Accidental Historian

Selah

Geds — 2013-04-19T12:00:00-05:00

This week, man. This fucking week.

A couple asshole cowards bravely stood up to the people of Boston by leaving bombs in public and then running off.

A few dozen asshole cowards bravely stood up to the people of America by keeping us from even allowing a weak-tea plan to move the gun conversation in America.

That's what they all are. Assholes and cowards. Mitch McConnell and Heidi Heitkamp are going to have the blood of the next eight year old that gets shot by a madman on their hands just as surely as the asshole cowards who planted a bomb in Boston have the blood of Martin Richard on their hands.

It's a different type of cowardice. It's a different type of assholeishness. But it's cowardly and it's assholery all the same.

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In news that didn't get much traction because it was overshadowed: America unequivocally engaged in torture. There are those of us who knew it. There are those who did their best to deny it. But it's out there, now. America gave up what little moral superiority it had.

And in exchange for our souls we didn't even get actionable information. Of course, those of us who don't get our information about torture from 24 saw that coming.

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Texas, meanwhile, blew up.

Chicago drowned.

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All I can do is offer the words of Charlie Pierce. How he managed to get through this week with such grace and poignancy I'll never know.

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And if not that, perhaps this will help.

May next week be better.

You Can Go Home Again, Part 2

Geds — 2013-04-12T08:00:00-05:00

Imagine that you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade or so. I don’t know why you’ve been living under that rock. Perhaps you’ve spent too long in Arizona and it’s just so nice and cool. Whatever.

Now imagine that you’ve crawled out from under your rock and decided to rejoin society. The first thing you do is look at your Nokia candy bar phone with its monochromatic display and ability to let you play Snake and think, “I probably need a new phone. Especially since the battery in this thing died about nine years, eleven months, and twenty-nine days ago.”

You notice that there’s an AT&T store nearby. So you walk in and ask, “Hey, do you guys know where there’s a Cingular store around here? I need a new phone.”

The guy behind the counter asks, “Cingular? Have you been living under a rock?” You tell him that yes, yes you have. So he says that AT&T bought Cingular about nine years ago and that he can totally get you a new phone.

You ask, “So what has changed about cell phones in the last ten years?”

He starts to explain. About thirty seconds later your head explodes like that dude from Scanners.

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I have this weird tendency to believe that things don’t change at all if I’m not paying attention. I think that’s probably a pretty normal human tendency, but I find it odd since I notice it in myself and I tend to pay attention to things like that. So a week or so ago I walked into Al’s Hobby Shop in downtown Elmhurst, Illinois and asked the guy at the counter what’s been going on in the world of R/C cars since 2000. I didn’t understand something in the neighborhood of 50% of what I was told. I also got into the habit of starting my sentences with, “In my day…”

I’m an old geezer in training, is what I am. I’ve been looking forward to my twilight years since I was 25.

If you think about it it’s probably reasonable to think that a lot of things have changed in the world of R/C cars since I hung up my Futaba Magnum Sport back in 2000. The world of consumer electronics has changed drastically, after all. It’s also changed in ways that directly impact the R/C world. We’ve been making better batteries. We’ve been making electronics smaller, smarter, and lighter. We’ve been creating new ways of making our devices communicate with each other.

I have a cell phone that can connect to the internet, hook in to my wi-fi network, access files from my laptop, and allow me to talk to my grandmother over my Mazda’s sound system right now. Absolutely none of that functionality required me to do anything, either. It was just part of the package.

The good news is that I’m pretty quick on the uptake, so I started to figure out the changes pretty fast. The bad news is that 13 years is a long time to not pay attention to a thing. It didn’t take me very long at all to realize that all of my equipment was completely and totally out of date. That actually kind of made me sad, since my equipment was in really good shape. The old 410-M5 and 610-RV were still working perfectly. My old race batteries were still discharging at about the 5 minute, 30 second mark.[1]

I took the RS4-MT and the RS4 out to my cul-du-sac and ran a few batteries through them on Easter Sunday. Everything worked great except for the bit where the receiver in the RS4 was glitching out and I drove it into a rock while attempting a close cut on a drift maneuver. The slide broke both rear body posts.[2] Everything else was fine, but it’s kind of hard to drive a car when the body is hanging off to the side. This handicap was exacerbated by the fact that one of my front posts was held together by strapping tape.

My battery training instincts were so strong that I pulled the battery out of my RS4 as soon as I realized I wasn’t going to be running it for a while, put the battery into my RS4-MT, and ran out the rest of its charge. Old habits die hard, I suppose.

It turned out that none of that mattered. My 410-M5 and 610-RV were no longer relevant. My Reedy 17 turn and Onyx 14 turn double motors were slow. My Ni-Cads were race-ready but no longer race worthy. Even my Futaba Sport radios were more than a little behind the times. My two newest cars had been discontinued for at least a decade, too.[3]

In truth some of my equipment was out of date when I retired from racing. The two ESCs were already several years out of date. Several of my batteries were already pretty old, too, and had been relegated to “practice pack” status. It didn’t really matter, though, as the state of the art in the world of R/C cars didn’t really advance all that much between 1992 and 2000. So when I pulled my stuff out of the basement on Easter Sunday I expected to find out that it was old. The thing that surprised me was when I found out that it had been completely eclipsed by subsequent developments.

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Imagine that you were a total gearhead in the ‘70s and ‘80s. You were a Chevy person and totally invested in the war with Ford. But then, for whatever reason, you put your love of cars away for a couple decades and started taking the subway everywhere. Then one day in early 2013 you decided to renew your license and get your old Impala up and running again, fully expecting to wow all the kids at the local track.

So you do exactly that. Except what you find is that the kids are now kicking your ass with their Subaru WRX STis and Honda Civic Sis and only the old timers seem to care about Mustangs, Corvettes, and making fun of Mopar.

That’s pretty much where I found myself the Wednesday after Easter. Ni-Cad batteries were actually two generations behind. NiMH batteries had come and gone and the new power was coming from LiPos. Brushless motors had replaced the old brushed cans. The difference boiled down to more power delivered more quickly with significantly longer run times. It also meant that there were new players in the market. Novak and Tekin were still making speed controls, but there was a new kid by the name of Castle Creations. There were several new manufacturers of batteries I’d never heard of, too.

The biggest change, though, was both the easiest to understand and the hardest to digest. Traxxas is now the biggest player in the car market. I knew a couple guys who ran Traxxas cars back in the day. They weren’t good cars by any stretch of the imagination. Traxxas was what you got if you couldn’t afford or didn’t know to buy Associated or Losi kits. Now, though, Traxxas is everywhere.

