Orgone Research

2006-12-25T12:38:00.000-08:00

Weird Al's Blowjob

Years ago, I went out on a few dates with a gal named Sally. Sally was a friend of an ex-girlfriend, so I had known her casually for a while. At the time, she lived in West Seattle and I lived in Wallingford. She had just broken up with her boyfriend, and claimed she lived in fear of retaliation. She wanted to buy a gun and learn how to shoot it and I obliged by helping her out. At the time, I was much more the gun nut than I am now, in the sense that I simply went out target shooting more. I agreed to teach her what I could about firearm safety and marksmanship.

I knew Sally had done a few stand-up comedy gigs in Seattle, mostly opening for headliners. She told me she was a comedian, but I had to wonder if she could make enough money to support herself doing just that. My spidey sense was beginning to tell me that she was not quite on the level, that she was holding things back.

By that time I had taught several individuals, including women, how to shoot guns and I had always enjoyed the student-teacher relationship. Sally was not the best student, and seemed to not want to listen to what I tried to tell her. This is not a good thing with firearms.

I finally learned that Sally was indeed more than a comedian, that she was a stripper! She did the "bachelor party" thing, and claimed to incorperate her "comedy" into her stripper act. Though I had been with Sally on several occasions, nothing sexual had happened between us. I was beginning to question whether our relationship was "going anywhere".

One day at the firing range, Sally dropped something of a bombsell on me. She told me that she had previously been an all-out prostitute! She claimed to have had sex with "hundreds" of men, in some sort of escort service capacity. She claimed that she didn't even appreciate having orgasms while with her customers, as she claimed it represented a loss of control.

But what really threw me for a loop was how this information was affecting our nascent relationship. I was beginning to get this icky feeling that Sally was something of a cock-tease, at least with regards to me. I suspected it was that old hooker-stripper mentality, which usually includes a disdain for men coupled with a need to exert power over men. She was beginning to tell me about all kinds of explicit sexual behavior to me, all without putting out. One time while I was over at her house she decided to change her clothes, all the while leaving the door open, and carrying on a conversation with me.

The cock-teasing came to a peak when she began to describe to me how she didn't like to spend much time with her clients when she was a prostitute, and so developed world-class blowjob technique, designed to make her clients come especially quickly. Sally also had the advantage of being good looking, albeit in a sort of long-faced, Ann Coulter way.

Eventually I could see the writting on the wall, and I decided that I didn't want to pursue being involved with this individual. But the strangest part of the story is her tale of being involved with fellow comedian Weird Al Yankovic. She claimed she knew Yankovic, and had hung out with him in Los Angeles. In typical groupie fashion, she bedded Yankovic, but claimed that due to his religious beliefs, something like Seventh Day Adventist or Jehovah's Witness, he was unwilling to have premarital sex with her. Instead she performed one of her world-class blowjobs...

True or not, this story inevitably colors my reaction when I watch Yankovic's videos.

2006-12-23T14:10:00.000-08:00

Lurking in the dark and gray environment under the West Seattle Bridge is a grizzly bear. I expect the big guy will be gone soon, so I'm glad I could capture him before he got away. If you get right up close, you can see he was put on wallpaper style.

2006-11-14T21:20:00.000-08:00

Cute Dog Blog

I've owned cameras and taken pictures since I was a child. My first camera was a Polaroid that took black and white "instant" photos that you had to wait a minute or so before you could open the little plastic envelope. I think you were supposed to wipe it down with some sort of chemical stabilizer afterwards. As an amateur, you have to take a lot of pictures before you get one or two that came out well.

I love my new digital camera. I've taken over 4000 photographs since I got it in April of 2005. These two dog photos were only the 26th and 27th photos I took with my new camera! I think they came out fairly well.

By the way, this is not my dog.

2006-11-13T01:19:00.000-08:00

Light My Fire

As you may know by now, I have strong but mixed feelings about the TV show Mythbusters. It seems like they employ protective equipment when they don't need it, yet they often do reckless and stupid things without any protection at all. I can't believe they do any kind of pyro at all indoors. Take a look at what happens at about 2:50 into this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hoplw-JBS1A

Note too, that it happens on Adam's watch.....

Oh, did that bring back memories! I previously blogged about my friend Mike and me making and detonating a pipe bomb. Though we had made crude black powder before, at that time we were on a kick of making a propellant out of sugar and potassium nitrate. Mike and I had discovered Paladin Press, and in fact had ordered a couple of books from them. One was The Poor Man's James Bond, and the other was one of the ever popular Get Even series of books. I think it was in the Get Even book that we learned a recipe for making a "smoke bomb" using sugar and potassium nitrate. The fatal flaw in the recipe was having to carmelize the sugar in the mixture using heat.

Mike and I never had a problem with this, as I believe we used an electrical hot plate which had no open flame. You also have to go really slowly in heating the mixture. At one point I suggested to my friend Dave Peterman that we should make a really big smoke bomb. I think our plan was to light it off under the Higgins Avenue bridge on a Friday or Saturday night, probably to piss off the jocks cruising in their Cameros and Trans Ams. Dave and I decided to enlist the help of our friend Randy Pepprock, as Randy had his own apartment and so avoided the onus of parantal supervision. I think this all happened in the summer of 1980, when I was 17 or 18. Randy Pepprock was in a band called Who Killed Society about whom Steve Albini once said;

Circle Seven when they were called Who Killed Society actually were a motherfucker band. Just amazing. If you can imagine it, almost a cross between old Agent Orange and Siouxsie and the Banshees. Then they turned into Circle Seven...whose record had its moments but it definitely wasn't as good as it should have been.

--Steve Albini, Forced Exposure 9

Randy was the real deal, as punk as you could get in Missoula at the time. But deep down he was a really mild and thoughtful guy. He eventually went on to create a business called "Downtown Deco";

http://www.downtowndeco.com/index.htm

So one night Dave, Randy and I mix potassium nitrate and sugar in a saucepan inside of Randy's apartment. Unfortunatly, Randy had a gas stove...

The sugar was turning to carmel just a little too fast, and suddenly all hell broke loose. We had WAY more stuff in our saucepan than what you see in the Mythbusters clip, and in 2 seconds the entire apartment is full of white smoke. Randy had the presence of mind to pull the saucepan into the sink, or at least off the stove. Some of the incindiary mass got on his linoleum floor, but thankfully nothing in the room caught on fire. We opened the window to let out the plumes of white smoke. We expected the fire trucks to arrive in moments, but amazingly they never did. I think because the building was so old there were no smoke alarms to blast anyone with ear-splitting sound, so I think most of the building's residents never even knew. I felt really bad for one old man, who bundled his most valuable worldly possesions in a small plastic bag and slowly descended the main stairwell to escape the smoke.

Dave and I profusely appologised to Randy. Some time later, Dave and I set about to help Randy repair his carmelized linoleum. We did it in a typically punk way, by cutting out an undamaged section from under his bed, and swaping it with the burned section beside his stove. The really weird part about this was finding writing and strangely drawn crucifixes on the wooden floor underneath the linoleum. We didn't cut enough flooring away to get the whole screed, so we never knew exactly what it all said. Perhaps it was a curse of some sort; divine karmic payback for our incendiary transgressions.

Well, what can I say, seeing the Mythbusters, a couple of professional FX guys, doing the same kind of fucked-up thing I did when I was 17 kind of warms my heart. First of all, if you want smoke, there are MUCH safer ways of generating it than trying to carmelize sugar and potassium nitrate. Second, if you play with fire, DO IT THE FUCK OUTSIDE!!!!!

2006-11-11T11:20:00.000-08:00

Just Beat It

From time to time, my mother would encounter a glass jar with its lid stuck on. Her reaction would be to bang the lid onto the stainless steel counter top in our kitchen. As I moved through childhood, I eventually encountered that classic "scientific" household tip; run the metal jar lid under hot water. This was claimed to be "scientific", as it was claimed to be based on the principle of differential expansion; the metal would expand more than the glass, and so would result in a greater spatial tolerence between the metal and the glass.

While it's clear by sheer empirical proof that this technique works, I began to doubt the claimed reason several years ago. After I became something of a gearhead I became rather obsessed with threaded fasteners. This was partly due to reading a really wonderfull book entitled Engineer to Win by Carroll Smith. http://www.amazon.com/Engineer-Motorbooks-Workshop-Carroll-Smith/dp/0879381868

Smith discussed how threaded fasteners stay fastened. One classic way is to use a a "thread locker" like Loctite. Good enough, but what do you do when when you want to remove the fastener? According to Smith, you use heat. Heat lowers the viscosity of the thread locker chemical, and vastly lowers the torque required to unscrew the fastener.

Suddenly it dawned on me, that's how the old stuck-jar-lid trick works as well; it's probably not due to something as exotic as differential expansion, but simply to lowering the viscosity of the thick food substance caught in the threads! Think about it, jar lids are not usually stuck when they are unopened, they get stuck after you pour out the food substance. Further, they are usually stuck when they are kept in the refrigerator, increasing the viscosity of the food stuck in the threads!

Though I believed the commonly held explanation of "differential expansion" as a child, I was correct in believing that heating the jar lid with hot water is the correct technique to remove it. I remember telling my mother this, and further suggesting that her banging of the jar lid was counterproductive, in that it would tend to cause the threads to bend and distort, and make things worse. Sadly, my mother was a fundamentally irrational person, and continued to bang away at those stuck jar lids. She went to her death believing that was the way to do it.

2006-11-09T18:55:00.000-08:00

Exploding Propane Tanks

I had a little accident in welding class yesterday. Of course it was not my fault...

I had welded together several pieces of metal to form a v-grooved butt joint for an innershield test coupon. I grabbed a propane and air tank with an old style valve that you have to manually light in order to pre-heat the metal before the final weld. I had used this unit before, and in fact it was my instructors tank. I lit it with my butane lighter. Almost immediately, a gas leak appeared, somewhere about the neck or the valve of the canister. I didn't have my gloves on or I would have simply turned the valve off. The entire valve and burner area was engulfed in flames. I decided this could become serious so I grabbed the canister by the base in my right hand and boogied it outside. I set it on the concrete outside, still burning. It looked like a Molotov cocktail. My instructor saw what had happened, and simply put it in a big water tank, which I didn't happen to see on my way out. I was shaken by the experience, but not hurt. I sloughed off some burned hair from the back of my right hand.

I suspect, but do not know, that a great deal more heat would be required to actually cause the canister to rupture, but hey, in a situation like that your emotions take over. I'd probably do the same thing again. This incident reminded me of something that took place way back when, probably about 1991.

It was winter time, and I was out target shooting in an old gravel pit near North Bend WA. I think it was right around the time of the first Gulf War, at least when Desert Shield became Desert Storm. I had gone through several hundred .45 rounds, and had actually stuck around into the darkness of the late afternoon to see the orange fireballs created by the burning propellant. Now it was quite dim, and I decided that it was time to pick up my ejected brass cartridges before I stopped being able to see them. I holstered my pistol.

Now a car pulls up and parks on the road beside the gravel pit. I hear someone get out. This is vaguely creeping me out, as it does not make sense that someone would start their target practice when it is just getting dark. Soon I hear the unmistakable sound of a round being racked into the chamber of a firearm. My instincts tell me something is wrong, but I still have live rounds left in my holstered pistol should worse come to worse. I continued to pick up my brass, hoping that I will get done post haste.

Presently the man rolls up to me and says hi. He is as friendly and charming as can be. Suddenly I understand why he has arrived at this hour; he's planning on shooting a propane tank! He sets a typical plumber-style propane cylinder down range and beside it lights a pool of gasoline or some flammable liquid. The burning liquid helps illuminate the propane cylinder. He takes several shots at it with his rifle, but does not hit it. He asks if I would like try. I take very careful aim, as the target is probably 30 yards away. Indeed, I was able to hit it with a .45 pistol, and the canister erupts in a ball of flame. Strangely, a car just happened to be driving down the road at the exact same time! It think it safe to assume the driver would have been startled...

It's strange how the mildly mundane things in life can remind you of the truly weird stuff that actually happened. That was the last propane cylinder I ever blew up, and it will probably remain that way.

2006-11-04T16:55:00.000-08:00

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

When I was about 8 my vocabulary expanded. No, not really expanded, perhaps exploded. Because of this, things began to happen to me that I couldn't really understand at the time, and became a source of life long turmoil and torment.

