Rewrenched

     Nope, not my back -- my toolbox.

     Working on my off-center-fed dipole ham antenna in its post-treefall location, I was using a 3/8" combination "ignition" wrench.  I'd had to buy a new set; the set in my workshop either never had a 3/8" or I lost it (memory claims it arrived with two 5/16" and no 3/8").

     I'd done without.  You can't buy just one ignition wrench.*  Sized for fine work -- like the ignition systems of older cars -- they're sold in sets, usually sized from 5/32" through 7/16" in either open end/box end combinations, or with open-ended wrench jaws at each end, set at different angles.  A decent set is inexpensive; if you use them a lot, you might want something better, but twelve dollars or less buys a usable set.  Most have all-over plating or polishing, including the jaws; pay more and you can avoid it.

     The combination kind are the most generally useful in electronics, and that's what I'd had.  "Had," because I'd bought another set when I needed a 3/8" wrench, used it to tighten the antenna wire connections to the impedance-matching balun, attempted to put the wrench in my pocket while balancing on an extension ladder, and been distracted by the effort of getting down, taking the ladder down without straining my back, and carefully carrying the ladder back to its storage spot.  I didn't think about it until doing laundry the next day.  "Better check these slacks, I don't want to wash a wrench by mistake."  Nothing.  The little wrench was gone.

     While the washer was running, I checked all the places where I might have set the wrench down.  Nope.

     Over the next few days, off and on, I retraced my path in the back yard multiple times.  No sign of that shiny little wrench, even while the sun was beating down and the sparkle would stand out.  I kept looking as I went about my normal routines.  Friday, it occurred to me that if I had dropped the wrench while aloft, I was working right over the fence that separates the patio from my narrow side yard, and it might be on the other side.  But that realization came after dark, and I promptly forgot.

     While cleaning up outdoors after dinner -- the grill trays I use get a first scrub-down with vinegar over a weedy patch  -- I remembered, and had a peek over the fence.  Though the sun was setting, there was a gleam from the grass.  I didn't have my keys, so after I had the trays soaking in a sink of soapy water, I went out the front door with a penlight and walked right to the tiny wrench, unhurt by nearly a week outside.  Victory!
____________________
* Strictly speaking, that's not  true.  Snap-On will sell onesie replacements for their open-ended sets.  The 3/8" ones are about $28 and yes, the sets are well over $100.  They will undoubtedly last forever, the warranty is first-rate and I'll bet the jaws are ever so slightly roughened, for a secure grip.  If you need really good ignition wrenches, they'd be the ideal choice.  At work, the North Campus has a few ignition and full-size Snap-On wrenches remaining from the original set of tools and they're outstandingly good.  My personal needs along those lines are more modest.     

Normal Entree Progression

     Tam and I enjoyed pork barbecue Friday night, the kind that consists of pork and a few vegetable cooked down in a smoky, tomato-based sauce with hints of sweet and spicy.  You ladle it onto buns, maybe add a little more sauce, and there you go.

     That's not the notable part.  What worth writing about is why, and what else works that way.

     The reason we had barbecue is that we had a pork roast last Sunday, a Boston Butt (still $3.99 a pound) marinated overnight in vinegar, soy sauce, Worcestershire and spices, then roasted for at least an hour per pound in a covered pan on the grill.  I'd added an apple, carrots, celery, a potato, a red onion, diced multicolored bell peppers, a can of mild green chilies, a big fresh tomato (diced) and a bottle of shakshuka tomato sauce.  In parts of the Middle East/Mediterranean, they poach eggs in that sauce, and it's delicious, but the sauce is kind of like supercharged marinara but sweeter and hotter, a spice profile that works in a lot of contexts.

     There were, of course, leftovers.  It was a three-pound roast.  I sliced the meat, bagged it in a gallon freezer bag, and laid it flat in the freezer for later.  Friday night, I put the bag in the microwave to defrost while I squeezed a couple of chorizo sausages out of their casings, fried and drained them, then poured most of a bottle of dark, smoky barbecue sauce over it and let it simmer.  I added the thawed pork roast leftovers and snipped it up small with kitchen shears and a potato masher, adding some gumbo file to thicken it (a little bit of that stuff works really well!).  The end result passed nicely as barbecue.

