Author Archives: Shadowtwin

Randy Johnson; Weird search strings

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There are only a couple of things that are on my mind today, so this will likely be a short one even by my standards. That being said I will get right to it.

• Being an Arizonan, I was just as excited about Randy Johnson’s perfect game as the next guy, even more so in a lot of cases I am sure. Since it was only the 17th perfect game in recorded history it is quite an accomplishment. The fact that Jonhson was able to do it at the age of 40 is mind-boggling. Understanding that he is a major league athlete, and as such will excercise as one, his body can not possibly be in the kind of shape it was ten or twenty years ago. He does deserve all the congratulations that he is getting. Not some two-bit guy like me to criticize it, but I pay for the opportunity to bitch, so bitch I shall.

There are a lot of factors that contribute to pitching a perfect game. First and foremost you need to be a top notch pitcher like, say, Randy Johnson. Second you have to have an umpire that is a bit lenient about the actual strike zone, as a pitch an inch too high/low or too far out/in side could ruin the whole thing. The third thing (in my mind) that has to happen is all on the pitcher, and that is that he has to keep it perfect for three or four innings; if he strikes out 8 over four innings and the other three are routine flyballs and maybe a grounder to first the rest of the guys are going to start to feel the energy. Once those three things have happened it is no longer just about the pitcher, unless he happens to strike out the last fifteen guys, which is unlikely. This is the point where a lot of perfect games become ‘no-hitters’.

Having watched only one perfect game, but seeing many ‘no-hitters’, or perfect until the ninth inning games, I have worked out a theory on how one could pitch the ‘perfect game’.

While a lot of people are rooting for the pitcher, a lot of people are also rooting against him; The perfect game would be lost if you were not a respected pitcher. No one, save the fans of the team, would want to see an unknown rookie throwing a perfect game, you need to have enough respect in the baseball community that the opposing fans are even on board with you achieving this feat.

This one doesn’t carry much weight considering the Current Standings, but you must be playing a team that is not really all that good to begin with. Johnson was facing a team that had 18 strike-outs against the Brewers (of all teams) a day or two before.

Now the aforementioned team energy needs to come into play. Can you imagine what it would feel like to be the guy who bobbled the ball at second that cost someone a perfect game? I can’t, but I also don’t make a ton of money, thus insuring that I will be in the public eye for all of my life. That is why it is up to the pitcher alone to keep it perfect for three or four innings, long enough for the rest of the guys on the team to get it in gear. Keep in mind that the rest of the guys on the team play 162 games a year while the pitcher plays every, what, fourth game? The guys on the field need to realize that it is happening so that they can wake up just long enough to make it happen. If you think that it is akin to blasphomy to say that, you haven’t seen a lot of ball games. Having attended a few of the games myself, I have seen that a lot of the players (outfielders in particular) sometimes seem to forget that they are playing the game at all. One of the players (for the Reds) that was in the outfield actually took off his shoe and was shaking it out while there was someone up to bat.

Now that we have very good pitching, respect from the fans (even opposing fans), and a really bad team to play against, there is still one more thing that needs to be factored in. That one thing is the guy on the other team that is an asshole for the sake of being an asshole. This is not really a concrete term that should be attached to the guy, but I am going to use it whenever possible. The scenario would go thusly:

The opposing pitcher has a perfect game going.

It is the ninth inning.

Your team is down by two runs.

There is no one on base.

There are already two outs.

You bunt to get on base.

I don’t think that the previous scenario has ever happened, but I bet that it will if it hasn’t.

The only thing that I am intending to say here is that it takes a lot more than a good pitcher to pitch a perfect game. All of the players on a team are involved in it. From the catcher that sends the calls to the pitcher, to the lowly outfielder (who is likely bored in a perfect game), the whole team must come together to help the pitcher achieve greatness. I bet that the pitcher knows this as well and likely will buy them all dinner and drinks after the game.

• The other thing that I wanted to mention is the weird strings that have resulted in people looking at my site through Google.

Two people clicked through on “drod roaches”, that one I can kind of understand since the drod website was (is?) still down, and I had mentioned them previously.

I had one click on “emachines 466is cpu upgrade”, of course when I googled that I am right near the top, but I shouldn’t be. I was bitching about my emachines antiquity, then talking about upgrading to a new system. I guess they do have to just go by what is on the page though, as opposed to what you were thinking/writing.

The third Google search really freaks me out. Someone searched for “tomorrow site:shadowtwin.com”. I am pretty sure that the word ‘tomorrow’ is going to be in a lot of my posts. Why would someone search for that particular word on this site? If I said, “tomorrow, goat porn”. Wouldn’t you search my site for goat porn? Or would you think that I had somehow forgotten to describe the goat porn as “goat porn”? I don’t know, that one just seemed a bit weird to me.

ICQ; Abu Ghraib

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I didn’t have to work late today so there will be an update! Rejoice or find medication depending on how you feel about my little update things.

I spoke yesterday about the local election. Well the election had the highest turn out that we have had in my memory, with over a thousand votes cast. The person that I (and my wife) voted for lost by thirteen votes. Keep that in mind when you are talking about your vote not counting. I bet we could just walk around town and find thirteen people that would have voted for our guy had they known it was going to be that close. I am sure that the same could be said for the other guy as well, though the last position that he ran for was city council and he won that by a lot. It was my thinking that a lot of the people who didn’t show up to vote were going to vote for the guy who lost, but didn’t vote because the guy who won had won his last post in a landslide. I suppose it is like being really drunk and hooking up with a transvestite hooker at last call, you only regret it the next day, and for the rest of your life, or so I’ve heard. Yes, I do believe that was the worst analogy of all time! Daddy always told me if I was going to write really bad analogies I had to be the best.

I had not used ICQ for several years, now I find that it is on this new machine. I am not sure why I quit using it, wait, oh, yes, okay, one day it just quit working and they wanted me to download a newer version of it and I just really didn’t want to. All the people that were on my list were people that had found my number through my old website or the Megadeth chat. Not really the type of individuals that I really would like to currently try to hold a conversation with. Unless of course we were trying to recreate the famous Budweiser commercial. To my surprise, my old ICQ number still worked after all of these years. The number is 14479550. If you wonder why I remember that, go ahead and ask why I know that the license plate on my boss’s truck is af410p, or why I know that the van is ‘510lzn’, or why I know the corvette that my dad drove had the plate ‘jng457’ (he died 14 years ago, btw). My first motorcycle had the plate ‘m413432’, which I remember mostly because it was quite similar to my dad’s driver’s license which was ‘1343132’. I don’t know why but I just genarally remember trivial numbers after a single glance. I haven’t yet figured out how to use all the credit card numbers that I have memorized for evil, but when I do, boy god there are going to be a lot of pizzas going to a couple of people that I strongly dislike.

• I checked out the Political Animal website again today and it turns out that there are a lot of stories breaking about the abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison and the possibility that someone other than the few people who were photographed may have been involved…DUH!…If you are doing something that you know is wrong you are not going to pose for photos. If, however, your head of command comes in and says, “I wonder what they would look like in a naked pyramid.” That might make you want to 1) force them to get into a naked pyramid and 2) not be afraid to be photographed while doing it.