I can remember Reader's Digest magazine having a "build your vocabulary" column each month. I remember it having 20 words with multiple choices for the correct definition. My mother highly encouraged me to pursue this, and I enjoyed doing it. At the time, Reader's Digest seemed very "grown up" so it seemed like quite an accomplishment to be able to take these tests and do well on them. But of course at 8, a child does not have the developed social skills to know how to present these sort of behaviours to the world. The world of Missoula Montana in 1970 was a cruel place for a child with a large vocabulary.

When I realized I was good, I wanted to be better. I set about to learn ever more exotic and "big" words. My mother had taken to reading the books of Adelle Davis and Prevention magazine, and so I became aware of the "eight essential amino acids". I decided it would be cool to memorize these words, and of course to show them off at school. The very pinnacle of "big words" was one I found listed in the Guinness Book of World Records: "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis" at 45 letters. It really was not too much for me to memorize this word, as I could give the letters and syllables a sort of rolling cadence.

Well, I think everyone can see where this is going. As you might imagine, my new found skill was greeted with absolute ridicule by the other children at Paxson grade school. Usually the fourth and fifth graders wouldn't pay any attention to the social games of the third graders, but I was the exception. The word got out that I was a freak of some sort, and and various fourth and fifth graders would crowd around me at recess and demand to know what "that thing in my pants is called" or "what's under your underwear". I honestly had no clue as to why I was being tormented. At 8, I simply didn't have the social skills to realize that they not only didn't think "big words" were cool, that they took it as a direct insult.

But the torments of the fourth and fifth graders were nothing compared to the terror that I felt by my own classmates in the third grade. The ringleader of my tormentors was a little shit named Michael Nimlos. Since I was never beaten by my parents, I really had no concept of serious physical pain. The thought alone that I would be beaten after school by Michael Nimlos and his gang of assholes was itself terrifying. Michael Nimlos had already chased me once after school, and I ran to the safety of a house on the way and rang the doorbell hoping that someone would be inside. Nimlos broke off his attack.

Since I knew that I now had the threat of multiple, simultaneous attackers, I decided I needed an improvised weapon to deal with the threat. I never had the famous GI Joe "action figures", but instead a series of Western figures by Marx, including Captain Tom Maddox.
Tom Maddox had articulated joints. His legs were connected at the hips by a spring that ran transversely through the pelvis. His arms and head were held by the same kind of spring arrangement. If you pulled the arms and legs far enough out of the sockets, you could remove the springs from their connecting points, and be left with a plastic torso. I sacrificed my Tom Maddox to make my improvised defensive weapon; a mace. I strung a twisted sisal rope through Captain Tom's pelvis, and tied it off to form a loop. The free end I could wrap around the torso. This created a weapon small enough to conceal in my jacket. Why I never simply went to my parents before the attack, I really don't know. Perhaps the fear of "telling" inhibited me from taking the direct approach.

The appointed day came, and indeed after school the faster, stronger boys encircled me in a vacant lot beside the school. Michael Nimlos was there, goading on Teddy Vinton and two of the Burwick brothers, Terry and Tracy. I pulled out my improvised mace and swung it around my head. Indeed it worked, or perhaps they viewed the situation in a more comical light than I did, and didn't want to venture into the path of the swinging plastic torso.

At this point I had to tell my mother, who decided that a passive approach was best; don't tell the school administrators about the physical attacks, but instead pick me up after school in her black Renault Dauphine. I could see her parked there at 3:00 PM each day, and it reassured me that I would get home safely yet another day.

Even after the after school gang attacks stopped, I was still tormented. It was a genuine shock for me to learn the reason I was being tormented. At one point I was taken out in the hall with Michael Nimlos, even though I was clearly the victim, and a teacher asked Michael why he was tormenting me. Right there, it comes out: "Big Words". I began to overeat when I was eight, and became somewhat overweight. In retrospect, it was obviously a reaction to stress, as I have the same problem today.

When recess would end we had to line up and quite down before we were allowed back into the building. Grade school was a study in chronic lack of adult supervision, and this day was no exception. Though the third grade class was lined up, they were not quiet, and the chant began; "Matt, Matt, you gotta lose some fat", again and again. I perceived it was horribly wrong to go inside before allowed to do so by the teachers, but I couldn't stand it anymore, and ran inside and sat down in my desk, crying. Miss Hanson, the fourth grade teacher, heard me and came in to comfort me.

Yes, being 8 years old, overweight, large vocabulary, and living in Missoula Montana in 1970 was a really shitty combination.

Yeah, life can be a bitch for a child with a large vocabulary. As you might imagine, as one grows up, you don't get physically threatened for having a large vocabulary, but from time to time, you still catch shit from people who decide you must be a pompous asshole for using unusual words. Frankly, I think having a large vocabulary is kind of like being left handed; it's easier to move through the world using the tools you are comfortable with, but you must adapt to the mainstream from time to time and use your right hand. You have to be able to read your audience and decide what kind of words will allow you to be best understood. As you grow up, you learn that having a large vocabulary is almost NEVER a social advantage.

As I've gone through life from time to time I've seen "vocabulary building" programs that are usually sold as a set of audio recordings to build your vocabulary. Jebus, do these people really know what they are getting into?

Over the years I've wondered what ever happened to that little shit, Michael Nimlos. Well, I see he became one of "Missoula's greatest dads": http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2005/06/19/news/local/news05.txt

Now it must be admitted that people do grow up. Perhaps Michael did too. Would he torment and physically threaten me today? Probably not. I can't deny I did mean things to other children, and I'm sure I underestimate the impact it really had, but you know, I never organized any after school gang assaults. On the other hand, why should I give him the benefit of the doubt? I still have a large vocabulary, maybe Michael Nimlos is still an asshole...

Perhaps I actually got off easy in childhood. There are people who have experienced much more physical and psychological torment than I ever did. I can only say that for me, what should have been a wonderful development of a mental skill turned into a nightmare that still torments my memory.

2006-10-25T17:43:00.000-07:00

Run Over By John Force

I like drag racing. In fact, drag racing and mixed martial arts are really about the only sports I like. I like how obsessive and singular drag racing is. It's also a mind blowing thing to be near the starting line when top fuel or funny cars launch. Thankfully the sound not in the same frequency range as say, a guitar or it would totally deafen you. The sound is way into the bass range, and so is more tolerable to the ear. Nevertheless, it's so loud near the starting line that you can't see the launch clearly! I'm assuming that this is because the sound vibrates the eyeballs, but I have to wonder if the air itself is vibrating!

Professional drag racing is unique in how accessible the drivers and crews are to the fans. Most of the drivers are willing to sign autographs and shake hands with the fans. One of the most well known funny car drivers is John Force. In fact he's got his own TV show now, though I can't bring myself to watch it. Can you get a cooler name than John Force? If I ever become a porn star I'm going to change my name to John Force.

Some of the drag strip officials get around the grounds on little mini-bikes. Some years ago at a race at SIR (Seattle International Raceway) I was walking back to my seat in the grandstand. I had to weave through a heavy crowd. Suddenly I come upon a man on a mini bike talking to a group of people, behind the bleachers. He's facing away from me. As I'm moving forward, he starts to back up on his bike. He's not watching where he's going. I'm thinking "learn how to drive, buddy". He's not watching where he's going because he is busy talking to these people. I nearly run into him.

As I walked around him, I realized it was John Force. Yes, I almost got "run over" by John Force. True story.

2006-10-23T21:44:00.000-07:00

Ray Wallace Track Morphology

I noticed this just two days ago. I've got this long article on my website about Dermal Ridges and Casting Artifacts.

http://www.orgoneresearch.com/photo.htm

I included a photo of the Blue Creek Mountain - Onion Mountain track photos taken by Doreen Hooker. It is a good, clear photo, and I had included it simply to demonstrate how compliant the soil was. But I was so busy comparing the human footprint to the putative Sasquatch footprint that I didn't notice this subtle detail: the Crack in the Track. Note the crack or furrow in the heel area of the right-footed wooden prosthetic. Now compare that with the putative Sasquatch track. The track represents a right foot, and indeed, you can see what appears to be a light colored straight line in the corresponding area of the heel in the track itself.

As far as I know, this comparison has never been made, and is one more piece of evidence that Ray Wallace and/or other family members faked tracks, specifically the Blue Creek Mountain - Onion Mountain tracks of 1967.

2006-10-21T12:01:00.000-07:00

Earliest Microwave Oven Plasma

Who first made "ball lightning" in the microwave oven? Bill Beaty links to an old Usenet posting here: http://amasci.com/tesla/mwball.txt that takes us back to 1997. This of course was the dark ages, using birthday candles and chared toothpicks. Some time back, I discovered a reference to a microwave oven plasma from at least the 1960's!

I remember reading Philip Klass's UFOs Identified in high school. I think it appealed to my growing skepticism. UFOs Identified was Philip J. Klass' first book, in which he explored the possibility that at least some UFO sightings could be due to natural or man made atmospheric plasmas. I don't follow the UFO field carefully, but I understand Klass himself moved away from this hypothesis as time went on. Unfortunately, Klass is somewhat vague on details in his treatment of this event, but it suggests that microwave ovens were accidently creating plasmas long before 1997!

The following is from Philip J. Klass UFOs Identified Random House 1968 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 67-22622 page 151-152:

"Next I called Dr. Finkelstein, who told me that a "synthitic kugelblitz" was being produced by Dr. James R. Powell at the Atomic Energy Commissions Brookhahaven National Laboratory in Upton, Long Island. The laboratory was using equipment originally built to enable bakeries to quickly defrost frozen bread, as well as for other industrial applications. How amusing, I thought, the AEC using bakery equipment to produce kugelblitz!

The equipment is a special type of oven whose heat is produced by radio-frequency energy supplied by a transmitter similar to those usen in television stations. The "Macrowave Oven," as it is called, is made by Radio Frequency Company, Incorporated, of Medfield Massachusetts. It is an aluminum box, nearly seven feeti in each dimension, fed by the radio transmitter. The dimensions are chosen to be equal to one-half the wavelength of the radio waves, which serves to intensify the heating. In technical terms, the metal box is a "tuned cavity."

One day, during the final tests of an oven, and engineer was amazed to see a ball of plasma suddenly form inside the oven. The synthetic kugelblitz, nearly a foot in diameter, hovered and floated mysteriously until power was shut off; then it collapsed and disappeared. The glowing plasma ball reminded the company's president, Joshua G.D. Manwaring, of some of the UFO reports he had read and he later tried to interest several newspapers in the idea that similar natural plasmas might explain some UFOs. But no one was interested in the idea, Manwaring told me.

Seeking an explanation for the phenomenon, Manwaring finally got in touch with Dr. Powell at Brookhaven. The laboratory agreed to send up a cameraman to make high-speed mivies of the plasma. When Powell saw the movies, he promptly ordered one of the Macrowave Ovens."

We are not told what kind of material was in the oven when this event occured. Could it have been bread that had become toasted then charred? We know that the early Usenet folks used charred toothpicks to initiate plasmas, could the same thing have happened with bread?

I'm going to guess the plasma was not contained. If you don't contain the plasma, it will float up to the ceiling of your microwave oven and start burning it. Obviously no mention of that is given!

2006-10-13T21:56:00.000-07:00

But Who Are You With?

As anyone who reads my blog knows by now, I like geodesic domes. When I met my girlfriend Dana in 2002 I began to rant all about them to her. I think she took it in stride, as she likes weird architecture in general. One day in the winter of 2002, we are driving westbound across the West Seattle bridge. Dana casually mentions that there are several geodesic domes on Harbor Island, which was north of us, to the right. I was chagrined, as I had lived in Seattle since 1987 and I was not familiar with them. Granted, Harbor Island is an almost purely industrial center, but I had been there before, and simply not noticed. For those of you not living in Seattle, there are no gates, checkpoints, barriers, "No Trespassing" signs, or "Private Propery" signs on the way into Harbor Island.

Dana and I detoured toward Harbor Island for an adventure. This would have been on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, while there was still day light out. We didn't have a camera with us at the time. The photograph you see above is one I took on the deck of the Westerdam, a big cruise ship on the way to Alaska, taken in May of 2006.

As we came close to the big structure, we passed a dark skinned man wearing dark clothing and riding a bike. We parked her Toyota Tacoma and got out When we got out we could tell that only the roof of the structure was a geodesic dome, as the sides were straight and vertical. I assumed they were fuel tanks of some kind, as I've read that the oil industry uses them this way. I've seen other oil refineries in the south with big geodesic domes. As Dana and I are standing there, the man on the bike pulls up. He asks what we are doing. Frankly I can't remember if he told us he was a security guard or not, but it was fairly obvious from the way he was dressed that he was. This was not too long after 9-11, and everyone was still paranoid.