There’s a very good reason why Traxxas is now the top dog: innovation. It’s not necessarily that they’ve been innovating on a technological level, although there’s some of that. I’m told that they single-handedly invented an entire off-road class. They also brought waterproof electric cars to the market. Mostly, though, they did what no one was doing in the ‘90s: they figured out that the best way to grow is to cater to the casual R/C driver who just wants to buy a fast car and have it work out of the box. They also figured out that allowing that casual dabbler to trade in some of the equipment for better equipment later is a pretty good way to keep them coming back for more.

That set of innovations actually made me pretty sad. Almost everything I saw was a ready to run car in a box. Aside from my Kyosho Raider I built my cars. If I got one that was already built it was because I got it used from someone else. That was a major part of the experience. I still know almost every inch of my RS4 and RS4-MT because I put everything on those cars together. I took pride in being able to say that. They weren’t just R/C cars. They were my R/C cars. That’s part of the reason why they followed me to Texas and back and I was able to pull them out after 13 years and run them down my street as if I’d never put them away.

It’s now possible to buy cars that go 70 or even 100 MPH right out of the box. I suppose that’s fantastic from a marketing perspective. I suppose it’s snobbish and elitist to complain about how the kids these days just don’t understand.

I also know that while I was at the hobby shop I saw several people walk in and ask to have someone else fix stuff that was so basic I would have been embarrassed to ask about in public. There’s nothing wrong with asking for help, don’t get me wrong. There is something wrong with not even bothering to try to figure out why something isn’t working. It seemed to me that the hobby was headed in that direction, at least judging by what I was seeing.

I can’t fathom letting other people do my work like that. Since I pulled my old stuff out less than two weeks ago I switched out the plugs on six batteries and four ESCs.[4] I installed new motors and electronics on two trucks. I rebuilt the shocks and put new wheels and tires on my RS4-MT. It’s pretty badass.

I honestly can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want the pleasure and satisfaction of looking at their car and saying, “I made that. I fixed that. It’s mine.” It seemed I was the only one. I was starting to despair, too.

Then the good news arrived.

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[1]We ran Ni-Cad batteries back in the day and had to “train” them. Races lasted five minutes, so the ideal run time was just a bit over five minutes. We would run the batteries for just over five minutes and then hook them up to discharge lights, which we made ourselves by soldering six to ten automotive bulbs together in series.

It was easy to tell who had the system down. We’d put the batteries in our cars, then put the transponders in and put the body on. Then we’d wave the car across the finish line to check in for the race and walk over to the start line and wait until the last possible moment to turn the car on and run over to the drivers’ stand.

My final set of race batteries was a triple set of Trinity 1700 Ni-Cads running Panasonic cells. They were expensive batteries when I got them at the tail-end of the ‘90s. I took damn good care of them, including making sure I stored them properly even when I stopped racing for over a decade. It’s a testament to the quality of the batteries and my understanding of how to take care of them that they still worked exactly as they were supposed to in March of 2013.

[2]I found a new set of RS4 Pro 2 body posts on Amazon and ordered them. When they came the comparative quality of the Pro 2 posts compared to the RS4 Sport posts was blatantly obvious. So part of the problem was HPI’s fault. I’m pretty sure that the Pro 2 posts wouldn’t have broken if I’d done the same exact thing with them installed.

[3]Interestingly enough, though, everyone who’s seen my RS4-MT and knew what it was had the exact same reaction: “Oh, I used to have one of those. It was a great car.”

Yes. Yes it was. Yes it is.

[4]I also discovered that there’s a really good reason why I was never particularly good at soldering: I had a soldering iron that was way too good.

I wanted a good, quality soldering iron with a pistol grip and a trigger. So I got the best one I could get, a beast of a Weller iron that did 200 watts. I always used great gobs of solder because the solder seemed to evaporate off the tip of my iron and never seemed to stick properly. The tip was also a really wide chisel design. I finally got frustrated by this last weekend and headed to the hardware store to see if I could find a soldering iron with a narrower tip.

I noticed that soldering irons actually had numbers attached to them. The soldering irons that were listed as “standard grade” were 25 watt units capable of up to 750 degree heat. The “medium grade units had a few more watts and went up to 900 degrees. I don’t know how hot my soldering iron got, but, again, 200 watts. Rosin core solder, by the by, has a melting temperature of about 460 degrees, depending.

Part of the problem is that I was using the 200w gun wrong. You’re not supposed to hold the trigger down and deliver constant heat. It has so much power because you’re supposed to pull the trigger, heat it up all quick-like, then hit your spot and release the trigger. I was applying constant heat, which is stupid as fuck.

Part of the problem, though, is that my tip was way wider than the area I was working with more often than not. That made precision deployment rather difficult. Long story short, I got a cheap, small soldering iron that’s way better for my style and application and it’s amazing how much better I got at soldering.

You Can Go Home Again, Part 1

Geds — 2013-04-10T08:00:00-05:00

Easter brought about a resurrection…of sorts. Can you really bring something back to life if it was never alive to begin with? Or is everything alive if it’s part of your living memory?

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They’ve been important enough that they moved with me four times. They were dead weight in all of those moves, things I thought I might do something with but never really in any serious, intentional way. Still, it was a part of my past that I had put away but never really forgotten. Sentimentality demanded I put in the effort. So they went to Brookfield. They went to Texas. They went into a storage locker for a year in Carol Stream. Finally they went to my basement.

On Easter Sunday they emerged once again.

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It all started in either the summer of ’92 or ’93. I want to say it was the summer before seventh grade, which would make it the earlier, but it might have been the summer after. My junior high offered summer clubs. It wasn’t summer school so much as summer camp in a school. I signed up for the radio controlled car club.

One of the requirements was to bring your own radio controlled car. My dad and I went down to the local Radio Shack and purchased a buggy. I thought it was the fastest car in the world and it was going to kick everyone’s butt. I had no idea what I was getting in to.

My little Radio Shack car broke on pretty much the first day. It was no big loss, really, since my little Radio Shack car was absolutely nothing compared to the cars the rest of the kids were running. It wasn’t something that could be repaired, either. My dad and I didn’t go back to the Radio Shack. We were directed to a local hardware store that had a hobby section.[1]

That was where I bought my first real R/C car: a Kyosho Raider.

The Raider was what was known as an ARR kit, which stood for “almost ready to run.” It was a starter car that came with a closed, can-style stock motor and a mechanical speed control. I needed to supply my own radio. I also needed to paint the body.

For those who don’t know, R/C car bodies are made of clear lexan. That’s so you can paint the inside. I did not know that, so I painted the outside. With a paint brush. The results were somewhat less than stellar.

The mechanical speed control melted shortly into the summer’s events. Back to the hobby shop I went with my dad. I bought my first electronic speed control (ESC): a Novak 410-M5. It was bright orange with a big, black heat sink. It also didn’t have a reverse option. I thought that was weird. The next time I bought an ESC I got a Novak 610-RV, precisely because it had reverse.