I don’t see any other way this could have happened. Of course there is all the requisite double-talk and blatant untruthful information coming from people the higher up you get in the chain of command, but it is all a load of steamy, smelly crap.

I just tried to google up a story about the guy in the fifties (I think) that used a little box to study how far a person would go when being commanded. I was not able to find the story that I was looking for, but it broke down thusly. Someone would apply for and get a job to test a new machine that was meant to cause harm to another human. An anonymous person in a lab coat would tell him to intensify the pain at regular intervals. No one was being hurt, there was just a tape playing of someone screaming in different degrees of pain as the dial got turned ever higher (yet the subject person on the dial did not know that). Most of the people would turn the dial past the point where it said certain injury or death. As I said, I was not able to find an actual article about the machine or the tests that they did, but I think that is quite relevant for the situation in Abu Ghraib. Hell, I think just the fact that I can now spell that without having to go to google must prove something…

I really think that the people who were in charge at that prison knew exactly what was going on, hell, they were probably the photographers. No one would have ever said a word about it had the U.S. media not got a hold of it and started to strangle it. Whether this is good or bad is something that is quite subjective. Does humiliating foriegn soldiers actually make them give up information? Does treating the same soldiers humanely make them less likely to divulge information? The truth about all that happened at Abu Ghraib will never be known, or if it is ever known it will be fifty years from now when the history channel can interview some of those that were involved while they are on their death beds.

I really believe that what we are seeing here is just a microcosm of the totally inept and monumentally fucked-up approach that Dubya adopted when he decided to attack IRAQ. It is like he thought that since his daddy was able to just walk right through Kuwait, he would do the same in IRAQ. The one thing that he totally forgot to factor in was that his daddy really did liberate Kuwait from the evil IRAQ, while he was trying liberate the evil IRAQ from a single guy. Iraq didn’t want to be ‘populated’ by our military, they wanted Saddam and his regime gone and then they would figure something out. Had we left Iraq very shortly after Saddam and his cohorts fled the country, and left Iraq to liberate themselves, we would be in far better shape than wer are now. After all, a forced democrocy is little more than a tyranny with a different name.

Once again this has gone political, I must end this now. I will leave you with a final thought, “Vote Quimby”.

Testing viruses; Bullshit news story

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Not a lot to talk about today. It was local election day. Yet they held an entire election for thse single purpose of electing a new mayor. That seemed like a monumental waste of taxpayer money to me. Sure all of the people that they staff during the voting are volunteers, but to print out all of the ballots and to rent (I assume) all of the equipment that they use for the vote is really just depressing. If they were only going to have a single thing on the ballot, couldn’t they have instead just got us all in an auditorium for two minutes and then just done a quick show of hands? It certainly would have been infinitely easier, but that would have made the ballot pretty public as opposed to ‘secret’. Why can’t they work out an internet voting thing that runs by your social security number? You log in with the number and some personal information, make a quick vote and log out. Faster, easier better all around. If you are concerned about the possibility of cheating, keep in mind that the person who gave me a ballot didn’t even check my ID, and I didn’t give her my full name, I just said ‘B,U,R’ to get her to the correct page, after that I could have picked from quite a few different names. At least with the internet idea I would have to know someones social, as well as having other information about them. Pointless speculating though.

• This is just something that I have been a tad curios about for the last few days. Let’s say that you are a budding programmer, you aren’t able to get the job that you really want and so you decide to go ahead and code a malicious virus. How do you test that? Sure you have now written the ultimate malicious program and all, but if there were typos it wouldn’t work, right? Do you have to run the thing on your own machine first to make sure that it infects the boot sector just how you had planned? How about one of the viruses that spreads through email, do you just go ahead and send it to your friends and family and make sure that it goes to their friends? Just a curious thought.

• Now for possibly the least believable news story of all time! That is of course not counting all of the stuff that you see in things like the ‘Enquirer’ and ‘Sun’. This one, I think, is trying to be serious and quite matter-of-fact. It is also complete and total bullshit.

Graphic, Violent Images Can Curb Kids’ Aggression. Now that is a hell of a headline. That is also a headline that is going to take a hell of a convincing argument to back up. I must mention that the headline itself seems out of context considering what the story talks about but still it is a damn bold headline. For the sake of brevity I will just quote a single paragraph from the story, then add my spin.

After looking at those pictures, participants showed signs that they would be “less likely to solve interpersonal conflict in a violent way,” study author Dr. Edward E. Cornwell, III told Reuters Health.

That quote was in referrence to having 9-17 year olds look at images of people in the emergency room after having been shot, stabbed or otherwise mutilated. It is much like when I had to watch all of the videos in driver’s education about people getting in horrible car crashes and then going to the emergency room. Sure I drove better for about a day, then it was back to the insane way that a teenager will drive. Perhaps that few seconds of clarity can change a life or two, but when the majority of them are going to go back home and play some game like ‘Hitman’ or ‘Grand theft auto’, where there appear to be no consequences for violence, I find it difficult to believe that they will actually change their tendencies based on a photo. For the most part when teens reach their mid-twenties they begin to understand that they are adults and that is when they decide to start being actual citizens. It doesn’t require any horrible images, it just requires one too many times of waking up in a pool of your own vomit in the back of your neighbor’s station wagon. This is, of course, my opinion on the matter and without any substantial proof to back it up. Does that differ in some way from the article I am talking about? I don’t think so.

To put a different light on the same idea, let us say that we start showing horny teen-aged boys porno videos. Sure they are going to be less likely to have sex in the very immediate future (like the next ten minutes), but then they will begin to crave it. I suppose that it is a little bit different but I can’t really see how. Show them people being killed and they won’t kill, show them people having sex and they won’t have sex. I don’t think either of those ideas are sound enough to even try to do a comprehensive study on.

Perhaps if there were more shows that showed the actual results from your decision to kill, like the shows on A&E that show the one time killer spending his life in prison for a few furious seconds that he would really like to have back. That would probably be a better premise to use than showing horrible photos. Or how about having the parents of the person that he killed being let alone with him in a room, with a board, with a nail in it, while he is tied up, and they have an hour of ‘No questions asked’ interrogation. The parents would not be prosecuted if he somehow died. That might slow it down.

I don’t like where I am going with this and I have even deleted a few parapraphs that I thought were a bit too harsh. I hope you were able to see my actual point, whether you saw the point or not, my email address is below and I welcome your comments.

Collection agency; News; Gay marriage

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I was thinking that when I got home from work today I would go ahead and finish off cleaning up the chaos that is the ‘computer room’. Instead, I got a letter in the mail from a collection agency regarding a long distance company that I have not had for several months. I did a quick check of my banking register to find that yes the amount in question was 103.53, and the check for it had been written and mailed forever and a day ago. I don’t keep my bank statements anymore so I had to get online to find the particular check (706 in this case) to make sure that it had been cashed. The company had cashed the check a couple of weeks ago, then turned me over to a collection agency without even sending me one of those demanding ‘final notice’ type letters. So, I called the collection agency to give them the information about the check, the date it was cashed and an offer to get a copy of the check emailed to them. She asked me to hold for a moment, I assume she was calling the referring company at that point, then came back on and said that the processing time for payments can sometimes be longer than expected, but noted that if I call her back in a week we can see if the problem has resolved itself.