I tell him that I'm a fan of geodesic domes, and that we saw this one from the bridge and decided to check it out. He asks, in an English-as-second-language sort of broken way, "Who are you with", which seemed kind of bizarre and irrational. I realized I might be dealing with someone who has a room-temperature IQ, and "geodesic dome" may not compute. I try again, trying to avoid exotic, polysyllabic terms like "architecture". I think I said something like "we like to look at strange buildings", or some such. It's hard for me to turn off my vocabulary sometimes. AGAIN he asks "But who are you with" as though we need to "be with" someone to look at a building. Then he tells us that we can't photograph the building, and then he wants to see some ID! Well, fuck this, he's not a cop and I'm not going to show him jack shit. I say, "Look, if we are on private property, then we will just leave, but I understand this is a public street, and we are not trespassing". Now he backs away from us, opens his jacket and pulls out a walkie talkie. Dana and I stand there in stunned amazement at the absurdity of it all. He talks into the little box, then finishes his call and tells us "the police have been called". Dana and I get back into her Toyota Tacoma and drive away. We never see the police or the shit-for-brains security guard again.

Some time later, I heard about a brown skinned guy that was stopped and questioned at the Ballard locks by the Seattle police because he was taking pictures of the locks. Or perhaps because he was brown and taking pictures! He put up a website here: http://www.brownequalsterrorist.com/artiststatement/

For some authoritarian meatheads, photographing or even looking at things today means you might be a terrorist.

It sounds like his experience was much worse than mine, and I'm obviously not brown. But Dana and I didn't even have cameras, yet the security guard called the police. I didn't even refuse to give him ID, I just said I'd leave if I was on private property. When in this country did security guards become empowered to ask for ID when you are on a public street? Fuck these fucking fuckers.

I have not let this little episode sour my quest for ever cooler geodesic domes, and at some point I'll have to go back and get a better close up photograph. Maybe I can include a photo of the dimwit security guard....

One positive aspect of this nasty little episode is that it gave Dana and me a fun catch phase which was our private code for a really dumbfuck comment: "But who are you with".

2006-10-12T22:39:00.000-07:00

Mountain Marbles

When I was a kid, I had a rock tumbler. It must have been a Christmas or birthday gift from my parents, as I didn't have a lot of spending money as a child. I hardly remember it as a toy, only that rock tumblers enjoyed a brief period of popularity in the early 1970's. Kind of like a geological version of the "ant farm".

I only remember two elements of the story, The machine was small, and was essentially a box with two rollers on top. A yellow plastic container fit between the rollers, and when the machine was turned on, the yellow plastic container slowly rolled. In fact, to polish rocks, it had to roll for something like a week. I think we put it in a corner in our basement laundry room, and it ground away the minutes, the hours, and the days. I assume I watched Hogan's Heroes and I Dream of Jeannie while it tirelessly worked.

Eventually I had a polished rock. It was too big to put on a ring, and I didn't wear rings anyway. I don't know what ever happened to my polished rock. I don't know what ever happened to my rock polisher...

I love old Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines. These magazines had a heavy influence on me as a child, augmenting an already huge fascination with science. As I grew older, I became somewhat more savvy about the commercial nature of these enterprises, and I saw that many of the things claimed to be soon to revolutionize our lives never panned out.

Some years back my friend Jan Gregor gave me a huge stack of these magazines from my favorite time period, the late 1960's and early 1970's. I even remember some of the particular issues. I nearly creamed my jeans when I found the soy-protein-turned-into-meat story from a particular issue of Popular Science in the mid 1970's. Somehow that seemed cool as fuck for me growing up in Missoula Montana. I had to have some soy-beef, and eventually I did. But that's another story...

While looking through the June 1965 issue of Mechanix Illustrated, Volume 62, number 445 I found a remarkable "sidebar". On page 30 is an illustrated account that lacks an author's name, but instead refers to the contents of a letter submitted by a Frank Wynne of South Pittsburg Tennessee.

For some reason, I find this concept as cool as hell, and would love to try it myself if I ever lived near a small stream. It sounds like way more fun than a "rock polisher", but I assume you need soft stone to start with. It kind of reminds me of the quasi-mysterious "ice circles" that get reported from tome to time. http://www.rense.com/general6/ice.htm

This is the text of the MI article:

"In January, 1964, MI ran a little piece called Marble Players of Blue Eye, about the grownup game of marbles played in that Ozark community. The players didn't play for keeps because their marbles are ancient ones made of stone and no one knew how to make them any more, we said. Wrong again.

Later on a letter came from Frank Wynne of South Pittsburg, Tenn., telling how he used to make his own stone marbles as a boy. The trick was to find a block of "sand rock" and chisel out a three-inch-deep hole in it, then divert stream water through a pipe so that it fell about three feet into one side of the hole in the rock.

Into the hole Frank would drop a bit of the same stone-as round as he could find- and leave it a few weeks to turn over and over and "grind true."

Somewhere a boy living near a stream is going to try this. We know it."

2006-10-12T17:21:00.000-07:00

The Genius of Gillette

When I was a kid, I loved almanacs. They were commonly available in the book aisle of the grocery store, and my mother was usually willing to buy them for me. I remember stuffing my desk in the third grade with books I had brought from home, and I think several of them were thick almanacs. Almanacs are full of lists, usually by category, like population, or geographical area, or chronological order.

By the fourth grade, I was working on the idea of a lending library from my desk; I think I wanted ten cents to rent out one of my books. I didn't have many takers. Besides the almanacs, I think I brought John Keel's Strange Creatures From Time and Space to school, much to my mother's chagrin, as she thought such a thing too valuable to leave home.

As an adult, I figured out the economic advantage of the almanac. Almanacs compile information that is already in the public domain, and thus is not previously copyrighted. How can they include so much for so little? They don't have to pay authors! Of course, as a child I always liked the weirdest and most esoteric stuff I could find. One of my almanacs had a list of either patents or inventions listed by date. I remember reading that the invention of the safety razor was by King C. Gillette in the year 1900. I think this stuck in my 8 year old mind because 1900 was a round number, and I had never seen the name "King" as a first name before. Some years later, my friend Dave Peterman had a very small chihuahua named "King".

Several years ago I developed a taste for books on inventions. I've read several books that mention Gillette's invention in almost reverential tones, as a supreme success story. But not because of the ingenuity of the invention or because it represented a better solution to a problem; no, it was because it was the first great use of an item which needed to be disposed of and replaced.

It should also be noted that I may have remembered my dates incorrectly, as I see that the year 1904 is given in the Wikipedia entry here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_C._Gillette And as with many inventions, there is dispute as to who really "invented" the safety razor. But the bottom line is that most popular accounts of Gillette's invention hail the "safety" aspect of his razor as an improvement over the straight razor, and the brilliant business model entailed by the constant replacement of blades.

I would like to argue that Gillette's real genius was in his design geometry, not his business model. And this is never mentioned in the popular accounts.

First off, we need to get some descriptive terms out of the way. This may sound a bit clunky but I have yet to think up a better way of describing this. Consider the geometry of a knife. First we abstract the handle to a line. The blade of the knife we abstract to a plane, with the cutting edge we abstract to a line. In fact, all blades can be abstracted to planes with cutting edges that form lines within that plane. A knife will serve as the first of three cutting tool geometries. It has a handle whose abstracted line lies within the plane of the blade, and is parallel with the cutting edge.

Geometry number two is that of a spade. A spade has the abstracted line of the handle in the same plane as the blade, but the cutting edge of the blade is at right angles to the line of the handle.

Geometry number three is that of the hoe. A hoe has the cutting edge of the blade also at right angles to the line of the handle, but also has the blade itself at right angles to the line of the handle.

Now go back and consider the geometry of the straight edge razor. When the blade is folded all the way out of the handle, it has "knife" geometry. But this is not the usual way the safety razor is held when actually shaving, usually the blade is positioned at right angles to the handle, and so assumes our geometry number two, the "spade" configuration. The real reason that the straight razor is awkward and somewhat dangerous is that the "knife" and "spade" configurations are not optimum for shaving, as they do not optimize control. In addition, the blade is not fixed rigidly to the handle, and so moves from "knife" to "spade" configuration.

I will argue that Gillette's unheralded breakthrough came with changing the geometry of shaving into a fixed "hoe" configuration. This led to vastly more control of the blade, and thus a safer, much easier way to shave.

How do I come up with ideas like this? Well, this one actually goes back to Descartes himself, with the development of our x, y, and z spatial axis system. After I started paying attention to spatial geometry, I realized that all motion in three dimensions can be reduced to translations and rotations in space. Sailors dub the three rotations about the x,y, and z axis roll, pitch, and yaw. Yaw is the coolest of course, almost as cool as the Scrabble word "qat". Anyway, with three axis of space, you have to be careful when you say something is at a right angle to a line, as there are two ways of a line being at a right angle to another line in space. Thinking about King C. Gillette and his safety razor geometry is a direct result of my own Cartesian meditations on orthogonal lines and planes in space. I guess I just dig right angles...

So think about this the next time you shave; imagine having to do this task with a knife or a paint scraper, and then give silent thanks to King C. Gillette for his revolution in shaving; the geometry of the hoe.

2006-10-07T14:19:00.000-07:00

Another Geodesic Dome

On our way to Craig Woolheater's 2005 Bigfoot conference in Jefferson Texas, Dana and I stopped in Roswell NM. Obviously the big tourist draw there is the UFO museum. But just down the street is a museum dedicated to rocket pioneer Robert Goddard. Next to the museum is the Goddard planetarium. We didn't have time to wait around until the next planetarium presentation, but we were able to take in the museum. I highly recommend it.

Buckminster Fuller did not invent the geodesic dome, though clearly he deserves credit for bringing the design to fruition. That honor in fact goes to an astronomer, Walter Bauersfeld, who simultaneously built the first planetarium! http://www.telacommunications.com/geodome.htm

I've visited museums all around the world, and I say this without reservation; the Goddard museum in Roswell NM was one of the very best. As a welder, I was particularly struck by all the brazed joints on the tubing necessary in a liquid fuel rocket. Not only did the museum display the various rocket components, but the tools used to produce them as well. Goddard's was a profound accomplishment, and the display moved me almost to tears.

So when in Roswell, visit the UFO museum first. I particularly liked the octahedral geometry of the Mogul reflector. Buy your green vinyl inflatable alien. Then get serious and go down the street to the Goddard museum.

2006-10-05T19:33:00.000-07:00

Bigfoot Roadkill

I read Benjamin Radford’s article “Bigfoot at 50” http://www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/bfat50.htm at a unique time in my life. Not long before I had seen a news report on the Internet about the discovery of the Skookum cast. I realized that learning about Bigfoot was much different in this new decade then when I was last interested in this esoteric subject, back in the 1970’s. I was becoming aware of the claims regarding Bigfoot’s alleged dermal ridges, claimed to be found in several footprint casts. Very little changes in the world of Bigfootery, but these two findings seemed very “scientific” to me.

I was more or less familiar with the particulars of the arguments that Radford covered in his Skeptical Inquirer article. But something fundamental and simple really caught my eye, his statement near the end: “At some point a Bigfoot's luck must run out: one out of the thousands must wander onto a freeway and get killed by a passing car, or get shot by a hunter, or die of natural causes and be discovered by a hiker.”

Believe it or not, I really hadn’t paid much attention to the roadkill angle of Bigfoot. Most people are attentive to roadkill in one of two ways; either they laugh about it, and mention “roadkill cookbooks”, or they find it a tragic loss of wildlife. Roadkill is so esoteric a subject in its own right that people usually ignore it.

Recently Dana, Harlo, and I took a long road trip in her new Ford F-150. We went all the way to Louisiana and back. I paid special attention to the roadkill I witnessed. I saw the following; raccoons, birds, deer, armadillos dogs, squirrels rabbits, coyote, and two dead alligators. In Yellowstone Park we were given a newspaper at the entrance that had a flyer insert that claimed that “100 animals were killed each year in collisions”. I didn’t save the flyer, as it was not really a good source of documentation, but it was an official publication of the parks service. At a rest stop in Wyoming, a flyer was posted the claimed that 15 people were killed in vehicular wildlife collisions. I assume this meant in the state of Wyoming, but again, it was not a good source of documentation.

Where I’m going with this is that every species of animal that can walk, crawl, or fly onto a road eventually becomes road kill. Except Bigfoot. So out come the “Bigfoot Band-Aids” as I call them; glib answers for the deep and profound problems that Bigfootery has faced since day one like “why can’t Bigfoot be tracked by dogs”? The Bigfoot Band-Aid for that one is “because dogs fear Bigfoot”. Easy, isn’t it? The Bigfoot Band-Aid for “why is there no body” is a multipart answer.

