21 Dec 08- Tis the season to be....desperate!

It would be so easy to write something about how Christmas has become so commercialized that its meaning is obscured. So I won’t. Instead I’ll write about something I personally know and understand about the Xmas season that affects us all: desperation.
 
As I’m writing this, my entire herd of in-laws is in the other room getting rowdy. I’m in here desperately trying to avoid them, even though I know in a few minutes I’m going to have to put on a happy face (you’ll never know how much effort that takes), saunter in and “mingle” (what a silly word). Even though I’m pretty much your basic bah-humbug type of Christmas guy, I’ll do my best. It’s not that I dislike them even slightly. In fact, I actually like them. It’s just that sometimes I’d like to flop down in front of the TV and soak up some tube, while snuggling with my wife, dog and two cats. I’ll never understand why my yearning for that is strongest when a family get-together is scheduled. Coincidence I guess. 
 
I’m back. I just floated out, threw a couple hugs around, sat in a chair chatting about…actually, I don’t know what we talked about…and slithered back here. No one will know I’m gone. Love this season!
 
And then there’s the desperation illustrated by Marlene’s limp. It’s a constant reminder of how nuts normally intelligent people get this time of the year. First, to appreciate what I’m about to say you have to understand a basic and incontrovertible fact about The Arizona Redhead: she doesn’t do mornings. Never. And then the Holidays came around and I get a call from her at 0700 hours: she’s standing in line at Target because the night before they told her they had an electronic game named Wii. So there she was, standing in the dark with a couple dozen other crazy strangers waiting for the doors to open.
 
Apparently, the doors opened and Marlene put all she had into sprinting down the aisles, determined to beat both the 19-year-old track star and the old lady in the walker (who won, by the way, but fortunately, wasn’t after the Wii.). Marlene screeched up in front of the counter and a sweet young thing smiles and says, “Oh, dear. It looks as if our computer was wrong. We don’t have one. Sorry!” Sweet smile, quick turn to another customer, slight residual smirk.
 
Marlene limped for three days. That was her reward for trying so desperately to get our youngest son what he wanted. Holidays are good for that kind of thing.
 
Incidentally, the primary reason I’m on speaking terms with desperation is that I’m feeling it myself. It’s a guy thing that has to do with finding the right gift for the one we love. My desperation got another shot in the arm this afternoon, when I ducked into a high-end jewelry store on the way to the airport. I walked about thirty feet into the store, looked around at the acres of glass cases overflowing with sparklies and was totally overwhelmed. I didn’t know where to start. And none of the stuff had price tags on it! Aw come on! Do I have to say, “What can I get for my allowance,” as I hold out a handful of crinkled one-dollar bills and embarrass myself? I beat a quick retreat to the door suitably cowed. And definitely desperate.
 
I’m not having a wonderful time this season and the primary reason for that is that I haven’t found what I know she will love. I’ll try again tomorrow, fully aware that the clock is ticking. Four days and counting. 
 
Desperation reigns.
 
I guess that calls for more ice cream.  Bye.

13 Dec 08- Two Days in The Tank Museum

If you’re not into neat nuts and bolts, you might consider skipping this installation of Thinking out Loud. This one is primarily an excuse to show a few of the photos I shot at The Tank Museum in Bovington, England a couple months ago. This is me indulging myself. If you’re into this kind of stuff, come along. Otherwise, I’ll see you next week.
 
The one time during our trip to England that we did things right, was at The Tank Museum: I spent two solid days in it with tripod and camera, for which I thank them profusely, since they don't usually allow tripods on the floor. The Tank Museum (their official name) is located on the south shore of England in the tiny hamlet of Bovington. There are some seashore resorts in the area and a killer castle (Coerfe) and some other typically English sites and experiences, but, when I told one of my English friends I was going to Bovington he said, “Why are you going down there? That’s nothing but tank country,” and he knew nothing about The Tank Museum. He said that because that’s where most of the UK tank training takes place. You’ll be driving down an idyllic country road and a tank will be coming the other direction and no one even turns to look. It’s all very cool.
 
The Museum itself is a huge, sprawling facility located on a multi-use military facility (some civilian stuff on it too) and “sprawling” is hardly adequate to describe it. Originally comprised of a number (about six I think) huge hangar-like buildings crammed right against one another, it now has a new section up front that was still being fitted out when we were there.
 
The Museum is unique because they have something over 100 tanks and armored vehicles on display, but they have another roughly fifty that are their “runners” that they take out during their annual armor orgy, Tank Fest, and run them around the adjacent track that is part of their grounds. They also take select runners out of the Museum, like their Tiger I, which is the only regularly operating Tiger tank in the world, and give the crowd a brief exposure to the sights and sounds of the legendary Tiger in action.
 
It’s hard to build a museum around something like tanks and not have the aura of a warehousing facility, but The Tank Museum (TTM) has largely avoided that. Although it’s mind numbing to wander through the maze of machinery, they’ve done an excellent job of putting them in context as well as building displays around them. I was there shooting pix for two solid days and I was most of the way through the first day before I could reliably find my way back to the lobby. That’s how big it is.

This is Little Willie, supposedly the world's first tank, first ran in 1915.

They have what is supposedly world’s first tank, “Little Willie”, right up to the most modern from almost all nations. I’m far from being an armor expert, but I have no doubt that their claim of this being the most complete collection of its type is absolutely true.
 
Incidentally, it’s a privately funded museum. Look them up on the web, www.tankmuseum.org. They are one of the most serious repositories of armor information and artifacts in the world.
 
In the mean time, cruise through the pictures. I made the enlargements bigger than usual, so be patient while they load. They’re worth it.
 
Click Here for Pictures
 

6 Dec 08- Dust Bunnies and Desk Treasures

Sit down. I’m about to say something shocking: I just cleaned my desk. No, really! Are you okay? It was a shock to me too, But, what was a real kick was the huge amount of treasure that had been literally buried right there at my elbow. If I’d known it was going to be that memorable, I would have cleaned it earlier, rather than waiting for the avalanche to get out of control.
 
The source of all the strata covering my desk, which is sixteen feet long, is that I don’t dare file anything or I’ll forget about it. It has to be out where I can see it. So, I stack everything on the north-south leg of my “L”-shaped desk. Bearhawk stuff goes near the south end and other stuff flows in drifts to the other. If I’m looking for something, I know it’s somewhere in a three-by-eight foot space.
 
I’m not a total slob, as evidenced by the mounting revulsion that periodically forces me to break into a frenzy of cleaning activity. It may take half a day, but soon there are garbage bags by the door and a few places on my desk where the top actually shows through.  This time, the work was often interrupted by a loud, “Holy,…! Look at this.” Marlene would come running to see if something had jumped out of its just-disturbed nest to bite me.
 
Here and there in the stacks, you'll normally find a number of unopened packages. If I recognize the return address, I generally know what’s in it, so I don’t open it until I have the time. Often, however, it slowly sifts deeper into the piles until it’s forgotten. One of those packages yielded a little treasure.

I've never known when Mauser made tools like this, but I think it is very cool.

The return address was my old buddy Clyde Laughlin in Seattle. He’s always sending me stuff in an effort at reducing his own clutter (there’s an underground railroad of clutter collectors that has a non-stop train of “stuff” going from one to the other). This time, as the aged, flat cardboard box slid out onto the desk top, nothing jumped out at me as unusual. Then I slid the tray-like box open and the top of a finely crafted vernier caliper came into view. What made that moment special was the magic word engraved into its head: Mauser! I was holding one of the fabled measuring instruments made by the equally fabled arms manufacturer.
 
I suppose it probably has some collector’s value to someone, but to me it was a tiny victory orchestrated by a good friend who knew my soft spot for such things. I had been keeping my eye open for one of these for a long time. It was the thought, as much as the tool, that touched me.

In my eyes, Bob Herendeen was the finest Pitts pilot to ever fly an airshow or a contest.

Then I was flipping through a stack of papers, brochures and stuff I’d liberated from a long taped-up moving box. Out came a promotional brochure that the late Bob Herendeen, whom I have always considered to be the epitome of Pitts airshow pilots, had signed for me. I’m not sure when I got that particular brochure—somewhere between 15 and 30 years—but it fired off some warm memories so, I sat for a few minutes with the brochure in my lap and remembered another time.

One of the more unexpected surprises was an envelope containing $450 in cash that had been my mad money for working on the roadster. I assumed I had spent it several years ago. Surprise!!

To put things in perspective: I'm 5'10" so both Gary and the killer bike were very tall.

The photo of two young men, boys actually, bearing a family resemblance and standing next to an ancient high-wheel bicycle brought tears to my eyes. The shorter one was me at about 19 years old. The taller one was my late, kid brother, Gary. I’m choking a little as I type this. He’s been gone nearly 25 years (heart attack at 42) and I miss him on a daily basis. In the pix, I’m wearing shorts, which means I just came back from my job as a life guard at the local pool. And the absence of any bandages on my arms means I haven’t tried to ride the high wheel bike yet. That happened after the shutter was tripped.
 
The ride was very, very short. I discovered an anatomical difference between a Nebraska kid of the 50’s and people of the 1890’s the first time the pedal came around: the distance between their feet and their knees was much shorter than mine. My knee came up and locked solidly against the handlebar, stopping the pedals instantaneously. I, however, did not stop. I went right over the front of the five-foot-tall wheel and landed on the gravely pavement like a sack of chicken feed. I wore bandages for a couple of weeks from that one.

Cleaning does have its up side but I think you have to wait about five years between cycles for the treasures to accumulate. So, I’m marking my calendar for December of 2013 for another go at it. Gee, five years doesn’t seem that long.
 

28 Nov 08- Carolitis: has anyone ever died from too much Xmas music?

I hate Christmas carols. I didn’t until this year, but it is now the day after Thanksgiving and I’ve already suffered through a solid month of carols on my favorite oldies station. When did the “The Holiday Season” get redefined to mean the entire last two months of the year. Bah! Humbug!
 
I am a creature of habit. If I were a dog and you moved my food bowl, I’m so entrenched in doing things the same way, I’d probably starve to death. This applies to my radios too. I have four buttons set on my car radio: oldies, classic rock, jazz and country. The other two are blank. Starting around November first, three of the four went Christmas on me. Totally Christmas. Not a single real song all day long. Net result:  I'm starving musically .
 
For three specific reasons, the radio in my work shop is the biggest problem: the first and most important difficulty is that it has been a tradition for well over half a century for me to listen to rock and roll while building stuff. This is important at this stage of my life because I’m listening to exactly the same songs I did when I was in my teens and building the roadster the first time. But, they weren't oldies then. The station's play list is light on the Everly Brothers, Gene Vincent, etc., but it’s close enough.
 
Another very specific problem is that my radio is old and beat up and no longer has a dial. If I go searching for another station (which is the equivalent of moving my food bowl), resetting back to 94.5 Kool FM after the holidays will be nearly impossible.
 
The last, and most heartfelt factor, is that I get out into my shop very, very seldom. A few hours a month, absolute tops. So my shop time is precious to me because, like so many other folks, having my projects move ahead is unimaginably important for my psychological wellbeing and a big factor in that is the music.
 
When I step into my small and chaotic shop (I’ve crammed a million pieces of Neat Sh*t into every nook and cranny—I need to give a photo tour someday) and hit the master switch, the bench light springs to life and the radio immediately starts kicking out oldies. Right at that instant, it is as if I’ve snuggled down into a warm little cocoon where the world and its problems don’t exist. For a few wonderful minutes, I can lose myself in creating something that is strictly my own and time stands still. It could be 1958, 2008 or anywhere in between. The continuity-of-the-shop is unbroken and I can lift my problems off my shoulders and be who, or what, I want to be. Christmas carols are, at the very least, screwing up the kharma. And who want's screwed kharma in their work shop?

Gene's 1949 Christmas album. FYI, Rudolph is reported to be the second highest selling single of all time: 30 million. I heard it that much last week alone. He made 93 films and 635 recordings, about half of which he wrote or co-wrote. Impressive! At five years old, I got lost at a Gene Autry concert. I never did really like him. Too clean. Liked his guitars though (Martin D-45 and 000-45).

Okay, so in the big scheme of things, those are minor irritations and I should be able to buy into the carol thing. And I probably could if they had a play list that had more than about 25 songs on it. And I mean that, 25 songs! I love Mannheim Steamroller, but I don’t need to hear about Christmas Bells three times in a two-hour shop season. And, for crying out loud, how many artists have recorded Rocking Around the Christmas Tree? Brenda Lee did it first, no one will do it better, so leave it at that. But noooo. I spent an afternoon in the shop a week ago and I’ll bet I heard fifteen different people sing the song.
 
I used to love this time of the year. Now, it’s wearing thin and, with Thanksgiving behind us, we are just now hitting the traditional start of it. I don’t know how much more I can take.
 
It may be a time for an iPod (Shhhhhh, don’t tell anyone).
 
PS
If I hear Gene Autry sing about Rudolph one more frigging time, I’m gonna puke!
 
PPS
I have a Thanksgiving food hangover. Just ignore me.

24 Nov 08- The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

I was a junior at Oklahoma University in Norman, OK. It was just another sunny November day and I was returning to my apartment. I had a guitar case in each hand and I leaned them against the wall to open the door. As the door swung open, my roommate, Dave Atwater, was laying on the couch, his head next to the door listening to the radio. He turned over to look at me and, in an incredulous voice, said, “Kennedy has been shot.”  That was 45 years ago last week. Absolutely amazing!
 
It’s hard to put that decade into perspective and make anyone who wasn’t functioning as an adult at the time truly understand. And that’s a sizeable portion of today’s population. Do the math: right now you’d have to be 60 years old to have been even 15 years old at the time, and, although you would have felt the chaos and the sorrow, I’m not sure how much you would have understood. However, at that age, you were perfectly poised for the decade that followed, which was, in so many ways, the most difficult in American history, with the possible exception of the Civil War.
 
First, a note about the assassination, and I’m just presenting facts here, not making a case for a conspiracy theory. I’ll just let the facts speak for themselves. The day after the assassination, my dad, who was a gun dealer amongst many other things, ordered the exact same rifle Oswald had used from the same supplier, Klien Sporting Goods in Chicago. Same scope, same everything. I’m an above average marksman (came in 12th in the nation in AFROTC matches) and I can say unequivocally that the Italian Carcano carbine is the kind of rifle that gives boat anchors a bad name. It’s a first class piece of crap. I could barely keep its groups under six inches from a rest at 100 yards. Plus the action is ratchety and hard to work, as bolt actions go. One of our local gun experts and I both tried to cycle the action and fire the same number of rounds in the same number of seconds as Oswald did  (5.6 by most accounts) and we couldn’t do it consistently. And we were doing it from the hip, not trying to hit anything. Yet, Lee Harvey O. was able to put his rounds dead on at 80 yards at a target that was moving 30 mph or more in almost no time at all. Some master marksmen later tested the rifle and they could do it, but I still have my doubts.
 
The shots fired in Dallas were the opening bells on a decade of violence and social upheaval that are hard to explain. Because I was a little older and continued on into graduate school, I saw most of the 60’s from a campus perspective, which wasn’t necessarily typical because when you’re on a college campus, neither your life nor your career has taken off, so your mind is free to concentrate on these kinds of events. The rest of the population doesn’t have that luxury because they are busy trying to make a living.
 
For a time, it seemed as if assassinations happened as regular as clockwork and they had become an accepted part of the American Scene. Although five years separated JFK’s killing from that of his brother, Robert, only three months after RFK, Martin Luther King was assassinated. Civil rights killings were sprinkled throughout the decade (Medgar Evers just before JFK, Goodman,Schwerner and Chaney, etc.). Then there was Kent state in 1970. In barely, a decade we had a bushel of assassinations and killings and we finally finished off the ten-year string when a president resigned in disgrace. And, of course, there was the incredibly screwed up way the government conducted the Vietnam war (never did let the military do its job), and the government intervention with students. Everything around us was in shambles and no one trusted the government. No one. And for good reason.
 
A great line fits here (not mine…obviously): it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
 
A million positive things came out of that decade, but at least one disturbing fact was driven home: it takes only one nut with a hunting rifle to change the lives of millions of people. And the individual nuts are still out there. They will never be gone. And they can never be disarmed. I’m not a praying man, but if I were, I’d pray that this generation escapes the types of tragic events that made so much of the ‘60’s so horrific.

16 Nov 08 - Rods and Customs at Scottsdale: What Recession?

Yesterday I walked my feet sore at the annual Good Guys rod and custom show/swap meet at Scottsdale and thought I’d share a few random thoughts and put up a slew of photos. Some of you might find this interesting. For those not into cars, just scan through the pix to see what that part of America is doing. It’s a super-strong subculture and is one of the few American art forms many parts of the world have chosen to import.
 
One interesting thing at Scottsdale was that considering that the entire world is running for economic cover and hunkering down, you certainly couldn’t tell it at Good Guys. I’ve been going to this show for the last eight or ten years and this year it was quite a bit bigger than years past, which I view as a good thing. At least that part of the economy has said, “Screw it, we’re all going in the crapper, but I’m going to do it in style.”
 
The swap mart is easy twice as big as normal and, like an idiot, I violated one of my own rules of swap meet/flea market conduct: if you see something you want, buy it, don’t vacillate. In this case there was an old 120-pound anvil for $100 and I’ve been looking for a big anvil forever (a long story suitable for another blog). I dickered on it a little, walked around for a while, then decided to go back and get it and, as you’d expect, it was gone. Oh, well, one less heavy piece of crap to move around the shop.

Very classic, 29 highboy roadster. It could be all catalog parts, I didn't ask, but at least he did it with restraint. Note no chrome on the front end.

One of the problematic aspects of the true hotrods (as opposed to customs, classics, etc.), the 32 highboy roadsters, etc. is that there’s such a strong support industry for parts (frames, bodies, etc.) that there’s little need for someone to spend years trying to save an old body (this assumes they can find one) or building a frame (assuming they are capable). There are thousands of true catalog cars, which means there’s an unavoidable sameness to the cars that aren’t built from scratch. And frankly, the world doesn’t need another $75,000, absolutely perfect, chromed to the hilt, ‘32 highboy or chopped ‘33 three-window coupe. There were so many absolutely perfect (no bugs, no rock chips, no soot in the tailpipes) cars at Scottsdale, that after a half hour, a visual numbness set in and you didn’t even turn you head to look at many of the rods.

There's no doubt that this guy is doing it the hardway, though the frame looks new.

There were some notable exceptions that broke a few rules and were fun. And there were some homebuilt cars in which the guys did it their way. And those stood out. At least in my mind. They weren’t as perfect as the rest, but they showed the builder’s taste and individuality. I asked quite a number of guys if they had built their car and too often the answer was “Yeah, I had it built,” and their obvious thinking was that because they told someone what to build and paid for it, they were the central part of the creative process and that qualified them as “builder.” Wrong! That’s not hotrodding.
 
Hotrodding, as I got into it in the mid-fifties was making do with what you had and figuring out how to stick it together in a way that didn’t kill you. There were no “new” bodies, ready-to-roll chassis and no one would have had the money to buy them anyway. We had plenty of speed parts for the engines, and dropped Ford axles were available, but that’s about it. Everything else you either built yourself or scrounged from the junkyard and then modified to fit. That mindset still exists, but it’s very much in the minority. And that’s pretty much the way I think. If I can’t build it or scrounge it, I don’t need it. This, incidentally, seems to apply to just about everything I do. This doesn’t mean I’m right and they’re wrong. It’s just a characteristic. Or a character flaw.
 
