I had an interesting day today out in Leesburg yesterday.

I went out for a three hour training session, including a flight. Yesterday’s storm cleared the air and presented us with a beautiful day. There were some overcast cumulus clouds at around 2700, but they were moving off to the east, so my instructor Alon and I initially filed a flight plan with FSS to go out to Winchester/HOAGE, but we immediately had to cancel and re-file due to low ceilings on the ridgeline just west of Leesburg.

We re-filed for Frederick, then went out to the field to pre-flight the 1982 172P we were to be flying. I chose the 172P because it had a carburetor rather than fuel injection, and I wanted to get some experience flying a carburetor aircraft before the weather got too cold and I switched over to an injected aircraft. Also, the 172P is a little cheaper to rent, so I figured I could stretch those dollars further during this first part of my training.

We did a slow and thorough pre-flight, going over every inch of the fuselage, rivet-by-rivet, top to bottom. Early in the preflight, minor problems started to appear. First, there were two rivets missing from the canopy, and one too-loose screw near the alternator assembly. Not a big deal though, and not uncommon in older aircraft, as you well know. Then we noticed that one of the hinge-pins on the right cabin door was loose. The door operated fine and did not pose a safety threat (and according to FAA rules were not a problem), but the combination of that issue and the one on the canopy made Alon feel a bit uneasy.

Finally, we were checking the cockpit and found that the pilot’s radio was inoperative. It received just fine, but could not transmit, which meant that Alon and I would have no way to communicate (except shouting) for the duration of the flight. We found that the broken comm was noted in the maintenance book, but the repair could be legally deferred, because the craft still had one working comm.

He hesitantly offered to take me up anyway, but I was adamant that if I could not ask questions during the flight that I wouldn’t learn anything, and we would both be frustrated. Also, at that point, neither of us completely trusted that the aircraft to take us up.

We completed the formality of pre-flighting the aircraft, just so I could get the experience, then radioed back to the FBO to see if there were any other 172s available. All of them were either out or grounded for repair, so we had to scrub the flight.

So, today was disappointing, but I learned a valuable lesson; go with your instincts, because what is technically airworthy according to the FAA is not always safe. Little things can add up quickly, and I’d rather learn that lesson on the field and not at 4000 feet.

I took part in last weekend’s 2006 Idiotarod, a shopping cart race across the Brooklyn Bridge. Here is the Wall Street Journal article about it. This appeared on Page 1A of today’s WSJ:

On Brooklyn Streets, Shopping Carts Roll In a Renegade Derby

Teams Dodge Potholes, Police In Race to Manhattan; Cobra’s Bag of Dirty Tricks
By JOE BARRETT
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
February 2, 2006; Page A1

BROOKLYN, N.Y. — Tom Grise and his team had high hopes for their shopping cart. They attached 10-foot metal bars to make it easier to pull and placed a scary plastic skull on the front. They girded it in cardboard, painted to look like a mining cart. The five members of the team decked themselves out in Indiana Jones costumes.

When they crested the hill of Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park last Saturday afternoon, they realized what they were up against: nearly 200 rival teams including a group of 7-foot bananas and a barrel full of naughty monkeys. Vampires escorted a bat with a 12-foot wingspan. An Old West saloon featured cowboys, a busty barkeep and a working keg of beer. A team from the “Mayo Clinic,” dressed as doctors, smothered themselves in mayonnaise.

Mr. Grise, a 25-year-old engineering consultant, had arrived at the starting point of the third annual Idiotarod, New York’s answer to Alaska’s Iditarod race, with shopping carts taking the place of sleds and human beings taking the place of dogs. Instead of more than 1,000 miles of snow-covered back country, the course features about four miles of snarling traffic, crowded sidewalks, nasty potholes, stern police and a chaotic crossing of the Manhattan Bridge in which entrants sabotage one another with body checks. They also throw fruit.

Shopping-cart races are popping up in cities around the country, offering an outlet for on-the-edge creativity and urban anarchy. San Francisco will hold its 12th “Urban Iditarod” on March 4, the starting date for the real Iditarod race from Anchorage to Nome. Racers will leave downtown San Francisco and go a little beyond Fisherman’s Wharf, about three miles away. Portland, Ore., and Ann Arbor, Mich., have similar events.
[Members of the Cobra team push their cart through the streets of Manhattan.]
Members of the Cobra team push their cart through the streets of Manhattan.

