More on Scrimshaw

For a time, I tried to do scrimshaw. I wasn't very good at it. But the guy mentioned in the previous post, Bob Hergert, was, and is.

My attempt to get our Sera logo is on a piece of artificial ivory, about 5"x 7". Nothing to write home about. Hergert's version, which requires a jeweler's loup to truly appreciate, was done on an oval an inch and a half across. Bob works under a stereoscopic microscope. He's done portraits that looked like photographs on ivory bits the size of a dime.

My camera doesn't give near the full detail, it washes the image out, but under ten-power magnification, you can see every one of the bird's feathers; under twenty-power, you can see the cougar's whiskers ...

Coincidence?

Dirisha ~~~~~~~~~ Tananarive ~~~~~~~~~~ Dirisha

I wrote Matadora, the second book of the original Matador trilogy, in 1985; Rich Berry did the cover, and the book was published in 1986. (Detail of that illo is to the left, above.)

At the time Tananarive Due was probably still in college. Later she became a journalist and novelist, and what? -- about ten years ago, married the writer Steven Barnes. That's her in the middle.

Has it been that long? My, how time flies. Seems like just last summer that wedding, and the reception up on the hill at Stevan and Kim's place ...

When I met Tananarive, I was struck by a certain resemblance to Berry's cover illustration. Maybe it's just me, but have a look. That's T in the middle, above.

Later, I had a set of gun grips done by scrimshaw artist Bob Hergert featuring Dirisha, detail of which is the image on the right. Bob is a master of the form, and I have two small pendants that he also did for me. One of these is the logo for Plinck's-style Sera -- a mountain lion superimposed on a red-tailed hawk, with a tjabang and a Bowie knife clutched in the bird's talons.

The other pendant was a case of art imitating art: I had a scene in one of the Clancy novels in which the protagonist bought a piece of scrimshaw for his bride, in Hawaii. The piece was Cynthia, Goddess of the Moon, a nude woman sitting in lotus and floating in the air, and attributed to Hergert. There was no such piece, but Bob read the novel, and then made it as a gift for me.

How cool is that?

What It Was, Was Football ...

I'm not much of a football fan (American or soccer); we watch the Super Bowl each year, and root for the underdogs, whoever they are. That's pretty much the extent of my football viewing.

However, we did watch the college championship game last night, featuring Ohio State and LSU. My wife is a graduate alum, and before I dropped out to move to L.A., first to study martial arts and eventually, become a hippie, I attended for a couple years Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College.

This is was in the mid-sixties, and a lot has changed since then.

As a boy, the Tiger football games were the hottest tickets in town. Deaf Valley, they called Tiger stadium -- still call it that -- and you could hear the roars of the fans miles away. So loud it once registered as an earthquake at the geology department's sensors. Before the games, streets close to the campus were one-wayed heading in; after the game, the streets were one-wayed heading out.

You could hear the roar of the tiger, too. Mike the Tiger -- there have been, I think six Mikes -- attended the games in his portable cage, and in those days, lived in a larger enclosure right next to the stadium. Mike the II was stuffed and in a museum on-campus when I attended the school. You stepped on a plate in front of the display, and got a recording of his roar.

Mike got out of his cage a few times; fortunately, he never bothered anybody. And woe to anybody fool enough to offer that cat harm when he did get out -- I'd hate to be the guy who shot the school mascot -- he'd have been run out of town covered in tar and feathers.

At the games, the Tiger marching band would come out onto the field, and before they played the National Anthem (and Dixie), they'd play Tiger Rag. If Mike roared, it was considered a good omen.

As a Boy Scout, I was an usher at the home games, and thus on Halloween in 1959, saw Billy Cannon make his famous Heisman-trophy winning eighty-nine yard run against Mississippi, LSU's traditional rival. Everybody on the Ole Miss team who could tackle tried, Cannon broke them all, and you never heard a crowd make so much noise. (Cannon went on to play pro ball, retired, became an orthodontist, and was eventually busted and sent to a federal pen for his part in -- of all things -- a counterfeiting scheme. The joke at the time was, they reason he got caught was that, instead of "In God We Trust," on the bills, it said, "Go to Hell Ole Miss ...)

