Indonesian Steel

No silat class this week -- Guru Plinck is in Texas, teaching a seminar. Funny, when you think of pentjak silat, the idea of Texans doing it doesn't spring immediately to mind, even though I know there are practioners of the art down that way. Of course, not everybody who lives in Texas is a cowboy, that's one of those state myths like all Californians having a screw loose, or all Oregonians wearing Birkenstocks ...

(Growing up in Louisiana, I can tell you that the only difference between east Texas and west Louisiana is the Sabine River, and most of the folks down that way were just as likely to be farmers or a loggers or fishermen as cowpunchers ...)

Um. So I had to work out on my own, and me and the chalked tiga and the punching bag and the freeweights and dogs had ourselves a fine old time on the back patio, between bouts of drizzle.

Somebody asked me recently which was my favorite keris from my small collection, and I thought I'd put up a picture of it. The blade is Balinese, although the furniture -- handle and sheath -- is Javanese. The keris is probably about a hundred and fifty years old, and most likely, according to the seller, belonged to a Balinese mercenary working in Java. Typically, Balinese blades of that period are both heavier and longer than the Javanese blades. This one has five luq, or waves, and a double pamor -- buntel mayit, and wos wutah.

To translate all that for those who might not know but are interested:

The keris is an Indonesian dagger, more a symbolic talisman for the last hundred years than actually used in fighting, though, in a pinch, you can stick somebody with it. Typically, boys got these from their fathers or uncles at twelve or thirteen, part of their coming-of-age, but sometimes girls also got them, and there are female blades to be found.

The steel of the blade is a mix of things, including nickel, which gives it the distinctive pattern. This is brought out usually by applying a mix of arsenic and lemon or lime juice to the metal, which cures in the hot sun; as it does, it turns the iron black, but doesn't affect the nickel.

Not all such daggers have the waves; many are perfectly straight. One counts the waves starting at the underside of the blade closest to the handle, and there are always an odd-number of them, three, five, seven, nine, eleven, thirteen -- I've seen one with as many as thirty-three waves.

There is a magical component to these daggers, and this is determined by many things, including the dapur -- shape, proportion, number of waves -- and the pamor, that is, the welded pattern. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of patterns, and whole books written on what they are and what they mean. Typically, they offer protection against fire, flood, sickness, enemies, but also can be designed to bring good fortune in business or love.

Buntel mayit is "the death shroud," is considered very powerful, and is often used for warriors' or executioners' blades. It looks like twisted parallel lines, and is on the third of the blade closest to the point.

The sheath is copper-clad wood, and the widest part of the sheath, that canoe-shaped piece, is of a wood that is apparently extinct in Java, where it was made. This particular sheath is midway between a plain wooden knockabout one and the more formal and intricately-carved prowed-boat version.

The handle is the seven-plane "fever man," a very stylized representation of a man bent over with ague; since Muslims are not supposed to depict people or animals in their art, and Java has been mostly of that faith for six hundred years, that's how this came about. On Bali, which is still predominantely Buddhist and Hindu, the handles often look like people or animals.

Redressing the blade with new handles and sheathes is considered proper care and feeding of a keris, so you often see steel from one country with furniture from another.

Wos wuta, which means "spilled rice grains" or "scattered rice," is supposed to be lucky, especially in material things, though not as much as udan mas, or "golden rain," which is for making money. Wos wuta or beras wuta are "discovered" patterns, that show up during the grinding, and often the maker doesn't know exactly what they will look like until he sees 'em.

So, there's your basic introduction to the keris.

Use it wisely ...

Think You Can Sing?

Maggie, Terre, and Suzzy, the Roches. Couple million years ago, I met Maggie, via a buddy who was enamored of her when she played at the local U. Lovely girl, and she and her sisters have done some fine music. This is an old clip, but shows what you can do acappella when you put your mind to it ...

Think You're Strong?

Watch these little girls on the first part of this video. I can't tell you how impressive this is -- being able to one a one-handed press into a one-handed handstand balance on another girls upraised hand? Incredible.

Got this from Tom Furman's website:

What's in a Name?

One of the fast-food places my wife and I like is Baja Fresh. As you might have surmised from the name, if you aren't familiar with the chain, they serve Mexican food, and tasty stuff it is, too.

I used to fool myself into thinking I was eating healthy when I dropped by Baja -- there's no MSG, no lard, nothing frozen, all grilled fresh -- until I got online and checked out the fat content in the chicken Ultimo.

This baby blows the doors off the Burger King Double-Whopper with Cheese and Bacon, we are talking the heart-attack special, here, and if you feel really brave, you can get it enchilado-style, which is all of the above, but drenched in melted cheese and mole sauce ...

