I dreamt that I had got to my boss’s house, Nimesh, to watch a movie. Actually, everyone at the company had gone, though in the dream we were all working at Kmart, not a pharmacy.

Nimesh’s house was vast, all rough stucco and dark beams like some Spanish villa, large enough to actually include a working tavern in one of the wings. I had been there before, where his wife in the dream, a petite redhead, nothing like his actual wife, was a good cook and was uncomfortably friendly with me.

But I was back again to watch the movie, which I had picked out, some British film based on a book about some alien who feel depressed and out of place, supposedly the writing team who made a movie script out of the book [which I also own] were well known television writers. [television was quite the theme in this film, this movie took place in the future, where television was a tightly controlled medium] диваниthe show “Coupling” never came up, but a viewer of the dream would get the distinct impression that that was implied.

We were a raucous bunch, us Kmart employees, none of whom I actually work with in real life. they made a mess of the place. the mess wasn’t specific, but the concept of “mess” was like a virus or radioactive fallout; it kept spreading. It spread all the way to work, at which point Nimesh stopped the movie, sent us all back to work, where we had to clean up this ”mess” before we could watch the rest of the film. General grumbling ensued.

This part of the dream was not clear. What was clear was that when it was al over, we went back to Nimesh’s house to finish the film. It was now at this point far later at night than I had planned to be out, I had actually stopped home briefly to explain this to Paula, who had been running late at her own social gather, and back I went to watch the rest of the film, though by now I was too sleepy to pay much attention to the plot. the movie finally finished, the people cleared out, the house was still a mess and nobody wanted to take responsibility, so they just filtered away, myself included, except tat I had to sneak back through the tavern, to the men’s room, through a door to an antechamber, and through another door to the entertainment room. I ejected my DVD, eventually, the Sony DVD player was a high end one, silver and green glass with buttons made of some fibrous plastic and labeled cryptically. The DVD had gotten so hot it had melted inside the player, I had to scrape it off the tray, like it was dough, and carefully put it back inside the case without closing it, otherwise it would all stick together. I grabbed a pocket television I had dropped behind the end table, the last time I was there, and went upstairs to sneak out the kitchen, since Nimesh was drinking whisky in the other room adjoining the entertainment room and I could leave that way.

By this time, it was daylight, and I bump into Nimesh’ wife in the kitchen , who tells me about the party that she was at, and makes me try this spicy beef that was there, and tells me about the drinks there and is as usual, way too friendly, and I see Nimesh coming up the stairs from downstairs into the kitchen and I wake up.

The guns stopped in Gaza for the Inauguration. Both sides did this, perhaps, to see if they would get better treatment under the new administration, as if President Obama has nothing more important to attend to than a bunch of extremists shooting at each other in a tiny section of the world’s armpit, better known as the Middle East.

The line score thus far? About 1000 Palestinians killed, 13 Israelis killed. The supposed provocation for this? 3 of those 13 were killed by Hamas-fired [we think] Kaytuscha rockets. If any country other than Israel killed roughly 300 people for every one of its own citizens killed, there would be global retributions not seen since the apartheid days in South Africa. But no, the billions in weapons and aid the US gives Israel flows unabated.

But take the Kaytuscha. Please. It is only called a rocket because those brightly colored cardboard tubes made by Estes are also called rockets. Developed by the Russians in WW2, it is about the size of a large firework, and almost as dangerous. They usually launch when fired, and sometimes even explode when they hit something. They are aimed by guesswork and experience, but are incapable of hitting a specific target. They are meant to be scary, a terror weapon, of a kind, though about the same level of terror as scuffing your feet on the carpet on a winter day and chasing your little sister around the living room trying to zap her. Or an Indian burn.

