Plastic geekery redux and a pilgrimage

So I convinced Merujo to come with me to Richmond on Saturday for the IPMS Old Dominion Open. She was a good sport last year, too. This year the event was held at the Richmond International Raceway, which was much better than previous years. There was a lot more space and it wasn't nearly as hot.

"Welcome to the raceway.
As a public service, the modelers are being kept out of sight..."

It was simultaneously inspirational and depressing. There was even a ten-year-old competing in the adult category with his Panzer IV. I've been doing this for nearly ten years and still wouldn't dare to enter any of my models in a contest. So, like I said, it was inspirational and depressing.

LVT from the Pacific theater. The detail on this was outstanding.

The Webelo's Panzer IV

I was able to find a few resource materials I'd been after for a while, as well as MiG Productions thinner and some resin British Mark II helmets (with liners). I also found a great Bersagliere figure to go with a planned Semovente M40-75 diorama.

A Soviet BT-5 light tank

A Sherman M4A1—note the excellent use of weathering powders

A Soviet KV-1 heavy tank

A BF-109 with an incredible natural metal finish (if you've ever tried to create a convincing natural metal finish, then you understand how good this one looks)

I love this hobby, because I usually only get to work in two dimensions. Combining a love of history, detail orientation, and surprisingly uncoordinated fingers, I'm able to do something I enjoy immensely. I get to do research, work with paint, and occasionally even finish a model (which, I'm given to understand, is fairly commonplace among modelers). Seeing a three-dimensional representation of history wrought by one's own hands is really pretty satisfying. The main drawback of building models, though, is actually *telling* people that I build models. The initial response tends to range from polite bemusement to outright disdain. I find I'm somewhat judicious in revealing this particular hobby to some people. Paintball tends to garner the same responses that modeling does, so I find that it's usually safest to stick with golf. On the plus side, I've never been called a barbarian for building models, which makes it slight different than paintball... (Atomic Editor, I know I still owe you a model; I haven't forgotten you.)

An SBD Dauntless. Merujo's uncle flew one of these in the Pacific

A herd of F3Fs

Up close and personal with an F3F. Check out that rigging!

All in all, the IPMS event was a great success. Merujo even ended up purchasing a Flight magazine from 1943 that was chock-full of all sorts of interesting articles, photographs, and advertisements. I'm sure she'll have her own recap of the day, so you should visit her blog and learn about women and the US Air Transport Command.

Once we left Richmond, we headed up I-95. We deviated from our course, however, and ended up following Stonewall Jackson Road to the Stonewall Jackson Shrine.

Can't beat free admission

The house where Stonewall Jackson died

Put succinctly, the National Park Service maintains the house where Stonewall Jackson died, and we went to see it. It was very simple and quite touching, really. The area is still very rural and quiet, and the house is open for touring. We saw the waiting room where his staff officers conferred, and the room where he died. The bed he used was there, and the clock put there by the house's owner is still there, keeping time just as it did in 1863. I found the clock's ticking to be very soothing, and it reminded me of sleeping in the living room at my great aunt's house in Iowa.

Stonewall Jackson' deathbed

The clock

We also went upstairs to see the room where Jackson's servant Jim Lewis slept, as well as the room where Jackson's aides-de-camp slept. Original pieces from the owners' house were there, along with dozens of ladybugs on the windowsill.

The window in the officers' quarters

"They talked about the high price of furniture and rugs/
And fire insurance for ladybugs"

The ranger working there knew absolutely everything there was to know. I got the impression that he would have wanted to be there whether or not there were people coming to visit.

Sasquatch gets artsy near the I-95 corridor

Merujo and I took a few more photographs, and then we hopped back in the car to finish our trek northward. The rest of the trip was uneventful, and we made excellent time. Now if I can just get back to the modeling table...

Images from the weekend

Mongolian tsam mask

Snow dome

Awakening in the snow

Shutting the power down

From today's Los Angeles Times:

Phil Brown, the veteran actor best known for his brief role as Luke Skywalker's Uncle Owen in the 1977 hit film "Star Wars," died of pneumonia Thursday at the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, said his wife, Ginny. He was 89.

Although he had worked in stage and film for more than 30 years, his availability to play Luke's protective guardian came through some unusual circumstances.

Brown had been blacklisted during the McCarthy period and had moved to London with his family in the early 1950s to continue his acting career. A longtime progressive, Brown always denied being a Communist.

In London, he found work on stage and in such films as "Tropic of Cancer" (1970) and "Twilight's Last Gleaming" (1977).

