E G O S P E W

I managed to peel the Eric Massa bumper sticker off our car today.

How did we get so fooled? He seemed pretty smart back during the campaign, at the living room chat and the log cabin barbecue fundraiser. He reminded me a little of Senator Jim Webb, with that ex-career military kicked-around-the-world and wrote-a-book-or-two kind of wisdom. We helped get him elected in a solid Republican upstate New York district that hadn’t voted a Democrat into office for decades. (Though we couldn’t quite tip the county to Obama, embarrassingly.)

Massa’s arguments against our Afghanistan involvement were pretty brave; I love seeing an ex-military officer go ballistically anti-war.  He had long been vocal over the abominable folly of the war in Iraq.  But then he disappointed us with his stand against the health care legislation because “it didn’t go far enough.” . . .A classic case of allowing the Perfect be the enemy of the Good. Or of the Better-than-Nothing. A chance to advance civilization comes around only once every fifteen or twenty years; don’t let it slip through your fingers because it ain’t perfect.

And now this bizarre resignation: for medical, or political, or personal reasons? I hope the doctor’s reports turn out to be good news for him. But as for all his bad news, the blame lies with Eric Massa. These wounds are self-inflicted. True, he accepted limited responsibility in the coded admissions about not “living up to his own standards.” Which only makes his subsequent ranting at environmental or political pressures seem more like attempts at deflection or dissemblance. Sadly, in this strange behavior and abandonment of his post, he has disappointed many, many people who had given him their support and trust. What emerges with each rambling interview is an intuited truth, disconnected from his admissions and protestations; a truth purposely unspoken. This exercise in deception is the saddest act to witness: an aware, worldly man so unable to come face-to-face with his own self-knowledge.

I didn’t know what to do with the bumper sticker. . .it was laden with so much history and personal investment, I couldn’t just throw it away.

Remember reciprocity failure? Sometimes you just don’t need Photoshop.

This is an actual unretouched photo of some unretouched structures in my nightly meanderings (Feb 7, 2009 ~8:30 PM).  No super-saturation or false-color IR.  All I added was my name and copyright.  How fair is that?

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All the color here comes from the various monochromatic artificial light sources and of course the wonderful hues you can coax from the evening sky with a 4-second exposure.

I used to love to shoot out the apartment window in the middle of the night and let my Nikkormat EL stretch towards 60 seconds with slide film to get the ‘real’ colors from the Upper West Side tenements, topped by urban nimbus streaks. Besides the amplified subtleties the results incorporated the non-linear sensitivities of the different color layers when exposed outside the roughly 1 to 1/1000 second range they were calibrated for, hence reciprocity failure.

Another note about this image is the lens: the little Nikkor 50mm 1.8 (effective 75mm in DX). The VR zooms are pretty amazing but if I want the sharpest of the sharp, I snap on this baby (and lock my vision into medium-telephoto for better or worse). It provides that extra kick I look for in the detail and undoubtedly adds to the overall subliminal effect on the viewer. (It makes me kinda yearn for one of the Micro Nikkors, except they are all longer and slower and bigger and cost 20 times as much.)
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Call Me Curious (Magenta)

Call me uncool, call me urban-not-country, but I hadn’t heard about this particular recreational trend until today, when I was doing some research on the noble gases, answering the kinds of questions that come to me in the shower. Really. Like why are the inert elements all gases at room temperature? And why do they glow? I have thoughtfully provided links to the answers; how noble of me. The second answer is a fairly complete treatment of neon and its history in sign usage, on a site called SnowGlow, and what led me to the subject of this post.

The Greatest Question

Those elemental issues have now been superseded by this greatest question of our time: Why do snowmobilers put funny lights on their rides?

The Hypothesis

I suppose it could be attributed to the typical filtering down to the general public of ethnic or political gestures considered cool and exclusive. It doesn’t take long for any powerful symbol to be co-opted by the masses. Consider the histories of the Raised Fist Salute, the Fist Bump, and the Yellow Ribbon of Tony Orlando and Dawn’s excruciatingly popular song.

