There is renewed hope for The Beloved 1964 Econoline Van. I have been feeling guilty about it ever since I essentially abandoned thing for my equally-beloved 1996 Geo Metro, which transports me in five times the comfort at about nineteen times the gas mileage, which gives you an idea of the delights of the Econoline.
Yet it was my principal form of transport since I bought it in 1980 from someone who lived on the same street in Pittsburgh as Andy Warhol once did for four hundred and fifty bucks. I'd been looking for a van for weeks to replace my seriously ravaged VW Beetle, and after about five tries came upon the Ford. It had problems, the fellow said, and he just wanted to get rid of it. The problems were that it wasn't charging properly, was running poorly when you tried to accelerate it, and had begun to get terrible gas mileage. But I checked over the engine, which seemed sound, and determined that the rest of it was something I could fix.
And so it was: once I'd replaced the fan belt so the generator would work, and unclogged the tiny accelerator pump in the carburetor so the thing would get its requisite shot of gas when needed, and improved the gas mileage by repairing the hole in the gas tank, I had a truck, and I reveled in it.
It's had a lot of work. That gas tank has been coated inside and fiberglassed outside. The engine has been rebuilt twice (the second time it got the rebore that it should've had to begin with) and the body was sandblasted into perdition in a winter-long exercise that filled our garage with rust and sand. I rebuilt the rear spring mounts as a project to distract myself during graduate school. The old generator has given way to a GM alternator, the radiator has been rebuilt, there are new body extensions to hold up the engine mounts so the engine doesn't fall out, and there are various new seals and universal joints and a stainless steel exhaust system.
When I was in the college professoring business, I drove it on week-long commutes from Athens, Ohio to McKeesport, Pennsylvania and from Starkville to Hattiesburg, Mississippi. I've parked it under the George Washington Bridge on E 181st St in New York City in the days when I was exploring that splendid town with one female or another. I rode it from Connecticut to New Mexico and back, sleeping inside the whole way on a trip I still haven't quite figured out.
And now it is parked in the back yard, a victim of when gas prices rose to two dollars per gallon and I panicked over it, not bothering to figure out that the incremental price increase was fairly negligible. But the Geo Metro was more comfortable, and I didn't need earplugs to drive it.
All along the truck never ran quite the way I'd wished, and I've always thought that it might be the carburetor. I'd cleaned it and replaced its insides and adjusted it according to the various books, but the truck always smelled a bit like gas, and the mileage was always worse than it should have been, and the tailpipe was always filled with carbon: the thing would always run rich. I even put a fuel-pressure regulator on it. A carburetor that was supposed to have been factory rebuilt made things even worse, and I longed for some form of fuel injection.
I've kept the Econoline registered and insured, but time had caught up with it and me. When I had to replace the battery at long last, I was sort of unhappy that it had cashed in until I looked at the date code and found that the old battery had exceeded its warranty by something like eight years. Time does pass, and I've had the truck for 26 years now.
One odd aspect of this little vehicle--besides the fact that it is but nine inches longer than my old Volkswagen Beetle and is capable of carrying virtually anything for any distance, including my ego and ambitions--is that it was manufactured at the same time and shares many parts with the legendary Ford Mustang. Both vehicles were based on the Ford Falcon, and when I look at someone's lavishly-rebuilt 'pony car' at an auto show, I have to laugh, for the dash knobs and engine parts and the lousy old heater match those found in my old truck.
In point of fact, the standard Mustang engine was the straight six that's in the Econoline. This has helped a few matters: I was able to replace my exhaust manifold with one meant for a Mustang. And I just this week discovered a firm which has long specialized in the repair of the Mustang carburetor, which it turns out mine is.
So I studied the situation, and wrote to them, and indeed they will rebuild my carburetor properly, which the factory rebuilds seldom were. The problem, they say, was that the Autolite 1100 carburetor was never much good from the beginning and was a constant source of grief even when the cars were new. The four-barrel carbs from that period were superb, but the little 1-barrel job that came with the old Ford sixes was decidedly not. The company has spent a good deal of time and effort, they say, in correcting the original difficulties inherent in my carburetor and they'll restore it to what it should have been for about two hundred bucks.
That's real money, but I think it's worth it if it'll make the truck a more viable enterprise, and I'm looking forward to the transaction.
M Kinsler
Monday, February 26, 2007
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Never watch the kids eat.
My journalism career has lately taken me into a couple of local schools. Every kid seems to drive a car to high school these days: the parking lots are huge, and full, with shiny little trucks with vanity plates. I park in one of the favored 'vistors' spots.
WELCOME.
ALL VISITORS MUST REGISTER AT THE OFFICE
YOU PERVERT
says the sign pasted to the glass front door.
Schools are big, with long hallways. I guess the idea was to avoid the crowded stairwells of the old multi-floor brick schools I grew up in; everything is on one story.
The office has a small sign: OFFICE, usually hand-made, presumably in the wood shop. Maybe it was an extra-credit project from a kid found guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors.
Outside, the cafeteria is rollicking with kids. There's a little table, gaily covered in green paper, set up in the hallway, where some girls are selling something that looks like glittery pencils to other girls. "Now, what's your room number?" commands one of the sellers to her customer. Here's where bureaucracy is born.