I know that companies make this type of error frequently, I do not really hate them for it as it is just a clerical error that is usually quite easy to fix. What can their defense possibly be when you produce a copy of the check that they cashed? The thing that I find irritating is that she would not say that, yes, the company had cashed the check weeks ago and it was an error on their part to turn the bill over to collection. So will my credit report now show that I left the bill unpaid long enough for it to be turned over to a collection agency, while the reality is that the bill had long been paid? If that turns out to be the case I will likely be more than irritated, hostile perhaps. And honestly if they thought that I had not paid them, why not one of those lame courtesy calls that could have cleared it all up when I explained to them that they had cashed the check? I am not entirely sure if companies moving their call centers to foriegn countries is really working out all that well in that respect.

Hopefully this situation will not escalate to the point where I have to get the Attorney General involved. That may seem far fetched, but my wife had to do exactly that to get her cell phone company to finally admit that they had cashed her check. We still don’t know whose account they posted that payment to, but it certainly wasn’t hers and it took government intervention to get the matter cleared up. Now That is customer service.

• I haven’t posted many news items here lately since the only thing there seems to be to post is about prison abuse. Today, however, I found a few things that I am going to comment on, not because they are newsworthy but because they are humorous, except one.

I usually just read the headlines from Yahoo News, and the little story that they have there, if the story interests me I will go to a major news site and search for the subject. This has worked pretty well for me in the past, it seems that I may have been getting a lot of bogus information though.

The first instance can be found Here. It is in regards to drugs being used by participants in the Olympics. But read this quote:

Greene said Monday he stands behind the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency rule that can bar an athlete from competing in the Athens Olympics without a positive drug test. On Sunday, Jones said she would go to court if USADA held her out because of the rule.

I read that paragraph several times to make sure that I was seeing it as it appeared and not omitting any words. You see the thing is that most athletes get banned from the sport because they test positive for drugs. So is that saying that we actually require our Olympians to use drugs? If that is the case then perhaps the athletes in question should just smoke a joint and get re-tested.

This one is pretty good also. It is an article about states that are run by republicans raising taxes. And at quite an alarming rate:

Ohi o. Spending in the Buckeye state has risen 71% during the past decade, when Republicans have controlled both the governor’s office and the legislature. To fund this spending, Republican Gov. Bob Taft, backed by the GOP legislature, has increased the sales tax by 20%, upped the gasoline tax by two cents a gallon and increased numerous small business fees.

Wow. The sales tax here just went up by 2/10ths of a percent (city tax) and I found that a bit irritating. Imagine if someone suddenly upped your sales tax by 20%! That would likely be the start of a revolt. I think that what they mean is that if the tax there was 10% previously it is now 12%, yet since the tax itself is measured in percentage it makes it look like it would have gone from 10% to 30%. Perhaps they could have elaborated on that just a bit to let you know exactly what they were trying to say?

I have said it since day one, I don’t proofread. It may be a fault but it is all mine. I really think that a site as popular as Yahoo News should go ahead and do a bit of proofreading.

• Here is a news item that is just plain depressing. Dubya has decided to start attacking gay marriage again. Could there be a worse time for him to do it? Actually I guess the question should be could there be a better time for him to do it. A quote from the article:

Noting that he had called on Congress some time ago to pass a constitutional amendment banning such marriages, Bush said “the need for that amendment is still urgent, and I renew that call today.”

Hmmm. Makes me wonder why this is suddenly ‘urgent’. Maybe he actually has advisors that read the latest popularity surveys for him and let him know that he doesn’t have much time left in office? Imagine if they do get that legislation pushed through. In they eyes of all but the most hardcore right-wing supporters, the legacy of Dubya will be failing to finish the job that his daddy started and pushing western society back a few decades by making homosexuality illegal. How can anyone have a set of beliefs that are just so idiotic and be in control of the most powerful country on earth?

Well I guess that is about enough for today. Check back tomorrow for more of my cheery, happy writing.

Wal-Mart; PCs

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Well Sunday has been a lot of fun, in a masochistic sort of way. I wanted to get my hands on a cheap value-priced top quality desk to set up the old pc on. I did a quick check at Walmart.com to see what was available in what price range, as the selection at our nearest Walmart is always vastly different than the Walmart anywhere else in the world. I then went to the nearest walmart and got undercharged on both a desk and a chair for said machine. Unfortunately they didn’t have the fifty dollar one that I saw on the internet, no they had one for $38.92 that was way bigger/better than the fifty dollar one on the website, and no shipping charge as a bonus. With the money that I had saved on that item, I decided I would go ahead and buy a new chair also. The chair is also not available at their website, but I got both the desk and the chair for fifty-seven dollars and change. I think that is pretty damn good for a usable desk and a chair that has wheels and lumbar support. Of course I did pay damn near the same price for my last chair alone, which I think I got at an Office Depot or a Staples, greedy sons of bitches…

The particular Wal Mart that we visited is not exactly the most ritzy one, and that is saying a lot, being that it is a Wal mart. The majority of the furniture that they had available didn’t even have sample pieces that were already constructed for you to admire. No, we just looked at the little 3X5 inch photos on the sides of the boxes to see which one seemed to be the most appropriate for the space we had, as well as the best value for the money. The one that we both thought was the best value, as well as being most appropriate for the space, was the one that I picked up…literally…

I read somewhere that once every two hours someone, somewhere files a lawsuit against WalMart. Those suits are for damn good reason, if the entire company runs the way the one I frequent does. We had made the decision to buy that particular desk, so I did the conscious shopper thing and went to the ‘layaway center’ where they generally have the large, flat carts to carryout such large, heavy items. There was a call made over the intercom for customer service to bring one of the carts to the furniture area, so I went back confident that the cart would soon arrive. It never did. After about ten minutes of waiting I was thinking, and said, something very similar to, “Fuck it, how much could this thing possibly weigh?” At that point I drug out one of the boxes, asked the wife to carry the little chair (in a box also) and headed for the register. The question of how much it could weigh is not rhetorical, I found out exactly how much it weighed. It breaks down like this; it weighed about 60 pounds for the first ten seconds, 70 pounds for the next five, and after that it just gained 10 pounds for every five seconds I was carrying it, which thankfully only took a minute and a half or so.

The evil, caniving part of me really wishes that I would have somehow injured my back in the process so that I could have sued them, while the real me is just happy that I didn’t wait for whatever teenager would have shown up with the cart. Invariably the people that they send to move large items are teens. Teens that look like it might kill them if they were to have lift anything as heavy as a bowling ball. After ten minutes of waiting for the second coming of Christ cart, I just dragged the thing to the register my damn self.

