Barry

I’m not much for “tell all” memoirs. I don’t think that I have the right to invade others’ privacy to any great extent, and the diligent reader will observe that most of the times when I’ve mentioned other people in these essays, I’ve either obscured the names or tried to paint the others in a good light.

But there is the matter of how to treat those who are dead, those who can neither grant or deny permission. I can see both sides to the argument there, so it’s inevitably a case by case basis. In this case, I think that Barry would not mind, and besides, I think he deserves some sort of eulogy from me, the sort that I could not deliver at his actual memorial service, because there were friends and family there who might have been wounded by some of the details.

Barry was a drug dealer. He began peddling marijuana in the early 1970s, and had graduated to cocaine by the time I met him in the early 80s. He was, when I met him, at something of a low ebb. A while before he’d planned on giving up the trade, getting married, the whole bit, then his fiancé ran off with someone he’d thought was his best friend, and then a series of ill-advised deals went sour, rendering him, if not impoverished, at least less able to finance the sybaritic life style that it turned out most of his other “friends” were interested in. So he was struggling to keep from foundering financially, a struggle made much more difficult by the lure of the product that he was back to peddling.

We met through a mutual friend, and Barry and I became friends. I won’t say that there weren’t drugs involved, because at that time, if you were around Barry, drugs were usually involved. However, we also joined a bowling team together, went to concerts, parties, etc. Barry was an amateur theater person, so I went to some of his performances, and he was interested in standup comedy. I never saw him perform, but we did go to see various comics he was interested in, and the SF comedy scene has had a lot of talent pass through.

When I started to feel the effects of “the Lurgy,” the maybe-it-was-chronic-fatigue-syndrome that I got in the mid-80s, drugs were one of the first things I gave up (with the occasional lapses, of course; I’m not some sort of iron-willed paragon). But Barry remained a friend, one of those who was willing to help with those minor things that sick people need, like the occasional trip out to a restaurant when I just couldn’t get it together to feed myself.

Barry got busted in the late 80s, but he was only holding grass at the time, the dealers’ paranoia serving him well enough that he didn’t take any coke to that particular meeting. The prosecutors tried to get him to set up his own suppliers (just as he’d been set up), but Barry was having none of that. While awaiting trial he dumped the rest of the business, cleaned up his act, and took a job as a night security guard. He sufficiently impressed the arresting officer that the man recommended straight parole, no jail time, and that was that for Barry as dope dealer.

Still, Barry was ever the entrepreneur, making frequent trips to Bali, to buy artwork that he then sold when he returned home. And he’d always been a comics collector, so he ramped that up as a small business as well.

Barry had an occasional girlfriend, whom I’ll call Di. It turned out that Di had lived near RPI during my time there, as a place called “The Farm” (did every college in the early 1970s have a “Farm” associated with it?). She’d been involved at that time with a guy I put in the acknowledgements to SunSmoke, Jim Nagy, who’d played McMurphy in the RPI Players production of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and had been given tepid reviews because he obviously hadn’t been acting, just playing himself. Which is to say that Nagy had major charisma, and I had the unfortunate task of telling Di that Jim had died in the mid-80s. He’d lived an amphetamine fueled life for years and had cleaned up too late, apparently, the damage having been done, and something critical finally gave out.

It can be a small world in the fast lane, even if you’re usually just a passenger.

After I married Amy, she and I had dinner a few times with Barry and Di. Amy told me after one of them that, during a time when I’d left the table to go to the restroom, Di had confided to her, “If ever any man looks at me the way he looks at you, I’m his forever.”

Barry quit the drugs, but he kept his Corvette, and that was what did it for him. He was on Highway 101 in Northern California, a twisty turny stretch that shrinks to two lanes for periods, and he was behind a camper and he was always impatient. He tried to pass when he couldn’t see far enough ahead, and someone was coming.

I developed a theory about the illegal drug business back when I had a better vantage point for observation. It seemed to me that the nature of it was primal, stark, a world of black and white. There is no legal system to enforce contracts and the regular criminal justice system is often deliberately manipulated by criminals to their own advantage, creating situations where the police and the law was the instrument of injustice, rather than of justice. And it looked to me like the tradesmen were either snakes or honorable men, with a great gulf between the two.

A friend of Barry’s told me he saw the highway patrol report of the accident, and it suggested that Barry deliberately went through a railing and down a steep embankment, rather than hitting the oncoming car. I believe it, because that was Barry, always taking risks, but trying his damnedest to confine the damage to himself.

Tonya Harding: Capitalist Hero

Tonya Harding had a problem, and the problem was named Nancy Kerrigan. Harding probably believed that she was a better skater than Kerrigan, and it's hard to come up with an objective way to judge the matter, except to note that in the sport of figure skating, it's the judges' opinions on the matter that set the standards. And the judges loved Kerrigan.

Well, sure. Kerrigan was tall, pretty, with high cheekbones and a toothy smile. She gave off the aura of aristocracy that the hard-scrabble Harding so obviously lacked. It was the Ice Queen vs Trailer Trash, and, really, who was going to win that deal?

Harding could have concentrated on improving the product. She could, perhaps, have spent even more time practicing (perhaps by inventing the 28 hour day). She'd already increased the difficulty of her routines, by adding the triple axle to her skills, a risky procedure, of course, and a bad enough injury could have ended her career. Or she could have worked on her looks, taken charm lessons, and so forth. But really, nothing short of cosmetic surgery was going to raise her cheekbones, and wouldn't the press have gotten a lot of mileage out of that?

So Harding did what any proper CEO would have done with a difficult competitor. She conspired to have Nancy Kerrigan kneecapped. I mean, after all, when Microsoft was competing with Word Perfect, you don't think they put all their efforts into making Word better, do you? Sometimes corporations buy their competitors instead, but that option is not available to Olympic athletes.

But she got caught, so morality carried the day, right? Harding appeared on the covers of both Time and Newsweek, but that was because she'd been bad, bad, and the 400 members of the press who were jammed into the practice rink in Lillehammer, Norway were there to insure that everyone got the proper moral lesson. Besides, she placed 8th, while Kerrigan placed second, and it was Kerrigan who later benefited the most from the figure skating boom that the sensationalism kicked off.

Still, once a celebrity, always a celebrity, and Harding had an internet sex tape released (with stills appearing in Penthouse), then later turned to boxing, first on the Fox TV network Celebrity Boxing event against Clinton accuser, Paula Jones, then later professionally in a short career. She should probably have gone for pro wrestling, where the villains make more money.

A cautionary tale? Perhaps. But a lot of people made a lot of money off of Tonya Harding, and she herself had more notoriety and more of a career than 99% of Olympic athletes. That she never managed to rise far enough to transcend her origins is unsurprising. Few do.

Oppenheimer

I recently read American Prometheus, the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. It won a Pulitzer, so there's that. Moreover, it is exhaustively researched, often spending substantial effort to unravel ancient questions, or at least to indicate the problematic nature of historical investigations. Often, even the principals involved do not agree on what actually took place, a phenomenon we're all familiar with.