As a teenager, I sold hot dogs and unflavored snow cones (left unflavored for those patrons who needed ice for their illegally-smuggled in liquor. I sold a lot of those.)

There were no black players on the team back then, and I can recall the wonderful racist chants when a team that had black players ran out onto the field: "Leroy, Leroy, Leroy ..."

A far cry from last night's game, after which, a cheerleader ran over to hug one of the Tiger linemen -- she was white and he was black.

Things change slowly back home, but they sometimes do change ...

Oh, and the Tigers won, thus becoming national champions.

Go, tigers!

The vid is Chet Atkins playing Jelly Roll Morton's Tiger Rag.

The Cold Water Grows Warmer

Hot tub is fixed, hooray!

As I suspected, it was the heater element, and -- wonder of wonders! -- they had one in stock.

It is not an inexpensive part; however, there is no way around it.

The tub is 110/electric, and it warms up slowly -- at a little over two degrees F. an hour. So starting at ambient temperature, it'll be tomorrow afternoon before it's ready.

There are many inventions that have made life better for humankind; hot water on tap is high on my list of them, and a tub full of it in which to soak is worth much. I've come up more than a few ideas for stories and books whilst soaking out there on the back deck, not to mention how it works the kinks out of aching muscles.

This is the second of these things we've owned. The first, Conan the Hot Tub, lasted for fifteen years, and was still running when we packed it off to my son -- it was large, seated six or seven, and we wanted a smaller one.

Worth every penny.

The Man Who Never Missed

Somebody asked me recently how I pictured Emile Antoon Khadaji, the protagonist of the first Matador novel I wrote, The Man Who Never Missed. There were three images originally submitted to Ace by James Gurney, who did the book's final cover.

This was my favorite of the three . The art director thought that it wouldn't make a good cover, but I liked it, and I've kept a color copy of it framed in my office since I got it.

Got the spetsdod wrong, but the man is right.

Entropy Rules

So, the clothes dryer is fixed -- burned-out thermal fuse, the cause of which was a clogged chute under the lint trap. Seems the little wire mesh that catches the lint (and which we dutifully clean out every load or two like we are supposed to) allows a certain amount of very fine particulate through. After six or eight years, enough of this had built up to cause things to get too warm, and zap! the fuse let go.

I'd never have found it, because I didn't realize this particular model could be accessed from the front, below the tub, and since we bought the sucker, somehow the owner's manual went away. So, clean the chute, new fuse, and we are back in business. Which is good, because hanging clothes to dry where we have had rain thirty-two of the last thirty-six days is a no-win proposition.

I now await the arrival of the hot tub guy, so see if my suspicion about the burned-out heater are correct. If so, that will be a tad more expensive than the dryer to repair, and probably another three or four days before the parts get here ...

Plus, the house cleaners are coming. Once a month, we have a service come in and do major cleaning, since we are too busy (read: too lazy) to do it ourselves.

Grand Central Terminal here today. Drives the dogs nuts, all the traffic, and of course, I love having people traipse in and out while I am trying to avoid working ...

Roar of the Pelican

My son is a flashlight geek. (Truth is, most men I know are flashlight geeks, the difference is a matter of degree. Boys love torches, from under the covers reading comics after lights out to that bent-neck Scout flashlight out in the woods camping.)

Todd Erven, whom I met through Bobbe, Erven being one of the Kid's MA students, is an uber-flashlight geek. Go look here and see why.

So I asked if he would build a really bright one for me, so I could see the expression on my son's face when I gave it to him. Todd did, and I passed it along last night.

Dal was passing pleased. As I drove away from his house, I could see the light gleaming behind his kitchen blinds.

The name of this entry comes from the name of the torch, which is a Maglite with an overdriven Pelican bulb.

It is waaay cool, and bright enough to knock passing airplanes down ...

Either, Or, Neither, Nor

Okay, being something of a political wonk -- at least to the point of wanting to know something about who's running things in our fair land and past the sound-bite on the evening news -- I sat and watched the presidential debates on ABC last night.

Set in New Hampshire, three days before their primary election, the debate was novel in several ways:

One, it included all the leading candidates from both major parties, first the R's, then the D's.

