Mama, I want my Wawa!

Via Fallows, a snapshot of the Romneycade beating the hustings for votes, and the Borg discovers the wonder of...Wawa!

"Romney on the stump, at a historic iron furnace in Cornwall, near Lebanon, using the hoagie-ordering experience at the WaWa as a parable for what's right and wrong in America. (Wrong: a doctor told him that he had to fill out a 33-page change-of-address form, several times, to get the post office to send his mail -- including reimbursement checks -- to his new location. That is what happens with government-run organizations where you have "no competition." Right: at WaWa, great hoagies. Also, very efficient touch-pad ordering system. This is what you get with competition.)"

It's hard to know just where to start with this fucktardry, but let's try starting with the Wawa.

I used to live in the northeast and these things are the local 7-Eleven-equivalent there. They make decent hoagies (sub sandwiches, to you fellow Left Coasters) but not that great; any local hoagie shop is usually better, and most Northeast towns have several. I've had a couple of Wawa hoagies and they're usually distinguished by the same qualities all fast food enjoys; a sort of "enh" flavor resulting from cheap products cranked out in volume. Processed cheese, mass-produced meat; you know the drill.

And here's the thing; they, like most chain stores, use their bankroll to do their level best to put those little local hoagie shops - the ones that do actual interesting things with local produce, cheeses, sauces, and meats - out of business.

So the local owner loses his business, and (if he's lucky) ends up a wage slave making hoagies for the Wawa down the street. This is good, because it's "competition"! Freedom, amiright! In the same way that putting a pair of ten-ounce gloves on you and putting you in the ring with the guy who's just gone fifteen rounds for the pro welterweight title at Caesar's is "competition". Competition! Amiright?

I have no idea what the "touch-pad ordering system" is or what it does, but, really, who gives a fuck? What benefit do I get out of it? Why is it better than, say, talking to a real live person and ordering a hoagie? Or, worse - what if it puts that person out of a job? Why is that "good", competition or no? I've actually started avoiding the auto-checker at our local Fred Meyer because, frankly, I don't want to give Kroger (the way-the-fuck-back-East ginormous grocery chain that bought our local Portland chain and gave us their fine Kroger products in place of the local stuff that Fred's used to stock) the excuse to lay off a live person.

"Competition", frankly, is one of those tidy little Republican myths, like the welfare queen and the anchor baby and the birth-control-abortion, that looks less impressive the more you look at it. Turns out that many forms of "competition" provide benefits mostly for the people who own the companies, and result in lower wages and fewer jobs as companies "compete" to sell cheaper crap for lower prices.

That is when they're not actively colluding to sell cheap crap for HIGH prices - try and drive around your town and find a gas station making a profit on the volume of selling gas for "low, low prices!!!". Sheeyeah; call me when you find one.

So I'd expect a Republican to be as stupid as a bag of hammers where "competition" is concerned.

But then there's that damn 33-page form, the paper embodiment of Evil Big Gummint.

Which is where I wish that these gomers had actually been forced to serve in the military.

Because Romney - like every GOP sunofabitch that draws breath - luuuuurves him some military. The U.S. fightin' men and women are just jake with him; they're the living embodiment of everything Good^TM and Right^TM about America. Amiright?

But if he's pissed off about all that non-"competitive" government bureaucracy what effing world has HE been living on?

Because there's no bureaucracy in the world like the U.S. Army.

Because armies - like insurance, like firefighting, like policing - aren't in the business of doing something cheap at low price. They need to do things that other people can't or won't do (unless they're ridiculous or insane, like the sort of people who fight for pay) and they need to do it right the first time.

So governments tend to be all about rules and making notes to file and filling in forms. That stuff gets out of hand, oftentimes, but the mere existence of a long form has absolutely nothing to do with the "value" of government and what it does.

In fact, the rottenest thing about the modern GOP and their current nominee is their and his insistence on the zombie Reagan lie about how "government is the problem".

Why would anyone running for political office insist that the very thing they want you to elect them to do is a "problem"?

Unless they want you to think of that thing as bad, unless they want you to expect that thing to BE bad, so that they can then do it badly and not get beaten to a bloody pulp for it?

Or unless they want you to forget that if you aren't part of governing your nation, if the government is a problem and "goes away" that you remain a single, relatively powerless individual and that there will be someone - something - still there to seize onto that power the failure of government leaves as a vacuum.

