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.
First, let me say I have NO idea how this song got stuck in my head this week. This is by a prog/thrash rock band called Dream Theater, and it came out way back in the late 90’s, at a time when I was most adjacent to hair metal. I remember the metalheads at high school speaking reverently about the shredding skills of the lead guitarist. It’s the only song I know by this band, and it’s their only song that reached Top 10 charting position (which is probably how I first heard it). It’s got some good ideas but like most prog/thrash bands of the time, the songwriting never coalesces into something complete. It starts and stops and every time it settles into a groove they switch time, switch the beat, or leave the phrase for something completely different in tone. I’m irritated to even admit it’s stuck in my head, but here we are.
Maybe I can offer a chaser to wash that out of our heads. I was watching a video the other day that used a track for background music which I really liked, and tracked it down. It’s by a band called Cigarettes After Sex, and the track is called Apocalypse. This band is all vibe; it’s slow tempo, surf-tone guitars and moody keyboards drenched in reverb.
As usual, this album is six years old, but I’m just getting to it now.
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.