Two, the format actually allowed the candidates to talk more than a minute each, and among themselves, for at least part of the time.

Three, they were all tired, drawn, and under pressure, which gives you a better insight into what really makes them tick. As a result, the slick veneer cracked at times, and you got to see real emotion. I like that. I want to know whoever is running the Oval Office has feelings -- they get pissed off, joke, give a damn ...

(Some of the speakers came across with the Right Stuff. Some of them whined. Nobody completely fucked up, though they all had iffy moments I'd bet they wish they could do-over.)

The essence of a good story, back in the old pulp fiction days was: Chase your hero up a tree and throw rocks at him. How s/he deals with pressure is the tale.

The Republicans went first, the six leaders. The questions were not softball and easy lobs right over the plate, some of them had bite, and when the dust had settled, and despite the spin by each guy's camp that his man had won, I didn't see a clear victor. I did notice at the time that the R's had fallen on hard times: How scary is it that the guy who doesn't believe in evolution seemed to be the most reasonable and bright one of the bunch?

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

The D's, down to four, went second -- came out and shook hands with the R's before they sat, and when they were finished, and despite each of their organizations's claims that their man -- or woman -- beat the pants off everybody, nobody ran away with it there, either, in my view.

More amazing, even astounding than the Republicans, which has since Lincoln pretty much been the rich white guy's party, the D's had a black man, a woman, an Hispanic, and one white southerner on the stage. We aren't anywhere near the Age of Aquarius, but we have come a long way, baby, that such a lineup could exist. History staring us in the face, that.

For my money, and based strictly on the debate, you could put any two of the D's on the ticket and they'd be able to handle the job.

Of course, you could walk out on the street and pick two people at random who'd do a better job than the two guys in the offices now ...

For my money, the D's generally came across as smarter, with better ideas, but that's my bias showing. I'm registered Independent, and this time, those are the voters who are going to decide the election. Last time, they went more for the R's. I wouldn't bet that's how it will go this round.

Long time between now and November, and a lot of things can and probably will change -- the war, the economy -- that will alter how people make their decisions, come the general election.
Too early to call, but at the moment, I see that it will probably be McCain or Romney going up against Obama or Clinton at the top of the ticket.

Guitarzan, Give Him a Hand

So, feeling the need to feel inept about myself once again, I broke down and bought a copy of the sheet music/tab for Michael Chapdelaine's arrangement of "California Dreamin'."

It is going to be something of a stretch -- not because it is especially hard, but because it uses fingering I'm not used to, with both hands. (In classical playing, generally the right hand thumb plays the bass strings, i.e. the upper three, and each of the trebles has its own dedicated finger -- ring plays the bottom-most, middle the second, and forefinger the third. In some of the new sheet music passages, these have to be shifted, so I have to add the mostly-useless pinkie, and shift the other fingers up, in order to play two bass notes at the same time.

Left hand changes are up and down the neck, from one to twelve, too, though that at least makes it classical-guitar neutral, even though he plays it on a steel string. (Classicals have twelve frets to the body; a lot of acoustic steel strings have fourteen, and some have scalloped bodies next to the fretboard to more easily access the highest frets, as you see on a Fender Strat.)

Plus there's a nasty hinge-barre that is supposed to leave two second-fret strings open while the other four are pressed down, and I can't pull it off, no way, no how.

I know, more information than you wanted.

But Chapdelaine is, like El McMeen, a wonderful player. It's not just the technical ability, of which he has loads, but the expressiveness. I saw a classical guitar competition once and the guy who placed second was technically better than the guy who won, but the winner was into the music in a way that pulled me in with him. That sense of musicality outweighs the odd clam or buzz.

Anyway, to see Chapdelaine (once considered a notorious and disrepectful student of the MaestroAndres Segovia, though it turns out that designation was misplaced) do a terrific job on the Beatle song, "Come Together," check out the YouTube vid link.

Cool Hand Luke's Dictum

Which dictum, if you don't remember it from the movie, is "What we have here is a failure to communicate ..."

Yesterday, Rory and I had lunch. Over a burger and fish and chips, we blathered on a bit and, as such things often turn out, realized that words on the screen didn't quite convey what either of us meant to say. And that we were a lot closer in what we agreed upon than not.