     Leftover pork roast can end up as pasta sauce, Hoppin' John or "chili" (red stew) starter, too.  If there's more sauce and vegetables than meat, you can poach eggs in it, and incline the spices Italian (Eggs Pomodoro!) or Middle Eastern (a version of Shakshuka you'd better not mention in its hometowns).

     Other main dishes work the same way.  Tam and I don't make much of a dent in a rotisserie chicken -- a leg or two and a wing for her, some breast meat for me.  But afterward, it's a simple job to get the rest of the meat off the bones, skin and all, and freeze it for chicken soup or stew later.  Meat loaf (I occasionally buy one from the butcher counter, oven-ready) can be cooked on the covered grill in the summer (why heat up the kitchen?*), and the leftovers become hot or cold sandwiches, or the meat in spaghetti or red stew.  A beef roast without tomatoes becomes soup or stew later; with tomatoes, it works as well as the pork roast in various tomato-based dishes.

     Looking back, I really started doing this consistently during the pandemic, but with the prices for meat never having come back down, it makes sense to continue, and the end result is pretty tasty, too.
____________________
* Having got the charcoal grill down to an easy process -- most starts take one match, and I'm only using lump charcoal, hardwood kindling and no accelerant, after a long, gradual learning process -- I have realized the old notion of a "summer kitchen" is absolutely brilliant.  Why heat up the house when you can cook outdoors?

Free Philip Glass Concert!

     Okay, maybe it's not exactly his style, but if you're not claustrophobic -- and I most definitely am not -- and you put in the earplugs and remember to ask for a blanket -- which I certainly did -- there's something restful about relaxing cozily inside an MRI in a loose-fitting hospital gown and scrub pants with your eyes shut while the machine does its thing:

     CLACK! Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tock.
     Brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt (pause)
      Brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt (pause)
       Brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt (pause)
        Brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt (pause)

     CLACK. Tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic, clunk.
     Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!  
     Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!  

     And so on, for nearly half an hour, while I drifted, toasty and half-asleep, trying to work out plot developments in a short story and counting repetitions.  This was all lower back, and while I did feel strangely warm from time to time, I didn't experience the thing that sometimes happens when they're looking at your skull: spinning rings of white light, apparently when the scanning RF beam intersects some part of the eye or optic nerve.  Anyway, I have been plenty magnetized to last me for awhile.

     MRI machines use a series of clever tricks to take a look at your innards, including the parts too soft and squishy to register in any detail on an X-ray, and while an MRI is generally louder and larger than an X-ray machine, the part that's actually scanning you is a little less intense.  The dodge is, the huge electromagnet you're inside has lined up each and every tiny proton in each tiny atom, and the detector is just looking to see how much they wiggle when the scanning beam zips by.  Each pass of the beam results in a series of data points, ρ (rho) much amplitude at an angle of φ (phi) over and over and over, and they slowly build an image in the form of a series of  "slices."  Smart processing software can turn that into a 3-D model or show flat projections at various angles, but it takes a lot of samples -- which is why it takes so long and you're not supposed to move while it's happening.

     If you're not much minded to panic, it's a good time to relax, half-dozing.  Might as well; you're not going anywhere until it is over.

     Despite my very best intentions, I walked to the room with a couple of metal clips in my hair.  The techs give you the once-over, twice, before you cross the threshold, and spotted them.  "Don't feel too bad about it," one of them told me, "I confiscated two lighters from a guy just last week.  I still can't figure out why he brought them."

     What they found out about my back, I don't know yet.  Maybe some time next week.

It's All About Image

      A part of my day will be about imaging -- they're going to stick me in an MRI machine* and look at my back.  It's still giving me some trouble; a week back at work has caused an increase in pain in my lower back, despite reduced physical activity and desk chairs that are far better than the old-fashioned wooden one I use at home.