I have to go through the cafeteria for some reason, and as I do my old lunch-duty instincts rise, sharp despite years of layoff. I see a flicker of a hand out of the corner of my eye: a kid's hands were headed toward another's face, but he puts them down, fast as I turn my head.
Mainly, though, I feel but one overwhelming, nostalgic emotion when I'm in a school, and that is that I'd better shape up already, or I'll flunk life. The Cleveland Heights Public Schools did not concern themselves with self-esteem; which was the responsibility of the student and his parents and was only to be conferred, grudgingly, upon completion of his first violin performance before a major symphony orchestra, and not before.
What am I doing here? Oh, yeah. Hi, I'm Mark Kinsler and I write for the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette (Surely you've read my acclaimed column. Well, perhaps not.) and I have an appointment with, uh...
I do like to watch the kids. If nothing else, they're just funny, and so energetic that I would challenge anyone in the NBA's television division to match the entertainment value of a junior high-school lunch period.
M Kinsler
WELCOME.
ALL VISITORS MUST REGISTER AT THE OFFICE
YOU PERVERT
says the sign pasted to the glass front door.
Schools are big, with long hallways. I guess the idea was to avoid the crowded stairwells of the old multi-floor brick schools I grew up in; everything is on one story.
The office has a small sign: OFFICE, usually hand-made, presumably in the wood shop. Maybe it was an extra-credit project from a kid found guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors.
Outside, the cafeteria is rollicking with kids. There's a little table, gaily covered in green paper, set up in the hallway, where some girls are selling something that looks like glittery pencils to other girls. "Now, what's your room number?" commands one of the sellers to her customer. Here's where bureaucracy is born.
I have to go through the cafeteria for some reason, and as I do my old lunch-duty instincts rise, sharp despite years of layoff. I see a flicker of a hand out of the corner of my eye: a kid's hands were headed toward another's face, but he puts them down, fast as I turn my head.
Mainly, though, I feel but one overwhelming, nostalgic emotion when I'm in a school, and that is that I'd better shape up already, or I'll flunk life. The Cleveland Heights Public Schools did not concern themselves with self-esteem; which was the responsibility of the student and his parents and was only to be conferred, grudgingly, upon completion of his first violin performance before a major symphony orchestra, and not before.
What am I doing here? Oh, yeah. Hi, I'm Mark Kinsler and I write for the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette (Surely you've read my acclaimed column. Well, perhaps not.) and I have an appointment with, uh...
I do like to watch the kids. If nothing else, they're just funny, and so energetic that I would challenge anyone in the NBA's television division to match the entertainment value of a junior high-school lunch period.
M Kinsler
Monday, February 19, 2007
An old trade school (deceased) and amateur radio
It says on my resume, posted somewhere in a dusty corner of http://www.mkinsler.com, that I taught for a time at a truly hard-luck trade school in Pittsburgh known as Gateway Technical Institute. To their credit, they'd kept it going for years, and they did good training in refrigeration and other trades; perhaps including the electronics I taught. Like most such operations, it was owned by a single family, and had things gone differently perhaps they would have worked out the magic formula and gone the route of another hard-luck private vocational school around the corner and become Point Park College (now University.)
I got there well along on the downward portion of GTI's arc of life. The Old Man (there's always an Old Man at a private trade school) had died, and Mr Gateway Junior, as I call him in the following correspondence, had taken over. His mother still held out bravely in the tiny bookstore they maintained for the students.
The school is long gone, but apparently one of its graduates did a Google search on his old alma mater this afternoon and came upon the mention of it in my resume posted there. Not a sparrow falls to earth...
And so he wrote to me, using the opportunity to take me to task for not pursuing the hobby of amateur radio during my career in electronics. This is not entirely unreasonable, for at its height in the 1940's and '50's, it seemed like every fourth house in most communities had a big antenna sprouting from its roof. If you worked in electronics, it could be safely assumed that you had a ham rig somewhere in your life; almost every TV repairman or station engineer did.
I did not, though my cousin Richard, K3NGP in Pittsburgh, did when he was maybe 13 and I was ten. But I've kept an eye on ham radio over the years, as discussed in this exchange. Perhaps it says more about me vs other males than anything about ham radio or men and hobbies:
Hi Mark,> I went to Gateway Tech back in the late 80's, and came across your >site.>You might have been one of my instructors.>With all your accomplishments, I have noticed that amateur radio is >not one of them.>Now you can get even the highest class amateur radio license with no >morse code.>Why haven't you been bitten by the radio bug yet?>David WQ3T
They're too late. While I have great sympathy and respect for the people who do amateur radio, I lost interest in doing it years ago.
I've written about amateur radio now and then over the years. It was a crowded field back in perhaps 1959, when I was twelve and in a prime position to take an interest, but there were millions of kids my age and it must have seemed to the hams back then that it would all last forever; there weren't any radio clubs available for kids my age back in Cleveland Heights, and it was all pretty intricate for someone with any other options.
Through the Viet Nam era, society became military vs. non-military, and the hams were most decidedly in the former category; the MARS business ensured that. Most hams were older than I was, and I suspect that the political situation made them even more clannish than they were before.