Nice guy, Rory, and a most enjoyable meal. I'm looking forward to reading his book when it comes out.

Terminology can get esoteric, and sometimes my definition of a word doesn't match somebody else's, even though we are going in the same general direction.

We didn't agree on every minute detail of our personal philosophies, but at least one of us came away somewhat enlightened as to what was said versus what was meant, and that's always a good thing.

Meanwhile, on the home front, the dead hot tub -- it'll be Monday before the repair guy can come back out and fiddle with it -- has been joined by the dead clothes dryer. A different repair guy will be coming out Monday to have a look at that.

As Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say, "It just goes to show you, it's always something ... "

The Thrill of Victory; The Agony of Defeat ...

So, the holidays went fine, nobody blew up or melted down, kids, grandkids, parents, in-laws, nieces and nephews, dogs, everybody made it through another one, and happy I am that it was so.

Of course, my hot tub is on the fritz. The electrical cord circuit-breaker keeps kicking the system off, and that's generally a symptom of something that needs to be fixed before you immerse your naked body into a body of water surrounded by things electrical. Being electrocuted unconscious and then drowned is not on the top of my to-do list.

I await the phone call from the service guy -- after spending a pleasant thirty minutes earlier today in the rain getting the board the deck guy installed in front of the access hatch on the tub. This was cleverly held in place by seven long screws that required leaning my bodyweight upon a T-handled Phillips screwdriver to break 'em loose.

Other than a few spiders and some wires, I don't recognize most of the stuff under the hatch well enough to fool with it. If I had to guess, based on experience with the previous spa we had, I'd say the heater is probably shot, which requires new parts anyhow.

Then again, how hard is your life when the biggest thing you have to worry about is a malfunctioning hot tub?

Oh, dear. The ash tray is full in the Rolls. We shall have to get another ...

No Nookie Song

Over on Steve Barnes's blog, there's a long-running discussion about racism. One of the things that Barnes points out is that, in Hollywood, this skews movies somewhat, consciously or not; in movies that are considered blockbusters -- making more than a hundred million dollars -- if there is a black guy or Asian guy in the lead, he never gets laid on-screen.

It is, unfortunately, true, and it probably says more about Americans than we want to admit.

That said, I wanted to razz Barnes a little about it, so I wrote a short song for him for Christmas.

Among all the other reasons I'm no doubt going to hell, add this one to the pile ...

Visualize This

In the early 1980's, I wrote a short story for Asimov's Magazine, called "Darts." It was based upon what was cutting-edge neurological research at the time, regarding visualization, and how effective it was in helping people get things done.

How I got the idea for the story was a piece I saw -- probably in Scientific American, but I don't recall for sure -- this was in the pre-internet days, so it was certainly print on paper and not on screen.

An experiment was set up, using darts -- the kind you throw in the pub. Basically, the gist of it was this: A bunch of college kids were brought in and asked to throw darts at a board. Their scores were recorded, and the subjects were broken up into groups and sent home.

One group was the control -- they did nothing special. A second group was told to practice throwing darts at a board every day for half an hour. There were a couple-three other groups, I'm a little fuzzy on that, but they were given instructions on a couple imaginary practice. One of these involved doing the exercise in real-time -- you imagined yourself in front of a dart board, and practicing for half an hour, throwing darts, and getting big scores, but you never actually threw a real dart.

Some weeks later, everybody got rounded up and re-tested.

To nobody's surprise, the control group had pretty much the same scores.

The group that practiced half an hour a day improved something like 67 points on average, again, not altogether unexpected.

The people who imagined themselves throwing the darts for half an hour each day blew the doors off the test -- 165 point improvement on average.

The guy conducting the experiment was amazed. In this case, imaginary practice beat actual practice by a factor of two. It seems, they have learned since, that imagination works the same reality maps in pretty much the same way as doing it does.

The big difference was mindfulness. Had those practicing been given lessons in focus and intent and not just tossing the darts, chances are they would have done better; still, you have to shake your head at this the first time you hear it.

Now, if you don't have a skill at all, imagining yourself doing it won't make you better. If you can't play "Chopsticks," then you won't accomplish Bach fugues by thinking about them; however, if you do have the skill -- and darts was chosen because it was simple and easy to learn the rules and moves -- then you can improve your performance by tripping your brain.