The only saving grace for Wal Mart is that they undercharged me by two cents on the chair, and by three dollars and ninety-two cents on the desk. I am an honest person and will usually point out when they undercharge me, today I SO didn’t. To further that, if I am riding a bull next Friday and I somehow get injured, I am going to attribute that directly to the terrible pain that I felt while I was having to carry that very heavy desk up to the register at Wal Mart. They could have provided me with a cart, but chose not to…

Unfortunately it only got worse from there. But, totally unrelated to Wal Mart.

You know how you have that drawer in your kitchen where you throw all the miscellaneous junk that you don’t know if you will ever need, we have expaned that drawer to occupy almost three full rooms in our house. Unfortunately, the room where we keep the computer is the one that I am pretty much solely responsible for. You would not believe how much dust can accumulate on vertical surfaces had you not been in the room that I was trying to clean out today. Sure it was all based on the ash of my cigarettes but come on. I had to take one of the shelves outside and hose it down to get it back to its normal state, and I may have to do that with the other shelf also if I ever get the inclination to spend the better part of my only day off making this room look clean.

I did, however, achieve the goal of having two working computers in the same room. I am not sure how that will ever work into my evil little plan, but it must play a role.

The immediate upside for me is that I can copy some of my web stuff over here, as opposed to having to write it all again. Also, I found a paper copy of an old Witles story that I thought was gone forever.

I think the wife also likes the idea that she will have her own computer to play with. She can play some online games while I type this out, and vice-versa. Yet I still don’t have any intention of installing the imaging software for the new camera on this machine, as I have no clue about windows XP and how to disable the software when it is not in use (which is most of the time at this camp).

The new desk lead to a chain-reaction that required me to clean the room up a bit, so maybe it was for the best. Time will tell.

Oral sex as birth control

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I got off of work late today and had every intention of not doing a post. Then I happened upon an article that just has so many tangents that one could write about that I simply can not resist putting in my two cents. This may not be the best subject for me to tackle but I am going to give it a go anyway.

The article in question is Oral sex lessons to cut rates of teenage pregnancy . It is a very short read, but such a fascinating subject. There are many other positives to teens engaging in oral sex, yet saving their ‘virginity’ for their life partner. It slows or stops the spread of AIDS (in their demographic) for instance. I can always trust that Flux over at BlackChampagne will have written something whenever I try to get into any sex discussion, and you will see that again, I was not disappointed I always enjoy reading the stuff that he writes regarding sex, as he has a way of making it more humorous than it should ever be, take the first line from his bit about the subject for instance, he says, “A study of the infection rates of swallowing fellatio-ers shows that none of them have reported HIV from their tasty non-dairy treat indulgence.”

At any rate, The original article (which, I must note, is a British article) goes on to say,

Encouraging schoolchildren to experiment with oral sex could prove the most effective way of curbing teenage pregnancy rates, a government study has found. Pupils under 16 who were taught to consider other forms of ‘intimacy’ such as oral sex were significantly less likely to engage in full intercourse, it was revealed.

I really think this is quite a wonderful approach to solving an age old problem, though the diseases and teen pregnancy are not really an ‘age old problem’, which is where the U.S. just totally loses touch with reality.

Times have changed a bit since the time when the white-haired guys who are now running the country were in their teens. The old-school idea of preaching abstinence is just not getting us anywhere. The fact that the Republican White House is also trying to keep from offering birth control to teens is worsening the problem. In the minds of the people who are trying to make the abstinence/no birth control thing work we are still in like 1950. Whether the times were really that different when they were in their teens, or whether a simple ‘hand-job’ was what worked to sate their desires is something that that we will never know. What we do know is that teen pregnancy is exploding all over the country, as are the spread of Sexually Transmitted Diseases.

Why is the U.S. the country that still clings to such old taboos about sex? Britain has seen that their teen pregnancy rate has skyrocketed, and are now planning to inform (not teach) children about other means of sexual gratification in order to slow it down. The U.S. is standing pat with the ‘if we keep telling them not to have sex, eventually they will listen’ approach. I don’t know, I think Britain has better odds at success. Perhaps a plan such as theirs could also mean that a girl could lose her virginity when she was really ready to, as opposed to the basic ‘date-rape’ situation that has probably claimed the virginity of more than half of all women.

Another consideration which I had not thought about until just now is that, in the teens, traditional intercourse would not benefit the girl in any way. Leave her scarred for life, sure, but satisfied?? Big NO on that front. Your average male at that age could probably have an orgasm if a pretty girl was walking down the aisle on the school bus. I have never been female and at that age, but I am thinking that it takes a bit more than a second-and-a-half of phallus insertion to reach the ‘pleasure level’.

If informing (not teaching) students about oral sex could slow down the teen pregnancy rate, and thus cut down on our taxes, as there are less bastard children to raise, why not give it the thumbs up? Honestly, even if the thought of ‘oral sex’ sickens you (male or female), would it be worse to mother/father a child that is born with AIDS, or to take the initiative and make sure that there would be no child, if even just to grow up a bit yourself?

I have long been saying that I would rather pay for teen birth control than to pay for the bastard child that will likely be on government assistance until the day he/she dies. The ‘oral sex ed.’ thing seems to be working in Britain, as it has lowered teen prenancy by 20% in test schools. Those are numbers that I can get behind. But then I was a teen-aged boy at one point, and I would have ‘gotten behind’ damn near anything that wiggled.

Meta blogging; Abu Ghraib

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I spent a bit of time on Wednesday, and an hour and a half today, getting finished with the March 2004 archive page . That, of course, required reading through my posts from the month of March which, while time-consuming, was a lot less depressing than I thought it might be. It turns out that it really is better to let what you have written sit there for at least a month before you try to read it and do a short description, as it seems that you are looking at it with fresh eyes. There were a couple of essay type things that I wrote during the month of March that I think were really quite good. There may be some point later when I pick a couple of them out and post a section of ‘stuff I wrote that doesn’t totally suck’ on here, but that would make people quit reading my daily update, which usually does suck, and then just go to the link for the stuff that doesn’t suck. The inherent problem is that I do not know if what I am writing sucks until I read it a lot later than when I write it. In my mind everything I write sucks, only time can clear my mind enough to look at what I have written with a clear perspective and that does not lend itself to making sure that every word I put down is worth the paper keyboard it is written on.

The other thing that I noticed as I was reading through the old posts is that I seem to be getting progressively better at getting my idea down as time goes on. It seems that with each new post I get just a bit better at keeping all of the ideas in my head long enough to put each one down and move on, while in the earliest posts I was trying to type all of them at once and often lost most of them in the process. The result of that was that each paragraph that I had written would look like it was four paragraphs that I had taken a sentence or two from and tried to make into a single, flowing concept. It was shit, honestly. Though I am always my worst critic, I am sure that anyone reading this would really have to agree that my writing in this form has gotten better from when I started. That being said, I still have a long way to go to make entire posts that will hold a reader’s attention and not make me look like the ass that I am. But isn’t that what I signed up for when I started this whole page in the first place?