I didn't learn electronics until I was about 22, when I became interested in repair work and broadcast engineering. And so I took the National Radio Institute correspondence course in radio and TV broadcasting. It was a fine course, and I swiped and adapted the labs they'd developed for my own classes for years afterwards. Part of the lab work was the construction of a transmitter--I believe it had a TV-type horizontal output tube for a final and a pair of 6BQ5's for a modulator--and it worked quite nicely, at least to the extent that I could tell.
But when I landed in the New Haven, Connecticut area in about 1972 and wanted to pursue some amateur radio work, I found that they didn't want any hippies, or anyone who might have ever looked like a hippie, anywhere near their clubs. The whole ARRL was arguably like that, and so I said the hell with it and got interested in other things.
But I sort of kept track of the field as I went along. I was in engineering school in 1979-80 when CB radio got popular; I was fixing a good many of the wretched devices. It hadn't occurred to me that ham radio was in any sort of difficulty until I started seeing ads from the ARRL telling people that they should become real radio operators instead of fooling with CB's. I concurred, but the old guard was apparently still holding forth with their code requirement, cackling with glee about how tough it was and how it had kept the riff-raff out.
When Internet communications came out, I was fascinated and took to the field with great enthusiasm, since I had access to big university mainframe DEC computers with their inherent messaging capability. It was only after I got to graduate school that I began to hear mournful cries from the ARRL, hoping to lure a new generation into a field that had suddenly lost about ninety percent of its appeal. And you still had to learn the code.
I taught some of the undergraduate communication labs when I was working on my doctorate at Mississippi State Unversity, and the professor in charge of these had the university ham club's rig in the lab; he was working with packets, which I found interesting, and I offered to take part. Well, it seemed that the whole club had pretty much dried up, and I think I saw the old defiant "You never learned code, you hippie" look in his eyes.
About the code: I believe that it is tied very closely to language ability. I was trying to learn it one day in perhaps 1969--I was finishing up National Radio Institute--when my live-in friend Penny, who could learn new languages just as a hobby, said that she'd learned to send and receive something like five words per minute in maybe a week back when she was about ten.
Someone on my howthingswork discussion group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/howthingswork) said that the story of ham clubs is very much the same as that of volunteer fire departments, which were closed fraternities right up until the time when they realized that they'd excluded all the young people. If I'd been in their place, I probably wouldn't have behaved any differently; men are like that. But being something of an outsider in every field and thus having but a limited number of potential fellow hams to discuss things with over the air, it probably wouldn't have worked for me.
On the other hand, I work at a very large science museum where they know nothing of radio. When we hosted the Titanic show, I developed a fast exhibit on code, spark transmitters, and early radio. While people waited in line for tickets, I broadcast buzzes from my auto spark coil in code to an AM receiver across the hallway. Nobody, but nobody, in that crowd had ever heard of such a thing (and this included the museum staff.) They knew what Morse code was, sort of, but they didn't know that it had anything to do with radio.
Thank you for writing. I don't recall much about Gateway Technical Institute; last I looked a few years ago the building was vacant but still there. I wasn't there for very long; but over the years it's clear that the school did a lot of good work there.
I imagine that the place was doomed when Mr. Gateway Junior took over the place, though there is some evidence that he tried. Unfortunately, I don't think he understood much about anything but office work and cash flow. I did what I could; the electronics they taught was strictly legacy, and old legacy at that. There was no way that anyone could convince the management to update things at all.
My, this got long. Time flies quickly when you're reminiscing. Perhaps I'll stick this in my new-fangled blog.
M Kinsler
I got there well along on the downward portion of GTI's arc of life. The Old Man (there's always an Old Man at a private trade school) had died, and Mr Gateway Junior, as I call him in the following correspondence, had taken over. His mother still held out bravely in the tiny bookstore they maintained for the students.
The school is long gone, but apparently one of its graduates did a Google search on his old alma mater this afternoon and came upon the mention of it in my resume posted there. Not a sparrow falls to earth...
And so he wrote to me, using the opportunity to take me to task for not pursuing the hobby of amateur radio during my career in electronics. This is not entirely unreasonable, for at its height in the 1940's and '50's, it seemed like every fourth house in most communities had a big antenna sprouting from its roof. If you worked in electronics, it could be safely assumed that you had a ham rig somewhere in your life; almost every TV repairman or station engineer did.
I did not, though my cousin Richard, K3NGP in Pittsburgh, did when he was maybe 13 and I was ten. But I've kept an eye on ham radio over the years, as discussed in this exchange. Perhaps it says more about me vs other males than anything about ham radio or men and hobbies:
Hi Mark,> I went to Gateway Tech back in the late 80's, and came across your >site.>You might have been one of my instructors.>With all your accomplishments, I have noticed that amateur radio is >not one of them.>Now you can get even the highest class amateur radio license with no >morse code.>Why haven't you been bitten by the radio bug yet?>David WQ3T
They're too late. While I have great sympathy and respect for the people who do amateur radio, I lost interest in doing it years ago.
I've written about amateur radio now and then over the years. It was a crowded field back in perhaps 1959, when I was twelve and in a prime position to take an interest, but there were millions of kids my age and it must have seemed to the hams back then that it would all last forever; there weren't any radio clubs available for kids my age back in Cleveland Heights, and it was all pretty intricate for someone with any other options.
