I stumbled upon an article on the Spartacus Educational website this morning about the JFK assassination and realized I was looking at the deepest of rabbit holes—a better organized rabbit hole than that of Wikipedia—which is saying something. There’s a ton of stuff to dig into there, on a site whose design dates back to about 2002, which is oddly comforting.
Here’s a very short recap of the last two weeks’ work on Darth; I haven’t been able to do as much, but I’ve had fun welding and fabricating.
I’ve had a bunch of obscure books in my Amazon list for years, and over the break I decided to see if I could track them down to read without spending $45 for an out-of-print copy.
The first was an accident, a book I stumbled on at the thrift store, and the thing that kicked this off: Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy, a history of the conflict in French Indochina up to the American ramp-up in the early 1960’s. This was a seminal text recommended to all of the officers headed into that expanding war, and something none of the idiots in charge ever bothered to read or digest. I’d read about it for years and meant to find a copy, so I was pleased to pick this up for $1.
The second is a book called Missile Inbound, by Levinson & Edwards, which recounts the missile attack on the USS Stark in the Persian Gulf in 1987. It’s an exhaustively researched book, and not quite what I was expecting—the first half is a minute-by-minute account of the attack, and the second is about the investigation afterwards. It’s a short book but a good read. There’s a related book called No Higher Honor about the USS Samuel B Roberts, which hit a mine a year later, and was saved through heroic action by its crew; that’s next to track down on my list.
The third is called A Corporate Tragedy: The Agony of the International Harvester Company, by Barbara Marsh. This traces the rise and fall of the company, from one of the largest agricultural manufacturers in the world to its collapse in the mid 1980’s. I found this one available on the Internet Archive—it’s long out of print.
I wish the publishing business would find an equitable way to make e-books more affordable.
Over dinner the other night, my girls asked me if the red truck had a name yet, which it did not. Historically, our group of local IH guys has an understanding that you don’t get to name your own truck—it’s named by the group. You can veto some of the suggestions to avoid stuff you can’t live with, but usually the names are good and they stick. Thus, Bennett’s ugly brown Scout became Mr. Hanky, Brian’s 4-cyl. white Scout became Slowflake, and my Scout became Peer Pressure. (Thankfully, I avoided a lot of the more obvious names like Barney and People Eater).
The girls started throwing some suggestions around, and Finn came up with one that got better and better as we thought about it: Darth Haul. Jen commented that it would be better if the top was painted black and not white; Finn suggested we should paint stripes on it to match the character—which I quickly vetoed. But the name stuck. I floated it past the boys and they all approved. I had some time to kill while I was rendering some video Tuesday evening and whacked this together:
It was pretty easy to find the base Star Wars font and modify it the way I needed. I tried using the Galactic Empire logo at first, but the scale and size didn’t work with the typeface. Somehow the Rebel Alliance logo (who I identify with anyway) worked better, and I liked flipping it to subvert the idea.
Now, to have some stickers made.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Here’s a review that left me scratching my head: The Verge ran an article asking if there’s a heavier album than Sleep’s Dopesmoker. This incongruity is not unlike a cooking website running a review of new luxury SUVs. To her credit, the author did her research, and the other artists she compared are legit: Electric Wizard, SunO))), and Bongripper, as well as several others I’ve not heard of before. Ultimately she decides on a live album from a band called Hell, who I’m not familiar with, but Dopesmoker will always be the high water mark in my opinion.
I’ve found that most modern metal has become super annoying, where the “singing” is nothing more than some guy gargling razor blades, the drums are cranked to 180BPM, and the compression has jacked the waveforms so close to the margins that it just becomes white noise. I prefer some sort of melody somewhere in my music, or at least a beat I can get behind. The last good metal album I really enjoyed was by a band called Windhand, which was slowed down, super heavy, and tuned super low—but had a great mixture of melody and riffage. Sadly, they have been on hiatus since 2018 and I don’t know if they’re going to release a new album. And I’m still waiting for True Widow to release some new music—their last album was great.
Perusing Instagram the other day, an ad popped up for a very pretty watch, and before I thought better of it, I clicked the link. Normally I’m smarter than this and I use the old two-finger click to take a picture of the ad, then follow that up separately in a web browser, but I must have been high on Christmas candy. The watches themselves are very nice, and live at the top edge of my budget for a discretionary purchase: Redwood offers a range of military-style watches in designs I like, especially this pilot model. It’s a 40mm case, which is correct for the style but would be a bit large on my wrist. I do like the fact that it’s a solar model—I’ve got a Vaer dive watch with a solar face, and I like it very much.