My Kyosho Raider was big, heavy, and slow. It was also not really part of the zeitgeist, as most of the other kids had Losi or Associated cars. Losi v. Associated was the Chevy v. Ford of R/C.

They came together at various points over that summer for spirited games of “kill the Raider.” Weirdly, although I firmly remember being a bullied kid and I remember the chants of, “Kill the Raider!” quite well I don’t remember that as being anything other than good fun. It was also a useful impetus to become a good driver. Sometimes slow and steady does win the race. Other times it simply means you can turn the tables on the other guys.

I also know that I didn’t hold those games of kill the Raider against the other guys. I raced with them for the better part of the next decade, after all. I can still remember their names, their faces, and in some cases their cars.

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I didn’t race the Raider for long. It just wasn’t a good car and there were no modifications that could change that. I’d added the 410-M5. I also added a Trinity Slot Machine 27 turn stock motor.[2] I shifted fairly quickly to 1/10th scale onroad pan cars. The big dog in that particular class was the Associated RC10L. I had a (used) TRC Pro10.[3]

Really, though, in 1/10th scale pan car there was no real advantage in one car over another. This is a Pro10:

This is a RC10L:

The cars were as basic as could be. It might look like the big metal bar on the front of the Pro 10 would add a lot of weight, but it was some sort of super light magnesium or something and the benefits of a much sturdier and easier to adjust steering system far outweighed the minor weight difference.

I put that car through a lot of races. The first body I had with the car was basically a lexan wedge. We raced on carpet that was stored on 12 foot wide rolls and duct taped together at the seams. One race the tape came up at the seam. The leading edge of the body caught the underside of the gap and the car disappeared under the carpet.

The car had its quirks. The motor mount, for one, gave me fits. The rear pod (as the motor mount box in the back was called) was just two metal supports with graphite over the top. The motor had to be able to move, as changing gear sizes required being able to move the motor to compensate. The motor mounts themselves were just a pair of grooves cut in the uprights that were wide enough to fit a motor mount screw. It was trivially easy to jostle the motor out of place. It happened in a race once when I had a pretty wide lead. The race was a main, which meant it was the big one at the end for all the bragging rights. I kept the car in the race even though it was emitting a ghastly whine and running incrementally slower with every lap.

I won the race by a hair or three, then retrieved my car. The pinion (the smaller metal gear attached to the motor shaft) had cut a perfect groove right down the middle of the spur gear (the larger plastic gear attached directly to the rear axle. There were no teeth left to speak of on the gear, either, which would explain why it was moving pretty slowly at the end.

In high school I needed to do a demonstration speech for speech class. I decided to do my speech on how to assemble an R/C car. I took the Pro-10, since it was a relatively simple car. The speech went pretty well, except for the bit where I cut a few corners and didn’t fully assemble the car because it actually takes for-frickin’-ever to mount a couple dozen screws while talking about it. I wasn’t using the car at the time so I never got around to fully reassembling it. The pieces are still somewhere in my parents’ basement.

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Sometime around the beginning of high school one of my friends decided to upgrade from his first generation RC10T to an RC10T2. His RC10T had the aluminum tub chassis and a lot of the cool upgrades, including Associated’s famous Stealth transmission. I jumped at the chance to buy it. I’d wanted a truck and I was tired of racing on road.

That was the golden age of stadium trucks, at least for us. There were a bunch of us keeping the Associated/Losi rivalry alive but also racing each other for bragging rights. Several of the guys had a competition going to see who could buy the coolest stuff and go the fastest.

I got the better end of that deal. I didn’t spend a lot of money on upgrades, so I just made sure I knew how to drive. I can still fondly remember weaving around my buddies while they went full-speed into walls because they didn’t understand the concept of braking into a turn.

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I wasn’t out of on road that long, though. There was a big change in tech in the mid- to late ‘90s. The old pan cars disappeared and were replaced with four wheel drive touring cars. I don’t remember Associated or Losi jumping on that market. I do know that I was a fairly early adopter, adding a HPI RS4 Sport to my collection sometime shortly after it was released in 1997. The other big name in the touring car market, at least as far as I knew, was Schumacher, who had put out the SST 2000.

Then came happy, amazing news. HPI was releasing the RS4-MT, a stadium truck version of the RS4.

I bought one almost immediately. Or, at least, I bought one as soon as I could afford to. It was the coolest thing in the world as far as I was concerned.

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I raced my last race in the spring of 2000. My cars were both HPI, which was solely an after-market parts, tire, and motor manufacturer when I bought my Kyosho Raider. The ESC in my RS4-MT was the Novak 410-M5 I’d put in that Kyosho Raider nearly a decade before. The ESC in my RS4 was the 610-RV I’d bought a year or two later.

In the thirteen years since that race I pulled them out exactly one time.

Then, on Easter Sunday of 2013, a resurrection.

(L-R: RC10T, RS4, RS4-MT)

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[1]That hardware store’s hobby section had R/C car stuff, model trains, and RPG stuff for reasons that are completely beyond my comprehension. I also used to get Ral Partha BattleTech minifigs there. My BattleTech thing and my R/C car thing are oddly intertwined like that. The week before I pulled my R/C cars out I pulled my BattleTech stuff out, set up a scenario, and played a game (against myself, because I’m weird like that).

In order to do that I had to come up with a way to create a temporary workspace. I also decided to finally get around to finishing a Shadow Cat and Cauldron-Born minifig that I got a few years ago.

This, somehow, got me thinking about R/C cars. Weirdly, the last time I put serious thought to one I also put serious thought to the other. There was a power outage in the summer of 2007 that lasted for the better part of a week. In order to pass the time I pulled out my BattleTech minifigs and my old Testors paint and painted (or, in a few cases, re-painted, including an Axeman that I’d completely and totally butchered but which is now one of my favorites) a bunch.

I was still seeing Amy at the time and I showed her what I was working on. She, um, she didn’t get why I thought it was cool. At around that time I also pulled my R/C stuff out to see if it worked. I took my RS4-MT over to her place one night to show her what I was talking about. She was nonplussed, to say the least.

There’s probably a lesson to be learned here, but fuck if I know what it is.

[2]”Turns” are a strange and wondrous thing that I never fully understood. These were electric motors, so they consisted of a round can with magnets on the edge and a pole that went down the middle. Wire was wrapped around the pole and the amount of wire determined the turns. The higher the number of turns the slower the motor because, um, science, bitches. I guess. There was then a cut off somewhere in the neighborhood of 22-24 turns that switched from “stock” to “modified.” Modified motors were generally faster. They also had an additional signifier of “double,” “triple,” and, I suppose, “single.” What that means is…um…I don’t know. I mostly raced stock because stock motors were a lot cheaper than modified. I was also usually running in some sort of formalized class where we all used similar equipment and kept track of points throughout the year.