The book is huge, and I'm going to focus on only a tiny sliver of it, but one that has some relevance to current questions and some recent commentary on this here blog.

The history of the creation and evolution of the Cold War is complex, and many people have various "woulda, coulda, shouldas" in their heads about the entire matter, just as many people believe that the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a contingent decision that could have been made in other ways. My own sense of it all has long been that these things were as close to inevitable as anything in human history. Given that nuclear weapons had been created, their use in an ongoing war was a forgone conclusion. There are details that could have been different (and I am hugely grateful that Kyoto was not a target), but the events were inevitable.

There is also some discussion in AP about the theory that the Japanese attacks were really meant as a threat to the Soviet Union, the opening salvo in the Cold War. Certainly there were those who argued for them on that basis, but there are always many players in the game, and I see no reason to believe that this reasoning was decisive. Truman also worked to get the Soviets to enter the war against Japan; it always looked to me like he was simply using everything in his arsenal to end the war.

But after the war, events developed a momentum of their own. The Strategic Air Command, part of the newly formed Air Force and under the direction of Curtis "Strategic Bombing will make Battlefields obsolete" LeMay, worked hard for a nuclear monopoly. It failed because the other services wanted them some nuke macho too.

Then there are the scientists. Let's look at Oppenheimer, Teller, and John von Neumann.

Teller is well-known as the "Father of the Hydrogen Bomb," originally just called The Super. His testimony in Oppenheimer's security clearance hearing resulted in his, Teller's ostracism by many in the scientific community for years afterwards. On the other hand, he had a national lab built for him (Livermore).

Teller's motivations for working on the Super are not as clear cut as one might think. I suspect he just thought it a very cool gadget and rationalized the rest. However, he was Hungarian, and not the most friendly guy towards the Russians, and said so, many times. He wanted the U.S. to have the Super before the Russians got it. And I will give Teller this due: his bombs have never been used in warfare, at least so far.

Von Neumann, another Hungarian, was even more bellicose than Teller. He advocated pre-emptive nuclear strikes on the Soviet Union in order to forestall their ever achieving nuclear weapons. This would also have had the effect of toppling the Soviet government and requiring a U.S. occupation of Russia, which he was also fine with. Von Neumann was also on the Japan nuclear targeting committee and was one of those pushing for nuking Kyoto, a city of practically no military significance.

Finally, there is Oppenheimer, who opposed the Super, and paid dearly for it, eventually losing his connections to the halls of power. But lest we get all teary-eyed, realize that he acceded to the Japanese strikes, albeit with some later breast beating.

Moreover, and this is the interesting part, Oppenheimer argued that, rather than building bigger weapons, such as the Super, which he thought was purely genocidal, the country's stockpile of fissile material should be used to build smaller, tactical, battlefield nuclear weapons. Subsequent thinking has been that such weapons blur the line between conventional and nuclear weapons, making escalation to full-scale nuclear war easier.

Truly large bombs, the multi-megaton behemoths have largely faded from the scene. Current nuclear arsenals contain mostly sub-megaton weapons, albeit small and MIRVed, and still several multiples of the Hiroshima sized yield. Part of that is the first part of Oppenheimer's logic: there just aren't many uses for huge bombs. Even genocide has its limits.

What I take away from the exercise is this: Oppenheimer, Teller, von Neumann, these were three of the smartest guys on the planet, each committed to "rationality" in his own mind. But each one of them managed to argue himself into a position that seems simply crazy on the face of it, unless nuclear genocide is sane, and those of us who find it horrible are somehow the ones who have lost our minds.

Terry

Hot August night
And the leaves hanging down
And the grass on the ground smelling sweet
Move up the road
To the outside of town
And the sound of that good gospel beat

Sits a ragged tent
Where there ain't no trees
And that gospel group
Telling you and me

It's Love
Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show
Pack up the babies
Grab the old ladies
Everyone goes
Everyone knows
Brother Love's show
--Neil Diamond, "Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show"

The Congressional Record contains many interesting items, especially from the days when a filibuster actually required Senators to continue speaking for the duration. Often a filibustering Senator would read from a book, insert cooking recipes, and the like, just in order to keep the words flowing. Nowadays, not only is this not required, owing to a thing called Senate Rule 22, which allows some Senators to say "we're filibustering," and then a cloture vote determines whether or not the bill is blocked.

It's also quite possible for things to show up in the Congressional Record that were never actually said on the floors of Congress, and things that are said may be taken back, the CR being amended to nullify the past, and isn't that the way it ought to be with everything?

I doubt that my name was ever said in the Hallowed Halls, but it does appear in the Congressional Record at least once, as a citation of an EPA report in the background documentation for some air quality legislation (you'd think I could be more specific, and I probably could, but there are limits to how much work I'm willing to put into these little memoirs). It was, as I recall, a monthly report that later went into a document sometimes cited as just "Killus et al." (heh, heh), primarily because I was co-author to a majority of the individual chapters. The final publication was titled "Continued research in mesoscale air pollution simulation modeling. Volume 5: Refinements in numerical analysis, transport, chemistry, and pollutant removal" [Final Report, Oct. 1979 - Jul. 1982] KILLUS, J P; MEYER, J P; DURRAN, G E; ANDERSON, G E; JERSKEY, T N.

The full report included new transport algorithms, chemistry, actinic flux calculations, aerosol formation mechanisms, and surface uptake models for a photochemical grid model. The subsection that went into the CR was on the surface uptake mechanisms, i.e. the way that pollutants are absorbed or otherwise destroyed or transformed by interactions with surfaces, and I co-wrote it with the last guy cited, Terry N. Jerskey.

We didn't really work that closely together, having broken up the problem into piece parts with Terry doing some chunks of it, and me the rest. But there was a fair amount of time sitting across the table from each other, talking about this or that aspect of things like surface resistance, diffusional transport in the planetary boundary layer and other nurdy things that we were being paid to talk about. It was a lot of fun, actually, for me at least. I hope Terry enjoyed it.

Terry's hands shook by that point, a tremor that was a side effect of the medication he was on, I think it was Haldol, but this is a 30 year old memory here, and he only told me once.

One day, late, after everyone else had left the office except Tom, who was a chronic workaholic, Terry went over to the shopping center across the street and bought several bottles of dry cleaning fluid, which he proceeded to swig down on the way back to the office, tossing the bottles into the trash cans on the way back. He made it back to the office and collapsed on the hall floor, where Tom found him a few minutes later.

In addition to being a workaholic, Tom was also a member of the Ski Patrol, and strong as an ox besides. Both turned out to be important, because, after he called for the paramedics, he had to use that strength to pry Terry's jaws apart, in order to give him mouth-to-mouth respiration. Terry's jaws had become locked with muscle spasms, you see.

Then, after the ambulance arrived, Tom raced across the street and located the bottles of cleaning fluid (which I suspect he'd tasted in Terry's vomit and breath during the time he was doing Terry's breathing for him) and reported what Terry had swallowed to the ER by the time Terry had arrived.

