Dances With Holocaust Deniers

This one has been nascent for quite a few years and I really have to get started writing it down.  It may take a while to work through and get right, so if you happen to run across it, consider it a work in progress.

This starts about ten years ago.  I’d finished reading Neil Baldwin‘s “Henry Ford and the Jews:  The Mass Production of Hate“, and learning that Ford had underwritten the original translation (from Russian to English) of the notorious Czarist fabrication “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion“.  Having never read it, I figured it was time to familiarize myself with this perennial bit of anti-Semitic nonsense.  Easiest thing to do, of course, is search it out online, and for that I turned to The Pirate Bay.  Found it immediately, downloaded it, started reading it, confirmed that it was too fucking stupid for me (or anyone else) to waste any time on, and moved on to something else.  But there was something interesting in the description:  A link to “Conspiracy Central” and the invitation to come for more conspiracy theories and related entertainment.

How could I possibly turn that down?

The link took me to a forum (and attached torrent tracker) with just about every imaginable bit of crackpottery represented:  JFK assassination, perpetual motion, 9/11, dowsing and the usual paranormal buncombe, and, of course, Holocaust denial.  So I did something (for me) uncharacteristic:  I tossed in some trollbait.  I commented on an interview clip of Ernst Zundel, then in prison in Germany (and since, thankfully, having assumed ambient temperature).  It was something to the effect the he was exactly where he belonged, being sodomized by big blacks, Jews, etc.  After the predicted flareup abated, I found myself engaged with a user named “Ctrl“, who was pushing the argument – on purely technical grounds – that the extermination+disposal system at Auschwitz (the gas chambers and ovens) could not possibly function as is commonly believed.  We established our bona fides.  He was most emphatic that, though a Holocaust denier, he was not an anti-Semite, and was interested enough in the subject to have visited the camps.  And I made clear that I’m an atheist Jew, technical, skeptical, and not sympathetic toward Israel (on this site, pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli sentiment blurs into some pretty raging anti-Semitism).  His argument started with the boiling point of hydrogen cyanide and how a “shower room” full of Jews couldn’t possibly raise the temperature enough for toxic levels of HCN to be liberated from the solid pellet form (as Zyklon B) introduced through the rooftop vents.  It was immediately obvious that he lacked even the most basic background in chemistry and thermodynamics (not that mine is all that great) to allow him to understand concepts like diffusion and vapour pressure.  I tried as patiently and sincerely as possible to explain, but it wasn’t taking.

Then things took a really weird turn – one that could not have been anticipated.  As I nosed around the forum, it was apparent that it was well-populated, to the tune of tens of thousands of registered users.  Then I found indications that it was based here in Calgary – and that “Ctrl” was the guy who ran it.  Suddenly, everything had changed.  This was no longer some arbitrarily distant, abstract relationship – we might actually engage personally.

So that’s when it got serious.  I told him that if he was that certain, that convinced that under those conditions people couldn’t possibly die, then he’d have no problem with undertaking an experiment:  We would set up a sealed room of agreed environmental conditions (temperature and humidity) and he would occupy it for an agreed period of time after the introduction of as close an analog to Zyklon B (HCN bound in a solid matrix e.g. diatomaceous earth) as we could obtain.  It should go without saying that I found the act of issuing this challenge very disturbing.  Would I be willing to go through with it, knowing that the outcome would almost certainly be his death?  The world can do to lose every Holocaust denier possible, and this would be a “suicide by stupidity”, but would that morally absolve me?  And what would my legal liability be?  This had become a nontrivial matter, and I sat through more than one of the subsequent online sessions with my hands shaking.

These exchanges were all taking place while the forum’s other users watched on, occasionally interjecting warnings to him like: “Mike – don’t do it – he’s a Zionist agent and he’s going to kill you!”

Ultimately, he backpedaled out of the challenge with an assortment of tepid excuses that made perfectly clear that he wasn’t really convinced enough by his own arguments.  He then switched subjects, arguing that the flammability of HCN made its use impossible in the same facility that housed the ovens – that the whole place would blow up.  Seemed to me that this claim too would be easily debunked, so I hit the MSDS and my trusty copy of the the CRC Handbook for the parametrics.  Sure enough, the concentration necessary for killing people is orders of magnitude lower than the explosive threshold, making operating both the gas chambers and crematoria in the same building way safer than using a welding torch near a car’s gas tank – something done thousands of times a day in muffler shops all over the world.  Strike two.

But while working that out from first principles, it occurred to me that I couldn’t be the first to have to debunk these blockheaded claims – there must be hundreds of Holocaust-denial-correction sites out there where these arguments had already been presented.  And a cursory search revealed that, sure enough, there are, and that these canards, along with the ones about the gas chamber doors and prussian blue, were nothing more than the Fred Leuchter playbook (which you too can find online).  If you’re not up on this stuff, Leuchter (a self-proclaimed expert in a lot of stuff he knows nothing about, and the subject of Errol Morris‘s documentary “Mr. Death“) was commissioned to write an “engineering analysis” of the Auschwitz facility by Zundel when the latter was on trial in Canada .  So I went back to the forum and told Ctrl/Mike and the rest of them that what they were doing was intellectually dishonest, and that I wasn’t going to waste any more time working through and arguing these points when everything in Leuchter’s report had already been throughly debunked by others.

And that’s about where it came to rest.  I wish I’d been able to capture the entire series of exchanges so I’d have a literal record of the whole episode, but the layout of the forum made it effectively impossible, and the site has since changed hands (though its users from back then still appear to substantially populate it) and those old posts were lost.

Coda:

Once the dust had settled a little, I invited Ctrl/Mike to get together for a beer.  I had a radio show coming up in a couple of days, so I asked him to join me at the University, and on the appointed night I brought the beer.  He was a no-show.  When I asked him why, he said he didn’t think I was serious.  I assured him that I was, and suggested we get together at The Ironwood (near where he lived in Forest Lawn), as friend and outstanding guitarist Lester Quitzau had a gig coming up.  This time he made it.

So we sat down at the bar and ordered a couple of beers.

(The rest of the story will be along soon – I’m a little tied up at the moment reverse-engineering the Alpine keyless-entry and security system Subaru used from ’99-’03.  It has problems that have really driven owners of those cars (including me) nuts for a long time and nobody has solved.)

On the Trail of the MCU, Part 3: Oh, No… Not the Tea Kettle.

It’s only been a couple of days since I wrote On the Trail of the MCU, Part 2: What the Hell is a Lattice GAL Doing in My Stove Hood?  That’s because during the depths of winter I updated my to-do (read: to fix) list, and it was long.  “Long” as in fifty or so things around here that need attention.  Well, maybe they don’t need attention, but I need to give them my attention in order to reclaim some mental bandwidth.  The problem is that as I move around the house, I keep seeing defective things, and each one – every time I see it – reminds me that I have to get to it.  I want to reduce the number of those thoughts that distract me from more interesting, more creative work, so (short of just throwing the fuckers out) I have to repair them so they no longer represent those intrusive reminders.  Hence my drive to grind through the busted stuff.

After the long-suffering KitchenAid stove hood, I figured I’d make short work of a water boiler I picked up at another thrift shop some months back (I don’t mind telling you which this one was – Value Village – because they mostly suck).  Here it is, the Sunpentown JP-430 Automatic Dispensing Hot Water Pot:

(Forgive my calling it a “tea kettle” in the title, because we don’t use that phrase around here – if it’s made to boil water, we call it a “water boiler”.  Making tea is a totally different thing.  But it made for a snappier, easier-to-understand title.)

Anyway, it was DOA when I got it for ten bucks or something, and I could (should?) have returned it, but we cook a lot and one of my girls has a one litre tea cup, so having four litres of boiling water on hand is pretty great.  (Note:  I do have an InSinkErator built-in hot water dispenser new-in-box in the basement – also a thrift shop score – but how about if you don’t add anything to my to-do list, okay?  Besides, I’m kind of thinking of saving that for the next place I live.)  At the time, I pulled the cover, and sure enough found another goddamn computer and parked it until… sometime.

The microprocessor is the 14-pin DIP at the top corner of the board.

