Old Shawnee Days '08

Remember Foghat? Slow Ride, Fool For the City, etc.? They were already on the classic rock station when I started listening to FM radio, back when the plains were black with buffalo.





Tonight, they're headlining Old Shawnee Days. Right up there with the time back in eighth grade that I caught Steppenwolf...playing World's of Fun. I've never seen such a called-in performance in my life: John Kay was chewing gum. They tried to play their 'new material' of their 'new album' they were all 'excited about.' But the audience, a pitiful collection of middle-school aged kids peppered with a few aged hippies who came to the park specifically to catch this legendary band, wasn't having it.



Born to Be Wild. I'll bet it was old for the band about 4,000 repetitions prior to my hearing them perform it live. Magic Carpet Ride, The Pusher, Sookie Sookie, these were not really great songs to begin with. They have their moments, I suppose. I listened to Steppenwolf Live in fairly heavy rotation when my record collection consisted of that, KISS Alive II, Kansas' Leftoverture, and the K-Tel compilation 'Southern Fried Rock.' I think I may have had the soundtrack to Grease as well, but I didn't listen to it: I only owned it because Peaches was selling cutouts of the incredibly overprinted thing for less than a pack of Hubba Bubba.





Oh, and I had Frampton Comes Alive, but I think that came with the house. All suburban houses in the 1970s had a copy of that. It was what functioned as a garage sale permit at the time. If you didn't have a copy on offer for a quarter, the police would rough you up and confiscate your so-called merchandise.





So we gave the show tonight a miss, but we went to the festival. I'm a total sucker for a carnival with my kids. I doubt I'd go on my own, but with honyocks in tow, they are irresistible. They can be expensive, but they're one of the few things that still does not take credit cards, so I can control the damage by only carrying as much cash as I feel I can spend. Guaranteed, if I have fifty bucks, they'll get fifty bucks off me. If I have twenty, that's all they'll get. If I carried a thousand dollars into a carnival, I'll bet they'd find a way to leave me without gas money to get home on.





This year, Old Shawnee Days cut the price of tickets in half. 50¢ instead of a buck a ticket. But then they took all their four ticket rides into eight ticket rides, so it was a wash. They may even have figured a way to hike prices in the process, making a three ticket ride go to eight instead of six. Nobody was fooled, of course.





The Johnson County Fair sells unlimited ride passes. Pricey, but we always ride enough rides to get our money's worth out of it. I think it was about $50 last year, for the three of us to ride until we were sick of it.





lI spent almost that much at Old Shawnee Days and we didn't ride half the rides we would have.


Old Shawnee Days from Chixulub on Vimeo.

Still, we rode plenty. Me and Mo went on the Ring of Fire, which is like a roller coaster with only a loop. And it works up to going around the loop, hanging you upside down in the process. I was glad I had an empty stomach.



Em and Mo rode the Scrambler, then we all got on the Ali Baba, which is the same ride as the Avalanche that comes to the county fair, with a different paint job and different heavy metal soundtrack blaring form its needless sound system.





This is a pet peeve of mine with the carnival circuit: being flung to a near death experience on a rickety machine maintained by carnies is thrilling; adding a Quiet Riot tune as soundtrack does not make it scarier.



I did catch a period re-enactor on a cell phone. Last I heard, this'd be a firing offense at a place like Ren Fest.



The girls did great, though. Em even had fun, atoning in some small part for her bitch-fest performance at last year's Old Shawnee Days.



And we got a pic by Foxzilla, which seemed appropriate with the Foghat thing and all that.



A great start to the year, though. This is the first wallet-eating festival we regularly hit. Coming up will be the JoCo Fair, Santa-Cali-Gon Days, and so on.

Pushing Buttons

Mo loves to push buttons. And this time, it was a good thing. We headed to the Purple Park with most of the fleet and Mo pushed the button on all but one launch.



And after the last launch, the two-stage Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, when I got back from hunting the booster, she was loading Mr. Creosote on the launch rod and pretending he was lifting off.



Last time I flew Mr. Creosote, he landed on the street at Shawnee Mission Park. And apparently dinged his nose cone. Must be he's trying to get cast on Battle Scar Galactica.

She was counting down a lot, besides singing the 'games' song from Barney.



The local honyocks helped chase and retrieve, though only a determined Lobster Sleuth could find the booster to Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby in the clover.





When we got home, Mo wanted to get out of taking a shower. But she was filthy, between the sidewalk chalk and the rockets and the mud/puddles. So I made her take the shower.



And she loved it. She sang all the way through it, had a great time with the rest of the ritual (even went the full two minutes with the SoniCare).



Anyway, we have a big weekend ahead, looks like. Old Shawnee Days, Greek Festival, etc. We won't be hitting Wakarusa or RockFest, I don't have that deep a pocket even if my honyocks would dig it. But we'll be using up the sunscreen.