This wasn't Terry's first suicide attempt, it turned out. That was the reason for the anti-depressants. In fact, I heard that Terry's wife was pretty blasé about the matter when she was called.

The next day, Terry was sitting up in the ICU, alert, seemingly fine. He told everyone who visited that he'd be back at work pretty soon.

The next day he was dead. The cause of death was "aspirated pneumonia." Vomiting cleaning fluid and then breathing it into your lungs causes damage, and there was enough damage for entirely different fluids to build up in his lungs—enough to kill him, in fact.

The only thing that I ever learned about Terry other than our working together was that he loved Neil Diamond, even the later pretentious stuff like "Longfellow Serenade." When we spoke about Neil, I'd always talk about songs like "Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show," because I could honestly say that I liked it.

I honestly liked Terry, too, but not nearly enough, really. For the most part, he was just a guy I worked with for a while.

One of the Places where it all Began

That was then:

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive . . ."And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about 100 miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"

Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. "What the hell are you yelling about," he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. "Never mind," I said. "It's your turn to drive." I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough. --Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson

This is Now:

Saturday noon. Recollection of the last 24 hours is excruciatingly difficult; I have taken every remaining pill in my kit bag, and yet somehow, despite the presence of enough chemicals in my system to transform me into the Joker, I have developed a raging cold. My throat is nearly sealed shut, which may work to my advantage since I’m reaching the point at which the rude answers which bubble up in my skull every time someone speaks to me are threatening to spill over into actual vocalization. Ever since Wednesday I have been asking myself in re my pharmacopia: how many is too many? Crashing into every sharp corner in my hotel room, I know the answer: however many I took when I woke up this morning.

Last night was the Ronald Reagan Banquet, a dinner which was for and unfortunately not of Ronald Reagan. Eating a dehydrated teriyaki jerky chunk of the old fraud might have given me some of his strength. I’ve heard the words “Ronald Reagan” and “tax cuts” so many times now they’re beginning to lose whatever meaning they might have once had, and Will, that payola-stuffed bloviator of manifest destiny, will say them another three dozen times while I tuck into my mashed potatoes. After the ghouls-gone-wild reception given to Ann Coulter a few hours ago, the crowd receives him politely and respectfully, and even considering the fact that this is an older crowd, made up largely of the parents of the rich kids hooting and snarling at Ann’s anti-McCain jeremiad, it still has the tone of someone forced to hear their grandpa read cowboy poetry just after they’ve come back from yelling “SHOW US YOUR TITS!” to drunken frat girls. Will himself is perfunctory at best, showing his chipper cheerleader side only when discussing Old Mother Reagan; the rest of the time, he’s just there to pick up a check. He even senses the hostility in the room when called upon to mention the Supplicant McCain: urging the crowd to be “happy warriors” for the default candidate, he sounds like a bored Sunday school teacher leading his tenth consecutive round of “I’ve Got the Joy” for a group of sugared-up fourth-graders.--Mister Leonard Pierce, The Beast is Red, Chapter 12: Show Us Your Twits, from Sadly, No.

Hot Buttered

Orville Redenbacher is on the TV, telling us again how great his microwave popcorn is, and by the way, it doesn't contain diacetyl. Any more.

Diacetyl (emphasis on the first syllable) is also called biacetyl (emphasis on the last syllable) and the latter is what we called in when I was working on the photooxidation of aromatic hydrocarbons a couple or three decades ago. Biactetyl, in fact, occupies an important place in the history of smog chemistry, though I have to admit the notion of "important" is open to interpretation.

There are basically four kinds of "reactive organics" that are important in smog photochemistry: paraffins, olefins, aromatics, and carbonyl compounds (aldehydes and ketones), the latter being more commonly formed in the smog process than emitted outright. I'm taking a bit of a liberty here by omitting alcohols, ethers, and other oxygenated compounds, partly because, ethanol and MTBE notwithstanding, they still don't amount to a large fraction of the mix, and partly because their photochemistry is pretty close to that of paraffins, or ketones that don't photolyze, i.e. break up by the direct action of sunlight.

The early days of smog chemistry were dominated by research into the chemistry of paraffins and olefins, so much so, in fact, that it wasn't until the mid-1970s that researchers realized that the photolysis of aldehydes and ketones was the primary source of catalytic radicals in the smog formation process. In fact, that was the biggest single difference between the first photochemical kinetic mechanism that I worked with, the Hecht-Seinfeld mechanism, and the later, Hecht, Seinfeld, Dodge mechanism. The former used oxygen atoms (from the photolysis of NO2) as its primary radical source, whereas the latter used formaldehyde and higher aldehydes to that purpose.

Both of these mechanisms were based on smog chamber experiments involving butane and propylene (or propene, if you're a nomenclature purist). Aromatics chemistry was tacked on as an afterthought, not because it was believed to be unimportant, but more because nobody had any idea what to do with it.

Aromatic hydrocarbons, as they are called, all have a "benzene ring" somewhere in them, and that makes everything very complex. Perhaps you remember the story about Friedrich Kekule literally dreaming up benzene's structure. It's formula is C6H6, and its structure "bites its own tail," so each carbon atom, with four chemical bonds, has, after accounting for the hydrogen, three bonds to share with its two neighboring carbon atoms. That could work out to two and one or one and two, i.e. a paraffinic bond with one neighbor and an olefinic bond with the other, but the wonders of quantum mechanisms allows it to actually be one and a half bonds with each neighbor. Such are the wonders of quantum electrons being able to be in several places at the same time.

Benzene itself is almost dead, photochemically speaking; put it into a smog chamber and it mostly just sits there, making a little tang of phenol after a while, but phenol is deader still, so…boring.

But if you replace one or more of benzene's hydrogens with a methyl group (-CH3), now you're talking. One added methyl group gives you toluene. Two, and you get xylene, which comes in three isomers, meta, para, and ortho, depending upon whether the methyl groups sit right next to each other (ortho), on opposite sides of the ring (para) or one over (meta). There are also, of course, trimethylated benzenes, and compounds where the substituted groups are more complex than methyl groups. But actually, toluene and the xylenes make up the bulk of aromatic compounds in air pollution. There is even a refinery stream referred to as "TBX" which stands for toluene, benzene, and xylene.

Okay, so I'm going to tell you how the photochemistry works, then how it got figured out. The tricky part had to do with how the aromatic rings would open up. Everyone knew it had to happen sometime, but how, and what the products were was a mystery for years.

What happens to something like toluene in smog is that, when it encounters an hydroxyl radical (-OH), the hydroxyl adds itself onto the ring somewhere, usually at the carbon that sits next to a methyl group, because of the way that methyl groups mess with the electron distribution of the aromatic ring. This is what hydroxyls do with olefins, incidentally, so you can look on it as the hydroxyl briefly looking at the ring and seeing, not that "one and a half bonds" thing I mentioned above, but a double carbon-carbon bond, which hydroxyls just love to glom onto.