Well over a thousand calories, enough fat to make Richard Simmons cry.

I limit myself to one of these a month.

But fast, fat, and delicious aside, there is one thing about the place that strikes me as odd. For some reason, the girls behind the counter cannot ever seem to get my name right. I give them my order, they total it up, then ask me for my name, which they will call out when the food is ready.

"Steve," I say. I make it a point to say it very clearly.

Nearly every time, I get a puzzled look. "Steef?"

"Steve. Estevo. Short for Estaban?"

Usually, this doesn't help. It's always amusing to wait to see what name they write down -- it's printed at the top of the ticket, and I've seen "Deve," or "Teef," or "Steeb." But the most recent one is my favorite. After watching the young woman frown after I told her my name thrice, I spelled it out for her: "Steve. Spelled S-t-e-v-e."

I smiled. She smiled. Tapped in the name, handed me the ticket and my drink cup.

At the top, it said, "Ted ..."

Ted?

Never a dull moment.

Death Star Keeps on Turnin'

I just had a chance to see the proposed cover art for the book my collaborator and I are doing -- that's Star Wars: The Death Star, due out in, I think, October, '07. I can't show it until it is final and official, but it looks way cool.

I can mention that the book is about what happened on the Imperial space station from the time it got built until ... no, wait ... better not offer any spoilers, in case you might be one of the three people in the civilized world who never saw any of the movies ...

Meanwhile, here's an image I can show, from the archives ...

Technology Doesn't Always Rule

As an option for my new garage door opener -- a device for which I have never had a need before now -- I was offered a laser spotter. For those of you who don't have cars or don't park 'em in a garage if you do, spaces therein can sometimes get tight, and to avoid pulling too far into the garage and maybe crunching your bumper against the chest freezer or mangling the bicycle, it is wise to figure out where to stop short of doing those things.

The little laser device mounts on the ceiling and when you drive your car under it, kicks on and puts a little red dot onto your dashboard. You pull forward until the dot is on a pre-determined spot and voila! there you are. Twenty bucks, and a testament to how ubiquitious lasers have become. I can recall making one for a science project as a youth, and it required buying an industrial ruby, and constructing a circuit board with soldered connnections, resistors and all like that, into a device the size of a shoebox. As I recall, it ran about fifty bucks, in 1962 dollars, and you were lucky to be able to see it across the room.

But even though I have techno-toys out the wazoo -- computers, cell phone, iPod, electronic guitar tuners, electronic cameras and all like that, I opted for the low-tech solution to the parking problem. Park the car where it is supposed to be, then run a string through a tennis ball and hang it from the ceiling so that it just kisses the windshield. Probably many of you analog-people have seen this one before -- you pull into the garage and when the tennis ball touches the windshield, you set the hand brake and turn the engine off.

Cost is about seventy-five cents, given what I paid for a case of tennis balls for the dogs to chase, and six feet of string. And I don't have to worry about the power going out -- or the gadget mutating into a death ray ...

Sometimes the old ways work just fine.

Accidental Research

You see a little thread sticking out, you pull it, and you never know where it will lead ...

I was looking the McMeen music book, mentioned a posting previously, and one of the arrangements is of "Ashokan Farewell." You might remember the Ken Burn's documentary The Civil War, and if you do, you will recall this song, because it was pretty much the main theme, played over and over in many variations throughout the series.

It's a beautiful and haunting tune, and the first one I'll try to learn from the book. Perfect compliment to the slow version of "Dixie" I sometimes play.

I hadn't really thought about the song before, assuming it was a period piece, but I wanted to know more about it, so I went online to check it out.

It's not a period piece at all. It was written in 1982 by Jay Unger, as a kind of Scottish lament, in honor of a fiddle and dance camp held at Ashokan, not far from Woodstock, New York. Apparently the main part of the town now lies under a reservoir that supplies drinking water for New York City.

Ken Burns heard the album, liked it, and thus how it got to become a kind of Civil War anthem. It was the only non-period music used.

I find this kind of thing fascinating.

For more information, check out Jay Unger's FAQ on "Ashokan Farewell."

Dropped D

No, Dropped-D is not a rap singer, it's a way of tuning a guitar -- five of the strings are kept standard, and the sixth string, the bass E, is lowered a step, to D, thus the open strings are DADGBE, going from six to one.

There are all kinds of such tunings, and mostly I stay away from them because they require that you learn new chord shapes and I barely know any in the plain-vanilla standard Elvis-Ate-Dynamite-Good-By-Elvis versions. (To give dropped-D even more of a resonant rumble, you can first lower every string a full step, to DGCFAD, then drop the D to a C -- CGCFAD ...)