Stairwell to Heaven from Chixulub on Vimeo.

In Case My House Blows Up...

As if one flood wasn't enough, my basement got it again last night. The power went off in the night: I learned this when I woke up struggling for air. My CPAP was off because the power had gone off.

Plus, my leaky Sleep Number bed kept collapsing to the point where it dumped me off the good side and I'd have to wake up and re-inflate the right side of the bed. They overnighted a replacement part Monday but it didn't come Tuesday: UPS apparently sent it on a detour somewhere and it wasn't delivered until shortly before I called Customer Service this morning to bitch about it.

Nothing makes for a long day like not breathing in your sleep combined with not sleeping longer than an hour at a shot because your brand new thousand-dollar bed is defective.

That, and when I got in the shower this morning, it was ice cold. Seems the first flood must have been deep enough to put out the pilot light on the water heater.

So I relit the water heater and did some other straightening up to make this dump more fit for human habitation when I brought the girls home tonight, and headed off late to work.

My day didn't totally suck, though. My Dad called me wanting to take me and the girls to dinner tonight at the Mandarin Kitchen. Which we all adore. And as I left work, I stopped at QuikTrip for a soda, and I don't know if the QT chick at the register (who, by the way, was gorgeous) was just being incredibly sweet to people, or if maybe I was showing the strain of the day, but my money was no good, she had me covered, 'It's hot outside, go on with you.'



Bless her pea-pickin' heart.

Then, after dinner, we went to the Purple Park at Mo's request. It was way too windy for rockets, so we did kites. I tried the airfoil with the new streamers I made, but it kept diving. I think I need longer, heavier streamers for it or something.



Then I got out the seven-foot crayon kite (I should name these things: I won't fly a rocket without a name, yet I have four nameless kites). And before I had him a hundred feet up I worried the rods would snap. He was just getting pulled way too hard.

Slowly but surely I reeled him back down.



Then I decided to try the airfoil again but with the stock streamers it came with.

And it climbed. Like crazy.



It'd start going in circles and diving periodically, but if I let the line spool out it'd stabilize. Until it did so at the end of the 500 foot line, when I had no slack to offer, and it crashed somewhere down the street.

What kind of idiot flies a kite at 500 feet when he doesn't have 500 feet of obstacle free ground around him? Well, whatever I am, I'm that kind of idiot apparently.



I reeled line until I got to a tree the line ran over, and I ran into resistance. I finally walked down the street (unspooling what I'd spooled in) to find the kite hanging on someone's deck, the eave of which was what he'd been snagging on.

Then, instead of being smart enough to unhook the kite and reel in the line, I tried to get it back over the houses.

The crazy climbing kids who live at the house on the end got up on the roofs to help liberate my kite. They refused to be talked out of this craziness. Their Dad even helped with a boost here and there.



I told him I didn't want his kids getting killed or maimed for my ten dollar kite and he said, 'They're looking for an excuse to climb up there.'

I got the kite back, though, so it's all good. And without having to cut the line. No children were harmed in the making of this blog post. Fearless daredevils and inveterate rocket chasers that they are.

So when we get home I make Em go take a shower and she comes back and tells me the water won't get hot.

But I relit the pilot this morning!

So I went down and relit it again. And it went out a few minutes later. And I relit it again.

And the third time, I'm sitting there holding the thing down that you have to hold down for a minute before turning it up and fully on, and I'm reading all the safety warnings because they're there and I'm stuck with nothing else to occupy my feeble mind, and I see a warning.



I'm like, well, I think the flood is what made the pilot go out, but it wasn't that much water. A couple inches. So what's the risk? Is my practically brand new $800 water heater really dead from such a small incident? The warning tells me to not even think about repairing this thing. 'It must be replaced!'

If we were talking about a couple feet of water, okay.

But I wonder, am I getting ready for the Darwin Awards because I kept relighting this thing until it stayed on (four times seems to be the charm)?

So, if my house blows up, it was an accident. Maybe it's because I'm stupid, but I didn't blow my home up on purpose, and I wasn't cooking meth at all. It was either the flooded hot water heater, or else the Chinese Government is way more sensitive to criticism than even I realized.

Deluge

Every three or four years my basement really floods.

My garage does every time it rains, but the rest of the basement, it takes a pretty good pour to flood it.



It happens just infrequently enough to lull me into not perfectly keeping 100% of everything from ever resting on or near the floor.



So here I am, trying to use the dehumidifier and fans to dry my den out and the garage has already flooded a second time in two days and the rain is coming down hard again.



The local grocery store sustained a direct hit form lightning. I'll try and get by it to grab a pic tomorrow. If I haven't been washed away.