Jeff Stark, a 33-year-old film-production worker and handyman, and Maureen Flaherty, 31, a buyer for a maker of recycled glass and concrete countertops, were looking for something fun to do at the end of a dreary January. The Brooklyn roommates are part of a loosely knit community drawn to the borough for its somewhat cheaper rents and low-budget, participatory art scene. They decided to steal the idea from the San Francisco event and import it to New York, redubbing it the Idiotarod.

“Art is one of the reasons that people will accept for doing things in New York,” Mr. Stark says. “You can get away with all kinds of creative high jinks.”

They promoted the event on the Web and through Nonsense NYC, an email list Mr. Stark runs highlighting “independent art” and “strange happenings.” The first year drew about 150 runners pushing 30 carts. The second year, 600 runners showed up and about 1,000 turned out this year, according to Mr. Stark.

Like their counterparts in San Francisco, the New York organizers had no interest in going through official channels and getting permits to close off streets along the route. Concerned that police were onto the published starting point in an industrial section of the Williamsburg neighborhood, organizers called participants the morning of the race and told them to assemble at the top of Fort Greene Park, a steeply sloping spot with a view of the Manhattan skyline.

Racers didn’t even know where they were headed. They were given one checkpoint at a time and were free to chart their own course.

Luke Stiles, 32, a Brooklyn software engineer at MTV, says his team, “Double Down — Red Squad,” acquired their cart from a store parking lot the night before the race. The morning of the event, they stenciled some white T-shirts with the logo from Mr. Stiles’s bicycle-racing team. Red bandanas completed their outfits. Short a fifth person, they recruited a friend’s girlfriend at the starting line.

Richard Garcia, a 38-year-old carpenter, spent six weekends building a cart with a cobra theme in his Jersey City, N.J., basement. With his girlfriend, Anne Silvernail, a 25-year-old sculptor and member of the Brooklyn Bombshells roller-derby team, Mr. Garcia enclosed the cart in plywood and installed a battery and a propane tank. The finished product had working headlights, a hot-rod paint job and a sculpted 6-foot-high, fire-breathing snake head.

The couple got swept into the race last summer by Oscar Owens, a 31-year-old Brooklyn music producer. He heads a 40-person “team of teams” called Cobra, or Carts of Brooklyn Racing Association. The group had five teams in the race, including Mr. Garcia’s and one with “anyone who admitted to having run before,” Mr. Owens says. An additional 15 team members with no carts at all were on hand simply to disrupt the other racers. Says Mr. Owens: “Our goal was a clean sweep.”

At 2:30, small explosions and a rain of confetti marked the start of the race. Contestants picked up their carts and scrambled down several sets of steps before descending on the city — taking over sidewalks on both sides of the street and dodging cars to cross.

It took only minutes for a passing patrol car to notice something amiss. Their lights flashing, police cars shadowed the racers for much of the day.

A few blocks short of the first checkpoint, Cobra laid a trap. Team members had set up a folding table with a sign that said “CHECKPOINT.” Runners scrambled to hand the bogus officials their paperwork, seeking a stamp to show they’d completed that leg of the race, Mr. Owens says. Many of them didn’t get the forms back, he says.

At the real checkpoint, Mr. Garcia says he tried to send flames out of the cobra’s mouth, but the bumpy ride had jarred loose some wires.

Leaving the checkpoint, contestants ran a gantlet of hurled bananas, maple syrup, ketchup and other goopy stuff. “We got pelted with everything,” Mr. Garcia says. “Eggs, whole fish, pudding, Silly String. I couldn’t stand the smell of myself.”

The tight quarters on the Manhattan Bridge walkway set up a free-for-all of cart bashing, shoving and other mischief. “It was the closest thing to ‘Mad Max’ I’ve ever experienced,” says Mr. Grise, the Indiana Jones team leader.
[Temple of Zoom: Maggie Grise, Lars Russell, Tom Grise, Jason Lee and Adam Duerson (left to right) at the finish line of Saturday’s Idiotarod, with their Indiana Jones-themed shopping cart.]
Temple of Zoom: Maggie Grise, Lars Russell, Tom Grise, Jason Lee and Adam Duerson (left to right) at the finish line of Saturday’s Idiotarod, with their Indiana Jones-themed shopping cart.