However, there are some songs or tunes that a simple Dropped-D tuning will muchly improve. I am working on an arrangement by El McMeen, an acoustic guitarist of extraordinary skill and musicality, of the old standard "The Water is Wide." Lovely the way he plays it.

El has now come out with a book, from Mel Bay, full of arrangements in this tuning. If you are thinking about moving into alternate tunings, this is the easiest one to try, and you should get this book: The Art of Dropped D Guitar

You might also poke around his website and pick up some of his CD's. Guy is, no two ways about it, a terrific guitarist.

New Book

Recently, I was asked if I wanted to write a short story for a new series being produced by Adventure Boys. These are pulp-style stories for YA readers (YA meaning "young adult," which translates to the ten-to-twelve year-old age bracket, and in this case aimed at boys.)

The stories are illustrated, and then put into the format of an old pulp magazine. Along with the fiction is a short section of history about the period.

The one I did, in collaboration with Mike Stackpole, was a hoot. Reminds me of the old Hardy Boys mysteries I read as a lad. Good, clean, fun -- unlike what I usually write ...

The Adventure Boys website is still being built, but you can sign up for mailings there if you want.

Tailgaters

The little electronic sign I carry in my car to remind tailgaters not to kiss my rear bumper ...

The first message is polite. The second less so. Because I didn't want to run afoul of YouTube's decency regs, I cut the vid off before the second one finished. Probably you can guess what it says, though ...

Hardwired

Tomorrow morning, Thursday, bright and early, a friend of mine in L.A. is going in to have half his brain rewired. (He had the first half done a couple years back, and now he'll really set off the metal detectors ...)

It's mostly probes and stuff -- head gets locked into a vise that is screwed into the skull and that is latched to a frame on a table so nobody moves. There are long needles and electrodes and all like that, but they don't have to cut away half the brain case or anything. Still, it's not a walk in the park.

If you have any spare spiritual energy laying around, I would appreciate it if you'd direct some it toward L.A. tomorrow. Prayers, pleasant thoughts, white light, all are welcome. Some for the doctors, and some for geology -- we don't want an earthquake while he's on the table.

Oh, and I have to mention this: The neurosurgeon's name? And I swear this is true, is Igor ...

Thanks.

What a Difference a Day Makes

Nothing like hauling a ton or two of paper, cutting fifty or sixty cardboard boxes to flats, and dragging assorted household impedimenta out to the rented dumpster to get the the old lactic acids flowing, nosiree.

From eight-thirty yesterday morning until about five yesterday afternoon, and a sandwich on the move, I tossed stuff into Mr. Bin's open maw. Another hour or two should see it topped off.

So far, the new sink isn't leaking yet -- knock on wood -- and the garage guy comes in the morning.

Gives me much respect for people who have to work for a living. A day or two are more than enough for me, thank you very much.

Cleaning Frenzy in Progress

Like a shark feeding-frenzy -- cue the theme from Jaws, dah-dat, dah-dat -- a cleaning-frenzy involves a lot of thrashing about. Instead of blood in the water, there are swirls of trash -- bits of paper, cardboard boxes, broken crockery and furniture. Little things that ordinarily wouldn't get noticed suddenly appear as an impediment to life itself, and you are apt to find yourself with an old toothbrush cleaning along that crack between the stove and counter-top because you can't stand the idea of the gunk in it, even if you can't actually see it ...

What happens is that you start out slow, and then you get revved up, and you tend to haul ass in fifth gear until you run out of gas.

The Waste Management people arrived early this morning bearing the drop-box. Not huge as such bins go, a mere four yards, it is now empty.

When the cleaning frenzy is done, I expect it to be full. The only question is, how long will it take ... ?

Homeowner's Blues

The joy of owning your own house -- well, you and and the mortgage company owning it -- is large. Space between you and your neighbors, a permanent place for your stuff, a sense of belonging that bespeaks home in a way an apartment or rented house seldom, if ever, achieves.

The downside is the upkeep. Your house, you take care of it. House, yard, bushes, trees, lawn. Fortunately, I have bark-dusted enough so there isn't any lawn, but I'm still sawing up tree branches that fell during the last windstorm ...

Which is why, for the next few days, I will be doing work around the house more than on the computer.

The little things start to add up. The washerless faucet in the bathroom is dripping, and what that means is that, unlike the old kinds of valves you could take apart and just stick in a new rubber washer to fix, you now have to replace the whole thing. And because the chances of finding one that matches the rest of the still-working hardware on the sink are slim and snowball, that means the whole shebang has to be replaced.

