Human Advancement

Wow, a lot more fireworks last night, of the natural kind. Tucson is in it's "monsoon" season, which, for those of you not familiar with exotic language, means rainy season. The word monsoon means "backward wind", or something like that. What happens this time of year (till about September) is that the prevailing winds shift from the south, bringing lots of moisture up from Mexico.

Add to that the typical 100-105 daily highs and you get two things: unbearably hot and humid days, and lots of convection. For the next three months, nearly every afternoon and evening will see a buildup of very small - often much less than a mile across - but very intense storms, first over the mountains, then moving across the city as the sun goes down and the temps drop. We say here that when the weather report lists a 30% chance of rain, it does not mean that there is a 30% chance that it will rain, but that there is a 100% chance it will rain, with a 30% chance it will hit your house.

Last night was looking uneventful, until after dark one storm popped up just northwest of me, moving my direction. It ended up not so much moving, as developing and expanding almost right over me, and almost stationary (I was watching the live doppler radar feed on the weather channel). These monsoon storms produce rain heavier than I've ever seen in the midwest. I've seen it rain so hard when driving once, that I could not see the ground in front of the car all of a sudden.

But they usually move fast and dissipate fast, and so this intense rain lasts 5-10 minutes, with lighter rain for a few minutes either side of the core. This time, this intensity went on for a full half-hour, with normal midwest thunderstorm type heavy rain continuing for another half hour. The NWS said that a rain gauge near my house measured 1.14 inches in the first 20 minutes, with a total of 1.69 for the night. On top of this, I went outside at one point to stick my hand out from under the patio canopy, just to feel how hard it was coming down, when I saw a flash as bright as someone snapping a camera from a few feet away, and before my eyes could even recover, I felt the loudest and sharpest thunder clap I've ever heard in my life. I actually felt it as a pressure wave.

I expect to see reports of flooding today, since the farmland - rapidly developing into housing - where all this water drains is very low-lying, and has been completely under water several times in the past. We looked at buying a house in that area one time, but it smelled musty.

Anyway, I live near a wash that only has water in it maybe ten days a year, and whenever it rains, the toads are all out there singing away, each trying to convince the lady toads that he has the swankiest mud puddle in town, and wouldn't it be nice to come up to his place for a nightcap. After these storms, the puddles left in the wash for a few days after the water drains into the river - which will also be drained dry by the end of today, I'm sure - are usually filled with tadpoles, so apparently, at least some of that croaking pays off.

So, we're in the house watching TV after all this, with the back door wide open, both so the dog can come and go, and so we can smell the rain and get the temporarily cool breeze, when Sally gives out a yell of disgust and despair. I figured it was a mouse, or a roach, or some other vermin, but no, there were toads hopping down the hall. These are Colorado River toads, the kind you can get high by licking. We've occasionally had an adult in the backyard, and they get to be about 6-8 inches long. The ones in our hallway were teenagers, maybe an inch and a half long. It was kind of funny to see, even just the idea of it, but we had to get them out of there. Aside from the risk of stepping on one and getting all the squishies between our toes, the same chemical that gets adventurous human teenagers high can be fatal to dogs. So for the next little while, we were scattering furniture, chasing frogs, dropping inverted glasses over them, sliding a piece of cardboard under the glass, and putting them back in the mud outside.

It's a strange place, this desert I live in.

I just got done watching the fireworks show. It was pretty impressive, though there was no accompanying laser show, no 1812 Overture, no choreographed grand finale.

I can't remember ever deciding to not go to the big 4th of July fireworks shows down at the city park, or, as they're done here in Tucson, on "A" Mountain. I just realized that I haven't been in several years. Maybe it was when they stopped caring about whether they actually did them on, you know, the 4th? Of July?

This year's show, though, was pretty impressive. My backyard got lit up a few times bright enough to read a book by. A couple of the booms almost, but not quite, rattled the windows. I nearly broke my neck turning around and around to keep up with them.