I bring this up because it seems possible that if imaginary practice is equal to or better than real practice, it could open up a nice can of worms in our discussions of martial arts ...

Play That Funky Neurology White Boy

Daniel J. Levitin is a former rock band member, session musician, sound engineer and record producer, who grew up to be a neuroscientist. He runs the lab for Musical Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill University, and has written for Grammy and Billboard.

The guy knows music from both ends, and if you want to walk with him a ways down the path of what music is, how it ticks around in our heads, and why we listen and play the stuff, pick up a copy of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.

The book is not the easiest one you'll ever read, but Dr. Levitin is a good enough writer to explain some fairly esoteric neurochemistry and assorted musical concepts in a way that I could stay with him, in a manner I found both entertaining and informative.

Any guy who ever picked up a guitar thinking it would get him laid has a handle on one of the basic truths, but there's a lot more going on, connected to language, memory, and motion, and it's fascinating stuff.

In some societies, music and dance are defined by one term, since they can't imagine one without the other. Why the music you were listening to when you came of age resonates so strongly has much to do with how your memory works. If you want to be a great musician, mindful practice is more important than in-born talent.

If you like this kind of thing, you will like this one.

Pratfall

So, Christmas Eve, home, quiet, and Dianne and I opened a bottle of champagne and went and sat in the hot tub. Very nice.

Half an hour later, I got out, went to fetch some more tablets for the brominator.

The deck this time of year, after a couple months of Oregon soggery, is mostly covered with a fine layer of moss and mold, turning it very slippery. I should have given it a wash with bleach to kill that stuff, and I was going to, eventually.

Three steps away, hit the slickest patch, both feet straight out and a sudden quick trip from upright to flat on my back ...

Falling is a fast thing, that thirty-two-feet-per-second-squared stuff. No time to think at all.

Quite the thud, and major chagrin. Us martial arts types take it as a personal failure when such things happen. Slip? Fall? Not moi! Had I been paying proper attention, had I not been champagned and hot tubbed, why, it would never have happened! Big lapse. It is to feel shame.

Alas, into each life, a little prat must fall ...

Fortunately, however, all those years of being thrown hither and yon paid off. Though I landed flat on the deck, I did so head up, arms outstretched to break the impact, just as if I meant to do it that way, and ... no harm, no foul.

Not as soft as the yard at Guru's, but a lot softer than Cotten's garage floor.

Once before, when I was living in L.A. and doing a lot of rolling and falling in the Okinawa-te class four nights a week, I was jogging across a gas station lot to pay the attendant when I slipped on a patch of oily concrete. My momentum caused me to take a header, and somehow, I tucked, hit on a shoulder, did a roll, came up, and kept going.

When I got there, the attendant stared at me. "Jesus, did you do that on purpose?"

And, of course, I said, "Yeah. I did. Good practice, you know."

Which, while not strictly true, in that I didn't want to take the dive, I surely did want to come away with nothing broken. I was amazed that I did.

It's this kind of thing that makes me think that, in the heat of -- or as in the deck instance, cold and nekkid of -- the moment, that some of this martial arts stuff will be ingrained enough and there should I need it.

Start of a Bad Joke

So, OJ Simpson, Robert Blake, and Phil Spector walk into a bar ...

You'll Shoot Your Eye Out

Christmas Eve tomorrow, and I'll crank up Ralphie and his quest for the Daisy Red Ryder air rifle once again. To those of you who celebrate the occasion, Happy Christmas. To those of you who don't, enjoy your Chinese food.

For fans who may not know, there is a whole industry that has sprung up about the movie, A Christmas Story.

Based on Jean Shepherd's radio ramblings and the books, In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, and Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories, along with some short stories in Playboy, the movie was directed by Bob Clark (and there's a funny story there, about Porky's), came out in 1983, and quietly became a holiday standard. It has been my favorite Christmas movie since I first saw it, twenty-odd years ago.

The Cleveland house featured in the film went on the market some years ago, and a Navy guy who was a major fan leaped on it, bought it, and turned it into a museum.