The Israelis have better terror weapons. White phosphorus, for one, according the UN. White phosphorus burns so hot and with so little provocation that not can really put it out; get any on you and it burns right through you. According to the Rules of War, it can be used for signal flares or for illumination but not as offensive weapon, certainly not in an area dense with civilians [Gaza is one of the most densely populated spaces on earth, hundreds of thousands in a few square miles] so when a UN compound was struck with a white phosphorus artillery shell, it naturally burned the women and children seeking shelter there and, as of yesterday, continues to burn in places.

I’m not holding the Palestinians blameless, much less Hamas, the political arm of the Islamic Brotherhood, an organization that was built on the model of Hitler’s Fascism and funded by Iran to attack Israel whenever possible, though their method of attack is pathetic [perhaps on purpose, Hamas knowing full well it doesn’t need much to set Israel off] the collective punishment practiced by Israel on the Palestinian civilians of Gaza might makes sense in a boot camp or 4^th grade classroom setting, but to do that to what is a separate country in all but name beggars belief. This is not the behavior of a civilized nation. Aside from this it will not have the intended effect, the Gazans won’t overthrow Hamas, they’ve spent so many years beat down, economically and physically and trammeled into the tiny cage of the Gaza Strip that they cling to any security they see, in this case, the security that Hamas will still be there for them [so they say].

One wonders what the Command and Control situation is within the Israeli military, in essence, whose in charge there? At what level are the decisions being made to pound the Gazan population into dust in order to punish a small number of Hamas ringleaders who don’t even live there. Or the small number of rocket launchers who do, when the ordinary citizens of Gaza would happily give these people up if they had jobs and trade with other countries that didn’t have to be conducted by secret tunnel and enough personal security that they knew they weren’t in any given week mere seconds away from having the shit bombed out of them. Opening up trade with them would do this. Opening up the border checkpoints would do this. Treating the people of Gaza like human beings and not some problem in need of a final solutions would do this as well.

Detroit is not having any fun.

Well, maybe somebody is, the repo men living in Redford or the lawyers in Bloomfield Hills, but least viewed from the 2009 North American International Auto Show, there was a distinct lack of fun this year.

Blame the economy, blame the Big Three [Toyota, VW and GM? Those are the actual Big 3, in case anyone cares] blame the Mayor, blame Csaba Cere. Regardless, I’ve been to funerals that had more emotional and spiritual uplift to them. Airliners stuck for hours on the tarmac have contained more smiles. If I needed a poster visually defining the phrase “goin’ through the motions”, a panoramic photograph of NAIAS ’09 would suffice.

I was excited about the show. I always am. I go every year, and as much fun as the cars are, [and to me they are, down to the very least subcompact] the atmosphere is as at least as exciting. The huge, elaborate sets in the vast space that is Cobo Hall, the thousands of people who pour in, especially on opening day, that is the day to go, where there are so many people in the narrow isles and alleys between the cars that it’s almost claustrophobic. I rely of a very wide angle lens to get any pictures of the cars at all, were I to back away any farther, I’d get nothing but pictures of people with something shiny in the background. Assuming you can even get that far away. Despite the size of the venue, the cars are chockablock, every model, often in multiple trim packages, vying for space with the turntables and the mechanical and electronic razzmatazz that make the concept cars look so compelling, even when they’re just painted blocks of sculpted foam.

This year, not so much. The sets were not elaborate. No walls of ice, holographic projections, waterfalls, and an embarassingly small number of LED video walls. The number of cars present were also fewer, far fewer. And I’d estimate that roughly 40% of the opening day crowd was missing. I could stand 20 feet from a concept car on a raised turntable, [it was a rather mild looking Chrysler concept sedan, but still] and take a picture with essentially no people in it—except for the far background. There was a slightly grim atmosphere to the event, among the people that did show up there was a undercurrent of it being a mandatory attendance, like some form of May Day festival in a communist country. Even the spokesmodels had a certain level of forced enthusiasm to them, at least, more so than in previous years. Not enough people to interact with, perhaps, they lacked the crowd’s energy to reach critical levels of perkiness. The only exception to this were the spokespeople at the Chinese car stands, who seemed largely indifferent to the presence of any autoshow goers whatsoever.