There must have been 8 or ten different houses just in my neighborhood launching some pretty impressive boomers, with a few distant, silent sparks indicating that my neighborhood was not alone. There were no computer-controlled mortar-launched shells that you'll see at a more civic event, but it impressive nonetheless. One house had a bunch of those multi-shot whistling things. Another had a stock of those big starburst works that would blow a hundred feet up. Yet another just had roman candles launched in intermittent bursts of wanton exuberance.

Another group, with an apparently more guerrilla approach to the whole thing, was moving down the dry wash next to my house lighting a whole bunch of different stuff, obviously smuggled across the border from New Mexico (or maybe Old Mexico) sometime in the last few weeks. At one point, they set off what must have been a brick of firecrackers that went on for 2-3 full minutes at a rate that made it impossible to distinguish each individual crack. I couldn't see them, but it was obvious that by the time the last part of their contribution had lit up the wash, they were already moving downstream toward the next spot.

I joined in the scattered applause and cheers sounding from houses blocks away every time a particularly good one went up. I was applauding for my appreciation for the show, true. But I was also offering these anonymous, unseen renegades a pat on the back. None of them had applied for a permit, none had asked permission. None had heeded the inane admonitions that have been on TV all week to leave the fireworks to the professionals.

They wanted to have fun, so they just went out and had it. It was their fun, and nobody was going to have it for them. And so it became my fun, too. It may have only been a vague, fading shadow of the spirit of '76, but if that's all the rebellion and independence left in Independence Day, I'll take it. I'll let it be enough tonight that at least some tiny part of this one day's meaning has not been lost.

I see Billy wrote about Road Tripping while I was gone... Road Tripping.

I was behind the wheel every inch of 4800+ miles just now. Our itinerary went like this: Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Illinois again, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana again, Illinois yet again, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico *sigh* again... and back to Arizona. Thats 14 states, more than one quarter of all that there are.

My general impression from this latest survey of the States of the Union was: Faded Glory. The rented Detroit steel aluminum and plastic had all the bells and whistles, but was uninspired and uninspiring, and showing obvious signs of wear at only 26K miles on the odometer (now 31K, take that Budget, haha). Flyover country was in pretty much the same shape. Lots of bells and whistles, but no longer inspiring. And showing too many signs of wear at far too young an age for it.

The whole place has the feel of consolidation. The bigger towns, in all their Chamber of Commerce glory, are thriving, with the brightest chains all clustered at the portages and landings on those long government built rivers, while the spaces in between seem to all be either emptying out or getting converted to Mini-Me's of the bigger burgs.

We got off those rivers when we could, when it could be justified under the tight deadlines of our three-destinations-in-one vacation schedule. We trekked though the dangerous wilderness where no blue and red shields pointed us in the right direction, where we were on our own to forage for food, gas, and "facilities", and where we were at the mercy of local cops from forgotten towns like Hereford, Texas or Rexford, Kansas, who apparently have even given up trying to generate revenue from strangers passing through just a little too fast.

Get off the interstates far enough, and away from any towns that know what developers are, and you see two things. First are those places just barely hanging on to any kind of cohesive town-ness, their economies trudging along only by virtue of a booming business in plywood and board-up services, and those towns desperately shilling for a slice of the good life and the promise of a Taco Bell if they can just get a few hundred more people to stay there long enough to be counted in the next census, or at least the next hotel industry survey.

Their main methods of doing so seem to be contrived festivals or historic notoriety, and half-heartely integrated marketing aimed at extolling the virtues of their 17 "fine" hotels and inns, the new movie theater, and the 1974 state softball championship high-school. They're all celebrating 85 Years of Progress, or promising a Bright Future, either approach sending a clear message that their best days are behind them if they don't do something in a big hurry.

That's not all that different than what small towns have always done, but it's different now, and that difference can be felt. I've been driving all over this country for 25 years, and maybe I'm just jaded, but now it feels, I don't know, less energetic than it used to be. Before we had Burma Shave and the World's Biggest Ball of Twine and the Mystery House, and The Thing. We had individuals and entrepreneurs shooting for the stars and sometimes taking their sleepy little towns with them. We had towns where people liked to live, liked to go down to the A&W on Saturday night and church on Sunday morning, and it showed.

