to its own random motion and gravity, with no assistance from any other nearby objects, because there are no other nearby objects yet.   And it has to be massive…really massive…for its collapse to break through the threshold where the heat from its own collapse simply pushes it back apart again and it never forms a star.  I mean…Really Massive.  About one-hundred times the mass of our sun massive.  Far more massive then the most massive stars that form in the cosmos as it is now.  Otherwise, it simply achieves stability as a dense cloud of hydrogen gas.

But if the structure got that big when it started collapsing, and was able to keep on collapsing over time as it shrank and heated up, radiated some heat off a bit and collapsed some more, heated up again, cooled down some more, and so on…at some point it hits a threshold where the collapse suddenly runs away and then the only thing that stops it is when the gas gets so dense and hot nuclear fusion starts happening and the gravitational collapse is pushed back by that.  Then what you end up with is…a star about a hundred times the mass of our sun.

Those stars are Strange.  They are fantastically brilliant, live very very short lives, and are massive enough to produce carbon, and then use their own carbon to produce other metals up to iron.  Some of them, in death, may have formed the massive black holes that lit the earliest quasars.

But they didn’t form galaxies.  The galaxies, by the time they began to form, already existed in a cosmic medium that had been seeded by metals from the first stars.  In that medium star formation was easier, resulting in much smaller, more longer lived stars.

No first stars have been observed yet.  They would be too faint, and too red shifted for the instruments we currently have.  The next generation space telescope (the James Webb Space Telescope) may be able to observe the first galaxies.  But observing a first generation star would be possible only in its death supernova, and then only by lucky chance.  But now I know better why the next generation space telescope is so focused on infrared astronomy and not visible light astronomy.  They need that to see the early universe…the first galaxies…and, maybe, the first stars.  All of that stuff is red shifted away from the visible light now, because of the expansion of the universe since then.

I love this job.  Other jobs I’ve had the upper management has been something out of Dilbert.  It’s scary how true to life Dilbert is sometimes.  This one I get to hear the top floors talk about how they’re gathering light from near the beginning of time and trying to figure out what it’s telling us about the universe we live in.  And I get to hear about it before it goes into the textbooks.

I’m copying the following from Brad DeLong’s blog comments in their entirety.  Some days you read the news and you just want to write off the human race altogether.  When those moments hit you, it’s good to be able to keep things in perspective…

Hoisted from Comments: The Dawn of Humanity

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal: The Dawn of Humanity: What astonishes me is the speed. They’ve got the origin date at -56,000, and the oldest modern human remains in Australia are -40,000. The route from East Africa across Asia to Northern Australia is 10K+ miles, which means humans were expanding at close to a mile a year. That’s just unbelievably fast.

We have all sorts of branches of homo surviving stably for a million plus years all over africa, asia, and europe, and this new branch comes out of Africa and by the end of the Great Migration, only a little over ten thousand years later, they are building boats to sail to Australia. And wiping out or out-competing every one of our homo sibling species on the way.

The Singularity is truly in our past.

Posted by: tavella | January 23, 2007 at 05:15 PM

Spectacular double rainbow in the sky here in Baltimore yesterday!  I’d just come home from work and glanced outside to see a sudden shower coming down on my street.  So I stepped out onto my front porch to watch, and noticed the sun was out and brightly shining to my west.  Down towards the end of my street, you could see the rain coming down in glistening sheets of raindrops through the intense sunlight.  To the east, it was dark as slate. 

I can’t see the sky too clearly from my front porch because of the Japanese oaks in the front lawn.  But given what I could see…sun shining brightly over there though the rain…dark rain clouds in the sky opposite…I reckoned there should be a rainbow over in the dark patch somewhere.  So I stepped out into the rain to take a look.

There was…

Already some of my neighbors had come out to take a look.  First you saw the bright inner rainbow.  Then as it became even brighter, you started seeing an outer one.  Eventually, the two of them formed perfect arches, vaulting across the Baltimore sky…

So beautiful!  The white car roof in the foreground of the last shot is Traveler.  By then the shower had turned into a light sprinkle and I took a stroll through the neighborhood, not minding how wet I was getting at all, just completely enraptured by the intense colors arching overhead.  These photos don’t really do it justice.  It was almost like they were burning up there, like the sky had caught fire and every color hidden within it was now ablaze, so intense were those arches.

It must have lasted for almost an hour.  Then the sun began to set and the rainbow slowly unraveled, as if drawing itself down into the earth.  First the outer loop faded away.  Then the top of the inner loop seemed to break off, separating it into two half arches.  Slowly, slowly, the broken arches shrank from the sky, until only two rainbow pillars at either end of the horizon were left.  But the pillars of color remained for a long time, staying bright and fiery until the last of the sunlight faded in the west.  I walked up and down the blocks of my rowhouse neighborhood until there was almost no light in the sky, and looking down the cross-streets toward the horizon, I could see those fantastically intense pillars of color well into the twilight.  They looked like fountains of color erupting from the earth.  I’ve never seen its like.

Whatever weather pattern had brought us the rain, a blanket of cool, dryer air came along with it and the evening was perfect for getting out of the house and strolling around some more.  I left all my chores undone and just savored it because I know what the summer will be like when it finally settles in.