You can buy Red Rider Leg Lamps at the gift shop across the street. There is an annual party at the house, featuring some of the actors from the movie.

And, of course, Daisy still makes Red Ryder air rifles, though they cost a little more now than when they first came out ...

Those of you too young to remember, Red Ryder was a cowboy hero in comics, on radio, and in movies. He shot the guns out of the bad guys' hands. Red had a sidekick, Li'l Beaver. The young lad -- not a girl, as you evil-minded sorts might think -- was played in the movies by various actors, including most notably, Robert Blake, who came out of the Our Gang comedies, went on to do Baretta on television, and who wound up being tried for murdering his ex-wife. Found not guilty on that. Just like OJ was not guilty of killing his ex-wife ...

The setting of A Christmas Story was probably about 1939 or 1940, which is about fifteen years before I was Ralphie's age and lusting after my first BB gun -- which I got the Christmas I was eight.

If you haven't seen this picture, you should -- it's not Miracle on 34th Street, nor It's a Wonderful Life, but it speaks to men of a certain age, and more so to me than either of those classics do. It makes me laugh, and I usually watch it late on Christmas Eve when Dianne is asleep; it's my personal ritual for the holiday.

Whaddya Think?

Unconscious associations make for an interesting sociological study. If you want to check on yours, using a series of tests, have a look here.

I feel the need to point out that video gamers will probably have a harder time with these than folks who are more analog -- punching keys to type is not quite the same as punching keys on a video game, and part of the process is that as soon as you get used to the "e"key for one result and the "i" key for the opposite, the tests switch them.

Video gamers seem to lock in what the buttons on a keyboard or controller do much faster than us old guys who learned how to shoot with a rifle and not a first-person-shooter video game. If you swap the buttons once you get them, that is apt to screw things up more for a gamer than a non-gamer.

That said, there are a series of tests in the demo section about race, sex, body type, and common sociology that might surprise you. I did but two of them, and found that I have no particular connection between weapons and white people, or weapons and black people, but that I have a slight preference for skinny people over obese ones.

Neither of these were earth-shaking surprises to me. (And I found it interesting which two tests I picked to take -- might be another study in that ...)

Food for Thought

A glancing thought on martial arts, couched in the form of an old joke:

Steve and Joe are out in the north woods hiking when, ahead of them, a nine-hundred pound grizzly bear ambles out onto the trail. The bear doesn't see them at first, but it will soon enough

Steve whispers to Joe: "Man, I'm glad I wore my running shoes!"

Joe, who knows a lot more about bears than Steve, whispers back, "That won't matter, idiot -- you can't outrun a grizzly!"

Whereupon Steve says, "I don't have to outrun him, I only have to outrun you ... "

Getting a Physical?

Some advice:

If you are going in for your annual physical exam, these are often scheduled for the morning, in order to check blood sugar and what not. Means you can't eat anything, though the nurse will tell you that black coffee is okay.

Actually, it's not. Skip it.

A lot of people have what is called "whitecoat hypertension." What this means is, your blood pressure goes up because you are in the doctor's office. At home it might be normal -- say, 120/80, but as soon as the nurse asks you to roll up your sleeve, it can shoot up ten points, bam, just like that.

So, 130/80 or even 130/90 is not great, but still marginally within the green zone.

Drink two or three cups of strong coffee, and the caffeine in it, a stimulant, can cause your BP to rise ten points, too. Some authorities say it won't, but mine does, and when I was working in the clinic, I saw it often enough to know that more than a small percentage of people will have the same reaction.

Now, this is transient and not dangerous if you have normal blood pressure; however, if you get nervous at the M.D.'s, and if you've had coffee, the combination might drive you over the 140/90 border and into the red zone.

Not dangerous per se, since if you exercise, your BP will shoot a lot higher than that while you are huffing an puffing. But: If they write down that number -- and they will -- and if it is into what is considered high, that will be on your chart forevermore. And the next time you go to get health insurance and they check your records, you will, at the least, get rated for it, and -- if you can get insurance at all -- it will cost more.

And, oh, yeah, if you put a little cream in your coffee and they do a blood sugar check, you might get diagnosed with diabetes because your fasting level is too high. There is sugar in cream, enough to skew the test.

Just so you know ...