So, a trip to Home Depot.

The meeting place of the driveway and the street has become mis-aligned, due to the roots of the gumball trees next to the curb. The cheapest and quickest fix is to rent a concrete grinder to smooth things. Neighborhood association won't let us take down the trees if they are healthy, aside from which, we like them. Ordinarily, I wouldn't care about the problem, since it's only the sidewalk I have to keep to city code, but the shift in tectonic plates there now causes all the water that used to run down the gutter on a rainy day to slosh over the curb and detour through my front yard. Somewhat distressing to step out the door and find yourself ankle-deep in swirling water lapping at your threshold ...

Another item to check into at Home Depot.

The newly cleaned-out garage which now hosts the new car requires a garage door opener if it is to be useful, and while these are relatively inexpensive, the chance of me being able to install one are probably not real good. Way I use tools, I'd hit the button on the garage door opener, all my toilets would flush, and I'd still be on the driveway trying to avoid drowning from the onrush of sloshed-over-the-curb rainwater.

Something else to look at whilst at Home Depot.

And the clearing of the garage resulted in a pile of junk on the side of the house. Moving Peter in order to pull Paul in out of the weather, so I have to get one of those dumpster thingees and see how much of a dent filling it up will make in the accreted household detritus. (The other joy of householding is that empty space fills up with junk. That spare, Japanese look I enjoy, has, over a few years, turned into a bargain-basement version of Hearst Castle. I wouldn't be surprised if my epitaph reflected this: Local Man Killed by Falling Debris Inside Own Home.)

Then, of course, it is time to do our income taxes ...

Never a dull moment.

My Precious ...

I used to do a stand-up routine at science fiction conventions, part of which was offering that the best job security in the world would be as an optometrist in Metropolis. Because everybody is obviously in dire need of glasses -- nobody can tell a bird from a plane from Superman, which indicates really bad eyes to me. Not to mention that a pair of horn-rims on the only guy who doesn't need them turns Superman into Clark Kent and nobody can see through that one, either.

Watching some of the old episodes, I came across another good one: Clark Kent wears a pinky ring on his left hand in the early episodes. And guess what? Superman wears exactly the same ring on his left pinky, too!

Continuity, where is thy sting?

Click on the picture, from the cover of one of the DVD sets, and see.

I'm having waaay too much fun here ...

Looking for a New Toy ... ?

with which to kill yourself?

Look no farther:

Suicide Stilts (aka: PoweriZers)

These are for people who want to take their trampolines with them ...

Next time you are at YouTube, check out some of the videos.

Cookies

One of the joys of getting older is that you get to see so many things change over the course of your life. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Nickel Cokes and candy bars are gone, but so are summer fears of catching polio. Radio dramas have faded, but we have hundreds of channels of television. (The golden age of TV, by the by, was supposedly the early fifties. Some of those years are better in memory than in truth. I recently got the old Superman series with George Reeves, on DVD, and most of those episodes don't hold up very well -- done on the cheap, awful EFX, talky, badly-written, and all of the actors should have died the first season from scenery-poisoning, given how much of it they chewed ...

We sent people to the moon, cured smallpox, and defeated the Evil Empire. The buggy whips of my youth are gone (unless I want to drop round Spartacus in Portland and check out their leather) and I can still find Brown's Velvet Pineapple Sherbet, if I want to fly back to Baton Rouge, and it still tastes as good as it did when I was a boy. Of course it would, being it is almost entirely unnatural ingredients and preservatives. A few years ago on a visit, I bought a half-gallon of it, and proceeded to eat it all over the course of two days ...

Jack's Cookie Company's Brown-Edge Lemon Thins are, however, no more.

Those favorite store-boughts of my childhood are as extinct as the dinosaurs. My mother went hunting them a few years back when I asked if the company was still in business, but there were none to be had.

The wonder of the world wide web is that it is a cornucopia of oddball information, and recently I went hunting for a clue to those cookies.

Apparently Jack's was bought up in the mid-sixties by the Murray Biscuit Company, which was in turn purchased by Beatrice Foods, and in the late nineties, Keebler, all now owned by Kellog's.

No brown-edge lemon thins, alas.

Apparently I wasn't the only person who remembered these treats fondly, and in answer to other queries, Gourmet Magazine published a recipe -- almost twenty years ago -- in which the need was addressed.

And some kind soul put it on the web where I found it.