To be completely fair, part of the problem is that vintage tin is getting harder to find and it’s not cheap. However, that having been said, there were two ’29 Model A roadster pick-ups for sale in the swap meet, complete with original rust and all the parts. One was $5000 and the other $7,500 and that one was a runner that looked as if it had just come out of a barn. If I had any thought of starting another car, I would have figured out how to buy that one. I probably should have anyway. Hopefully, there’s still at least one car project left in my future.
 
Anyway, I had a great time and I hope you’ll enjoy the pix. Now, I’m wondering how long it will be before my feet stop hurting.
 
Click Here to View the Pictures

8 Nov 08 - The Other Shoe has Dropped: Now what?

I’ve started to write this particular blog about a half dozen times because I really didn’t want to do another politically charged one. But how can I let the last week go by without saying something? At the very least I want to share an epiphany of sorts I had that hopefully will redirect my thought processes over the next four years.
 
Although we hear a lot of moaning and teeth-gnashing (and ammo and gun sales are through the roof) concerning the end of civilization as we know it, the truth is, our country is going to die only if we let it. So, before we start briefing a missing man formation or blowing taps, let’s look around and see how much we contributed to this ourselves and then figure out what to do about it. And I’m not talking just about the election. I’m talking about the mess the country is in.

I, for one, feel as if I’m to blame for some of this because I trusted my future to someone else, which has been proven time and again is never a good idea. And I did something incredibly stupid: I stopped monitoring what those who are in control were doing. I decided I couldn’t be bothered and crawled inside my own little cubby hole to do my own thing. And I think many others did exactly the same thing. And now we’re paying for our inattentiveness. I’m a right-leaning Independent and even I have to admit that the GOP was the architect of it’s own demise. It’s the same way I feel about Ford and GM: they stopped listening to the market and are now in dire straits.
 
Incidentally, what we’re talking about applies to everyone, not just Republicans or those who feel they lost this one. Democrats are affected by the same thing and everything I’m going to say applies to them too.
 
We, more correctly, I, am the political market place and the Congress has been ignoring us. Again to correct myself, they have been ignoring us because apparently we haven’t been saying anything. We haven’t been communicating our displeasure. That’s our fault. Not theirs. Although I could point at tons of stuff they’ve either passed or ignored that have contributed to our current financial/political state, I won't. Bottom line, it’s their performance that beat them at the polls. Can the new administration do any better? Not if we don’t let ourselves be heard.
 
First we should look at some facts:
The voter turnout was approximately 3.1mm less than it was in 2004 and Obama (to be known as BOB from here on out) got slightly more than Bush did that time around (400K more) and McCain got slightly less than Kerry did.
 
The actual numbers are:
Obama:    65,285,166    53%
McCain:   57,317,302     46% 
 
The difference is 6.3%, hardly a landslide mandate, but certainly bigger than we’ve seen in recent elections. Regardless, it goes in the loss column for the so-called “right”. Of more importance is the shift to a Super Majority in Congress, which effectively makes BOB king, at least until the mid-term elections and maybe for the entire term, and it’s the Congress that is the important change and problem here, not the president.
 
We have a tendency to think there’s no way we can sway the President. But there is and that’s through Congress. The President is just a figurehead, not a king. He can only do what the Congress lets him do. And while we can’t easily reach the President in meaningful ways, we can sure as hell get to our people in Congress and effectively kick the snot out of them. Plus, through local activism, and BOB was really good at that, we can affect who gets in the Congress much more easily than we can effect the presidential races. Plus, we need to keep an eye on these guys because that’s where the mistakes were made over the last two administrations that got us where we are.

The financial crisis started way back when, but the Congress has had plenty of time to see it coming and prevent it. Ditto every other problem you can think of from immigration to the wars in Iraq/Afghanistan and how they are being conducted to the energy crisis. Congress isn’t doing their job, as elected officials, and we aren’t doing our jobs as citizens. Every solitary soul on The Hill is worried more about keeping their job than they are about doing their job and it’s that insecurity that we can use to our advantage.
 
Every one of us, regardless of which party we favor, should have the e-mail addresses of our Congressional representatives in our address books and every time we see something going a way we don’t  like, we should tell them so. We absolutely have to let them know that their job is at stake, if they don’t start listening. If we keep that up, sooner or later, they’ll start caring about the Nation and their constituency as much as they do their political perks.
 
In the meantime, those of us who feel we lost and are threatened are going to have to suck it up and soldier on. It is what it is and it’s essential that we support BOB and his people where it makes sense, and oppose "them" where it doesn’t. We’re all in the same boat and we can’t let our own political views make us act like politicians and forget that The Nation needs us now more than ever.
 
Here are some websites that will help hook us up to our local congressional types as well as the Oval Office. Spend a few minutes getting the info and let’s let them know we’re paying a lot more attention now than we have in the past.
 
Hopefully, this will be the last political blog I have to do because I HATE political rhetoric, whether it’s mine or theirs.
 
The best place to find out about your local people is
here: http://www.azleg.gov/MemberRoster.asp?Body=S
This one is for Arizona, but there is probably a similar one for your own state. Unfortunately, many Federal Senators and Representatives have gone to e-mail that can only be sent to them on their website with no addresses revealed, but the sites below give you most phone and fax numbers. Most of these will be updated in the near future as offices get new inhabitants.
 
Here is the Senate listing:
http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
 
This is a good source for the names of your Congressional reps: http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/
 
And this is the White House:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

If a link doesn't work, cut and past it into your browser.

My thanks to Bruce Frank for ferreting out the websites for me.

1 Nov 08 - Skunk Hollow, Peace of Mind and the Election

It’s Saturday before The Election. Yeah, that one. And I’m going to be so unbelievably glad, when it’s over, regardless of who wins. I just want to get it behind us so we can get back to dealing with everything that is facing us.  I’m tired of thinking about it and all of the “what if” scenarios that are floating around, most of which are BS with only a few being plausible. Let’s throw the cards on the table, show all the hole cards, and move on. Or maybe move to Skunk Hollow.
 
Skunk Hollow is six acres our family has owned in the country for over sixty years and now, is technically mine—a long ago Xmas present. Originally, it was to be a weekend getaway place, but, when the old farmhouse burned down the day they finished it in 1948, it became my hiding place. If, as a teenager and a young man, everything was going to hell in a hand basket, I went to Skunk Hollow.
 
First, it’s important you understand the place. It’s essentially a small peninsula bounded by the Blue River and attached to the rest of Nebraska by a narrowish neck at the top where the crumbling remains of the house’s foundation are sinking into the asphalt-black dirt. Now totally covered with big oaks and cottonwoods, I spent literally hundreds of nights there camping and even more days just sitting on the river bank banging away at leaves and floating twigs with my trusty .22. It was, to me, a state within a state, and a refuge from the real world.
 
Growing up in the ‘50’s meant the “real world” included the Cold War, Russia, the Minute Man silo a few miles south west of Skunk Hollow and SAC headquarters with its never ending supply of B-47’s 80 miles east at Offutt AFB. We were located on the 8-ring of Moscow’s targeting computers. Our house had a concrete bomb shelter and we had bomb drills hammered into us via television and school programs. The impending war was everywhere. But, at 15 years old, I was ready for it.
 
Under my work bench in the basement was an old footlocker that contained my camping gear and everything I needed to catch and eat everything from blue gills and carp to rabbits, squirrels and the odd feral cat or two. There were a1000 rounds of .22 for my Marlin 39 lever gun and clothes for every season. Everything was in a tidy box I would throw in the back of the pick-up the second I heard that the dirty Russkis had crossed the Missouri River into Nebraska. I’d make my home and my stand at Skunk Hollow. The movie Red Dawn and Montana survivalists had nothing on me. I was waaay ahead of that curve. When the world went crazy, I’d be living like Grizzly Adams at Skunk Hollow, guarding the perimeter of my kingdom with the unerring aim of a vengeful sniper. Invade Nebraska will you? You’ll pay for it! At that age, that all seemed so very real. And plausible. I didn’t let reality get in the way of my daydreams.
 
This week, as some of the “what if” scenarios began to nip away at my peace of mind (“Ah, he’ll go door to door, taking your guns, force all your cats into servitude, make eating with your right hand illegal, etc., etc.”) I’ve found myself thinking like a fifteen-year-old. Skunk Hollow is looking pretty good.
 
I hate thinking this way. I want to trust my government. Especially, I want to trust it to leave me and mine alone and not change the rules in the middle of the game so that part of my life is automatically illegal. As one of the most law-abiding people on the planet, I don’t want to start thinking like an outlaw, just so I can live my life.
 
Mostly, I just want to find out what we’re dealing with but, regardless of which side wins this week, I don’t think we’ll have the answers to that for many, many months. My dear old mother used to say, “Don’t borrow troubles from tomorrow,” which is exactly what many of us are doing. Too much conjecture, not enough facts. At this stage of the game, all we can do is wait and watch. And get out and vote. This time, it REALLY counts.
 
On the subject of voting, here’s a fun video my Hollywood mogul daughter put together with some of her clients and colleagues. The message is clear: Get out and vote or you can’t bitch about it later. http://www.youtube.com/user/5friendsvote
 
28 Oct 08 - The Great Toilet Paper Conspiracy of 2008

When I first ran across it, we were in England, so I thought it was some sort of quaint, Old World thing: I’d never seen 3 1⁄4” toilet paper before. As I sat there, I thought they were recycling adding machine paper, since those have gone the way of the digital do-do bird. Then, this morning, after wending my way out to the airport to use their facilities because our main sewer line was clogged (again), I found myself sitting there looking at 3 1⁄2” paper. Ah come on guys! The world has enough problems without shrinking toilet paper. Some of life’s basics are not to be screwed with. This is just another milepost marking our sure slide downhill. Damn!
 
This whole slide into mediocrity goes back years and each milepost marks a change in the fundamentals that have made us what we are. Take Browning shotguns, for instance. They were the quintessential hunting tool every kid worth his oats lusted after. I wanted a Browning sweet sixteen. It was beautiful, purposeful and, as I saw it, made for a man. Then, I saw my first one that was equipped with a recoil pad. A RECOIL PAD? On a Browning? Oh, my God, have we been taken over by girly-men?
 
A few years later, I saw my first ’32 highboy roadster with an automatic trans behind a hairy-chested small block and, right there I thought the world could go no lower. Hotrods and other real cars are supposed to have three pedals. Not two. Much of the fun of being able to smoke the tires is seeing if you can get rubber in all three, four, or now, five, gears. No wonder the human race is in trouble. Recoil pads and shiftless hotrods. I’m overwhelmed with sadness thinking about it. The world has a testosterone leak.
 
Don’t get me started on nosewheels on airplanes. As soon as we gave in to the girly men and put nosewheels under perfectly good airplanes, we signed the death knell of skill. Cessna called their nose-dragger gear “Land-o-matic” boasting, “If you can drive, you can fly.” That’s a helluva big “if”, Bub. I don’t want to be flying with the same people I’m forced into driving with, do you? We’re messing with the fundamentals of life here.
 
And then there’s the toilet paper thing. Why, in a world where it has been proven over and over that the population is getting taller and bigger, would you want to shrink toilet paper? I have to tell you that today there are more, and certainly bigger, assh…oh, wait….that might be a little too crude, even for Airbum.com. Just let it be said that our civilization was founded on 4 1/4” toilet paper and for “them” (the TP Mafia?) to think they can pass the 3 1⁄2” stuff off on us, just shows they don’t know how tough we can be.
 
As much as we’d like to, we can’t blame shrinking toilet paper on Democrats. Or Republicans. And probably not even on Nazis, Gypsys, Greenies or the PTA. These trends are our fault for giving in too easily. If we let them know we won’t accept lesser toilet paper by refusing to buy it (the market has the final word over everybody and everything, in case you’ve forgotten) we can regain control of our own porcelain destiny.
 
Huh! Interesting concept. I wonder if the same thing will work with our political leadership? Of course, to do that, we’ll need much, much bigger toilet paper.

The England Odyssey Part Four:
Two Hours in the Imperial War Museum

This is another of those "We should have allowed a complete day" types of things but we only had a couple hours. What a frustrating pity.

One theme I seemed to see in every UK museum is that they worked hard to put everything in context, rather than just presenting artifacts in cases. They tell you the background, in this case the background of the conflict, what lead up to it, how it developed and how the hardware was adapted. Very educational, but you miss most of it when you to tearing through, as we did. Click Here for More

18 Oct 08 - Caution: Media-Free Zone Ahead

Wow! As I sit here trying to talk to my computer, I’m finding it difficult to think about anything but the economy and politics.  It has crowded every other sane thought out of my head. The What-If’s just won’t go away. And I know why: every single form of media is serving it up to us in gigantic portions and you can’t avoid being totally inundated by it. And I think it’s unhealthy for both the Nation and the individual.  I’d give anything for my brain to go back to normal.
 
I grant you that this is a hyper-interesting time we’re in. In fact, it’s possibly financially fatal. Damn! I didn’t mean to type that, but the thought is rattling around inside my head and it fell out. I’m not naturally pessimistic (okay maybe a little), but I keep getting so hammered about the seriousness of what’s going on, that I’m losing sight of how serious the effects of thinking about it too much can be. I’m losing my optimism. I’m losing my faith in The System. And this is something I’m not sure our people in congress fully understand. And it’s something I don’t think the Media realizes—they are complicit in making the problem worse.

For our foreign readers, substitute your own flag for the above, as each of our countries is all that matters and partisan politics is killing us all.

Fundamentally, the congress is to blame for our loss of faith in The System. In the current crisis there is too much finger pointing: EVERYONE in government screwed up on this one. No one president owns the fault, as it started many decades ago, but the congress is at fault for letting it continue. If the congress is really doing its job, the president is essentially a figurehead. He can make suggestions, but he can’t enact anything without them. But, they have been so busy making certain those on the other side of the aisle don’t get a leg up on them that the country was sliding down the drain while they playing party politics. I keep looking for a way to totally rebuild the congress but don’t have a clue. They aren’t doing their job and we need to shake them up somehow.

Here's a thought: eliminate the aisle. Have them sit in alternate seats so a Republican has Democrats on both sides of them and vice-versa so they won't always be drinking the same conversational Cool-aid. Well...it's a start.
 
One fact we seem to over look is that the media, in all its forms, is a business. Period. It’s there to make a profit. It appears to be a service that lets The Nation know what’s going on across the country and the world, but, it’s a business and, like any business, it has to fight for market share to survive. And competition is tough. Broadcasts profits have been falling for years. So, they have to make their particular broadcasting package more exciting, with brighter labels and made of ingredients that appear better/flashier/tastier than their competition's. They might as well be marketing cake mix. The same principles apply. So, for that reason, they have to pick on those tiny morsels of a story that look sensational and will draw the public to them more than others and splash them across the screen and the airwaves. Subliminally, we know all of this. And because of that we’re losing our faith in our news services because in so many cases they are biasing the reporting and cooking the facts to make them more saleable.
 
Unfortunately, the Internet is rapidly becoming part of The Media and is doing the same thing, but without FCC restrains. There you can say any thing you want, using any words you want, true or not, and it’s out there for the world to see. It’s easy to put together what looks like a legitimate website but be a total wacko. Plus, increasingly, we’re seeing it used for guerilla marketing of candidates, often in a negative way. It may come in looking like a simple e-mail, but it’s really propaganda/advertising from some special interest group or individual. This kind of thing has pretty much killed our faith in anything we see on the web. It’s too easy to lie and get away with it.
 
The net result of all of this is a national funk. A sort of fundamental depression that has dimmed our spirit. Yes, we have a huge crisis on hand, but I wonder if we’d all be so crazy, if the media and the net would stop ramming it down our throats.
 
As I was having the above thought I suddenly realized, “Hey wait, they aren’t ramming it down my throat. I’m opening my beak like a baby bird and begging them to ram it down my throat.”  The media comes equipped with something we/I seem to forget about: an “on-off” button. I can shut them off at my leisure. So, I think I will.
 
Effective right now, I am hereby declaring Davisson Weekends to be Sanity Zones. From this point on, they will be Media Free. If the networks want to tell me Sarah Palin belched in public or yet another bank has gone under, they are going to have to knock on my door and do it in person. And even then, I probably won’t answer.
 
I think the nation would be better off if we all did the same thing: shut the media off and live within our own lives for a few days to give our emotions a rest. The reality of Monday will come soon enough.
 
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go do something that IS of some importance to me: I’m going to lace some wiring bundles on The Roadster and give my brain a little vacation.

11 Oct 08 - Cousins, Paxton Tours and Friends

I went back and re-read my rant about how you can’t do even a cursory tour of all of England’s history in anything less than a lifetime and I realized that I forgot one very important ingredient of our trip that made the entire thing worthwhile (two ingredients actually): Marlene’s cousin, Linda Paxton, and her husband Peter. Together, especially for us, they became Paxton Tours (not really…well, maybe) and they absolutely made the trip.

Our tour guides and chauffeurs: Linda and Peter Paxton, AKA Paxton Tours

I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but almost as soon as we started talking about coming to see them, Peter and Linda took us under their wing, and quite literally took over nearly all of those things I was concerned about. Like driving on the wrong side of the road. And figuring out where to go. And driving on the wrong side of the road. And picking hotels. And driving on the…..you know the rest.
 
Upon arrival, they tossed us in their BMW (it’s really weird sitting on the left side with no steering wheel) and wouldn’t let us out until we’d covered over 1200 miles. That’s an unheard-of amount of mileage on an island that’s 20% smaller than Arizona.
 
I know it’s no big deal to most people, but I’m certain part of the reason I’ve dragged my feet for so long on actually taking this trip was the backwards (from my perspective) driving thing. When I drive, I’m borderline unconscious most of the time and if I drove in England, I knew I’d have to treat every minute behind the wheel like I do when I’m in the Pitts: totally focused on the job at hand with no time for lolly-gagging (were do words like that come from?). And, because of that, I knew my sight-seeing would consist primarily of watching the yellow line and trying to remember which way to look for traffic at stop signs. Peter eliminated that entirely by doing all the driving. I spent the entire time looking every way but straight ahead. That’s the first time that’s ever happened to me in a car and it was an intoxicating experience: who knew there was so much to see, when you’re not doing the driving?
 
Although we’d met Linda and Peter a couple times when they vacationed in AZ, we’d never spent an extended time around them and a big question hung over the entire adventure: “Can we get along with someone for an entire week while trapped in a car?” Actually, I wasn’t positive I could get along with anyone for that period of time, much less someone I didn’t really know. Wow! Was I ever wrong! Linda and Peter proved to be not only the easiest people to get along with that I’ve ever known, but they were delightful in so many ways. Both are funny as can be and Peter is a real stitch. And they wanted so badly for us to see England. And we did.
 
We laughed our way down tiny little one-way roads lost between hedgerows and thatched roof stone cottages, hoping the GPS wasn’t lying, and we gawked at crown jewels, castles and tanks and enjoyed ourselves immensely.
 
Marlene and I both agree that getting to know Peter and Linda was the high point of the trip. I only hope that when you take trips like this that you can be as lucky as we were in having the perfect guides/friends/traveling companions.
 
And I hope your GPS isn’t so set on taking every detour it can find, although that turned out to be an adventure in itself.