Oh. Yeah. Them. Riiiiight.

Y'think?

Gah. Honestly, the mere fact that this lying sack of shit is within a couple of percentage points of becoming the next President makes me very, very tired. If we're not lucky this November we're going to get the government we deserve, and while I will derive a certain vicious satisfaction in that my schadenfreude will be very grim indeed.

RCTID

More video, I'm afraid; this time from out local soccer supporters' organization, the Timbers Army.
I had forgotten about this little short. And I'm not ashamed to admit to finding it again and tearing up a little while watching it. Passion is an odd thing, and it wells up in places where it shouldn't and in ways that are often dark and deep. And the doings of human beings in mass are chancy and often frightful.

But I find something wonderfully silly and yet ridiculously powerful about this foolish love of a sport, and a team, and a place we all share. And I hope this little video gives you some idea of why I feel that way.

Rose City 'til I die, Rose City 'til I die!
I know I am, I'm sure I am!
Rose City 'til I die!

Catfight

This odd little video is actually from some sort of Chevy ad from 1937.
Mind you, it still doesn't excuse "Catwoman".

(h/t to "Lawyers, Guns & Money for the video)

Commo Problems

The home computer slipped into it's black dress and sauntered off down to the local electronics dive bar for a pick-me-up. That is, Mojo had to take the laptop in for some serious borescoping and a pullover. The damn thing was so slow and kludgy that it's either got some feelin'-like-I'm-fixin'-to-die hard drive issues or has been virused with something nasty. Hopefully the good people at our local Computer Wash can clean it up and get it feeling a little more peppy.

But until then the noise-to-signal ratio is pretty harsh.

But the sad truth, though, is that I'm not exactly full of ideas at the moment; a recent perusal of the new Blogger format has me feeling a little mopey.

The new telltale that gives you the views for each post is kinda depressing. I thought that this was a semi-interesting blog; I was used to the idea that I got 600-700 pageviews a day. That seemed like a decent amount of interest for a little random private blog that I use mostly for my own vanity and entertainment.

But the per-post views make the source of almost all my traffic pretty clear;

1) the "Decisive Battles" posts,
2) anything with smut in it, and
3) damn near nothing else.

Now I respect all Internet traditions and I know that the 'net is for porn, but, damn; I really don't seem myself turning this thing into a war/porn site.

But it seems like nothing else holds fashion.

I need to think a little more about where I want to take this place.

And I'm curious; would you regular readers (assuming there is such a thing) follow this dog if it was reduced primarily to the "Battles" posts, with the occasional sidetrack into geology, Vargas pin-ups, and Tom of Finland?

Feel free to let me have it.

Fifteen Hundred

The first five hundred took more than two years; from 17 JUL 2006 to 19 AUG 2008, or about 763 days.

The next five hundred took three months less; from 19 AUG 2008 to 8 JUN 2010, or about 660 days,

And since then it's been 737 days. A total of 2,160 days for 1,500 posts. About a post every 1.4 days.

Fifteen hundred posts.

Hmmm.

That's a hell of a lot of writing.

A hell of a lot of sitting up late at the computer thumping my index finger on my skull trying to figure out another word for "fucktardry". A hell of a lot of paging through the Internet looking for Charlie Sheen quotes to put in Muhammar Qaddafi's mouth. A hell of a lot of sorting through Asian bondage porn pictures for a good illustration for the concept of "hogtied".

Okay, maybe the porn wasn't exactly required for the bloggage. But, hey, I respect all Internet traditions!

It's late, and I don't want to go on and on about this; the first 500 seemed like a big deal. The next came at a sort of pivotal time in my life, and I wondered whether all this meant anything worth a cup of warm spit. But now I think I've pretty much figured this stuff out and I'm here for a while yet, so, hey, no biggie, right? Another 500 down, another 499 still to go. Put yourself a cup of coffee from the Silex, we might be here for a while; there's more stuff about soccer, kaiju movies, the barracks at Fort Kobbe, Panama, and "Republican Is The New Stupid" I need to talk about. And did I mention the whole "bikini record album cover" topic thing.

Yeah. That.

So I gotta get some sleep. See you tomorrow?

Filthy zerks

OK, I admit it; I picked the title for this post mostly because I've always wanted to use the word "zerk" in a blog post title.

But bear with me, because I do have a cunning plan here.