When “sometime” came around last night, I lucked out:  The data sheet for the (Chinese) Cmsemicon (never heard of ’em) CMS16P53 OTP (One-Time Programmable) MCU was readily found online.  Looking at the (cursory) data sheet, though, I’m not at all convinced that this is actually an OTP chip, which means it’s shipped without anything in its program memory and the designer installs his/her software using a special programming procedure (e.g. using a “device programmer” of the sort I used for my Lattice GAL, JTAG, etc.).  The “one-time” part means you can only do this once, as the device cannot subsequently be erased.  But since the data sheet doesn’t contain any discussion of the programming process, I suspect that this is a mistranslation, and that rather than being OTP, it’s actually “mask programmed” at the factory and cannot be field-programmed at all.  So this isn’t like the Lattice GAL of the previous article; it’s not a part I might have kicking around along with the convenient ability to make copies.  If it’s NFG I’m SOL and out a sawbuck.

But let’s take a step back:  Is there anything in this water boiler that needs a computer?  The answer is a resounding Hell No.  For at least 50 years people having been building them with simple bimetallic thermostats, and the added functions here (an electric dispensing pump and safety interlock) are, as with the KitchenAid hood, just as easily – and more reliably – implemented with a relay or two.

And again, as coincidence would have it, the problem here was simply a bad power supply, though a little more subtle than in the previous case.  Having downloaded the MCU’s data sheet, I threw a meter on the Vcc and GND pins and came up with 4.70V (which might be okay for a part with a wide power supply range) – but with 70mV of ripple, which is definitely a deal-stopper.  I might have put the scope on it, but since it appears to be powered by a little switcher, that would have been risky without first taking a closer look at the circuit, as clipping my ground lead onto a hot (non-isolated) ground would probably have blown the lead out of my hand – and I’ve been able to avoid repeating that mistake for 42 years.  So I took a SWAG (Scientific Wild-Assed Guess), spotted a couple of 470μF 25V capacitors whose tops seemed to be bulging a little, and replaced them.  And up it came, since one of those caps was on the MCU’s power supply rails and failing to do its job.

So here we are again:  An appliance featuring unnecessary digital electronics dead and discarded thanks to a failure of the extra circuitry needed to support those electronics.

On the Trail of the MCU, Part 2: What the Hell is a Lattice GAL Doing in My Stove Hood?

This is a little different than my original OtTotMCU article, in that it’s about appropriate design rather than odd supply chain paths.  But it starts in the same place, namely my being a bottom-feeder always looking to save a buck.  This time I’m not scouring a computer surplus warehouse, rather our favourite local thrift shop.  It’s a lulu – among a lot of other stuff over the past few years I’ve picked up four Dyson vacuums (I think I have less than $100 in the lot, and may actually love them more than my children, since the latter do not clean the house) and two Rancilio cappuccino makers ($15 each – kept one, sold the other for $600).  And no, I’m not going to tell you where it is.

I’d long needed an exhaust hood for my kitchen stove (a “range hood” to some).  As with all thrift shop stuff, you don’t really go shopping, but have to be aware of every thing that might someday be useful and ready to grab it in an instant – because at [instant + 5 minutes] someone else will have it in their car.  It smarts when that happens – last weekend I turned away for a moment from a countertop ice maker (I’ve been to France and do not take ice for granted) and someone else snagged it; I still feel like an asshole.  This is tricky business if you’re a pack rat like me.  So I ran across a KitchenAid KWVU205Y, which is a nice retractable hood with light, perfect for my application, and apparently worth about a grand new.  Five or ten bucks, can’t remember.  Took it home, powered it up on the bench, and everything worked – light and three fan speeds (the number matters).  Then, over a rather protracted stretch of time (price a 6″ hole saw you expect to use once to cut a hole through the outside wall of a cedar log house and you’ll see why I was willing to wait for one to come from China) got it installed and wired.  And it was great – eliminating the annoyance alarms coming from our smoke detector during cooking.

Then it stopped, and I mean really abruptly.  Light and fan went off and refused to be restarted, except for sometimes, and even then not often or for long.  Clearly that’s why it wound up at the thrift shop – an intermittent fault, the worst kind.  The cover comes off the little controller board in the wiring compartment, and the damn thing has a Lattice 16V8 GAL on it.

This is where we sharply depart appliance repairman territory and rejoin the computer hardware engineers.  “GAL” stands for Generic Array Logic, a family of programmable logic devices (PLDs) from Lattice Semiconductor, a plucky, independent semiconductor company based not in Silicon Valley, but in Oregon.  GALs were a modernized, low-power reprogrammable version of the original OTP fusible-link PAL (Programmable Array Logic) chips from Monolithic Memories (MMI, which was absorbed by AMD).  The short version is that all of these PLDs allow the designer to pack an awful lot of “random logic” functions (gates and flip-flops and stuff) into small, inexpensive, field-programmable chips.  They really are awesome and a lot of fun to work with, and here I’ll put a plug in for Tracy Kidder’s terrific book “The Soul of a New Machine”, which is about a team of engineers at Data General in the late 1970s designing a new superminicomputer to compete with the Digital Equipment (DEC) VAX-11/780.  Their pioneering use of PALs figures prominently into the story.  Anyway, these small early PLDs aren’t used anymore (Lattice discontinued their first-generation GALs in 2010); modern PLDs are incredible, massively dense devices like Xilinx FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays).

But back to the stove hood.  Appliances are (or used to be) of a class of consumer products known as “durables”.  That is, they’re supposed to be built to last – 10, 20, 30 years – because they’re made of metal and inherently reliable.  I mean, a clothes dryer is a box with a heater, a motor, and a fan.  So is a furnace.  And so is, pretty much, a stove.  A drop of oil from time to time and shit like that runs for decades.  At least that’s how it used to be, but it ain’t that way no more.  Without going off on a tear over China and plastics, the reason that durables no longer are is complexity, for which “efficiency” has been a common Trojan horse.  Why put an old-fashioned mechanical dial timer in that dryer when you can give it snappy, high-tech digital controls that make your competitors look positively Jurassic?  It may seem more modern, but what it really is is more complex, and with increased complexity comes not only increased failure modes and rates, but accelerated obsolescence.  What added benefits did all this high technology (and don’t fool yourself – the use of a GAL qualifies) bring to my stove hood?  Nothing but state memory; that is, when you push the hood in it shuts off the light and fan, but restores them to their previous settings when you pull it back out.  Big deal – you could do that with an all-relay design too if you wanted to, but it’s not much of a feature.

As it happens, a few years back I designed a little controller almost identical to the one in this hood.  The guys at a local grow shop asked me if I could build them an auto-change nutrient reservoir.  Hydroponic growing is about water and fertilizer solutions that not only have to be maintained, but changed regularly, and that can be a hassle.  They wanted to automate that change process, so at the push of a button the reservoir would empty itself down the drain and refill with fresh water.  No sweat – that’s a machine with three states:  Circulate nutrient solution, pump out, refill.  Two relays will automate four states, so those and a couple of valves and float switches (all 110VAC devices) and Bob’s your uncle.  Worked out the logic, wired it up, handed it in, and they were thrilled.  Then one of them – the clever one – made a show of explaining to me that you could do this with a microprocessor.  As patiently as possible, I explained that he was right, but then you’d need to add a power supply for the MCU and relays for it to drive the valves, so what would be the point when you can do it all with the relays alone?  He didn’t say anything after that.

This hood is that reservoir controller.  The fan has off and three speeds (four states, again two relays); add another relay and the light is covered, logically speaking.  But instead of doing it the low-tech way that would be inherently more reliable and serviceable by anyone until the end of time, some smartypants KitchenAid engineer (no doubt frustrated at having to design appliance controllers rather than computers) put a GAL in it to contain that state logic.  With a power supply to power the GAL.  And low-voltage relays to interface the GAL to the fan and light.  And I’m willing to bet∗ that I’m the only person on earth who had one of these hoods die and has the knowledge and specialized equipment necessary to suck the fuse map out of that GAL so I can burn a fresh chip out of my stock of old PLDs.  To KitchenAid‘s credit, they socketed the part (though I replaced the cheap stamped socket with a machined one) and they didn’t blow the GAL’s security fuse, which would have made the fuse map unreadable by my device programmer.  Since this is an intermittent fault that could be anywhere, it’s not certain that I can successfully read the GAL’s contents, but if I can I’ll be able to burn a fresh part and/or back it up in case it dies later.  After all, what we’re talking about here is the software that runs the hood, software that’s bound up in a special little chip.  If that chip packs up and I can’t get that code into a replacement, I’m SOL.  I surely do like my KitchenAid stand mixer (named “Stan”), but phooey to KitchenAid for designing unserviceability and accelerated obsolescence into this appliance.  To be honest, I haven’t asked, but if I did I’ll also bet that a replacement for this board is either prohibitively expensive or completely unavailable.  So much for durables.

