The Inevitability of Blivets

The following is reprinted with permission of the author, who submitted it as a comment in the delightfully irreverent Horse Pucky.  Therein, the lovely Pam had referred to the military standard "blivet," which consists of 10 lb of digestive effluent in a 5-lb bag.  But wait!  There's more!

This is for the engineers in the group.

Aerospace engineers (one of which I once was) recognize a unique commercial mutation of the military specification blivet.  As you may not want to know, airplane toilets are "serviced" via an offloading hose attached to a valve on the side of the fuselage.  Sadly, this valve inevitably gets - um - clogged.  With further inevitability, these valves leak a little.

Leakage speeds up as the altitude increases (there is a formula for this), and the leak continues apace as the airplane cruises at 30,000 feet.  It's really cold up there.  So the leakage tends to form a frozen - shall we say - globule, which adheres tightly to the side of the aircraft.  Our globule grows ever bigger as the flight continues and the back-pressure on the valve continues to increase.  Inevitably.  There comes a moment when our burgeoning "blivet" - you can see how it might have gotten that name - becomes heavy enough to lose adhesion, and it plummets from the heavens.

No, it does not burn up on re-entry (this is no meteorite).  Inevitably, the bright blue blivet - you do remember that airplane toilets flush blue, don't you? - anyway, the bright blue blivet always lands in a farmer's field, usually in Iowa, frightening the cows something terrible.

Upon discovering the source of the cows' discomfiture, the farmer inevitably phones the authorities with tales of imminent extraterrestrial invasion.  The authorities, having heard it before, call the local airport to inquire.  The resulting report inevitably appears in the weekly report that crosses a certain aerospace engineer's desk.  About once a week.

That's a blivet. 

Newt

Wimple, Wimple on a Bun

I fell asleep last night thinking about wimples.  This doesn't happen often.

A wimple, for those of you raised in some heathen tradition, is the starched, white linen gadget that nuns used to wear around their head and face, like a Catholic ḥijāb.  Sally Field wore one in The Flying Nun.  Yes, before there was that Academy Award thing and even before Burt Reynolds - but after Gidget, of course - there was Sister Bertrille.  Okay, okay - I watched it some.  There was a period in my young life when I was still confused about some things.  More confused than now, I mean.

Anyway, Sally Fields wore this funky wimple - "funky" was a legitimate word back then - with a couple of giant gull-wing appendages that magically imbued the hot little nun with the gift of flight.  Nobody ever really got the point of all this, but Sally was still Gidget back then, and you could get away with a lot if you were Gidget.  At least with guys you could, despite the fact that the wimple and the rest of the white habit rendered Sally effectively sexless.  Unless you had a hinky little wimple thing going.

So I watched.  Television and sex were simpler in the 70s.  Or the 60's.  But who's counting?

Enter the James Beard Society.  If James Beard was the Pope of Food, then his Society, even today, is the College of Culinary Cardinals.  They might have been the Bishopric of Bon Appetit, but given the state of contemporary priestly society, "Bishopric" carves a bit too close to the bone.

Recently, the JBS decided to name five "Classic American Restaurants."  It's what the JBS does - name things.  It canonized Shady Glen, from my hometown of Manchester, Connecticut.

Shady Glen's glory is its "classic" cheeseburger.  The Glen's original owner, long before Burt Reynolds and even before Gidget, discovered that if you drape three big pieces of cheese over a hamburger while it's grilling, the overhanging cheese crisps up like some God-blessed cheesy potato chip.  As the cheese begins to crackle, the grill man lifts and sculpts it into a soaring, swooping set of wings:  a cheeseburger wimple to make Sally Field jealous.

I have worshiped Shady Glen's cheeseburgers since long before I discovered Gidget.  Girls, after all, come and go.  (Okay, most of them come and go; my wife reads these things.)  But a wimpled Shady Glen burger was, is, and I hope always will be paradise on a bun.  The James Beard Society got it right.

Newt.. 



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Pedaling My La-Z-Boy to Glory

I own three bicycles, not one of which rides itself.  Two of them live on my front porch lanai behind my comfy La-Z-Boy.  That's the nice thing about a La-Z-Boy.  You never have to pedal a La-Z-Boy.

A couple of months back, in the height of our gloriously mild winter, I cleaned and polished my bikes to a gleaming luster, oiled the chains, greased the nice leather saddles.  Put them carefully back on the lanai behind the La-Z-Boy and headed out to play bridge.  Bike cleaning takes so much out of you.

Before I retired to Florida, I averaged about 5000 miles a year cycling.  As such an experienced cyclist, I am rather demanding, as you might imagine.  I have expectations of bicycling that Florida has a tough time meeting.  There aren't any damn hills here, for one thing, hills like the ones I used to devour in Connecticut.  Nothing here gets even remotely vertical.  And what's the point of riding on endlessly flat terrain?  Not enough of a workout to bother with, really.