The origin of this post came from something Ed posted over at Gin & Tacos about a USAF Class A mishap. Seems that the zoomies lost a V-22 "Osprey" tilt-rotor transport down in Florida the other day and Ed was harkening back to the halcyon days of his blog-youth when he called down fire and rain on the V-22 for being a massive boondoggle.

It got me thinking to the military kit I've encountered that smelled suspiciously like the someones involved in getting a hold of it had more in mind than getting there fustest with the mostest.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the M792 GAMA Goat ambulance.

I've never really figured out who thought these big bastards were a good idea. They were ginormous, slow, and clumsy. The motor was decent - a three-cylinder Detroit diesel - but the rest of the contraption was a mechanic's nightmare.

They were supposed to be amphibious, so the entire bottom was sealed outside of a couple of screw-in drain plugs. Which made any maintenance that required access to the bottom of the vehicle a frigging huge pain in the ass. The main wiring harness ran underneath the engine block, so if you ever developed a problem with an electrical line you had to pull the entire fuckin' power pack! To make matters worse it didn't float, really; the rubber seal on the tailgate split or tore within hours of leaving the factory, so the thing was always a danger of going to Davy Jones' Locker, while it "swam" by spinning it's tires as paddlewheels which worked about as well as you'd think.

The thing had no spare (the tires and wheels were too freaking huge to carry one) and if you flatted the idea was that you dragged out this "bridge kit" which locked the back part to the front - though it looked like a truck-and-trailer the Goat was actually one vehicle that had a universal joint in the middle - took off one of the back tires from the tractor to replace the flat, put the tractor in 6WD and drove away.

But damn GAMA Goat's the worst feature was the carrier bearing.

The bottom is sealed, remember? So the driveshaft to the rear wheels ran in a channel in the bottom of the trailer from the universal joint to the rear differential. It had a single bearing between the U-joint and the diff, mounted in a metal housing that stuck down below the trailer floor.

The bearing was just a regular old bearing of no particular distinction, and being underneath a tactical truck it tended to get filthy dirty. It was hard to reach - you had to crawl under the trailer to get to it. So drivers doing PMCS tended to skip lubing the carrier bearing. Even if you took the time to get under the damn trailer the grease fitting - the proper name for those little nipple things are "zerks" - tended to be caked with glaur, or had been banged on something and wouldn't take the grease gun nozzle. So the bearing tended to get dry and crusty. And then...

That was brought home to me in a particularly painfully embarrassing way when the carrier bearing of HQ-52 burned up like a vampire under a sunlamp and locked the entire rear driveshaft up tight just as I was crossing the swing bridge at Pedro Miguel Locks one lovely winter afternoon in 1986.

Well, THAT sucked.

The truck was stuck, and so was the bridge, and the entire crew of the Polish freighter waiting for the locks to open ambled over to laugh at the imperialist Yankee scum and his broken-down Goat. The lock-keeper went berserk in Panamanian, and the convoy commander detailed me to wait with the vehicle until the battalion's five-ton wrecker could drive all the way over from the Westside to tow me home.

Because, you see, military equipment tends to live a hard life; it's called upon to go places and do things no sensible civilian equipment would think of. So it makes sense to try and keep that equipment as simple and robust as possible. The M782's carrier bearing violated that rule. And I payed for it that day. Imagine if I'd been racing to pick up wounded men in combat. It doesn't pay to think about. Men would have died because of that damn carrier bearing, the operators who didn't maintain it, and the people who designed and fielded that vehicle.


Now the MV-22 is a just a VSTOL transport; in effect, a sort of quasi-helicopter. The way I see it the only real advantage it has over the current fleet of USMC rotary-wing aircraft is the in-flight speed.

But in my opinion the in-flight speed requirement is the weakest argument for the aircraft. I don't see that it has ever really been proven to be critical to the design – i.e., the USMC has never really explained why the 100-knot increase in maximum speed over the helos is that important.

Supposedly it's because it allows the V-22 to keep pace with fast movers, but since when in the past sixty-some years have our transport aircraft required fighter escorts?

Seems to me that this is really a macguffin. The guys want this thing because it's just flat-out, stomp-down fuckin' COOL.

And that's when I start thinking about carrier bearings.