This breaks one of the carbon-carbon bonds, and one end of it now has a romantic relationship with the hydroxyl radical. But the other end, like a jilted lover, is on the rebound, ready to pick up with just about any pretty face that comes by. That face, almost always, belongs to oxygen, a really promiscuous molecule. It's diatomic (i.e. O2), but not so committed to the relationship that it passes up some good carbon bond action.

So an O2 gloms onto the other, lonely, carbon and you now have a peroxy radical, an aromatic ring with an oxygen tail. The radical characteristic of the thing tends to be concentrated at the free swinging tip of the tail, and in most peroxy radicals, that tip winds up reacting with some other molecule.

Not so with the aromatic peroxy radicals, however, because it so happens that the radical tip is just right for swinging around and hooking up with another carbon, somewhere else on the aromatic ring. You may now consider all of the other sexual double entendres that I could use for this situation.

Anyway, another oxygen now gloms onto the group, but now the situation is stable enough (maybe) so that it waits around for some outside compound (usually a molecule of nitric oxide—NO) to take the last lonely oxygen atom away from the daisy chain.

All the oxygens then decide to settle down with their new carbon best buddies. The oxygen-oxygen bonds call it quits, and that leaves another oxygen bond for each oxygen connected carbon. If you're counting, and remember that carbon only has four bonds to its name, this means that it has a double bond with an oxygen, one for either a hydrogen or a methyl group, and, whoops, only one left for another carbon in the aromatic ring. In short, the ring opens, in multiple places, once for each oxygen. At some point, the poor hydroxyl group, which is now the radical of the bunch, meets yet another oxygen molecule and the hydrogen leaves the party to for hydroperyoxyl (HO2).

The aromatic ring is pretty much finished at this point, and it cleaves into at least two pieces, one with two ring carbons, the other with four. The one with four has, in addition to two oxygen atoms, a olefinic bond (there was some belief for a while that the fragments might all have two ring carbons, each, meaning that there would have been another oxygen molecule bridge on the ring, but later product yield measurements indicate otherwise).

Both ring fragments are called "dicarbonyls" because they each have two carbonyl (C=O) bonds. In one of the fragments, the two carbonyl bonds are right next to each other.

The simplest dicarbonyl is called "glyoxal." It's just H(C=O)(C=O)H. The next one is methyl glyoxal, with a single added methyl group: H(C=O)(C=O)CH3. Both of these are very hard to measure; they tend to stick to gas chromatographic columns nigh onto forever.

Ah, but the next in line is a dicarbonyl with two methyl substituants: CH3(C=O)(C=O)CH3. This is called biacetyl, or diacetyl. And it comes through a chromatographic column.

If you photooxidize orthoxylene, with it's two adjacent methyl groups, when the ring opens, a certain percentage of time you get biacetyl. A group at the University of California at Riverside, (Darnall, Atkinson, and Pitts, 1979) saw the biacetyl coming off of their chromatograph and realized that they had seen the first evidence of ring opening products.

It so happens that both biacetyl and methylglyoxal photolyze like crazy, so much so that they last only a few minutes in sunlight before splitting into radical fragments. I had been looking for something exactly like these dicarbonyls in my own studies of aromatics photochemistry, because I'd found good evidence of very powerful radical sources in toluene experiments. My calculations indicated that the radical formation rate from toluene was twice what it would be if toluene were going to pure formaldehyde, which of course it does not. It forms a significant amount of methyl glyoxal, and that was what I was looking for.

Later, I heard that biacetyl/diacetyl was used to flavor margarine; I also heard that microwave food products use excess flavoring agents because the microwave heating process drives the volatiles away faster than regular cooking.

I had some vague suspicions that it might not be a good idea to use a compound as photochemically unstable as biacetyl in food. Light causes biacetyl to break into two pieces, both acetyl radicals, and when there is any oxygen around, you get peroxyacetyl radicals. Add some nitrogen dioxide and you get peroxyacetyl nitrate (PAN), which is biologically active. Actually, it's a good bet that any give peroxy compound is biologically active. These are some pretty potent radicals.

So then we see a story about the guy who loved the buttery smell of microwaved popcorn and got a rare lung disease, bronchiolitis obliterans. More to the point, "popcorn lung" has been added to the list of industrial diseases affecting production workers.

All I had were a few suspicions, of course. Nothing to go on, really. But I can't say that I'm surprised in the slightest.

One Tank Counted a Million Times

My friend Murray is Jewish, as are a lot of friends of mine from RPI, because RPI gets a lot of smart kids from the northeast, especially New York City, Long Island, and Philadelphia. Murray’s father, Meyer, was originally from Poland, spent the last part of WWII in a Soviet labor camp (a lucky thing, considering the alternative), and had the sense to stay on the last train out of Poland at the end of the war, rather than going back home to the last Polish pogrom. You thought that only the Nazis were killing Jews in 1945?

Once, during one of my extended visits with Murray, his brother Sol decided to do an oral history of the family and got out a tape recorder to get some of Meyer’s stories down for posterity. Because I was the only one in attendance who hadn’t heard the stories, Meyer basically told them to me, which I’ve always considered quite a privilege. One of them, for reasons that will be obvious, always stuck in my mind.

It was from the Soviet labor camp, a frontier post out in a Siberian forest, cutting trees to supply wood for the war effort. The conditions were as brutal as you might imagine, though, since timber output was the main purpose, the camp wasn’t deliberately for the purpose of killing people. Nevertheless, no one in authority cared much when someone died, and sometimes the prescribed rules had that effect.

One particularly pernicious rule was the timber quota/food ration rule. Basically, if a work gang didn’t meet their timber quota, their food rations were cut. Since the rations were barely subsistence anyway, cutting them would render the workers even weaker, more sluggish, less able to work, than before, which would result in more lost quotas, more cuts, etc. spiraling downward into starvation and death. So the quotas had to be met at all costs.

The problem was that the quotas kept being increased, until finally, even fully healthy workers would have been unable to meet them. Again, this wasn’t done with the express purpose of killing anyone; it would just have had that effect.

However, Meyer was the straw boss, and he concocted a plan. The crew would work until noon, cutting as many trees as they could. During the brief lunch period, Meyer would count how many trees had been cut, and calculate how many more they needed after lunch to meet quota. Then, after lunch, the crew would go back over the previous day’s cut logs and saw off the very ends of the logs—where the inspectors had stamped the previous day’s logs with a mark to indicate that the logs had been counted. The log ends would go onto the camp fires, and the inspectors would go over the day’s cut and double count the trees whose marks had been removed.

Now obviously there were probably some inspectors who figured out what was happening, but no one said anything. It wasn’t their jobs to say anything; their jobs were to count the logs with no stamps and to stamp the logs. Nothing more. If they piped up, they risked having their superiors get angry, since all their superiors were interested in was making the quotas as well.

“The whole system was like that,” Meyer said. “If they tell you they have a million tanks, don’t believe them. They have one tank; they count it a million times.”

Patience

I'm not a very patient man. The best I can do generally is to fake it with a mix of persistence and procrastination. But at least I understand the dimensions of my problem.