The only real enthusiasm I saw was with the engineering students at their Formula SAE [Formula Student] stands on the lower level. The attendees could catch that enthusiasm if there were a few more of them. The models could catch that subsequent enthusiasm, and perhaps, with some enthusiastically-generated sales, the manufacturers could catch it, too.

I am no fan of nuclear power. It’s not the safety that concerns me, the plants are safe, by and large, and the worst a nuclear plant can do is melt down. This is far less bad than a nuclear explosion, and there’s been a couple hundred of those since 1945, so I can live with that part. My main concern is nuclear waste. A coal fired power plant produces waste, and while it laced with toxic compounds and heavy metals, even when a dam breaks and a tidal wave of it washes over rural Tennessee, aside from some property damage, not much else dangerous happens. Dirty as that is, its waste is cleaner than nuclear waste, which will kill you even if you’re just sitting in the same room with it. The stuff is radioactive for more than ten thousand years. We hope that the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste depository will last that long, but no one knows for sure since we as a civilization have not yet managed to build anything that has lasted intact for ten thousand years at a stretch. This is of course assuming that we’re ever going to use the Yucca Mountain facility at all. It may leak too much, [Yucca Mountain isn’t so much a mountain as much as it is a gigantic pile of petrified volcanic ash from an eruption millions of years ago. As such, it has no water table, which is good, but apparently, rainwater flows right through it, top to bottom, which is bad.] there may be too much public opposition in Nevada, there certainly is a great deal of opposition in the surrounding states that the nuclear waste would have to travel through to get there.

The solution would be to turn the nuclear waste, the used up fuel rods in this case, back into fresh fuel rods that could be used again. Oh, wait, you say, I left my magic wand in my other pants. No, really, this is real and well established technology.

To make fuel for a nuclear power plant, you can’t just throw freshly mined uranium into the reactor. It needs to be refined, so there are enough of the right kinds of isotopes to make the fission reaction work. There are a couple of ways to do this, using chemicals, or centrifuges, like Iran is doing for their nuclear program, or inside a special type of reactor called a breeder reactor. Breeder reactors create new, fissionable isotopes, new elements, actually, which is why the Periodic Table extends past 92, the heaviest naturally occurring element, Uranium. Breeder reactors are generally tuned to generate Plutonium, which works in nuclear power plants just fine, however they can generate any number of radioactive elements. By doing to such reactors rejuvenate spent nuclear fuel rods so that they can be used again instead of being thrown away, inasmuch as you can throw away nuclear waste.

Recycling nuclear waste means that there’s less of it, and more fuel for more reactors, which means fewer coal fired power plants and less greenhouse gas produced. This is all good. It does mean more nuclear power plants and reminding people the reason breeder reactors were built in the first place: To make weapons grade fissile material for nuclear weapons. If you refine the spent fuel a little, you fresh fuel. If you refine it a lot, you get nuclear weapon material. People who like to worry about terrorism say that building breeder reactors, like the plan to build one in Southern Ohio, say that they could become targets for terrorists. So could a lot of things that terrorists could target. American nuclear plants would be a fairly hard target, though. They have proven so far. It would be nice if we didn’t have any nuclear plants at all, or any waste to have to store until the next two or three human civilizations rise and fall. But we’re stuck with what we’ve got. That being the case, then it seems the very least we could do would be to make as little nuclear waste as possible, and recycle the fuel as much as possible,

My neighbor has a patio set. Nothing especially spectacular or unusual about this, a table, some benches, and an umbrella to top it off. What do they call these things “market umbrellas?” I’ve been to my share of markets and have yet to see one there, unless they’re talking about those small town flea markets held in the parking lots of the local shopping plazas, where the wiry men in tobacco T shirts and wide women in muumuus sit under loud-printed patio umbrellas stuck into sockets bolted to the side of their 1978 Dodge Tradesman 300 out the back of which they sell a variety of faded baseball cards, abstract rusted shapes that used to be tools in the time of Teddy Roosevelt and Chinese pocketknives by the 12 pack.