But let’s be specific; why is there no roadkill? The best Bigfoot Band-Aid I’ve seen for that one is “because Bigfoot is too smart to step out in front of a car”. Really! Have you even driven south on I5 near the Mexican border? There are road signs that warn drivers to avoid human beings running across the Interstate highway. Why are these people, illegal aliens, at risk of becoming roadkill? Because many of them are from areas without high speed vehicular traffic. They simply don’t grow up having to do the wordless time-and-motion calculations that populations with a fast and dense automotive infrastructure do.

By this logic, Bigfoot must be smarter than human beings. The arguments by the advocates as to why Bigfoot avoids becoming roadkill are some of the weakest I’ve ever seen. It’s not like the animal is a whale, and never appears on roads, Bigfoot is sighted all the time walking beside or across man’s roads. Yet he is never hit by a car. This just does not add up, and in fact, the proliferation of roads and rifles on the North American continent is the crux of my Sasquatch skepticism.

For those of you still not convinced at what a toll roadkill takes on wildlife, I encourage you to take a look at this rather sarcastic blog. Note that even megafauna gets hit, sometimes in deadly encounters for the driver or passengers. http://slowcrow.blogspot.com/

2006-10-04T19:25:00.000-07:00

Bigger Better Balls (Ball Lightning)

I’ve decided to demonstrate the easiest way yet to produce microwave oven plasma.

Step 1. Impale a small (say 4cm by 3cm) rectangle of carbon fiber veil onto a bamboo skewer. You will need to cut the skewer to the length described in step two.

Step 2. Place the skewer into an upturned glass flower vase that you have purchased from Goodwill for two dollars so that the carbon fiber is suspended roughly in the middle of the vase.

Step 3. Remove the revolving glass plate and supporting lazy Susan. Place upturned glass vase in microwave oven, preferably one that has more than one thousand watts of power.

Step 4. Nuke. Don’t let the thing run for more than a few seconds. Even at that, the glass can get very hot. Let it cool, or wear oven mitts to touch it. It may break after repeated use. No biggie, go buy more at Goodwill.

Step 5. Acknowledge the God-Like wisdom of Big Daddy Tube in discovering carbon fiber veil for microwave oven plasma.

2006-10-04T18:20:00.000-07:00

The Insect Collection

When I was in the 7th or 8th grade we had a class project; create an insect collection. It was springtime in Missoula, and it sounded like more fun than the usual dreary schoolwork. Besides, before video games, boys had to actually do things outside, like kill and maim insects. Thus the toned-down version of this, simply collecting them, sounded fairly easy.

Our teacher for this was Mr. Clements, who had earned the nickname "Mr. Sadist", as he was fond of becoming kind of rough with misbehaving boys. I believe this was called "corporal punishment" back in those days. My friends Mike and Joe called him "Luca" behind his back, a slur derived from Mario Puzo's novel The Godfather that they had both recently read. Luca Brasi was Vito Corleone's sadistic personal enforcer. Mike and Joe both grew up to be lawyers.

Mr. Clements had to provide us all with "euthanizing chambers" to kill the little bugs after we collected them and prior to display. These were simple affairs, a glass "Mason" jar with a tight fitting lid, some cotton at the bottom, and a tightly woven screen placed over the cotton to prevent the bugs from ending up in the cotton. Mr. Clements placed some sort of noxious organic chemical in the jars, intended to "euthanize" the bugs. I'm thinking it might have been dry cleaner fluid. Many jokes were made comparing Mr. Clements to a Nazi concentration camp guard, and the dry cleaner fluid to Zyklon B.

Unfortunately the toxic liquid soon evaporated away, even with the jar lids screwed down tight. We had to figure out a better way of killing the little bugs without mutilating them. About this time, a fellow student with the exotic name of Tom Jones introduced us to the wonders of the smoking pen. He modified a "clicker" style ball point pen by taking out the ink filled cartridge and manipulating the spring into a sort of "striker". The pen unscrewed in the middle, and a kitchen match was placed inside. The spring was pulled back and released, striking the head of the match. The smoke poured out the tip of the pen in a sort of James Bond or Wild Wild West production. Not surprisingly, we experimented with exterminating bugs with this smoke. It worked.

We had to buy special "insect pins" from the University of Montana student center. These were remarkable things, much finer than ordinary sewing pins, and metallurgically superior. The pins were plunged through the thorax of the bugs upon death and mounted for display. Chris Reynolds told me he found a lost pin in his shag carpet once, the hard way. As he slid his hand along the carpet, a pin pierced the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. A pre-modern-primitive piercing, perhaps.

It was inevitable that I would try this, and I did. I had to impale a still living Coleoptera to see what would happen. My experiment came to an ignominious end one day when my grandmother saw the still moving legs of little beast, flailing away in the air. An embarrassed euthanasia quickly followed.

The night before the grand unveiling of our collections at school I was over at Dave Peterman's house, trading and organizing our respective collections like baseball cards. We decided to prank the system by creating "UFI's", or Unidentified Flying Insects. We knew that all insects by definition had three segments, head, thorax, and abdomen. We used an X-Acto knife to separate segments of various insects then mixed and rejoined them with Superglue. Remember, before video games, kids really did shit like this…

Our collections were to be sorted by insect Order, and Dave and I both had several specimens of "UFI" for inspection the next day. Mr. Clements, passed by one of our sets without comment, but we were busted when he saw the second "UFI" set.
Believe it or not, I can still remember various orders of insects that I learned from that exercise. But what's really memorable about the whole experience is how smart, pent-up young minds twisted and modified the dull and ordinary circumstances that life provided. Yes, insect collecting was cool...

2006-10-03T19:40:00.000-07:00

Burning Plastic

I've always been fascinated with fire. I remember making something called a "pocket rocket" when I was about 7 or 8. I got the "plans" from a strange place, The Great International Paper Airplane Book, which I received as a Christmas gift from my father. The pocket rocket was simply a safety match that had aluminium foil wrapped around the head and about half way down the shaft. A pin was pushed underneath the foil to form an "exhaust nozzle". This was placed on a paperclip that was bend up to form a "launch pad". A flame was held under the match head from the outside until it lit. The expanding gasses went out the nozzle, and off went the match. Not a great deal of fun, but it was worth a try.

What I really enjoyed was burning plastic. I think I rationalized this activity by wanting to "repair" the cheap plastic toys that I broke. I wanted to "weld" the plastic back together to repair it. But honestly, it's been so long that I really can't remember if this is how I truly felt, or if I was just rationalizing the fun of burning plastic. I remember noting that certain kinds of plastics would burn cleanly, while some would burn with a very dirty flame. When I became an adult my childhood curiosity was finally satisfied, as plastics began to have little symbols printed on them in order to sort them for recycling. Conveniently, they also had little letters printed beside them, like "PS", which stood for polystyrene. I didn't know it at the time, but the smokey flame was due to burning polystyrene, the stuff many toys are made of. Model airplanes are made of polystyrene, as old school "airplane glue" contained toluene, which actually dissolved the plastic to form the adhesive bond.

I had to take a back seat to burning model airplanes, as John Turman and Chris Reynolds had me outclassed in that regard. When John would get a new model kit, I would cynically ask him if he was going to burn it. He would always say no, that this new model was just too good to end up being burned. About 6 months later we would, of course, end up burning it. Chris and John would sometimes put firecrackers inside the models while they were building them to enhance the pyro display. Sadly this was often counterproductive, as the explosion would usually blow out the flame, Red Adair style.

I didn't know it at the time, but the Kings of Burning Plastic were HDPE and LDPE; High Density Polyethylene and Low Density Polyethylene. The flame burned very cleanly, unlike polystyrene. More importantly, it produced a wonderful burning "tail" of molten plastic. The ends of this tail would drop off while still burning. As they descended, they would produce a characteristic buzzing noise which we called "Screaming Me-Me's". Smoke would come off the little droplets as they descended, sort of like how white phosphorous munitions looked that you see in old Vietnam war footage. All in all, an impressive sound, light, and smell display for not much money. I wish I could take credit for this God-Given discovery, but I can't. I think John Turman or maybe Roald Sonju came up with it.

By this time I was 15 or 16, and old enough to drive. We were all too old to play with our Hot Wheels, but John discovered a remarkable property of the orange-yellow track; It made a really outstanding burning plastic torch! The length was perfect for holding and manipulating the molten end. The killer app for Hot Wheels track was dropping burning plastic on insects. One summer afternoon, John Turman and I drove up to Pattee Canyon outside Missoula MT armed with a huge bundle of Hot Wheels track and a can of lighter fluid. The lighter fuel was used to clear a path to our goal, a huge ant hill. You had to flat out kill the little bastards on the ground or they would crawl up your leg. This was insect genocide, pure and simple. All of this was dangerous as fuck, as Pattee Canyon was full of tall, bone dry grass... We spent that whole day dropping burning Hot Wheels track screaming me-me's onto the ant hill. John fantasized he was a WWI pilot, strafing the enemy trenches from a biplane. I imagined that I was an American B-52 pilot, dropping napalm on helpless, scurrying villagers.

Years later I heard a sort of urban legend about the screaming me-me's. I was told that "hippies" used to tie dry cleaner bags into knotted "ropes", with a knot every 12" or so. This was attached to the ceiling, and a pail of water was placed beneath. The bottom of the bag was lit, and the hippies got high. The lights were turned off, and the low-grade sound and light show was enjoyed with stoned reverence. Maybe these were the same hippies who thought they could fly after taking LSD, and jumped out of those windows.

I don't burn plastic these days like I did when I was a child, but I can't deny that when I see a nice piece of plastic I silently wonder what does it burn like...

2006-09-29T16:50:00.000-07:00

The Duct Tape Wallet

I invented the duct tape wallet. Or at least I think I may have. Frankly, I haven't gone to a lot of trouble to try and figure out the historical truth, and I suspect it would be a very hard thing to prove. Here's the story:

I was one of the founding members of the Jim Rose Sideshow in the early 1990's. We toured all around the world, and one of the highlight tours for me was Lollapalooza in 1992. It was a huge ego rush, being able to "hang out" with real live rock stars. Even more fundamentally, other performers appreciated what we did, and we got lots of positive feedback from them. But being a performer puts strange kinks into your lifestyle. One is that you have a great deal of "down time" while you are simply waiting around to perform. You can either do meaningful things with this time or you can waste it. Unfortunately on Lollapalooza, we usually performed in "sheds" or large outdoor performance spaces away from the big cities. You couldn't just walk to a museum for an afternoon's edification.

One thing to do to pass the time was arts and crafts. I began to notice that the technicians (don't call them roadies) used a great deal of duct tape, and would often simply discard the roll before they got to the end and leave a significant amount of tape. I also noticed it wasn't really duct tape, as the fabric was tightly woven into a crosshatched pattern. In fact I learned it was called "gaffer's tape", and indeed was a significantly superior product than ordinary duct tape. It was also available in black, and I think yellow. There was a lot of this stuff just lying around, waiting for something useful to be done with it.

I don't remember what my inspiration was for my wallet. I recall being on the tour bus, and simply began to cut and fold the tape into a wallet. To do it for the first time is sort of a puzzle, as you have no instructions to go by. I was pleased with my new wallet as it came out rather well. I decided to make another one which I think was yellow. I may have shown my first wallet to Matt Cameron, then the drummer of Soundgarden, as I decided to give him my second one. I replaced my old Nylon wallet with my new duct tape version, and have never looked back. From time to time I would have to make a new one as the old one wore out. If I recall correctly, all this happened before all the duct tape books came out, but the one thing I'm sure of is that I figured it out for myself.

Fast forward to 1996. I had become a big Soundgarden fan, and remained friends with Kim Thayil after the tour was over. Kim was the best man at my wedding in 2000. A Rolling Stone magazine article about Soundgarden's new record Down on the Upside appeared. The article opens with an intimate description of how Chris Cornell makes a new duct tape wallet each time he records a new Soundgarden album! Looks like Matt Cameron taught Cornell the wallet thing! This got to me enough that I even asked Kim about it, and indeed Kim told Cornell that the idea originally came from me. I suspect, but do not know, that this Rolling Stone article was the real "break" as far as publicity goes for the duct tape wallet. During the late 1990's I would see duct tape wallets around, and even saw them for sale on the Internet!