Through the Viet Nam era, society became military vs. non-military, and the hams were most decidedly in the former category; the MARS business ensured that. Most hams were older than I was, and I suspect that the political situation made them even more clannish than they were before.
I didn't learn electronics until I was about 22, when I became interested in repair work and broadcast engineering. And so I took the National Radio Institute correspondence course in radio and TV broadcasting. It was a fine course, and I swiped and adapted the labs they'd developed for my own classes for years afterwards. Part of the lab work was the construction of a transmitter--I believe it had a TV-type horizontal output tube for a final and a pair of 6BQ5's for a modulator--and it worked quite nicely, at least to the extent that I could tell.
But when I landed in the New Haven, Connecticut area in about 1972 and wanted to pursue some amateur radio work, I found that they didn't want any hippies, or anyone who might have ever looked like a hippie, anywhere near their clubs. The whole ARRL was arguably like that, and so I said the hell with it and got interested in other things.
But I sort of kept track of the field as I went along. I was in engineering school in 1979-80 when CB radio got popular; I was fixing a good many of the wretched devices. It hadn't occurred to me that ham radio was in any sort of difficulty until I started seeing ads from the ARRL telling people that they should become real radio operators instead of fooling with CB's. I concurred, but the old guard was apparently still holding forth with their code requirement, cackling with glee about how tough it was and how it had kept the riff-raff out.
When Internet communications came out, I was fascinated and took to the field with great enthusiasm, since I had access to big university mainframe DEC computers with their inherent messaging capability. It was only after I got to graduate school that I began to hear mournful cries from the ARRL, hoping to lure a new generation into a field that had suddenly lost about ninety percent of its appeal. And you still had to learn the code.
I taught some of the undergraduate communication labs when I was working on my doctorate at Mississippi State Unversity, and the professor in charge of these had the university ham club's rig in the lab; he was working with packets, which I found interesting, and I offered to take part. Well, it seemed that the whole club had pretty much dried up, and I think I saw the old defiant "You never learned code, you hippie" look in his eyes.
About the code: I believe that it is tied very closely to language ability. I was trying to learn it one day in perhaps 1969--I was finishing up National Radio Institute--when my live-in friend Penny, who could learn new languages just as a hobby, said that she'd learned to send and receive something like five words per minute in maybe a week back when she was about ten.
Someone on my howthingswork discussion group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/howthingswork) said that the story of ham clubs is very much the same as that of volunteer fire departments, which were closed fraternities right up until the time when they realized that they'd excluded all the young people. If I'd been in their place, I probably wouldn't have behaved any differently; men are like that. But being something of an outsider in every field and thus having but a limited number of potential fellow hams to discuss things with over the air, it probably wouldn't have worked for me.
On the other hand, I work at a very large science museum where they know nothing of radio. When we hosted the Titanic show, I developed a fast exhibit on code, spark transmitters, and early radio. While people waited in line for tickets, I broadcast buzzes from my auto spark coil in code to an AM receiver across the hallway. Nobody, but nobody, in that crowd had ever heard of such a thing (and this included the museum staff.) They knew what Morse code was, sort of, but they didn't know that it had anything to do with radio.
Thank you for writing. I don't recall much about Gateway Technical Institute; last I looked a few years ago the building was vacant but still there. I wasn't there for very long; but over the years it's clear that the school did a lot of good work there.
I imagine that the place was doomed when Mr. Gateway Junior took over the place, though there is some evidence that he tried. Unfortunately, I don't think he understood much about anything but office work and cash flow. I did what I could; the electronics they taught was strictly legacy, and old legacy at that. There was no way that anyone could convince the management to update things at all.
My, this got long. Time flies quickly when you're reminiscing. Perhaps I'll stick this in my new-fangled blog.
M Kinsler
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Quick thought on blogs
My mother says that her father used to write endlessly, sitting at a card table atop which was perched his ancient Smith-Corona manual office typewriter. She said that he couldn't see constantly changing those sheets of paper, so at one point he tried a roll of shelf paper and just kept on typing. Charles C. Goldman was quite a man, and he would have rejoiced in the Internet.
M Kinsler
M Kinsler
On blogs and lightning
The problem is that the newspaper business appears to be going south. At the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette, they've cut back the newspaper staff, and I'm afraid that the features they run, like my stuff, will be going with it. And so it's off to this new, odd, format, where successive postings are upside-down and you have no idea if anyone has or ever will look at it.
I am going to try flailing away at magazines once again, so I'm writing a very long article that I will then cut down into something. It is about lightning, and my experiences being sort of a lightning-protection engineer.
Mostly, it's funny, because the history of lightning--or at least everyone's reaction to this utterly random and instantly destructive force of nature has been more amusing than anything else. People, men especially, do not do very well when confronted with random phenomena. There has to be a system, says the gambler with his dice and cards. There has to be a system, says the stock market speculator.
Well, there isn't a system for either of those, and there isn't a system that determines where lightning is going to hit, and it just drives people crazy. This hasn't stopped the the tort lawyers, who hire lightning experts to debate between God, country clubs, and the estates of fried golfers, nor has it prevented the establishment of National Lightning Safety Week, the lore of which must be seen to be believed.