One of the difficulties of the democratic political process is how slowly it moves. This includes the criminal justice system, but I'm thinking here about the other parts of what we call "government." The designers of the U.S. Constitution very consciously put in a lot of time lags, plus those pesky things we call "checks and balances" in order to impede "popular enthusiasms" that they (rightly, in my opinion) feared.

One necessary exception to this was during emergencies, especially the time of war. But even then, the Constitution tries to parcel out the authority and responsibilities, again, fearing the tides that sweep nations into foolish conflicts. It's worth noting that two of our greatest Presidents who had first been Generals, warned of the pernicious effects of conflict. Washington's warning about "foreign entanglements" was directed at treaties that might embroil the U.S. in someone else's wars, and Eisenhower's criticism of the "military/industrial complex" was a warning about how those who profit from war may push a country against its own interests.

The other great President/General, Jackson, stands as something of a cautionary tale all by himself.

So now we're stuck in the middle of a post-colonial occupation, one of the most seriously wrongheaded maneuvers in the history of the Republic, and we've seen the entire set of warnings disregarded. Foreign entanglements, check. Military/Industrial Complex, check. "Popular enthusiasms," check. Oh, you want to tell me now that you were against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq from the beginning? Yeah, I believe you. Sure was lonely, wasn't it? Or are you one of the "Afghanistan was fine, but Iraq was a mistake?" Or maybe, "We're better off without Saddam, but the war was badly mismanaged." Yeah, you keep thinking that.

Many in the country are now sick of military "glory," though it's worth bearing in mind that even little minor changes in the ongoing slaughter are enough for hordes of people to begin spouting inanities like "The Surge is working!" Working at what? Have U.S. soldiers stopped dying? No, they're just dying at a somewhat slower rate than before. Iraqi citizens? Maybe the same thing, though is there anyone reading this who is naïve enough to take the U.S. military's word about that, to say nothing of the Bush Administration?

Besides, these conflicts are unwinnable. How do I know that? Because I have yet to hear someone give me a plausible theory of what winning would look like. The closest was on The Family Guy, where they had a sequence showing Iraqi women stripping off their burkas and opening a bikini car wash. It made as much sense as anything else I've heard, and at least it was concrete. Yeah, we'll have "won" when Iraq is a safe and stable democracy.

Just for the record: if you plan for "winning" depends on favorably changing the attitudes and behavior of some people who hate you, and who have hated you for decades, you're probably not going to win.

Oh yeah, and then there's that part about how Pakistan is destabilizing as we speak. Not that anyone could have predicted that a U.S. invasion the country next door, driving a pack of radicals with military training across the border could destabilize a country. I mean, after all, the corrupt military dictator said he was our friend. What could go wrong? And why would Iran want nuclear weapons just because it has a nuclear Pakistan to the east, and the U.S. military immediately to the West. I mean, really, why wouldn't they trust us? We only have their best interests at heart.

Anyway, so the American public is pretty sick of the matter, which I'm sure comes as a complete surprise to Islamic radicals in the Middle East, and we had an off-year election in 2006. Lo and behold, a lot of warmongers lost their seats in Congress and the Senate. Congress flipped, and everyone expected the whole foreign policy situation to change immediately.

Because George W. Bush had shown himself such a flexible guy up to this point. I mean, the people speak and he listens.

Besides, Congress is so very, very powerful. It's not like the President can just ignore what it says, right? And Bush never uses his veto power, well, at least he didn't up until the point when Congress stopped giving him absolutely everything he asked for.

Anyway, some people are pissed at Congress. How dare they not take the 51-49 vote mandate in the Senate and just stop the war? It's easy. Cut off the money, pass a law, impeach the bastard. Etc. Etc.

It has been my observation that it's very easy to tell other people how to do their jobs. Everybody's job looks easy from the outside. And maybe all it really would take is some "leadership," and some "courage," though I have to think that those aren't really that high up on the real talents required in Congress. And one might consider parsing that "courage" thing to remember that every member of Congress has to be thinking that their phones are tapped, that maybe their offices are bugged, and that there is a legion of political operatives ready to run with any hint of a scandal. Hell, in 2002 and 2004 we had two decorated war heroes lose elections because their patriotism was called into question. What do you think would have happened if there had been a real scandal to work with? Oh, and there's the part about how the U.S. Attorney's in Bush's Justice Department have been cooking up fake investigations of Democratic candidates just before elections.

But all it takes is a little courage—say internet bloggers and commenters who don't even use their real names online.

The Conservative Movement has been trying to take control of the country for at least the last 50 years, using the same fear-and-smear tactics all the while, but with a growing ideological base that allows them to paint a nice coat of rationalization over what is basically just Big Man Authoritarianism. September 11 gave them their chance and they glommed onto it and rode that puppy into the ground, feeding on the deaths long after the remaining bodies had been buried. The only thing that prevented the establishment of the Theocratic Plutocracy that they really, really want is that the whole enterprise is irrational and contradictory. Oh, and undemocratic.

But going off on a snit and blaming the current Congress for not cleaning up the whole thing immediately, that's also pretty undemocratic, too. We had a single election. That's not enough to usher in the Progressive Utopia. (I'm pretty much on record as not thinking Utopias are a good idea, anyway).

It has taken decades for the Conservative Movement to bring the country to its current miserable state. It will take that long (at least) to dig ourselves out of it. Those who want the overnight fix are setting themselves up for another ride on the Authoritarian roller coaster, or maybe just another big disappointment. I'm hoping for the last one, in fact. It's less of a betrayal of what I like to think my country is about.

Dust Explosions

Dust Explosion in a Coal Mine



There are two kinds of sparks. One kind is the electrical spark, where a potential charge bridges the gap between two conductors. Electrical sparks span the range from that little flash you see when you touch the door knob after walking across the carpet when the air is dry, to the lightning flash caused by clouds playing with themselves.

The other kind of spark is basically a small particle burning in air. Those are the ones you see coming off of the campfire, or when you strike flint. One of the fun things to do with the old Gilbert Chemistry set is to take some of the iron filings and shake a few into the flame of the alcohol lamp. Or you can make a paste of some iron filings, potassium nitrate, charcoal, and a starch binder. Put it on a stick, let it dry and you have sparklers. Alternately, you can just drive to the nearest store that has a 50 foot sign that says !!!!FIREWORKS!!!! and just buy a few.

People don’t usually think of iron as something that burns, because most of the iron we deal with every day won’t. Very few solids will actually burn in ordinary air (air under pressure, pure oxygen, chlorine, fluorine, etc. are another matter). Wood, for example, emits combustible gases when heated, so wood burns by what is a complex, multistage process. Charcoal is similar; it has to be very hot, and then the carbon combines with oxygen to make CO, and the CO is what burns in a charcoal flame (which you mostly don’t want, since you’d rather have hot charcoal embers). Moreover, and this is very important, charcoal is porous, so it has a large surface area.

