Author: Gil

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Axis of Green

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, my drunken Irish readers! It’s not yet 9am local time, so I’ll assume you only have a good buzz on at present!

It’s a hectic weekend here at stately VM Manor. I’ve got plenty of writing to do for my magazine — two articles (regional bio-investment and disposable bioprocessing systems) and an overhaul of our 20-page annual glossary of pharma & biopharma terms — so expect little by way of posting.

Still, I couldn’t let the “running of the green” go by without a wacky article. In this case, it’s a piece from Der Spiegel about how much trouble the German automakers are having building hybrid cars:

[Toyota representatives] told [Porsche CEO] Wiedeking that they could help him, but only by providing the full package — in other words, the platform for the entire vehicle. The Japanese insisted that merely buying the individual components, as Wiedeking had envisioned, made no sense. The Asians politely advised the Porsche boss not to underestimate the complexity of hybrid engines. Wiedeking’s talks with Toyota quickly came to an end.

Today Porsche’s engineers know that the Toyota executives were by no means trying to make fools of them two years ago. The engineers discovered first hand just how sincere the Japanese had actually been when they set out to develop, in a joint effort with Volkswagen, a hybrid engine at Volkswagen’s research center in the town of Isenbüttel near VW’s Wolfsburg headquarters. But the project failed to progress as smoothly as the Germans had expected.

Enjoy. And go drink yourself stupid.

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Drugs’re bad, mmmkay?

Scot Pollard hasn’t had a distinguished career in the NBA. He has shown off some tremendously bad haircuts, which I give him credit for, because not a lot of white guys go with crazy styles in the league.

Although he had a bright yellow mohawk going earlier this season, he has a more conservative look now. He also made one of the funniest in-game comments, um, EVER:

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Explain that to St. Peter, mon General

It’s all a bit of a blur after I invented wine.

–Bacchus

Doing the Islands with Bacchus, a collection of comics by Eddie Campbell, is one of my all-time faves. Consisting of a travelogue of Bacchus and friends around the Greek islands, the comics relate the “real” stories behind some of the Greek myths, along with digressions on the history of fashion, the art of vinoculture, the discovery of champagne, and the nature of the afterlife (or afterdeath, as it turns out). Importantly, Campbell achieves this while keeping his characters as characters. That is, they don’t simply recite facts, but rather bring different perspectives and styles.

The Last of the Summer Wine, a 24-pager narrated by Bacchus’ companion Simpson as he, Bacchus and Hermes travel to Naxos by boat, is a marvel. The story manages to convey the glory of ancient Greek culture, make wry observations (verbal and visual) about the power of myth, and lead to a wonderfully poignant conclusion about the essence of love. Maybe it’s that inner classics-geek I’ve been referring to lately, but the final page of that comic always chokes me up.

I bring all this up because Campbell recently wrote about one of his major influences on those comic strips: the books of Walter James. I’d never heard of James before this, and with good reason. Sez Campbell, “He was an Australian wine maker who wrote several volumes of diaristic thoughts on just about everything, but mostly about winemaking and his enthusiasm for reading. They were published between 1949 (Barrel and Book,) and 1957 (Antipasto) and amounted to six volumes, of which I’ve managed to find four.”

Give Eddie’s post a read, take some delight in the excerpts of James’ writing, and tip a little libation to Bacchus, wouldja?

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Hammertime

Amy had to work late on Monday, so our anniversary dinner consisted of pizza and the rest of a fantastic bottle of champagne left over from the weekend (a wedding gift). We gave each other our “paper anniversary” gifts: she got me a wonderful print of a New Orleans photo by Frank Relle, and I gave her an IOU for a photo album / book of memories that I’m in the process of making. It’ll be great. Just late.

In keeping with our made-for-each-other-ness, we also hunted through TiVo to find an episode of Mythbusters that we wanted to catch: Underwater Car. As the episode guide says,

If you’re unfortunate enough to drive your vehicle into the drink, is it possible to escape, or will a watery grave be your fate? Heading poolside, the guys get their feet wet by doing some intensive underwater training. Then the pressure is on as they seat themselves inside a submerged car and do their darndest to get out.