I developed loyalties in motors, much like I developed loyalties in speed controls. My ESCs were both Novak. My motors were either Trinity or Reedy unless I was required to run something else. The two best motors I had at the end were a Reedy Speedworks 17 turn modified and a Trinity Onyx 14 turn double from their SpeedGems series, which was the absolute shit.

[3]You might be noticing a pattern here…

Everything Old...

Geds — 2013-03-07T14:00:00-06:00

This is an old piece from the Washington Monthly. In fact, it's a piece from 2008. But it's new to me and that's why I want it to be new to you. Read it. It's fascinating.

The thing that drew me wasn't the A Plot, which is a truly interesting story of a bunch of Baltimore criminals trying to daffiest defense of all time. The B Plot is what got my attention, specifically the way that the B Plot was the history of the Sovereign Citizens movement. It pulls a lot of threads together, even to the point of the cranks who think that the layout of Washington D.C. is a secret message from the Masons.

Read it. It's kind of long, but it's illuminating in that it ties Reconstruction and Jim Crow and the Posse Commitatus movement together. It's also illuminating in how it explains the rise of militias and how ol' Sheriff Joe out in Maricopa County thinks that he can arrest the President and all the county sheriffs who think they can stop the feds from taking away their guns.

Mostly it's interesting in the way that everything old is new again. [Via]

In Which Geds Talks About Music

Geds — 2013-03-07T08:00:00-06:00

The Sons of Bill-ification of The Gaslight Anthem continues apace. That, for anyone wondering, is an actual sentence in English. I know, I’m as surprised as you are.

It turns out that I kinda-sorta have to eat my words from the post I wrote about The Gaslight Anthem a couple weeks ago. I compared them to Sons of Bill but gave them a markdown because they couldn’t seem to shift into a lower gear like Sons of Bill can. I apparently had not made it all the way to the end of Handwritten then, because there’s this song called “National Anthem.” Here, listen to it:

I could have used that song about four years ago. The first verse pretty much defines a certain period of my life. And the second verse…

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Now everybody lately is living up in space
Flying through transmissions on invisible airwaves
With everything discovered
Just waiting to be known
What’s left for god to teach from his throne?
And who will forgive us when he’s gone?

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I like music. I’ve defined my life, or at least parts of my life, through and by music. I like writing about music. I also tend to really, really despise people who write about music. I don’t think people should write about music.

This is awkward.

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In order to get me into the proper mood for this post I set up a randomized playlist consisting of exactly six albums: Sons of Bills’ A Far Cry From Freedom, My Hometown, and Sirens and The Gaslight Anthems’ American Slang, The ’59 Sound, and Handwritten.

The randomizer just went from Gaslight’s “National Anthem” to SoB’s “Roll on Jordan.” This is how “Roll on Jordan” starts:

Yeah, in this sad world we live in
The government bought all the trains
And there’s a lot of lonely people
And they’re all flying aeroplanes
And they think they’re closer to heaven
Lord but that is far from true
You gotta take that ride on the
River of Jordan
See what a boy from Galilee can do

The second verse of “National Anthem” makes me think of the first verse of “Roll on Jordan.”

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The problem with people who write about music is that they generally write about music to let you know how much smarter they are than you. Or they write about music to let you know that they’re not nearly as dumb as you think they are. It kind of seems to depend on what they’re writing about. If it’s some indie band like, say, Sons of Bill or The Gaslight Anthem it’s probably the former. If it’s Taylor Swift it’s probably the latter.[1]

Here’s the thing: I don’t care what you think of me for writing about Sons of Bill. I like them. Don’t get me wrong, I want you to like them, too. I think that they’re one of the ten best bands in the world right now, and that’s a list that includes the reconstituted Soundgarden, two different Scott Lucas projects, Mike Doughty, Flogging Molly, Matt Nathanson, and Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers. I also genuinely don’t give a shit whether you actually do like them or not. Music, like all art, is completely subjective. My appreciation for a particular band or song shouldn’t have any impact on your appreciation of the same thing. It doesn’t fucking matter.

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I took Amy to exactly one concert. It was a Local H show at Durty Nellie’s in Palatine. I couldn’t go to Local H shows or listen to Local H songs without thinking about that night for a long time after we stopped talking. That included the time I saw Local H in Houston and Fort Worth when I was in Texas and desperate for anything that reminded me of home.

It sucked. It’s weird, too, the memories that come from moments like that. I was driving my old Cavalier at the time and I’d just installed a new Clarion head unit. It was a pretty high-end unit and I was proud of it. As I drove home from the Local H show she pointed out that the colors weren’t lined up correctly with the rest of the dials on the dash of the car.

At least she knew to be happy for me about the fact that I had a cool head unit. I’d installed a pretty cool Pioneer unit in an earlier car and the girl I was dating at the time had only pointed out that my radio presets were suspiciously secular in their musical content. I think I’d told Amy that story. So she might have gotten the message already.

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I was at a party a couple weeks ago. While I was there I met this really cute blonde. I walked her back to her car, which required a detour to my car for…y’know…reasons. It was really cold, so I turned the car on to get the heater going. I reached over to turn the sound down on the stereo and she told me to leave it on. She wanted to know what I was listening to.

As it turns out it was one of many CDs I’ve been obsessively working on of late. I keep trying to come up with the greatest randomized driving compilation. It contained everything that mattered: Veruca Salt, Letters to Cleo, Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Local H, Scott Lucas & the Married Men, Sons of Bill, Garbage, the Wheeler Brothers, and Mike Doughty.

I reached over to turn the music off and she said she wanted to hear what I was listening to. She didn't seem to realize that she might as well have asked to see me naked.

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Right after I moved back from Texas I went on a couple dates with this one woman. After the first date I was walking back to my car with Sons of Bills’ “So Much for the Blues” running through my head. It was right then that I knew it wouldn’t work out.

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That’s the thing about writing about music. I don’t have to justify any of it to anyone else. If you, as the reader of this blog post, listen to Sons of Bill and don’t like them it doesn’t negate my memories. If you, as the reader of this blog post, listen to Sons of Bill and love them it doesn’t make me like them more.

Too many people who write about music don’t get that, though. They think that your appreciation levels somehow impact their lives. It doesn’t. Or, at least, it shouldn’t. If you’re the sort of person who thinks that the opinions of others somehow invalidates or reinforces yours then, well, you’re just a sad, pathetic person.

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The thing about music, though, is that you can’t get more personal than a song. You also can’t get less personal than a song. I love Sons of Bill. I’m coming to love Gaslight Anthem. I want you to love both bands as well.

Please. Go. Love them both. But know that if you decide that they’re not your cup of tea that I just don’t care.

Why should I? You don’t think about the same things that I think about when you hear them, after all.