• I haven’t posted any news here for a while, not for lack of trying. I was hoping to get a bit or two up here today, but it seems that all there is to talk about anymore is the damn Abu Ghraib garbage. Don’t get me wrong, I think that what our people did to those prisoners was inhumane. From the pictures that I have seen, though, it did not seem as there was any physical abuse to the men. It was sick and wrong for anyone to even stage the events for such photos, but it happened, and we (the U.S.) did it to prisoners of war (well I guess there is a loophole so they aren’t actually POW’s, still it was inhumane). If we (the U.S.) can’t understand that the entire world has a microscope on the way we are handling ourselves in the so-called ‘War on Terror’ this is going to get infinitely worse for our brave men and women who are there actually fighting it.

Whether those photos were staged by the U.S. troops who posed in them as ‘trophies’ to take home with them, or if that is the way we treat prisoners on a daily basis seems to be a dead discussion in every nation except ours. Less than half of our country is behind the war in Iraq at this point and I don’t think we have any allies left that would actually send more troops over to help us if it came to that. That whole war has gone completely to hell. I am pretty sure that Dubya doesn’t mind, since it has driven oil prices over forty dollars a barrel, and that is extra profit for him, but now it appears that he is ready to bail out. Just makes me wonder what his reason for bailing out is, the fact that he has a financial windfall with oil prices skyrocketting, or the fact that an american civilian got his head cut off.

That is exactly why I don’t like to talk politics. I have some pretty strong views, and Dubya is such an easy target. I sure wish I hadn’t voted for him, but I did. So, please, to help clear my conscience, do not vote for him next election. We have seen the FUBAR that the country can become when being backed only by ‘big oil’, and that somehow drives the prices up. I am so sickened by the situation that I am honestly thinking about putting down ‘Reagan’ on my vote, as a write-in.

• Guild Wars

Today is the last day of the E3 trial of the aforementioned game. I played it a bit each day that it was online and it seemed pretty cool. The one thing that I question is whether the local PC crashes that I experienced were based on it downloading ever more data, or if my system just can not run the game. I am leaning towards the game downloading as you play, I have all of the minimums beat by a lot but still get weird freezes when trying to play it. I hope that they get that all worked out when they go to Beta testing, which I am sure they will, and the game could be really cool. Also, having the game already installed on your machine, as opposed to having to download each zone that you enter, would likely make it much easier to play. I am not going to throw out an opinion based on my experience as it would be quite negative, if they do have a beta test for it, though, I am going to jump all over that. It would be extremely cool to see such a game in its infancy working towards a world-wide release. I do suppose they would likely be looking for players who had cable or dsl connections though, yet, at the same time they must be trying to sell it to normal people like me who have neither., My hope is not dead yet…

Childhood prostitution averted

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Have you ever had one of those times when someone says something to you and it sparks a memory of some event in your life that you always thought you would never forget, only to realize that you had basically forgotten about it for at least ten years? I had one of those moments today. I don’t recall exactly what was said that made me remember the event, it had something to do with being followed by a car while on a bicycle. Anyway, for the lack of anything better to post I will recount this story from my past. I really shouldn’t, but has that ever stopped me before?

It all happened over summer vacation either the year before or the year after my freshman year of high school, come to think of it it must have happened before my first year of high school as I recall telling the story to someone in drafting class (which I only took my freshman year, elective class, easy A, what could be so hard about drawing a straight line when they require that you use a ruler?). Anyway, as I think about it that would make me a bit younger than I thought I was. Depending on what month it happened I would either have been thirteen or fourteen, either way still pretty damn young as you will no doubt agree.

I was at the little mall in Roseburg, OR. playing video games and ‘cruising for chicks’ in the sense that I was walking around the mall wearing the torn up jeans (with leopard print spandex under them), Def Leppard t-shirt and wearing a ridiculous hat that I got at the county fair. Mind you this was all status quo in the late eighties, I looked like damn near every other kid there. Because my dad didn’t really understand that the price of video games had gone up since he was a kid it didn’t take long to run out of quarters (on a side note, didn’t you just love Guantlet?). As I recall the last game I played that day was “720”, a game which I really sucked at, but I had to give it a try since it was one of the newer games there at the time.

I made one last round of the mall floor, which was really tiny by todays standards; you could get to any store within a minute from any entrance. Unable to find my one true love, I left through the Montgomery Wards where I had left my bicycle locked up. I unchained the bike and started to push it across the parking lot, as I think back I don’t have any idea why I wasn’t riding it across the parking lot, but that is how it happened. I heard a voice over my shoulder shout, “Hey.” I turned around thinking it was probably mall security wanting to give me a pat down, that was commonplace for kids my age at this mall. I asked what he wanted, and was quite surprised by his response.

“How would you like to make some money?” The guy asked me.

Again, in hindsight I should have thought this was a bit odd, but it was the summer and I had been doing odd jobs for a lot of dad’s friends. It was not uncommon that I would work in a yard for eight or ten hours and get only twenty dollars and a glass of lemonade, which was pretty cheap even way back then. So, being naive, I assumed that one of dad’s friends had told one of their friends, and that he somehow knew what I looked like well enough to pick me out of a dozen identically dressed kids my age at the mall. (that does seem pretty far-fetched, but this is how I remember it). So I asked him, “Doing what?”

I sure wish that I had a recording of what he said. I can remember the words that he spoke in vivid detail, I can remember every nuance of his voice. As I sit here typing I can hear it in my head just as if it were an audio file that I was playing on my computer. I will never forget the tone, and the absolute non-chalance of the way he responded with this quote:

“Well, gettin’ kinky, I guess.”

I said no thanks and got onto the bike, he shouted, in the middle of a parking lot, “I’ve got a hundred dollars for you and it won’t take but a half an hour.” I didn’t respond, just pumped the pedals as fast as I could. In my hurry to get away as fast as possible, I made a mistake that could very well have cost me my life, since you are reading this I guess you already know it didn’t, but I will elaborate anyway. There were two ways to get home from the mall, one was along Garden Valley Boulevard which was always dense with traffic and had a lot of stoplights. The other was much faster with no stoplights, but there was also no traffic, that was the way I chose to go, hoping to get home as fast as possible.

I was riding along stewing in anger about what had happened. I wasn’t frightened, as I recall, just violently angry. It was only about a ten minute ride home (well to the friend’s house where my dad was going to pick me up later that day) and I was about a third of the way there when the same guy pulled up next to me in a yellow Chevy Monza. He was keeping pace with me for a few seconds while I tried to ignore him, then he said, “I have two hundred dollars here.”. I was still not interested and just ignored it, knowing that I was only six minutes from home, and maybe three minutes from a very public street. Thankfully, he fell back. Whcich, again, should have been a tigger since I was on a bicycle and he was in a car, but I didn’t think of it at the time.

I had made it about another minute down the road when I saw the car pull up next to me again. The guy had in his hands a bunch of twenty dollar bills, fanned out, and said, “I have three-hundred dollars here, do you know how to play with yourself?” Even though that was more money than I would make for like a few years, I still declined in the only way I knew how, I yelled NO and kept pumping the pedals. Thankfully, for me, the guy then went past me and I never actually saw him again, though I did see his car again 😉 and that is something that I best not speak of here.