In October of 2002, I believe, I "invented" the polypropylene tape wallet. Polypropylene is even superior to the gaffer tape, as the adhesive is stronger, and there is no "grain" or weave to split along. The tape I'm talking about is the kind used in conjunction with Tyvek vapor barrier house wrap. The Polypropylene film is incredibly strong, especially considering how thin it is. It's much thinner than duct or gaffer tape. The adhesive is an acrylic, and is very "tacky". This quality is needed to allow it to stick to Tyvek, which is itself quite slick. Tyvek vapor barrier and the associated tape are made by Du Pont, but Lowe's Home Center makes a house brand that is comparable. Owens Corning makes a pink polypropylene tape. Thankfully, Owens Corning doesen't insist on plastering their logo on their tape like Du Pont and Lowe's do. Plain pink is good. Remember the Pink Panther? Look for the Pink Panther logo when buying your polypropylene vapor barrier tape!

This tape can be also be used in conjunction with ordinary Tyvek to make form fitting credit card envelope protectors.

Now, go forth and make your own wallets and credit card protectors!

2006-09-25T20:49:00.000-07:00

Octet Truss

I'm fascinated with solid geometry, geodesic domes, and space frames. While Buckminster Fuller is often associated with the geodesic dome, few know that he is also the creator of a space frame design called the "octet truss". The word "octet" is derived from "octahedron" and "tetrahedron". You see, if you combine octahedrons and tetrahedrons in a 1:2 ratio, you get a space filling solid. Thus a framework that bounds these solids can fill space without gaps. Fuller was even able to get a patent on his design in 1961: http://ecosyn.us/Patents/patent2986241/octetruss_patent.html

But wait, there's more to the story! Note that the ratio of tetrahedrons to octahedrons is 1:2. Why is it specified this way? Fuller was obsessed with simplifying things, it's possible to simplify this description even more. If you bisect an octahedron, you get Johnson solid number one, the square pyramid. Thus, the "octet" truss can also be thought of as a space-filling array of an equal number of tetrahedrons and square pyramids. Granted, "octet" is a great neologism, but is there a subtle bias at work here?

Fuller liked to claim the octet truss was "fully triangulated" and thus was totally stable in three dimensions. Indeed, if you look at photos of some of his original trusses, you always see the top and bottom surfaces of the array as forming triangles, or hexagons if you count the nodes as centers. Actually, within the octet truss, there is always a plane of squares. These squares come from the bases of the square pyramids. Most modern octet trusses orient the square lattice either at the top or the bottom of the array. The octet truss, while an outstanding space frame design, does not really fulfill Fuller's claim of being "fully triangulated".

More fundamentally, Fuller did not invent the "octet" truss! Credit for that goes to Alexander Graham Bell! Fuller was honest enough to acknowledge this, though: http://www.grunch.net/synergetics/docs/bellnote.html I'm really not trying to take anything away from Fuller; to independently discover, then successfully patent, such a thing is a significant accomplishment.

With that historical background in mind, take a look at the octet truss as art. Here in Seattle we have a large octet truss array located in front of Grand and Benedicts, a retail store fixture outlet, located at 3825 1st Ave S. in Seattle. On top of six concrete columns sits a steel octet truss that seems to be five "layers" high. It appears to be fabricated from struts and hubs manufactured by the Unistrut company: http://www.unistrut.com/ though when I look through the current Unistrut website I can't find space frames that utilize this sort of bent plate hub arrangement. It looks like Unistrut still makes space frame parts that utilize other types of hub attachments.

This is all based on information I've gleaned from an old textbook entitled Space Structures. Davies, R.M., ed., Space Structures: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Space Structures, Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford, 1967.

Chapter 94 of this book is entitled "The Basic Elements of the 'Unistrut' Space-Frame",written by S.C. Hsiao. From the photograph I've included here from page 1084, we see a close match to the flange system used at the hub of the Seattle space frame. There is no placard at the base of this sculpture to tell us who made it, perhaps if it was simply erected from parts made by Unistrut, and really has no "artist".

Grand and Benedict also has a Portland location. When taking Amtrac down to San Francisco, I quickly passed a sculpture that looked very much like the one seen here in Seattle. I would guess this is the Portland Grand and Benedict location. If I can find out any more of the "back story" on this sculpture, I'll post it here. I hope you enjoy this artwork like I do.

2006-09-22T00:33:00.000-07:00

Good Cop, Bad Cop.

When I was in college, I started to get bad sore throats. What would start off as something that seemed like a cold would become worse. My throat would continue to grow more painful and swollen. I was given antibiotics, first erythromycin then later cephalexin.

One morning I awoke early, with my throat so sore and swollen that I became concerned my airway would become compromised. I realized I would have trouble speaking, so I quickly scribbled a note to give to the doctors and nurses at the student health service. I rushed to the clinic and gave my note to a startled nurse. Soon after I was admitted, a nurse phoned the doctor on call, and he proscribed 30mg of prednisone, stat. They were difficult to swallow, but the six 5mg tablets were small, so the staff didn't have to resort to injection. My anxiety subsided about my airway being compromised.

Later, when I was feeling better, one of the doctors diagnosed that my tonsils were abcessed, so the infection was being walled off, which caused the antibiotics to be less than effective. He suggested I had two choices; one was to take prophylactic antibiotics every day, every winter, for the rest of my life. The other was to have a tonsillectomy. I chose the tonsilectomy. I think I was about 24 when this went down, somewhat late in life for a tonsillectomy.

I was scheduled and admitted into day surgery in St. Patrick's hospital in Missoula. I was NPO the night before, and given Demerol about 30 minutes before surgery. I think the general anesthetic was given IV.

I woke up coughing, and the nurses helped me sit up in bed. I wanted to be macho about my recovery, and go home ASAP, but I remember having to stay in the hospital a day longer than I expected. Other than that, eveything else was uneventful. I was told not to eat any rough foods for a certain time period following surgery.

Several days later I'm over at my friend Andrew Ward's place. I'm talking with him, listening to music, and drinking a tall boy beer. Suddenly I start bleeding from my mouth. At this point I begin to panic, as I have no idea how serious this is. Andrew and I get into his car and he literally rushes me to the hospital. When I say literally, I mean he was speeding and running red lights to get me there. I get into the ER, and the admitting nurse even seemed startled at my condition. A doctor had me sit down in a chair and wait for him in a side room. Andrew stays with me. Fortunately by this time the bleeding had slowed down, but I was glad to be in a hospital.

Presently a police officer walks in the room. He's not a security guard, he's a real cop, one of Missoula's finest. Though short, he looks down at me as I'm sitting in this chair.

He beginns to interogate me, as if I had committed some bizarre, exotic crime. I remember looking at Andrew, noting how he could see how bizarre the situation just became. Honestly, it's been too many years since this happened, so I don't even remember his questions. I tell him the truth. I have to wonder if he understood what the word "tonsillectomy" meant. Eventually he went away. Later I complained about his behavior to the doctor who acknowledged, not in so many words, that this cop was a real asshole.

From time to time you hear about cops who beat the shit out of diabetics who seem "drunk" to the cop, after my experience I'm more inclined to believe that could really happen. Maybe I got off lucky. Did my friend Andrew's presence as a witness inhibit this little puke from doing something worse to me?

I guess this is an example of how everything looks like a nail, if the only tool you have is a hammer. I'm sorry I didn't catch the name of the short Missoula cop, or I'd give the little asshole a shout-out by name...

2006-09-20T19:28:00.000-07:00

Stealing Golf Carts

I got my first lock pick set when I was about 14. I had been fascinated by Houdini ever since I first heard about him. I remember reading a Houdini biography as a child, possibly by Milbourne Christopher. Somewhere in the late 1970’s a hobby shop on Higgins Ave. in Missoula put in a small magic section in the back of the store. A young man worked there who had long dark hair. Dave Peterman and I used to hang around this shop and talk to the long haired magician. This man was also a Houdini fan, and in fact told Dave and me that he could sell us real lockpicks! This was a mind blowing thing, as it seemed both furtive and unbelievably esoteric! Just the kind of thing to turn on two teens growing up in Missoula Montana. Being the moral kind of kids we were, Dave and I both asked our parents if we could buy such things. They said yes, and off we went. We soon realized that the man who sold us the lockpicks was simply buying them by mail order at retail from an outfit in Great Falls called “Prince E. Wheeler”. Once I found this out I ordered their catalog, which smelled of cigar smoke.

Our lockpick sets came in little leather pouches, which closed with a snap. These were picks for pin tumbler locks, which require two tools, a tension wrench and a pick. The leather case held about 6 picks and two identical tension wrenches.

Dave and I now felt superior to the great unwashed, whose ideas of lock picking were derived from watching TV. You see, on TV, they NEVER SHOW THE TENSION WRENCH. Funny, you can show homicide and all kinds of degradation in great detail on TV and the movies, but showing a TENSION WRENCH in action is still a taboo!

How else can I describe this; picking a pin tumbler lock for the first time is kind of like getting high, or having sex. It’s like getting high in that once you pick the thing it seems unreal; your mental map of reality shifts a little bit, and the world as you know it is richer, more subtle and complex. A feeling of euphoric unreality washes over you.. It’s also like having sex, at least it seemed so at that age, as one “scores” by overcoming what seems like an insurmountable obstacle. These descriptions must seem outrageous and hyperbolic, but I stand by them.

As time went on, I could see that I was way more into the lock pick thing than Dave. I would buy padlocks just to practice on. Friends who lost bicycle lock keys would contact me to try to pick their locks. Dave and I never used these things for ill gotten gain; it was more or less a game, kind of like solving a Rubik’s cube.

By the time I got to college, I was involved with all sorts of other things, and I had more or less set my lock picks aside. I would rescue folks from time to time who got locked out of their apartments or what not. Most door locks are more difficult to pick than padlocks, and by no means did I pick every lock I attempted.

One of my great goals was to be able to make my own lock picks. The advantage of this is that you can tailor the pick to the specific lock. By the mid 1990’s I had obtained several Loompanics books by “Eddie the Wire” who detailed how to make lockpicks. As with apple pie, the home made product is often better than the commercial equivalent. Though I don’t have the passion for picking locks like I did in high school, I do engage in it from time to time. If I see an old padlock for sale at a flea market, I’ll often buy it just for the challenge. I make all my own lockpicks now, though I sometimes use commercial tension wrenches.

On Lollapalooza in 1992, a strange status pattern developed. On these huge outdoor festival grounds where we would perform maintenance workers would travel around the grounds on golf carts. Performers or Lollapalooza crew workers who could obtain a golf cart just to ride around in seemed to me to have “connections”. It was a subtle, but real, “status symbol”.

Late one afternoon in Wisconsin, I think, Chris Cornell and Eddie Vedder spontaneously began performing Temple of the Dog songs on the second stage. A crowd quickly gathered. It was a great performance, and came at the very peak of the Pearl Jam and Soundgarden “buzz”. After the show, Vedder and Cornell had to get back to their tour buses. I saw my great opportunity. I saw an unmanned golf cart, and I wanted to jump in and join the “procession” as fans had by now lined the roadway between the stage and the tour buses. Thinking fast, I opened my Leatherman tool and extended a little curved scraping tool. I inserted it into the ignition lock of the golf cart. What I was trying to do was mimic a “jiggler pick” http://www.lockpickshop.com/c-Try-Out-Keys.html to turn the ignition lock. What a “jiggler pick” does is lift the wafers or pins while simultaneously applying tension. It almost only works on very cheap locks, like cheap file cabinet locks. This is one of the exceptions to the "two tools" rule.

Indeed, the lockpick deities shined favorably on me that day and I picked the lock! I now went to the head of the golf cart procession. It became obvious to me how reinforcing being a rock star could be; the look in the fan’s eyes, and the screams of “Eddie, Eddie” totally convinced me. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I too began screaming “Eddie, Eddie”, as I knew that put off the sensitive Mr. Vedder.

Of course I didn’t really “steal” the golf cart that day, that was just a catchy title to get you to read this blog. It was more or less “unauthorized use”, as the golf carts never left the stadium grounds.

So of all the locks I’ve picked, that one was perhaps the best; improvised tools, a time constraint, and a fun payoff in playing with what you picked. Yeah, that was a good one…

2006-09-18T17:04:00.000-07:00

Stull's Hole to Hell

Years ago, a man spoke to Art Bell live on late night radio. He identified himself as "Mel Waters". He claimed he had an 80,000 foot deep hole in his back yard. Pure Art Bell show bullshit. But various people took it quite seriously, and for some time I associated with some of them, through Seattle's Museum of the Mysteries.

Eventually I came to feel the "Mel's Hole" story was a modern updating on the old "lost mine" story. Instead of metallic riches, the hole had paranormal powers. Instead of the map to the mine becoming lost, "government agents" came in and took poor Mel's land, forcing "Mel" to flee to Australia to study wombats.

