2011 January

	2011, JANUARY

January 30

I had to post another set of appropriate names when I learned that the White House Deputy Press Secretary was (really!) Josh Earnest. I can't beat that, but I can try.

Eloper: Marian Haste

Marathon runner: Tony Hipplehurt

Ground-floor riveter: Alfreda Heitz

Fertility specialist: Philip Ian Toober

Valet parker: Rick Les Driver

Barber: Nicholas Shaeffer

Procrastinator: Tom Morrow

Gospel singer: Mae Zingarase

Woman looking for a sperm donor: Amanda Pushkin

Quiz show hostess: Ann Sadie Question

President of Dean Martin fan club: Thad Zamoré

Barfly still alone at closing time: Annie Portia Nastorum

Nutritionist: Archie Toesfood

Trapeze artist: Darren Youngman

And finally, one the Car Talk guys can actually use—the Puzzler Obfuscator: Duncan Feusmie.

January 25

Another thing they didn’t teach me in med school.

If you pull a hair out of your nose, it will bring tears to your eyes. Why this happens is an interesting problem in neurophysiology and a question that has been used at least once on medical board exams in the last 50 years. I always thought it was a great question because it’s obviously something you never thought about before. It requires a knowledge of anatomy and physiology and also (unlike, say, “Name the twelve cranial nerves and what they do”) tests your ability to apply what you had to memorize for the final to a new problem.

I’ve been working a lot in the garage making sawdust lately and, of course, sneezing my head off. This got me thinking along lines similar to that first question. Why (or, more properly, how) do you sneeze when there is a tickle in your nose? Even more interesting: why do you sneeze with your mouth open? It seems to me if you are trying to rid yourself of some irritant in your nose, it would be much more effective if you snoze with your mouth closed. Not a pretty picture, that. And you’d have to find some way to cover your nose and your ears.

January 20: News Flash! The Curmudgeon is pissed.

There’s a new documentary, “Inside Job,” about the banks and how they engineered the global financial collapse. Reviewers are virtually unanimous in their opinions: I must see it, and I will leave enlightened and enraged.

I need this?

I’m already plenty enraged, about practically everything. I’m angry at banks and bankers, and insurance companies, and airlines. I hate oil companies and CEOs all over the world.

I’m angry at the Democrats and the Republicans, and I’d be angry at the Tea Party if they weren’t so ridiculous. Christine O’Donnell? Don’t you have to be aware of the Constitution before you can run for the Senate? I don’t care who wins the elections; nobody—certainly not Meg Whitman or Jerry Brown—has any hope of straightening out California, and Congress doesn’t do anything constructive no matter who’s in charge. I just wish they would all shut the hell up.

I’m even angry with the Nobel Committee for awarding a prize in what they call the “science” of Economics, a field that has all the answers and changes them roughly every 4 or 5 years. The last time that prize made any sense was 1994, when they gave it to the schizophrenic mathematician John Nash. He deserved it. He deserved something.

I hate concerts that are so over-amped it’s painful, and likewise movies that are shown with the soundtrack so loud you need earplugs. I’m angry about TV commercials, political and otherwise, that are tasteless, insulting, and endlessly irritating. And who told the advertisers it’s a good idea to run the same damn ad twice in a row? I’m not much happier about the TV programs themselves: the only decent show on the air is Jeopardy, and just when I’m getting interested they screw it up with something like Celebrity Jeopardy. I don’t need a quiz show to show me how stupid actors are.

I’m pissed at emails in Chinese that appear in my inbox along with the ads to make my penis larger or my belly smaller.

The thing is, being angry at everything is hard work. It’s exhausting, and not terribly effective. Nothing I’m mad at gets any better because of it. So I have decided to give it up. Do your damnedest, world. See if I care.

And I’m not going to see the movie.

January 15: The Steam Bender Blues.