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[1]For the record, Taylor Swift sucks. It’s not because her music is trite and overcommercialized, which it is. It’s not because she seems to think that fucking other people over to fuel her next number 1 hit is a good business decision, which seems to be the case. It’s because SHE CAN’T FUCKING SING. That’s my main gripe. Listen to her sing live. She doesn’t get within the same ZIP code as the appropriate key.

I Bring Glad Tidings of Great Joy

Geds — 2013-02-28T09:00:00-06:00

Do you feel like your life is missing something? Have you been wondering if there’s something more than that which you’ve been able to experience and understand up until now? Then I have good news for you. There is more out there. You just need to open yourself up to the possibility that there’s something bigger. You need to admit that you’re not capable of making it on your own. Then you need to accept The Dollyrots into your heart.

Will The Dollyrots fix all your ills? Probably not. Chances are that they won’t find you a job. Chances are better that they won’t cure you of cancer or herpes or that annoying cold you’ve had for the last couple days. They probably also won’t get you a date on Friday night. So you might ask yourself, “Why should I accept The Dollyrots into my heart instead of, say, accepting tequila into my stomach?” I’m glad you asked. The answer is “hangovers.”

The Dollyrots will not give you a hangover. Tequila most likely will. Ergo, tomorrow you’ll be better off with The Dollyrots. Tonight you might be better off with tequila, but, well, have you considered that it’s your short-sightedness that has caused you to become the unemployed, single, cancer-riddled sad sack you are today? Think about it. No, YOU think about it. But not too long. Especially about that cancer-riddled part, since I don’t think that tequila causes cancer and if you think I’m saying that you’ll probably decide I don’t know anything. And tequila manufacturers might sue me for libel or something.

Anyway, where were we? Oh, yeah, you were accepting The Dollyrots into your heart. Why were you doing that, again? Because the Dollyrots are awesome, that’s why. In fact, if you listen closely, chances are that you’ll hear The Dollyrots tell you that they’re awesome. See if you can catch the undercurrent in their song “Because I’m Awesome:”

The Dollyrots kinda-sorta jumped onto my radar last week and have basically clubbed my head against the various bits of solid equipment that make up said radar. I’m okay with that. I didn’t really need my head, anyway. I mean, I didn’t need it as much as I needed The Dollyrots to take up residence in my heart. That might be a long-term problem, though, since my heart is where my blood used to be and I feel like that might be detrimental.

Eh. What’re ya gonna do?

I came of age during the reign of grunge. I also came of age during the golden age of pop punk. As such, while Soundgarden is the most important fucking band in the world to me, Green Day and the various Green Day clones that followed had more than a bit of influence on my determination of what makes music good. For anyone who’s been paying attention to this here blog I’ve also recently spent quite a bit of time making sure that ‘90s riot grrl rock got added to its proper place in my own personal pantheon.

Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, then, I was in the exact perfect state of mind to get my mind completely and totally fucking blown by The Dollyrots. How do I explain The Dollyrots, then? Basically, they’re what would happen if Kay Hanley of Letters to Cleo and Emma Stone had a daughter[1] and raised their love child on a steady diet of Green Day’s Dookie, Sugarcult’s Start Static[2], Letters to Cleo’s Go!, Veruca Salt’s Eight Arms to Hold You, and No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom.[3]

Seriously. Kelly Ogden of The Dollyrots sings like a hybrid of Kay Hanley and Louise Post of Veruca Salt. This is more of the Kay Hanley side:

This is more of the Louise Post side (weirdly, every single live YouTube video of the band seems to have the same washed-out lead vocals. This is the best example I could find. What're ya gonna do?):

Also, in case you’re wondering, Kelly O plays the bass and is the lead singer, which puts her in the same, rarified, air as Lemmy Kilmeister of Motorhead. So, fuck yeah?

And, um, yeah, that was just an excuse to put up another YouTube video. What’re ya gonna do about it?

Either way, The Dollyrots: go get you some. Your life will be better. Even if you have cancer-herpes. I don’t know what those are, but I’m guessing they’re cold sores that break out all over your body every couple weeks and never, ever go away until they kill you. Don’t get cancer-herpes.

--------------------

Because I can, here’s some music cited in the above post:

Veruca Salt’s “Volcano Girls.” Because I can, that’s why.

Japanese people. So hilarious. Amirite, guys?

Green Day used to be fun. Then they went all political and Billy Joe started wearing eyeliner. I miss the old days of songs about masturbation and, um, other songs about masturbation. And albums named after slang for poop and dumb people. The ‘90s, man. The ‘90s. They were the best.

Let’s all move to Portland. This has nothing to do with anything, but I need the dream of the ‘90s to be alive right now. I just do. Also, I totally want to move to Portland. Except I fear that the reality will be more annoying hipster than musical numbers and that hot girl with the glasses and the blue bandana. Who's probably actually an annoying hipster.

Every time I see this video I realize that there will come a time when we’re as embarrassed by the fashion of the ‘90s as people who came of age in the ‘80s are about leg warmers and pastels. I mean, all the dudes in the video are dressed like Charlie Sheen from Two and a Half Men. And the whole cutoff jean shorts + leggings thing Kay Hanley was rocking? Yeah…no.

Oh my god, you guys. THIS WAS A THING. I TOTALLY FORGOT ABOUT THIS BEING A THING!

Okay, then, I think that the Flaming Lips just broke my brain. The lesson, as always, is that following YouTube links is dangerous.

Eh. Have some No Doubt. Nothing bad comes from that, right?

-------------------------

[1]Which is totally possible according to science. It’s why the feminazis want to get rid of men, after all. Consider yourselves warned, men who would otherwise be procreating with Emma Stone or Kay Hanley.

[2]This is technically impossible, since the band’s creation myth comes from the election of George W Bush in 2000 and Sugarcult put out Start Static in 2001. But my theory makes sense because, um, shut up, that’s why.

[3]By the by, a playlist consisting of Green Day’s Dookie and Nimrod, Sugarcult’s Start Static, No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom, Veruca Salt’s Eight Arms to Hold You, Letters to Cleo’s discography, and The Dollyrots’ discography is kind of awesome.

Hello, World!

Geds — 2013-02-21T13:00:00-06:00

So...I'm not dead. I guess I've got that goin' for me. On the heels[1] of the Being Me stuff I decided I need to get out more and meet more people and say, "You know, that seems like a terrible idea, I'ma go do that," more often. It's kinda like what I tried to force myself to do with last year's Dancing Monkey Project, but it's actually working because I'd gone to great lengths to exorcise the demons that required me to try to force myself to do things like that in the past.

Or, y'know, whatever.