So what was the fault?  A bad power supply bridge rectifier (in the photo, it’s the little black cylinder to the right of the GAL) – the one responsible for the low voltages (+5 and +12) needed to operate the GAL and relays.  As I explained, without the solid state logic there’d be no need for that supply, a perfect example of added complexity and increased component count compromising reliability.

∗ If I’m wrong on my first bet, and someone else on this planet has the same dead hood and the knowledge and a GAL programmer and some 16V8s lying around, here’s the fuse map.  You don’t really have to know how to read it to grasp that there’s not much going on in here (relative to the chip’s capability), but without it you’re buying a new hood – as, presumably, did the person who dropped this one off at the thrift shop for some bottom-feeder to deal with.

*QP000020
*QF002194
*G0
*F0
*L000000 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000032 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000064 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000096 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000128 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000160 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000192 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000224 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000256 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000288 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000320 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000352 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000384 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000416 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000448 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000480 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000512 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000544 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000576 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000608 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000640 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000672 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000704 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000736 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000768 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000800 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000832 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000864 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000896 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000928 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000960 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L000992 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001024 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001056 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001088 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001120 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001152 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001184 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001216 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001248 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001280 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001312 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001344 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001376 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001408 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001440 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001472 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001504 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001536 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001568 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001600 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001632 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001664 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001696 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001728 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001760 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001792 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001824 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001856 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001888 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001920 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001952 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L001984 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L002016 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L002048 11111111010000110100000100110000
*L002080 00110000001100010011011000000000
*L002112 00000000111111111111111111111111
*L002144 11111111111111111111111111111111
*L002176 111111111111111111
*C0B4D
*^C26F3

 

On the Trail of the MCU

This story kind of bounces around a little, so you’ll have to bear with me.  It used to just be a handful of connected anecdotes on experience, but when it came up in a chat a while ago with a CS prof, he said there was probably a paper in it.  I dunno about that (at least, without a lot more research), but I think this much deserves a blog post.

It starts with my being an embedded system designer whose early work was with Motorola microprocessors:  6800, 6802, an assortment of 6805 variants, 6809, 68008, 68000/010, (and later) 68HC16, 68332, 68340, etc.  By the late 80s, though, I was working with the 68HC11 – a great part for its time with a buttload of onboard resources (e.g. A/D, EEPROM, SCI, SPI, GPIO, expandable bus, counters/timers, watchdog) that laid groundwork for excellent modern parts like the Atmel AVR series I work with now (yeah, I know, the HC11 was von Neumann and the AVR is modified Harvard, but let’s not start splitting hairs, okay?).  It had pretty much everything except for a FLASH code store.  I did a lot of HC11-based designs, including the controllers I built at Survival Research Laboratories (see other posts), and the last being the original ISA version of our PC Weasel, a board for low-level administration of PC-based servers (and another story all its own).

The PC Weasel started as a no-budget side project, so we were jamming econo (thanks, Minutemen).  After we got the first wire-wrapped proto running (I still use Slit-n-Wrap, bitches.  Dat shit da bomb.  Alright, I’m done with the fake ebonics now.)  I banged out a double-sided through-hole board and we fabbed something like a hundred as betas.  But on a visit to our then-local surplus dealer we bumped into a box of Conner Peripherals IDE disks (little things – 20 and 40 megabyte – my Compaq portables used them) that happened to use HC11s as their MCUs.  We got them for a fraction of what new HC11s cost at the time, so I didn’t have any problem with spending a minute or two using my hot air SMT tool to pop them off the drives, after which I dropped them into the Data I/O Unisite to check the setting of the configuration register.  That’s where you enable/disable onboard resources like the mask ROM, EEPROM, etc.

While I was in there, I took a look at the ROM, and was surprised to find a Chrysler copyright notice.  What was evidently happening was that Motorola was selling their factory seconds to Conner, parts that had been mask programmed for Chrysler, but had defects, or maybe were overruns.  Conner was using (as was I) an external ROM for their firmware, so they didn’t care, and probably got the parts from Motorola at a discount.  So I’d confirmed firsthand what I think I’d read in a trade some years before – that Chrysler was using a family I was familiar with in their ignition (and perhaps other) controllers.  And that their seconds wound up in hard disks made for an interesting anecdote.

A few years later, though, this became useful information.  I’d had a two-wheel-drive 1990 Dodge Dakota pickup for some years, and it was stolen one night in early 2005 from our office parking lot while I was working.  It turned up a few days later in another part of town, apparently the product of a joyride.  When the police called to let me know they’d found it they said it had been “trashed”, so I expected a real mess (broken windows, flat tires, etc.) when I went to the impound lot.  Didn’t look much different than before it was stolen, really… it’s not that it was in bad shape (it was actually in quite good condition), so someone must have made a snap judgement based on how many burger wrappers I’d left on the floor.  Whatever.  As far as the insurance company was concerned it was a writeoff, and I was happy to take the money and flip it into a “well-used” 1991 Dakota 4×4, much more appropriate for where we live in the country.  I’ve had more than my share of trouble from this truck, and at one point spent more than it was worth to replace a bad front differential, but sometimes circumstances (and a bit of a cash surplus) can make bad choices easy.  A few years later the ignition controller failed, and that’s where this story picks up again.

(Because they’re not relevant to this story, I won’t get into here the other failures I’ve endured with this thing, including overheating thanks to a clogged rad, the valves wearing badly enough to abruptly leave me stranded at a lake with the TriFoiler in tow and necessitating a head job, a bad ignition coil that dogged me for a long time in the weirdest way and the persistent vibration which produced some comic results.  I blame high miles, and not the motor – that 318 is a rock.)

1991 was a crossover year for this truck family in that the earlier years were carbureted and later years full fuel injection, but the ’91 was unique in using throttle body injection (TBI).  So, suddenly, I had to find that exact year and model – with the same engine (5.2/318 V8) – at the junkyard in order to hope to scavenge a working compatible engine controller module, because surely a new replacement (if available at all) would cost more than the truck was worth, and that was  no longer an option available to me.  As luck would have it, after weeks of searching… I didn’t.   But I did find a module that looked the same (i.e. same package, and more importantly, same connector) in a truck with a V6.  I got it, and as expected, it didn’t work when I connected it in place of mine.  Figuring that they were the same except for the firmware (different timing and number of plugs, right?), I unpotted the old/dead one, confirmed by inspecting the circuit that it was in all likelyhood the expected 68HC11 (couldn’t tell by the package markings, which were house numbers, but it’s just a 52-pin J-lead PLCC, so it was trivial to ID a few ground and Vcc pins), and desoldered the nearby DIP EPROM from the board.  Now that I knew where to look, I unpotted that corner of the new (V6) board, yanked its EPROM, laid down a socket, and plugged in my old firmware.  Voila – fired up first try.

All of which leaves me wondering:  How the hell does anyone without my ridiculously varied skill set keep stuff like this running without breaking the bank?

SRL Diary, Part One: Welcome to San Francisco

Note:  I’m writing this diary 20+ years after the fact, and entirely from memory, as I didn’t keep anything like a journal at the time.  There are just so many great stories (and some not so great, but still worth recording) that I want to commit them before the memories fade too much.  Any reader who thinks I got something wrong – or that I missed something important – is eagerly invited to get in touch so we can correct and/or complete the record.

I may have seen some stuff earlier – perhaps clips on TV – but I really became aware of Survival Research Laboratories in 1986.  I may have just picked up the July issue of Bob Guccione’s Newlook magazine on spec, or because there was an article on The Residents in it – I honestly don’t remember.  But there were four pages dedicated to “War of the Robots”.  The photos accompanying the piece didn’t show much in the way of machines, but there was one captioned “The Men of Survival Research Laboratories” that still haunts me a little when I look at it – even after spending nine years as one of those men (don’t get huffy – a lot of women have worked there too).  It’s a photo of the big catapult, and you can’t tell who the guys operating it are (I might take a couple of guesses from the haircuts, but I wouldn’t have much confidence in the answers).  There’s just something about the anonymous figures crouching amid – and orchestrating – the chaos that I found incredibly mysterious, compelling, and even a little creepy.  I still think it’s one of the best images to come out of SRL ever.