So I'm cranking out this article, about how I got through graduate school having fun in a Frankenstein-like artificial lightning laboratory, and then learned that the legends, literature and people that surround the field of lightning protection are way more interesting than the field itself will ever be. Should be done in maybe a week at the rate I'm going; writing is a way of abolishing depression for me.
M Kinsler
I am going to try flailing away at magazines once again, so I'm writing a very long article that I will then cut down into something. It is about lightning, and my experiences being sort of a lightning-protection engineer.
Mostly, it's funny, because the history of lightning--or at least everyone's reaction to this utterly random and instantly destructive force of nature has been more amusing than anything else. People, men especially, do not do very well when confronted with random phenomena. There has to be a system, says the gambler with his dice and cards. There has to be a system, says the stock market speculator.
Well, there isn't a system for either of those, and there isn't a system that determines where lightning is going to hit, and it just drives people crazy. This hasn't stopped the the tort lawyers, who hire lightning experts to debate between God, country clubs, and the estates of fried golfers, nor has it prevented the establishment of National Lightning Safety Week, the lore of which must be seen to be believed.
So I'm cranking out this article, about how I got through graduate school having fun in a Frankenstein-like artificial lightning laboratory, and then learned that the legends, literature and people that surround the field of lightning protection are way more interesting than the field itself will ever be. Should be done in maybe a week at the rate I'm going; writing is a way of abolishing depression for me.
M Kinsler
Friday, February 16, 2007
In Which Kinsler Ventures Into the Strange World of Yahoo Answers.
I'm not completely sorry to say that I have reached Level 2 on Yahoo! Answers, one of the strangest bits of information exchange I've come across in my weary years. Because Yahoo Answers, and I refuse to use that damn exclamation point in their dumb name any further, is a fascinating bit of sociology.
The first question really got me. It has the casual grammar and punctuation customary to this part of the world; you get used to it soon enough.
Was supersonic airliner Concorde just a hoax? If we haven't got a supersonic airliner now and one isn't on the drawing board, how come it was supposedly developed in the 1960's. How come we can't do it now?
Now, this is interesting, because a supersonic airliner would, to the average kid, be an advance over the slow kind. I had to explain about sonic booms (who in this day and age has heard one?) and the ozone concerns that killed government funding for Boeing's proposed 'Supersonic transport' in the of the 1960's. That, and the fact that the Concorde never made money.
But to someone who lived through that era, it was an astonishing question for several reasons. Kids have learned that their government lies, and keeps secrets from them. We grew up with Walt Disney's enthusiasm for space. They grew up with Area 51, aliens hidden by evil Government conspiracies, and Men in Black.
So I have been answering questions. Science and engineering, but most of those are for homework assignments, and I only respond to the funny ones that were clearly misread by the kids, like why Pluto is a dwarf planet, which I compared to asking why a mountain was a particular height.
There are other puzzlers:
i have never been abroad before and im looking for the perfect family holiday. my daughter will be 2 so id like somewhere that has activities for her and maybe a creche so we could go and do our own thing for a couple of hours.i want to go somewhere thats hot (Im going in september) but not too far as my daughter will get bored on the plane.and somewhere not too remote from shops etc but not thats going to be right in the center of 18-30 holidays!!!please help.thanks x x x
This is where I began to become aware of the size of the English-speaking population on Planet Earth, and its general absent-mindedness as well. I could only respond that it would have been nice if the writer had told us where she lived.
It's almost addictive. There was the kid who wrote in to ask if he had been accepted for admission at a university in Nigeria. There are kids--and adults--who write in to ask if they're showing signs of mental illness. There was this one:
Is there anything wrong with me by living with my parents at 29yo?
I get along with my parents so well and I dont need a lousy, noisy, scum roomate. My parents house is paid off and I go to school. Besides I can spend my money in better things than in a rip off rent to some morgage company that employees their ceo and than I will end up paying them for their big mansions.
I replied that if he didn't think there was something wrong, he probably wouldn't have asked. Usually I try to be more helpful than that, but there hardly seemed to be any other answer.
Yahoo Answers is something of a service to the community and something of a game. You get two points for each question you answer, and ten points if someone--presumably whoever asked--declares your answer to be the best of any of them. My Best Answer Ratio is 12%, which might be great. There's some sort of reward system for getting lots of points, but I've forgotten what great privileges it gives the avid Answerer. For my part, I've found it to be a good exercise in making up fast answers, and it's taught me something else, which is that if I decide to try, I could probably be a fairly good advice columnist. Here's one that I liked.
Why can't I get Him to go completely away?
I keep telling Him that I don't want to go out and kill the abortion doctors and that I don't want to try and force His religion into society but He keeps nagging me. I don't want His rules where I become so psychologically damaged because I think everything is a sin. But He still stays with me. What should I do?
Here's what I wrote. Very carefully, and I sure hope it helped:
If you are sincere, and a young adult, you may be experiencing the onset of one or another form of schizophrenia or other psychotic illness. This has nothing to do with religion: God doesn't contact His believers this way.
When someone speaks to us, our ears pick up the sounds, and then they contact the brain with the information. In some people, nobody knows why, the brain makes up its own information and makes it seem like it came in through the ears. These are the voices one hears, and they'll tell you to do almost anything: good, evil or otherwise.