     There might be some answers in a closer look.  Or not, and there's a limit to what they can do to fix spines anyway.  But at least they're looking -- and I'm still exercising.
________________
* They have not, despite what you may have heard, been renamed "America machines."

We're Going To Have To Be Weirder, Too

     His most famous role never held much interest for me, though I was happy that the more extroverted outcasts, oddballs and theater kids had the rollicking midnight movie as an outlet, and a joyous one at that.

     In his other roles, the late Tim Curry chewed up scenery with the best of them, with a unique kind of silken, outlandish glee.  He did a lot of fantasy and science fiction, sometimes heavily costumed, but the greasepaint was only decoration -- hardly anyone remembers his appearance in the single-season Earth 2 as the villain Gaal, but even playing that small role in an obscure series, he projected unnerving menace without any special makeup or props.  Fans and fellow actors say the man himself was anything but evil: charming, friendly, and modest about his own abilities; but he was a superbly talented actor.

     Tim Curry was an original.  There's no replacement.  You'll have to improvise your own strangeness -- and he'd've applauded you for it.

A Pig In A Poke

     If there's any carrier offering "Medigap" insurance who will tell you what their various plans cost before they sit you down with a fast-talking sales type, I'd love to hear about it.

     These are plans that fill in what Medicare doesn't cover, pay all or some of the deductibles, etc. rather than the plans that glom onto your Social Security check and Medicare coverage, and allow a pittance after taking their cut; I'm sure the latter are not much worse than company-provided health plans -- except for the part where they don't leave you enough to live on.

     The problem is that just about the entire system is selling their stuff without admitting how much it will cost.  Medicare itself will provide a guess about how big a bite they'll take, and it's pretty grim, but the commercial companies are all smoke and mirrors.

     Nothing personal, guys, but if it was an honest product, you'd set it out in trays with price tags, and let people wander the aisles, picking 'em up and evaluating price and quality.  Instead, there's a lot of well-fronted bullshit about what all it'll save us hapless customers from, and to what extent, with tables and charts and illustrations -- and not word one about the monthly bill.

     Look, I'm old.  From here on, the ride goes downhill.  Something -- or a few things -- are going to incapacitate me to a lesser or greater extent; something's going to kill me, eventually.  My sincere hope is to use up nearly all my money by the day before that happens, and leave just enough for a tidy disposal of my remains.  And, you know, maybe stiff the health insurance company for that last monthly bill, just as a final token of the esteem in which I have held them.  Presumably by then, they'll have told me how much it will be.

Going To Have To Be Better

     The net goodness of the world diminished a little yesterday, when Dolly Parton died.  In the face of a world filled with all manner of monstrous evil, she pushed back.

     You're going to hear a lot of talk about Dolly Parton being inherently good, a a simple country girl from a poor family* who rose to great heights -- but from the evidence, she worked at being good; once her success reached a point where a high and steady income was nearly certain (and it wasn't quick), she targeted charity along lines that aimed at the root of suffering, working to encourage literacy, support human rights, and fund medical research.  Initially a songwriter, her music and her occasional comments about religious philosophy reveal a Zen-like simplicity, a willingness to work down to root causes and tackle issues at the broadest level.  It was both a driver of commercial success (once she got to the top of the country charts, she actively sought out material with crossover potential, while staying true to her musical roots) and a source of the positive difference she made in the world.

     She was intelligent -- and knew that mental horsepower wasn't even half of what it takes; she had plenty of ambition and drive, but her "emotional IQ" was off the charts and I think it was the source of the deep and lasting goodwill she engendered.

     Dolly is gone.  Her legacy remains -- and the rest of us are going to have to be just a little bit better to one another to make up for her loss.
______________________
* While she cultivated a fun and slightly zany public image, I have always liked a story from the set of Steel Magnolias: the director began berating her for a poor performance, saying he didn't even know why she had been hired for her role.  "They hired me because I'm Dolly Parton," she replied, "And it's your job to make me look like I can act."  He did, she did, and the film did right well at the box office.