For the record, it's amazing how quickly life starts throwing you curveballs when you decide to do something like that and then actually follow through. Back when I was all Churchy Joe and whatnot we used to talk about the dangers of asking god to open our eyes and lead us to opportunities to do his work because, boom, those opportunities would appear. I've realized now that it's not because the universe changes, but because the way you view and interact with the universe that changes. We close our eyes and ears to so much and tune out everything that's not a direct influence on our desires and habits that we miss just how much there is out there in the world.

There's a lot of world out there, folks. It's terrible and wonderful and big and broad and there's not enough time to see all of it.

-------------------------

Meanwhile, I've been letting The Gaslight Anthem grow on me. They're kinda what would happen if the guys from Sons of Bill grew up in Jersey and had a bit more of a punk influence on their style. This is a statement that makes no sense and is why people shouldn't write about music and expect to seem like they're anything other than pretentious twits, complete idiots, or completely pretentious idiots. Just, y'know, listen:

That said, they don't seem to have the ability to downshift that Sons of Bill exhibits, so their songs kinda sound the same. Still, I got Handwritten and The '59 Sound the other day and I'm not regretting the decision.

It also seems from live videos that the Gaslight guy...how do I say this...benefits from studio magic. This is not something I would say about, say, James Wilson of Sons of Bill. So I'm less likely to truck my ass out to see Gaslight live is what I'm saying.

-------------------------

Speaking of Sons of Bill, they seem to have made a new video for "Virginia Calling."

I enjoy both the composition and the storytelling.

-------------------------

[1]Or the heals, if you enjoy homonym-based punnery. Which I don't. Not in the least little bit.

Sketches: Ellie

Geds — 2013-02-14T08:00:00-06:00

This would have been the second chapter of the 2010 kinda-sorta re-write of the project that never got off the ground. Note the rather intentional parallel structure to the first chapter. This, like yesterday's entry, is an unedited copy of something I wrote three-ish years ago.

------------------------------

The last thing Eleanor Jane McIntire's father had said to her was, "When you get tired of this rebellion, you come on back home. We'll be waiting." He'd then tossed the last box in to the back of her rented truck and slammed the door shut.

Eleanor, or Ellie, as everyone called her, was a twenty-five-year old college graduate with dreams of a successful career in the big city and a past she was desperate to escape. She'd lived in a world dominated by men and wanted to know what it meant to be a woman for herself.

Her father wanted to be the image of the stern Southern gentleman. That's what the McIntires had been for as long as he knew, after all. He hadn't bothered to trace his lineage back any farther than a Colonel who served under Joe Johnston in the final days of the War of Northern Aggression. It was just as well, as the hard drinking Irish Catholic immgrants who had scraped together the money necessary to buy passage to the New World in the early 1800s wouldn't exactly have met his high standards. Either way, he expected his boys to grow up to be successful gentlemen as well and live up to the family name. He'd expected his daughter to grow up to be a beautiful debutant, even if they weren't part of the class that had such things, and settle down early to the life of the content homemaker. It was expected, it was right, at least in his world.

Her mother, meanwhile, had other plans. After giving birth to four boys and hoping for a girl the entire time, she'd named her only daughter after Eleanor Roosevelt. It was a little act of defiance. She couldn't have gotten away with naming the girl after Susan B. Anthony, but no one seemed to think twice about a First Lady. Even if she was a powerful, determined woman, she had gotten where she was by being a wife. Ellie's middle name, meanwhile, came from Jane Addams, the social work pioneer who had changed the landscape of Chicago forever. It was a good name, a strong name, one Ellie wore with pride.

Her father called her "Princess," a name Ellie pretended to enjoy but secretly simply endured. She had no urge to be a princess or carry the burden the name held. She didn't want to be daddy's little girl or simply Mrs. So-and-so. But as bad as Princess was, it beat by a country mile the name she wore through most of high school, the name that cause her to burn with shame every time she heard it. Easy Ellie, the boys at school called her.
Even after her older brothers beat Tim Johnson so hard he ended up in the hospital the name stuck. It was a whisper, but it was still there. On one level, though, it had been a blessing. Her father had let her leave Atlanta to go away to college in Florida in the hopes that by the time she returned everyone would have forgotten about the whole thing.

She'd made the mistake of growing up tall, headstrong, and beautiful in a world where the girls were supposed to stay virtuous and the youthful indiscretions of the boys were dismissed with a knowing smile, a wink, and the words, "Boys will be boys." It was all her fault in the all-important court of public opinion. It was Ellie who had messed up. That was simply how it worked.

Strange, though, how she'd yearned to hear her father call her Princess after a while. But when Easy Ellie arrived, it seemed that Princess was gone forever. Still, her father had expected her to play the role as best she could from then on out. He'd ask her if she'd met anybody every time she called home from college. When she invariably said she hadn't he would sigh heavily and hand the phone to her mother.

Ellie stayed in college as long as she could, but eventually had to graduate and head back home. She'd taken a job teaching fourth graders at a nearby Christian school, but soon started to feel that her world was far too small. She began dreaming of a life lived according to her own rules and plans. One day she began daydreaming about the life of her middle namesake. Before she realized it, she was making plans to move to Chicago and make use of her double minor in social work and psychology and her major in education.

Ever since she'd left home for the second and, hopefully, last time, her father had not even made a pretense of caring what happened to her or expecting her to meet a man. Her mother always answered the phone and they played a game where both pretended her father had a legitimate reason he couldn't talk and that he sent his love. For the first three months after arriving in Chicago Ellie had cried herself to sleep.

She hadn't actually ended up in Chicago itself. She'd ended up forty miles away from the city in one of the many old river towns that dotted the area. It looked pretty much like every river town in the midwest. A long main street dotted with bars, restaurants, and cute little shops occupying hundred-year old brick and stone buildings dropped sharply towards the river, crossed it on an ornamented span, then climbed another hill on the other side. The farther up the hill out of the river valley or down along the river away from the town center, the more modern the construction became. The cute shops and riverfront parks gave way and were replaced with tract housing, strip malls, Dunkin' Donuts, McDonald's, Meijer, and Menards.

Still, Ellie loved her new home. Easy Ellie was a distant memory, Princess a non-factor. Even if she wasn't exactly the second coming of Jane Addams, she was happy. She had a full-time job working at a day care center and pouring her love in to the children of strangers. Three nights a week she worked at a little coffee shop called the Koffee Klatch. The regulars loved that she was always willing to offer a sympathetic ear and laugh at their lame jokes. And if some of the men seemed just a little too charmed by her southern accent and big, bright, green eyes, well, that was bound to happen sometimes.

And so Eleanor Jane McIntire went through her days outside Chicago, trying desperately to keep herself from realizing that none of her dreams were anywhere close to coming true.

---------------------

Whether or not this ends up going anywhere it's important. It marks a sea change in my perception of narrative structure and, possibly more importantly, a new understanding of the nature of the Self and the Other in both the story and reality. It's also the first time I fully realized the importance of empathy in the creation of a character.