Go to your local public health service and tell the receptionist what you think is happening to you. It's possible that things will clear up by themselves, but generally treatment is needed. Right now, it would seem to you that your cause is right and just, but the voices know that you'll be destroyed as surely as those they're asking you to kill.
Please be careful.
This wasn't considered the best answer. Those that voted on it--my God, there must be people with even less to do than I--liked another one better. 'Stay on your meds,' it advised.
The first question really got me. It has the casual grammar and punctuation customary to this part of the world; you get used to it soon enough.
Was supersonic airliner Concorde just a hoax? If we haven't got a supersonic airliner now and one isn't on the drawing board, how come it was supposedly developed in the 1960's. How come we can't do it now?
Now, this is interesting, because a supersonic airliner would, to the average kid, be an advance over the slow kind. I had to explain about sonic booms (who in this day and age has heard one?) and the ozone concerns that killed government funding for Boeing's proposed 'Supersonic transport' in the of the 1960's. That, and the fact that the Concorde never made money.
But to someone who lived through that era, it was an astonishing question for several reasons. Kids have learned that their government lies, and keeps secrets from them. We grew up with Walt Disney's enthusiasm for space. They grew up with Area 51, aliens hidden by evil Government conspiracies, and Men in Black.
So I have been answering questions. Science and engineering, but most of those are for homework assignments, and I only respond to the funny ones that were clearly misread by the kids, like why Pluto is a dwarf planet, which I compared to asking why a mountain was a particular height.
There are other puzzlers:
i have never been abroad before and im looking for the perfect family holiday. my daughter will be 2 so id like somewhere that has activities for her and maybe a creche so we could go and do our own thing for a couple of hours.i want to go somewhere thats hot (Im going in september) but not too far as my daughter will get bored on the plane.and somewhere not too remote from shops etc but not thats going to be right in the center of 18-30 holidays!!!please help.thanks x x x
This is where I began to become aware of the size of the English-speaking population on Planet Earth, and its general absent-mindedness as well. I could only respond that it would have been nice if the writer had told us where she lived.
It's almost addictive. There was the kid who wrote in to ask if he had been accepted for admission at a university in Nigeria. There are kids--and adults--who write in to ask if they're showing signs of mental illness. There was this one:
Is there anything wrong with me by living with my parents at 29yo?
I get along with my parents so well and I dont need a lousy, noisy, scum roomate. My parents house is paid off and I go to school. Besides I can spend my money in better things than in a rip off rent to some morgage company that employees their ceo and than I will end up paying them for their big mansions.
I replied that if he didn't think there was something wrong, he probably wouldn't have asked. Usually I try to be more helpful than that, but there hardly seemed to be any other answer.
Yahoo Answers is something of a service to the community and something of a game. You get two points for each question you answer, and ten points if someone--presumably whoever asked--declares your answer to be the best of any of them. My Best Answer Ratio is 12%, which might be great. There's some sort of reward system for getting lots of points, but I've forgotten what great privileges it gives the avid Answerer. For my part, I've found it to be a good exercise in making up fast answers, and it's taught me something else, which is that if I decide to try, I could probably be a fairly good advice columnist. Here's one that I liked.
Why can't I get Him to go completely away?
I keep telling Him that I don't want to go out and kill the abortion doctors and that I don't want to try and force His religion into society but He keeps nagging me. I don't want His rules where I become so psychologically damaged because I think everything is a sin. But He still stays with me. What should I do?
Here's what I wrote. Very carefully, and I sure hope it helped:
If you are sincere, and a young adult, you may be experiencing the onset of one or another form of schizophrenia or other psychotic illness. This has nothing to do with religion: God doesn't contact His believers this way.
When someone speaks to us, our ears pick up the sounds, and then they contact the brain with the information. In some people, nobody knows why, the brain makes up its own information and makes it seem like it came in through the ears. These are the voices one hears, and they'll tell you to do almost anything: good, evil or otherwise.
Go to your local public health service and tell the receptionist what you think is happening to you. It's possible that things will clear up by themselves, but generally treatment is needed. Right now, it would seem to you that your cause is right and just, but the voices know that you'll be destroyed as surely as those they're asking you to kill.
Please be careful.
This wasn't considered the best answer. Those that voted on it--my God, there must be people with even less to do than I--liked another one better. 'Stay on your meds,' it advised.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
appropos to nothing
It's been a good few days to think about energy policy. Not only was our electric power, and thus the heat, off for seven hours last night, but it's Valentine's Day today and Herself has decided to burn her red candle. It's there on the dining room table, where it just finished presiding over the mostly ceremonial supper I make every year.
It is a bright red candle, not scented or anything, and I think it must have been made by the Pakistani Petroleum Works, because it burns with a romantic plume of black smoke. Funniest thing I ever saw: she wants things to be romantic, and this thing is pumping out unburned hydrocarbons like it's idling in front of the Flying J Truck Stop. She has surrounded it with one of these curvy glass sleeves to keep it from blowing out, and we're collecting carbon samples on it.
Last night after the power went out we got to experiment with sources of alternative illumination. I have a couple of fake Chinese railroad lanterns on hand, and we have a bottle of highly-purified and rather expensive lamp oil that lives, appropriately, inside the cabinet with the flashlight batteries. These lanterns are surprisingly efficient and seem to have a lot of sophisticated features that I can't figure out. Lemme see if I can find an image, which is what we call pictures these days....