But I’m getting a little prematurely poetic here – let me get back to the story.  What I’d seen up until then told me that, clearly, these guys were making some incredible machines (and doing fascinating things with them), but there was no sign that they’d put any smarts on them.  As an embedded systems designer, it was obvious that they needed systems more advanced than the model airplane radio controls they appeared to be using.  It wasn’t lost on me that an electronics engineer coming from Calgary (of all places) to San Francisco – a short drive north of Silicon Valley – would be bringing coals to Newcastle.  Surely they must have a thousand guys like me not just on the detail already (and more pounding on the door to get in), but I had to know.  The Newlook article was the first I found that named SRL‘s three principals – Mark Pauline, Matt Heckert, and Eric Werner.  Somewhere around mid-January 1987 I got their phone numbers, and called, and got answering machines, and kept calling, and eventually someone answered.  I don’t remember for sure (and I don’t think I kept notes), but I think it was Mark.  I explained my interest, and he said “Oh, you know, we don’t have anyone doing that – we can’t afford stuff like that.  I can’t really talk now – we’re real busy trying to get ready for a show.”  The show was scheduled for the end of the month.  My roommate Max spotted me a couple of hundred for the air ticket, and on January 30th, quite without a plan (or a place to stay, or any money, or…) I flew to San Francisco for the first time.  The order things happened in is a little hazy now, but I think I made my way to the dead end of San Bruno Ave. by shuttle bus from the airport followed by a bunch of walking.  I wandered down the driveway and to the door of what appeared to be the shop.  I don’t know whether I was expecting some kind of reception; if so, their committee clearly hadn’t gotten the memo.  The evening’s performance was Delusions of Expediency:  How to Avoid Responsibility for Social Disintegration by Acting Without Principle Under the Pretenses of Utility – A Totally Mechanized Dramatization by Survival Research Laboratories (which, despite Mark’s typically – and wonderfully – grandiose title, was a rather small show by SRL standards, held in a South of Market taxi parking lot), and the inevitable panicked last-minute preparations were underway.  I announced my arrival and someone replied by asking me if I knew how to run a punch press.  I didn’t, but told them to point me at it anyway.  I spent the next hour cutting up lengths of angle iron into foot-long pieces  – I think they were used to stake some stuff down.

The rest of the evening was a bit of a blur.  I caught a lift to the site at Townsend & 8th, wandered around a little, trying to take it in, and not doing much.  An audience appeared and it started to get dark.  Someone – it must have been Mike Dingle, who managed the shows and tours – asked if I’d work security.  That means standing around and making sure people don’t wander into the performance area and do stupid (and potentially self-destructive) things.  I said I would, but I think later I flaked out and told him I didn’t want to miss any of the action.  That’s really not my MO, and I’m grateful that Ding never held it against me.

The show was short, and didn’t feature a lot of machines (Matt’s Inspector and Calliope,  Mark’s Inchworm, Eric’s Square-Wheeled Car… were there any others?  I’ll have to go back and look at the video.  Perhaps Eric’s Ram Car was there too.), but I was enthralled.  It was the only time I ever saw the Square-Wheeled Car run – and only for a few seconds – but how amazing.  I saw the show from near a big mound of dirt in which the Inspector discovered a buried cache of prosthetic limbs.  Butyric acid had been poured all over it – that’s the smell that Abbie Hoffman called a “Froines“.  After the engines were all quiet, the Eggman smashed, the smoke dissipated, and the audience gone, Ding asked if I’d stay at the site overnight in case anyone showed up to mess with the stuff.  Having no other place to go, I said sure, and crashed under a few blankets in the cab of a big truck parked next to the building adjacent the performance area.  I was tired and slept well, but still got a sense of what Mark Twain was talking about when he said “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco”.

The next day was all about the cleanup – the limbs, the dirt, the empty 50-gallon drums that had been built into towers on the set, pulling up the stakes, getting the machines onto trucks and back to the shop.  The work done, I hung out with Matt.  He gave me a tour of the Mission district on the back of his Laverda (as we crested a hill – way too fast – and caught air, he yelled back at me “This where they shot the chase scene in Bullitt!”).  That night we rode up to North Beach to Tosca, the bar famous for having a jukebox full of opera.  Before we went in he stopped to unscrew some parts from another motorbike parked out front – a prank on a friend in the bar.  We went to the back room and played pool for a while, killing some time to see whether Hunter Thompson might show up.  He’d been hanging out at the shop of late; Matt told me that when Hunter visited he arrived in a Mitchell Brothers limo, as at the time he held the position of Night Manager at the O’Farrell Theatre (I saw the business card on Matt’s desk) in addition to his duties as Rolling Stone‘s National Affairs Correspondent.  Hunter never showed up that night, but a few years later, in a video on him (The Crazy Never Die – put out by The Mitchell Bros.), I found footage of HST messing around at the shop as well as at Delusions.  He’d been right around me and that mound of dirt throughout, and I was so engrossed in the spectacle that I didn’t notice.  That night Matt headed over to his girlfriend’s place and let me have his bed in the shop – I shared the room with his cat Malcolm (I think that’s the right order – Yasser was later).  That’s the kind of guy Matt is – I needed a place to stay, and he didn’t say “I’ll have to check with my partners”; he just handed me the keys.

Sunday I had to head home.  Mark was in front of his lathe – we hadn’t really met and exchanged only a few words – all I remember him saying was “So you’re from Canada, huh?”.  Matt, Eric, and I got some breakfast en route to the airport, which gave us a chance to chat for the first time about my bringing some microprocessor control to the machines.  Matt didn’t have anything cooking that would have been appropriate, but the Torture Machine Eric was working on seemed a good possibility.  It never happened, though, and although it would have been a pretty cool machine, I don’t think it would have fit well with the shows as they were evolving at the time.  They dropped me at the airport, and they’d no sooner left than I discovered I was at the wrong terminal (a domestic vs. international mixup, since I wasn’t booked on a direct flight) and subsequently missed my plane.  The airline got me on another, but it left me with an overnight stopover in Salt Lake City.  I sorta schmoozed my way into a hotel room that the airline had supplied to another laid-over flyer, and after experiencing the nuclear winter that passes for Salt Lake City late on a Sunday night, made it home.

(Postscript:  When I departed SF I somehow managed to leave behind a pair of white coveralls I’d been sporting for a while.  I’d had a big black biohazard symbol embroidered on the back and was pretty fond of them.  Matt set them aside for me, but Mark (being Mark) found, assumed, and totally trashed them.  Reportedly, Matt got really pissed at him over it.)

I stayed loosely in touch over the next few months, but nothing much developed, mainly because Mark and Matt were pretty deeply engrossed in in making the short non-performance film A Bitter Message of Hopeless Grief (or as the in-joke goes, …Hopeless Grease) with Jon Reiss, the filmmaker (ex of Target Video) who documented all the SRL performances at the time.  (Attn. completists:  Bitter Message was financed, in part, by a non-SRL job that Mark and Matt did – the chainsaw-hedge-trimmer-sporting V8-powered lawn mower that neighbor-from-hell Randy Quaid rolls out of his garage in the Richard Pryor movie Moving.  It’s only on–screen for a few seconds, but fun to see anyway.  Except for seeing Matt’s name misspelled in the credits, that is.)  Eric was already becoming marginalized and made only a passing contribution to Bitter Message; he was gone by the time I really got involved a year later.

Then something happened:  Snakefinger and his band came to Calgary, touring their new album Night of Desireable Objects.  I was thrilled to to get the chance to see them play at the National Hotel, one of the city’s great punk-rock dive bars of the era.  They did a three-night stand at the beginning of April, and I went all three, disappointed at the poor audience turnout, and riveted by the performances.  Man, how exciting to see those guys in a really “intimate” (read: with a dozen people) setting.  Being with CJSW, I introduced myself to Snakefinger and invited him up to the station for an interview that John Rutherford (who did our blues show at the time) joined us in.  We had a good time, and I’m sorry to say the tape was lost by a sloppy Program Director.  But I mentioned to Snakey that I’d just recently visited San Francisco for the first time to meet the SRL guys and talk about joining up.  He lit up and said to say hi to Matty and Mark for him the next time I spoke to them.  In that instant, I got a sense of the warmth and closeness of the SF arts and music community that’s never left me.  Later I learned the depth of the connections: Snakefinger and Mike Dingle had been roommates, along with Richard Marriott of Clubfoot Orchestra, who I also met before long.  It was all a big, happy family, really; Matt had been in an early SF punk band (Pink Section) before joining SRL, and had also played in Clubfoot.  Over the coming years I’d meet a lot more from the Bay Area music scene, including Z’ev, Naught Humon (of Rhythm and Noise), Helios Creed (of Chrome), and many who were associated with Subterranean Records, which was next door in SRL’s building.  So after Snakefinger’s casual comment made me feel so welcome, as though I was already one of their community, I was crushed when John called at the beginning of July to say that Snakefinger had died while on tour in Europe on the first of the month.  When I think about I still well up.