The England Odyssey Part Three: Edinburgh and the Little House on the Hill

Edinburgh is just across the border in Scotland and is what you expect a major Scotish city to look like: old, classic, anything but rectilinear street layout with history oozing out of every cobblestone. We saw our first, and only light drizzle of the trip and, for some reason, I didn't take as many pictures as I should have.Click Here for More

4 Oct 08 - There IS Life After Politics...I hope

A few minutes ago, the battle of the vice-presidents, which didn’t reach even verbal abuse standards, much less battle standards, wrapped up. And once again, I’m glad it’s over. In fact, I’ll be glad when the entire election thing is over. That way my kids will talk to me again and they can stop trying to explain me away because of the way I’m likely to vote.  You see, I have a daughter in Hollywood and a son in New Jersey, so politically I’m something of an embarrassment.
 
Actually, what I am mostly is misunderstood. My daughter said , “Face it dad, you’re a Republican and your son will probably have to go through therapy because of that.” She said it shaking her head and checking both directions to make sure no one heard. A Hollywood mogul with a Republican father: how can she possibly face her friends and colleagues? Except I’m not a Republican.
 
In reality, I don’t know what I am. I’m liberal in some areas, conservative in others and I’m registered as an Independent. But, because I don’t get goose bumps when Obama is mentioned and I don’t spit on the sidewalk when Sarah Palin is mentioned, they say I must be a Republican. And, when they say “Republican,” it comes off their tongues as if they’re spitting out a gerbil. I think the rule is, if I don’t think like they do, I must be a Republican, which apparently is a lower life form of some sort. It’s all so black and white for them. Ah, to be young again.
 
What started this whole line of politically-charged family rhetoric was the release of my daughter’s (well, it’s not exactly hers, but she produced it) election video. It featured people she manages and lots of their Hollywood friends. Boiled down to terms this country boy can understand, it says “You can’t bitch, if you don’t vote, and you can’t vote, if you don’t register and the deadline is coming.” To see it, go to http://www.youtube.com/5friendsvote
 
Considering the source (Hollywood—truly on the left coast), I was impressed that she could keep it from automatically having a left-leaning orientation. I sent her an e-mail, copying everyone on her family list, that said, “…you were so even handed, that even my machinegun toting buddies loved it.”
 
Instantly I got an e-mail from my ex (her mother), “I can’t believe you’ve become such a super right-winged conservative. I’m SHOCKED. You were never that way!”
 
Hey, what did I say? I thought I was paying her a compliment, saying that even my hardcore conservative friends thought she was fair. But, nooo! I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to convince that part of the family circle that I’m not a Nazi. It was frustrating.  Why is it the left is always trying to convert the right, but the right just wants to be left alone?
 
And this is why you’re always cautioned against talking politics and religion with friends and family.  It ALWAYS breeds bad blood.
 
I can hardly wait to hear their take on the Vice Presidential Debates. Surely, they’ll talk about how shallow Sarah Palin was (they love that word, “shallow”) and how brilliant Joe Biden was. Actually, Biden was excellent, although I later found out some of his points bordered on fantasy. And Palin totally redeemed herself: she did great! But, I still wouldn’t want her in the oval office. Not yet anyway. They both did their jobs well and, I personally wish Biden was running instead of Obama (I think), although I still wouldn’t vote for him. Palin surprised a lot of folks and showed how she handled stress and what an incredibly quick study she is. They’d been force-feeding her information since last week and she made it sound as if it was part of her.  However, 90 minutes of second bananas saying how great their top banana is gets old quickly.
 
I’m going to be sooo glad when this thing is over. We keep forgetting there’s a country to run.  Now, if intersted, hang on for the sub-blog.
 
The Davisson England Odyssey, Part Two: Two Hours in the British Museum
The British Museum is their Smithsonian, but under one gigantic roof. Like idiots, we showed up around three o’clock and it closes at five. Can you do the Smithsonian in two hours? Like I said—idiots. But I did enjoy our frantic rush through what we could get through, which was mostly the Egyptian rooms. Click Here for More

28 Sept 08 - The England Experience; Doin' it the Wrong Way

Yes, we just returned from our 12-day trip to England. Our first vacation ever. And yes, this is going to be a “This is what we did on our summer vacation” essay. Sort of. What it is likely to turn into, however, is “This is how we did England, so please try to benefit from our mistakes.” If we learned anything about England, it is that while, when compared to the US, it, may not be very big area wise, every thing about it is too damned deep to be done in 12 days. We tried it and it can’t be done.
 
Actually, there were some eye-opening revelations along the way that I really want to wrap some words around and pass on, but to keep “Thinking Out Loud” from degenerating into a long-winded, many months-long travelogue, we’re going to do a blog within a blog: starting this week, at the end of each of my weekly cases of verbal diarrhea, I’ll plug in a short paragraph and a link that, if you so desire, will take you to a second, continually expanding, blog that focuses on what I learned, and experienced, over the past ten days including a bunch of pictures. If you want to share in some of those thoughts, click on the link. If not, just party on, dude.
 
First, a quick itinerary, beginning with the absolute worse routing possible to England. We were using Frequent Flyers’ miles and heading for Marlene’s cousins outside of Manchester (Southport), so we wound up going Phoenix-LAX-Frankfurt-Manchester. 16 hours of flying in total, but 11 was on Lufthansa, so it wasn’t too bad. The trip back was worse, beginning with a four-hour delay that had us sitting on the ramp at Heathrow. After well over twelve hours in the airplane we missed our connections in Philly and had to over night there.
 
As much as we’ve traveled, I’ve never experienced jet lag so that was my welcome to England: the first day we were on our feet 32 hours, went to bed at 10:30 that night, started to get up at 0800 for breakfast, closed our eyes for a few seconds and instantaneously it was noon! Then I didn’t sleep a wink for 48 hours! Jet lag hammered me at night, but the days were surprisingly normal. Then, the rocket-tour began and we started making tourista mistakes:
 

Our Thames taxi: a WWII DUKW (Duck)!

Southport (middle west coast) to Liverpool, back to Southport, a night in York (mid-country), rocket north to Edinburgh on the Scotland/England border the next night, three hours in Edinburgh, scream across to the lake district and Glasmere, Scotland (Wadsworth is buried there, very pretty, even in the rain). Then we pointed our noses south—all the way south to Wareham and the very south shore. About 300 miles. Three nights and two days there with Marlene touring with the cousins while I played with tanks and such. A train to London (the cousins had driven us prior to that) for three days of frantic touring in town, which included every single tourist site worth seeing. We did everything from riding in the Thames in an ex-WWII duck (DUKW officially) to the changing of the guards to Westminster Abbey (truly humbling) and a peek into St. Paul’s Cathedral (where Di got married—Marlene insisted). It wears me out just reading about it!
 
Okay, so now we’ve hit just about every high spot listed in every tourist brochure and some that aren’t (The Tank Museum at Bovington usually isn’t listed and should be, more on that later). What I came away with however, is the distinct feeling that I had cruised through Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory and was allowed only one lick of every one of the sweets available. I want more! Frustration now reigns supreme.
 
Raising the frustration level considerably was that we weren’t there more than twenty-four hours, when it became abundantly clear that even though I had read plenty of English history, when confronted with trying to actually visit it, I was doomed to failure. There’s just too much of it: here’s a country that’s only about the size of Oregon with a history going back several thousand years and beyond: after a while, you get to the point that, if a site doesn’t date from at least the 1100-1200’s, you raise your nose at it. It seems as if every damn building in the country is at least 350 years old. I’ll bet there are Holiday Inns over there that old.
 
The bronze age/iron age/Norman/Georgian/Elzabethan/Victorian, etc. ages are layered one on top one another and crammed together so tightly that trying to absorb the history contained in a single city block of even the smallest hamlet is exhausting.
 
If you’re going to visit England, I can make one very strong suggestion: plan ahead and focus on a couple of smaller areas so you can do them justice. Don’t, for instance, think you’re going to do Edinburgh in a single morning like we did. And you have to allow at least a half a day, or longer, for any one of London’s museums. The better ones, like the British Museum will suck up an entire day. As will the Imperial War Museum. Ditto the Tower of London (which isn’t a tower, by the way).

The Tower of London—does this look like a "tower" to you? This is where you use the word "castle." This is six pictures stitched together. Cool, huh? Click Here for Larger Pix

If you want to do castles, which was one of my prime motivations, beware that the Brits kick the word around with some abandon and often call huge manor houses castles, when they aren’t. And those incredibly luxurious, ornate monuments to wealth are everywhere you look with each one being more incredible than the next.
 
One of my goals was to photograph ruined castles, which would be semi-military residences from 1100-1300 when the various invasions, wars, conflicts and feudal skirmishes were underway but I hadn’t done enough research to plan our travels well enough and barely got to shoot one (Corfe Castle on the south shore).
 
Incidentally, a century, one way or the other, doesn’t mean much in England. They tend to round things off to the nearest two hundred years. Ha! Try that in the US!
 
So, now that we have dipped our toes into the tremendously deep ocean of history represented by the British Isles, it looks as if we have no choice but to go back (when our bank account has recovered from the two-to-one exchange rate). I figure six or seven trips should do it. Maybe.
 
If you’re interested in more detailed observations and experiences, start clicking onto the follow-on blogs.
 
England Odyssey: Part One—and speaking of castles

Corfe Castle. Read the sub-blog for more

I’m fascinated by the civilization that developed in the UK that necessitated the building of honest-to-God castles that stretched even Disney’s imagination. It’s simply impossible to imagine the level of opulence and wealth each of these feudal states developed. It’s also hard to imagine, given the technology of the times, how they could erect such incredibly complex physical structures, which were designed as forts as well as homes. Each lord had his own army and his castle was his own personal army base that was to protect what was his and, when he felt like it, go take what wasn’t his. Click Here for More


7 Sept 08 - WWII: Could We Do It Again?

I’ve been racing to get the first issue of Armor Journal finished before we leave for the UK this week, and, in the process, I had an epiphany of sorts: after a lifetime of vicariously living WWII through books, movies and interviews, and constantly talking about the fantastic things done to fight it, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of it. And I had to ask a question: could we do it again?

Part of building Armor Journal has involved a never-ending search for photos. In the course of doing that, I ran across PDFs of three books put out by the US Army right after the war. They were entitled “United States Army in World War II, a Pictorial Record.” There were three of them, which covered Africa and the Mediterranean, Europe and the Pacific. They were loaded with pictures I could legitimately use because they were all public domain. So, I sat down to build an archive of photos from that one source and I ran through it from beginning to end in one sitting. All 1,425 pages of it! About four hours worth.

At the end of that period, besides being nearly blind, I was also nearly numb: I had received a crash course in WWII and I was amazed at what I had read and seen. Although I ran across very little I didn’t already know as individual events and campaigns, it was the first time I had seen them all assembled together as The War in its entirety and had the dates soak into my brain. Holy crap! It was so much bigger than my mind had originally envisioned! And because of my life-long immersion in it, I’m probably closer to it than most, which means that many folks, especially the younger generation, don’t have a clue.

A case in point: Not long ago I was sitting in our living room with Marlene’s oldest (25 at the time) and four or five of his friends and he was complaining about trying to figure out big something is and I made the comment, “Well, it’s easy enough to figure out since we know there are thirty-six inches in a yard.” I could tell from his eyes, he didn’t know, and I was appalled. Then I started doing a man-in-the-street sort of interview with the bunch of them, with me asking questions I thought everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, could answer.

It turned out that Lee Harvey Oswald was either a rock star from the sixties or an Alabama football player. Martin Luther King was…well, not one single person knew. It went on and on and was all very depressing. I knew we, as a country, were in trouble, when I got dates for WWII ranging from the middle 1800’s to the early 1960’s. Plus, we were fighting a variety of enemies, including England (they all agreed on that one) and it all took place in Europe somewhere. Or maybe South Africa. They weren’t sure. But some of those countries were involved.

Of the four or five guys involved, all in their mid-twenties, half had graduated college and all were gainfully employed, some in very responsible positions. So they weren’t dummies. They were typical, upper middle class kids. And they didn’t know sh*t about ANYTHING, from knowing how long a yard is to being able to even put WWII in the right decade. I was depressed. And then I cruised through the PDFs and received my own crash course in WWII history.

On December 7th, 1941, the concept of amphibious warfare didn’t physically exist. As far as that goes, our military practically didn’t exist either. It was tiny! Exactly eight months (to the day) later, Marines waded ashore at Guadalcanal. During those eight months, the concept was developed, landing craft designed and built, ships to carry the landing craft designed and built, all the support (ships, airplanes, gasoline, shoe laces, rifles, etc.) was designed and built and thousands of men were trained and equipped. And this wasn’t just the Marines that waded through the surf. It included the hundreds of thousands of those behind them from sailors and cooks, to the DI’s at Lejuene and Pendleton to the bus drivers that moved them around in the states. Oh yeah, then all that stuff had to be moved to the South Pacific. IN EIGHT MONTHS!!!!

What’s important to remember is that our leaders looked at the Pacific as a secondary front, as their real attention was focused on freeing Europe. So an equally big push was putting forces in North Africa to help the Allies (mostly Brits) fight Rommel and his gang.

By 1941, after years of war, the Germans and the Japanese were already well-oiled, highly experienced military machines. And they were sitting there waiting for us. From Burma to Tunisia, on dozens of little islands, from Sicily to every inch of Europe, they were waiting, and eventually every part of the globe was ablaze and practically every nation was focused on it.

It is amazing, however, that our entire war (not counting the lend lease ramp-up) lasted an unbelievably short three years and nine months. Normandy to VE day was eleven months. It took less than a year to march across the beaches and into Germany! But look how large that all looms in history! At least to some of us. But, could we do it again, if forced into it?

The know-nothing twenty-somethings I was haranguing are a big part of our voting base. They are assuming roles of leadership. The population, as a whole, is divided over drill/don’t drill, legalize the illegals/ throw them out, the globe is getting hotter/no it isn’t, terrorism will go away/no it won’t. We’ve pretty much moved our ability to manufacture off-shore and become an economy that can sell stuff but can’t make it. Our national leadership is focused on their own political survival, not our survival as a nation. So, when the question is ask “Could we put together enough manufacturing and national commitment to do something the size of the Guadalcanal and North Africa campaigns in less than a year?” you have to laugh. Or cry. Or both.

Pearl	NYC - I don't see the difference

I don’t know what my point is here, other than saying, I now have a much more solid understanding of the immensity of WWII. And I sure wish others could truly understand who we were, as a nation, in what has to be the finest hour of our existence. Could we be that people again? I like to think so. But I wouldn’t count on it.

911 killed more Americans than Pearl Harbor. And they were all innocent civilians. Not soldiers. But now, among many other things, we’re even arguing about whether we should be fighting those who, in one way or the other, perpetrated that atrocity. It’s absolutely incredible how short our memories have become. How long before the numbers 911 are once again just a phone number?

30 August 08 - I wish Mom Could See...

The other day I was putting together a little in-joke package to send to my daughter: it contained an Elvis pictorial book I’d never seen and a plastic Publix shopping bag I’d picked up while I was in Florida. She loves Elvis and, for some reason, always got off on Publix, a grocery/shopping chain she only saw when we were in Florida while she was young. I was just stuffing it in an envelope when the thought crossed my mind, “I sure wish mom could see Jen now.”
 
I lost my mother at the age of 91 ten years ago this coming February. Dad, whom we always said wouldn’t last two weeks, if mom went first, checked out exactly two weeks later at 92. When mom died, he was hale and hardy, considering his age, and appeared unaffected—five days later he was in a coma. After sixty-six years of facing life as a team, he just didn’t want to go it alone. Which, I find very poetic.
 
The two of them cut a wide swath through Nebraska and the surrounding area. She was a highly educated, feisty little fireball that kept dad’s business ventures on an even financial keel while, at the same, time being a mover and a shaker in the small community where we lived. He was a small town P.T. Barnum in that he surrounded his many businesses (all successful) with an air of excitement borne of often off-the-wall promotions: he had a radio show remoted out of his store for 45 years and, among other celebrities, he had every Nebraska governor as a guest, and they all caught a good ribbing from him. Or he’d have such-and-such a caller come with him to the interstate and they’d stop a car. Dad would pay the car’s way anywhere it was going and the winning caller got to go the same place. They might be going to the next town or San Francisco. It made no difference to him. It was good entertainment. He also built the world’s largest privately-owned time capsule and wound up in the Guinness Book of Records (1975).
 
As tight as mom and dad were as a team, that’s how different they were as people. Dad was very old world and he was a traveling fool (he took us to every state on the continent by the time I was fifteen, including driving the AlCan Highway to go to Seward, Alaska when the AlCan had only been a civilian road for two years…it was ROUGH!). Still, he was super provincial and close-minded in so many ways.
 
Mom, on the other hand, was open to anything and was physically and mentally adventurous. For instance, where dad hated that I flew, Mom wanted to learn herself, which would put dad into orbit every time she mentioned it.

Twana and Zoe. Is this beautiful or what?.

Dad was 90, or so, when my son, Scott, got married but we couldn’t tell him, because our beloved daughter-in-law, Twana (Doctor Davisson to her staff), is African American, and we weren’t sure but what that may have killed dad. That’s a terrible fact to face about one of your parents, but what is worse is that my mother would have immediately thrown her arms tightly around Twana to draw her in, making her an instant part of the family. She would have thought it was great fun to add some diversity to the Davisson Tribe, especially someone as funny, intelligent and beautiful as Twana. And the grandkids, Mason and Zoe? Forget it! She wouldn’t have let them out of her grasp, once she got her arms around them. Her love and her intelligence knew no limits.

Mason wearing grandad's old football helmet	Zoe. 'Enuff said?

In all probability, dad’s reaction would have been very quiet and self-contained but it may have torn him up inside. He wasn’t a racist or overtly prejudiced, but he was very  much from another generation and we didn’t want to take a chance at that stage in his life.
 
Both of them would have flipped out the way my kids and all of my sisters’ kids have turned out. I would have given anything to have had them at Jennifer’s wedding. They would have talked about it for the rest of their lives. However, more than one toast remembered them.
 
Someday I’ll tell you the entire story of Harold and Claire Davisson. They were highly unusual people who created an unusual and incredibly interesting life. But they live on in the generations of Davissons they created.
 
All of us had, or have, parents and after they are gone, it’s impossible not to wish they could have seen how things turned out. Unfortunately, there’s not much we can do about that. The best we can do is to make them as much a part of our lives as we can, for as long as we can. Our time with them is short.
 
I now wish we had introduced dad to Twana. He may have surprised us.

Scott, his old man and Bensen, who was later traded for a cat of the same name. Long story, don't ask.

24 August 08 - 36 Hours in the Urban Desert

This week I took a marathon 922 mile, 36-hour power-trip doing photography that took me from Phoenix to LA (normally 385 miles) by way of the Mexican border. Granted, it was a terribly circuitous route, but along the way I was once again reminded of the immense diversity our country offers in terms of topography, history and the problems it faces.
 
The goal of this trip was to spend as little time as possible traveling to the San Diego area to photograph a Sherman, loop up to Huntington Beach to shoot a Kettenkrad (yeah, I know, I’ll explain later), then continue the loop still further north to West Hollywood to have lunch with my daughter in the high rent district before pointing my nose East towards Phoenix. The changes along the way were a crash course in why you can’t categorize the US in 25 words or less, either physically or psychologically. We’re just too diverse.
 
I wended my way out of Phoenix, which at 3.6 million is the fifth largest city in the country and rated higher than that in land area. It flows out like a shallow mud puddle because few buildings are taller than two stories and those are rare. Then, suddenly, civilization ends and the desert takes over, as it always does. Saguaro cacti, the occasional verde tree, then nothing but rocky spines of low purple mountains break the desolate expanse for nearly three hundred miles. The occasional dried up little town struggles to survive and entice travelers into their small businesses. Even there, however, the blooming, scraggly suburbs keep growing. I, however, couldn’t believe how much Yuma, right on the AZ/CA border had exploded since my last trip, not even a year earlier.
 