Entertaining and educational! It promised to be even better than the Diet Coke & Mentos episode!

We zipped through the “B-Team” segments, which we were convinced was assigned to them as a joke: “Why don’t you guys go figure out if a piece of paper can actually be folded more than seven times or something?”

The first thing I learned about a car in the drink is that, once the vehicle is completely filled with water, the pressure equalizes and the doors will open pretty easily. Getting to that equalization point without running out of oxygen is a challenge. And before that point, the pressure of the water makes it impossible to get the door open.

The Mythbusters tested to see whether windows are openable underwater. As it turns out, the manual window strips its gears without opening, while an electric window, though still operable despite the presence of water, isn’t strong enough to open the window against the weight of the water in even minimal circumstances. So if you go in the drink, get the door or window open quickly, before too much pressure builds up.

Now, faux macho psycho that I am, I’ve long contended that, were I trapped in Underwater Car, I’d kick out / shatter a window and escape that way. This belief is based solely on the fact that I once cracked the windshield of my car with a single punch, about 15 years ago. (My brother was pretty impressed.) I always figured that it meant a panicked Gil would be perfectly able to crack one of the windows enough for the water-pressure to shatter the whole shebang, allowing me to escape. (Of course, it’s possible that Hyundai was using substandard glass in its windshields, but hey.)

Or, as it turns out, I could just use the LifeHammer.

After discovering that windows aren’t openable, the Mythbusters tested various ways to break an underwater car window. They found that standard “things you’d have in the car,” like keys or a cellphone, wouldn’t make a scratch. Even kicking the glass with steel-toed boots didn’t do the trick. So they resorted to a hammer designed to shatter the window in emergency situations (or if you’re a carjacker, I guess). It smashed the glass so completely, with what appeared to be a moderate swing, that I immediately jumped onto Amazon to add a couple of them to my shopping list.

Now I just have to figure out which wedding anniversary is the “glass-shattering hammer” one.

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Monday Morning Montaigne

I was pretty excited when I saw that the next essay in my Montaigne collection was Of Friendship. I saved it till Saturday morning, figuring I’d be able to spend the day ruminating on his ideas of the subject and how they jibed — or failed to jibe — with my own. Unfortunately, I found this essay pretty unenlightening and, well, boring.

Of Friendship is intended to introduce poems by Montaigne’s dead friend, political philosopher Etienne de La Boetie, but what it focuses on is the character of their “once in three centuries” friendship. In the process of describing the intense, four-year relationship the men shared, Montaigne proceeds to dismiss the possibility of true friendship between a man and

  • his dad (too much respect)
  • his brother (too much sibling rivalry)
  • a girl (too much lust; a 16th century version of When Harry Met Sally)
  • a fag (see above, and note “[T]hat other, licentious Greek love is justly abhorred by our morality.”)
  • more than one guy (too much sharing)

So I was let down, especially because my brother and my wife are two of my closest friends, there are a number of other friends I’d (essentially) go to the end of the earth for, and I once contemplated having two guys killed to avenge a brutal assault on a queer friend of mine (not that we shared that other, licentious Greek love or anything).

Anyway, rather than pass on any excerpts from that stuff, I thought I’d share with you the opening to the essay. It mirrors my own tendency to start off strong and end up all over the darned place:

As I was considering the way a painter I employ went about his work, I had a mind to imitate him. He chooses the best spot, the middle of each wall, to put a picture labored over with all his skill, and the empty space around it he fills with grotesques, which are fantastic paintings whose only charm lies in their variety and strangeness. And what are these essays of mine, in truth, but grotesques and monstrous bodies, pieced together of divers members, without definite shape, having no order, sequence or proportion other than accidental?

“A lovely woman tapers off into a fish.” [Horace]

I do indeed go along with my painter in this second point, but I fall short in the first and better part; for my ability does not go far enough for me to dare to undertake a rich, polished picture, formed according to art.

Fortunately, the next few essays are Of Moderation, Of Cannibals, and Of the Custom of Wearing Clothes, so I figure there should be some more entertaining posts in the weeks ahead.