Ellie started out as Jack's love interest and the woman to be won over as part of the overall course of the plot. Over the course of the various scenes I sketched out between coming up with the story in 2006 and the attempted re-write in 2010 she became a fully fleshed-out character with her own hopes, dreams, and voice. I realized that just leaving her as the woman who showed up and gave Jack's journey diminished her. More than that, it robbed her of her life and experience and all the things that brought her into Jack's life.

She was actually a far more interesting character than Jack. I think that's why I ended up keying in on names and the idea of namesakes. The idea of a girl growing up knowing she was expected to be a southern belle by her father but also knowing that she was named for Eleanor Roosevelt and Jane Addams by a secretly rebelling mother fascinated me. She'd always had this sort of inherent agency, longing, and darkness that combined in a way that was far, far more interesting than Jack's rather static tale.

The problem was that I wrote myself into a corner by going with the parallel opening chapters. Jack had to be the main character, as the thing that drove the plot was something that happened to him. I thought about making a not-exactly-parallel structure, where we were introduced to both characters as co-equals, then each chapter was from an alternating perspective. That proved to be far, far too difficult to pull off while also preserving the actual narrative arc the story necessitated.

This, for the record, is why the 2010 re-write didn't get too far. I knew how to get through the first half-dozen chapters. After that I was more than a little lost.

Sketches: Jack

Geds — 2013-02-13T08:00:00-06:00

So I've had one of those stretches where I've lacked the time and energy to do much writing. As such, I think I shall begin my sketches idea.

I've had an idea sitting out there in various states of incompletion since early 2006. The idea still fascinates me and I love the characters involved. I've never actually been able to write the whole idea, though. I think there are two reasons for that.

First, this project, such as it is, really brought the origin of the sketches idea. I kept seeing scenes of interaction between the characters. I never really knew what happened between the scenes, though. Every time I tried to write their stories I got hung up on the events between the events.

Second, this project, such as it is, straddles the end of my Christianity like nothing else. It arrived during the period of great confusion that marked the beginning of the end. It's stuck with me ever since, with the characters remaining the same while their worlds have changed drastically.

In the spring of 2010 I tried to re-write the book. Well, I tried to write the book in a different way than I'd conceived of it the first time around. I didn't get very far. I'd still like to get somewhere with this one of these days, though.

Today and tomorrow I'll put up the first two chapters from that 2010 re-write. I might put some other stuff up later. This is unedited, for the record. I just pulled it directly out of the file in question.

--------------------------------

The last thing Jackson Paul Reed's father said to him was, "Don't ever let a woman get her claws in to you, kiddo. It just ain't worth it." He'd then thrown a pair of suitcases in to the trunk of his old brown Cutlass and disappeared in a cloud of thick, black exhaust smoke.

Jackson, or Jack, as his biological father had called him, was five years old. He stood in the middle of the street. Watching. Expecting the beat up Oldsmobile to return.
It never did.

His father had left plenty of women in the past, but never a kid. He didn't know that a child didn't quite understand the dynamic of relationships between a woman and a man who was terrified of commitment. He didn't know that the kid could grow up blaming himself, could grow up insecure. Chances are, though, he wouldn't have cared. Such is the nature of selfishness.

To her credit, Jack's mother never once attempted to use her son as a stand-in for his deadbeat father. She'd set out as soon as possible in an attempt to find a real man, not the sort of self-focused rebel who stoked the imagination of an 18-year old girl from a small town, then left when things got tough, but the sort of man who was stable. She decided to do it right the second time around.

Tom Patterson was exactly the right sort of man. When he met Cindy Reed he was a thirty-two-year old widower looking for a new start. She was thirty. Jack was twelve.
He'd arrived at the door to pick Cindy up on their first date with a bouquet of flowers for her and a Transformer action figure for Jack. Bumblebee.

Jack already had a Bumblebee, but he didn't care. All that mattered to him was that Tom had thought of him. He hadn't heard from his own father in seven years: no calls, no birthday presents, no Christmas cards. Nothing.

His mother had always called him Jackson. She'd named him after Jackson Pollock, hoped that such a name would give him creativity and genius. Tom called him Jack, and so did everyone else, except for about three months during his eighth grade year when all the boys at school called him Action Jackson after he told a whopper about getting his hand under Jennifer Dooley's shirt after a basketball game. She had actually let him kiss her. On the cheek. When word got out about his supposed adventures she'd met him at his locker, slapped him as hard as she could and called him a pervert. Even as a marginally aware thirteen-year old, Jack had been able to recognize the pain in her eyes. He'd vowed right then and there to never hurt another girl again. If anyone was going to get hurt in his future relationships, he decided, it was him.

The one thing nobody ever called Jack was "son." His biological father had always called him "kiddo" before he'd stopped calling him anything at all. His mother called him by name or referred to him as, "My boy." Sometimes, too, she called him "kiddo." Tom had wanted to call him son, but hadn't, even after the official adoption papers went through.

Tom had been hurt and never really understood why Jack refused to take his last name. It was no big deal, really, just the defiance of a teenager struggling for an identity, but Tom had never seen it that way. He had always wanted a son, and even if this wasn't how he'd envisioned getting one, he was determined to make the best of it. The fact that Jack wouldn't completely play along bugged him on some level. It wasn't supposed to work that way.

From the first time Cindy and Jack came in to his life, Tom had regarded his treatment of the boy as one of the most clear-cut aspects of his Christian duty. God had adopted Tom, after all, a metaphysical orphan who had only made it through the years following his first wife's tragic death in a car accident with God's help. He was bound and determined to make sure that Cindy and Jack knew the same God he did. His new wife adjusted to the concept well enough. She'd grown up in church, but really hadn't had time to go in years. She didn't so much leave as much as come up with other things to do with her time.

Jack didn't adjust to the church idea anywhere close to as well as his mother. Nobody really knew why, and Jack didn't say anything because he didn't want to cause any problems. But whenever someone referred to God as the Heavenly Father he winced just a little bit inside. His father had left in a cloud of smoke, after all. What was to stop this other, new father and his big, cosmic father from doing the exact same thing?

Eventually, though, things settled down in the Reed-Patterson household. Teenaged Jack never rebelled like the rest of his peers did. On one level he knew he had it pretty good. On another level he feared that it could disappear at any time. That little five-year old standing in the street trying to figure out what he'd done to chase his dad away had grown up to be a teenager who tried to figure out how to never chase anyone away.

He grew up handsome and awkward. Certain girls saw this and decided to take advantage of him. A succession of clingly bitches used him through high school and college, always taking and rarely giving back. He rarely broke up with a girlfriend even though he always knew within a few days or weeks that he should. Still, with each one he thought that he could help them or, at the very least, he didn't want to hurt them like he'd hurt Jennifer Dooley, like he'd been hurt. So a succession of girls had used him up, sucked him dry, then left him abandoned, hurt, confused, and calling them, weeping, in the middle of the night long after they'd gone on to their next mark.