One of the most important features of physical geometry is the cube-square law. This is the recognition that, as things get larger, they have proportionally more volume to surface area (or any other two dimensional feature such as cross section). That’s because, as things get larger, their surface area changes as the square of linear dimension, while the volume increases as a cube, so volume goes up faster. Conversely, as things get smaller, surface effects begin to get more and more important. Chemical reactions between two different substances can only occur where the substances touch each other; for a solid and a gas, that is at the surface of the solid.

So oxidation of a bulk solid takes place at its surface, and, for big objects, that tends to be pretty slow. So iron slowly oxidizes on its surface to form rust. Because rust is porous and crumbly (that being because iron oxide is much bigger than the original iron), rust is progressive and will slowly rust the whole piece of iron. Aluminum, on the other hand, forms a tough oxide film on its surface, and that protects the rest of the aluminum from oxidation.

Chop a metal bar into fine enough pieces, however, and the dynamic changes. Iron filings will oxidize much more rapidly than if they were in an iron bar. Moreover, the oxidation rate increases with temperature. Heat the filings enough and the oxidation will take off and the whole filing will rapidly burn: a spark. You can also burn ordinary steel wool, incidentally.

Chop your particles even further and they will get to the size where they can be suspended in air. Get the right mix of combustible particles and air, and the burning can coordinate itself into a self-propagating flame front. Confine the particles in an enclosure and you can get a dust explosion.

I’ve been talking about iron particles, but any combustible material will do, and the most common types of dust explosions are in coal mines and in granaries and flour mills. The coal mine part seems pretty obvious, but people don’t usually think of flour as an explosive or even as combustible. Strictly speaking flour isn’t explosive; it’s just that, under the right conditions, it can burn rapidly enough in a confined space to cause what is called a “pressure burst” explosion. In other words, under the right conditions, a grain elevator can become a pipe bomb.



Grain elevators used to protect against dust buildup by rapid ventilation. That, however, sometimes caused local air quality problems, violations of the ambient air quality standards for particulate matter. So ventilation was reduced, and air filters were added, and sometimes the air filters weren’t maintained as properly as they should, so bang.

Actually, the dust filters themselves were sometimes a problem, since they concentrated the dust in a small space, and sometimes the filter itself would have a dust explosion. Sometimes, because the filter contained a lot of previously collected dust, a minor filter explosion would push the contained dust into a larger volume, and then a larger, secondary explosion would result.

That’s a specific example of the more general problem in dust explosions: secondary explosions. Often the amount of dust in the air was fairly small in comparison to the amount of settled dust in a container, or in a coal mine, or whatever. The first, small explosion would shake the area enough to push a lot more dust into suspension, and then that dust would ignite and cause the much larger pressure burst. In some ways, the geometry of the situation resembles that in a CVCC engine, where a small ignition chamber shoots a flame front into a larger combustion chamber. Only in the case of a flour mill or coal mine, the primary ignition also mixes the fuel with in the larger chamber.

There’s a standard educational lab demonstration that uses a pipe or small container, a funnel attached to an air hose, some flour and a candle to demonstrate dust explosions. A more dramatic demonstration of the secondary explosion effect would be to put a pan of flour on top of the first pipe, and have the pan shoot the flour into the air in a larger volume, like a shipping container perhaps. However, that might be a little rough on the shipping container.

Besides, I don’t want to give anyone ideas. The day that bags of flour are viewed as the tools of terrorists is the day that I’m packing my bags for New Zealand.

Detcord

So I just got back from Loscon, and boy, are my arms tired. Seriously, we drove, and that always tires my arms.

One of the things about gatherings of all sorts, of course, is that you meet interesting people with interesting stories. One of the folks I shared a panel with (Future Horror, I think it was) is a special effects pyrotechnician. That's part of the deal with Loscon, the connection to the movie biz, especially the technonerdy parts, which I find fascinating because, well, because.

After the panel, he told me a story about going through airport security. The name of this company was on his briefcase, bags, etc., and it included the word "pyrotechnics" and possibly, "explosives." Never mind. He was "randomly selected" for a bag check, and the guy swabbed his briefcase, then fed it into the sniffer. He scratched his head, then took another swab sample and fed it in again. Then he looked at the guy and asked, "What's PETN?"

That would be pentaerythritol tetranitrate, official IUPAC name: 1,3-Dinitrato-2,2-bis (nitratomethyl) propane. It's the principle ingredient in detcord, detonating cord that's used as a superfast fuse for triggering simultaneous explosions.

Okay, so the name "Department of Homeland Security" gives me the Orwellian creeps to start with. I noticed several weeks ago that on the TV show Smallville, they concocted a fictional name for the same organization and called it the "Department of Domestic Security." Smallville is based on Superman, a comic book character. What does it say when a comic book story has a less hokey name than the real thing?

Many people have noted the ongoing dynamic of "terrorism," where real or imagined threats are taken as license not to make policy changes that might actually address security, but rather as excuses to erode legal rights, expand police authority, and generally harass segments of the populace. Part of the wink, wink, nudge, nudge is that the Authoritarian Right assumes that these powers will never be used on them, but rather on other ethnic groups and the Right's political—and social—enemies. They are wrong, of course, but they never figure that part out. There are Russians who still yearn for the good old days of Stalin. For that matter, some still yearn for the Czar.

A recent trilogy of episodes on South Park had the nice conceit of terrorists invading "Imaginationland," literally attacking, not reality, but our imaginations. Last June, after Amy had her toothpaste confiscated by airline security, I realized that the policy of confiscating gels and liquids was to protect us from the terrorists in "Die Hard with a Vengence," i.e., from a type of explosive that does not actually exist, but has appeared in a movie.

Then there is the phenomenon of various pundits just salivating at the prospect of another 9/11 type event, often fantasizing it taking out some "left wing type" who have transgressed, who "don't love America," at least certainly not enough to fantasize about having famous landmarks blown up because they didn't like some election result.

Okay, so none of this is new, and, frankly, there are plenty of people who have been commenting on the politics of it for longer and at greater length than I have, and many of them are better at it. So why am I adding my oar to the water? Because of the other little thing that slips by in this story.

The airport security guard who asks "What is PETN?" is not to blame in this story. He's underpaid and undertrained and he knows full well that his job is basically harassing people, not actually improving their security. Besides, the sheer boredom of swabbing people's shoes and briefcases day after day would turn almost anyone's brain to mush.

But this stuff is supposed to be important, right? Shouldn't they at least try for the appearance of competence? Well, that would violate Conservative Movement Ideology, wouldn't it? I mean, government is supposed to be incompetent.

But wait. These are not government employees. They are employees of companies that have been contracted to provide these services. These companies are supposed to be "more efficient" than government.

Ah, but more efficient at what? Well, the purpose of it all has come to be "provide shareholder value," which is to say, "to make money." And there is some efficiency there, after all. But paying your workers well, training them, well, that just gets in the way of efficiency.