Now we have desperate little towns where people live because they can't save up enough money to move out - or just figure there's nowhere to move to anymore - towns with far too energetically busy councilmen and assorted busybodies taking it upon themselves to shoot for a slightly classier level of mediocrity, and hoping the owner of some moderately large Ball of Twine will see an opportunity and move there so the town can tax him to death.

So long as he moves to a properly zoned parcel, that is. Wouldn't want all that string and all those Winnebagoes ruining the view from that land they've set aside for the new environmentally friendly industrial campus, or bringing down the property values of the surrounding farmland with their proletariat common-man appeal. That's not what a town with a Bright Future is all about, after all.

That's what it's all about now, even in the major cities, though it's not as apparent there. Except maybe in Detroit where I was earlier in the week. Aside from the general post-apocolyptic look of the joint, they no longer have 4th of July or Independence Day fireworks - they have "Freedom Day" fireworks, this year on June 23rd. There's no spontaneity, there's only that which is either planned or approved (and a kind of freedom that in Newspeak is carefully distinguished from independence). There's no room for it. I don't mean physical room, there's still more of that than could ever be filled, even in another seven generations of raping Mother Earth and depleting her natural resources. I mean breathing room. There's no room for taking chances anymore, for trying something to see if it works, or just because it's fun and makes some farmer enough money to take his wife into the big city once a year to see all the lights and all the shopping.

The margins are too small. The Rotarian Kleptocrats and the planners and the busybodies take the biggest cut of that margin, leaving only what they think is "enough" for the one who takes all the chances. And that's if they like you. They plan and approve and make sure that you don't take any chances that don't fit their comprehensive five-year vision and risk your status of a member in good standing of the community Tax Base. There's only room for sure things anymore, and the sure thing is usually the thing the other guy just did. And sure things live mostly in the cities now, or those small but becoming medium-sized towns that got over the hump of getting Wendy's and Best Western and Chevron to fund their truck bypass.

So the spaces in between are emptying out, or at least not getting much bigger and better. They're not where it's at anymore, those places like where all the cities and towns big enough to be printed on the map in bold lettering started out. There's no more "starting out" and growing because people like living there and building things from scratch, there's only managing what is already there, and growing because you're already big enough to grow, and not wither on the vine of State Route 123 or County Road "A".

Road trips ain't what they used to be. Now there's mostly destinations and "drive by" country and food-gas-lodging next exit. Getting there might still be half the fun, but only because where you get to isn't much fun anymore either.

So the Supremes finally realized that there is a right to own a gun, even if the babbling heads on the so-called news stations fail to mention the fact that it was always true, and that all that has changed is that the government now officially agrees. But we can't be too hard on them, being informed and informative isn't in their job description, after all.

Of course, our rulers' agreement on our rights only goes so far. It can still be infringed if they have a good enough excuse, so says the thin "pro second amendment" majority of high muckety-mucks. There's no right to bear arms in this decision, only an agreed-upon privilege, revokable for anyone who gets too uppity, or upon the appointment of one more "reasonable and common-sense" oriented justice.

Given that, the one conclusion that has so far escaped all analysis that I am aware of is this:

There is now a very diverse mix of legal regimes when it comes to the right to keep and bear arms. Some, like DC, have outright banned it. Others. like Chicago effectively ban it while stopping short of admitting that it's what they're doing. Then there's others, like Vermont with their shall-issue, no-questions-asked permits, and Arizona, where I commonly see people with six-shooters and 1911's on their hip at Circle-K or Home Depot.

Now, however, there has been a "decisive" ruling. Beware that word "decisive" when it comes to your rights. All it means is that the extent and methodology for violating them can be safely standardized. Have you noticed how nearly every state in the country miraculously came up with "click it or ticket" seatbelt laws, and "speeding fines doubled in work zones", and DUI checkpoints at around the same time, each legislature and governor pretending it was their own brilliant idea? I bet if you researched it, you'd find that it all happened shortly after some "decisive" court ruling on whether they'd be able to get away with it.

They have been given a "decisive" ruling on exactly how far they can go, and they will now all go directly there.