The raised fist, whose indelible first impression for me was for Black Power, has since the 1960s been used by millions of people in many different movements. The fist bump, popularized by football and basketball player types, is now observed among hip nerds and even less hip CEOs. And, as anybody who watches the Oscars or follows a gas-guzzling SUV down the freeway knows, that yellow ribbon (in the song, a secret signal for an ex-con) has morphed into little fabric loops of every dye-able color symbolizing any worthy cause.

Wool Gathering

Note that if you dig just the littlest bit into Wikipedia (with the customary Skeptic Filter engaged) it becomes pretty clear that most of these symbols in some form preexisted “modern day” usage. For instance, the raised fist was lifted in the Spanish Civil War and the Russian Revolution(s). The fist bump is a traditional Jamaican greeting. And the yellow ribbon story has existed in poem and song for centuries, since the dawn of time, as it were.

Anyway, what I’m trying to suggest is that lights under snowmobiles may have originated from the influence of Music Television videos depicting flamboyant Hip-Hop artists flashing personalized transportation tricked out with ostentatious lighting effects reminiscent of the style devloped by the Custom Car lowrider movement in Southern California of the 1950s and ’60s.

The Digression

In Brooklyn, whence I hail (at least for the past tenth of my life), a lot of the cars have tiny blue lights mounted on the hood, facing forward. I’m not sure what it means, some gang sign one assumes, but after I moved here I thought seriously of wiring a couple of those babies on my (otherwise unmodified) RAV4, just to fit in. Then I wasn’t sure exactly how to effect their acquisition. I don’t often find myself in an auto supply store, and Borders is disappointingly thin in that department. If I were to happen into a local shop, would I ask for “those cute little blue lights I notice on the indigenous automobiles”? Or how about, “Yo, gimme somma them blue gang lights. Y’know, for the hood o’my ride. Like the Bloods. But blue. The Blue Bloods. Aw, nevermind.”

Maybe once a year, I get my car washed, whether it needs it or not. Usually I’m piggybacking on the free coupon from the 10-minute oil change. Isn’t it fun while your car is being pulled through the 5-buck car wash, killing time in the accessory shop, looking at all the crap people buy to junk up their cars? Oh, how tempting some of that stuff is, way more sophisticated these days than pine tree air fresheners or Playboy mudflaps. A lot of it is high-tech, requiring batteries. Like blue lights. But the better stuff plugs into your cigarette lighter, like the Neverdown DeLuxe Auto-Vibrator I found in my neighborhood Instalube’n'Wash. Just keep the motor idling so the car battery doesn’t drain. Don’t forget the tip. (That’s a complete dramatisation of course. But you get my point.)

The Evidence

But back to the subject. First of all, it kinda seems that you can’t get much lower than a snowmobile, heightwise. Okay, maybe a toboggan. But then where would you put the hydraulic lifts? Now I’m not saying these snowmobiles actually do that hip-hop thing like the socal chebbies, though it would seem to come in handy for ski jumps, moguls, xtreme snowmobiling or whatever. All I know is what I see from the photo above and the SnowGlow website. They’re just kinda sitting there. Glowing.

Whoops, I spoke too soon. Here’s yer jumpin video. Check out NiteRide.

Conclusion

So, I have come to conclude, snowmobilers put funny lights on their rides because it looks freakin awesome.

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Next: Céleste Gone Wild (video!)
Our 1969 Citroën DS-21 and my plan to put lowrider lights under her rocker panels and cruise my hood.

Pseudointellectual Language Discussion #73
More Questions Than Answers

How is it that “honeycomb” became the authoritative nomenclature when describing a hexagonal pattern?

Bee’s Honeycomb	Cow’s Reticulum

(continue reading…)

Don’t use a name invoking invincibility when we know servers or at least their sysops are mere mortals.

Offered in Evidence, the “Always-On Websites” site-down page:

(Unretouched screen capture, January 5, 2008.)

Courtesy of a Reality-Based Training Session at The School of Hard Knocks,  we may deduce that the following titles for your new Web Presence are probably ill-advised:

• Always-On
• Never-Down
• CrashPruf
• UpAnAtEm
• Error-Free
• PerfectGenius
• Spotless-Syntax
• Faultless-n-Friendly
• Zero-Defect
• Immune-to-Laws-of-Nature
• Technical Difficulties, Pshaw!