But I do subscribe to Bicycling magazine, which I read while sitting in my La-Z-Boy in front of my two gleaming bikes.  The third bike, by the way, is a beach cruiser, a relaxed rider that I bought especially for riding on the packed sand along the miles of  beautiful beach that we have here.  I keep it in the shed, where I have to climb over it to get to my gardening tools.  That's why I never use gardening tools.  In fact, I dropped my subscription to Modern Gardening magazine.  The bike in the shed makes gardening ridiculously difficult.

I paid $40 a few months back for a three-month membership in the municipal athletic facility, which has a nice selection of bike machines.  Trouble is, they are not like the real thing - no wind in your face, and the artificial "hills" you can program in are not at all convincing.  Waste of money if you ask me.

I once rode a bicycle from Manchester, Connecticut to Bar Harbor, Maine.  Yessir, fully loaded for camping and cooking along the road.  The stories I could tell you about that week in the saddle; it was the adventure of a lifetime.  I would definitely do that again if I still lived in Connecticut.  When it comes to bicycling, you can't beat Connecticut.

Recently I decided that I should ride again, even if the roads are too flat.  I bought nice new pedals for my favorite bike and installed a new bike computer so I can track all my miles on my laptop while sitting in my La-Z-Boy.  I get tremendous inspiration from the statistics of exercise; it's the engineer in me, I suppose.  The software was much harder to install than I expected.  Stupid programmers!  How am I supposed to ride if my bike computer doesn't read accurately?

My favorite bike is a custom touring job that set me back more than any new car I owned before the age of 40.  If you look at my new picture at the top of this blog, you can just make out the seat post of that bike sticking up over my right ear.  (The picture was taken sitting in my La-Z-Boy.)  That bike has a Shimano Deore XT drivetrain and Chris King hubs and bearings, which make the bike ride like a dream.  I get tremendous satisfaction owning a fine piece of equipment like that.  It's best use is fully loaded touring, like that ride to Bar Harbor.  That was a ride, all right.  Hard to do that here in Florida.  Bar Harbor being so far away, I mean.

Anyway, I'm thinking of buying new tires to replace the ones that have gotten ratty after sitting for the past two years.  I would not want to go out on a long ride only to blow a tire 30 miles out.  Modern technology is great for tire shopping.  I can sit here in my La-Z-Boy, scanning the tire ads in my magazine and order them on line without getting out of my chair.

For shorter rides, I have a great carbon fiber bike that is super fast on flat roads and even up hills if we had any.  Trouble is there's really no place to ride here in Tampa Bay because of the traffic.  The traffic is so bad they put in a long bike trail that goes from Tarpon Springs down to the waterfront in St. Pete, about 40 miles.  That would be great except it's too flat and kind of boring, since it goes mostly in a straight line (it used to be a rail line).  Not much to look at except the scenery, which is barely above average. 

I have Google Earth on my laptop.  Maybe I'll lay out a route for next weekend.  Except it's getting kind of hot in Florida for riding.

Newt

Driving for Jesus

Once in a while something comes along that profoundly improves one's understanding of the human condition.  Take religion, for instance.  Some go to church and do good works.  I get that.  I have a daughter and granddaughter on their way in July to equatorial Africa to build a church for some friends' families.  Africa in the summer?  Sure - temperatures run cooler than in Connecticut and WAY cooler than Tampa Bay.

There is another side of religious joy that words cannot convey.  Behold the Jesus Truck:

Newt

Good Times at TPA

Nothing rattles 63-year-old bones like a week in the thrall of a couple of 11-year-olds on spring break.  Katy and friend Noelle arrived a week ago and - sandy beach be damned - headed straight for the refrigerator.  Boy-howdy.

As a non-traveling grandfather claiming children off an airplane, I still had to go through security.  It's okay; I know the drill:  I left everything in the car but keys and ID, and approached the groping zone in shorts, unbelted and wearing the battered boat shoes I now live in.  Not that I expected to be invisible - the beard alone elevated every TSA agent in the place to Defcon One.

So I shuffled on command into the electronic peeping Tom, barefoot and naked beneath my clothes.  Oops.  The machine beeped at my knees.  I knew it was my knees because the conspicuously sexless stick figure on the wall flashed two blinking red squares where you would expect to see knees.  That and the TSA guy growled, "There's something wrong with your knees.  Please step over here."

So I stepped over to the groping station with my knees.  Did I mention I was wearing shorts?  It's Paradise; shorts is the uniform of the day.  You would think the guy in the blue gloves could look at my knees and see there were no devices strapped to them.  Not really, no.

"Spread your legs wide, sir, please."  Still barefoot and unbelted, I knew that any such big athletic moves risked widespread embarrassment, but I had no interest in spending the weekend in the pokey or the newspapers.  So I spread 'em. 

Now tell me honestly: don't you think any terrorist clever enough to hide Semtex in his skivvies would know not to wear shorts if he had bombs on his knees?  I did not point this out to the groper in the blue gloves.

Eventually, I got the girls home in their customary advanced state of starvation, despite stopping on the way for sandwiches. 

Vignette:  Stick-thin Noelle standing in the kitchen at 11:30 in the morning, munching a hastily assembled PBJ - I knew it was hastily assembled because J was dripping on the floor - deadpanning: "What are we having for lunch?"

It doesn't get any better than this.

Newt