I see it from time to time, while I’m washing the dishes or walking to my car, in the sense that I generally don’t see it there at all, it’s part of the local landscape, and I take it for granted that it’s there.

Christmas Eve was windy. Very windy, 45 mph gusts making the whole house creak and me glad that I was inside. I thought about tree branches breaking, but didn’t hear anything besides the wind.

The next day, Christmas Day, I was on the phone with my mother, looking idly out the front window since I had wandered there while in my on-the-phone-orbit, I see that the people across the street have put a brown market umbrella on their tree lawn for trash day. Except that trash day is Monday and this is Thursday. And the umbrella is completely open and apparently missing its shaft. The color and the style of the umbrella also look a little too familiar, so I walk to the kitchen and look out the windows again at the neighbor’s backyard. Lo and behold, his 7umbrella was missing, the shaft was still there, but the rest of it was gone. My neighbor is out of town for the holiday so there was no one but his cat to notice the umbrella’s absence.

Later, I put on a coat and crossed the street to fetch it for him. As I walked over, I looked around for any obvious signs of a path of destruction the umbrella had made along its journey, about 250 feet from its origin, who knows how far it had traveled through the sky first. I didn’t see anything. I went to pick it up and discovered it had been stuck to the ground with its remaining bit of shaft like a giant push pin. I don’t know if the wind had done this, or someone had caught it and pushed it into the ground to keep it from traveling any farther. I did eventually pull it free and walked it, open, back to where it was supposed to go, the broken end of the shaft had prevented me from being able to close it. It had snapped, actually, in the cast metal hinge that allowed you to tilt the thing to block the sun. It had the classic, crystalline look of metal fatigue [well, duh].

I tried sticking into the ground myself, but the ground was frozen, and far too hard to attempt it. I began to wonder just how it got stuck in the ground in the first place. There was little wind, but as insurance I wedged it under a couple of the benches to make sure that it wont run away again.

My neighbor isn’t back in town yet, and I’ll be leaving town myself in a couple of hours, so I wonder when It will be when I next bump into him to explain the curious tableau I left in his backyard.

How does ideology govern technology? I’m thinking about Russia and the nixie tube right now. How did they seem to get so locked into certain technologies, in case glass and vacuum? Not that there wasn’t innovation, they invented nightvision over there, but that also relied on vacuum tube technology, as did their technological lead in lasers for so many years, laser tubes being yet another application. [or microphones, for that matter, the technology of vapor deposition is common in the tube world, and transfers well into making transducers for microphones.] But it appears that the integrated circuit never took hold over there, in some kind of fundamental way. Lasers are all solid state now, otherwise checkout scanners at the supermarket would be three times the size and full of growling pumps and gurgling coolant. Nightvision is solid state as well, five or eight [depending on who you ask] generations on the Russian originals. And only steampunks use nixie tubes anymore.

The Russians didn’t invent the vacuum tube [though I wonder what the old Soviet histories say] they copied the technology of the West, just as the 1950 Lada was actually a 1930’s Chevrolet. But for reasons known only to themselves, they decided to innovate with what they had, rather than copy newer technology from the West. China today is at that stage of copying that the USSR was in the 1940’s and 50’s, though I wonder if they really have the kind of informational isolation and maniacal self belief necessary to tread the same kind of path. North Korea, on the other hand, might actually have developed something interesting from the 50’s war materiel they captured from in 1952, though so few westerners go over there it might not be immediately obvious just what it may be. Though if their chief exports currently are pot and counterfeit hundreds, they may actually be too pathetic to innovate, no matter what technology they have copied.

