This is a fine way to recover from one’s yard work on a cold, cloudy day.

Spent a delightful Saturday at the all-day seminar on Great War aviation held at the Museum of Flight. Long-lost compadre Cliff Hare was there in a wingman capacity.

Here, he floats though the zero-gee environs of the Space Station module.

Highlights of the seminar included a report on a detailed windtunnel analysis of the doughty Fokker DVII, conducted at the UW windtunnel in the 1990’s.

One of several graphing-oriented slides.

The 1/4 scale model used for the tests.

This slide was from my favorite presentation, an overview of research techniques and results for learning about aircraft color schemes and insignia and how the appearances of a plane changed over time. The presentation was something like a primer in spectro-chemical and microscopic analysis of paint and canvas composition in scientific art history, except instead of preindustrial masterworks by Leonardo, it was the hurried and evolving efforts of factories and line crews.

This slide shows the contemporary appearance of the left-side cross insignia cut from Manfred von Richthofen’s celebrated, and fatal, red Fokker Dr.1 (the worn swatch to the left). The crisp graphics to the right show the stages of appearance the plane took, from factory to the day it was destroyed.

The presenter showed case after case in which a photographic evidence was used in combination with detailed swatch analysis to present compelling interpretations for the history of a given aircraft’s livery. It was thrilling.

Took long enough, but after strictly following the 10% a week rule, I finally managed to get back where I was when I gave myself tedonitis in February. Today I did 2.14 miles in 20 minutes. I hope to keep that as floor.

Now it is time to think about other objectives, like increasing the tilt on the treadmill, or varying the time daily, and so forth.

As I run I have been working through our iTunes by albums, in alphabetical order, skipping the country, folk, and bluegrass, since that’s what I listen to be default most of the time.

For the past several days I have been enjoying the still-ethereal strains of the Cocteau Twins, music I expected to be awful to run to but which is instead transporting.

Wait, what? Hasn’t it been in the 80s east of the Rockies for two months now already?

Took a buddy to his first legit ball game today.

It was the twenty-first perfect game in pro ball history. At the Mariners’ expense. He’s a Chicago fan, albeit a Bears guy.

I am still mad.

Recently, The Stranger’s Eli Sanders won a Pulitzer for his astounding, heartbreaking piece, The Bravest Woman in Seattle.

I was amazed and excited, both because I have long been an admirer of Sanders’ work and, selfishly, because I can now claim to have written for a Pulitzer-prize winning publication.

Reflecting on Eli’s work, I wondered when I first noted it. The answer is predictable and may have lead indirectly to my writing for The Stranger.

I posted a piece titled The Stranger Awakens in early April 2003, in which I expressed admiration for a piece by Sanders about the death of Rachel Corrie, Was This House Worth Her Life?

In my post I generally stated an improving opinion of the vitality of The Stranger and said some mildly snarky things about its recent past. At just around this time, I was writing for a national slick-paper genre film magazine, Cinescape, and was either already writing for or thinking about writing for Tablet, a local alternative to the alternative paper.

At any rate, I was really just talking to myself, with no expectation or intent to be heard. I was mistaken. A day or two later I received a tart, well-reasoned defense of The Stranger via email from no less a luminary than Dan Savage. I was understandably a bit flummoxed, sent Dan a thank you, and noted the event.

Around that time, I noticed that the blog was being regularly visited by folks from The Stranger, which made me very happy indeed, as the paper will always be my paper, even when I don’t read it weekly. Over the next year or so, I worked my way up to a masthead position at Cinescape and kept writing about local cartoonists and film at Tablet. Eventually, both publications folded.

To my shock, the week Tablet folded I was contacted by Dan, asking me to write a piece, a short feature, for The Stranger about local cartoonists and the sibling rivalry between Portland and Seattle. I wrote the piece, and it was, eh, OK. Dan tried to goose me into expressing my own critical opinions more forcefully in the editing process, but my time at Cinescape made it hard for me to speak as directly in my journalism as I do in personal communication, blogging included. So, I kinda blew it. Dan’s editorial guidance was absolutely right on, and it was my own inertia that made the piece more tepid than it could have been.

I still ended up writing about comics and film as a pitching (or pitch-in) stringer at the paper for a year or two, mostly under Bradley Steinbacher, one of the other remaining founders on staff at the time and a (very) vague acquaintance from my time at The Comet.

Anyway, so it would be a total exaggeration to say, “I totally called that Pulitzer.” It would not be a total exaggeration to extrapolate that Dan may well have done so. I would be a simple statement of fact to note that my admiration for a piece by Eli led to my writing for a publication I had long wished to be a part of, and that Dan is the man responsible for making that happen. So, heartfelt thanks and congratulations to you both.

Iwakuma finally gets a shot in Safeco! Man, I sure hope he does well.

well over ten years ago, I was delighted to find a bottle of the Peruvian raw brandy known as pisco in the liquor store.

On getting it open at home, I was dismayed. The bottle had been corked with a peculiar flexible stopper, not at all like the foam corks on wine we are all accustomed to today.

The stopper was made of injection-molded plastic, and apparently had been inserted into the bottle while the plastic was still hot.

How did I know this? Because the pisco, a drink which is a mere micron or two above moonshine in palate and drinkability, tasted as though it had been distilled from used carburetor oil and essence of migraine. It was headache-and-dry-heave terroir.

Because I have poor judgement, I kept the bottle, after swapping the poison stopper for a real cork. Occasionally I have sampled the foul swill to see if the heavier petroleum molecules have sunk to the bottom or mystically bound with the ether. Until tonight, the answer was, as Richard Dawkins would be happy to belittlingly crow, the predictable outcome of superstition.

But tonight when I sniffed the bottle my vision did not grow dark, nor did my guts churn. I poured a bit.

It’s still pisco, hot and harsh, but nearly grappa now, inexplicably. The horrible shower-curtain and asphalt bouquet is gone.

KUOW has run over an hour of programming today regarding pregnancy and childrearing, featuring STUNNINGLY smug and self absorbed American parents and sprog factories. Blech.