I once saw a documentary on John L. Lewis, who ran the United Mineworkers of America for 40 years. It was mostly coal mining, and coal mining is dirty, dangerous, and brutal. Lewis pushed not only for more money, but also higher safety standards. And he made what amounted to a long term bargain with the coal industry: they would not oppose mechanization if the miners got their fair share of the wealth that derived from enhanced productivity. It made sense; mechanized jobs required higher skills, more experience, and were safer. But there would be fewer of them. So Lewis got more money for fewer workers, undercutting his own political power for the good of those that remained.

The same thing happened with longshoremen when containerization came in. Nowadays, "stevedore" is essentially an archaicism; the men in the longshoremens union run those giant cranes and are paid very well. Ben tells me that Eric Hoffer wrote about the phenomenon in one of his books.

That was the deal as everyone understood it after WWII: rising productivity meant better pay in fewer jobs, but the economy as a whole would create jobs, especially "knowledge based" jobs that required college degrees, etc., so overall wages would increase and productivity would rise. They hadn't coined the phrase "win/win" yet, but there it was.

Somewhere along the line, that pact was broken. Somewhere between 1950 and now, the new business model became that of a South American banana republic: beat down the wages for the masses of workers so that those at the top could skim more cream. This is sometimes called the "Walmart model."

It pains me to think that both the engineering profession and science fiction were enablers to breaking the pact, but there that is as well. Engineers have always been their own worst enemies, partly because we love the work so much, and partly because so many engineers wind up in management. But I do not get the part about slowly undercutting the value of expertise and training. It took me forever to realize that new technologies were being accepted or rejected on the basis of whether or not they allowed the substitution of unskilled labor for skilled labor. And once that process begins, you get more and more highly capable people shoved into lower and lower scale jobs. I've lost count of the number of people I know who have to "dumb down" their resumes to find employment. Then, because the workforce is, in fact, overqualified, really, really, stupid managerial decisions sometimes can be made to work—simply because of the sheer competence of the labor force.

As for science fiction, Analog magazine has been the SF equivalent of Fox News for at least a couple of decades now. When was the last time you read an SF story that portrayed a union or government bureaucrat in a favorable light?

At the top, of course, the push for this new business model is the same as it always was: more booty for those who divvy up the spoils. There has been a huge effort to rationalize the vast sums paid to these folks as "the superstar effect," as if a CEO who gets a $50 million pay packet when his company has lost $2 billion in the quarter is somehow comparable to Barry Bonds. Or some hold that "people skills" have become the most important thing in the economy. Which is true, provided "people skills" is shorthand for "kiss up, kick down," treachery, mendacity, and the ability to pass off criminal behavior as standard business practice.

Lavoisier

Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier was born in 1743 to Jean-Antoine Lavoisier, a prominent lawyer, and Emilie Punctis, who belonged to a rich and influential family, and who died when Antoine-Laurent was five years old. He was basically raised by his maiden aunt Mlle Constance Punctis, who arranged for his education at the College Mazarin, which was noted for its faculty of science.

Although young Antoine completed a law degree in accordance with family wishes, his true calling was in science. On the basis of his early scientific work, primarily in geology, he was elected at the age of 25—to the Academy of Sciences, France’s most elite scientific society.

In the same year as his election to the Academy, in order to finance his scientific research, he bought into the Ferme Générale, the private corporation that collected taxes for the Crown on a for profit (as you can see, “privatization” is hardly a new idea). A few years later he married the daughter of another “tax farmer.” Her name was Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, and she was not quite 14 at the time. Madame Lavoisier learned English, in order to translate the work of British chemists like Joseph Priestley and Henry Cavendish for her husband. She also studied art and engraving and illustrated Lavoisier’s scientific experiments.

Lavoisier has been called the “father of modern chemistry” for good reason. He established the principle of conservation of mass in chemistry and physics, and performed a series of experiments which, combined with the work of Priestly and Cavendish, overthrew the theory of phlogiston as an explanation of combustion, and thereafter the swept away the classical theory of the elements (earth, air, fire, and water). Lavoisier’s replacement table of the elements ran to some 33 “irreducible substances” most of which were what we today recognize as elements, such as mercury, sulfur, and oxygen, which he renamed from “dephlogistonized air.” He also performed such flashy experiments as demonstrating that diamond is made from carbon by burning one in an atmosphere of pure oxygen.

During the Reign of Terror in 1794, Antoine Lavoisier was arrested, along with 27 others, by the French Revolutionary Tribune for abusing the office of Ferme Générale by adulterating tobacco with water. They were guillotined the same day. When asked for his defense, Lavoisier is famously said to have remarked, “I am a scientist,” to which the tribunal replied, “The Revolution has no need of scientists.” Then “snick” went the head of Lavoisier. That’s the famous part of the story, anyway, usually given as a cautionary tale about the anti-science nature of revolutions.

Popular accounts often omit the predatory nature of the Ferme Générale, which was, after all, basically a protection racket, there being no limit to the taxes collected except what the tax collectors could gouge from the populace. The Crown got its share, but everything above that was pure profit, and the agency was very profitable, profitable enough to finance the purchase of diamonds to burn, something which was probably well-known to the revolutionaries.

So Lavoisier, despite actually being a politically liberal who had worked for many reforms, was vulnerable to the revolutionary fervor of the times. Still, he might have survived, were it not for the fact that he had a famous enemy, one Jean-Paul Marat. Yes, that Marat.

Why did Marat hate Lavoisier? Because, years before, Marat had applied for membership in the French Academy and had been rejected, with Lavoisier being a major factor in the rejection. It seems that Marat had taken to the idea of “animal magnetism” as propounded by Franz Mesmer, a process also called Mesmerism, and which is now called hypnosis. The French Academy had appointed a commission of scientists, which included Lavoisier, and also the American Ambasador, one Benjamin Franklin to look into the matter. The commission concluded that animal magnetism was “the product of mere imagination,” thus dashing Marat’s hopes for acceptance.

Think of it perhaps as being denied tenure.

So fate set up Laviosier for the perfect storm of vengeance, from Marat, over the professional slight, from the revolutionary tribunal over the tax farming business, and perhaps even from those who had been outraged by the extravagance of burning a fabulous gemstone simply to prove that it was just another form of coal.

The story doesn’t end there, though. Lavoisier’s widow remarried, to an Englishman whose language she spoke (in more ways than one) because of her service to her brilliant husband. The Englishman’s name was Benjamin Thompson, also known as Count Rumford. Thompson had been born in America, and was a Tory who fled the colonies after the American Revolution, leaving his wife behind (forever, as it turned out). He conducted studies on the physics of gunpowder explosions and manufactured munitions. During the course of boring out cannons, he took careful measurements of the heat generated. On the basis of those experiments, using the same methods whereby Lavoisier had overthrown the theory of phlogiston he established that one of Lavoisier’s proposed elements, caloric, could not be an element, and must be for form of energy, of motion (albeit, motion at the smallest scale). This was published in 1798.