In the mid-1970s, George Lucas was filming interior scenes for "Star Wars" at a London sound stage and needed an actor with a strong American accent.

After getting the role, Brown spent a month or so in Tunisia filming fewer than a handful of scenes.

As Luke's uncle in "Star Wars," he is trying to give the teenager a normal childhood and keep him from knowing he has Jedi roots. But Uncle Owen and his wife Beru meet an early end at the hands of imperial storm troopers.

It was, Brown later told the Baltimore Sun, "a very small part by comparison to the roles I had previously played. To be quite frank, I never gave it a thought again."

The son of a doctor, Brown was born in Cambridge, Mass., graduated from Stanford University and was accepted in the Group Theatre in New York in 1938. His first job on Broadway was as a dancer in the play "Everywhere I Roam."

According to a biographical sketch on his website, Brown was also interested in humanitarian causes and became involved in campaigns to send medical supplies to loyalist Spain and help in Russian relief efforts.

Despite its critical success, the Group Theatre folded in 1941, and Brown moved to Los Angeles to seek work in film.

Along with other former Group Theatre members, he formed the Actor's Laboratory, which produced critically acclaimed works in Hollywood. At the theater, he directed plays by Arthur Miller, Nikolai Gogol and Arthur Laurent. In 1948, he moved to London and played opposite Helen Hayes in "The Glass Menagerie."

Returning to Hollywood in 1949, he found work as a director and two years later finished his first feature film, "The Harlem Globetrotters," starring Dorothy Dandridge and members of the famous basketball team.

But that promising start ended quickly with the Red scare and the government focus on some members of the Actor's Lab. Brown and his wife left for London and stayed for 40 years.

When he returned to California in the early 1990s, Brown discovered that his small role in "Star Wars" had made him a celebrity. He became a popular figure at science fiction conventions.

He is survived by his wife of 65 years; a son, Kevin, of Hawaii; two grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.

A little trademark infringement, Scarecrow?

While driving around the streets of L.A., we passed a Starbucks. At least, it *looked* like a Starbucks until you actually focused on the logo a bit more carefully:



I reckon the Cleaning Baron may get a cease-and-desist letter from some attorneys in Seattle one of these days. Maybe not, but I think they would have a fairly strong case. I just hope the Baron didn't pay his logo designer all that much. He'll need the rest of the money for legal fees.

L.A. Story, Part II

Saturday

Coming off the high that was the Dolby gig, we were set to meet Javi for brunch at the crack of 1000. Apparently this is quite early in L.A. time. No matter—we were working on Central and Eastern Time, so our internal clocks had no problem making it up. Our bodies, on the other hand, may have differed with us at the time, considering how late we were up the night before.

Javi et alii

We met Javi at the King's Road Café on Beverly. The orange juice may well have been the best I've ever had in my life. I just had to get that out.

Javi's a great (and surprisingly normal) guy, and regaled us with many tales of his adventures in Hollywood and Marshalltown, Iowa. He was even kind enough to present me with Volume 1 of his comic (or should I say graphic novel?) "The Middleman". Great story with dynamic artwork. I'm a big fan of grayscale halftones, and Javi's illustrator and co-conspirator Les McClaine has a thing for them, which really works for me. On top of the stories and the comics, he had the audacity to buy us breakfast. Of course, he allowed us our "requisite five seconds of protest," but he was not to be denied.

Javi returned to his regular life, and we headed for the La Brea Tar Pits. I'd only seen them from a distance back in the early 90s when I had come to L.A. in a fruitless attempt to join the Foreign Service. We decided to visit the museum adjoining the tar pits, and were pleased to find out that Gonzomantis has prehistoric ancestors:

Check out the chins!

As we have a history of doing so, it was necessary that Gonzo and I (and this time, Merujo, too) compare our heights to whatever animals are being displayed in the museum. This time, it was bears:

Da bears

According to the guide shown above, Gonzo is slightly shorter and I'm slightly taller than a short-faced bear, and Merujo is the same height as a polar bear. Who knew?

Probably not Gonzomantis' ancestors

We then toured the grounds of the museum, and ended up sitting outside in the sun, soaking up as much Vitamin D as possible. It was 68F, with a decent AQI and without a cloud in the sky. A rather welcome change from the 22F we dealt with prior to leaving DC. I flopped onto the lawn and just exulted for a little while. I was reminded of going to school in Minnesota and that feeling I got when it was finally warm enough to go outside without a coat. Unbeatable, really.

Sloth hug!