For a while I read all the postings on the Mel's Hole discussion board. At some point deep in the discussion board threads a related story appeared. It seems that at some point Art Bell played a sound file on his radio show that claimed to be the "Sounds of Hell", allegedly recorded by Russian miners at the bottom of a very deep bore hole in Siberia.

At this point in my searches I decided to google "Hole to Hell" or "Stairway to Hell", or some such. It seems that fundie Christians have grabbed those phrases to create websites that warn us of the dangers of rock music! But beyond those are the interesting websites that deal with this peculiar class of legends. One of the more famous is the "Hole to Hell" in Stull, Kansas.

Dana's sister and brother in law live near Lawrence, Kansas, and so are not far from Stull. We drove by the famous cemetery and stopped for pictures. I had heard that it was fenced off, and this was the case. Strangely, there were actually two gates, a locked automotive gate, and a pedestrian gate which was unlocked. Dana & I zipped inside for a few photographs.

As you can see in the photo above, the tiny church in the center of the cemetery has been torn down, but the rubble has not been removed. From what I've read on the Internet, the residents of Stull take trespass into the cemetery very seriously, and while we were parked there Dana's sister told us some lady from across the street was watching us. We took a few quick photos, then left. About 3 minutes after our visit, a sheriff's car passed us going in the other direction. Cemetery trespass call? I'll never know...

More on Stull's cemetary: http://www.roadsideamerica.com/tips/getAttraction.php3?tip_AttractionNo==503

Mel's Hole discussion board: http://www.melshole.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi

2006-09-18T15:52:00.000-07:00

Deadly Sex Thrills

This essay was originally published for the Loompanics Unlimited main catalog of 1989. It represented the fruition of research into the subject that I did when I was a student at the University of Montana. At the time, I was fascinated with the Re Search series of books by V. Vale and Andrea Juno. At the time, 1985, these books represented about the coolest things I could get my hands on. I was inspired by their notion that obsessive research into the nooks and crannies of culture was outstandingly cool, as I did not feel "cool" by any other standard at the time…

Anyway, I had heard about Autoerotic Asphyxia through some book on safety I read at the public library, probably sometime in the mid 1970’s. I decided that Autoerotic Asphyxia was the most unusual subject that I could think of, and I decided to research it as thoroughly as I could. Surprisingly, the first grip I got on the subject came about in an article in Vanity Fair of all places! Soon I utilized the Index Medicus at the University library and began to submit interlibrary loan requests. By 1986, I believe I had acquired about 90% of the world’s primary literature on the subject.

Somewhere in 1988, Mike Hoy of Loompanics learned of my fascination through a mutual friend of ours Tim "Zamora" Cridland. Mike asked I write an article for his catalog. At the time, this was the greatest ego thrill of my life. Little did I know I would experience much greater ego "thrills" later on…

Two wonderful illustrations by Ashleigh Talbot were included with the original essay. Unfortunately they are not yet included here. Perhaps I’ll be able to include them in the future.
The essay was later published in 1990 a Loompanics compilation simply entitled "Loompanics Greatest Hits (ISBN 1-55950-031-x) pages 176 to 180. It represents one of the first popular accounts of the subject in print, though by no means the very first.

If this introduction seems unnecessary, you must consider that society has changed so fast in the last 20 years that what seemed like an enormous and esoteric accomplishment at the time now seems almost quaint. As I write this Google is returning over 12,000 hits for the term "Autoerotic Asphyxia". Even Wikipedia has an entry on the topic!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoerotic_asphyxia And this is good. I certainly fantasized about an electronic version of interlibrary loan even back in the mid 1980’s.
So please read the following essay with context in mind, this was created by a guy who grew up in Missoula Montana using only interlibrary loan as a database. Hell, I think I was still a virgin when I did the original research!

Deadly Sex Thrills

Though the 1980's may be the twilight of the sexual revolution, one sex practice that has yet to see the light of day is Autoerotic Asphyxia (hereafter referred to as AA). While homosexuality, bisexuality, pedophilia, sadomasochism, incest and a host of other practices have become household conversation topics, AA has been confined to the back pages of esoteric forensic science journals.

What is AA? Although it may have some variations, it is basically the act of hanging oneself in order to cut off oxygen and blood flow to the brain while masturbating. The idea seems to be that the hypoxia (lack of Oxygen) and ischemia (lack of blood flow) can contribute to the intensity of sexual arousal and orgasm.

Almost always, people learn about AA after someone has died from it.

It is undoubtedly the most dangerous of all sex practices. Approximately 500 to 1000 people die from it each year. It has claimed the lives of cartoonist Vaughn Bode and actor Albert Dekker. Years ago, medical examiners often made the mistaken conclusion that these deaths were suicidal hangings. Several factors differentiate an AA hanging from suicidal hanging.

1. The feet are often touching the ground. This enables the practitioner to vary the pressure that the ligature is applying to the neck by lifting his body up or down from the floor.

2. The rope or ligature is often tied in a highly complex manner. This is done to provide an "escape mechanism" to manipulate the pressure on the neck with arms, legs, or torso.

3. The victim will often have padding around the neck to prevent tell-tale bruises and abrasions.

4. Pornography is present.

5. The victim had no known motive to commit suicide.

In some cases the family of the victim may modify the scene in order to eliminate the stigma of a sex-related death. This obviously creates considerable problems for the investigator trying to determine exactly what happened.

To compound this problem is the question of insurance settlements. If the victim had a life insurance policy covering accidental death, the family of the deceased will argue that the death was accidental. The insurance company will argue that the victim knowingly engaged in a life threatening behavior and thus the death was not wholly accidental. the courts are still debating this question.

If AA practitioners create elaborate escape mechanisms for themselves, then why do they die? The reason lies in the physiology of the heart and the nerves that regulate it. The body has feedback mechanisms for controlling blood pressure. At several points in the vascular system there exist structures called baroreceptors. Baroreceptors sense changes in blood pressure and produce nervous impulses which respond to those changes. When pressures on the baroreceptors are too low, impulses are fired to the heart and brain that lead to an increase in heart rate and force of contraction. This occurs, for example, when one stands up suddenly from a horizontal position. Gravity draws blood down from the brain and pressure drops. The baroreceptors sense the lowered pressure and fire, raising blood pressure, increasing force of contraction, and returning blood to the brain. One of the areas of the body with the highest concentration of baroreceptors is the neck. Thus, when pressure is applied to the baroreceptors (as in hanging) the opposite of the above-mentioned process occurs. Powerful impulses are sent to the brain and slow the heart, decrease force of contraction, and lower blood pressure. This phenomenon is called carotid sinus reflex. As little as seven pounds of pressure can cause this to occur.

If a person is engaged in AA and is already cutting off oxygen and blood flow to the brain, the additional slowing of the heart can cause rapid unconsciousness. So rapid, in fact, that the victim may not have a chance to release himself from the ligature. Death soon follows.

Who practices AA? Generally young, white males of average or above-average intelligence. Often they are socially withdrawn and may dabble in sado-masochism or bondage. AA in females is so rare that entire articles in forensic journals are devoted to single case histories.

A typical case history is that of Clarey Faye reported in the March, 1985 edition of Vanity Fair. As Clarey moved into adolescence, he became introverted. "He was still going to therapists off and on, but no one could alleviate his black moods. He was playing less Bach on his cello and more hard rock on his guitar". He kept a journal, composed of a secret language consisting of Arabic, Sanskrit, and Greek characters. Repeatedly written on a page was the single word "phosphene". This very possibly refers to the reports of AA practitioners, describing "seeing stars". Clarey was 16 years old when he was found dead by his mother, hanging nude by his belt from a bar in his bathroom. A mirror was positioned so that he could view himself (an unusually common theme in AA deaths).

Not all AA practitioners use a neck ligature to produce hypoxia and ischemia. There are primarily two other means. These are suffocating environment and chest compression. Two cases from forensic literature illustrate the former method. In the first case, a man used semi-drowning ("aqua-eroticum") in a lake to provide a masturbation opportunity. In the second case, a Yale graduate constructed an airtight vinyl bag that he zippered himself into. He also bound his hands behind his back with a short length of chain. His penis was wrapped with a Saran-Wrap-rubber-band condom. Both men died.

In chest compression, the movement of the ribcage is restricted or the diaphragm movement is cut off. Cases of death resulting from asphyxia in a garbage can, and suspension by a rope around the abdomen have been reported. In the first case, the victim intended to use a roll of chicken wire (?) as an escape mechanism. The mechanism failed and the man died. In the second case, a man winched himself up off the ground by a rope wrapped around his abdomen. He was unable to release the winch which led to his death. A high blood alcohol content probably contributed to his inability to release the winch. It was not known whether fecal matter found at the scene was part of an erotic fantasy or due to extreme intestinal pressure.

Various other asphyxial scenarios come to mind (my mind) that have yet to appear in forensic literature. Consider that perennial child-killer: the abandoned refrigerator. It is dark, airtight, and private. Perfect for furtive AA. Do you have sexual fantasies about Mama Cass Elliot? How about ham sandwich asphyxia while masturbating? Do you get off on the music of John Bonham or Jimi Hendrix? How about AA with inspired vomitus? Off-the-deep-end conspiracy types will no doubt suggest that these deaths were truly autoerotic asphyxial in nature and were simply "covered up".

Perhaps the most bizarre case of a (quasi) AA death in the literature is that of J.C. Rupp's classic "LoveBug". An airline pilot drove his Volkswagen Bug to a secluded, roughly circular, flat clearing. He stripped naked and attached around his torso a chain harness which was attached to the Bug's rear bumper by a ten-foot length of chain. He tied his belt to the steering wheel and strapped it down so that the wheel was turned completely counter-clockwise. He started the engine and let the Bug pull him in overlapping circles. At some point, he tired of this and approached the car presumably to turn off the engine. At this point a serious "pilot error" occurred. The chain began to wind around the left rear axle and he was pulled into the left wheel area and asphyxiated by extreme compression against the car.

Asphyxial games for the sake of alteration of consciousness without the addition of sexuality are not at all uncommon. Researcher Harvey Resnick refers to anthropological studies of various native American and South American tribes who play such games, variously entitled "smoke out", "red out", and "hang up". Indeed, after I started studying AA, I began asking people I knew if they could recall playing asphyxial games as children. Many did, and were surprised that they could remember doing such things. Perhaps this is an example of "repression" whereby "antisocial" behaviors of children are forgotten only to return with prompting. Very often, people not only recall asphyxial games, but remember the exact sequence and number of actions they performed. These include hugging by another, blowing on a finger in the mouth to prevent exhalation, rising quickly from a squatting position, pressing on the neck, and many others.

There is an unusual subset of AA fatalities that prove very difficult for the researcher to classify. These are cases of erotic suicide. In these the victim was known to have practiced AA, but also evidenced a suicidal intent.

In the early 1970's two researchers, Litman and Swearingen, studied the sex practices of a group of 9 S&M-AA practitioners. Though none died while the study was in effect, all exhibited strong "death wish"orientation, and often strong depression. All had complex esoteric fantasies, as in #7's case. He wanted to be the "leader of an imperiled group" who"eroticized fear, nooses, hanging" and needed danger for orgasm. The deaths of any of these individuals would be very difficult to classify in either pigeonhole of "suicide" or "accident" because all seemed to intentionally live on that border.

The most extreme case presented by the authors was case"A", a 50 year old actor who died of extremely eroticized AA. There was a ball in his mouth, scarf over his eyes, hand cuffs on both wrists, and the words"suck" and "fuck" written on the body. A bizarre suicide note was left of which this is only a part: "Please tender me when you cut me down. My pantygirdles are fastened to my brassieres with safety pins. There are no hooks on the garter belts so you will have to pull them off". And finally: "In a frenzy of passion I kick the chair over and my body is spasming at the end of the chain noose. I come wildly, madly. My eyes bulge and I try and reach the keys, knowing I have finally found the courage to end a horrible nightmare life dangerously". End of note.

Beside the obvious reason that it feels good, why do people engage in AA? Various long winded psycho-analytic explanations have proposed, all of which rely on explanations which are as controversial as the whole body of psycho-analysis itself. A very clever hypothesis has been proposed by Resnick; it asserts that while breast-feeding, a baby may experience a partial asphyxia. Further, certain gastric and urethral reflexes may, in males, produce erections. Thus a very early association between the pleasure involved with feeding, erection, and asphyxia is formed. Later, when breast-feeding stops, the association between asphyxia and erections may persist. Resnick refers to the breastfeeding mother as the "smother mother".