They're What?

     How knowledge fades: Tam was playing back an interview about storm damage in our a neighborhood a couple of weeks ago, as in the tree that fell and crushed a neighbor's house (empty at the time).  Another neighbor was interviewed about the event, saying the sound "...was like one of those energy boxes up on a pole? When they go out."

     A what, now?

     I suppose some of my reaction is curse-of-knowledge stuff: my work is power distribution adjacent, since we're out of business when the juice stops flowing (and maintain our own MegaWatt-sized backups); and some of it is age: when I was young, most people knew that humming thing up on the pole was a transformer, and no few even knew it by its nickname, "pole pig," fat and round, with small insulators sticking out the sides and a bigger one at the top.  Rotate it ninety degrees, and it is indeed shaped like some kind of robotic pig.  They are the magic that makes big power grids possible: it's a lot easier to ship electricity around at high voltage and low current, but it's more useful in your home at a lower voltage.  The transformer's the middleware that makes it possible.

     Or, you know, the energy box.  They work the same no matter what you call them. (If your wall-socket juice travels underground, you'll have a warm, humming cube hiding in an out-of-the-way spot every few houses instead.  They work the same way, but are all buttoned up to keep curious fingers away.) 

Slow Horses

     Not the actual plodding kind of horse but the TV series Slow Horses, based on the book series, a kind of affectionate homage to the worlds of John le Carre (pretty directly) and Len Deighton (less so) and one that will be recognizable to fans of the Charles Stross Laundry Files novels and short stories.  Tam and I started watching it and ended up following the entire series to date, night after night

     There's none of Stross's cosmic horror in Slow Horses but lots of horrible office experiences at Slough House, where the ultra-polished UK MI-5 spy agency sends their screw-ups and burn-outs, hoping they'll quit quietly, or possibly fall down the stairs.  The place is run by Jackson Lamb, a very burnt-out Cold War relic with a knack for being in the right place that kept reminding me of someone -- it took watching the entire series before I figured it out: "Sam Sheepdog," from the sheepdog-and-wolf Loony Tunes cartoons: the wolf gets up to all manner of subterfuge and Sam's always right there when it counts, minimal effort, stopping him cold.  Sam -- and Jackson -- have seen it all before; they know the next five moves and they're not impressed.

     Of course, the thing about the screw-ups infesting Slough House is they're MI-5 screw-ups, which means they're pretty good at spying -- and operate outside (or at least at odds with) the agency's bureaucracy.  It makes for exciting viewing, with the callous, obnoxious and nevertheless competent Jackson Lamb managing to manage them largely by indirection and malice.

     Highly recommended, if you like that sort of thing.  Tam and I do. 

The B*stard Theory

     Still waiting on more examples, but so far, my theory about what it takes to run a successful human spaceflight program is holding water.

     Of course, it takes talented engineers, and plenty of them; of course it takes access to resources -- money will do, but money and actual materiel is even better.  And it takes a decent manufacturing base.  Countries with those things, and a will to send stuff into space, can and do run space programs: Japan, the European Union, India.

     To successfully send humans into space, and bring most of them back, you need one more thing: an utter bastard at the top.  Three of the four entities that have done so demonstrate this: The Soviet Union, the United States, and SpaceX.  Two of the principals were trained engineers, though the details of their spacecraft were designed by others; the third is a coder (or was; it takes about fifteen minutes away from that work to get out of date, and he's been a business promoter for decades now).  All three were or are relentless promoters.  All three accommodated the political environments in which they operated, without regard to moral hazard.  And all three were or are pretty much bastards.  They're not the precise same kinds of bastards: raw and relentless, charming and driven, or weird and unflagging, but they're all relatively amoral.  They all chugged on through anything that got between them and their goal.  And though they all got people into space, none of them quite got to where they wanted to be.

     I'm waiting on another example.  Obscurity still conceals China's guy(s); India's manned space program is supposedly still on track, but they're quiet about it.  But there's almost certainly some kind of bastard behind the scenes, driving the detail people, navigating bureaucracy, moving with little regard to the feelings and careers of others.