(For a moment, I’m going to jump forward about a year and a half here.  In the fall of 1988, after we came back from the European tour, I was down in SF for the return and unpacking of the sea can and general talk and strategizing.  SRL was a pretty straightedge place – not consciously or self-righteously or anything, but just out of practicality, given that a machine shop and the machines themself make for a potentially dangerous environment and everyone has to be clearheaded.  But a bunch of us were out for a drink, and in the bar we went to, just by coincidence, we ran into Johnny Ryan (and ?) from Snakefinger’s band.  I went over to say hi, and I was surprised – and touched – that they remembered me from a couple of poorly attended nights thousands of miles away 18 months prior.  “So you wound up joining SRL after all?  Cool.”  Yeah, cool.)

By late 1987 I’d spent some time on the phone with Mark, and we’d decided I’d get a controller together for the new Six-Barreled Shock Wave Cannon that he was working on.  It was a fairly simple sequencer that accepted user input on the proportions of acetylene and oxygen that power the cannon, ran the valves between it and the gas cylinders, and fired the sparkplugs.  Back home in Calgary I was doing a job based on the MC6809 (my last before switching to the 68HC11), and the hardware fit well, as it had a keypad and LCD in addition to the required ports, so my old friend Garry (who was coding for the job) contributed the software for the cannon.  It worked, but we got the user interface totally wrong.  Having not actually yet had any experience building or using any of the performing machines, I didn’t have a clue what was needed to make it usable during a show, and Mark hadn’t given me any input or guidance – it just hadn’t dawned on him (still might not, actually) that UI issues are important.  No matter – it was my point of entry.  Many times over the years I’ve been asked how one joins SRL.  The answer is, “Just show up and do something”.

A Rare and Happy Story of Sailboats, Wires, and People Who Do the Right Thing

We all know it:  Governments and bureaucracies suck, and when you have to deal with them, you go in assuming they’re going to be intransigent blockheads that refuse to listen to reason.  Or maybe you go in hopeful, but know in your heart that it’s only going to be a matter of time before some asshole stonewalls you for no plausible reason.  It’s the Peter Principle at work.  So when you gird for battle, and instead of getting one everyone just does exactly what they should, it’s worth writing about.

I’ve been sailing most of my life.  How I got into it is a little weird (given where I live), but it’s still my main recreational love.  I keep one of my boats – a 17′ Mystere catamaran – in a city-owned lot on the Heritage Park (a Southern Alberta historical park) side of the Glenmore Reservoir in Calgary.  It’s nice to be able to keep a boat mast-up; it minimizes the time getting in and out of the water.  There are two lots on this side of the lake, and one of them (not the one I’m in) was moved a few years back when Heritage Park undertook a big expansion and needed the real estate for new buildings and parking.  That boat parking lot was pushed a couple of hundred yards further away.

The new layout, however, included the extension of a streetcar track and resulted in a lot of rejigging of roads.  The part that matters to us (and this story) is that people towing their boats – masts up – from that far lot now have to make an abrupt left turn just before crossing the train tracks.  And that train is powered by overhead electrical wires.  You can see where this is going, right?  High-voltage and -current electricity do not combine with 20′-30′ aluminum masts for a fun day at the beach.  That shit kills people.

So when I saw, during construction, that there didn’t appear to be any provision – other than a small sign – for preventing sailors from missing the turn and inadvertently driving into the wires, I figured I was stepping into one of those scraps.  I actually made a list that included city council members (one of whom is an old business friend), lawyers, the press, sailing clubs, statistics on mast-to-wire electrocutions (both on land and water), etc.  I was ready for a fight.

Restupidiculame

I started with the city’s parks and recreation department, as that’s who we rent the boat parking stalls from.  They sent someone out and confirmed that the area in question belongs to Heritage Park, which (and I didn’t know this) is operated as a non-profit society apart from the city.  I was immediately referred to the Park’s president, Alida Visbach.  I sent her an email in which I described, in no uncertain terms, the potential for injury or death, given the high probability that, sooner or later, in daylight or darkness, someone was going to miss the turn and pull a boat into the wires.  In that email I insisted that signage would not be an adequate preventive measure, and that an overhead obstacle guaranteed to dismast a boat, or knock it off its trailer, would be required to ensure safety.  Nobody wants to see a boat damaged, but if it’s either that or someone getting zapped, there’s no choice.  She replied, telling me that she’d look into it and get back to me within a week.  For the next seven days my list was humming, waiting for the signal that it was time to throw some proper hellraising into gear.

When I heard back from her, she said they’d looked into it.  I replied, asking what they were planning to do, and by when.  She said no, it was done.   A little stunned, I told her I’d drive in and take a look.  Sure enough, they’d erected a well-supported telephone/power pole on each side of the road, with a pair of stout wires between, and featuring no-nonsense signage.  Just to be thorough, I asked her what the tensile strength on the wires was, and she got a number from their engineer that seemed more than adequate.  What more to say?  Alida Visbach gets added to the roll call of Good Guys.  QED.

After

And we mean it.

So if you see me out sailing (or even just around), take note of the Hobie hat I wear.  Back in the 80s Hobie Cat used to publish a magazine called Hotline, and one of their features was a bounty on overhead wires.  If you alerted them to a hazard, they’d go to work at getting it (re)moved, and reward you with some swag.  They don’t actually have that program anymore, but when I got ahold of Matt Miller at Hobie and told him about taking care of the Heritage wires he sent me the hat.  That’s cool.  I like those guys.

Postscript:  A couple of summers ago a couple more ground-level signs appeared on the approach to the turn/wires/tracks location.  I haven’t confirmed this, but I strongly suspect that they’re the result of some boats getting knocked down, and if that’s the case it’s a pretty warm+fuzzy vindication of my original complaint.

May we have your attention…

…please?

I (heart) Subaru

Note to Reader:  I’m not actually a mechanic, but I can impersonate one well enough to fool some cars.

Really, I don’t know why it took so long to discover these cars.  We moved out to the country in 2000, and since then we’ve really needed to drive 4x4s, to date including: a ’91 Dodge Dakota (318 – 5.2, I think) , a ’97 Jeep Grand Cherokee (4.0), a little Toyota pickup (can’t remember the year offhand), and a BJ60 Diesel Toyota Land Cruiser (which was a real Charlie Foxtrot – a mistake from the outset).  Since we’re talking about daily-drivers (an hour each way to/from work in the city), the Dakota and Jeep – though great cars – were a pretty serious lose in terms of gas economy, and the Toyota was a two-seater without provision for hauling our kids.  So when I had the chance to finally cut my losses and dump the Land Cruiser as a parts car (for a thousand bucks – I had to swallow the four or so I had in it) I flipped the grand the next day into a ’99 Subaru Legacy Outback.

I think I fell in love with these guys with my first visit to the parts counter:  There’s a signifcant difference between Subaru OEM and aftermarket thermostats, and I wanted to start eliminating variables.  I stepped up and told the partsman I wanted a thermostat; he said “Coming right up” and turned to fetch it.  I stopped him and asked whether he might need to know which model, year, engine, and temperature, and he replied “No, we only have one”.  In all my years of pulling wrenches, I’d never heard such a thing.

And speaking of wrenches, I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by how few of them I need to work on this thing.  To do just about anything, you need 10mm, 12mm, 14mm, and 17mm sockets and wrenches.  A deep 12-point 14mm socket is about the most exotic thing I’ve used (for pulling heads).  Compare that with the Jeep, which was a dog’s breakfast mix of standard and metric fasteners.