Whether the guy went back to the mall and found another adolescent to molest is something that I just do not know. Actually, considering that his car was still in the parking lot of that mall the next night, long after the mall had closed, may point to the fact that he did, or at least tried. When my friends and I were walking home from the roller skating rink the next night, we saw the same yellow chevy monza in the parking lot of the mall, it was the only car there. I grabbed a huge rock from the side of the road and threw it through the windshield. Try to molest me and there are consequences..

Thankfully, I guess, the guy that was pursuing me was only a pediphile. Had he been the type that would rape and torture children, only to toss the bodies over a bridge months later I would have really been fucked. The thing about that whole experience is that it really bolsters my hatred misunderstanding of homosexuals. I do not hate or fear homosexuals, as a matter of fact I have a brother that is homosexual. To my knowledge he has never cruised the local mall looking for barely pubescent boys to take home, if he has done that, my gun will be the first justice to reach him.

Had this been a woman in the same age group as the man was, (of course I remember him as being a geezer, but as I think back on it he had a full head of hair, a mullet actually, and I doubt that he was any older than 35-40 since he didn’t have much grey hair and a really smooth face.) I might not think of it as such a negative experience. Might have expanded my horizons…so to speak…

As I write it, it kind of makes me question what I hated more, the fact that the guy was a pediphile, or the fact that the guy was a Homosexual pediphile. Either way, death would be far too pleasant an option for someone like him. As I previously stated, the non-chalance that he used when he talked of sex made me think that he had done it before and would certainly do it again. I have no doubt in my mind that this guy is now in prison, and probably enjoying the experience, yet as an adult I have to wonder how we can keep freaks like him away from children.

If we had not been in the middle of a city (no matter how small), and had he the inclination to have an orgasm that involved a young boy, I really don’t think that he would have cared if there was life in the body of that boy. I am, of course, speaking from the perspective of someone who is not a pediphile and certainly not a necrophiliac pediphile, I am just saying that I was lucky to be approached by the one that didn’t turn me into part of the new house that they were building.

Pediphiles are one of the most troubling things in the world, in my mind. If you can go to visit a friend and see their child, say 8-12 years old, swimming in a play pool, if you find that erotic you need help. I may not be the most ‘stand up’ citizen in this country, but I certainly do not find it erotic when I see a five-year-old swimming in a pool. If you do fall into the aforesaid demographic, please kill yourself as the lynch mob will be quite unforgiving…

Dogs in the news

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Yesterday’s update was by far the largest one I have done to date. I didn’t think that was going to be the case, as I had no idea what to write about when I began it, that was why I just left the four paragraphs from the previous day on there. As it turns out I had a lot to write about, so much in fact that it bored my wife. I think it was probably because of the subject matter. Also I made reference to airplane parts without really describing what they were, but I figured if you had never built or flown an r.c. plane you likely were going to skip that section anyway.

I fear this update may go even longer since I really don’t have anything to write about today. Nothing in the news is worth posting about, well unless I really wanted to beat the dead horse that is the situation in Iraq and I am so not going there. If you want to know the truth about what the world thinks about the situation in Iraq (as opposed to the US Media blowing sunshine up your ass) just read a paper or website based anywhere except the US. We are pretty much universally hated at this point. Because I like to speculate, and love to look for worst case scenarios, imagine this; The US administration continues to fight in Iraq, despite the whole UN asking us to stand down. The US then invades North Korea, even as the UN advises against it. The UN then eliminates our position in the UN entirely. With us no longer having a say, the rest of the countries decide that we are a major threat and must be eliminated. The UN makes a unanimous decision to invade the US to free the rest of the world from the threat. The majority of our army is still deployed in north Korea and Iraq, so it is no problem for the world’s combined military to land in Canada and begin their attack from there, being as the US/Canadian border is the largest unprotected border in the world. Think about it, what country out there doesn’t have a bone to pick with the US? Our demise would be pretty swift. Hopefully, though, that will be the next video game coming to a store near you and not the truth about what could happen if we continue the path we are on.

• I got an email a few days ago regarding my dogs. I sent an email back in response but, just for fun I am going to post his email here. Unfortunately my exact response to his email is on my old computer and I have no intention of taking the time to plug it back in to quote myself. I remember what I was getting at, so I will write a new response, which may vary vastly from the one I sent him.

No offense intended, but out of curiosity, how do you read this type of article, or the dozens of others like it every year about the latest pit bull mauling/murder, and feel safe with your pets? Blog topic for a pit bull owner, eh?
http://www.thelouisvillechannel.com/news/3243296/detail.html

I mean sure, no one thinks their dogs will ever do that. But then again, that’s what the parents of that little girl thought too, until earlier this week. I’m never relaxed around any dog large enough to possibly do me severe physical harm, and that’s all dogs, not just the types that have been bred for hundreds of generations to be vicious, deadly fighting machines.

I will address his last point first. I know that dogs are basically wolves that have been tamed, and as such they already have it in their genes to kill. When dogs were domesticated, some of them were domesticated a bit less than others, like pit bulls. The thing is that your genes don’t necessarily mean that you are going to be like your ancestors. You are a product of your upbringing, just as a dog is a product of theirs. If you get a puppy and truly love and nurture the dog from birth I bet it is a lot less likely to be vicious than a dog that you buy as a puppy then stick on a ten foot chain in the yard and forget about until the day it either dies or kills.

As far as dogs in general, I am afraid of them also. I am deathly afraid of dogs like rottweilers. Unlike the mixed breed pit-bulls that I own, I have never seen a friendly rottweiler. Those dogs look like killers and are killers. They probably don’t get nearly as much publicity about killing children since any sensible parent would not own one of those dogs if they had children, or vice-versa.

The other thing about pit-bulls is that I think they get a really bum wrap. Both of our dogs are identified as ‘pit-bull mix’ which I think is code for ‘we got no idea’ at the local animal shelter. That way when the dog decides to eat your family they can say, “well we did tell you that it was a pit-bull”. That being whether the dog had any pit-bull in it or not. I say this based on the fact that I was trying to find a picture of a ‘pure bred’ pit-bull while trying to see if that was what our new puppy was, that was when I discovered that the pit-bull can look like a labrador, or a dalmation, or a greyhound, while it is in fact a ‘Bull Terrier’, I am not joking on this. The breed ‘pit bull’ is actually a ‘Bull Terrier”. I have found many images that closely resemble both of my mild-manored dogs.

I actually read a lot more about the “Pit Bull” than I had ever known, while I was at that site. It seems that the Pit Bull is getting even worse publicity than what I was thinking, as evidenced by This Report, which I will quote a bit of:

The odds of being struck by lightning are 1 in 600,000 in the USA. Comparatively speaking you are 6 times more likely to be struck by lightning than you are to be killed by a dog of any breed. When you further break down the odds of being attacked and killed by a Pit Bull the odds are in your favor -approximately 1 in 145,000,000. That’s million folks. In contrast, you are 4 times more likely to be killed by a cow in the USA than any breed of dog, much less a Pit Bull.
So why do some dogs attack?

The answer is quite simple really.

• Irresponsible pet owners.

• Irresponsible parents.