The cookies feature Crisco, butter, sugar, various forms of lemon -- juice, extract, and zest -- and the other bakery things that icebox cookies have, flour, vanilla, baking powder and soda and salt and like that, and I can see why they went away. Nothing the least bit healthy about them, more fat than gravy-smothered pork chops ...

But, having found the recipe, I had to try them, so I went out and got the ingredients -- no Crisco in our house -- blended them together as instructed and after chilling the dough for a couple hours, popped them into the oven.

And the results?

Well, they came out pretty good. Great taste, nice texture, good flavor.

Not the same as the commercial ones, which had that preserved-uniformity and that were already-going-stale-in-the-package when you bought 'em. Are the home-baked ones better? Yeah, I'd have to say so.

Better. But they aren't the same ...

What a Waste

While it's not my intent to turn this into a look-who-died-now-blog, I have to report that stand-up comedian Richard Jeni is gone -- apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot.

The details are still hazy, but it seems he was having breakfast with his girlfriend. Got up, went into the shower, and shot himself. She called for help, and he was still alive when the police arrived, but died a few hours later in the hospital.

Reading between the lines, you can get the idea that he was depressed -- he'd cancelled some appearances, and some of the people interviewed indicated they knew he was having some problems, though they didn't say what.

It's well-known that comedians sometimes turn to humor to compensate for less-than-funny personal lives -- the act becomes therapy -- and it pays the bills.

Jeni was a regular on the Carson and Leno shows, had HBO specials, was in a few movies, even had a short-lived TV series. For my money, he was hands-down the funniest stand-up working. The one time we managed to see him in person, he had my kind-hearted, animal-loving, anti-cruelty wife laughing so hard she was crying -- and this doing a routine about orcas torturing and killing a baby seal.

You had to be there.

He was clever, his humor was sophisticated, and he was truly, deeply, genuinely funny. I never saw anybody work an audience as completely as he did. In one early routine, he hummed the first few bars of the theme for the National Geographic TV Show -- dah, dah, dah, daaah-dah! --
then held the mike out and waited as the audience filled in the rest, like a call-and-response blues singer.

What a shame. What a terrible waste of talent.

The Lion Sleeps Tonight

Stripe
1986-2007

After a year or so in a local college, my son went off to school in SoCal, in the fall of 1986. Suffering from acute half-empty-nest syndrome, my wife and I immediately went out and got a new puppy and two kittens.

The dog was a Chow-Chow, Roxanne. The kittens, gray tabbies, both male, we got from a German woman we called Helga, the Cat Nazi, and my daughter named them Spot and Stripe.

Spot was the sweet kitty who loved to sit in your lap. Stripe would rather be outside on his own.

Not six months later, Spot got into one of the garbage cans and found some moldy pizza and that was the end of him.

Stripe became an inside/outside kitty once his brother was gone, a now-and-then lap-cat, but he liked to roam and do combat with the neighborhood toms, even though he had been neutered. Got his ears tattered and some raging infections, but ruled our yard against all comers. He liked to sleep in odd places. A couple of the more interesting ones were in a frying pan on the stove, and in the bathroom sink.

We never expected him to more than last twenty years. We thought sure he'd get run over or mauled, and yet somehow, he managed to keep going.

He was blind in one eye and slowing down. He liked the new puppy, they would rub noses and he would put up with her licking his face. But he had to be near a litter box the last year or so, or he'd just go wherever he was, we couldn't let him run loose in the house. We put a bed in the garage with a heater in front of it, and that's where he spent cold days; warmer ones, he laid on a heating pad in a deck chair in the front courtyard. Now and then, he'd sit on my lap watching TV. He slept a lot.

Saturday, Stripe's belly swelled up, and while he didn't seem in any great discomfort, his appetite was off, and there was obviously something wrong. The diagnosis was that he probably had a bowel tumor, certainly some kind of blockage, but without X-rays and a battery of diagnostic tests, it was hard to be sure, and he wasn't a good candidate for surgery in any event. The prognosis was, at best, not good. Things were not going to get better.

We thought about what would be the kindest thing to do. And so we had him put down, and his ashes will join those of Cady and Scout out front. (Spot's remains, I buried out back almost twenty years ago. Regular pet cemetary, our yard ...)

Been a sad year for animals in our family. My old dog Scout and my daughter's dog Howard went on the same day a few months back; now the old cat. But, Stripe had a good run, four months shy of twenty-one, which is pretty good for an outside/inside cat.

And the big wheel keeps on turning ...

New Some New Bling?

Here's a watch for you:

Click here: Quenttin

No price on the website, but a little research, you can find out easily enough.

Given the current British pound to U.S. dollar exchange, you can pick one up for a mere $356,000, plus or minus a couple grand ...