The 1995 Legacy Brighton w/ EJ22+5MT

Our first Subaru – the ’99 Legacy (with the EJ25D 2.5 litre DOHC and auto trans) – turned out to be a bit of a saga, but a few months after getting it we picked up another Legacy – a ’95 (with the EJ22 2.2 litre SOHC and 5-speed manual) with an eye to swapping the motor into the ’99.  The Brighton is the base model – a car with a manual gearbox that didn’t come with a tachometer (!).  Got it for $500, including noisy exhaust, body with a couple of rust spots, and a bad CV joint,.  Driving it home, though, I realized I’d be an idiot to cannibalize it.  So here’s what happened, to the nearest more-or-less:

• Car: $500
• Junkyard CV axle:  $30
• Junkyard exhaust:  $15
• Muffler shop to install junkyard exhaust properly i.e. weld in flex joint:  $100

That’s all it took to make it roadworthy.  After a month or two of driving the need for a little upkeep became apparent:

• New window crank:  $15
• New rear struts  – the old ones were getting creaky; I reused the springs.  I don’t remember what I paid for them, but I see today they’re going for anything between $35 and $150, so let’s just go with $75 each:  $150

Then I flew into a wild fit of customization:

• Junkyard trailer hitch:  $25
• Junkyard roof rack:  $5
• Retractable cargo cover (also from wrecker): $5

And an old car does need some attention over time:

• After about a year the alternator packed up, so a junkyard replacement:  $25
• And a weird thing happened – when I tried to recharge the air conditioning the compressor seized.  No idea why.  Got another one from (you guessed it) the wrecker and it charged up just fine:  $40

If you’ve been keeping track, that’s about $900 for a four-wheel-drive family wagon (the back seats fold down to double the cargo space) that has never failed to start – all the way down past -30 degrees without a block heater (though I’ve since added one for about five bucks).  Other than routine stuff like oil changes and some new tires, that’s what it cost us for the first three years.  Here’s a useful comparison:  A friend of mine has a 4WD Volvo wagon.  His shock absorbers cost $800 each.

The ’95 did use some oil, and eventually (fall 2014) there was a noticeable loss of power one day while towing one of the catamarans home from the lake.  At 340,000 km a valve went bad and the engine lost compression in one cylinder.  I disconnected that cylinder’s injector and we drove it that way until summer, when I pulled the motor.  And since it had developed some drivetrain noise over the winter, the transmission came out as well (I was hoping it was just a clutch bearing, but once I got the motor out I figured it was actually the tranny’s main shaft bearings).

(Later…)  The ’95 is done and back on the road.  Cost of repair:  About $400, including the used motor and transmission (from a ’98, I think), a new clutch disk, junkyard exhaust manifold/y-pipe (the new heads have single exhaust ports, where the old ones had dual ports), a few gaskets, and a pipe plug.  The gentleman who supplied the motor+tranny also threw in a hatchback door (mine was rusting) for a case of beer (that he insisted I share in partaking; this is man’s commerce, mind you).  With relatively little effort (and even less skill!) invested in the repair, this thing drives like new – the motor is strong and the transmission tight, and I’m really enjoying it.  Total cost to date:  Less than $1500.

The 1999 Legacy Outback w/ EJ25D+4AT

Okay, assuming it’s (finally) settling down, it’s time to relate the saga.

As I said, when I dumped the Land Cruiser for whatever I could get out of the miserable thing, I picked up the ’99 Outback – our first Subaru – the next day.  It was in terrific outward condition, but came with the caveat that it’d had problems with overheating.  Just a little research revealed that its motor – the 2.5L DOHC – had a history of these problems thanks to a bad head gasket design.  Typically, one solves it by simply pulling the heads and replacing the gaskets, which can be done without lifting the motor.  So over a few days in November I did just that – pulled the heads (losing some knuckle skin in the process – turns out that if you unbolt the motor mounts and raise it up just a couple of inches it makes a huge difference), sent them out to be milled flat (same day service!), bought the new gaskets and other assorted (cam, cover, etc.) seals, and stuffed it all back together.  Let me add that the head torquing procedure on these things is Baroque, and that in the course of getting the timing belt right I found an error in the Subaru factory documentation that had dutifully been reproduced in the Haynes manual, but I got it done.  It started on the first crank and ran beautifully… for exactly two days.  Then the motor began issuing a horrible clatter that turned out to be a couple of connecting rod bearings that had been done in by the overheating even before I got the car.  (This is when we bought the ’95, thinking it would be a good engine donor for this one.  Many do that swap – the EJ25D-to-EJ22 – but as I explained above, after buying the car I thought better of it.)  The following summer (or was it the summer after that?  I can’t remember anymore.) I pulled the motor, figuring I’d basically be doing the bearings, but when I took the crank to the machine shop they told me it was too far gone.  I found a short block on Kijiji for a couple of hundred bucks, swapped my heads onto it, and gave it another go.

It ran pretty well, but there was one bit of weirdness.  The transmission didn’t want to shift into 4th (the highest) gear until the speed was way up near 130km/hr, and that ain’t right.  As well, the tranny’s idiot light would occasionally blink while out on the highway, but the error never persisted.  Finally, the tranny conked out and just wouldn’t shift properly at all at the same time as the heater core sprung a leak.  I’ve been debugging stuff for a really long time, and if there’s anything I don’t believe in it’s coincidental unrelated failures, but that’s exactly what happened.  I parked the damn thing until the following summer.

So, simultaneously with putting the new motor+tranny in the ’95 and doing general rehabilitation on the ’99 Forester (that I introduce later), I tried to sort out what was going on with this one.  I jumpered around the heater core so I could concentrate on the tranny problem, and using one of those goofy do-an-ignition-switch-and-shifter-dance-then-read-the-blinkenlicht-code things found that the transmission control module was complaining about an engine load signal that it gets from the engine control module.  To make a long (a couple of months, on and off) story short, it boiled down to my having failed to tighten down a crucial ground wire on the top of the intake manifold when I dropped the new motor in.  Duh.  I torqued it down, went for a flawless (as in: that high shift point even moved back down to where it belonged) test drive, and had some crow for supper.  After that, replacing the heater core was just a couple of days of rather ugly grunt work:

All in a day’s work.

and it’s now back on the road.  Let’s see if it holds…

At this point, I’d like to take a little break to talk about the kind of people who are into Subarus.  In a phrase: A better class of people.  You know how, when you start driving a new kind of car, you immediately begin noticing every car on the road that’s the same as yours?  Since getting into these, it’s been amazing how many we see out there – Subaru really seems to be some kind of sleeper in the car market; the brand that quietly dominates a category while going quite unnoticed by everyone else.  In contrast, drive a Land Cruiser and you’ll be struck by how few of them are out there.  It’s a brand favoured by fetishists – marginal personalities who, based on arcane logic and argument, do things like import right-hand-drive trucks that have spent their working lives underground in South African mines.  Used parts?  Fuggedaboudit.  On the rare occasion that one hits the wrecker, the grapevine positively catches fire as the fanatics race for the parts.  And Jeeps?  Obviously they’re abundant, but most of the guys I’ve bought parts from (though I’ve few complaints about the parts themselves, including an excellent engine) have been slobs, hillbillies, and low-lifes.  Not all, I hasten to add – I’ve met some really good folks too – but most.

On the other hand, Subaru people continue to surprise and delight.  When I first joined the online forum I’m most active on, one of the first subjects that came up was that thermostat I mentioned up in the second paragraph.  Now, I’ve long gotten used to people getting their backs up in conversation with me.  It’s not because I’m being a dick, rather because I like to dig a little deeper and understand things, and what usually happens is that the people I’m asking  think I’m challenging – or don’t believe – them (it’s a geeks vs. normals thing).  When I pressed these guys over why the Subaru thermostat is significantly better than the aftermarkets, they didn’t ask why I was asking stupid questions.  They put up the hysteresis curve and explained that it also has a much larger aperture for greater flow.  Seems there’s a disproportionate number of engineers among Subaru owners.  People I can talk to (and in this group, heavy cats, too.  I do embedded systems, but one of the guys does satellite hardware.).  I bought a motor last summer from a Ph.D. student in psychology, and this summer’s motor and tranny are coming from a retired mechanical engineer who’s the most enjoyable company for pulling wrenches.  I’ve got other friends locally who drive them, including a former business partner who used to be dean of sciences at our university.  As I said, these cars seem to attract a better class of people.

The 1999 Forester w/ EJ25S+4AT

We’re now up to three:  The above two, plus a ’99 Forester (2.5litre SOHC auto) that came from a pal for a couple of hundred bucks as he was cleaning up his dad’s stuff.  It needed some wiring tidied up, a new stereo, and a little TLC.  It still needs an oxygen sensor and there’s a harsh 4-3 downshift when you step on it, so it’s a work in progress.  But still, it’s 4WD and easy and cheap to work on, and it’s already my wife’s daily driver.