Having clicked that link, The Algorithm suddenly decided I needed to see all of the watch ads, and my feed was then swamped with them. Many were for brands that were too expensive or for watches that were hideously ugly, but another brand popped up that I found interesting, a Japanese manufacturer offering military reproduction designs that closely mirror what was made in the 40’s through the 60’s. One design definitely caught my eye, a night/day 24-hour watch with a split face. It’s hard to tell how big the case is—the measurements given don’t follow normal specifications—but I’m going to follow up with my watch connection to ask about the manufacturer and see if he recommends taking a chance on this one.
Now I’m off to see if there’s a way to cleanse my Instagram algorithm.
Two of the weekend’s highlights were from the family advent calendar: Saturday evening we went to dinner at Amoora, a Syrian restaurant in the Inner Harbor. It’s always fun to get dressed up and go out with the girls, and the food and company was excellent.
Sunday we drove back into Baltimore to the Senator theater to see Wicked on the big screen. Unfortunately I didn’t realize they’d added smaller theaters on to the building and that we were in one of those annexes. Still, we all really enjoyed the movie—I was, honestly, a bit dubious about the whole thing but within the first half hour they had hooked me and I was on board. 2h40m went by very quickly. I will definitely be looking forward to the second half.
As I get older I’m affected more and more by cold weather. The prospect of taking the dog out for a well-deserved walk fills me with dread. Our 100-year-old house is one large draft covered by a roof; there are few places it’s easy to remain toasty without sitting under a pile of blankets. I’ve spent twenty years attempting to fill cracks, upgrade windows, add insulation, improve heating, and plug holes, but it still has little effect. My hands become icicles in October and don’t thaw until April. I lose all contact with my toes sometime around Thanksgiving and pray it returns for my birthday. This is partially due to my age and partially to my body type; I lose heat quickly even on warm days, and it’s only gotten worse since my 40th birthday.
A couple of years ago I found a couple of long-sleeve shirts on the rack at our local thrift store and grabbed them up; among them was an Under Armour shirt I wound up wearing a lot because the sleeves didn’t shrink after the first wash. This has been one of my pet peeves for years: I buy a longsleeve shirt and after two runs through the wash the cuffs only come down to the middle of my forearms (Gilden, Champion, I’m looking at you). The Under Armour shirt held up well and didn’t shrink, so I started looking for them specifically on our visits. A year or so after that I found another, which said “ColdGear” on the tag. Intrigued, I tried it on, and found it was skin-tight, but felt warm, so I spent $6 on it.
What I found after wearing it on cold days was that it did keep me warm—far better than other shirts I’ve tried, and much more comfortable than multiple layers. It kept my upper core warm during snowboard trips, frigid junkyard runs, shoveling snow, and walking Hazel. So much so that I took my jacket off and stuffed it into my backpack the last time we went snowboarding. On subsequent thrifting visits, I found more of them, and stocked up for cold weather. They take some getting used to; I’m not normally a skin-tight kind of guy. After a day, they irritate my surgery scar—almost as much as wearing a fleece with a full zipper—but the warmth is worth it.
The next issue has been my feet. They only have two temperatures: sweating and freezing. They know no middle ground; they are as impossible to regulate as an overtired toddler on a candy binge. Any socks I have ever worn make my feet sweat, making the socks damp. In the winter, they will then freeze over into solid ice; in the summer they become a fetid swamp. This also limits the kind of shoes I can wear. Any shoe with lots of fabric padding inside will become intolerable within weeks. I’ve found that Nike running shoes made of thin webbing are the best summer shoes; meanwhile I have a pair of leather Keen shoes that are at least 15 years old I wear almost exclusively in the winter. The soles have been reglued twice; I will weep when they finally fall apart.
It comes down to the socks. I wore cotton socks for years, but they were no good. Even looking at polyester socks made my feet sweat. Some of the blends worked better than others; Timberland makes a sock I’ve been wearing for a couple of years that seems to work for fall and spring. A couple of Christmases ago, my sister got me a pair of SmartWool socks and these became the go-to for winter. I wore that pair so much, I bought a couple more on sale.
Over the Thanksgiving break, I used these as my base layers along with a pair of bike tights for the junkyard run I made. I also had the good fortune of borrowing a set of insulated Wellington boots from my brother in law, which made a huge difference. It got to the point where I had stripped down to my jeans and fleece. Bike tights are pretty good, but I think I’m going to buy a pair of ColdGear leggings for our next snowboard trip.