Hokay. There's a site called lanternnet.com that seems pretty good. Here's their diagram of the sort of lantern that we've got. It was invented, and still made, by the Deitz Co., but ours sure wasn't.
This shows how air from the top of the lantern is pulled down through the hollow supports to feed the flame, but there also seem to be subtleties that it ignores, like that draft down along the glass. This might be there to keep the glass cool, or to keep it clean. In any case, there are about a million little ports and screens and things on one of these, and I suppose they each contribute to producing a lovely light. And if you keep it turned down, it'll keep going all night.
It would be a real pain to fill every day, though, and even with the deodorized fuel it smells like something's on fire, which of course it is. Electric lighting was an awfully good deal in so many ways. It's one of those developments that we've lived with for so long that even the most appreciative of us can't truly grasp its impact: bedrooms no longer need to be ventilated to allow for combustion air. Libraries can stay open at night (yes, the fire hazard was simply too great, and even Harvard closed down @ local sunset.) Jobs like illuminating engine rooms and paint factories and mines became simple. Even architecture changed, since you didn't need to have such big windows for the highly-touted 'natural light.' Natural light was not only good because it had a spectrum that you could see by, but it didn't flicker, a quality that you can't get from any combusting-type lamp. But with a 60W reading lamp in a desk fixture in 1920, you were set. Just pay the bill when necessary and sit and study: no chimney cleaning, no spilled kerosene, no concerns about fuel quality.
That last was important, too. Kerosene was distilled from crude oil, just as it is now, but you couldn't guarantee that what you bought from the barrel at the general store didn't have a high proportion of gasoline in it, the vapors from which would blow up your house. John D Rockefeller, early oil man, recognized the problem, and made his fortune selling his high-quality kerosene in sealed cans. It was made to a high standard, hence the name Standard Oil, and you can supposedly find the steel from the cans integrated into the structure of century-old huts in newly-discovered villages in the mountains of central Asia. Lemme see if I can find a picture of the can, which I've read about but never seen.
...boy, there is nothing. I will see if there's something at the Exxon website...
Well, nothing there, either. I will check. It's odd that there's not a bit of evidence of one of the most common items of commerce ever sold. I read that the Bedouins or someone used to build shelters out of the stacked cans.
M Kinsler
It is a bright red candle, not scented or anything, and I think it must have been made by the Pakistani Petroleum Works, because it burns with a romantic plume of black smoke. Funniest thing I ever saw: she wants things to be romantic, and this thing is pumping out unburned hydrocarbons like it's idling in front of the Flying J Truck Stop. She has surrounded it with one of these curvy glass sleeves to keep it from blowing out, and we're collecting carbon samples on it.
Last night after the power went out we got to experiment with sources of alternative illumination. I have a couple of fake Chinese railroad lanterns on hand, and we have a bottle of highly-purified and rather expensive lamp oil that lives, appropriately, inside the cabinet with the flashlight batteries. These lanterns are surprisingly efficient and seem to have a lot of sophisticated features that I can't figure out. Lemme see if I can find an image, which is what we call pictures these days....
Hokay. There's a site called lanternnet.com that seems pretty good. Here's their diagram of the sort of lantern that we've got. It was invented, and still made, by the Deitz Co., but ours sure wasn't.
This shows how air from the top of the lantern is pulled down through the hollow supports to feed the flame, but there also seem to be subtleties that it ignores, like that draft down along the glass. This might be there to keep the glass cool, or to keep it clean. In any case, there are about a million little ports and screens and things on one of these, and I suppose they each contribute to producing a lovely light. And if you keep it turned down, it'll keep going all night.
It would be a real pain to fill every day, though, and even with the deodorized fuel it smells like something's on fire, which of course it is. Electric lighting was an awfully good deal in so many ways. It's one of those developments that we've lived with for so long that even the most appreciative of us can't truly grasp its impact: bedrooms no longer need to be ventilated to allow for combustion air. Libraries can stay open at night (yes, the fire hazard was simply too great, and even Harvard closed down @ local sunset.) Jobs like illuminating engine rooms and paint factories and mines became simple. Even architecture changed, since you didn't need to have such big windows for the highly-touted 'natural light.' Natural light was not only good because it had a spectrum that you could see by, but it didn't flicker, a quality that you can't get from any combusting-type lamp. But with a 60W reading lamp in a desk fixture in 1920, you were set. Just pay the bill when necessary and sit and study: no chimney cleaning, no spilled kerosene, no concerns about fuel quality.
That last was important, too. Kerosene was distilled from crude oil, just as it is now, but you couldn't guarantee that what you bought from the barrel at the general store didn't have a high proportion of gasoline in it, the vapors from which would blow up your house. John D Rockefeller, early oil man, recognized the problem, and made his fortune selling his high-quality kerosene in sealed cans. It was made to a high standard, hence the name Standard Oil, and you can supposedly find the steel from the cans integrated into the structure of century-old huts in newly-discovered villages in the mountains of central Asia. Lemme see if I can find a picture of the can, which I've read about but never seen.
...boy, there is nothing. I will see if there's something at the Exxon website...
Well, nothing there, either. I will check. It's odd that there's not a bit of evidence of one of the most common items of commerce ever sold. I read that the Bedouins or someone used to build shelters out of the stacked cans.