Obviously, these cars aren’t 1-ton pickups or serious offroad bashers.  But when it comes to everyday light- to medium-duty use, I don’t know why other cars even bother showing up.

July 2017 Update:

We drove the Forester for a couple of summers, but by last fall the transmission had just become too nasty to continue to use.  That 4-3 downshift under power wasn’t just harsh – it felt like you’d been hit from behind.  So we parked it for the winter.  The $2000+ estimate I received from a transmission shop was a nonstarter, so once the wrench-pulling weather returned in the spring, I counted myself lucky to find the same year and model in the local boneyard – important because that’s the only car that transmission was used in.  And given that Foresters aren’t nearly as plentiful as Legacy/Outbacks, I jumped at it.  Spent a whole day dropping it by myself, a task exacerbated by my:  a) having had shoulder surgery in January that I was making an effort not to blow, and b) having forgotten to bring a water bottle along.  Once it was out and loaded into my car I couldn’t get a Slurpee fast enough.

Now, here’s the thing:  When you get a major component like that from a wrecker, you don’t know whether it’s any good.  Sure, they guarantee the stuff so if it’s DOA I can get my money back.  But that’s little comfort after days of effort expended pulling it in the yard, dropping the bad one from my car, and bolting in the new one – all to then find out whether the replacement is good, because it’s not possible to test it before installing it.  About all one has to go on is the condition of the donor car:  If the body is sound a mechanical failure probably led it to the yard and the odds aren’t good.  If there’s body damage there’s a better chance it was mechanically sound before the crash.  So you throw the dice and invest $130 and a lot of effort.

This time it came up seven, and I couldn’t be happier.

Two Kinds of Dicks.

Back in the summer of 1990 I found myself at loose ends – the SRL show we had scheduled for ArtPark in upstate New York had been canceled (something to do with word getting out that we were going to burn a lot of bibles…), and I didn’t have anything else going on.  I ran into an old friend, and he asked whether I could come in and help the company in Calgary for which he’d been working, Microtech.  They’d had a group of engineers in there to build some oil+gas drilling instrumentation, and these guys had wasted a lot of time and money without delivering anything that worked.  The company was in trouble, and I do rescues, so I came on board.  I got all that crap sorted out and in a few months we had a prototype we could do our first field tests on.

So in the first week of December we were all installed in an Atco trailer out at a wellsite near Provost, Alberta.  It was seriously nasty cold that winter; we were seeing those -40 days, but the work was going well.  On December 8th we were having breakfast at one of the restaurants in town, and I went out to the lobby to give my dad a birthday call.  As I was calling, I noticed that in one of those little brochure-holders full of American Express applications there was one on which someone had been doodling swastikas.

Now, you need a little context here.  Not too far from Provost there was an asshole named Terry Long who’d hooked up with that miserable old creep Richard Butler, infamous for running the Aryan Nations compound down in Hayden Lake, Idaho.  Long was noisily staging cross-burnings and the like, which the local press dubbed “pinhead picnics”.

This is what I had in mind while calling my dad.  I almost couldn’t stop laughing, and told him we didn’t have anything to worry about from this batch of neo-Nazi shitkickers, since every one of the swastikas doodled on the AmEx brochure was botched, and most of the attempts were drawn in the wrong rotation.  To add to the hilarity, the restaurant’s muzak system was piping out selections from Fiddler on the Roof.  The white-supremacist-wannabe losers who couldn’t even draw their own logo are the first dicks in this story.

But back out at the rig, our testing was underway.  Since the stuff I built was working okay and I was really just there in case problems popped up, I was spending my time in my bunk, reading Robert Graysmith’s Zodiac book.  But our president, Gerry Thorpe, had other ideas.  He wanted to get some snazzy group photos of his R+D crew on their first field test.  I told him to include me out, as I wasn’t particularly interested in trading a warm bunk and book about a serial killer for a romp out in the -40.  But he insisted, so we all got bundled up and posed for him in a steaming clump in front of the drilling rig, and while he was busy snapping pics for the company photo album I flashed him a rat for dragging me into the cold.  Apparently he didn’t notice.

The rest of the trip was uneventful.  Our stuff seemed to behave, and in a day or two we packed it all up and headed back to the shop in Calgary.

A couple of weeks later Gerry called me into his office, and began relating a little story about how, at a meeting of the company’s board and investors, he’d proudly pulled out the photo album to show off his pictures of our first field tests.  And how the chairman was flipping through the photos, and stopped at one, and squinted, and looked closer, and called Gerry over, asking him “Gerry, what’s this?”, to which (Gerry claimed) he answered, “Why, sir, it would appear to be a penis, but it’s very small and difficult to tell”.

I mentioned it was -40, didn’t I?

Tupac: Legendary Thug or Whiny Little Bitch?

I have 12-year-old girls.  They’re in grade 7.  This week they got their first taste of poetry (note air bunnies) at school.

Sarah got Poe, which is completely cool.  During supper I pulled down the book and she read The Raven.  Then we watched the episode of Homicide in which a 10-year-old corpse is discovered walled-in in a basement, and the now-revealed killer cracks up (thump thump, thump thump) and walls himself in.  That was a great show, and a worthy predecessor to The Wire.  But back to the story.

Becky got Tupac.  I swear to gawd.  It’s still not totally clear, but it would seem to have been one of the choices of author offered by her teacher, and this particular piece, Sometimes I Cry, was chosen by one of her classmates.  Now, I hate most hippety-hop.But I love Public Enemy, The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, and Ice T/Body Count, but with few exceptions the rest blows.  So while I’m not way up on the late Mr. Shakur’s oeuvre, I’m reasonably certain that this poem (air bunnies again) was one of few acceptable choices amongst all the “niggaz” and “muthafuckaz”:

Sometimes when I’m alone
I Cry,
Cause I am on my own.
The tears I cry are bitter and warm.
They flow with life but take no form
I Cry because my heart is torn.
I find it difficult to carry on.
If I had an ear to confide in,
I would cry among my treasured friend,
but who do you know that stops that long,
to help another carry on.
The world moves fast and it would rather pass by.
Then to stop and see what makes one cry,
so painful and sad.
And sometimes…
I Cry
and no one cares about why.

I read that and snorted.  My wife guffawed.  There’s a lot of stuff we don’t agree on, but not among those things is that this sounds like the work of an angst-ridden adolescent girl.

Some thug.

(Thanks to George Booth, the best cartoonist in the whole world.)

On Radio

I love being on the radio.  I don’t know why, really.  I just do, and always have.  I don’t think it has much to do with ego, or I wouldn’t use a pseudonym for my on-air presence.

Listening to the radio has been a centerpiece of my life as far back as I can remember, but being on it started in the spring of 1980, when I visited my cousin and his friends in southern California for the first time.  He was going to UC Irvine and doing a show at KUCI, and I joined him there one night while he did his shift.  Inside it looked pretty much like most small college stations – I remember a huge wall of record shelves and a copy of Jon Hassell’s Earthquake Island on Tomato.  Outside it had 10 FM Watts, barely enough to cover the campus, let alone any of the surrounding houses in the massive, radio-dense Los Angeles and Orange County market.  But I was smitten.  So when I started classes at the University of Calgary that fall, CJSW was one of the places I went in my first week on campus.  Bill Reynolds was the station manager.  We chatted for a bit and he got a sense of my musical taste – still pretty immature, but already decidedly offbeat.  He asked me to show him how I handled records.  A couple of weeks later he called and asked whether I was interested in taking over a midnight Wednesday spot.  I jumped at it, and I’ve been on the air ever since, on and off.  When “off” it’s never been out of choice.  We’ve been through a lot together.  When I joined we were cable-FM-only, off the air overnight (time we sometimes gave to another college station in town), and precariously funded.  We fought the fights, got the funding, put it on the FM dial, and now CJSW is an 18,000 Watt force, by all accounts the best college station in the country.

Over the years, my dad, always concerned about what might (generously) be called “career instability” in my life, asked me from time to time why, if I liked it so much, I didn’t go in for a professional life in radio.  I had to explain that my primary interest is in music (something that, as serious music lover himself, he understood, even if he didn’t understand my music) that’s played very seldom and in very few places where one might get paid for playing it.  Like (at the time) CBC’s Brave New Waves, and the odds of making it to the chair on that program would be too long.  Just wasn’t a viable option.