We then headed for the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Three people (who don't know each other) recommended this museum, so we had to check it out. Maybe I'm just a Philistine, but I just didn't get it. Merujo and I thought that it might just be an elaborate piece of performance art, or possibly a colossal practical joke on par with Barnum's "This Way to the Egress." I suppose there's also the possibility that the idea is that anything can be put on formal display and be considered worthy in one way or another. We weren't alone in being baffled, though. A guy sat next to Merujo at one point and flat out asked "Do you know what this is supposed to be?" Perhaps I'm not sufficiently intellectually evolved to grasp the concept being presented, but I feel like I was being duped. Who knows? Perhaps if any of you have been there and understand it, you can enlighten me.

After we spent an hour being puzzled, we went to Venice Beach, which was much more readily understood by all. I hadn't seen the Pacific since grad school, so it was great standing on the shore smelling the sea air and listening to the waves rolling in.

They grow them tall on the West Coast

Merujo on the pier, either before or after some guy offered her vodka

Geeks on the beach

The sun was setting, and it was lovely. We never heard it sizzle, though. We left Venice Beach and headed north on the PCH toward Sunset. Then it was a right turn and a pleasant if somewhat curvy drive through the hills to our hotel.

Sasquatch by taillight

After a brief rest at the hotel, it was time for food. Mexican food. Good Mexican food. Merujo's friend AJ had recommended El Coyote on Beverly. From the look of the crowd, AJ had recommended El Coyote to everyone west of the Mississippi. We were not in the mood for a 45-minute wait, so we ended up going to Acapulco. It may be a local chain in L.A., but the service was great and the food was plentiful and not cost-prohibitive. Gonzomantis had a margarita that was big enough to swim in. He also bought us dinner, which was very kind of him.

A margarita with an undertow

After dinner, we decided to visit the Griffith Park Observatory to take in the quintessential L.A. skyline view. We were denied, however. The observatory has been under renovation for nearly two years now. So instead of taking in the view from above, we just cruised around Hollywood for a while. Then the tired grown-ups in us took over, and we called it a night.

Sunday

Once more into the fray

Sunday morning we were off to drop Gonzomantis at LAX. Of course, we took full advantage of the breakfast bar before we left. I managed two muffins, two glasses of orange juice, and a banana within about six minutes. Thankfully I was alone as I stuffed my face.

After throwing him out to see how far he'd roll, we jumped on the 405 and zipped to Long Beach. There was no traffic to speak of, and we returned our rental car, checked in for our flight, and cleared security in no time flat. It could have gone better, perhaps, but I'm hard pressed to figure out quite how.

Real life reared its ugly heard shortly after we arrived back at Dulles. In our haste to get to the parking shuttle on Friday morning, I had only remembered to write down the lot section number, not the color. I recalled that we were in the Gold Lot, and Merujo thought we were in the Green Lot. After an extremely uncomfortable (and rude) shuttle ride to a parking lot stop we didn't recognize, we hopped out. Of course, it didn't help that the driver insisted that we were in the right place when clearly we weren't. So we walked through the Green Lot, looking for section 23C. As it turned out, we were actually parked in the Gold Lot. Thankfully it was a relatively short walk to the other section. After a quick stop at Wendy's for some protein, we went home.

It was a fantastic trip, and I'm glad we did it. We got to see the Dolby perform, we met a really cool guy, and got to soak up some sun and stare at the ocean for a while. You can't beat that with a stick.
———————
NB—I wish I could have made the end bits of the trip more interesting for you, but it was pretty straightforward and blissfully uneventful (except for the great Gold vs. Green controversy).

Dash it all

OK, native speakers of Spanish. Now's your chance to shine (and help me win a bet).

I do a lot of work with typography, and one of my recent projects was in Spanish. I had to use hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes throughout. However, when I asked the author what these particular typographical elements were called in Spanish, only one word came up: guion.

After some research (and much insistence on my part), I found that the hyphen is called guion, and an em dash is called either raya or guion largo.

I maintain that there has to exist a word in Spanish to account for the en dash, even though they're not used in Spanish. The whole point of the en dash (in English, anyway) is to denote range (for example, "1000–1500 patients"). The only thing I've been able to find is "guion de la anchura de una letra 'n'," and that's just not cutting it for me. This may be enough to win my bet, but I'd really like it if a specific term (and not just a description) existed in Spanish.

If it's any help/interest to you, I had a slight rant on the topic of the various dashes back when I first started blogging. Enjoy.

Ayúdenme aquí, por favor, o me voy a morir de la vergüenza...