I'm sitting in a cheap motel in Detroit, waiting to go visit some family and watching the insipid morning "news" shows. One of them is all in a tizzy over the fact that many couples now have to defer their retirement because the bummer economy is harshing their financial buzz.

What struck me is how differently most people look at retirement from how I look at it. The traditional way to look at it is that they work like a dog all their lives to earn the freedom to sit on their asses - perhaps in a golf cart - and wait to die.

My view is to work like a dog at work that is not of my own choosing in order to earn the freedom to work at something that is of my own choosing. The magic "65" is completely irrelevant to that.

Take my dad, for instance. He's retired now. He no longer has to hang off the end of a boxcar swinging a lantern in between jumping off and on the moving train to throw a track switch. Instead, he now gets to work in the wood shop in the garage building an amazing home interior. It has hand-laid wood floors and wall trim, custom cabinetry and some furniture, and hand-painted artwork on the walls.

It's not what most people call work, but he's nonetheless amazingly productive, especially given the recent heart attack that could have provided all the excuse he would ever need to just sit on the golf cart every day waiting for the next heart attack. He doesn't have a schedule, doesn't have to think of an excuse when he wants a day off, and still gets to golf whenever he decides the fresh air, exercise, and a day with his friends is more productive than more woodworking.

That's what I think of as retirement. I can sit on my ass with the best of them, but sooner or later, ideas and ambitions start popping into my head. The problem I have now is that I have no time to execute on them. Retirement means that I'd have the time to work my ass off on my own ideas, instead of somebody else's.

I love the work I do, and I would probably still do some of it if I was retired. What I don't love is alarm clocks, commuting, and living on clock time. Those people deferring their retirement don't realize that it's probably the best thing for them. Their vision of retirement seems like hell to me. I don't really ever want to stop working like a dog, I just want to be off the leash.

Well, I just deposited my $600.00 economic reach-around check. Of course, it's only a tiny fraction of what they've taken from me, so it doesn't make me feel any better about the BOHICA I can look forward to with every paycheck. I haven't changed my spending habits one bit, since I pretty much determine my spending by what I need, not by how much "extra" cash I happen to have that day. I'm thinking maybe, just as a fuck you to George and the Fed, I'll invest it in Chinese stocks, so it doesn't, even imperceptibly, slow this economy's dive off the cliff.

I know, I could just spend it at Best Buy like everyone else is doing and accomplish the same thing, but if I did that, somebody in town might get to keep his job another week. Screw him, he probably voted.

Hillary wants to be your Veep, eh? Aside from the fact that the complete suicidal stupidity of choosing her would automatically disqualify you from the Presidency on soundness of judgment grounds, here's what I would do if somehow Hillary were just one of my heartbeats away from the Presidency:

• Hire a food taster


• Have someone expendable start my car every morning


• Stay out of Fort Marcy Park

It's the fanatic cult of green meets Jim Jones, encouraging your kids to drink the Kool-Aid. Warren dissects it here. I don't have the stomach for giving it the treatment it deserves. I gotta wonder, thought, if there's a kid out there in Oz who will take this a little too seriously.

I think this year's campaign commercials for the Republicans practically write themselves:

What is Obama's plan to reduce gas prices? "Hope!"

What is Obama's plan to secure the border? "Hope!"

What is Obama's plan to win the war in Iraq? "Hope!"

And when you send your dollars to Washington, what will Obama give you back? "Change!"

It's the same basic plan all of them have.

So, Ted Kennedy had a seizure and is in the hospital.

As all the fawning lefties and righties, from Presidential candidates to Senate pages, are saying, no one has done more to improve tear apart the health care system in this country. In a collection of 535 bastards, he is the biggest longest lasting, and most distinguished bastard of the bunch. The tragedies he's lived through in his family don't buy him one iota of excuse for what he's done to this country.

And on the subject of tragedies, Teddy, how's those lifeguarding lessons going? Saved anybody - anybody at all - from drowning yet?

Look, I don't want him dead. I don't even want him gravely ill. What I want is his fat pompous ass out of my goddamn life. My sincerest hope is that he enjoys a full recovery, then decides that he's tired of fucking up everybody's health and prosperity and safety and families and freedom, and makes his farewell bow to the Senate.