When individuals practice AA, to they always have to die? Is there "safe sex" AA? Wearing condoms and soaking the ligature in bleach just won't do. An article from the gay men's magazine Drummer suggests that there is safe AA. Author Robert Bahr interviewed"Ed", who rigged up a gaff in his apartment designed specifically to prevent accidental death. Around a wireframe is wrapped a plastic bag. On the floor beneath the contraption is a mattress. One stands on the mattress and puts his face into the frame. While masturbating, all inhaled and exhaled air collects in the bag and is quickly depleted of oxygen. The wireframe prevents the bag from being inhaled when breathing becomes rapid, near orgasm. After orgasm, or if the participant passes out, the mattress is underneath to cushion a fall. One cannot die in such an arrangement, because one cannot get caught in the bag, and unconsciousness only removes one from the gaff. This practice does not produce ischemia, however, which may limit its euphoric potential for the true thrill seeking AA connoisseur.

As exhortations for abstinence have never prevented venereal disease, it is not likely that AA deaths will go away just by saying "Don't do it". Only when practitioners understand why it is so dangerous and are offered safer alternatives will autoerotic asphyxia deaths decrease.

For Further Reading:

Autoerotic Fatalities, R.R. Hazelwood, et al.,Lexington Books, 1983, Lexington, MA, (Excellent references).

"The Love Bug", J.C. Rupp, Journal of ForensicSciences, vol. 18, 1973. pp. 259-262.

"Deadly Kicks", Robert Bahr. Drummer, vol. 6, #56, pp. 8-11.

2006-09-16T00:33:00.000-07:00

The homosexual agenda of Gilligan’s Island.

Gilligan’s Island is usually dismissed as low-brow camp by most cultural warriors. Little do they know that this 60’s TV show was one of the first salvos fired in the Culture Wars by the gay left. The level of cunning by the “homintern” was so profound that few people are even aware that Gilligan’s Island was not really about sitcom; it was really a set of encoded gay “lifestyle” symbols.

Let’s look at this carefully and decode the encrypted message. My first clue was way back in the 80’s when mainstream society was shocked by the announcement that Rock Hudson was dying of AIDS. Few outside of Hollywood knew that he was gay, and that his “marriage “was really a sham. I remembered back to Gilligan’s Island and how hetero sex-bomb Ginger was always lusting after Rock Hudson. With numerous men to pick from for Ginger to lust after why pick Hudson? Surely the script writers for Gilligan’s Island were Hollywood “insiders” who must have know that Hudson was gay. If they did know, why make a joke of it? Could it be that the “in-joke” of Hudson’s orientation was funnier to gay men than to straight men? As I pondered this profound question as a college student in Missoula Montana, I was simply too ignorant of the vast and subtle “gay agenda” to decipher any more clues. It would take years for me to figure it all out.

Clue number one; Hetero Ginger lusts after in-the-closet-gay man. Hetero Ginger is a character obviously based on Marilyn Monroe. Now what kind of men have a particular fascination with Marilyn Monroe? Gay men!

Clue number two; The character of Mary-Ann is clearly based on Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. (A down-to-earth girl from Kansas who is suddenly thrust into an exotic place far from her home). Dorothy was played by Judy Garland. What kind of men have a particular veneration for Judy Garland? Gay men!

Clue number three; the strange relationship between the Skipper and his “first mate” .Remember, the skipper and Gilligan are both “seamen”. But this is just the start. Gilligan is constantly ribbing the skipper about being fat. Why? Because this gives the Skipper the chance to tell Gilligan (and the audience) that he is “big boned”. Notice that with all the space on the island Gilligan and the Skipper not only share the same hut but one sleeps above the other one! This bunk bed mentality is only needed when space is at a premium. But Gilligan sleeping above the Skipper allows for the “comedic device” of Gilligan periodically falling down on top of Skipper. Falling onto Skipper’s “big bone”.

Clue number four; Mr. and Mrs. Howell do not sleep together. This is clearly an allusion to the Hollywood practice of the gay “sham marriage”. Think Rock Hudson and that other famous “in-the-closet” guy. Conspiracy researcher Tim Cridland asserts that the gay connection with Mr. Howell is that Mr. Howell was played by Jim Backus who had previously done the voice for the cartoon character Mr. Magoo who Cridland asserts is clearly a “chocolate stabber”.

Clue number five; The hero himself, Gilligan. Why is it “funny” that Gilligan is always resisting the advances of Ginger, the Hollywood sex bomb? Why does this scenario – utterly bogus for a straight young man- crop up again and again? Ga-Ga-Ga-Gilligan is Ga-Ga-Ga-Gay……

Clue number six is the most encrypted of all. The Professor. On the surface he seems to be as straight as an arrow, even though he is oddly “wooden” when he is around “the girls”. The answer is in whom “The Professor” is supposed to be, i.e. what person in real life might he represent. The clue is in the theme song. Note that the line “three hour tour” is repeated, suggesting its subtle importance. The group could be said to be “touring”. Touring is the Key! But not touring as in going on tour but Turing, specifically Alan Turing gay British mathematician! The professor represents Alan Turing!

Well there you have it, now I think you will watch Gilligan’s Island in a whole new way. Clearly this is only the first step in understanding. How many more TV shows are really just encrypted gay lifestyle symbols? I don’t’ know yet but I have recently learned that some researchers are suspecting SpongeBob Squarepants of being gay.

By they way, his pants aren’t square, as they are not planar, they are three dimensional. Further, they are not even cubic, as they are wider than they are tall. Therefore he should properly be referred to as “Spongebob Parallelepiped Pants”.

2006-09-15T23:16:00.000-07:00

Madonna Pap Smear Origin

In the mid 1980’s I met Frank Zappa. Actually Frank Zappa was not his real name. His real name was Jim Goodwin, but for a variety of reasons he wanted people to call him Frank Zappa. Frank was a remarkably smart guy, and seemed to be most turned on in life by Russia and all things Russian. We were college students at the time in Missoula Montana. Frank was from Texas and was always talking about his best friend in Texas named Rick Linklater. Now this Rick Linklater was really Rick Linklater. Yes, the Rick Linklater of film fame. Only this was 1985, and Rick was not yet famous.

I finally got to meet Frank’s friend Rick when he visited Missoula from Texas. At the time, he had an 8mm movie camera and was intent on becoming a serious filmmaker. Though I could tell he was very smart and a serious, genuine guy, I didn’t expect he would "make it". Well, obviously I was wrong and obviously he did! One thing I learned from the short time I hung around with Rick in Missoula was that he had a very good memory. You can see this in his film Dazed and Confused in which he gets subtle details of late 1970’s life down just right. Anyway, by the early 1990’s I had essentially forgotten about Rick until his movie "Slacker" came out. A friend of mine told me he heard a radio interview with Linklater in which he credited the inspiration for the famous "Madonna Pap Smear" scene to me! Frankly, I couldn’t exactly remember what I might have said….

Some time passed and I found out that Rick had written a "making-of" book about the movie Slacker, entitled of course, Slacker, published by St. Martin’s Press. (ISBN 0-312-07797-1) On a sidebar on page 26 Rick recounts:

Madonna Pap Smear Origin
Since I get asked about it more than anything else, here goes: I’m sitting in a bar in Missoula, Montana, in August 1985 and I get in a conversation with a very witty and scientific pharmacy student named Matt Crowley. The conversation leads to the future of pornography upon which he speculates could very well be Madonna pap smears. The next day he shows me his Autoerotic Asphyxia file. He is clearly the nation’s foremost researcher/authority on this sex practice that accidentally (?) kills between 500 and 1000 people a year – typically young white males of average or above average intelligence. I run to Kinko’s and copy his entire file for future reference.

The concept of Madonna’s pap smear stays with me for years and eventually manifests itself physically in the film via Teresa Taylor. As a commodity, it is no doubt worth even more now than when I first heard about it, which says more for the staying power of the rock god herself than anything else. As for Matt, years later, while flipping through "Loompanics Greatest Hits" (Articles and Features from the Best Book Catalog in the World), I come across an illustrated article by him on, of course, "Deadly Sex Thrills".

2006-09-15T21:23:00.000-07:00

Home made gunpowder

With liquid "binary" explosives in the news recently, I thought it might be fun to write about making explosives in a more "simple" era.

When I was a child, I was fascinated with science. I was also a huge Star Trek fan, and obviously I could relate to Mr. Spock, for better or for worse. My favorite episode of Star Trek was "Arena", where Kirk defeats the Gorn using a cannon powered by improvised black powder.
One day in the fourth grade these various fascinations began to come together. Steve Haddon had brought to class an interesting "science" project. It consisted of an empty steel food can attached to a block of wood for a base. Inside was a charcoal briquette, set alight with the obligatory Ronson lighter fluid. That a 4th grade kid would be allowed to perform such an "experiment" today, boggles the mind, but as I say that was a simpler time. This would have been 1971 in Miss Hansen's class at Paxson grade school in Missoula MT.

Indeed, Steve's experiment performed admirably, and the briquette did burn. But since I was a "science guy" I felt the need to interject and brag that "I knew how to make gunpowder". You see, before Wikipedia, there was a thing called the "Encyclopedia Britannica", and our family had one. I don't know specifically where I got the recipe for black powder but it was commonly available in books, even those written for young people. Amazingly, the local drug store, Skaggs, sold potassium nitrate right off the shelf. Better yet, it was right next to the sulfur... Yeah, I know this sounds like a bullshit story, but I have witnesses...

When it came time for Steve to extinguish his "experiment", he did what most people would do and tried to blow it out. But the displaced air has to go somewhere, and of course it blew back in his face and singed his eyebrows. I never witnessed a similar such "science experiment" thereafter.

Anyway, Steve and I got on our bikes and rode out to Skaggs drugstore and got our ingredients. Steve already had the charcoal briquettes, as previously mentioned. We used my mother's glass mortar and pestle to grind up and mix our powders. By the way, this is perhaps the most dangerous thing we did, as the separate fuel and oxidizer powders should always be mixed together, never ground together.

Thankfully I'm writing this with 2 eyes, 10 fingers, and functional hearing. We never contained our black powder, and only burned it off. I seem to remember Steve added the element of a road flare at some point, which was pretty cool. Steve Haddon later went on to become a lawyer in Montana.

Years later I discovered the "underground literature" of Loompanics, Paladin Press, and the infamous "Poor Man's James Bond" by Kurt Saxon. I think it was in one of the famous "revenge" books that we learned that you could substitute sugar for sulfur and charcoal. By this time I was 18, and was now running with my friend Mike, who was much more cunning than Steve but more volatile and wild. We decided it was time to make a pipe bomb.

We made some of the crudest "black powder" that would burn, using sugar instead of sulfur and charcoal. We had obtained waterproof fuse, I think by mail order. We bought a 6" iron pipe and two caps at a hardware store. We filled the pipe with the substance, and inserted the fuse through a hole previously drilled in one cap. We hiked into Hellgate canyon a ways, and up the side of the Mt. Sentinel. We placed the IED deep in the corner of a rock shelf and buried it under about 300 pounds of loose rock. We weren't stupid, and our fuse was about 3 feet long, giving us about a minute of burn time before detonation. Because of where we had placed the device we had a large chunk of solid mountain between us and the device, so no shrapnel would hit us. It would all be directed away from us, toward Mt. Jumbo. We lit the fuse and ran. We waited for what seemed like forever. Finally it detonated. I can only describe the sound like this; a firecracker is like a snare drum. This was like John Bonham's bass drum. The echo bounced off Mt. Jumbo several seconds later. No car alarms went off, as there were no such things back then...

We inspected where our bomb had been. Several of the big rocks had been displaced 20 or 30 feet down the mountainside, so we knew it was at least that powerful. Amazingly, we found both the original pipe, and one of the caps. The second pipe cap was still screwed on, but with a silver dollar sized piece blown out. Here is the weird part, and if you think I'm bullshiting you, I understand. The threads on both the pipe and the intact pipe cap were virtually undamaged! We could almost screw the cap back on. It was as if the cap had been enlarged then lifted off. Eventually we tired of marveling at our vaguely Fortean find as we walked home, and we chucked the evidence into the Clark Fork River. It's probably still there!

At this point, I realized that if I continued doing what I was doing that I would need a "bigger bang" each time, and that I would likely end up dead or disfigured if I continued. Mike and I both stopped making improvised explosive devices.

Mike, too, eventually became a lawyer and practices in Montana...

2006-09-15T19:08:00.000-07:00

Mythbusters and Padlocks

Tonight I watched the Mythbusters episode on "movie myths". One segment tested whether bullets could blow a padlock off a hasp. I enjoyed this segment, as I myself had tested this in about 1990.