As always, I craned my neck to catch sight of what was left of the fading runways at the long-gone Dateland airbase where thousands of B-25 crews learned the art of gunnery during WWII. Millions of rounds of .50 caliber lie mixed with the arrowheads and pottery shards from the original inhabitants.
 
Then, the flatness of the desert gives way to a steep climb up truly rocky mountains that redefine the word “barren” and, as you crest them, your world changes. The cactus gives way to an increasing blanket of scrub oak until the area is a broken sea of green/brown held together by rocks and sand. I’m traveling in an endless stream of fast moving trucks and SUVs all headed for the lower temperatures and green of the San Diego coast that’s barely 80 miles away over the horizon.  
 
Then, my route takes a sudden hard left toward the south and in a matter of a few miles I leave traffic, roads and civilization behind. I’m in a part of Southern California I didn’t even know existed, even though I’d driven through it a hundred times.
 
I drop down off the highway into the scrub covered mini-mountains and hills and I’m in a different world. A totally different world. The narrow two-lane road wends its way through the countryside with only the occasional double-wide or shed-like house breaking the expanse. Could it be I had found a part of California the developers hadn’t discovered yet? It was refreshingly rural. Almost scary so. Then I arrived at my destination.
 
In a matter of minutes I was driving dusty ranch roads scouting photography locations when we were brought up short by an immense, solid steel wall that looked to be at least 15 feet high and stretched out of sight in both directions. The owner had erected another fence about fifty feet from the tall brown one, this one was a 12-foot chain link affair topped with concertina/razor wire. For the first time I was looking at the Mexican border and was seeing the illegal immigrant problem through the eyes of those who live it.
 
This man’s property abutted Mexico and the two apparently didn’t co-exist peacefully. This picturesque ranch, with its free-grazing long horn cattle and horses, was a personal combat zone and the owner had a .357 on his hip to underscore the seriousness of his life.
 
It was sobering to watch Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents (ICE) practicing at a shooting range provided by the owner. When they were shooting at targets while in a dead run, it was obvious that this was their job and their lives depended on being good at it. They dealt only with the bad parts of the immigration problem. The majority of illegal’s are just people looking for a better life and pose no physical danger, but they are often sponsored by border gangsters and drug cartels who wouldn’t blink at killing a Border Patrol agent. And that’s what ICE is for.
 
Photography accomplished (see below), I was back on the road, my nose pointed northwest into the heart of Orange County and in less than 30 miles, the scrub oak beauty gave way to rampant development. You couldn’t see the ground for the rooftops. I was back in the Southern California we all know too well and my trusty GPS held my hand, guiding me through the endless maze of freeways and arterials to my hotel.
 
The next morning, I shot my Kettendrad and caught up with my daughter and we had a wonderfully loving couple of hours until I once again challenged LA to let me out. But it didn’t want to let me go, as I suffered through a solid hour and a half of bumper-to-bumper, stop-and-go driving just to go 40 miles. Then magically, as the mountains opened up and the hundreds upon hundreds of gigantic windmills in Banning Pass announced that Palm Springs was just around the corner, I was once again thankfully vomited out into the desert, this time the Mojave.
 
As I climbed up the side of the valley and passed Chiriaco Summit, I thought of George Patton who established the Desert Training Command at this location. At one time, the air was split by the sight of distant dust trails being thrown up by hundreds of tanks being driven by young recruits who would soon be doing battle with Rommel and his Panzers. The little, but wonderful, Patton Memorial Museum at the Summit recalls those days and what it meant to victory.
 
Then the world was behind me, and Phoenix lay somewhere in the dark over the far horizon. I had only to follow my headlights to find it. And I did. And I had plenty of time to think about what I had seen. From the densest and richest population the country has to offer, to absolute desolation, from a city of hope and prosperity, to an on-going fight for survival at the border. All in 36 hours. It was a cram course in America.
 
The drive would be a good one for both presidential candidates to take. They might learn something about how one-size-fits-all solutions aren't likely to work. But they'd probably miss the point.

Here are some of the shots.

Sherman M4A3. How's this for protecting your property? He rents it out for movies and it was in "Flags of our Fathers."

The Kettenkrad originated as a tow vehicle, especially for airplanes, but became a general purpose machine. This one is 100% original, never having been restored.

This one's restored complete with MG42. Chassis built by NSU.

11 August 08 - Talk to me, dammit!

Doesn’t it drive you nuts that inanimate objects can’t talk and tell you their stories? One of the items I brought back from the Davisson Crap Collection and Goody Bin in Nebraska last month is what appears to be a civil war belt buckle (it’s actually a McKeever box emblem) with a rebel Minie ball stuck half way through it.  Gheez I wish it could tell me where and when this happened and how the young soldier carrying it faired after being hit.

This was located on his hip on his ammunition pouch.

Inasmuch as Minie balls (actually a hollow base, conical bullet, not a ball, Blue and Gray both used them) generally arrived in a cloud of lead, rather than as single shots, did this young blue coat soak up other bullets and die on an unnamed battlefield? Or did he live on and sire a whole line of descendants that settled the West?  Maybe he was related to me. I look at that hunk of brass and lead and can’t help but think, “Talk to me dammit! Talk to me.”
 

Every tree on every Civil War battlefield was filled with lead and shrapnel

Ditto for the piece of branch with a large caliber lead ball stuck in it. At least this has a faded, and obviously ancient, tag on it that reads, “Rebel bullet in shell bark hickory wood, taken from Missionary Ridge. Presented to me by Capt. Cooper.” Missionary Ridge played a major role in the battle for Chattanooga, so at least I know where this piece came from.

It's hard to see, but this old Single Action Army has an even coat of rust over it's entire frame and it's a four-digit pistol. Very old, as single actions go and nothing of its history is known.

But then there is the rusty 7 1⁄2” barrel single action Colt I’ve had forever. It is a four-digit serial number, which puts it in 1874, the first full year of production. Before it was left to rust evenly all over, it was in pretty fair mechanical condition. What had it done in its life and how did it come to be so neglected for so long?
 
I have another single action that was made in 1902. When it was less than two years old someone crudely stamped “May 17,1903” in the frame and there are three equally crude notches in one grip. What does any of this mean? Was it part of something momentous, like the Pinkerton Meat Packing riots in Omaha that same year? Or was it just some kid messing with an old gun?

Great for catching mice. This thing is just under four feet long. Everyone needs at least one. I have two!

And then there’s the oft-mentioned four-foot bear trap we brought back from Alaska half a century ago. You just know it has an interesting history (don’t all bear traps?). But, will we know any of it. Of course, not.

I've worn this same belt buckle every day for 37 years, but others wore it before and I wish I knew who they were.

And last, but not least, is the 1874 cavalry buckle I’ve worn every single day of my life since1971 when I bought it in Oklahoma City for twenty bucks. The original leather belt that came with it has extra holes in it showing it was probably worn by a child while playing. But where did it spend its service years, most of which were dead in the middle of the Indian Wars out west? Did some trooper give his life only to have his belt taken by a victorious Sioux warrior? Or did he simply take it with him after he retired and give it to one of his kids, who gave it to a friend who gave it to another friend who….. I am the latest in its cast of characters, but who came before me?
 
As I’m typing this I’m literally surrounded by dozens, hundreds of items, all of which want to tell me their story, but they can’t. They are forever lost to the silence of time. It drives me nuts. But, I keep listening hoping that one day a faint whisper will reach across the void and connect me with someone who also enjoyed a given artifact. But, I’m not holding my breath waiting for it to happen.
 
PS
I work hard to establish provenance on items, when I can. For instance, I have a signed affidavit from the old gentleman who, as a member of a US patrol in Germany during WWII, got in a fire fight with a Werhmacht patrol. After the fight, he took a P-38 pistol off a dead sergeant he had just shot and I have that pistol. So know its complete life story. A rarity. And a prized possession.
 

5 August 08 - Row 147 at Oshkosh Will Never Be the Same
 
I’m on my way home from the fly-in at Oshkosh, which, for those of you reading this in lower Slobania or the outback of Tanzania who don’t know, is the largest annual outdoor event in the world. It’s airplanes, good friends and a seemingly endless supply of porta-potties. Unfortunately, as I was driving around the far south parking area, there were none close enough to solve a pressing urinary issue. So, I solved it as only a farm kid would and right there, in front of God and everybody, I pee’d on row 147. A personal first.
 
Relax, it’s not as bad as it sounds: this was the day after the show shut down and row 147 was an easy half mile away from civilization so, I offended no one.
 
The same could not be said of my performance at the welding forum. I stood up there for an hour and a half excitedly pontificating about the glories of welding and how zen-like the skill could be. As I finished up, the large crowd applauded, I stepped down off the stage with a triumphal feeling within and someone came up to me and whispered in my ear, “Your pants are unzipped.”  Ah, Man! How stupid can one person be?
 
And then there is the most classic line from the entire fly-in. I had just stepped into a porta-pottie when I heard a loud voice from the one next door. It was a woman scolding her young child. “No, don’t look down in the potty! Don’t look down!”
 
Listen to your mom, kid. It’s good advice. And it put me in mind of the time I saw a guy coming out of a porta-potty holding his wallet by a corner as he shook it off. My mind refused to let the image of the wallet-recovery process play itself on my mental screen. Yeeeeech!

The possible high point of the fly-in, however, was discovering free WiFi at Arbys. It became such an after-fly-in evening ritual for me, that, if anyone was looking for me, they drove over to Arbys. How many office locations have Diet Dr. Pepper on tap, fries and apple turnovers?
 
Still, being on the road is getting really old. In July I spent 22 days on the road, and flew 23 hours of Pitts dual in six days during the short time I was home. I’m pooped! In a good sort of way, of course.
 
PS
Now you see why I write this blog: what legitimate magazine is going to let me write this kind of drivel? :-)
 
PPS
The aerial high points of Oshkosh included a B-52 making a 200 foot, pedal-to-the-metal pass, the majestic Boeing 40A, the similarly configured Zenith and a WACO ZPF (single-place WACO with a sliding canopy) that I’d love to own. I’m certain that when ("if"actually) my brain finally shows up from Oshkosh and I’m no longer in my current zombie-mode, I’ll have other, less biologically-oriented observations to offer.

26 July 08 - Computers, Airlines, Elbows and Outlets
 
As with most folks these days, a disproportionate amount of my time is spent poking my nose into dark corners of airline terminals looking for a place to plug my computer in. When I’m not doing that, I’m trying to find a place for my elbows onboard airliners, while I’m using my computer. The competition in both areas is exhausting me.
 
I’m writing this blog in—you guessed it—tourist class, which is where a lot of these words get their start and yes, I’m engaged in an elbow-fencing match with the gal on my right and the guy on my left. I think I’ve finessed the girl and she realizes that I’m not going to yield easily, so she’s collapsed against the window and taken her elbows with her. The guy, on the other hand, has his computer out too, and right now he’s winning.
 
Oh, wait….he just glanced over at what I’m writing and sucked his right elbow in just enough to give me maneuvering room. Did I win? Did he see I was writing about him and he wanted to affect his image, as I portray him. Or is he just a good guy? Ah, elbow breathing space!
 
The terminal free-for-all in finding an outlet wasn’t as easy. The field seemed to be evenly split between kids in crooked baseball hats playing games and surfing the net and hardcore business types, their eyes sagging and their jaws set. I had passed several of them, their eyes, like mine, flicking back in search of computing power: were the outlets behind the next pole? Nope! How about behind that row of seats against the wall? Yeah, there’s one….damn…that little old lady with the iBook was fast! I’d never actually seen someone that old snarl. She’s definitely not going to share.
 
As if the elbow/power competition isn’t bad enough, this trip started throwing off bad vibes right from the get-go. I returned from Nebraska barely 30 hours ago thinking I had two days at home. Thankfully, a friend called saying he’d meet me in Seattle the next day and I thought “what the hell, it’s not tomorrow? Is it?” It was! I nearly missed my trip!
 
Then, I found I’d booked yet another 0700 flight. When am I going to learn? I’m a fruitcake about showing up early, so that meant an 0500 launch from the house (we’re only 15 minutes from the airport), which in turn meant an 0415 wake-up, which invariably means I wake up periodically all night afraid I’ve missed my alarms. My feet hit the floor at 0317. Yawn!
 
Of course, my wait for the flight was forever long, but it was made much shorter by finding that a good friend, Curtis Clark, one of the local aviation addicts, was going to be driving me and the 737-400 to Seattle. We pass a pleasant half hour talking about airplanes, tanks and hangars, then we board and, as I’m sitting down in my seat, I discover yet another Budd-screwup: my computer bag felt light. Oh, oh! I check and, sure enough, I’ve left it at Security. In my blurry state of mind I somehow managed to leave it in TSA hell. Dammit! I’m going to spend the trip without a computer. I’m positive I can’t endure the damage that would cause to my psyche. A week without a computer? My God, the world would come to an end.
 
I start doing my salmon-up-stream thing through boarding passengers and Curtis spots my head bobbing up and down going the wrong way. Bless his heart, he volunteers to go retrieve my computer, which, I imagine, by that time the TSA bomb-squad had out on the ramp ready to blow up. However, when he delivered it, its lights were glowing, so they must have turned it on, read a couple of my articles and declared the computer to be obviously useless, but not threatening, so they spared its life.
 
At this point, I’m whizzing along five miles above the Earth and life is good. From this point on, it’ll be a great trip, if I can remember to look for outlets as I leave the boarding area in Seattle so I’m ahead of the competition on my return, remember to pick-up my computer at Security and remember to zip my pants, when I dress.
 
PS
While I was typing this, a new kind of airline space competition popped up: the guy behind me just asked if I could put my seat back up because he’s six foot five. I wonder if I can get the old lady in front of me to put her seat up to give me computer-room by explaining that the guy behind me is so tall? Yeah, fat chance.

20 July 08 - Postcards and Such
 
As I was paying my bill at a restaurant in a tourist location, I happened to notice the ever-present rack of postcards and the thought went through my mind: with cell phone cameras, e-mails, etc., does anyone still send post cards? Ditto pay phones. When was the last time you used a pay phone? Technology may be creating lots of new jobs and industries, but it’s also killing others.
 
One of the items we bought back from our trip to Nebraska last month was one of those old fashion crank wall phones. For those who haven’t seen them in action, you turned a crank, that woke up the operator (often Gerty or Betty Lou), you told her what number you wanted and she connected you (or you just ask for old Sam, or the beauty parlor. She knew the numbers). They were crude in the extreme, but not as old as you’d think: The phone we shipped back was one of the hundreds my dad bought from the phone company when they were retired in my old home county: they were still in service in the country when I was in high school in the late 1950’s. Hard to imagine the changes since that time.
 
My dad was always talking about the immense changes he’d seen (Model T’s were new when he was in school, Tri-Five Chevys were new, when I was in school) and I’m now realizing that reminiscing like that is just part of any generation. It helps make us aware of progress and I shouldn’t feel like I’m edging into old-cootdom, when I talk the same way.
 
When it comes to digital stuff, it’s hard to imagine what folks like me have seen. As an engineering student, I was in only the second or third class to have the concept of the computer introduced to us. That would have been about 1963. At the time, my school, the Oklahoma University, had what was reputed to be one of the largest computers in the country. It was called Osage II (if I remember correctly), filled an entire building with air conditioners covering the roof, and was something like 50K. Not Mb, but “k”. We’d spend hours in the all-night computer lab punching Number Nine cards and then feed stacks of the cards, sometimes ten feet tall, through the reader to get the data in. Then we’d wait hours for it to crunch the numbers. What’s important in this is that this is the kind of technology that took us to the moon and back. Every single one of us carried a slide rule on our belt, as that was still the mainstay numbers machine.
 
As I’m writing this, I’m watching a kid play some sort of electronic game in a seat ahead of me and his toy has far more computing power and contains more lines of code than NASA possessed in its entirety, when we went into space. The changes are mind numbing.
 
When I look around, I’d have to say that even though some trades are disappearing, there is more opportunity for a young person today than at any time in the past because every day a new field is created by advancing technology. However, one basic truth still applies: if you are really serious about making money, forget high tech and the professions and become a plumber in a big city. If you don’t believe that, ask any BMW dealer how many of their cars go to plumbers. No don’t! It’ll depress you. Unless, of course, you're a plumber, which case, I'm jealous.
 
 
14 July 08 - Beartraps, TSA and Skycaps

An image popped into my mind as I was packing my four-foot bear trap into a package I planned to take as onboard baggage: A grumpy-looking TSA X-ray operator jumps with surprise and screams at the top of her lungs “BAG CHECK!”  A gruff dude with humorless eyes stares me down and asks, “What’s in the box, sir?” I answer, “A bear trap.” The rest of my imaginary conversation has me wearing handcuffs while I explain.
 
Although I think it rather whimsical to be carrying a full-sized bear trap that folded neatly into a two-foot square box as onboard baggage I was fairly certain the TSA wouldn’t see the humor in it. The “Terrorist With a Bear Trap” scenario is probably so common, they have a section in their training manuals on how to handle it. I finally decided that I really didn’t want to go through a body cavity search and dropped it off at UPS.
 
Why didn’t I just check it? Because this was just after US Airways, along with a bunch of other carriers, decided to whack us $15 for the first bag checked and $50 for the second and we’d already checked one each. My first thought, when they announced their plans to charge us for the first bag was that, considering the pressure the airlines are under from the price of fuel, it was a logical move. Then I thought about the effect it was going to have on Skycaps and curbside check-in: it’s going to be disastrous.
 
I absolutely depend on curbside check-in to avoid the unreal mess that surrounds most airline check-in counters at big airports. I remember one specific situation in Orlando, where, due to cancelled flights and tour groups, the line went completely out of sight.  I’d still be standing there, if I hadn’t had the sense to step outside on the sidewalk and check-in at curbside. Curbside check-in lightens the load on agents and streamlines the process. But that was then, this is now. Today it’s all lumped together and a bad situation has gotten worse. And more expensive.
 
All travelers are bitching about it, but most have missed one real tragedy attached to it: think about the effect on curbside Skycaps. That entire segment of the travel community has essentially been put out of a job. Nationwide, there is simply no use for them because there’s no provision for charging for the bags at their stations, so we all have to go inside to the check-in counters.
 
This all went into effect in the last few days, so the dust hasn’t settled yet, but I hope they figure out a way to do their bag charging at curbside. It’ll make my life a lot easier, but more important, it won’t put thousands of Skycaps out of a job.
 
In the meantime, right now a UPS truck somewhere is carrying my bear trap to its new home. I wonder how the driver would feel if he knew he was carrying such a high profile terrorist weapon. 

6 July 08 - Reborn on the Fourth of July

28 Jun 08—Stephen Stills and me (and Nash and that other guy)

Geezer Rock? No Damn Way!
As a charter member of the Buffalo Springfield fan club (not really, but close), last night I fulfilled a forty-plus year dream and sang For What it’s Worth with Stephen Stills. The fact that 5,500 others decided to join in didn’t diminish the  duet moment one damn bit. It was still magic for me and I didn’t care about the others.

When I bought tickets for us to see Crosby, Stills and Nash it was with more than a little trepidation: the group, which for most of us in the day it was a fluid follow-on to Buffalo Springfield (named after a steam roller company, by the way), redefined musicianship and through their harmony and musical choices, had set a helluva standard. Their harmonies were so tight and complex, even at their peak, if they were having a slightly off night, the music suffered horribly. They took a risk every time they opened their mouths at missing some of the split intervals their music depended on.