Because I think the other issue - the bigger, eventually murderous issue - about the MV-22 that's going to bite the USMC and the aircraft's other users in the ass is that the tilt-rotors are going to prove to be a maintenance nightmare that will become a monster as these airframes age. Mission capable rate is already low – below 60% between FY09 and FY12 for the USMC, and combat equipment gets used hard, and fiddly bits like the tilt-rotors tend to age poorly. The maintenance estimates for the V-22 fleet has just been bumped up over 60%, and IMO this is waaaayyyyy too optimistic.


And that's just now, when everything is all shiny and new and all the grease fittings are clean. The dark days are to come, as these airframes age and the tilty bits in the rotors get worn and need more and more fixing. And we go years and years without a combat mission that required fighter escort for these transports to make everyone wonder why they seemed so important. And the cost of each aircraft goes up and the numbers of the mission-capable units go down and...

In the end it isn't that the USMC and the USAF and their contractors are jonesing for these things. I was a GI, and GIs, even and sometimes especially commissioned GIs, even admirals and generals, get a hard-on for cool shit, and what's cooler than an aircraft that's like a real-life Transformer?

Nope. The thing that rings my bell is that nobody in Congress seemed or seems willing to question the entire NEED for them, or the supposed missions that can't be performed without them.

After all, it's the Congress that's supposed to be the gatekeeper for all things warlike in our country. They're supposed to debate the weighty issues of going to war and making peace, of supplying the soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen with the equipment, training, and geopolitical cunning they need to fight and win.

And it should have been the Congress to ask the hard questions; why is this aircraft necessary? What missions can it do that others cannot? Why is THIS aircraft necessary? What makes the need for speed so critical? What does this aircraft provide that another machine, or a combination of others, cannot - as, say, a helicopter can not - that will require the troopers riding in them to hope that everything works as designed and that the designs are good, that the tilt-rotors work just so all the time, every time, and that every single zerk is perfectly clean and shiny and new and smooth and full of grease.

Red Hot and Rollin'...

It's almost midnight and I just got back from work. Just. Having started work at four this morning.

Summer can get a bit hectic in this business.

But I didn't actually post this to talk about that.

What I wanted to talk about was two weekends ago and the Rose City Rollers' Season 7 Championships. Because it was my very first time as a volunteer for the gals from The Hangar.

I think I've mentioned before that I love our Rollers in particular and the flat-track rollergirls in general. I love that they play their sport for themselves, and for those who love it and not for money or glory. I love the "do-it-yourself" ethic that is steeped into the Derby, and the oddball combination of rockers, hipsters, working janes and their joes, jockettes, and wild women that make up the four teams that make up the Derby scene here in Portland.

(By the way - I want to apologize for how this post and the preceding ones look. For some reason the fucking photo uploader at Blogger is now left-justifying all the photos. I've repeatedly told it to put them in the center, or on the right margin, but no. Left, ever to the left, never to the right, forever to the left. Thanks, Blogger; you screwed that pooch. Again)

Sorry, had to get that off my chest.

Anyway, so the way the Derby here works - and, I assume, it works the same way in most big cities - is that we have a local Derby "season" that involves the four teams in our Rose City league. The Guns n' Rollers, Breakneck Betties, Heartless Heathers, and High Rollers play each other through the winter and spring to determine the local bragging rights.

But...we also have am all-star/travel team composed of the best skaters in all four local teams (well, actually, we have TWO travel teams, a "B" team - the Axles of Annihilation - and the "A" team, the Wheels of Justice). The Wheels represent Portland in derby across the country and were good enough to go to nationals this past season. These gals kick ass like crazy monkeys.

But this wasn't about clobbering the soggy wenches from Rat City (boooo!) but local pride and the honor of the Rollers' seventh season title.

And to make it more fun, the bouts were at the old Memorial Coliseum down in Albina. The Mem is a real white elephant from the days before naming rights and luxury boxes. It's basically a ginormous concrete bowl inside a ginormouser glass box. It has all the charm of a 170-pound blocker elbowing you in the face, and all the elegance of a San Diego Emergency Room on a busy Saturday night when the Fleet is in town.

What can I say? I like the old barn.

So it was in mid-afternoon on Saturday when about thirty of us slipped, stumbled, stumped, or wandered into the windowless room down in the lower level of the Coliseum to meet with the volunteer organizers. As a group we were distinctive as individuals.