Mr. Stiles’s team fell victim to a well-worn Idiotarod trick: Someone cut the ropes they used to pull the cart.

Police were waiting on the Manhattan side of the bridge, urging participants to slow down for a tight turn and handing out citations for drinking in public. The police “couldn’t have been nicer about it,” said one recipient, who said it carried a $25 fine.

Police later said the race caused only minor problems. “Police officers were called to marshal traffic and pedestrians,” said Detective Bernard Gifford. The group really should get a street-closing permit for future races, he said.

Mr. Stiles’s Double Down team picked up speed after the bridge. One of his fellow teammates knew Chinatown and the Lower East Side well, and the team reached the second checkpoint in first place.

The race ended in East River Park, just across from Brooklyn, where it all had begun. The first team to cross the finish line, “Scout Troop 666,” a bunch of guys in scout uniforms, was disqualified because it hadn’t stopped at any of the checkpoints, Mr. Stark says. The team did pick up a prize for best-in-sabotage. The second team to finish, “Hawaii Five-0,” was penalized for being rude to the judges at one of the rest stops, he says.

That left Mr. Stiles and the Double Down squad, who crossed the finish line third, to take the first place prize by default, winning $500.

After walking the last leg of the race with all 25 of the Cobra team racers and crossing the finish line in style, Mr. Garcia finally succeeded in letting loose with a 3-foot-long blast of flames for the judges. The Cobra team was rewarded with the $500 best-in-show prize and the honor of organizing the event next year.

I just finished Al Franken’s newest book, The Truth (with Jokes). Here is his take on the Republican “Party of Responsibility”. Take it away, Al:

“You can’t count on them to give you straight information. You can’t count on them to tell us straight why we’re going to war. You can’t count on them to tell us what’s happening over there.

You can’t count on them to do their homework. To keep track of our money. You can’t count on them to punish war profiteers. You can’t count on them to protect our troops.

You can’t rely on them for much of anything. Armor. Veterans’ benefits. You can’t count on them for the true story of how Jessica Lynch was captured, or how Pat Tillman died. Even for how the “Mission Accomplished” sign went up on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. They actually lied about that.

You can’t count on them to count terrorist attacks. You can’t count on them to count civilian victims. You can’t count on them to listen to military commanders and send in enough troops, or to not lie about the commanders asking them to send more troops, or to listen to Colin Powell and not torture people, or to not lie about whether the torture policies started at the top.

You can’t trust them to care. About Iraqis. About Americans.

You can’t trust them to do the work of actually signing killed-in-action letters. You can’t trust them not to lie about not signing killed-in-action letters.

You can’t count on them to acknowledge any mistakes whatsoever. You can’t trust them not to lie when confronted with those mistakes.

You can’t trust them not to believe their own propaganda.

You can’t trust them. Period.”

Ed Cone tries to find some middle ground on the abortion debate.

How did I miss this. Last week, Wilco released a double live album, Kicking Television. Read the Bitchfork review or pick it up at Amazon.

Further Signs of the Apocalypse #24:
Video of a school dance team’s Harry Potter skit. I was holding it together until “Let’s Hear It For the Boy”.

Harry Potter and the Dance Team of Fire

The top 5 songs to play on my iPod today:

1. Superchunk — The First Part
2. Tiger Trap — Hiding
3. Old 97s — Barrier Reef (Live)
4. The Jealous Sound — The Fold Out
5. Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince — Summertime

I will always remember the summer of 2005 as the summer of dentistry. After 5 years of dental neglect — engendered by Fear of the Dentist — my teeth had had enough, and I was forced to seek the services of a dental professional. Since May, I have sat in the big boy chair six times; two cleanings, a root canal, 3 wisdom teeth extractions, a partridge and a pear tree.

Today was to be my final exam — no pun intended — where Dr. Cote was to apply a crown to my root-canaled-tooth, and I was honestly really excited about it. Finally, I am cured of my Fear of the Dentist. Until he called me last night.

Apparently, there was a fire in his office on Friday afternoon, and the office will be closed for four to five weeks for repairs. So, no dentistry for me.