As I plunked down more than I thought I would ever pay for a concert ticket, I knew I too was taking a risk: these guys are all collecting social security and have been together for forty years. How good can they possibly still be? Was I going back and looking for my high school prom queen only to be crushed by the toll time has taken? I had only to look in the mirror on the way out the door to the concert to know none of us has improved with age.

The Dodge Theater in Phoenix, is a great venue. Good acoustics and huge jumbotron TV screens on both sides of the stage. Plus, we had good seats. When they came on stage, I immediately wished they didn’t have the jumbotrons because you saw too much of the performers. You could, for instance, clearly see the damage David Crosby’s self-destructive past has carved into his face and body. Balding, with his signature mustache and flowing white hair, his 67 years have been hard ones and and each had left their mark. Graham Nash, looked good for 65 and Stephen Stills, the kid of the group at 63, also had held up well, considering his background. Still, you were looking at guys like me standing on stage and we’d paid more than I’d paid for my first three cars combined to see them. My heroes were becoming wizen caricatures of their former selves. What did I expect?

A little beat-up looking, yes, but as the evening rolled on, your eyes adjusted and you saw past the appearance to the music and he seemed to lose years, at least in my eyes the more they sang. A great evening!

Then, David Crosby played a surprisingly nimble, and very familiar riff on a mid-70’s Martin D-45, barely opened his mouth, his eyes mostly shut, and my night was absolutely made. It wasn’t David Crosby the old guy singing. It was David Crosby the musician I’d always known. Ditto for the rest. And with only few minor exceptions, the harmonies reached inside me and reminded me that it’s about what’s inside the album, not what’s on the cover. These guys were past being great. They were wonderful! They did a couple of near a cappella pieces that actually put tears in my eyes they were so tight and delicate.

Thanks to them, I was once again reminded that gray does not mean you are no longer the person you once were. It just means the album sleeve is showing some wear, and in their case, some abuse, but, if you've been true to your craft, the tracks will still run clean and true.

Most of us have spent a lifetime honing our skills and there’s no reason to believe that because you’ve reached an age society has arbitrarily decreed as “old” that you have to either accept, or act, that label. My attitude, and apparently that of Crosby, Stills and Nash, is screw ‘em all. If some young punk of twenty, thirty or forty, thinks they’re better than you are at what you do, tell ‘em to bring it on. When it comes to applying what a long lifetime has taught us, they'll find that kickin’ butt is NOT an ability possessed by only the young. And we should teach our children well, so they understand that.

Now....where did I put my finger picks?

PS
For What It’s Worth was part of their encore set and I made it a point to look around at the audience, which was surprisingly young. It was gratifying to see hundreds and hundreds, possibly thousands, of twenty-something guys and gals all singing along and not missing a word. I guess classic is classic and good music knows no age boundaries.

21 Jun 08—Warning: Computers are Harmful to your Health
I think I now have a very clear picture of how I'm going to die: I'm going to be sitting at my computer, clutching my chest while my body vascillates between having a stroke and a heart attack. This will be after I've emptied an entire magazine of 9mm into my monitor. I HATE FRIGGING COMPUTERS!

Today is a classic example of why generations that followed my father's, the computer generation that includes even us baby boomers (actually, I'm a pre-boomer, but close) will not live as long as his did. Our computers are going to kill us. I'll shorten this up as much as I can, but it'll still drag on so be patient.

First, Thinking Outloud didn't get updated last week because I was in Oregon playing with tanks and I came back with some photos and videos I couldn't wait to share. But I've spent most of the last week trying to figure out how to do that. The stills coming out of the new cameras, were easy enough to sort out, but my super-sophisticated little hard drive camcorder has absolutely defied easy understanding.

JVC must stand for "Jerk! it's Very Complex" because, after probably ten hours of screwing around, I still haven't gotten it to talk to my computer without hours and hours of file manipulation. Then, this morning I noticd in teeny-tiny mouse type at the bottom of a manual page it says, "to connect to computer use cable PNxxxx, which is optional and must be purchased." YOU HAVE TO BE SH*TTING ME!

First, what kind of computerized anything, especially something with a hard drive, doesn't talk to a computer through a USB cable (it has a USB port right on the camera)? It uses a funky looking cable that plugs into its charging dock, not the camera itself.

And what kind of idiot company comes out with a digital anything and doesn't supply the cable necessary to transfer the files right to the computer in a useful form? Sounds like I need to pay a visit to a JVC product planner and put my rectal cranial crowbar to use.

I ponied up the forty bucks for the cable and two-day freight, but it won't show up until Tuesday so I still don't know if it'll solve the problem. I'm so damn frustrated I can't stand it! I have the files on my hard drive, but the amount of manipulation and new software it has taken to make them even remotely useful is outrageous.

Yeah, I know, this is just me venting about a problem most folks don't have, so they can't identify. But, how about this one:

I'd loaded the Browning in preparation for an iExecution and couldn't wait to blow off the steam by writing this blog. Then, there I am with my brain bulging from excess computer crap and Microsoft Word won't open! GIVE ME A DAMN BREAK! For about 20 minutes it kept telling me that this font and that font were corrupt, and I kept clicking "OK." Then I shut down and went through a bunch of fix-me-ups and it still doesn't work so I'm writing this right in the web software. Damn! That's not the way life is supposed to work!

WHAT GOOD IS A COMPUTER WITH A DEAD WORD PROCESSING PROGRAM? Espcially to a quasi-writer?

Alright, enough cyber-whining! When I get the videos worked out, we're putting them up on the Armor Journal web page. They're really fun. In the meantime, here's some armored eye-candy.

The only running Type 95 Japanese tank that we know of.	The armor was easily punched through by a 20mm and it used an aircooled, inline diesel.

M3A1 Stuart light tanks are my all around favorite. Its about the size of a full-size van and uses a Continental W-670 radial engine exactly as used in the Stearman. I'd LOVE to own one of these and it would clear my garage door by two inches.

1943 M-18 Hellcat tank destroyer. Lightly armored, heavily gunned, faster 'n snot. top: M18 Hellcat was the fastest tracked vehicle of WWII: 65 mph Bottom: The ever-present M4 Sherman. The Sherman and the Hellcat both used Wright R-975 radial engines.

7 Jun 08—A Blog in Two Parts: Digitals and D-Day

When I sat down to write this, I intended to do a light piece about this being the first day in my digital life, so-to-speak, as I’ll be shooting my first all-digital air-to-air mission this afternoon (B-25H and TBM). Then I typed the date and noted it was D-Day Plus One and other thoughts, more serious ones, crowded into my head. So, if you don’t mind, I’m going to do a short brain dump on both. Baby blogs. Blogettes. Whatever.

A Digital Weekend:
If you scroll back to the March 22nd ‘08 installation of my rants, you’ll see my misgivings about going all-digital. But, the publishing world being what it is, and the incredible convenience digital photography (and everything else digital) offers, I had to give in and I spent more than I had invested in my first airplane (a Cessna 195 in 1965) on some of Canon’s not-quite-best (a couple of 40d’s–I can’t afford the really good stuff). And this weekend, I get serious about digitalizing new additions to Davisson’s on-going archive of neat mechanical stuff.

The day was rough as blazes and I nearly chipped a tooth on my shiny new Canon. Got nothing Earth shaking, but had a good time and met some really fine people.

This afternoon I’m doing an air-to-air mission on a B-25H, which, if you don’t recognize the significance of the “H”, it could stand for “hard hitting” as it has a 75 mm howitzer in the nose in addition to eight fixed, forward firing .50 calibers. I haven’t had the opportunity to shoot much air-to-air lately so I’m looking forward to this.

Another thing I’m looking forward to, which is definitely courtesy of the digital age, is employing the stitching software I mentioned in a blog a while back. This airplane is completely restored inside, so I’m going to do a series of panoramas and see how they work out.

This is three shots stitched

Then, tomorrow, I have an appointment at the Arizona Military History museum where, among other things, I’m hoping to shoot some interiors (panoramas) of their Russian T-55 tank that was captured in Iraq. Since a closed up tank in Arizona has to be the most perfect incubator for black widows, scorpions and rattlers that has ever existed, this may not happen. But I’m going to try. The AZ Mil. Museum has to be the best kept secret in the Southwest. It has a terrific series of chronological displays of every weapon and every uniform used by every combatant in every war from 1840 to Iraq. Amazing stuff all put in historical contest. They also have some really neat Russian fighting vehicles, you aren't likely to see elsewhere.

This Russian T-55 was captured in Iraq. The amazing thing is that the interior is exactly as captured and everything about the tank is live, including the machine gun on top. We didn't have time to shoot interiors, but that'll happen soon.

One of the coolest things about digital in this situation is the immediacy attached to the photos: I not only see them as I shoot them, but I’ll put some up in this space this evening and tomorrow for all to see.

You can’t imagine what a huge difference this is to the professional shooter. It not only eliminates the three days of dead time waiting for the film to be processed but saves wear and tear on my nervous system. “Did I have a camera failure? Was the exposure right? Did I capture the color in the background?” and on and on. Even after well over a thousand such missions, my inherent self-doubt always made that a helluva nerve wracking period. The photos will never be as crisp or satisfying as Kodachrome, but the process and the experience is light years better. Too bad they won’t last long enough for my grand kids to see them. But…..that’s another argument.

D-Day Plus One:
I absolutely cannot live through this period of June without having a mental movie playing in my mind that is a combination of “The Longest Day” and the thousands of pages of text and photos I’ve read about it.

64 years ago today, 24 hours after the landing, the outcome is still in doubt, and Allied troops are scrambling like crazy to maintain the tenuous foothold they hammered out yesterday. Paratroopers are still doing their best to regroup behind the lines and the surf still surges red. Bodies caught in the ebb and flow are beginning to swell and putrefy. Their buddies had to forge on and maintaining the invasion’s inertia takes temporary precedence over recovering sons, brothers, fathers and friends.

But, they would understand. They were soldiers and they would have no doubt that they’d eventually be given the respect they deserved. What they couldn’t imagine is that they would become part of an immense field of white crosses in a country whose friendship has since soured. But, for the most part, the French people remember, even if the government doesn’t.

Even those poor souls who were never found, or lay under crosses marked “unknown,” can rest easy. They have not been forgotten.

Increasingly, as I work on our new special issue, Armor Journal, I’m immersing myself even deeper into the ground combat that has always been scattered through out my thoughts. And, what has been an enormous (and often emotional) connection with those warriors and those times, has become even tighter. It saddens me that I’m going to watch as that generation fades away. What a helpless feeling of loss. My generation will remember, venerate and thank them to the end of our days. I only hope that following generations do that same.

An Anniversary Missed: Thinking Out Loud is a year old
Somehow I failed to note that a couple weeks ago, this long-winded stream of semi-conscious thoughts was a year old. Thanks to those who meet with me over cyber-coffee every Saturday morning to listen to me ramble on. And how are we doing so far?

31 May 08—A Dog that Sits

I have to be honest about it. Between the politics, the oil situation, the hassle of making a living, and a basically dreary looking future in which too many people, including the candidates, don’t really “understand,” I’ve been close to having an anxiety attack of late. However, just as I was contemplating the end of days, Sháhn-deen came scampering into the room and pawed at my legs to get in my lap and, without thinking, I said “sit” and she sat. Right then I realized everything was going to work out because I have a puppy that will sit, when asked. So, life is good.

A word about the world situation: it’s understandable that people want their short term problems to go away, bills being what they are, but it’s amazing they are so myopic. China/India demands and a shortfall in production (85 billion barrels produced, 86.5 bb barrels demanded) are at the root of high fuel prices and everything else that’s skyrocketing. I’m as green as you can get and still have a logical outlook and even I know something has to give. We need to drill. And we need more serious research. But, do you think China or India is worrying about being green while they kick our financial butts?

And don’t think pulling out of Iraq is going to be anything but a longterm disaster. As Iran moves in and takes over the area, their first move will be a tightening, then a total cut-off of oil. Period. Think it’s bad now? Ha! Wait until the people who absolutely hate our guts, radical Jihadists, control our oil jugular. And we're going to lose a lot more boys trying to straighten it out going back in than staying.

Kennedy put us on the moon with a presidential proclamation that said we’d do it in a decade and, in so doing, pumped life and enthusiasm into our technological soul. What I want the next president to say is, we’re going to hold them at the gate by gunpoint until we’re no longer energy dependent on ANYBODY and that includes developing alternate sources that make sense (repeat, make sense). Someone has to stop political posturing, draw a line in the damn sand and get on with saving America.

With a face like that, how can you worry about trivialities, like the end of the world as we know it?

As I’m writing this with foam coming out of my mouth, however, Sháhn-deen is circling around under me looking for the nutritional flotsam and jetsam that cascades down while I’m munching my way through work. As I look down at her, I know all I have to do is say “sit” and she’ll plop her butt down and look at me with her head cocked waiting for the next command. Her look is that of the cutest, most intelligent dog (I hate to use that word because it sounds so trivial) we’ve ever had. If I say “lay down” I know she’ll lay down. Then, if I drop to one knee, she’ll automatically roll over on her back asking for a tummy rub. How can you worry about oil prices and Jihadists rampaging through the neighborhood, when a trusting soul is offering you her pink belly to rub (we’re talking about the puppy here, folks).

God knows we loved Nizhoni and practically died right along with her, but Sháhn-deen truly is the ray of light her name stands for (Navajo). And, as we’re sitting in the backyard throwing a squeaky ball across the pool to send her racing after it and she excitedly returns it to our waiting hands, the problems of the world seem far away.

I have very bad feelings about the next few years, but we have water in the swimming pool, the Winchesters and Colts are loaded, and our puppy loves us. And on top of that, Hank was absolutely right: country boys will survive.

24 May 08—Ice Ages, Sweat and Logic

I hereby want to be the first to notify the world that Arizona has officially gone nuts. Barely 48 hours ago the official high was 109 degrees. 109!!!! In May yet!! Global Warming is upon us. Al Gore is finally right about something: we’re all going to become carbon footprints.  Then, this morning, when I dialed in ATIS getting ready to fly, the recorded voice said it was 9 degrees celsius. I called ground control and asked for that in real degrees: it was 49 freaking degrees! In May yet! Global warming, meet the new ice age!

I would like to make some profound remark about how we’ve brought such weather patterns on ourselves by firing so many rockets through the ozone layer that we’re letting the air leak out. Or maybe prove that it’s the net result of too many Nathan’s hotdogs being cooked at Coney Island. However, speaking as an engineer and someone who used to subscribe to Popular Mechanics, which gives me at least as many credentials as the media “experts” who keep explaining the world to us, I’d like to let you know that my considered opinion is that I have no damn idea what’s going on.  And neither does anyone else.

I know that there are scientists all around the world who have measured the polar ice and the polar bear population and point out that their reduction proves conclusively that the ice caps are going to move to Long Island and melt. Or something like that.

I also know there are scientists all around the world who have done the same measurements and say the polar bear population has been expanding steadily for over forty years (they now upset garbage cans here in Phoenix) and there’s more new ice than in any recent year. Both groups insist they can prove that Elvis is still alive and living in Secaucus, NJ. Which, of course, is silly: Elvis wouldn’t be caught dead in Secaucus even if he were dead.

I don’t have any answers, but, if I were to put this whole global warming thing into my mental computer and insist on a conclusion it would be something simple like, “I don’t know if it’s real or not, but why don’t we act as if it is real just as insurance. That can’t be a wrong decision, but ignoring it might be.”

At the same time, let’s get the media and pseudo-science out of the whole thing and look at the big picture, not focusing on our own little pet projects. Folks focused on ethanol not realizing we’re giving up our food supply to produce fuel that eats parts of most fuel systems and isn’t that clean anyway. We’re producing green cars like the Prius, not doing the entire equation: the additional energy required to produce short production run cars is going to be more than they save simply because the economy of scale isn’t there.

Okay, so those are ideas that don’t work, but, if we keep trying, sooner or later we’ll hit the right combination. It’s the effort that counts.

Me? I’m still driving my 18 year old Honda Civic that gets a steady 32.6  mpg IN THE CITY with the A/C on. It has 214,000 miles, runs like a top and courtesy of a new performance exhaust and cat converter whizzes right though emission testing. I’m not going to replace it, EVER, because, in the big scheme of things, it would take more energy and resources to replace than I could ever save with even the most efficient vehicle.

And as for the super-greenies who are willing to sacrifice our economy and world market position by slamming the lid on stuff like drilling in ANWR and off shore to protect a pitifully small number of species that will just move someplace else, they haven’t looked at the entire equation either.

There’s no doubt that we desperately need to streamline ourselves as a nation, but “efficiency” should be the by-word, not an attitude that says we’ll lower our standard of living to that which makes it easier for those coming across our borders to meet it. Tony Blair once said you can judge the quality of a nation by whether people are trying to get into, or out of it. And I guess that says something very clear about America. So, let’s hold on to that.

Let’s do the entire energy equation and make sure, when we’re saving a gallon of gas, we aren’t spending more energy to do it than we’re saving. Simple as that.

At the same time, let’s take a look around us and do the simple things: turn off the lights, turn up the A/C. Keep looking for energy sources that actually do make sense. Even modern nuclear sources now make sense, although everyone’s perception is tainted by old school technology and they haven’t caught up. And wind. Maybe sea surge. I don’t know, but there is something out there that works. We just have to make sure we’re looking at the big picture, not a snapshot we’re carrying in our own wallet.

17 May 08—Tanks for the Vacation Memories

Okay, the die has been cast: Marlene and I have committed to a vacation. An honest-to-God, screw-off-for-days-on-end vacation. And we’ll be gone twelve days! In the sixteen years we’ve been together, this will be a first. An absolute first! And to make it even more special, it’ll be the honeymoon trip to England we were supposed to take ten years ago. But, of course, there will be the Tiger tank!

First, about the vacation: all of Marlene’s family is from England, so we have someone to break us in on the driving-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-road thing. That really has me worried. And being from Nebraska, I hope I can pick up on enough of the language to make myself understood.  Our goal is to do all of the touristy things, from castles to museums, to London hotspots. I’m looking forward to the castles and museums, but I’ve never been a hotspot kind of guy. Oh, well.

Incidentally, this is being financed by my daughter repaying a major debt she has owned us in conjunction with the Social Security Administration and Frequent Fliers. We’re shooting our wad all at one time.

Now, about the high point (for me, obviously): the possibility of driving a Tiger tank. One of the projects we have on a front burner here is the trial issue of a new magazine entitled Armor Journal. If you read Flight Journa, our other mag, Armor Journal be an exact parallel to that, but the emphasis is on ground combat, specifically AFV’s (armored fighting vehicles). If you don’t read Flight Journal, you should.

As with Flight Journal, AJ will have hardware oriented articles built around the personal experiences of tankers and soldiers in combat. This is combined with lots of modern and vintage photography of tanks and I’m doing something I’ve always wanted to try: panoramic shots of the insides of famous tanks so you see the entire interior in a single frame. To that end, I bought some high end stitching software that seamlessly stitiches multiple shots together. It’s an amazing piece of the software designer’s art.

This is my office shot in six separate shots. I dare you to find the seams. There aren't any! I wish you could see this in high-res: you can read the stickie notes on my computer. This covers about 120 degrees. Simply amazing!

Armor Journal is my personal brainchild and is built basically upon those interests that have been burning in my brain since I was a kid. In fact, owning a Stuart light tank is the only goal I set when I was fourteen that I haven’t yet satisfied, and given their prices, probably won’t. But in a week or two, I get to drive one of those, so at least I’m making progress in that direction. The first issue goes out in October, newsstands and bookstores only, no subs at first.