• Instigation by the “so called” victims themselves.

Although there are some bad dogs out there these are in the minority and the tendency is to blame the dogs and / or their owners without just cause.

Now, I am not necessarily trying to defend the pit bull, but after educating myslef on the subject I think that it is far more likely that the dogs involved in the vicious, mutilating attacks are of the rottweiler or doberman breed and mixed with the vicious ‘Bull Terrier’ (as a matter of fact, I can not find a single story at the AKC.org where a registered ‘Bull Terrier’ has ever killed anyone.). At the same time I do read/hear the news, and as such I doubt that I would ever have both a baby and a ‘pit bull’ in the house at the same time. I certainly love my dogs, but if there did happen to be an infant in my home the rules may have to change at least long enough to let the infant develop the ability to walk/run in case it did all go bad.

Survivor; Windows; Childhood hobbies (legal and not)

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Well I spent the majority of yesterday at work. Once I got home the new computer was doing the usual things like updating windows and Norton, which has always seemed a bit odd to me, but I guess they were current when they put the computer together six months ago, patches will always be necessary straight out of the box, or so I tell myself.

I also downloaded and installed a few of the things that I simply must have. Including core files to run a couple of games and some ad removal software and the such. Then, just for fun, I decided to try to download the new GuildWars thing that is supposed to have a free demo in a week or so. I must say that I am quite impressed with the transfer speed. Keep in mind that everything about my system is exactly the same, only the tower has changed, but the downloads over a 56k modem seem notably faster. Could it be that I simply had antiquated drivers for the modem on my old machine, possibly. Could it be that more ram and a faster processor make it faster, possibly. Could it be that I was expecting it to be faster, and as such think that it was faster even if it wasn’t, likely.

I am still not quite sure if I like Windows XP or not. It seems to work just fine, in fact it seems to load a lot faster than 98 ever did, and I have not been getting random ‘blue screens of death’ yet. The thing that I find annoying is that they have changed everything around. Moved the buttons away from where they used to be, eliminated the little tray icons for quick launch, just a bunch of little things like that which just annoy me. I was able to find the way to set the appearance to “windows classic”, but opted to just leave it be, I think I should give it a week or so to see if I can get used to it. And get used to it I will, it is not like I am going to return the computer and live in a cave somewhere using windows 98 unwilling to upgrade regardless of how much better the technology has gotten.

On a side note, even as I type this I just got another ‘Urgent warning’ about a security flaw in the Microsoft Virtual Machine that must be patched. I am downloading it, but I tell you that I am going to disable all of the antivirus and system protection on this thing when I hook up to play a game of Diablo. There are three separate things running on the machine, the windows update, Norton and something called ‘BigFix’, bigfix is the one that is continually telling me about all of the patches even though I have seen nothing about security issues on MSN.com. Whether or not all of the patches are necessary is something that I will likely never know. I am sure that in a month or so I will have given up on using all of the ‘live update’ type crap and just go back to just downloading the fixes myself once every couple of weeks.

While I am bitching about Microsoft and related products, I just must mention that I really think the Windows OS has been on a steady decline since the release of Windows 3.1. I do remember that it was a bit of a pain to have to go into DOS and use memmaker to free up enough system memory to play some games, but compare that to the problems that I have had with Windows 98 and it would seem like a cake walk. With 3.1 you had to kind of know what you were doing to make pretty much anything work, which seems bad on the surface, but with later releases trying to do it all for you it simply paved the way to a multitude of ‘blue screens of death’ when the computer is forced to make a decision and decides wrong. Amusing thing with windows 98 that happened at work a couple of months ago. I had installed a new modem (used actually) and when it detected the modem it was looking for the drivers. It could not find them in the windows directory, I didn’t have any disks to install them, so it decided it was going to connect to the internet to try to download the driver for the modem. Then it gave me an error about not being able to connect because I didn’t have the correct modem drivers. I mean really, would any human ever try to do that? It would be like being stuck in the middle of nowhere and trying to get electricity by plugging an extension cord into itself, it just doesn’t make a damn bit of sense, but the computer gave it a go..

The previous portion of this was written yesterday after Mother’s day dinner and prior to the seson finale of Survivor. I completely forgot to upload it, so I am just going to piggy back onto it today.

I would love to go into a long winded rant about the Survivor All Stars, but I am sure that you can find that type of thing all over the internet at this point, and I don’t really care enough about the outcome to do it. One thing that I do think bears mentioning was in regards to a question that one of the jurors asked of Rob and Amber, the question about what they were going to do with the money.

Now everyone knows that Rob lied to and stepped on everyone to try to win the game. The fact that he claimed that he was going to use the money to set up a scholarship fund was so much bull shit. Did he really expect anyone to believe that? Not just Rob, but anyone who signs up for Survivor is out to win the million dollars. When they win the million I bet the first thing they do is buy a fancy car, then likely a house. Maybe after they have blown 80 percent of it on creature comforts, maybe then they will feel a bit guilty about it all and donate some of their old clothes to goodwill. They certainly did not go into the game thinking that they were going to sacrifice their time, struggle to survive in horrible conditions just so that they could donate the money to a good cause. If there are people out there that actually would do that they are just insane.

A final thought about this season’s Survivor. I wonder if Rob would have been so gung-ho about proposing to Amber if he had really thought that he had a good chance of winning. I know that the votes were actually cast months before, but he was able to watch the show just like the rest of us prior to the finale, makes me wonder if he thought he may not be getting the check, or at the very least hedging his bets. I guess I am a bit to cynical since I actually believe that is a real possibility. Or maybe I read to much in the way Rob was portrayed in the editing of the episodes, I am sure for all the bad that he did he probably was also unselfish and helpful also…I hope… Pointless to speculate, but when they show up in some scandal rag after a horrible break-up I won’t be the least bit surprised.

• Something that I saw in the news today interests me a bit. I just read it in the quick notes on some website, not sure where I saw it, that is not really important anyway. The quick note just said that the US is failing to follow suit with the rest of the western world by slowing or requiring permits to purchase ammonium nitrate. I suppose that it should be a bit surprising with the current administration’s ‘Stop Terror Now’ facade. This is the very substance that is used in many terrorist bombs, it is cheap, readily available and you don’t even have to show an ID to buy it. I wasn’t really sure how destructive the stuff was until I googled up some news about it. I didn’t know that this was what was used in the Oklahoma city bombing, I thought that it was just the kind of thing that the terrorists in the middle east use. Who knew.

I bring this up only because of yet another childhood obsession of mine. Pipe bombs. Yes, I built pipe bombs. Not the type that you see on the tv news that were filled with shrapnel and killed and mutilated, no I just did it to hear the boom and see some faux destruction. Without going into any detail about how to actually make them (if you want that there are a lot of sites out there that will tell you, just not mine) I will just give a brief mention of what a few friends and myself did with them.