Cancel the Show

Shame on the International Olympic Committee.

I'm not an anti-globalist, I have no problem with trade with China because I think commerce will raise the level of wealth and education in that country to a level where the despots running it will not be able to hold on to power. All we have to do is look at Cuba to see what an embargo can accomplish: it's world news when people get limited freedom to own a cell phone in Havana, even if they can't get any bars on it.

But the Chinese government has got to go. There's no other term for it, the whole regime is flat-out evil. If war were actually a means of liberation (I think Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, etc., demonstrate that it rarely is), it'd be time to invade China about, oh, 60 years ago.

So I made the mistake of listening to NPR tonight, and I heard a story about how despite the promises that free speech would be upheld, that the athletes, for instance, in the coming Olympiad would be free to speak their minds at least outside the official arena, that push comes to shove, China will probably eject them if they say 'Free Tibet.' Even people who have bought tickets are not guaranteed visas to visit the games, and if they break the rules by simply criticizing a regime that has no moral right to even exist, whose leaders all deserve to be hanged if Saddam deserved to be, they'll likely be kicked out of the country.

Remember Tiananmen Square? Makes Kent State look like small beer, no offense to those hippies who got senselessly gunned down by those shithead National Guardsmen.

So here's the deal: besides the whole Tibet problem, besides China's continued insistence that it is the legitimate government of Taiwan (imagine your attitude toward England if it continued to assert that we were colonies subject to its rule and was willing to use military might to reinforce that assertion), this whole free speech issue is grounds to cancel the Olympics.

I'm totally and completely serious. I won't watch the Bejing Olympics if they let it go on this way. The Chinese government, any government, that asserts authority over your right to free speech is worthy only of destruction. Rewarding them with a multi-billion dollar world event is beyond immoral. Pull the plug or quit having Olympiads all together.

Reschedule to another venue. Maybe a repeat venue, some other city that has already hosted an Olympics. Get on the horn with Athens, Atlanta, Barcelona, Sydney. Pick the one you want because the first one you call is going to say that yes, they'd love to have an incredible economic windfall and go down in history as the only city to host the Olympics twice in quick succession. They have the infrastructure, more or less, and I'll bet any of them would jump at the opportunity. But send a message to the Chinese public that the price of their tolerating this dictatorship is that the Olympics is not coming after all.

Then we'd see a free Tibet. And a free Bejing. It'd be the Berlin Wall coming down all over again, get a billion Chinese pissed off that their oppressive government has made them asses in front of the rest of the planet.

But I Wanted To Be the Popular Parent

Em went on an awake-over this weekend at a friend's house for a twelfth birthday.

Everything seemed to go great. Dinner at a Japanese Steakhouse (I'm jealous), popcorn and movies, staying up late. Church the next day and a cookout/birthday party at the birthday girl's Dad's house. So two parties in one. Wow.

And I heard some of this from Em when she got back. Then the Artist Formerly Known as Frau Lobster heard the rest and felt the need to make a call.

They'd watched The Sweetest Thing. Which I misheard, initially as The Swedish Thing. Which would have been worse, I'm sure.

Here's the thing: Rated R.

I'm a relatively permissive parent. My Dad once cut off a CD we were listening to in the car with my children, saying 'Why do you play this stuff for them?'

And I was taken aback: it was just music. A little double-entendre humor, sure, but harmless stuff.

Full disclosure: at 38, I don't know if I've fully forgiven my Dad's censorship. He confiscated albums I'd bought with money I earned, albums tame by modern standards. He also tried to make me pay for time spent listening to my musical choices with 'Balance Time' spent listening to an annoying easy listening station because he feared the psychological damage AC/DC and KISS would do to me. As it is, truly, the psychological damage was mostly chalked up to Dad's column.

Still, that little deal in the car with Grandpa made me wonder, when I was driving the girls (with one of the other sleepover guests) to the park, if the Jolly Rogers were a bridge too far for this guest.

I prize the innocence of my children. I might play them a bawdy pirate tune about a whore of high re-known or falling into a vat of apple juice (I'm deep in cider), but there are limits. I've allowed Em to watch parts of R-rated movies such as the opening sequence of 'Office Space' with the old man in the walker beating the guy in the car to work. Before that, I showed her parts of Monty Python's 'Meaning of Life' when she was four, a movie I totally understand the R rating on. But the parts that got its R rating, I still won't show her.

In any case: a joke about a woman getting her mouth stuck on a guy's stuff is not twelve year old material. I don't want Em forming a mental picture of a penis in a chick's mouth, so it doesn't much matter that they don't show that in the movie. She understood it, or she couldn't have explained the hilarity to her mother.