Ahh, William Gibson really truly and deeply wanted the internet to become a seamless extension of reality. A seamless extension of self, just seen through a different lens, like the contrails of heat left by a walking person as seen through an infrared camera. I’ve had a strange love/hate relationship with Gibson, he has easily been my worst girlfriend, ever. [yes Danilee, feel free to add that to your quotes “William Gibson has been my worst girlfriend ever”.] It’s not helped by the fact that as much as I like reading science fiction, or like the idea of reading science fiction, I find so much of it being bad fiction propped up by the genre. You read it because it’s sci-fi, not because it is a good book anyway. I find that problem with a lot of genre fiction, though sci-fi has the added problem of telling stories that the reader has no frame of reference for. If you’re not careful, it just turns into word salad. I held off reading Neuromancer forever, [well it seemed like forever when I was that age, 10 years] because I was having a hard time with sci fi in general. I actually had to read the book for a class, but then inhaled it in two gulps, folded into a chair in my college library. It was a really good book, regardless of genre. I was fascinated by it, even though I never really “got” cyberspace the way he did; I still tend to think of it as a telephone with a really comprehensive phone book.

Then I read his other books. Count Zero kept getting lost in technical gobbledygook. Mona Lisa Overdrive just kept hitting the nail driven in by Neuromancer, the book wasn’t terrible, but it didn’t seem to move the overall arc of the storyline among the books forward. Then came his next trilogy. By this time I had started buying his books new, just about the only books I ever buy new, one of my few masochistic traits. I really wanted to like his books, but I just didn’t. The story arc for Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties were originally based on a very short work, “Skinner’s Room”, written for an art exhibit imagining the future of urban San Francisco. When you expand such a small work into something so large, the holes just get bigger. It was like watching a very bad magician fumbling through his illusions. You could see what was happening, but clearly, there was no magic. This was also about the time of his rewriting Johnny Mnemonic for the movie, the very nadir of his career if ever there was one [I like Burning Chrome, it contained his good writing, even the Twilight Zone-y The Belonging Kind]. It was like getting punched in the face. Godzilla 1985 had a better plot. Teenwolf had more empathetic characters.

But I held in there, I knew there was a good writer in there somewhere, even though I was contemplating driving to Vancouver to send him a note with my opinions wrapped around the brick that just went sailing through his living room window.

But then I heard an interview with him on NPR about his then latest book, Pattern Recognition. “9/11 killed science fiction,” he said, “our vision of the future has been radically changed by terrorism.” Maybe, but loved the book. I’m almost finished with Spook Country, and like that just as much. Not science fiction, but maybe speculative fiction? Just fiction? Or is it the science fiction of the present? This is the Tomorrowland that we got, not the one we necessarily wanted. This is the Great Cosmic Joke of the march of technology; technology is only half of the puzzle, the uses for it are the other half. And so often, like the internet, the actual uses are so unlike the imagined uses that the bear little resemblance to each other, in the end.

In the last big windstorm in my neighborhood, a tree was blown down. I ordinarily see it, or rather, ordinarily didn’t notice it until it was blown over, on one of the side streets that leads to the highway on my commute to work. It was huge and old, gnarled linbs twisting skyward, now just sections of wood strewn atop a torn up lawn.

Now that I could see it better, it was clear that it wasn’t just the wind that had knocked this tree down. It was hollow, extremely hollow. The truck, and every section of branch that I could see was a mere tube of wood, in some places, only the thinnest rind inside of the bark was supporting this tree against the elements. I just hope the elves got out OK. The wind must have blow away all the crumbs, though I fully expected to see puddles of congealed chocolate in the ground.

I want to get on two wheels.  I’ve finally gotten to the point where the tug of th eopen road has outweighed the fear of a horrible death at the hands of a soccer mom behind the wheel of a free cingular mp3 ringtones | phone ringtones verizon | free music nextel real ringtones | celcom malaysia caller ringtones | free funny voice ringtones | free real ringtones tone | download free ringtones samsung | free verizon cell phone ringtones | virgin mobile ringtones | free nokia ringtones | free get ringtones | download free midi ringtonesкомпютри | free ringtones for cingular phone | complimentary music real ringtones | real ringtones | free ringtones for cricket cell phone | ringtones for prepaid phone | dash mobile ringtones t | free new ringtones | free samsung x427 ringtones | Suburban, but you have to walk before you run, so passing my motorcycle test with something that requires no shifting is probably best, all things considered.