I don’t know of a song with that title, but if there isn’t one, I’m sure it’s some sort of oversight. My first pre-project project was to build a steam bender, basically a box full of steam to make wood pliable enough to bend. I thought it would be a good way to shape the guitar bindings, despite the assurance (accurate, as it turned out) of the best luthier I know that it wouldn’t work. I figured I could use it for other woodworking projects, too, so what could I lose?

So here’s what I know. Now.

1. If you want to make a steam bender out of 4-inch diameter schedule 80 PVC pipe, as recommended by many on the internet, good luck finding the stuff. If you’re lucky, you may be able to buy a 20-foot length (for about eighty bucks). Unless you know 3 other people who want to build a steam bender, you will throw away 15 feet.

2. If you decide to make it out of wood, it will work fine unless you use plywood, which will probably delaminate (i.e., come APART) in high heat and moisture. Poplar works.

3. If you think you ought to caulk the seams, go to the head of the class. If you think you can pop in to Home Depot and pick up a tube of kitchen and bathtub caulk, go back to the rear. Caulk melts somewhere below 212º. Get some heat resistant sealant (like Red Devil at Ace Hardware).

4. If you think it would be a good idea to put some insulation around the outside, you’re probably right again. But don’t stick it on with spray adhesive: the adhesive is no better than caulk at 212º. Staple it on or wrap it with cable ties, or string, or anything. I used duct tape. On the outside of the insulation, it’s OK.

5. There are as many possible steam generators as there are builders. I’ve seen camp stoves, kettles on a hot plate, propane torches, barbecue starters, turkey fryers, God knows what else. The easiest is a wallpaper steamer, about $45 at Lowe’s. It’s probably also the cheapest, since you don’t have to mess with hoses and connections.

6. Oh, yeah: if you want to make connections or drains (just drilling holes works, but isn’t elegant), don’t use the PVC plumbing fixtures you found at Home Depot. Like everything else, they melt.

When you get it all done, your steam bender will make steam. Your expensive bloodwood bindings will make splinters. But you can still use the thing to make Windsor chairs.

steambox

January 11

Lutherie, like many specialized fields, has its own particular argot, language and terminology familiar only to its practitioners. “Lutherie” itself is such a term, since nobody builds lutes these days.

If you are going to be following along with me on my quest to produce the most elegant and mellifluous classical guitar in history, you may well encounter some words you haven’t seen before. To make it easier, I herewith offer some definitions you may find useful.

Bollocks: A very handy word meaning “balls.” Also lousy, lies, and general sorrow or despair. And something broken or messed up. As a verb, to screw up. How can you make a guitar without such a word?

Fructose: a word in common usage these days, but not used (by me, at least) in its common context. Generally preceded by “Oh,” and followed by “!,” I say it when I measure 12 inches and cut 11 7/8.

Meekrab: A euphemism for a thing too vile and disgusting to mention by name. You know the level of hell reserved for child-molesting priests? The level below that is Meekrab.

Muckworm: A larva or grub that lives in muck or manure; -- applied to the larvae of the tumbledung and allied beetles.

Scorp: No, not a spoon with tines but a cutting tool used by engravers. The term is also used by skateboarders to mean a fall on your face, and slang for another type of activity, as in “I took that chick home and scorped her.” Any or all of these usages may be appropriate in lutherie.

Adz: surely familiar to anyone who plays Scrabble or does crosswords, it’s a cutting or shaping tool. Not much use in building guitars unless you are starting with a tree, but it may come up from time to time in phrases like “0.085 inches my adz.”

Froe: a cleaving tool, for splitting wood down the grain instead of cutting across the grain. Purists do this because the wood is much stronger if the grain is not interrupted. I’m not a purist and don’t own one of these, but I may use the other meaning of the word (“a dirty woman; a slattern”) to refer to my incipient guitar under certain circumstances such as a loose fit between the neck and the body. Of the guitar.