My fantasy, though I can't really call it a hope, is that he has an epiphany laying in that hospital bed. An epiphany that reveals to him where all that great medical care really comes from, and in a fit of remorse devotes the rest of his life to trying to undo the incalculable damage he's done to everyone his efforts have ever touched.

He'd barely be able to make a dent, but I'd give him credit, even the admiration that he's enjoyed unearned for so long, for sincerely trying.

It ain't gonna happen. He's a threat to every free person in this country, and by extension, the whole world. When and if he returns to the Senate, he will continue to tear people's lives apart. No, I don't wish him dead, but if this seizure is more severe than it sounds at the moment, and not just the DT's, then I won't miss him one bit when he's burning in hell.

It'll be nothing compared to what he's left us.

We do things a little different here in Arizona. Worked on a new roof today, and got about a fourth of it done. I'll do another fourth each weekend, and that should get it all done before it rains.

OK, it's not really a new roof. It's just another of the odd things I've had to get used to here. For instance, there's no insulation in my house, except for a thin layer of fiberglass above the ceiling. Don't really need it, though in the summer it would probably help some. There's no screen on my back door, so at night we get the occasional moth or other flying pest, even a mosquito once in a while, if we leave the door open after dark. Most houses and even businesses are cooled by blowing air across a wet sponge. Works great until the humidity gets above 50%, which it does - with temperatures remaining in the high 90's and 100's - from late June through late August. And you have to spend a hundred bucks on new "pads" every four or five years, plus the annual ritual of cleaning winter's accumulated algae and cruft out of the pads and reservoir.

Then there's the roof itself. Mine is just raw plywood. Sure, a lot of the fancy new houses those people from California are building have Spanish tile, but thats just for show. What keeps the rain out here is a giant rubber sheet over the roof. It comes in 5-gallon buckets and is applied with a regular paint roller. The buckets cost about $80 each (I'll be needing four of them), unless you buy the cheap stuff. And by cheap stuff, it means that it wears out in two or three years instead of five. Oh, and it's not as white. See, one of the big selling points is the reflectivity. Some of them even have titanium flakes in them to make them even more white and more reflective. It's probably enough to blind passing airplanes in a giant solar oven made from all those reflective roofs all over the city.

So my new roof, or one five-gallon bucket's worth, took about an hour before breakfast to put on. And since we're expecting rain in six weeks, I need to stay on top of things like that.

Rule of Life #462: Never, EVER, buy a plastic pepper mill. Just trust me on this. I know, I know, it did seem like a good idea at the time, but it's not. I learned my lesson the hard way, so you don't have to. I don't want to talk about it. Lets just say that if the dog gets into the garbage to go after my uneaten eggs today, he'll learn his lesson, too.

With all the complainin' I do here, I thought it would be nice to talk about someone I've had a great experience with. I've lately been making a point of honing and developing my practical, hands-on skills - the kind that requires actual tools and a good hand cleaner. Owning a 30 year old house that I've done harely any maintenance on in the 5 years I've owned it pretty much forces my hand on that, but rather than just forcing myself to get done whatever needs doing, or paying someone to do it, I've jumped in with all (well, most) of the enthusiasm I bring to learning a lot of other things.

This means a lot of trips to Home Depot, and the like. Home Depot used to be great, but they've really let themselves go lately. I'm sure you're familiar with the "can somebody help me... help meee.... help meeeeee... echoing through the vast empty Grand Canyon of Home Depot aisles, with nobody in sight, possibly for days. I've seen those orange-vested maniacs actually turn and run at the sound of "excuse me...". I swear I once saw a tumbleweed bouncing down the aisle, and there's the story of the guy who died of thirst in the lawn-tractor section, whose body was not discovered for two weeks.

OK, I made all that up, so, Home Depot corporate toady, put the phone down, you don't need your lawyers. And Lowe's is not one bit better. Well, except for the month after the new Lowe's opened up a half mile from the Home Depot I go to - they both had absolutely fawning "associates" and every checkout lane open all day for that month. After that, not so much.