Of course, when I was Em's age, I was forbidden from watching R rated movies on HBO at the one house on my street that had it. Naturally, I watched R rated movies at his house every chance I got. So I'm familiar with the impulse.

And the hosting mother had set aside a group of movies as inappropriate, including some Harry Potter because one of the guests is not allowed to watch PG-13s. And despite The Sweetest Thing being in the 'No' pile, it was still what went in the player, at least for awhile.

And it's not the worst mischief twelve year olds ever got up to. When I was this age, my experimentation already included beer and cigarettes.

My Own Modest Political Cartoon

I've been stewing on this awhile now, but am I the only one who hears a bit of threat in Hillary reminding us that Bobby Kennedy was shot later than this point in the campaign?

Obama had the biggest, earliest Secret Service detail in the history of Presidential Wannabes. As well he should: all Presidents are scum bags, but the ones who are assassinated become martyrs with impossibly inflated legacies and unlikely virtues attributed to them. Even a near miss, like with Ronald Reagan, elevates these criminals to near statesman status.

But like it or not, this is a racist country. We may be hard on women in our way, it's true. But we don't incarcerate women just for being women, and that is a thing we do to black folks. You can call it a war on drugs if you like, but white folks take those same drugs, just as much, and they mostly avoid prison.



Why else would Hilly stay in when she's obviously licked? Because who else would get the nomination if the Klan gets a clean shot at Obama tomorrow?

Hillary is hungry enough for power, I wouldn't put it past her to finance the operation. I know she probably wouldn't quite do that, but has the woman ever made a decision in her pitiful life that wasn't based on achieving power?

Midwestern Nights Dream

I am not, by and large, impressed with the beauty of the Midwest. It's too familiar, being almost all the landscape I've seen in thirty eight years.

And I detest extremes of climate, and we get both: 25 below and 110 in the shade. Usually note quite that extreme, granted, but we get snot-freezing winters and summers like a big, sweaty sex offender's hug.

And as far off as the possibility of a move to Portland or Seattle seem, I often find myself actively hating the Midwest for its climatological shortcomings, and the unrelenting monotony that day after day, it's still the same place.

I think to myself, I might have shitty extremes in weather in New York City, but at least I'd be in New York. The Village Vanguard, the Met, MoMA, the great food, the amphetamine nature of that city. Never mind that I wouldn't be able to afford to bask in those glorious cultural assets while trying to come up with the rent on a coffin-sized apartment. It's New York.

There are worse places, I'll give you that. Phoenix. Houston. Florida. More extreme variations, such as Alaska.

Still, I find myself impressed with the sunsets by the Purple Park. Got this one at the end of Saturday's launching festivities. It's almost enough to make you want to live in Kansas.

Getting Into It

Softly As In A Morning Sunrise Launches from Chixulub on Vimeo.

The rockets have been a thing I do, in part, to spend time with my kids. I get a kick out of it, too, obviously. Or why would I launch on weekends I don't have my kids?



Still, it's mainly something we do together.



But building them, painting them, designing them. This is strictly my doing. The girls consult on color choices and names, but that's all.



And until this weekend, all the flight prep was me, too.

Then, out at Shawnee Mission Park, while I prepped BeBop at length, Em decided she wanted to prep Hatful of Hollow, so she did. She took him over to the RSO for a safety check, logged the flight, filled out an entry in the Set Duration competition, and loaded the rocket on the rod. She also pushed the button for launch, something she's done before, but that used to be the limit of her involvement.



She must have enjoyed it because she did Mr. Creosote next, then Scribble V. She made a couple of beginner mistakes, but none cost us a rocket, and she learned form them.



It was great.



Then, at the Purple Park when Em had gone on a sleepover party, Mo got into it, wanting to pack parachutes and load rockets onto the rod and whatnot. I was beyond impressed.





The weather for launches this weekend was spectacular. Sometimes a light breeze, but mostly the winds were 3-5 mph, load 'em hot and fly 'em straight up.



Got Floyd up for the third time, and he about landed on me.

Also flew ÜberTubester Chixulubster on an AeroTech D21-7 composite motor. It was startling how fast this heavy-ass rocket went up. Basically, the letter in a motor description is how much total impulse it has. The number after the letter is the average thrust. The third number is the delay before ejection.



So in the case of a D21, it's a 20 N-sec motor, and the burn time is just under one second. Meaning you get all that power right now. By contrast, an E9-8, for instance, has about half again as much total impulse, but burns over three seconds, with an average thrust of only nine N-sec.



The reason I include all this is I'd launched this rocket on D10 Apogee composite motors and was impressed. But the D21, which is basically the same motor with half the burn time, is just scary.



For that matter, the E-30's I fly Floyd on are pretty astounding. I'm always surprised that they're actually so loud it's painful for a split-second. Almost as painful as the price tag on this motor (about $15).