When the universe sends me a sign, it really sends me a sign.

I don’t care what you say… I can’t stop listening to Ashlee Simpson’s Autobiography. Much like the Dukes of Hazzard movie, it knows exactly what it is, and doesn’t try to be anything else.

Whiskeytown might be reforming. So what? Whiskeytown was known as much for destroying stages as releasing albums, so why should rumors of a possible reunion register on the musical radar, especially in the wake of the reunions of so many other bands — Mission of Burma, Slint, Dinosaur, Jr.? Somewhere between Jeff Tweedy “inventing country rock” and Ryan Adams’ solo debut “Heartbreaker” sits Whiskeytown — Uncle Tupelo’s flash-in-the-pan snot-nosed little brother. It shouldn’t be that five years and three albums should mean so much to so many people.

But it does…

I don’t remember much of 1999. The previous year had ended very badly for me with the death of a friend. It was one more shock than I could take, so I guess my brain sort of shut off. At the time, I didn’t recognize the forgetfulness — I kept a job, paid rent, played in a band, and had a girlfriend — but it has only been in the subsuquent years, after reading birthday cards, letters, and old emails that I recognize just how much happened that year, and just how much of it I cannot remember. What follows is drawn from those emails and letters, and the reverberations of one amazing event.

One thing I do remember is the time I spent sitting behind a drum set in the back room of my house on Lorimer Road in Davidson, helping my friend Cameron finish his demo. He wanted to move to Austin, the country-rock capital of the universe, and get famous. I needed something to do.

The house on Lorimer Road was an old fraternity house with huge common areas, wrap-around floor-to-ceiling windows and a patio that comfortably sit 25. (If anyone reading this has pictures of the old place, I’d love to see them.) Built into the exterior wall of the kitchen was a huge commercial-sized exhaust fan, designed to suck the air from the room in the event of a grease fire, activated by a tiny switch right above the comically underpowered electric stove. Flipping the switch would cause the fan to roar to life, darken the rest of the house and raise the noise level in the house by several decibals. It sounded like a rocket launching into space and so we christened the house “The Lauchpad”.

In the fall of 1999, I was introduced to Cam over beers at the Davidson Depot through a friend who knew I played drums. I’d seen him around campus, and because Davidson was so small, we had some mutual friends, but we had never been introduced. Cam was looking for a drummer and place to practice, so we convinced a mutual friend Christian to play bass and moved all of the equipment into the back room of the house, set up shop and got ready to record Cam’s demo.

Cam wanted to call our little project AM, after the first Wilco album, and I wanted something a little longer, so chose AM-80. At the time, all of the bands on the radio had numbers in the band name; Seven Mary Three, Matchbox 20, Marvelous 3. We chose 80 because it looked really cool in a font that Cam had picked out (Lucida Typewriter).

I’d not played drums in years, so to shake off the rust and immerse myself properly in the genre, I sat down with Whiskeytown’s Faithless Street album and practiced until I could play the entire album front to back. For an encore, I moved on to Stranger’s Almanac, Son Volt’s Trace, Uncle Tupelo, Old 97’s, The Backsliders, and Six String Drag. By that time, we had worked out the different song parts for the demo, and got ready to set aside some time to record.

And so it went. The week before New Year’s Eve 1999, Cam told me that he’d read in the newspaper that Whiskeytown was playing the the Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill, ringing in the New Year by playing their two albums, Stranger’s Almanac before the New Year and Faithless Street right after. Yes, we went.

I don’t remember most of the first set, but towards the end, right before midnight, Ryan Adams introduced the last song of the set, then got ready for the toast. We all drank the drink — Cam and I both kissed the girl standing in front of us — and as Whiskeytown broke into the first track from Stranger’s Almanac the flood gates opened in my head and the entire year’s worth of memories, everything I experienced but not remembered during 1999, rushed into my head. My knees buckled under force of it all and I sat on the floor of the Cat’s Cradle, breathing deeply, ringing in the New Year, listening to Whiskeytown.

In the years since, most of those bands I listened to have disbanded and Ryan Adams went from alt-country poster boy to loud-mouthed debutante.

For my part I’ve tracked down a bootleg of that New Years Eve show so I can remember what I’ve forgotten and made peace with the year I lost.