Petard: a small bomb used to blast open a door. Sometimes they go off prematurely, blowing the user into the air (hence “hoist by his own petard”). But never mind that; “petard” is also a synonym for “ass,” and derives from the French “pétard”, from “péter,” to fart. Apologies and sympathy to my friends of that name, especially the one living in France.

Truss rod: nothing to do with hernias or genitalia, it’s a steel device buried in the neck of a guitar to allow for correction of the inevitable bowing that occurs over the years. I could use one in my neck, come to think of it.

We will surely encounter other unfamiliar words as we go along, but I’ll try to pause long enough to explain what you need to know.

January 5

When I was in high school, my mother made me take a typing class. Touch typing, that is—using all your fingers. She said I would need to be able to type in college and, although I suspect her ulterior motive was to be freed from having to type my school papers for me, she was right. I was baffled by the very concept of the “qwerty” keyboard, but eventually I got to where I could type about 60 words per minute, which in the days of carbon paper and Wite-Out means without errors. I could have gotten a job as an executive assistant, which in those days we called a secretary.

I learned on a manual typewriter, which gave me innumerable opportunites to untangle all the keys I had managed to jam together. Then came electric typewriters, which made it harder to mess up the machine, and finally the IBM Selectric. The Selectric replaced the keys with a whiz-ball that was unjammable and even replaceable if you wanted a different font—though we called it “type” in those days.

I never had a Selectric and only got to use my mom’s a few times, but that was the height of my typing career.

It’s been all downhill since.

The computer and electronic keyboards made Wite-Out, Ezerase paper (Remember that? Kind of slimy, but it worked) and typing skill obsolete. Suddenly you could correct your errors before they appeared on the page. And since it didn’t matter how badly you typed, it didn’t matter if they made the keyboards smaller and the keys more sensitive. You could type with your nose, fix it, and nobody would have a clue. So we got sloppy, or at least I did.

Then came laptops, tablets, virtual keyboards. Then cell phones with keyboards. The keys are much too small for touch typing as I learned it, of course. Now you have to learn to type with your thumbs. They still use the qwerty layout, but whatever rationale for it we once had is long gone.

Probably no one under age 30 will ever learn to type with ten fingers, but my phone only makes calls. I’m still using a full-size keyboard on my desktop computer, but the keys are too sensitive and I tend to put in a lot of extr4aneous characters. And since neither the keyboard nor I is in a fixed position, I move around just enough that sometimes my hands shift over a key and I end up qeurubf—I mean writing—in code. There are little Braille dots on the F and J keys to let you know where you are by feel, but I’ve lost enough sensation in my fingertips that I can’t really tell.

All in all, I suppose the word processor is a good thing—I mean, look how nice this page is. But fifty years ago, I could do almost as well by myself. And feel good about it.

January 1

While we’re on the subject, I want to say a word or two about farts. I realize that there are necessarily gases left over from digestion, and they have to go somewhere. But why do they have to smell bad? Human flatus is mostly nitrogen, carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and oxygen—all odorless—with a little skatol, indol, hydrogen sulfide, and an occasional soupçon of methane thrown in for flavor.

It has been suggested that there may be an evolutionary advantage to the stench: that animals that smell bad are less likely to be eaten by bigger animals. But, skunks notwithstanding, this argument doesn’t hold up. In the first place, smelling bad only once in a while is unlikely to deter all those hungry predators. In the second place, if those prehistoric carnivores were all that picky, they wouldn’t have had much to eat: humans aren’t the only animals who fart. Ask any dog owner.

So as far as I can see, foul flatus conveys no benefit; it just is.

But does it need to be thus? The intestine is a little chemical factory. Why can’t these stinky gases be combined with other chemicals to form odorless compounds? Earthworms do it all the time, oxidizing H2S, skatol, and other vile things into odorless substances. Surely people could do that too, with one small genetic tweak.

Another example of the Creator’s inattention to detail, if you ask me.

And you thought I was going to say something about the new year.

The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect--well, yes, come to think of it, I guess they do.