There is a bit of a digression before I get to that, be warned

First, I remember exactly where I got the idea to try to build one. I was a model rocket entusiast when I was young and always had marveled at the way the little engines would roar to life and send my creation skyward. It was quite an enjoyable hobby, but in the pacific northwest the rocket retrieval ratio was pretty low. Even when I launched them in a five-acre open field the wind would often pull them off into the forest never to be seen again. That was a bit depressing after having spent so much time building and painting a rocket (not to mention the out of pocket cost, which was a lot for an unemployed teenager), just to watch it go up once. I never really lost my enthusiasm for that hobby, but it was put into the background when a new friend introduced me to Radio Controlled Airplanes.

My friend trained me in the basics of flight with a powered glider. He would fly it while it was under power to get it as high as possible, once the engine cut he would let me fly it down, with him handling the actual landing the first dozen or so times. I clearly remember my first landing, as I was getting very low to the ground at far too steep an angle. I tried to pull the nose up and pulled it way too far. The plane stalled and came down from about twenty feet, tail-first, and snapped the fuselage in two. Not the best landing I could have done by far. After repeated failures and mending I was able to land the thing pretty well as long as I had no cross wind. Before long he was letting me fly some of his planes after he had done the take-off, only taking the control away from me if I did something very foolish or if it was time to land (many of them having to land while still in powered flight due to weight issues). He thought I was ready to fly solo, but requested that I buy my own kit and build my own plane so that he would not have any monetary reason to net let me learn by trial and error. (I haven’t thought about him for years, but he was a damn good trainer and friend. I wonder what became of him).

The very first airplane that I built was a Fokker Eindecker. It took me several months to build it, due to inexperience, but came out looking every bit as good as the one in the previous link, only mine was red and my kit didn’t have ailerons. Once the plane was complete, my friend gifted me an old radio, receiver and servos to install in it. That plane was my pride and joy. I had at least a couple of dozen pictures of it even before it ever flew, which I knew it must eventually. I had never actually been at the controls during the take-off (which was a hand-launch in the case of this plane), and decided to let my friend have the honors of the first flight. In retrospect I think mostly I wanted someone a lot better at the sport than me to try it out and make sure that I hadn’t totally fucked up with the installation of the elevator, rudder or some other thing that would just make it impossible to fly, at the time I said I wanted him to have the honor since he had introduced me to the hobby and gifted me the radio -well over a hundred dollar value in the late eighties-.

The plane flew beautifully. I was staring on in amazement as he executed loops and rolls with it. He even did a drop from high altitude followed by a nearly vertical ascent. After about six minutes the engine died and he brought the plane in to land, it touched down so softly it was like a marshmallow landing on a cloud. My little plane was the most beautiful thing that I had ever seen, so quick, so manueverable. I was ready to give it a go myself.

–There is an intricacy to the hand launch that is hard to describe. One person must run with the plane above their head until such a speed is reached that, with luck, the plane will be able to ascend under its own power. Variables like any wind (especially cross-wind), angle of release, the speed of the runner, the height of the release, hell there are tons of variables that I can’t remember since it has been so long since I have flown, can mean instant disaster.–

My friend was going to be doing the hand launching while I was guiding the plane. This was my very first attempt at doing that so I was a bit apprehensive. He ran for a bit and let go. The plane immediately began to dive hard to the left, holding hard to the right while trying to first level, then pull up, I managed to get the plane airborn. It was at that point that I looked down at the radio to see that I had somehow moved the trim for the rudder all the way to the left prior to the hand launch. In my estimate, I was lucky that I was flying at all after that little oversight. Yet, flying I was. No tricks, just mostly a circle around the field. When the engine died I lined up a nice straight course to land in the soft grass. Only inches above the ground I was still holding the wings perfectly level, the landing gear touched down and the rest of the plane followed, but not in a good way. The landing gear was basically the pivot point to swing the cowl into the ground. Luckily I only broke off the tail and it was a quick fix.

It was a couple of days later before we went out to fly my little plane again. Confident in my ability to correct for the variables, I asked him to launch it for me. This time the launch went perfectly. There was no descent, no turning, just a perfect launch. Then as the plane went over the tiny valley created by the two small hills we use for hand launching, a cross-wind caught the wing and sent it almost vertical. without ailerons I was trying to use the rudder and elevator to level the plane as it was heading, at full power, towards both the ground and the trunk of the only tree in the field. The plane was going hard left and down, so I instictively pulled hard right and pushed up, in the panic forgetting that when you push up the plane goes down. There was a marvelous display of balsa and radio equipment exploding on the ground when it hit. I must say that I would not have thought that a fall, even at full power, from only ten or twelve feet could have so completely destroyed my creation. I suppose it is no wonder that they don’t use balsa wood to create commercial airliners.

Back to the bombs.

So having given up on a couple of hobbies along the way (the radio receiver was destroyed in my crash), I decided to find something more destructive to occupy my time. I still had some of the so called ‘solar ignitors’ from the days when I was launching model rockets, as well as the launch box. The launch box is just a button that has a wire running to the pad so you don’t have to light the engine with a match. My dad had a lot of gun powder, since he reloaded his own bullets. I had a lot of free time and some wide open space. What do you think would happen.

I had played with the gunpowder before. I liked to draw designs on the pavement with it, then once you light it there will be a brief fire and the design will stay on the road for a while. Now, though, I was in posession of gun powder and a remote ignition device. I began to wonder what would have happened if the model rocket was not able to expel the energy by forcing itself into the air. I realized quickly that a bomb would be the result. But how powerful would it be? There was a broken wind chime in our old shed. It had a bunch of little pipes on it. Each pipe had two holes drilled in it very near the top end (where the wire that suspended it went through).

My usual target was the wood pile in the back yard. I would put the bomb at the bottom of it and hit the button just to see how much of the wood got thrown how far. As time went by I had to improvise the conatiners, and each time the wood pile was destroyed I had to rebuild it before dad got home. The culmination of my destructive wood pile fetish came when I created the largest (by far) pipe bomb that I ever had and set it off in the wood pile some thirty feet away. One piece, roughly four pounds, hit me square in the back and it hurt like hell. It took me (and a couple of nameless friends 😉 ) several hours to get the wood pile back into a form that even resemled a wood pile. Even after that my dad questioned why a lot of the wood was charred.. We never let on, but I think that he knew what was going on.

After that I never tried to construct another pipe bomb. I am pretty sure that neither of the other two ever did either, as they are both also happily married now and I really think the curiousity about bombs/destruction goes away for most of us after the teen years. I don’t own any guns, or any gun powder for that matter, and happily lock those little experiences away in my mind as things I would rather not have done (now that I am an adult and can look objectively at the risk/reward of what I was doing. Something that you never think of while you are in your teens).

Speaking from the point of view of an adult, I think that it should be much more difficult for anyone to acquire components that can make explosives. I consider myself pretty lucky that I didn’t kill myself or someone else while I was farting around with gun powder as a kid. Now imagine that someone wants to use it to kill/maim, knowing the consequences of their actions. There should be laws in place (in the western world) to keep things like that from happening.

While I was using actual gun powder for my little bombs, imagine the kid on the farm that realizes that fertilizer is the ultimate bomb. Shouldn’t anything that is potentially lethal have slightly better safeguards than, “Well, he didn’t look like a terrorist.”