     I'm deeply skeptical of "Great Man" theories of history.  Getting human spaceflight programs up and running may be an exception. 

Star City

     I finished the first season of Apple TV's Star City a few weeks ago.  It's the Russian-side companion to their alternate history series For All Mankind, in which the Soviet Union barely beats the U.S. to the Moon and the Space Race never stops.

     The latter series shows events from the U.S. side, and the hardware is mostly familiar to anyone who grew up with NASA-inspired articles in the Sunday supplement and national magazines.  It provides about as much view into details of the USSR's space program as we ever got in real life: clunky, overbuilt equipment and cosmonauts who got the job done through grit and fatalistic determination -- or died trying.  Where America succeeded or failed in plain sight, the Russians announced results after the fact, or swept them under the rug when things went wrong.

      And that's what Star City is about: exploring space under paranoid totalitarianism and sometimes despite it, using improvised hardware, taking chances the West never would.  The hardware is...well, it's very Russian.

     Watching the series, I thought the clunkiness and improvisation was a little overplayed.  Surely the real-life Russians had better stuff, despite the awful politics?  Tamara's been reading The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned, by John Strausbaugh.  He certainly looks to have done his homework, and the real Soviet space program was, if anything, even iffier than the TV series makes it out to be.  Oh, the Russians had (and still have) plenty of fine engineers, and Sergei Korolev was (and needed to be) even more determined an organizer, manager and overall rocket designer than Werner von Braun.  But circumstances far outside his control resulted in an effort that had to brute-force everything and accept huge risks.  One reason the R-7 launch system, direct ancestor to today's Soyuz, has been able to become ever more capable though incremental improvement is that it was a crude (but workable) mechanism to begin with; better alloys, better machining, better construction techniques and better electronics have kept it usable, and increased the payload carried on the large amounts of thrust originally needed just to get the stack of stages off the ground and headed for space.

     The Wrong Stuff makes an excellent companion volume to Star City, for all that it slightly undermines the big "what if..." of the series: what if Russia got there first?  But the real "what if..." is a different question: what if Korolev had not been so terribly abused under Stalin's purges that his time in the gulags left him physically damaged and headed for an early death?  If anyone could have led the way to getting the N-1 launcher working and pulled off a Moon landing with Russia's equipment, he would have been the guy; but as things went, he was gone long before the deadline.

     In For All Mankind's timeline, the USSR is still together by the early 2010s -- but it's not quite the same place it was, having loosened up just a little under the pressure to compete (and sometimes cooperate), largely peacefully, in space and at home.  But after one season of Star City, it's clear that even making that small amount of progress will be a long, hard road.

Distraction Screens

     It's no secret that I don't think much of Mr. Trump, or of how he and his gang of Republicans are running the federal government, ringing up unprecedented debt, yanking the rug out from under the poor at home and abroad, handing out tax breaks to their ultra-wealthy pals who do not pay it back in the form of increasing employment* and engaging in wars of choice with murky and/or immoral victory conditions.

     But I do try to limit myself to substantive criticism about issues of importance.  I might think the way he combs his hair looks stupid, but so what?  That hairstyle isn't picking anyone's pocket or breaking their leg, and in the course of a busy day, you can find five or six more at least as dumb.

     So the recent fuss about sneaking the President out of Turkey in the wake of a credible threat (and leaving the Press as sitting ducks -- the very same sitting ducks they'd be if they were sharing the plane with him) or an aide who appears to have an unhealthy devotion to the President (as have many, to many Presidents, and it's never a good sign) strikes me as silly-season distractions, running while there are at least two and half wars on, and our country is well involved with all of them, and while the economy continues to teeter dangerously.

     This August isn't a slow-news month.  There's plenty of real stuff to report on, none of it reflecting any glory on the clod infesting 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
____________________
* The thing about trickle-down economics is, something's got to be trickling down for it to make sense, and I don't mean job cuts.  Otherwise, it's just a trick.