A WWII German Tiger E. I have a chance of driving one. How very cool! Photo: Jim Brown

And then there’s the England vacation connection: one of the world’s largest collection of operational tanks is in Bovington, England, and they’ve been amazingly cooperative on the AJ project. And there’s the possibility, when I’m spending two days there photographing their hardware, that I’m going to get a go at a German Tiger I. How cool is that!?  Even as a kid, that possibility never entered my mind.

Anyway, just thought I’d share some of what’s happening at the Davisson’s. Gotta go fly. See ‘ya.

10 May 08—Magazines, Memories and Storage

Recently, courtesy of a friend who is moving, I became the proud owner of about seventy pounds of old Air Progress magazines. They spanned back from its demise, around 1993, to the late 1950’s. He knew I was desperately looking for old mags in which my pireps had been printed so I could scan them and get them up on Airbum.com. And these moldy old pages were a veritable treasure trove of pireps. In cruising through those old mags, however, I found both fun and funny things, as well as discovering a few sad facts.

Smoki-Jo The Cat stands guard over a magazine treasure trove. Anyone who wants the 100 or so extras going back to the late 1950's drop me a note.

Magazines have always been the central core around which my life has been built. As a kid, I couldn’t wait for the next hotrod, gun or airplane magazine to hit the stands. In what laughingly passes for adulthood, a good percentage of my income has always been derived from writing for them and much of my pleasure comes from reading narrow-niche magazines for which I don’t write. The stack in the bathroom is heavy in Street Rodder, Rod & Custom, Wooden Boat and Archeology back issues and through those, I get to vicariously build and experience things, I know I’ll probably never get around to. That’s the goal of magazines, to entertain and educate and I never truly finish reading any particular issue because every time I flip one open that I’ve read ten times, I discover something I missed before.

When I started digging through the incredible pile of mags Ed Wischmeyer sent me, for one thing, it was as if I were reliving parts of my life. When reading the articles that came out of those periods, I came to realize/remember how much I was enjoying myself then. I found pireps from 65 hp SE5a replicas to 2100 hp Bearcats, and columns that dealt with the silly and the serious. Every so often a picture of me would pop up and I was reminded that yes, once upon a time I was young. I was also reminded that, when younger, I had more of a tendency to call a spade a spade and challenged the government and the industry on a regular basis pulling no punches in the process. I found my very first column and my very first cover, both published in 1969. So we’re talking just shy of four decades between then and how. Who’d a thunk?

One of the more fun pix I ran across. That's the actual French registration number on the CAP-10 I was evaluating. The caption on the picture by the Air Progress staff reads, "We couldn't have said it better ourselves." Don't you love the hair! Nov. 1974.

At the same time, I couldn’t escape the melancholy feeling that I had experienced a golden age of aviation that wasn’t likely to come again. I can’t explain that, since part of that comment makes absolutely no sense because, courtesy of the EAA, we’ve never seen such a powerful, alive period in sport aviation as we are experiencing today. But it is somehow different. Through the pages of those magazines, most of which were printed before Jim Bede ushered in the concept of the kit-built airplane, there was a warmer, closer feeling to the pages. Possibly because every homebuilt of any kind, was scratchbuilt and that said a huge amount about the population that was building those airplanes. There was more grease under more fingernails and fewer signatures on large checks. Although sport aviation was much smaller, there was a more down home feeling to the movement.

What I may have also been reacting to was the way the magazine business has changed. In those days, it was all sunshine and hope. Everything was increasing, both in market size and publishing technology. We felt as if we were really building something. Today, any hope among magazines is them hoping they are going to survive. It’s a very grim time in the magazine community.

In the next few years the magazine business, especially the narrow-niche mags like aviation, guns, etc., is going to have to be overhauled or disappear. Part of it is the simple fact that narrow niche interests are “graying out.” The readers are dying off and there are no young readers. Go to any fly-in or hotrod meet and see how grey hair dominates the landscape. Exactly what ARE kids interested in today? Computers? Hanging out at the mall?

And then there’s the problem of the internet and advertisers who have many more ways to get their messages out than in the past. Although, the word is that increasingly they are realizing banner ads aren’t working for them either, there’s no clear way they are going to go with their dollars and magazines are scrambling.

And then there’s the cost of production: paper has gone out of sight along with distribution costs. And newsstands are not only disappearing, but becoming much more picky about what mags they allow on the stand. 

As I was sifting through the golden age of av mags last week, it was a brief respite from what may now be the dark ages of the same industry.

The good news personally, is that I now have about forty more pireps to be scanned and put up on Airbum.com (it’ll take about six weeks before you start seeing them). The bad news is, it’s going to take someone finding a treasure trove of old Plane and Pilots and Private Pilots to ferret out the rest of my old pireps as I think I’ve maxed out the Air Progress sources.

So, keep checking back. We’re about to relive some of the more fun times of a type hunter’s life. 

PS.
 I have probably 100 extra old Air Progresses going back to the late 1950’s and if anyone wants them, drop me a note, pay the postage and they are yours. I really hate to throw them out, but we’re running out of space.

3 May 08 –Death out of Place

Last week I was casually flipping through a muzzle loading catalog when I happened to glance at a product description that said, “…designed by the late John Bivins…”  The word “Late” jumped out at me as if it were neon. Damn! John Bivins is gone? When? Where? How? Although we hadn’t communicated for probably fifteen years, I felt as if a tiny sliver of my soul had just died.

Google thought enough of John to put a well fleshed-out obituary/biography right at the top of the page. And I was crushed: he passed in 2001. He had been gone for seven years and I didn’t have a clue. I don’t know which bothered me most, him being gone, or me not knowing it for so long. Damn!

John was one of the most lateral and most talented people I have ever known. So, for that reason, people knew him for different things, depending on what their specific interest in life was. I knew him as a cornerstone of the long rifle community, but that was only one of the arenas in which he was a giant.

One of my favorite moments in life occurred during one of my long-winded conversations with my older sister who has always lived in houses designated as national landmarks, complete with brass plaques by their doors. As such, she was/is an expert in things historical, including colonial architecture and decoration. Somehow the conversation trended toward the accurate decorating of her latest restoration (a massive Amish stone house from the late 1700’s) and I mentioned that I knew the guy who ran the Museum of Southern Decorative Arts and she very uncharacteristically blurted, “You know John Bivins!?”  She was very impressed. And I was impressed that she was impressed: I had no idea John was so highly regarded in that field, even though I knew him to be probably the most respected architectural wood carver alive.

To me, John Bivins is the guy with whom I had a nearly telepathic link the instant we met in 1980. At the time, I was trying to learn to build Pennsylvania/Kentucky long rifles of the 1770’s and to say John was considered good at that particular skill is like saying it rained the night Noah built the ark. He was amazing and did things with his hands no mere mortal should be capable of doing.

The weapons of that period featured raised, baroque carving that had very specific design elements (leaves, vines, volutes, etc.) and I was having a terrible time getting the designs just right, much less executing them in curly maple. Remember: it was 1980: no e-mail, no fax, no nothing. It was all phone calls and letters. Very Jurassic! Crude, actually.

This is one of the practice blocks John did during my long weekend with him. I had him sign it with his touchmark and it's one of my absolute prized possessions. And one of my guides every time I pick up a chisel.

Finally, John called me one night and said, “Enough of this! Come on down and spend a four day weekend and I’ll teach you how to carve.”

I cannot fully explain how important that phone call was or what it meant. It was the equivalent of DaVinci or Rembrandt saying, “Hey, come on down and I’ll show you how to sling paint.”

Those four days were pivotal in my life for a lot of reasons and fully five minutes of every ground school I give in my Pitts training is devoted to applying what I learned from John to flying airplanes. Among other things, it was the first time I’d ever been more or less inside the mind of a true master. A genius actually. And amongst the things I observed was the way in which he moved his chisels: no matter how much wood needed to be removed, he always took a paper thin shaving with the only variable being how many he took in a given time span. Sometimes the slivers were flying. Other times they were agonizingly slow to fall. He crept up on the shape he wanted one shaving at a time, and I equate that to increasing and decreasing pressure on aircraft controls, as opposed to actually moving them. I sum it up by saying you fly an airplane by changing the pressures, not moving the controls. It’s a fundamental, philosophical difference that breeds a different kind of pilot.

For over seven years, I had been using his name continuously in ground school three or four times a week and didn’t even know he was gone. I’m still having trouble believing it.

I use lots of the tricks he taught me when I’m working wood. And much of my studio photography techniques were stolen from him, yet another skill he mastered. And, when I’m writing, I try to imagine him looking over my shoulder, because he was even better with words than he was with a chisel, and that’s saying a lot. I have yet to know anyone who did as many things as well as he did them.

So, I guess it’s adios, John Bivins. My friend. The shadow you cast across the many landscapes you inhabited is long and dense. You’re well remembered and the respect your peers have for you has only continued to grow. And, on a daily basis, you still touch my life. I thought you’d like to know that. And I know I needed to say it.

26 April 08 –Hummers With Bling: Why ?

I live in Phoenix, Arizona, which sees no more than eight inches of precipitation a year. And none of it is white. We have almost no weather, which is why we’re overrun with touristas. Yet, at any stoplight, I’m surrounded by towering four-wheelers of all description—and almost all are disgustingly clean and shiny. No dirt, no desert scars. Every-day moms in all manner of monolithic SUV’s and Hummers form a lethal wall around me all the way to the airport (seems as if I'm on a car jag this month, sorry).

It's just a little terrifying to see these juggernauts with a couple of rug-rats in the back and a 100 pound blonde driving while putting her make-up on.

In addition to the foregoing, I’m absolutely certain that there is a law somewhere that says, if you’re a hundred-pound blonde and you’re driving a blinged-out Hummer or gigungo SUV, you can’t enter Scottsdale unless you’re on the cell phone. I’m a hell of a lot more likely to get whacked by a blonde in an M-class Mercedes than I am by a student in the Pitts.

The macho types who build true four-wheel-drive monsters you can walk under, I can understand: it’s like me building 1000 yard rifles I’ll seldom shoot. We like the art of the artifact and the fun is in the creation, plus we love knowing we can rip across an arroyo or nail a bad guy gopher a thousand yards away, should we ever want to. Which we seldom do. What I don’t understand is all the upper class gas guzzlers, the Escalades, M-classes, and Suburbans that never see dirt and seldom see an adventure more hair-raising than a PTA run with a tray of cookies and two four-year olds in the back,

A Cadillac king-cab? Just last week I saw one of these things at the lumberyard. The driver hollered, "Yeah, four yards of river rock. Just pour it in the back!" NOT! Have you ever seen one with a spec of dirt on it? The sales literature says 12 mpg in the city! I bet the greenies all drive one for the utility!

The truth about four-wheel drive, is that, if you’re in conditions that actually demand four-wheel drive, you probably shouldn’t be there in the first place because the conditions may exceed your ability to handle them. Still, in lots of parts of the country, for half of the year having 4WD gives folks peace of mind and will occasionally save their butts. However, driving a huge chunk of iron in a no-weather city like Phoenix (the Nation’s fifth largest with traffic to match) makes no sense whatsoever.

Mini-vans make sense. Even a regular van makes sense. But Escalades, Navigators, Hummers, etc.? Give me a break!

If you build it, they will come. Pontiac Aztek Rule Number One: if it's this ugly, please don't paint it yellow!

From an entrepreneurial point of view, however, you do have to admit, that somewhere there’s a conference room full of marketing geeks who disserve a round of applause: they identified a market segment that wanted a dumb vehicle, so they got together with their engineers and designed a dumb vehicle. Lots of them actually.

It seems as if you can build almost anything and someone will buy it, no matter how dumb or ugly it may be. On the way to the airport, I see enough Pontiac Azteks to prove that.

19 April 08 –Where Have All The Yugos Gone?

For whatever reason, I’m haunted by two little cars, neither of which makes much sense, considering I’m a big motor, lots of noise type of gear head. One car that I’m constantly keeping my eyes open for is a 1980-83 Honda Civic hatchback. That’s understandable: I bought one new with alloy wheels, fat tires, Koni shocks, etc. and for 175,000 miles, until rust ate it, it was one of the most useful, fun little cars I’d ever owned. But the other is—are you sitting down—a Yugo! That takes some explaining.

This is a great description of the “car” from Times’ list of the 50 worse cars ever (it was no. 39): Malcolm Bricklin, he of the Bricklin SV1, wouldn't be satisfied until he had forced every American to walk to work. To that end, in 1985, he began importing the Yugo GV, which had the distinct feeling of something assembled at gunpoint. The Yugo had a rear-window defroster — reportedly to keep your hands warm while you pushed it. Love it!

I’ve always had a bug to build some sort of really ridiculous little street machine. No, I’ll never build it in real life, but the virtual garage in my mind has built lots of odd little vehicles and one of them is a “street freak” Yugo. For some reason I just like the concept of building something out of what is universally recognized as the crappiest car ever created. Sort of an in-your-face, anti-establishment statement. Walking to a different drummer and all that.

Okay, I know this sounds stupid, but stay with me, as I’m just day dreaming out loud.

Ideally, the final result would look pretty much like a stock Yugo, which would take some head scratching considering all the hardware that would have to be stuffed inside that tinny sheet metal. If I were to actually put a tape measure to the various components, I might find I’d have to make the hood and front fenders a little longer, but I’d try not to.

To gain room for a real motor, the pilot, would have to move back a foot and a half, which would probably necessitate a racing type, removable steering wheel to give access to the front seat. The rear seat, such as it is, would go where it should have gone, when brand new, to the junk heap.

The chassis would be a cross between a dune buggy and an airplane: a tubing truss work that incorporates a subtle, hard-to-see roll cage that nestles up against the inside of the sheet metal and door posts. We don’t want to give away too many secrets to those who pull up next to it at the stoplight.

Front suspension would be independent and stiff enough to support a fair amount of motor and still handle well. Maybe out of a late model Accord (?). The rear end, depending on the motor, would probably be the tried-and-true 9” Ford greatly shortened to let a set of fat tires fit inside the sheet metal, although fender flairs would help in that regard.

Although I’m tempted to toss something like a small block Chevy in it, even I recognize when enough may be too much, and, instead, I’d go for a hyper-nasty little V-6: maybe one of the Chevys for which there is so much speed equipment available. 250 hp would be easy. Also, it’s smaller and would make it much easier to maintain stock sheet metal. It would be backed up with a healthy five-speed.

Of course, if I wanted to do something really outlandish, I’d drop a full-dress flathead into it. It’s not as if I don’t have enough parts for one. And that’s actually not such a bad idea. What could be further out on the fringes of acceptability than a flathead powered Yugo? Now that’s funny! I’m laughing even as I type this!

Hopefully the body I’d find would be covered by a nearly complete coat of severely oxidized paint with minimal rust and working window regulators. Past that, the sheet metal doesn’t make much difference since it would just be a thin skin over the new chassis. I want it to have that worn-out look that Yugos developed about two minutes after leaving the show room. What we would have, when finished would be your basic stealth rocket that looks raunchy but goes like snot and handles like a go cart.

I figure it would make a great grocery getter for Marlene. I even have the license plate picked out for her: YUGOGRL, emphasis on the second syllable.

Yeah I know, dumb idea. But who said that daydream cars have to make sense?

15 April 08 –Hooterettes?

I have never been to Hooters. That’s neither a complaint nor a boast. It’s just a fact. However, I was recently at a warbird bash that featured Hooters girls as barmaids and servers and I had to ask myself: are all Hooter girls in junior high or have I just gotten that old?

First you should know that I have nothing at all against Hooters (neither the restaurants nor the…uh, well…hooters. You know.). In fact, I’d have to say that I’m very much in favor of both varieties. But when I was standing there amidst a bunch of warbird guys, some graying, some not, watching these nubile young things scampering around like so many chipmunks (and just as tiny and cute) there was some sort of awkwardness to the situation. And I don’t think I was alone.

Meet Tiffany. She looks much older than the warbird Hooters I encountered but she still looks like a kid.

There were probably a dozen of them and honest-to-God, not one looked old enough to have a drivers license. And the bodies they were trying so hard to flaunt were not worth flaunting because, while all the lumps and bumps were in the right place, they were little-girl curves and they all appeared to be playing dress-up. The concept didn’t work. And, in fact, mixed in with the testosterone-filled flight suits swaggering around, they were just a little embarrassing. I watched for a while and not one warbird pilot siddled up to one of them and made so much as a humorous, off-color comment. Think about that: fighter pilots, scantily clothed young things, no attempt at hitting on them. What’s wrong with this picture?

I know it’s very much a taste thing, but to my eyes, sexy should have a little raw edge to it. A hint of something that connotes a personality, experience and performance that adds interest to the physical. I don’t know exactly how to describe it, but wide-eyed, oh-gee-look-at-me-in-tight-clothes innocence is definitely not sexy.

Of course the fact that some of the clothes I was wearing at that moment were older them any of them, didn’t help either.

I’m not trying to make a point here. I just wanted to pass along something I’d seen: a situation where a bunch of hot-rock pilots were more interested in beer than boobs. In my rather limited Hooter experience, that’s a first. Give those girls another five or ten years and it may be a different situation. Right now, however, they look so young, they should be thrown back in, if they get caught.

I wonder if their mommies know what they do after school?

5 April 08 –Talking Books and Me?

Duh! This morning I finally remembered that I had an iPod and, for whatever reason, put it on to do my exercising. Bob Seger just finished wailing away about open roads and motorcycles when suddenly I heard my own voice talking in my ears: when I downloaded the MP3 files for my podcasts, some of them apparently wound up in my music files and hence into my iPod. And you know what? Before I realized it, I had finished my allotted half hour (which feels like four hours) of torture and I almost enjoyed it. Almost. Huh! There might be something to this audio book thing.

Even though it was my own voice, I found listening to me talk about flying a Lockheed 12 fascinating. As I relived the experience, the walking went faster, and more important, less noticeable. It didn’t hurt as much. At that moment I had an epiphany that every person in the universe has already had: Listen to books when exercising and doing other mindless tasks and the time goes by much faster. What a concept! And I thought it up all by myself. :-)

The most important parts of the epiphany were first, I started looking into the world of audio books, which was not only more diverse than I imagined, but also more complicated. Hey, all I want to do is buy a frigging book. I don’t want to join a club, learn a secret handshake or subscribe. I just want the damn book. Gheez!

The second part of the epiphany was that I started thinking about my own novels. Having just heard my own voice rambling through a pilot report, I wondered if I could pull off reading a book and not put people to sleep. The podcasts are pulled right out of my head (or some other dark place) and done totally cold. No script, no forethought. I just turn on the recorder and start BSing. It’s a very natural thing to do. But, could I actually read something and not stumble all over my tongue? Equally as important, is there a market for The Stonewall File and Cobalt Blue as audio books?

First things first: could I read something and make it flow and interesting? The only way to find out was to try it. So, I printed out the prologue to The Stonewall File and blew it up to 16 point type to make it easier to read and started: Eleven-thousand feet below the lumbering B-17, the frozen coast of Norway….

I can probably read this entire thing, but will anyone listen? We're gonna find out

Fifteen minutes later I downloaded the results into my computer and had just started playing it back when the AZ Redhead walked into the room. She listened for a few seconds then pulled up a chair and the two of us sat and listened to the whole thing. She loved it. I thought it didn’t totally suck. And I’d only flubbed a couple of words, which I thought added character (I’ve always been good at rationalizing). So, I sent it to my son, Scott, the scriptwriter/software mogul. “Not bad” was his response. Then my computer guru, who isn’t related to me, said, “Hey, that’s okay.”