What part did Marie-Anne play in all of this? She and Thompson were married in 1804 (Thompson’s wife having died some time before), and separated shortly thereafter. So Marie-Anne came too late as Thompson’s wife to be said to have played a role in his earlier researches. Still, there might be more to it all than that, but I’m not sure I can get through all the layers of irony in the stories of these interwoven lives, to say precisely what.

Koufax

On August 8, 1964, Sandy Koufax was took a lead off second base and barely managed to get back in time to beat a pick-off throw. In the sliding dive back to second, he jammed his pitching arm. Nevertheless, he pitched two more games in rotation, but after his 19th win of the season, he awoke the next morning to discover he couldn’t straighten his arm. He finished the ’64 season with a 19-5 record, and traumatic arthritis in his arm.

Koufax had already pitched 3 no-hitters in his career, and had triumphed in the 1963 World Series, winning two out of the four wins of the Dodger sweep of the Yankees. His record in 1963 was 25-5, and Yogi Berra famously remarked after game 1 of the World Series, "I can see how he won 25 games. What I don't understand is how he lost five."

But some of Koufax’s greatest achievements lay ahead of him, including a perfect game, a second World Series win for the Dodgers, and a second Cy Young award. He could have done none of it without drugs.

He took Empirin with codeine for pain, assisted by Butazolin an NSAID as both a painkiller and anti-inflammatory. But the real drug of necessity was cortisone, a corticosteroid.

Okay, corticosteroids aren’t the same as anabolic steroids. In some ways, they are more dangerous, since physical dependence comes quickly, with the body’s adrenal glands deciding that they can go to sleep for a while, it’s all covered, and then, when the cortisone is stopped, you get “adrenal insufficiency,” which means “die from trying to climb a flight of stairs.”

Any way you figure it, however, Koufax extended his career by using drugs that were unavailable in previous eras. There is no asterisk by any of his records, however. Nothing says, “Perfect game made possible only by the use of drugs.”

I saw a cartoon some while back, maybe in the New Yorker. It showed a young boy in a drug store asking, “Is this where you have the home run pills?” Again, he was inquiring about anabolic steroids, wasn’t he? It wouldn’t have been as funny if he’d been asking, “Is this where I get the fast bicycle shots?” but that would have been part of the zeitgeist as well, though EPO doesn’t have the same cachet as anabolic steroids, partly because you don’t get those really cool muscles.

How many baseball players have taken anabolic steroids. Hard to say, but the short answer is “very many.” How many of them hit over 70 home runs in a single season of professional baseball? One. But he doesn’t count, because he took drugs. Whenever drugs appear in the narrative, the narrative becomes about the drugs. It’s “cheating” to use drugs to enhance performance, even when, as is the case for anabolic steroids, major effort is required to actually achieve that enhancement. Anabolic steroids are an adjunct to weight training; without diligent effort, the gains are minimal. And without serious training, incorporating added muscle mass into a sport can cause a reduction in ability, rather than a gain.

But the narrative says that taking performance enhancing drugs is cheating. Except, of course, when it isn’t. Sandy Koufax benefits from a different, more powerful narrative. He was “playing hurt.” Then it’s okay to take the drugs. That’s not cheating; that’s “heroic.”

So we have contrasting morality plays. Anabolic steroids are bad, because they can hurt you (which is true, especially for adolescents). That argument would carry more weight were it not for the fact that so many sports can hurt you in and of themselves. Try watching a retired pro football player walk—or rather hobble—sometime. If preventing injury were the point of it, would we even allow the sport of boxing?

And the health and injury dangers of anabolic steroids pale in comparison to “play while hurt” or “work through the pain” commandments. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I knew more than one coach in my time who was a sadistic SOB. A lot of “sport” is about pain, the giving and receiving of it, with the sport itself a gloss upon the basic sadomasochistic dance. In any case, compare the number of professional athletes with the number who blew out their knee, or tore a rotator cup, or fill in the blank for yet another career ending injury before the career even happened.

And if you’re really worried about impressionable young athletes, why are you putting these drug stories on the front pages of the newspapers? Do you really think that you can teach a teenage boy that it’s okay to risk destroying his body on the playing field, and that playing through the pain is the highest achievement in sport, and then expect him to refrain from taking a performance enhancing drug just because it might hurt him, and besides, it’s against the rules, or at least it is if he gets caught?

Nancy Reagan's Astrologer

If you do a little research, you'll find that the most dangerous profession in the United States is "timber cutter," aka "lumberjack." (Short pause for Monty Python nostalgia). Look at the stats a little more closely, and you see that, while the timber cutters, with 118 deaths per 100,000 per year die more often than fishermen generally (71 d/100000/y), Alaskan crab fishers are at greater risk: a shocking 400/100K/y.

Even so, Alaskan fishing is not the most dangerous job in the U.S. Being President is much more dangerous.

We've had 1 assassinated President since Eisenhower (the first President I remember), and 4 since the office was created. Both of those stats work out to be 1 death every 54 years, about 1850/100K/y, more than 4 times as dangerous as fishing for crab in Alaska. And it doesn't stop there. Of the 10 presidents in my lifetime, 8 had people sent to jail (or worse) for plotting/trying to kill them (the lucky 2 were Eisenhower and Johnson). One (Reagan) was seriously injured and could easily have died. One (Ford) had two separate incidents where members of the Manson Family (oh good grief) tried to kill him; in one case the shots went wild, and in the other, the dingbat apparently didn't know how to take the safety off. When I say "dingbat," incidentally, I am not implying that I wish she'd been more competent. I liked Ford, and I'm glad he lived a nice long life.

Still, looking at the stats over the past half century, if you become President you've got a near certainty that people are plotting to kill you, a 30% change you'll be fired upon, a 20% chance of being hit, and 10% chance of being killed. During the Lewinsky nonsense, a lot of people got very incensed about Clinton's "recklessness." Man, if there was ever a job that selected for reckless, it's being President, and hanky panky with an intern doesn't even make the charts, in my view.

Of course, Presidents get plenty to offset the risks, power, fame, money, all the alpha male perks. But what about their wives? Did those two attempts on her husband's life help put Betty Ford into the rehab business? She's the obvious one, but I daresay that other First Ladies have had to battle the demons without the opiate of power to help balance the scales.

Now maybe my memory is faulty, but I don't remember much reporting about Nancy Reagan's astrology kink before the incident that almost killed Ronnie. I do remember hearing the shaking heads complaining about how she was jerking his schedule around, based on her astrologer's advice; I'm pretty sure that was after Hinkley. Ah, silly superstitious bitch, how dare she inconvenience people, make the President's schedule unpredictable. How dare she, in fact, do the very thing that security experts say is one of the best things to do if there are death threats against "the target." Which is to say that, whoever was complaining about Nancy's interference, I'll bet it wasn't the Secret Service.

Now realize, I've never liked Nancy Reagan and I still don't. There's nothing special about my opinion in that respect; a lot of people don't like her, and I'm one of them. And I don't like astrology, either. Pseudoscientific crap is the short version. But, given the circumstances, I'd have to say that NR's response to the situation was more productive than alcohol or prayer. She might even have known that at the time.