I had some of that same conversation with a CBC Calgary producer I took sailing (for a feature he does) some years later.  I explained to him that on student radio I have freedoms he couldn’t ever indulge in, like playing John Cage’s infamous 4:33.  You can’t do that on the Mother Corp, because after 28 seconds of silence the “dead air preventer” kicks in and plays smarmy jazz (or jazzy smarm – could be either one) until someone sorts out the “problem” (perhaps there’s a special dispensation to be had from on high for such antics, but if there is, it’s probably preceded by “Submit this requisition in triplicate and we’ll get back to you by the next fiscal quarter”).  To me, radio is freedom, and their version – as much as I enjoy (and learn from) it – just has too many rules.

But here’s my Best Radio Story Ever.

It’s somewhere around 2006, sometime in the fall, something like 10:00 at night.  I’m doing a show called Noise, and I’m playing Jaap Blonk’s reading of Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate, which is such a favourite piece.  It’s been performed and recorded by Christopher Butterfield and Christian Bok (what is it about Canadians and this stuff, huh?) and Eberhard Blum (come to think about it, how come every one of these performers has a surname that starts with “B”?) and Schwitters himself, but to my ears the best reading is by Blonk.  And it was rare, too – after he put it out, there was some kind of flap with Schwitters’ estate and he was forced to pull it from the market.  For a long time the only place I could find his version was on ubuweb as an mp3.  So I’m about a quarter of the way into the more than 25 minutes of this wild labioglottal blowout, and the phone starts ringing. It’s mostly calls from the truly bewildered, wanting to know how long the insanity is going to continue. Some callers are open to engaging in conversation about it; some just yell at me and hang up.  I’m used to all of this, given the weirdo music I play on my shows.

But what I wasn’t expecting was the call from the guy out in the field outside of Didsbury. You don’t need to know where Didsbury is; stay with me and you’ll get the picture. The call was from a guy who explained that he was in the cab of a combine, and he was there in the middle of the night because they were in the middle of the fall harvest. And he told me about how hard it is to stay clear and attentive, given the long, tough hours they work during harvest and the numbing boredom that comes from driving one line after another, and that when they’re doing that they spend a lot of time flipping through the dial, looking for something interesting, something engaging, something different to listen to. He said that he found me playing this bizarre work, and that it was the most amazing thing he’d ever heard in his life. And that, in turn, was the most amazing thing I’d ever heard from a listener in 25 years, on and off, of doing volunteer radio at CJSW, because reaching a farmer, a rural blue-collar guy who’s about the last guy I’d ever think is my audience, a guy out on a combine in the middle of the night in the middle of a field outside of Didsbury, with an outlawed recording of a Dutch performance artist doing an 80-year-old vocal tone poem by an Austrian Dadaist… well, that was simply the moment that 25 years in radio had all led up to. It was perfect.

And because perfect can sometimes get just a little bit better, I got to tell Jaap Blonk this story a few years ago when he was in Calgary for the spoken word festival.

God I love radio.

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I’ve thought for a long time about whether to post this story, because it might come off as too self-aggrandizing, and that’s really not my style.  But it was such a peculiar, unlikely event that I can’t leave it out, so please forgive me if it strikes you as a bit boastful.

The context that makes this so improbable is, basically, that I’m a misanthrope.  I live out in the woods because I don’t care much for being around people that I don’t have close relationships (work or recreational, mostly) with, and living out in the woods makes casual social interactions (especially in the city) much less frequent and likely.  So it was very unusual for me, after finishing another episode of Noise at 10pm on a Thursday, instead of just making the hour-long drive straight home, to pop down to a bar downtown (that I’d never previously visited) where some station people had organized a “games night” (that’s another thing I don’t do much, other than Scrabble).  By the time I got there things had largely wound down, but I figured What the hell, might as well have a drink and hang out for a bit.

I was probably still on that first drink when I noticed a couple of guys walking by the club’s storefront window.  What made them notable was that one really stood out – tall, well-built, black, and wearing a tour jacket with a huge Warner Brothers logo stitched on the back.  Everything about his appearance and the way he carried himself said Not From Around Here, “urban” in the “big city” sense, not the hippety-hop sense.  The impression was hardened with each of the two or three passes they made by the window over, maybe, an hour.  Eventually they stuck their noses in the door and spoke to someone who then came over to our table and asked whether anyone here answered to “CC” (my nom de radio).  I raised my hand and was told that the chaps at the door wanted to speak with me.

I went to the door and we introduced ourselves; the fellow in question was visiting from New York, where he’s in the music business.  He said that he’d heard my show, thought it was incredible, and decided to try to track me down and meet.  We chatted for a bit and he insisted that I go for a walk so he could introduce me to a couple of friends who were spinning tunes in other clubs down the 1st St SW strip.  I did, and the rest of the evening was spent talking and meeting some people.

That’s it.  The story doesn’t have a gripping climax and it didn’t signal one of those events upon which the direction of one’s life pivots.  Just a really strange thing to have happened at all.

p.s. I’d love to know when, exactly, this happened – I didn’t make note of the date.  I keep aircheck CDs of all my shows, and I’d very much like to go back and give that one a listen to see what it was that he found so interesting.

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Oh, alright… as long as I’m being immodest, here’s another one:

H.K. has sent you a message.
Date: 11/02/2012
Subject: Yer Awesomeness

A month or so ago, when you were doing Alternative to What, you played,
uninterrupted the entire album "The Sensational Alex Harvey Band". I was
driving into Calgary and I heard the entire thing....at one point I was
crying...do not have any idea what THAT was about...tears of joy? Anyhow,
just wanted to thank you for the incredible radio experience.
 
ciao,
H.

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I don’t do a lot of interviews, so I try to make the ones I do count.  My favourite thing is to find the oddities, the little things that most people don’t even notice or connect up and that I can be pretty certain the subject has never been asked about.  And the unexpected interactions are sometimes a real treat.  A truly memorable example came from interviewing Philip Glass in 1987 for VOX, the monthly magazine our station used to put out (I was one of the founding writers).  I’d been listening to his stuff since the late 70s, having ordered his early “hardcore” (Michael Riesman’s term) Chatham Square LPs through Swamp Bird Jazz Records, and on my first trip to L.A. (see above) driven to San Diego to get a copy of Einstein on the Beach.  The kids really don’t get how much work being serious about music was back then.  I’d also seen the ensemble play in Vancouver when they were touring Glassworks in the early 80s.

I did a phoner with him from Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, before the Ensemble came to play Calgary – the timing worked out well; we had the magazine on the stands by the time of the gig.  The interview was a lot of fun, and at the end he invited me down to the Jack Singer to meet when they were doing their soundcheck.  So on the appointed day one of my station pals – another Glass fan – and I went down to say hi.  As it was getting late in the afternoon, I thought I’d take a flyer on asking them out to supper, though I didn’t really expect the invitation to be accepted.  After all, Glass is one of the giants of late 20th-century composition, and it would only make sense for all of Calgary’s arts glitterati to be vying for his attention – surely he already had other arrangements.  Instead, I was (and am to this day) gobsmacked to hear him say, “Thank god – not another grilled cheese sandwich on the bus.”

So we called up another station pal and the three of us took Glass, Riesman, and their tour manager (Glass explained that the wind players don’t like to eat before a show) to my favourite hole-in-the-wall Chinatown noodle kitchen (the sadly departed Hang Fung).  It was a gas.  He particularly dug their congee and I got my LPs autographed in true fanboy fashion.  (He added that if I made it to New York he’d return the favour by taking me out to one of his noodle joints.  A year later I was there doing my first Survival Research Laboratories tour, and since we were being co-presented by The Kitchen I asked one of their people to get in touch with him for me.  As it happened, they were of very little use to us, so that didn’t happen either.)  The concert – though excellent – wasn’t very well-attended.  If I recall properly, there was some stupid hockey game on and 10,000 Maniacs were playing MacEwan Hall, so there was an unusual level of entertainment dilution that night.  We chatted afterward, and when I mentioned it he said he should have had them open for him.  I initially took it in jest, but quickly realized he was serious, which makes all the sense in the world if you know about his history as a hot new composer on the rise in New York in the 70s.  He’s been here a few times since (with and without the Ensemble), and I always try to say hello.

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