So, I’ve now printed out the entire book in gigantic geezer type and I’m taking part of it with me to the Sun ‘n Fun fly-in tomorrow (which is why next week’s blog will be late). The goal will be to dictate at least a half hour a night. If I can do an hour, I’ll do an hour. I calculate this thing will be about eleven hours long, so a week trapped away from my main computer and all the distractions it contains may result in about half of the book being read.

So, if any of you want to weigh in with your comments about audiobooks and me (good idea, bad idea, what you’d be willing to pay, etc.), feel free to chime in. Go to one of my podcasts- podcast-to hear how I sound.

Later, dude.

29 March 08 –Alright: who has my music?

The other day LaVerne Baker, one of the power rockers from my 1950’s youth popped into my head and I suddenly realized I couldn’t remember the last time I heard Jim Dandy, See See Rider, or any of her other goodies. Right behind her image, Gene Vincent Be Bop A Lulla’ed across my memory’s musical stage. Then the Platters. And so many others I hadn’t heard forever on any so-called “oldies station.” And that pisses me off. What happened to my music?

To my taste, LaVerne Baker was one of the best R & B belters ever and really helped set the tone for 1950's rock & roll. In her later years she was entertainment director at the the USMC club in Subic Bay.

My generation was sitting (dancing actually) in the front row when rock and roll was born (1954/55). When my sister, Mona, first started teaching me to dance in junior high, for the most part we were working out to big band music and don’t kid yourself, I can still jitterbug the living hell out of Pennsylvania 6-5000 or anything else by Glenn Miller, the Dorsey brothers or Benny Goodman. Then, it seemed as if our musical world changed over night. Rock Around the Clock jumped off the screen in Black Board Jungle, and names like Elvis, Little Richard and Fats suddenly filled all the white space in our lives. Rock and roll, at least as I remember it, didn’t gradually work its way into the mainstream, it bulldozed everything out of its path and took over in what seemed like two hours.

Rock and roll totally rebuilt the cultural landscape and took a generation of kids who had nothing to call their own and gave them something on which to focus: rock and roll and fast cars. Although, in all fairness, most of the customs, aka leadsleds, weren’t very fast, but low, slinky and noisy was as good as fast. The hotrods were, indeed, fast.

It was important that we had these diversions so we could grow up still thinking like kids because the adults were playing a deadly game called Nuclear Annihilation and even our Nebraska home had a solid-as-a-vault, fully stocked, concrete fall-out shelter. As I lay in my bed upstairs, I could look out the window and see the lights of a Minute Man silo outside of town and watch B-47’s inbound to Lincoln AFB.

Those times were monumentally important in the development of the world. And for the most part, they are recognized as such by everyone except most oldies stations. With the exception of Elvis and the occasional Ricky song (did you know he’s second only to Elvis in the number of songs put in the top 100?!) there’s a whole cast of voices we never hear from. It seems as if most radio stations think the 100 songs on their play list is all we listened to during that first half-decade of the new genre. Even with Elvis, they start with the big hits (Heartbreak Hotel) and work their way up. When was the last time you heard him do That’s Alright Mama, Blue Moon of Kentucky, Train/Train, or I Forgot To Remember to Forget Her? All hardcore rockabilly and all on the glorious Sun label.

Doo Wop? Forget it! Unless you live in the New York metro area (still Doo Wop capital of the universe), your kids have probably never heard In The Still of the Night (The Satins) or other solid gold killers.

And last year Frankie Laine (who I saw as a kid on stage with Rosemary Clooney when Dad took me on my very first plane ride—a DC-3 flight to Chicago) died without a single media ripple. Ditto Teresa Brewer and Donnie Brooks (Mission Bell, Doll House). If you want to get an audio guide through those days with lots of music (probably illegal, but who cares!) go to http://www.bigbobh.net/dowop/, one of Bopper Bob’s many nostalgia websites (where do guys get that much time?).

I find it sad so much music is overlooked. And I’ll tell you an even sadder fact of life: you know you’ve stepped over a threshold when you’re not only too old to be called a grown-up, but the so-called “Golden Oldies” on the radio are too new to include your music.

PS
Google your favorite old artist and there’s lots of their music floating around the net for free. Try http://www.rhapsody.com/lavernbaker for some Laverne. Damn she was good! Read her on-line biography. It’s really fun where she spent the last portion of her life.

22 March 08 –Digital Suicide?

I’m digitally depressed! After fighting it for years, I finally committed to replacing my main film cameras with a shiny new Canon D40. Oh, yeah, I’ve been digital for years for studio work, and snaps around the house, but not for air-to-air or for photos I really care about. I held off because I view this decade, when the digitalization of photography has even sucked in National Geographic, as a historical disaster that will eventually be labeled as being of major proportions.

I think the time will come when historians label this decade as the beginning of the end of the graphic record of civilization. This decade will be the equivalent of that dark line of sedimentary ash that scientists say marked the end of the dinosaur record. Below the line, they were here. Above it, they were gone. I feel this way because digital photography in every one of its guises isn’t permanent.

History has always depended on the photos left in attics, garages and family albums to tell us the story of what life was actually like back “then.” The professionals left us monumental images from Gettysburg to Mount Surabachi to the moon and everywhere in between. There is little chance those images will ever be lost because they’ll change mediums as they are handed down to each new generation. But they don’t tell us the small stories, about how life was actually lived. Those photos come courtesy of images left behind by amateurs. And now that every one and their dog is recording their lives digitally, the graphic record they’ve left behind is doomed.

For one thing, flashcards and baby hard drives aren’t totally stable. Neither are CD’s and DVD’s. Given time, as they are bombarded by everything around them, their images slowly disappear, one tiny pixel at a time.

On top of that, who amongst us thinks that twenty years from now we’ll even be able to read the incredible variety of storage medium our images are being stored on. Not a chance! Right now I have stacks of 5 ¼” floppies, Syquest, Jaz, and Zip disks for my computer that I can’t read and I burned some of them no more than five years ago. I’ve tried to transfer all of that information from hard drive to hard drive, but, each time I do, more of it gets scrambled and sits there, just out of my reach, unreadable. The same thing is going to happen with our digital photos. We may have the flash card or whatever, but either we won’t be able to read it or it’ll be corrupted and gone.

The prototype Pitts S-2. 1971	'Think I'll get a chance to shoot this again? Circa 1975

Film eventually degrades too, but, if it’s kept away from heat and humidity, we don’t know for sure what it’s limits are. We know that WWII Kodachrome has less than a 5% color shift in the sixty-five years since it was shot. What do you think the shots in your digital camera will look like in sixty years?

Digital is fantastically convenient. But I’m not sure it’s worth the price we’ll eventually pay for that convenience.

If I had waited for the three hours to show up it took to finish this, it would have never happened. 30 minutes at a time did it.

Quick-Project Update
Back on March 1 I was bitching about not having enough shop time and came up with the Quick-Project, thirty-minutes-at-a-time, approach to building things. Here’s the result of the first five half-hour sessions. In the process of building it, the concept changed, when I noticed a small antler being used to support a pistol in the glass case in our dining room. I think it’s cute!

22 March 08 –An Inverse Bucket List

The movie of the same name has given rise to common usage of the phrase “bucket list.” This concept has you making up a list of things you want to do before you kick the bucket. However, the other day I saw a 1965 Shelby 350 and I remembered it as being on my “Shouldn’t Have Sold” list. In my typically negative way of thinking, I don’t have a list of things I want to do but I very definitely have a list of things I shouldn’t have sold.  Don’t we all?

First, let me say that I’m absolutely the last person to beat myself up for selling something that’s now worth a lot of money. This is because I usually sold them for a profit and, as my dear old daddy used to say, “as long as you sell everything for a profit, you’ll never go broke.” I usually have, so I haven’t. Still, a few things I’ve let get away bug me, but not the big things. 

One of the bigger things I’ve sold that some folks would assume I would regret selling was my P-51D Mustang project. I hadn’t been out of college six months when I ran across (there’s a whole story here that’s too long to tell) a complete P-51D, exactly as retired by the Ohio ANG, but missing its engine and prop. For the grand sum of $700 I had my very own, entirely original, right down to the fuselage tank and rocket rails, Mustang. In another month, I had a brand new, military overhauled dash-seven Merlin engine. So, when completed, I would have had the cheapest Mustang in the universe. Even at the time, 1968, it would have been cheap. But, then I started flying Mustangs and found I didn’t love them enough to go through the aggravation to get mine flying. I sold it for $4000 and that became the down payment on my first Pitts. Even though the Mustang, even as a project, would be a $500, 000 item today, I don’t care. Pitts Specials have been such a huge part of my life that I can’t imagine what kind of life it would have been without them.

And then there was the aforementioned 1965 Shelby 350 (serial number 195). I paid $1,700 and, when I had no room to easily store it, sold it for $2,100. It was a butt-kicking car and I would like to still have it, but what the heck, I made a few bucks on it.

A car I really am sorry I sold was my ’65 GTO (tri-power, posi-traction, four-speed, the whole enchilada!), but it sat out side and deteriorated to the point it needed a complete restoration. It was my first new car and I have a lot of fond memories of it. I only sold it about five years ago, but, even if it were sitting in my back yard right now, I would have neither the time nor the money to restore it. So, it went to a better home. Still…L

Then there was the ’37 Ford coupe my dad gave me on my 16th birthday, thinking it was something I could hotrod. He didn’t realize that at the time, a ’37 Ford was just about the most un-cool Ford ever built. Of course, today I’d kill to have it back, since it has near cult status.

Don’t even ask about my ’47 Crosley station wagon that I used as a parts runner for my little teenage hotrod shop. That would be so much fun today!

I really regret letting a college mate talk me out of my very first single-action Colt (4 ¾” barrel, 44-40) for the then princely sum of $50. Then there was the 1934 00-21 Martin guitar. And the ’36 knucklehead Harley. And the Vincent Black Shadow. And the…. You get the idea.

I suppose I really should be more positive and get started on my own bucket list. At least that way I won’t keep depressing myself. 

8 March 08 –The Luxury of a Working Toilet
Here are some interesting pieces of information you probably won’t need unless you find yourself with the main sewer line from your house totally clogged and your intestines overflowing. In our town, Mickey D’s and Burger King shut down at ten, about ten minutes before The Urge hit crisis proportions. In-and-Out Burger, however, are open until 10:30, and their johns/heads/latrines are impressively clean. Are you taking notes?

Why is it that sewer lines only get plugged on weekends AND, when important company is about to arrive? I figure that, if there truly is a God, he invented clogged sewer lines to give us a sharp rap up along side the head so we know how good we really have it. There’s nothing like not being able to use the commode to move #2 up to your #1 priority.

We’ve had off and on problems with what we thought was a petulant toilet for a year or so. Then, when we had one B & B guest in residence and another and his wife inbound, no amount of high rpm plumber’s friend action or liquid so caustic it’s guaranteed to eat a hole to China, if spilled, could get the water to go down. Damn! And they are only three hours out.

Quick! Dig a hole in the backyard for them to use? Knock on neighbor’s door (whom I barely know), “Hey can we send some strangers over to use your commode?” Subliminally, I knew that wasn’t a very classy way to run a B & B.

Aaaargh!!! I quickly called a local hotel, asked if they had working indoor plumbing. They replied in the affirmative so I booked a room for our guests. I thought about running over to use their toilet, but we were too busy trying to figure out why I had brown water backing up in all our showers.

Then I realized I had my own personal sewage backing up. Can I keep it in captivity until morning, when the plumber supposedly shows up? A few seconds of introspection came back with “Are you out of your mind? You need a bathroom and you need it now!” Where do you go when it’s after ten at night and you’re about to make a biological fool of yourself?

That’s when a quick tour of all the local fast food joints pointed out to me that maybe In-n-Out Burger wasn’t such a bad place after all. ‘Not crazy about their burgers, but absolutely love their restrooms.

Thank God for my buddy, and B & B guest, Clyde. He stepped in, as soon as the plumber showed up, and let me wend my way to the airport where I knew my only possible problem was a student trying to kill me. He had to deal with a plumber standing on my roof for four hours unknowingly running a clean-out snake down the wrong vent.

Another call, this time to the pros, Roto-Rooter, brought out the killer squad and we learned lots of important stuff: first my sewer lines are nowhere close to where everyone says they are. They go out the back of the house, not the front. Also, Roto-Rooter has a mechanical snake with a roto-tiller head that looks as if it was designed to do a hemorrhoidectomy on a fast-moving robot at a hundred yards. A half hour of pushing and grinding and some tree roots were chopped clear and we could flush our johns again. Heaven!

I was so ecstatic I ran around and used all four of them just because I could.

By this time, two days had elapsed and I’d had to heat water on the stove twice to shave, had three johns pretty full of mellow-yellow and made it a point not to ask the AZ Redhead what she had done about brown stuff, since I knew she hadn’t left the house. Also, two days without a shower had me circling a car wash trying to decide whether I had the guts to go streaking through it while also navigating my way around the hot wax section.

Okay, whomever controls such acts of fate, I got the point. We live in the lap of luxury compared to other nations and other times in history. And I now appreciate that fact every time I flush a commode. I also buy an In–and-Out burger from time to time in an effort at supporting my local late-night emergency drop-off station.

1 March 08 –A Birthday Blog
Today is the first day of the rest of my life (a line supposedly first spoken by Jerry Garcia). Since it’s my birthday, it’s also the first day of my own New Year. And I’m sitting here trying to decide what to do with what is usually a special day for most folks. I want to invest it wisely, but I'm in a quandary as to how to do that.

This is a big deal for me and is made so by tomorrow being a truly sad anniversary: it marks a year since I’ve even touched anything that remotely qualifies as a personal project.

When I’m not moving ahead on personal projects, it drives me absolutely nuts. Every time I walk through the garage and see the roadster gathering dust, a little piece of me screams in frustration. Every time I look at the various bits of “project kits” I’ve accumulated, I want to drop everything and go bang on them. But duty calls, so I earn my good-boy merit badge by knocking down yet another deadline or doing something that needs to be done.

A note on “project kits:” this is probably how I keep my frustration in check. Although I don’t physically work on my projects, I’m constantly building them in my mind, so, when I do get the shop time, I can do amazing things in amazingly short time frames. I’ve, for instance, gone through every single step, right down to the last bolt, of finishing the roadster, scheduling The Accuracy Project (more on that at another time), restoring the artillery piece and even finishing the little damascus blade desk knife.

The “kit” part of “project kit” comes from part of the above thought pattern: more than just thinking about the project, if I have the money, I order in all the parts required to move that particular project forward. I for instance have the wheels for the artillery piece under construction by a wheelwright in Michigan, I located and bought a Mauser, the barrel and the sights for The Accuracy Project, etc. So, the projects aren’t truly standing still, I’m just not working on them. Of course, if I get hit by a bus, my kids are going to have a helluva lot of miscellaneous junk to sort through.

So, a year from now am I going to have another birthday show up and look back on another year gone with no personal goals accomplished? The answer is a resounding HELL NO! And, if that’s the case, what am I going to do to change the way my life runs?

First, I can’t change the way my life runs. There are too many deadlines, student’s schedules, financial stuff, etc., that form it into what it is. So, I’ll have to work within that framework and I happened upon the perfect solution last week during a particularly productive Commode Counseling Session (CCS). I’m calling it the Quik-Project Approach to Life. Under this approach, I change my outlook on shop time. Rather than thinking in hours, look at projects, no matter how large, in chucks of a half hour. I can manage a half hour here and there, but an entire hour will never happen.

The Desk Knife Project Kit: 2" laminated (damascus) blade from gun show: walnut from the tree I hung my chain hoist from as a teenager: bone for hilt from my dog —I'll give back what I don't use.

To put this concept into action, I dedicated a big section of my ever-present commode notebook to first breaking the roadster down to half hour segments. Every time I’m in there meditating, I mentally break another section of the car into half hour projects and write them down.

For instance, I need to separate a fat bundle of wiring into three smaller ones and arrange them vertically in a squeezed-down Adel clamp to fit between the firewall and the fuse box. I can do that in a half hour easily. And it’ll be major progress on that particular project. I’ve almost finished the roadster list and it has less than 100 steps, 50 hours total. Piece of cake. Next I’ll do a list for The Accuracy Project. However, the desk knife is such an easy project, no more than three hours total, that it may move ahead in priority.

I feel so much better just having come up with the Quik-Project concept. And I’ve already done one of the steps on the knife (blanked out the handle). So life is good. And it’s moving ahead.

So, what about today? Screw it! Maybe I’ll just go back to bed.

Yeah, right!

23 Feb 08 –The Wedding

Part One: The morning before the wedding
This morning the sun came up like any other day and my life is the same as usual. Almost. I have a married son, two grandkids, and a wonderful wife. One big difference, however, is that my daughter, Jennifer, is about to get married. By the time the sun goes down, my daughter too will be married and another chapter of life will have begun.

On the one hand, the fact that my little girl is no longer so little seems surreal, as if I’m talking about someone else. On the other hand, it’s also such a natural part of life’s cycle that, although I know I’m likely to cry my eyes out this afternoon, it’s something I’m looking forward to.

I tend to get overly emotional on occasions like this one and come off looking like an idiot. This morning in the shower, in an effort to head off some of that stuff, I mentally ran through our upcoming walk down the aisle (in this case, down stairs to a patio in San Diego). I’ve thought of what I’ll say to her, as we separate and—dammit, I’m getting emotional just writing about it—how I’ll calmly step aside and let Johnny (who I absolutely love, by the way) take her arm.

I should probably say something profound, but the only thing that comes to mind is, as we start down the aisle, I’ll whisper, “Let’s make Doodles proud.” Doodles was, and is, her ever-present, now 30-year-old and horribly disfigured, Teddy bear who won’t be in attendance. And he probably should be.

This morning is going to be the typical pre-wedding mish-mash of breakfasts and lunches with family and friends. Then it’s back to get dressed and figure out how to handle the single fly-in-the-wedding-ointment: she insists that I wear plastic shoes (patent leather actually) and a traditional tux, which, in my case, is unheard of.

I’ve had two weddings of my own (the first being a very Jewish ceremony) and one of my son’s and at all three, I was ME: cowboy boots and Doc Holiday  western tie. For that reason, I brought my Wedding Ceremony Lucchese boots with us. She said she wanted everyone to look the same for the pictures. So, no boots for the ceremony. She, however, didn’t say anything specific about anything else. A mistake on her part? You bet!

Now, where do I put my boots until after the ceremony? I love my daughter, but I’m not sure I can make it through the reception masquerading as a gay matre’d. The boots are going dancing.

Stay tuned for more.

Part Two: The next morning
Well, the sun came up this morning too. And life is subtly different, if nothing else because we had a helluva party last night. Oh, yeah…my daughter got married too.

Jennifer discovers I'm wearing boots. You can take the boy out of the country, but not for long.

Last things first: the boots did go dancing. As I took her in my arms for the father/daughter dance, she said, “Watch out, Daddy, I’m not wearing shoes.”

I said, I’ll be careful,” and I stepped back and pulled a pant leg up. She laughed and held me tight.

It was one of the most loving, emotional evenings of my life and, at the center of it all, was the intense love Jennifer’s friends and co-workers demonstrated for her. It’s heart warming to see that others feel the same about your child as you do. In this case, her co-workers in attendance included the likes of Leonardo diCaprio, Justin Timberlake (who came bowling with us) and Hillary Swank, just to name a few. Their praise of my little girl was humbling.