Oh, did I say I was not going to complain? So, I've started preferring Ace Hardware, and they're pretty good, but their selection is limited. Still, it's a far better experience than HD or Lowe's, and even with the limited selection, they have things that the Big Two wouldn't even think to carry. But if you don't live in Tucson, prepare to get jealous, because the real gem only has stores here.

Naughton's specializes in HVAC and plumbing. They're about a tenth the size of an HD, but their selection within their specialty is far better. Good prices too, and they'll order whatever they don't have. But the best is their customer service. It's the prefect mix of helpful and not overbearing.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided it was time to learn how to work with copper pipe - before I needed to, since I expect half the copper in this house to just explode or completely disintegrate any day now, and some of it already has. I read up on the basics, and headed to Naughtons for the first time. I wandered in and looked around for a bit, to get the lay of the land, see where the best watering holes were, that kind of thing. Then I looked up with that expectant look that says "can you help me..." No echo this time. Here, the guy was at my side like he'd been waiting for that look, but wouldn't bother me until I'd sent a clear signal. It's as good as the waitress that always keeps your coffee or drink full, but never interrupts your conversation.

Anyway, I told the guy I was a total noob, and just wanted a random selection of pipe and fittings, and all the other goodies. He was right on top of it, finding all the things I'd need (torch, cutter, solder and flux, etc.), including the ones I wouldn't have thought of or forgotten (burnishing cloth). He showed some of the more expensive varieties, but made it clear that the less expensive stuff was all I'd need to get started. And then he gave me a quick primer on soldering the pipes.

It's hard to explain just how perfect this was. Very few businesses of any kind get this customer service thing down just right. It's partly a function of knowing and caring about the things you sell, but it's also about dealing with customers as people instead of statistics, and approaching the interaction as a person rather than a talking monkey trying to execute a pre-planned and scripted one-size-fits-all piece of performance art. I'm not your audience, I'm a guy that has questions and needs and am willing to spend money to get them answered and fulfilled. The more quickly you move me towards the checkout lane, the less stuff I'll have in my cart, and the less quickly I'll be back.

My second trip to them just now, for a much more mundane purpose, was just as good. And at a different location, too, so it tells me it's the way they operate, not just a particularly good employee - an "isolated incident".

And while I'm at it, have I mentioned that Amazon just completely kicks ass? I needed a bench vice to hold the pipe while I soldered, and since it's a generally handy thing to have. This one from Stanley, was just perfect. Steel construction, removable rubber pads on the jaws with v-notches underneath for holding round objects like copper pipe, and a three-axis adjustable head angle. It's the perfect light-duty thing for what I needed, and it was under $30.00 total price on Amazon, with free two-day shipping with Amazon Prime.

I know, Billy, it's not really capitalism at work here, but occasionally the basic decency, innovation, and moral self-interest of the human race manages to make that wooden decoy function as a pretty good fascimile of an actual duck. Despite all the obstacles to it, a lot of people really do want to trade value for value, and quite a few manage to make it happen anyway.

I've apparently managed to shock Glenn. Though if he thinks I might be right, it's technically not cynical.

Here's a brief science quiz for ya. If you pump water up a hill so that it can run back down the hill and power an electrical generator, how much electricity will you net benefit?

The state of Utah was apparently not interested in the scientific question. That's just engineering details to be worked out later. No, the most important question is how much environmental damage will their perpetual motion machine cause?

OK, the project actually seeks to time-shift energy usage by doing the pumping in off-peak hours and using to generate power during peak hours. But it's still a net loss of electricity, despite the claim in the article that:

Symbiotics LLC, in arguing for the project, pointed to hydroelectricity's renewable energy potential and claimed the project could meet about 85 percent of Utah's current peak energy demands if used in concert with conservation efforts.

They still need a power plant somewhere to supply 100% of Utah's current power demands, plus whatever additional this Roosevelt-esque make-work project. That would be, for the math challenged among you, greater than 100%. It's theoretically possibly they'd have to build a new power plant to meet the extra demand. I guess they plan to make it up in volume.

These people better not laugh too hard at the penis thievery panic in the Congo.