Some of the volunteers were very obviously skaters, retired skaters, or young women skating for the junior team (the Rosebuds). A handful were older guys ranging from some rakish pirates who had clearly spent years keeping Portland weird to whitebred me, a guy who clearly had a day job and wore deck shoes to the Derby. One youngish guy with a shaved head and less than half his left arm was introduced as a derby official whose derby name was "Bandit".

These two were the Cute Couple, but in derby fashion. They were both painfully skinny, quiet, and introverted. He looked about fifteen and was beyond quiet - he may have possibly said eight words I could actually hear, and she spent most of the evening doing everything but talking to him. They weren't "couply" most of the night in most of the conventional ways that people are. But during the pre-bout briefing when she thought nobody was watching she skootched up next to him and gently rested her bare feet on his legs.

The coordinators made it clear that we were NOT bouncers; any trouble was to be handled by the Coliseum guys. Most of us would just help people find their seats, run the front door, or help with the grunt work of moving and lifting. I drew the front, and so got a great view of the evening's progress.

Even though the doors didn't officially open until nearly six, fans, friends of the skaters, and various people involved in the various parts of the event started showing up well before then.

I loved these two; I have no idea who they were fans of, or what, but they were there ready to cheer something, by God.

One of the most interesting surprises for me was getting a really close look at the skaters "offstage", as it were. The elevator between the lower level, where the dressing rooms are, and the various team booths and merch stands on the main floor was located just to the right of our tables. So rollergirls from all the teams glided to and fro in front of us, often stopping to talk to friends or rivals or, as in this skater's case, have a pre-match feed.

I guess I always figured that the "tough girl/bad girl" personas were just that - a sort of homage to the old-school banked-track roller derby where the skaters would perform exaggerated pro-wrestling-style hits and mime theatrical ferocity to work up the crowd.

But watching the skaters that night I was strongly reminded of experienced troops at rest; a sort of businesslike toughness, a casual and undramatic physical power that had as much to do with their confidence in their skill as their muscle mass. Some of the costumes and part of the fierce derby names are for show, but these women are genuinely hard. Their cheerful brutality is not an act.

So the gates opened and the crowd streamed in; hipster couples looking for irony and PBR. Gresham yobs looking for PBR who wouldn't have known irony if it bit them on the ass. Derby moms and dads, boyfriends, and pals. A pretty fair number of people like me; regular Joe and Mary Lunchpails who love the game and enjoy the honest love of the sport that shines from the skaters themselves. But my favorites were the girls like the young lady in red here, who by her bright eyes is clearly impatient for the day when she, too, can wear purple; not to be old but to skate the flat track and dump some skivvy on her bony ass.

The Coliseum was rocking by the time the anthem was sung and the first skaters to the track, and as the door we were able to break away and look in on the bouts. I wasn't all that curious about the Guns v Heathers; they were playing for third place and pride alone. Although looking through my photos I realize that while taking crowd shots I seem to have caught a moment in film in the making;

Turns out that the woman in the picture above - she's in the black wifebeater in left center (look for the white number 419) is Diana Federoff, a.k.a. "Juvie Hall", who is (and, presumably that night, was) making a movie about derby around the world.

It IS a frigging small world after all...

I took a turn around the main floor of the Coliseum; it really is quite beautiful in a grim, industrial sort of way.

And then the featured bout of the evening began; High Rollers against the Breakneck Betties for all the marbles. I'm a Rollers fan because my kids' beloved aftercare teacher skates as a blocker for the Rollers under the derby name Kickassidy. So I made one last check on the door and put up everything but the very essentials, and went to watch the bout.

I won't give you the whole breakdown but let's just say that with nineteen seconds left the match was tied 110-110. You can read all about it at the first link, though. It was a great bout and...

And then it was over, and we had a 2012 champion.

The crowd stomped and cheered, the teams cheered, hell, everybody cheered. They cheered for the winners but, really, everyone who skated that night was a winner. They won the love of their friends and families, they won the awe and hopes of the little girls, they won the respect of their teammates and their rivals, they won the pride of the derby lovers of our great city for the Rose City Rollers.

And they won my heart all over again. They're terrific, our Rollers, and you can say I said so.

So the happy crowd decanted from the old glass box, and we turned in our yellow T-shirts and boxed up the remaining programs, and nodded goodbyes and headed out into the cool night. As I scuffed up the dark steps towards the lights of the Broadway Bridge I realized that I was smiling and humming a familiar tune under my breath.

There's a party in Portland...

No one's sleeping tonight.