Mr. and Mrs. Johnny Killoran. He's a scriptwriter. I guess she figured the family needed a "real" writer.

High points of the evening included Justin Timberlake seeking Marlene (the AZ Redhead) out and high-fiving her for her dancing entry to the hall. He also lost in a dance-off with daughter-in-law Twana. We all lost in the cuteness contest to grandkids Zoe and Mason. My son, Scott, gave an off-the-cuff toast that turned into a monologue so funny even the waiters at the back of the room were laughing their butts off. I could go on for pages about all of this, but you get the drift.

The sun will continue to come up each morning. And our lives will continue changing. I just hope your new morning is as good as mine. I’m looking forward to the new day.

9 Feb 08 –The Upside to Feeling Like Crap

I’m on the backside of a not-quite-debillitating-but-I-wish-it-were-so-I-could-give-up-and-rest cold. It’s one of those that make you positively feel like crap but, because I’m self-employed, it wasn’t bad enough to hang it up and stay in bed (I’ve never had one that bad). As I’m now seeing a healthy light at the end of a nasal-looking tunnel, I’m beginning to think there’s something to be learned from periodically being sick.

I was lucky on this one, as it was just a regular cold, which I almost never get. Normally, when I get a cold, it leads into a long lasting (two weeks minimum) violent cough that has absolutely no other symptoms other than the cough. How violent, you may ask: I’ve twice cracked ribs coughing and I spend 4-6 weeks of the year sleeping in the office so I don’t wake up the entire house. We’re talking cough-up-a-lung violent. It breeds a lot of confidence in my students when their instructor is hacking away in the other cockpit.

This time around, about four o’clock one morning I woke up and realized I hadn’t coughed myself awake for a couple of hours and may survive this one in grand shape. Then I remembered a phone call I had received from my buddy, Mike, only the night before.

Mike was all bubbly and happy because that day he had successfully gotten his FAA medical back, no small task, considering his fight against cancer over the last two years. He’s been sliced and diced, chemo’d and x-rayed until he glows in the dark. As I lay there staring at a ceiling I couldn’t see, glorying in the simple fact that I was actually feeling better, I thought about Mike and the spirit of people like him.

I’ve never actually been sick, even though I thought I was at the time. I’ve never been hospitalized (if you don’t count stitching visits to emergency rooms, etc.) and I was only bedridden once for pneumonia. My back has laid me low a few days at a time, but those are only minor aggravations. Knock on wood, my health has never seen seriously challenged and it’s at those moments, when I’m staring at the ceiling and thinking of folks like Mike, that I wonder how I’d cope if I were in their situation.

I’m a lousy patient. If you don’t believe that ask Marlene. And our dog. And our cats. When I’m less than 100% I’m not a nice person to be around. Even though I try to keep things in perspective, I have to admit to being a baby about being sick. And it makes me angry to think of myself that way.

I’ve known any number of Mike’s in my life, people who, when faced with life-threatening adversity have risen to the occasion, put their heads down and plowed straight ahead. They have refused to let the way they feel or the darkness on the horizon slow them down. I constantly wonder how I would do in the same situation. And I have my serious doubts.

I think it’s important we all get sick from time to time to make us appreciate those moments, when we’re feeling great. And to give us just the tiniest glimpse of what many people must endure as part of their daily existence. With any luck, I’ll go cradle-to-grave never having a serious health issue. If not, I hope I can keep the spirit of guys like Mike central in my mind as a reminder that giving up simply isn’t an option. Sick, or not, if we’re still alive, at some level, the ability to persevere still exists and it’s up to us to call it to the fore. When my time comes, I hope I’m up to the task.

Now, excuse me, I just ran out of toilet paper for my nose and have to go get another roll.

2 Feb 08 –Snowflakes, Little Girls and Parenthood

This morning came up dark and early and the first thing that popped into my mind was my daughter, the weather and distance. Last night I held on the phone with her while she carved her way through a Colorado snowstorm in the dark in search of a hotel and safe haven. I was so tense, you would have thought I was the one doing the white knuckle driving. And I wished I were. No matter the age, your daughter never outgrows being your little girl.

As this is being written, she’s on dry pavement racing into New Mexico with me plowing the way ahead of her via weather radar reports. I was doing that all day yesterday when she left Chicago and I’ll continue doing it today until she rolls into LA late tonight. There’s a huge storm racing down from the northwest and it’s a crapshoot whether it’ll catch her in the high country or not. It’s going to be a long day for me and my thirty-one-year-old, Hollywood mogul, little girl.

Being a parent is a life long task and, at times like this, it’s one of the most helpless feelings you can have. You want to be there to help. But you can’t and all you can do is help them deal with the situation.

In Jennifer’s case, it’s especially frustrating because she has an absolute phobia about flying. It’s debilitating and so far has resisted all attempts to cure it. In her job (she co-manages Leonardo diCaprio —among others— and runs his production company), she has no choice but to crisscross the country regularly. Usually she goes by train, but this time she was in Montreal producing her first movie and decided to drive rather than take the train back to Follywood. I told her it was a mistake. But who listens to a father? Then, the snow gets thick and the sun is gone. And, old dad is there.

I suppose it is the never-ending caution/fear/anxiety/etc. attached to having kids that make some people shy away from having them. And they may have something there because your kids are part of your psyche and, as a friend once said, it’s like having a bundle of your own nerve ends out there that you can’t protect. On top of that, you never know what you’re going to wind up with. You might have to raise a Tazmanian Devil or a potted plant. In my case, I did both. In fact, Jennifer was both (assuming the plant was a jumping cactus). But I can’t imagine going through life without the pain, the joy, the laughs, the anger and the pride that my kids have given me. They are what have given color to my life.

Jennifer gets married in a couple of weeks. A new era begins. Scott (via our wonderful daughter-in-law Twana) has already given us unreal grandkids. So, life goes on. And it changes. New chapters begin. Old chapters end. But it is always an interesting book.

Now, if I can just get Jen to LA safely so I can breathe again. Then, it’s time to work seriously on her phobia. I can’t handle another long cross-country trip like this. :-)

26 Jan 08 –Bugs, Bats and Barrett Jackson

Last week I ranted on about finding out that I was a builder at heart, rather than a buyer, and it all started at an out-of-my-comfort-zone, posh party for the Barrett Jackson collector car auction. Then we went to the auction and amidst the millions of dollars being spent and the hyper expensive hardware being sold, we discovered yet another of our personality quirks: enter Barrett the Bat, AKA Bat Jackson

First, you have to visualize the Barrett Jackson auction experience, which is actually difficult to do because I can’t think of anything to compare it to. At its core, it is an auction like any other auction: cars are driven up on stage, people nod, wink, wiggle an ear or otherwise cleverly signify that they are willing to part with hundreds of thousands of dollars for what, a few years ago, was simply a used car. However, it’s the show-business/carnival atmosphere that surrounds the show that makes the Barrett Jackson Experience an experience.

The auction itself takes place in a domed, permanent tent that’s bigger than any circus tent I’ve ever seen. However, that size is doubled by a long series of circus-sized tents that run off the end until they are out of space on the property. The area under canvas is measured in acres. Lots of acres.  These are filled with hundreds and hundreds of exhibitors. The grounds surrounding the tents are also filled with hundreds and hundreds of exhibitors. But these are not just any exhibitors: they are companies and individuals who have something to sell that costs a lot of money and they need an audience that has a lot of money. And that’s the BJ audience. Or at least part of it: present company is excepted from that generality.

The AZ Red Head (aka Marlene) and I love cruising down the aisles oogling the art, the newest concept cars, the outlandish jewelry, the restored coke machines that cost more than my car and every other kind of high-bling object that some vendor hopes to unload. Its fun to look at but none of it tugs at our heartstrings. Most of it makes us laugh. That is, until we saw…the bugs.

Clear the deck folks and start looking for silly money that’s available to spend on silly stuff.

There, stuffed in between someone who specialized in Zebra upholstery and a vendor of carved granite shift knobs, was a bug vendor. No, not VW bugs—BUGS—the creepy crawly kind. Some were so big and ugly even Spielberg would hesitate casting them. Others were so uniquely shaped for their function, that their their glistening, horned, hard shells looked as if they were CNC’d out of polished ebony. Iridescent butterflies looked as if they’d glow in the dark and moths big enough to carry off our dog still managed to come off looking furry and friendly.

For whatever reason, the display reached out and sucked me in and held a portion of my brain captive for much longer than I would have thought possible.

I’m not passionate about nature. It’s there, I respect it, I enjoy it. But I’m not a bug freak. Or at least I didn’t think I was. But, then, I’ve never looked at bugs, spiders, centipedes and bats as art before either. They were something to be avoided or squashed, not inspected. But, I found myself fascinated by the forms, the lines, the tiny adaptive apparatuses they had all developed to survive. But, it was the bats (he only had a few), that had me fogging up the glass to get a closer look.

Meet Bat Jackson. God, I love odd items like this!

For whatever reason, I’ve always wanted a bat. Something fascinates me about their ability to harness energy and effortlessly fly while at the same time being blind as a…well, you know. I love to study their ugliness. And their efficiency. I was salivating over an Indonesian male (he had a little bat dick), when the vendor made us a deal that Marlene couldn’t resist. So, she bought me my first bat. That must be some sort of marriage mile post.

Yeah, I know some ASPCA twit is going to get pissed that I bought something that had to die for me to have it. But so did the chicken I had last night. So, it doesn’t bother me. The world is hardly short on bats and people weren’t lining behind me waiting to buy this one so I don’t think the market demand is going to make a dent on the bat population.

Anyway, now, amidst the clutter and debris I call an office, my very own bat has its very own place on my wall. And I get a kick out of it every time I look at it. Someone at the auction walked off with a $1.6 million custom Corvette. I got Bat Jackson. And I'll bet I'm enjoying my purchase more than he is his.

19 Jan 08 –A revelation: I'm a Builder, not a Buyer

It’s interesting to me how we can wander around through life and, when something really obvious is revealed to us, the lights come on as if it’s a mystical revelation even though some part of us knew it all along.

The other night at a cocktail party, while standing around amidst the wealthy and the wannabee-wealthy, it became abundantly clear that I’m a builder, not an owner, and sometimes, the two don’t understand each other.

The epiphany came about at a very posh event that was built around one of the collector car auctions that takes place in conjunction with the enormous Barrett-Jackson auction. For a week, there are three major, high-buck car auctions taking place in town (Phoenix) and the money flows, the rich play, and the airport is totally swamped with jets and turbo props. It is excess in action. 

1937 Delage drophead coupe expected to bring $700-$900K

This particular cocktail party (if you can call a completely filled, circus-size tent a party) had all the accouterments necessary to remind people why they were there. Tossed through out the slightly inebriated, crowd, like pieces of decorator furniture, were items like a 1934 Dusenburg dual-cowl phaeton (expected to bring upwards of 1.5 mil), a birdcage Maserati, all three of the heavy hitting Mercedes (SLR roadster, Gull Wing and 1930’s 500K –where is a swastika when you really need one?) and a bunch of other four-wheeled investment properties. They were fun. The crowd was not. At least not for me.

Those kinds of events are definitely out of my comfort zone. Marlene, on the other hand, really gets into the scene and has a high, old time. She had latched onto a foursome that included a very-white, 70’s something guy with long gray hair. He was casually attired in expensive, open throat shirt, jacket, jeans and no socks in penny loafers. You know the look. His date was a loudly gregarious Queen Lathifah lookalike a third his age. Her young, chocolate, high-energy vibe contrasted heavily with his slightly-toasted lack of vibe.

The other couple was an obviously successful (I think I heard him tell Marlene that) couple who also hovered around 70. He was holding his alcohol well and was almost pleasant. 

For about fifteen minutes I stood away, as it didn’t look like a group I’d normally play with. But, then Marlene dragged me in to introduce me and I came face-to-face first, with the kind of person I don’t particularly enjoy and second, with myself, as the exchange told me something about myself.

The long-haired guy (I almost said “long-haired coot”, but I’m closing on cootdom myself, something I have to keep in mind), put his red nose in my face and said, “Hey, what’re you here to buy?”

“I’m not buying, just looking,” I said.

“Not, me, I’m buying. ‘going to all three auctions, but I’m limiting myself to spending fifty grand at each. Nah! Probably a hundred. Already got too many cars. You know the problem. ‘Wanna buy one of mine? Hey, come on, you can’t be here and not buy a car!”

He was easy to turn my back on. There was no way I could insult him by being rude. Then the other, more or less sober, guy stuck out his hand.

Same question. “What’re you here to buy?”

Different answer. “I’m not really a buyer. I just enjoy building stuff like cars. You know!”

He pulled himself up and said, “Oh, that makes no sense. It’s much smarter to have people restore them for you or buy one already done. I buy cars from guys like you.” He had a slight smirk on his lips. 

The “…guys like you” stung. I didn’t answer because the sentence that was poised on the tip of my tongue was “You arrogant sonuvabitch!”

Right at that instant I realized there is a very clear gulf between people like him and folks like me. For whatever reason, it became crystal clear that I really don’t get pleasure out of “owning” anything. I have no interest in owning a fancy car, new or old, and just plunking down money to buy something like a well done rifle, doesn’t scratch an itch. My pleasure comes from building, from taking nothing and creating something, even though in many cases I know it makes absolutely no financial sense to do so. I am at heart, I suddenly and finally realized, a sawdust-in-the-lungs, grease-under-my-fingernails builder.

I had around fifteen hundred dollars of found money drop into my lap a while back (all legal with the taxes paid) and I had been vascillating between finally buying a WWII-dated M-1 Garand (an excellent investment) or building a long range target rifle (essentially a waste of money). I came home that night and e-mailed a friend saying I’d take that WWII Mauser action he had for sale and dug through my stack of walnut looking for some I could resaw into eighth-inch planks for a laminated stock. I had finally made an agonizing decision.

I woke up the next morning feeling great. And, although it had been obvious from the beginning, I came to grips with the fact that I’m a builder, not a buyer. I enjoy the process of building FAR more than I enjoy the final product.

Incidentally, I told Marlene that’s the last one of those shindigs we’re ever going to attend, although I’d probably do it again, just for her. But, screw ‘em. I’m not going to even talk to them.

9 Jan 08 –Chimpanzee Thumbs
Text messages drive me nuts. I hate to receive them, but I hate to send them even more. The letters are too small and the one-or-two-or-three taps thing is just too damn aggravating. My daughter lives on her Blackberry and I watch her thumbing her way around on the bigger-than-a-phone keyboard and I imagine thousands of other young folks doing the exact same thing worldwide. We’re raising a generation of people who are going to have long, disfigured Chimpanzee thumbs and have forgotten how to type. Or make phone calls.

In truth, I fought getting a cell phone myself, even though over 15 years ago I lived with one of those big Motorola bricks stuck in a back pocket. I remember sitting down for lunch with friends at an airport and all four of us whipped out our bricks and set them in the middle of the table. If they had all rung at the same time, I’m certain the interference generated would have caused airplanes to crash and local pacemakers to shut down.

When I finally did commit to a phone, maybe eight years ago, I, like everyone else, wondered how I ever got along without one. The way I knew I was addicted and/or phone-dependent was when I lost mine at a fly-in. It was the set up day for our booth and I was cut off from the outside world. Where is Prozac when you really need it? I raced around trying to get a new phone and was near panic because I couldn’t contact the trucker bringing our airplane kit into the show and he didn’t know where to go. At that time Cingular couldn’t sell me a phone outside of my own area code with my old number and I was going ballistic. Absolutely bat sh*t!

As I stormed out of the cellular store, having just called the AZ Redhead (Marlene) to quickly buy a phone in Phoenix, and FedEx it to me in Florida, the great gods of cellular frustration must have looked down and said, “Okay, we’ve messed with this guy’s head enough, let’s give him one break.”

As I roared up onto the interstate headed back to the airport, there was the truck with our kit two cars ahead. I had accidentally averted that particular disaster, with no help from anything but luck.

And then yesterday I somehow managed to let my battery go dead (a new battery) and I started looking around for a phone to borrow even though I had no one to call.

Although I’m much more dependent on e-mail than on the cell phone, I don’t want my email bleeding over to my phone and having to deal with the little bitty screen and tiny buttons. In fact, when interviewing phones as a possible replacement for the one I lost, I had to continually interrupt the salesman’s pitch about how this one could browse the net and that one could cook popcorn while playing full length movies. I finally grabbed him by the nose and had him look directly into my eyes and slowly repeat after me, “I want a phone I can talk on and that’s all.” He couldn’t understand the concept.

I also needed a phone I was unlikely to lose and that turned out to be a Motorola Razor CARRIED IN A VERIZON CASE. This is a super slim case that let’s me clip the phone INSIDE my hip pocket where I’m unlikely to lose it but is quick to get at.

I know not having 33,000 songs, 38 movies, 14 games and GPS imbedded in my phone or a ring tone that plays Motley Crue shows I’m a Neatherthal. But, hey, all I want to do is talk and avoid having large, hairy, arthritic thumbs. Is that too much to ask?

1 Jan 08 –Resolutions and Reality
I hate New Years. Yeah I know it’s supposed to be a time of rebirth and redirection. At this stage of my life, however, I tend to look at New Years resolutions as a sure way to disappoint yourself later in the year. Bah! Humbug!

A problem with resolutions is that most of the time they are the same resolutions we’ve made many times in the past and they've failed. I, for instance, need to loose a solid 25 pounds. In fact, I’d estimate that resolutions have caused me to loose something like 1400-1500 pounds over the years. But, by the next New Years, I’m at it again.

I think the entire universe has the same issues with life: too much weight, not enough time, not enough money. In the past, I’ve made resolutions aimed at all three. For instance, I’d love to get more time to work on my projects. I somehow managed to end 2007 with only three days off between March 1st (my birthday) and year’s end including Xmas. It would be logical to make a resolution that says I’m going to take more time off. But, for resolutions to work, they must match reality and, for those who are self employed, that one doesn’t.

The good news about the above is that every second of every day I’m doing something I truly love. It’s not like I’m digging ditches or anything. I live a dream life, but I do wish I had more time strictly for me.

I could resolve to take a day a week off, but that runs head on into the “more money” thing.   Ask anyone who is self employed and they’ll all agree that self employment allows you to work any 80-90 hours of the week you want. You then begin to attach dollar signs to your time and it becomes very hard to force yourself to take time off.

This year, I'll probably mentally flagellate myself into exercising more. Funny thing about exercising: for the past three or four years, I’ve been able to stick to a strict regimen of walking 2 miles really hard every morning. Then I took a stress test and my doctor said I had conditioning issues and needed to exercise more. I started riding a stationary bike until my heart rate hit around 2,000 and my tongue was getting caught in the pedals, then I’d walk hard for a mile. That lasted less than a month. Now I don’t do anything. My years of self-control have gone down the tube because someone said I had to do it. I can’t explain that.

So, here I am in the wee hours of the new year recognizing that I need/want to make some changes. But, will I? Good question.

In the past, I was fairly successful designating 9-10:30 PM as project time. So, I guess I’ll try to put that back into play. And I’ll go back to my two-miles-a-morning schedule, even though it’s colder’n crap at 0515, even in AZ. Anything is better than nothing and I have enough willpower to do that. Dreading the tongue hanging out thing just makes me stay in bed longer. And getting rid of the weight is going to be a simple matter of not eating a ton of crap a day. I’ll cut it back to a half ton.

The New Year ritual of looking in a mirror and planning the next year sounds good in theory, but I’ve never been able to make it work. Bah! Humbug!

Oh, yeah: Happy New Year! :-(

fields.