M Kinsler
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Of Webster and Lawn Mowers
Well, I thought "oughta" was spelled "oughtta." Google, however, disagrees: 3 million hits for "oughta," but only a thenth that for my version. Oh well, outvoted by the collective wisdom of humanity. I guess that's not such a bad thing.
Tecumseh, however, reminds me of lawnmowers. If you have to ask why, then you've never experienced the pleasure of trying to pull start a two-stroke engine that's been rusting in your neighbor's garage all Winter. I did that for a few years as a kid, every Spring, to raise money to buy books. Science fiction books; stuff by Asimov and anything about Star Trek.
I never bought any Star Wars material, though. Star Wars was just too Hollywood. Star Trek was much more real - to me, anyway.
The difference between Star Wars and Star Trek has a lot to do with how people view current events. ... Bet you can't wait for me to explain that, can you?
Star Wars was grandiose - well, you can afford to be grandiose in a two hour film. The film concerned a sweeping history of the universe with absolutely evil characters and absolutely noble characters. The protagonists had to prevail lest everyone be doomed to live under the iron thumb of the evil Empire.
Ever notice how empires are always evil?
Star Trek, however, didn't have that luxury. The directors had but 50 minutes within which to tell a morality tale. But they weren't sweeping, and they always left things just a bit up in the air. Kind of like real life, that.
Which is why Star Trek is closer to reality than Star Wars.
People, it seems to me, have a tendency to get this sort of thing mixed up all the time, especially when it concerns the history through which they're living. Things that may seem quite important - who is President or Prime Minister, how much tax you have to pay, whether the government will promote nuclear power, whether we should do something global warming - sometimes aren't as important as they might seem.
Unlike Star Wars, no hero will fly out of the Orion nebula to save us all, gifting humanity with peace and good times forever more. There are no simple solutions. There are no easy answers to humanity's most vexing problems and no easy answers to the most important questions.
Like Captain Kirk, we'll get most of it right, some of it wrong, and the Republic will putter along much as it always has.
Which is why people could, in my opinion, do well to just calm down already.
Tecumseh, however, reminds me of lawnmowers. If you have to ask why, then you've never experienced the pleasure of trying to pull start a two-stroke engine that's been rusting in your neighbor's garage all Winter. I did that for a few years as a kid, every Spring, to raise money to buy books. Science fiction books; stuff by Asimov and anything about Star Trek.
I never bought any Star Wars material, though. Star Wars was just too Hollywood. Star Trek was much more real - to me, anyway.
The difference between Star Wars and Star Trek has a lot to do with how people view current events. ... Bet you can't wait for me to explain that, can you?
Star Wars was grandiose - well, you can afford to be grandiose in a two hour film. The film concerned a sweeping history of the universe with absolutely evil characters and absolutely noble characters. The protagonists had to prevail lest everyone be doomed to live under the iron thumb of the evil Empire.
Ever notice how empires are always evil?
Star Trek, however, didn't have that luxury. The directors had but 50 minutes within which to tell a morality tale. But they weren't sweeping, and they always left things just a bit up in the air. Kind of like real life, that.
Which is why Star Trek is closer to reality than Star Wars.
People, it seems to me, have a tendency to get this sort of thing mixed up all the time, especially when it concerns the history through which they're living. Things that may seem quite important - who is President or Prime Minister, how much tax you have to pay, whether the government will promote nuclear power, whether we should do something global warming - sometimes aren't as important as they might seem.
Unlike Star Wars, no hero will fly out of the Orion nebula to save us all, gifting humanity with peace and good times forever more. There are no simple solutions. There are no easy answers to humanity's most vexing problems and no easy answers to the most important questions.
Like Captain Kirk, we'll get most of it right, some of it wrong, and the Republic will putter along much as it always has.
Which is why people could, in my opinion, do well to just calm down already.
the first correction
And I spelled 'Tecumseh' wrong. And I might have done it once again. I'll have to check to see how the family spelled it. Eddie Tecumseh, who used to run a water-softener business down in New Marshfield, never spelled it the same twice.
Read this first
The other guy is one Dave Typinski, who lives in Florida. Every time they have one of their trademark weather cataclysms down there I check in with him to see if he's been blown out to sea, yet. I don't know where he lives in Florida, exactly: I know that it's a Florida-shaped state, and it's got Miami at the bottom and Cuba down below that, seething, and Cape Canaveral somewhere on the edge.
I, on the other hand, am Mark Kinsler, currently of Lancaster, Ohio. Lancaster is a bit southeast of Columbus, if that helps, and it's been waiting to be recognized as the greatest place on earth for about two hundred years now. Its most famous citizen, besides me, was General William Techumseh Sherman, who grew up a couple of blocks away and never returned alive or dead.
This is a lot more fun than working on the stuff I'm supposed to be doing.
I, on the other hand, am Mark Kinsler, currently of Lancaster, Ohio. Lancaster is a bit southeast of Columbus, if that helps, and it's been waiting to be recognized as the greatest place on earth for about two hundred years now. Its most famous citizen, besides me, was General William Techumseh Sherman, who grew up a couple of blocks away and never returned alive or dead.
This is a lot more fun than working on the stuff I'm supposed to be doing.
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