I want something to traipse around on at the various Burningmman-like festivals I attend, and a scooter is easy to pack up and transport places.

I want a project, and my current car, the Fit, is new, and a daily driver, so having the leisure of pulling something apart I don’t have to reassemble by Monday is nice, as is the fact that it’s always easier to tear apart something that’s crummy and old, as opposed to your brand new car.

So off to craigslist I go, I had tried ebay and found good deals in faraway states that I couldn’t get to easily ro cheaply, so I wanted a local seller. I wanted a Honda, since they build quality scooters just like their cars, and for the most part they sell 4 stroke engines with them, which pollute less and are a known quantity with me.

But then I found a 1984 Honda Aero 80 on craigslist for an absurdly low price that I felt that I had to have.  I did some research, and yes, it’s a 2-stroke, but it has oil injection, neater and cleaner running than premix, and, I suppose, I’d have to learn about how 2-strokes work sometime anyway, so this would be my chance.  Also, the fact that this scoot shared engine architecture at least with some Honda dirtbikes meant that I could hop it up some, yup

The scoot looked good,  and I wanted it, so I sent off the requisite email and heard. . . nothing.  I emailled and emailled through the end of February and almost all of March, only getting 2 responses, perhaps the most maddenning aspect of the it.  It seemed like he wanted to sell, but no movement was being made.  Finally, about 40 days into this mess, I made a fateful decision–  I had the seller’s name from his email, and it being somewhat unusual, I hunted around whitepages.com and found an address for who I thought was the right guy.

Thursday, March 27 was raining, the kind of fine, drenching rain that seems to so often be the mark of portentious events afoot, so I drove out to the address I had and knocked on the door.

I didn’t even get a whole sentence out when he said “Oh, you’re the guy who wants the scooter.”

Bingo.

I paid for it and dragged it home, inside my Honda Fit, no less, hatch closed and everything, and it’s now sitting right next to me as I type.  I done some basic cleaning and a little disassembly, to see what I have:  All 4 turn signals battered or missing, missing left engine cover, ancient tires, lots of scuffs and scratches, but no rust, and  and mechanical soundness everywhere else.  I’ll backdate this with pictures as they get scanned into the blog, and the inevitable lists of what needs to be done and what I want to do to make this the most spectacular scooter of all time.

Of course, I was travelling, ther same route pover and over again from my home to southern Ohio, to a town like Asheville, which actually contained Yve, as well, and I did whatever business I did down there, seeminly pushing the X-1 album and selling color changing flashlights.  I was describing this whole plan to my parents, while we were at a motor lodge that looked an awful lot like the Red House Admin. building in Allegany State Park, where I bumped into a pair of little old ladies I recognized for the road, mostly from the terribly slow driving that they did.  I recalled the many times I passed them on the routs, parts of which looked a lot like the Swiss Alps, and sold them an album and the paperwork to get a flashlight.

Next I found myself in that southern Ohio town. in a park on a hill overlooking the place, there was a moon mostly obscured buy clouds.  I was sitting at a park bench, dressing the contacts on one of my color changing flashlights, just like the ones in reality, when I hear a dull explosion in the distance, but it’s fain’t and I’m not sure.  I see a plane flying looking like a Gloucester Meteor, straight wing, two jet engines, flying swiftly, with a bit of a wobble and losing altitude.I watch it crash to the ground some distance off, the fireball partially obscured by trees and houses.  I count to 5 before I hear the explosion.  But then another identical plane crashes, much nearer, only 2 seconds go by before I hear the crash and feel the displacement of air. This is getting alarming, but the alarm itself goes off and wakes me up.