After a while, Jack began to believe the last words of his father. He vowed at some point to never again let a woman get her claws in to him. It just wasn't worth it.

And so Jackson Paul Reed grew up a living embodiment of one of the great, unspoken truths. Although people rarely get what they actually deserve, most are spectacularly good at getting what they think they deserve.

-----------------------------

Looking back I can honestly say that I wouldn't change much about this chapter. I also absolutely wouldn't include it in anything as is, especially not as the introductory chapter to a book. It's just a bit on the nose. I guess I might have been fascinated with the notion of being on the nose at the time. I don't know.

It's also interesting to me how hard I was trying to flog the idea of god, family, and fathers. The idea of god as a father and, more importantly, as a deadbeat dad, was strong in my mind.

So...yeah. That's a thing.

1434 Fridays, Part 5

Geds — 2013-02-08T08:00:00-06:00

So I think I’m about done with Gavin Menzies’ introduction to 1434. That’s not to say I’m to the end. That’s to say that this will be the last post I write about it because there’s just so goddamn much fail packed into this thing I might never get done.

Also, the latter half of the Introduction is all about Gavin Menzies making sure we know he goes on awesome vacations. No, really. He seems to think that the fact that his vacations are awesome but he doesn’t take vacations from his stupid ideas matter to us. Also, I’m pretty sure he brings up the fact that he knows things because he was the captain of a Royal Navy submarine, which makes him an expert. Captains, after all, are the unimpeachably brilliant successes of the sea.

Just don’t tell the people on the Costa Concordia. Or the penguins covered in oil by the Exxon Valdez. Or the folks from the Titanic. Although it must be said that a Royal Navy-trained captain would probably know better. The Royal Navy, after all, never used one of their pre-dreadnoughts to ram and sink another one of their pre-dreadnoughts because the admiral in charge couldn’t be arsed to figure out that running a 180-degree inward reversal of course is best accomplished when the ships are not within each others’ turning range.

You might be saying that I’m not making a fair comparison. Gavin Menzies, after all, never once rammed the HMS Rorqual into the HMS Camperdown. Fair point, that. My point is, though, that there’s nothing magical about “going to sea,” even though Menzies seems to think that matters. The truth is that I’ve never been to sea, either, but I could still draw a pretty decent map of the world.

Well, I couldn’t, really. I’m a terrible artist.

Anyway, fuck that noise. We’ve got unsupported assertions to deal with here.

Menzies makes an interesting statement after dragging Schoner and Waldseemuller’s good names through the mud.

Similarly, Brazil appeared on Portuguese maps before the first Portuguese, Cabral and Dias, set sail for Brazil.

This literally comes out of nowhere. He tosses it in as an aside after his claims that the di Virga map depicted Australia, which I covered last time out. The problem here is that there’s no evidence Cabral had a map of Brazil. We know next to nothing about what sort of kit Cabral had and all of the indications are that Cabral’s discovery of Brazil was a happy accident or, possibly, a secret instruction to find out if there was anything on Portugal’s side of the line from the Treaty of Tordesillas.

We simply don’t know what, if anything, Cabral knew. Well, that’s not true. We do know that they had to engage in a bit of surveying to prove that the land was, indeed, on Portugal’s side of the Tordesillas line. Oh, and we know that Brazil’s original name was Island of the True Cross. Because they thought it was a fucking island. Which is problematic for Menzies’ Chinese map theory.

I suppose you could make up a theory that the Portuguese were doing it to bullshit the Spanish. The fact is, though, that nobody knew what was what in the New World at the time and the Portuguese were in the right – at least where the Spanish and the Pope were concerned, which was the only issue that mattered to them at the time – to claim the land. There was no real need to call the land a big island for the purposes of subterfuge.

It doesn’t matter, though. You see, Gavin Menzies is engaging in a Gish Gallop here, just throwing out information without backing it up. If I’m charitable I’ll admit that’s because I’m still in the Introduction. Still, though, it’s a lot of bullshit. Perhaps I’d have a better grasp on what he thinks is going on if I’d read all of 1421. Perhaps I wouldn’t be writing these posts, though. I don’t think they’d allow me to access my blog from the loony bin.

So what’s his next bit of information? I’m glad you asked:

The South Shetland Islands were shown on the Piri Reis map four hundred years before Europeans reached the Antarctic.

I’ve seen the Piri Reis Map. I have no fucking clue what Menzies is talking about. This should shock no one.

Piri Reis, or Piri the Captain, was one of the captains who served the first generation of what would be known as the Barbary Pirates. He was a navigator and a mapmaker and the producer of the most detailed maps of the Mediterranean available to the armadas of the Sultan during the 16th Century. He produced a world map in 1513 that looked quite a bit like the earlier Caverio and Cantino maps. Take a look at the Atlantic in the Piri Reis:

Now the Cantino:

Now the Caverio:

It’s also likely that Piri Reis would have had access to either the Ruysch map or the Waldseemuller map or both. It’s pretty easy to look at the Piri Reis Map and see the influence of the earlier maps. That’s pretty much always been the historical consensus about the Piri Reis map as far as I know. This consensus is aided and abetted by the fact that early 16th Century mapmakers liberally stole from their source material all the freaking time. And, hell, Piri Reis was a fucking pirate, so there’s that.

One thing Reis did that was different from his source material, though, was to draw other land in around South America. This land, it should be noted, conforms to absolutely no land that exists anywhere near South America, as it makes it look like South America stretches almost to Africa just south of Brazil. There was absolutely nothing analogous to that landform on any maps before or after 1513. Magellan hadn’t done his thing yet, but Vasco de Gama, Cabral, and Amerigo Vespucci would have known better by then.

The most likely explanation is pretty simple: Piri Reis decided to duplicate the shape of South America from the Ruysch map or the Waldseemuller map but ran out of paper, so he drew it around the corner. This is a much easier explanation to swallow than the idea that he was drawing an accurate depiction of the South Shetland Islands. That theory would require us to believe that Piri Reis had a super accurate Chinese map of the world that somehow put Antarctica on a line directly between Uruguay and South Africa.

Menzies then follows up his unsupported assertions with this paragraph:

The great European explorers were brave and determined men. But they discovered nothing. Magellan was not the first to circumnavigate the globe, nor was Columbus the first to discover the Americas. So why, we may ask, do historians persist in propagating this fantasy? Why is The Times Atlas of World Exploration, which details the discoveries of European explorers, still taught in schools? Why are the young so insistently misled?

Good god, but the man is a fucking idiot. And a self-important fucking idiot at that.

Either way, I give up on the Introduction. Join me next week when I wade into the giant pile-o-fail that is, well, the rest of the goddamn book.