One of the first videotapes I ever owned was from the makers of Second Chance soft body armor. Richard Davis, the inventor of Kevlar based soft body armor, spectacularly demonstrated the effectiveness of his company's product by shooting himself with a .44 magnum handgun while wearing his Kevlar vest. To pad his sales pitch documentary, he demonstrated what all sorts of rounds could and could not do. If I recall correctly, he never shot a padlock. This inspired me, as I realized it would be fairly simple to test. I rented a bulky camcorder, from of all places, 7-11 on Stone way here in Seattle. Tim Cridland, aka Zamora, was scheduled to be my cameraman, but when the morning came, he had some sort of health issue and could not make it. I got a female friend of mind, Sunny, to step in.

What I found was more or less what the Mythbusters found; that a handgun round will not blow a laminated padlock off a hasp, but a slug from a shotgun would. But I also tested Master brand's cheap combination lock that is commonly found on lockers. The combination lock was particularly easy to blow off, even with .38 special rounds. BTW, I suspect that Mythbuster Kari was using .38 rounds rather than .357 rounds, based on lack of recoil and muzzle blast. Perhaps the producers were concerned that a magnum round might break a fingernail or scuff her nail polish... Nice knockers though.

For those old enough to remember, Master lock used to have a TV ad in which a bullet from a high powered rifle perforated one of their laminated padlocks without the shackle coming loose. This aired, I think, in the early 1970's. As far as I can figure, they must have used an armor piercing round, as CLEARLY an ordinary 30.06 round will destroy their laminated padlock. Too bad the Mythbusters were not more specific about what rounds they were using. Obviously you can't expect too much from TV.

I don't have "High-Def" TV, but it appeared to me as if the word or logo on the upper black plastic band had been "fuzzed out", like they do with license plates on TV these days. The word "Master" on the lower black plastic band was not fuzzed out. Why?

I no longer have the video I shot, as I became sort of embarrassed by it. Back then, before the World Wide Web, there was no easy way to commercially distribute such a thing, or even give it away. I remember using a high quality VHS tape to record my documentary. Instead of simply discarding the tape, I recorded over it.

Yup, you guessed it, the tape became porn...

But thankfully life marches on, and I see other people besides the Mythbusters and me have actually tried this. The following is a good website, and I'd credit the man by name, but I can't find it: http://www.theboxotruth.com/docs/bot5.htm My only criticism is that he does not use a hasp, but rather lets the padlocks swing freely. I suspect that may affect the "energy dump" from bullet to padlock. Too bad he didn't test the cheap combination locks; it would be interesting to see what the minimum round would be to blow one of those apart. Would a .32 auto from a handgun do it?

2006-09-15T18:47:00.000-07:00

Tabasco Tour

Twice now, Dana and I have visited Avery Island LA, where the Tabasco company is located. To get onto the island, a one dollar toll is taken as one crosses the bridge. Avery Island is not much of an island, as the distance across the water is only about 50 feet! Nevertheless, the tour is worthwhile, free, and I recommend it.

First of all, growing up in Montana, Tabasco sauce was considered a slightly exotic condiment by our family. My father told me that some cutting edge folks would put one drop of the precious fluid on the yolks of their fried eggs.... You see, my father had a subscription for many years to Gourmet magazine, so he was reasonably "up" on the cutting edge of fine foods. Gourmet magazine is half way to being a travel magazine, with lots of photo spreads of exotic locations. So I was prepared to like the Tabasco tour.

The tour is quite popular, with perhaps 40 people showing up for the particular tour we were on. After a brief introduction by our tour guide, we are led into a small movie theatre, where a well dressed female talking head in the movie gave a very slick "color" type presentation. Then we were led past the actual bottling plant, separated from the hallway by a floor to ceiling glass pane. We were there on Sunday, so the "line" was down. Tabasco production is actually very simple, and is not like making cars or computers. It's really just pepper harvesting, grinding, mixing with salt and vinegar, fermenting in barrels, and finally bottling the result after several years.

If there was a Q & A period I missed it, as what I really wanted to know was whether the wooden barrels were a necessity, like those used for distilled alcohol, or whether they are simply cheaper than some other kind of barrel. Also, exactly what kind of "fermentation" is going on? Gas bubbles rise from the barrels during fermentation, and a thick layer of salt is put on the top to keep out air and impurities. But surely alcoholic fermentation is not going on, what exactly is going on chemically? Obviously this is way to technical for a consumer oriented tour, but I'd like to know.

I have to confess at this point that I'm not a big fan of Tabasco! It simply has too much vinegar for my tastes, and it's really not very hot. But surprise, surprise, the Tabasco company has way more products for sale than just the original sauce. As one finishes the tour, you are led into the gift shop, where one can sample all the products they make. They must make at least a dozen products, like barbecue sauce, other hot sauces, spicy mustards, and even spicy jelly. They make a habanero sauce which is pretty good.

For me the highlight is the chipotle sauce. Chipotle is made from smoked jalapeno peppers, and has a much "darker" and "richer" taste than the original sauce. I highly recommend it. In fact, I liked it so much we bought a gallon of it on our first trip! The gallon lasted about a year, as I'm fond of putting an ounce or two into a bowl of gumbo. Dana & I bought another gallon on this trip.

I had a rather unusual introduction into the world of hot. As you might imagine, growing up in Montana does not afford one many opportunities to partake in spicy food. One does not usually put Tabasco sauce on one's brains and eggs while dining at Missoula's finest dining establishment, the Oxford. I first heard about the veneration of chillis by reading Andres Weil's The Marriage of the Sun and Moon, a collection of essays about drugs and consciousness. The notion that one could get a buzz by eating chillis was mind blowing to me, and I had to try it. Damn, if it doesn't work! Kind of like doing a sideshow act, your have to "have your mind right" in order to have a successful result. If you don't have your mind right it will burn like a mofo, and you will think the whole enterprise is stupid. I was able to get dried Japanese "Hontaka" peppers from the Butterfly herb in Missoula. Everyone else thought I was a freak, but it was cheap, not dangerous, and legal.

From there, it was a easy transition to enjoy hot sauces on food, as one's tolerance is greatly increased when one goes all out by eating chillis. I once won a Cinco de Mayo chilli pepper eating contest at a local Azteca Mexican restaurant, but it was really no big deal, as the chillis were just jalapenos.

If you like hot food, try the Tabasco chipotle sauce.

2006-09-15T18:41:00.000-07:00

Bigfoot's Bones

Almost from day one, Bigfootery as an organized enterprise has applied a series of Band-aids over the obvious objections to Bigfoot's existence. One of the fundamental objections is "Where are the bones"? This gets the following Band-aid; "dead animals are disarticulated and consumed by predators and scavengers thoroughly and quickly". Grover Krantz went as far as to suggest we don't even find bear bones in the wild, though the woods are known to be full of bears.

To this I say; BULLSHIT.

Though I remain intrigued by the possibility of Bigfoot, and have even spoken at several Bigfoot conferences, I'm really not a wilderness guy. Yes, Dana & I once camped overnight in the legendary Ape Canyon, but that's about it. Therefore it becomes all the more surprising to me that as a wilderness n00b, I've found animal bones in the wilderness on three occasions. The third set is shown here. Note that this section of vertebra is actually bleached white by the action of the sun. It's been there a long time. Granted, this was found on the plains of Wyoming, I think, but hey, according to John Green, the BFRO's database, and even R. Crumb, BIGFOOT IS EVERYWHERE. Well, his bones should be everywhere too...

I'll even go so far as to suggest that the genuine field guys probably find bones all the time, and simply don't mention it so as not to confute the holy canon set down by Grover Krantz. If they really don't find bones, then what are they doing wrong? Perhaps they are too busy "call blasting" or checking for "tree breaks" or "nests".

By and large, Bigfootery is a quasi-religious human social structure, whose persistent topics of conversation are all about the second-rate evidence that they have, not the fundamental lack of REAL evidence. For instance you will find gigs of computer storage devoted to Native American Bigfoot legends, but not one whisper of the fact that the close-to-the-earth First Nations peoples have no bones, hides, teeth, or anything that came from a Sasquatch.
But you know, I could be totally wrong, and will have to eat major crow someday. Perhaps the solution to the "no bones" problem is that Bigfoot is an invertebrate....

2006-09-15T18:33:00.000-07:00

Geodesic Domes

I like geodesic domes. I became aware of Bucky Fuller only a few years ago. That is to say, I first read Fuller only a few years ago. In Fuller we have a man imbued with idealism, and it's hard not to root for the idealist underdog. But my natural skepticism interfered with any wide-eyed belief in his concepts. Fuller advocated all kinds of woo nonsense, like man having devolved from aquatic animals. He also claimed gold was the most electrically conductive metal. Ultimately I think Fuller was one of those rare individuals who is both a visionary and a crank, simultaneously. Though he advocated all kinds of things, he is most commonly associated with the geodesic dome. As someone who likes solid geometry, I find geodesic domes quite beautiful.
To temper one's idealism for the geodesic dome, I highly recommend the book Shelter, edited by Lloyd Kahn: http://www.shelterpub.com/_shelter/shelter_book.html
Kahn wrote Domebook 1 and Domebook 2 back in the hippie days, both considered classics. By 1973, Kahn's enthusiasm for geodesic domes had been tempered by the reality of actually building and living in them. By the time he wrote Shelter, Kahn began to deflate some of the Fuller mythology. Domebook 3 is included in Shelter. On page 111 Kahn writes;
"We made an error in Domebook 2 in stating that Buckminster Fuller was the inventor of the geodesic dome. Fuller's contribution, rather than origination of the great circle principle, or its earliest structural utilization, is rather application of the word geodesic to this type of polyhedral building framework, and its popularization and commercialization in the United States."
Kahn goes on to detail the various practical problems with geodesic domes for residential use here: http://www.shelterpub.com/_shelter/domebuilder
One of Kahn's big points is this: "Domes are difficult to roof. And if not roofed exceptionally well, they will leak like a sieve". In my travels around the United States, I see geodesic domes from time to time, and many are simply the roofs of petroleum storage tanks. Has the oil industry solved the leakage problem? For sure, the oil men are not a bunch of idealistic hippies, you can bet they would not use inferior technology.
That said, domes simply look cool. Dana and I saw this one yesterday in La Grande Oregon. We stopped and took pictures. The man working there at "Dome Plumbing" was kind enough to let us inside. The interior bracing struts appeared to be made of wood, and was covered with spray-on foam insulation. Several angular pieces of sheetrock had been put over that, at least in one spot. The interior seemed to be acting as a mini-warehouse for plumbing supplies. The exterior appeared to be well shingled, and I can see it is possible to make the shingles overlap, even while conforming to the uniquely curved surface.
I'll post more on geodesic domes later.

2006-09-15T14:02:00.000-07:00

Dennis P. Eichhorn

I can't remember exactly when and where I met Denny Eichhorn. It must have been in the early 1990's, as I can remember visiting him in either 1994 or 1995. I believe I met him through Mike Hoy of Loompanics books, where he worked at that time. Initially, I had no idea of his "Real Stuff" comic persona until he gave me a set of his comics. The level of violence in his comics would lead you to imagine Denny as a real hot-head, but in fact he he is one of the more mellow people I know.
One of the reasons I now "blog" is because of Eichhorn. Denny told me that he found the comic treatment of some of his more extreme life events to be something of a psychic exorcism, and helped him get over his various life traumas. While I've not yet written about some of the more traumatic events in my life, I actually look forward to doing so, as I can tell already that "full disclosure" is emotionally can be helpful to some, like me and Eichhorn.
As you can see, I made Denny pose with his copy of the novel To Live and Die in LA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Live_and_Die_in_L.A. which is the basis of my favorite film of all time. When I first visited Denny, I was surprised to see that he, like me, had read Numbers by John Rechy.
Despite owning most of the original comics, I bought the compilation volume recently published. It had a few comics I did not have. So if you want the original, very funny, very sad, very weird, "full disclosure" life blog then go forth and buy Denny's book: http://www.amazon.com/Real-Stuff-Dennis-P-Eichhorn/dp/0974587001

2006-09-14T15:46:00.000-07:00

What exactly is "Orgone Research"?

It's an allusion to the work of Wilhelm Reich, a student of Freud, who became progressively more insane as time went on. He felt the life force of the universe was something called the "orgone", a neologism that I believe derives from the word "orgasm".

And why am I posing with a dead armadillo in this picture? Well, I think that's obvious don't you? The vital orgone has left this poor creature, and I am "researching" the result...

Here is the obligatory Wikipedia entry on Reich: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich