Ahh, those lovely alloy wheels. But wait….

There’s no space to get the wrench on the axle nut, especialy if we don’t want to tear up those lovely alloy wheels. But maybe if we use the ugly steel rim we got for free on craigslist…..

…There’ll be enough space to get the wrench on there, super-long breaker bar attached.

And once we soak it with Liquid Wrench and then stand on the breaker bar and bounce around a little, we’ll crack that nut, and get the brake drum off.

Then we can replace the brake pads and most of the hardware.

Put it all back together, adjust the parking brake, and we’re set.

(I also have to get some kotter pins, because I lost the new ones I had. They fall into the ‘do not replace’ category, and I have no urgent reason to recycle the old ones.)

So I called Schuck’s, which is a nationwide chain of auto parts stores. The guy answers and says he’d be delighted to help me.

“I need a half-inch drive breaker bar. 24 inches or better.”

“OK, let me go find out.”

Time passes. He returns.

“Sir… What year is your car?”

I sigh.

Schuck’s, it turns out, doesn’t have breaker bars in lengths longer than 18 inches, and if I’m going to the trouble….

Now, I’ve heard of a fabled hardware store in the U district that alledgedly has everything, called Hardwick’s. I can get on the 75 bus and wander on down, stop for lunch at Chipotle’s, and poke around this place. And that’s what I did.

An uneventful ride, except there are these two guys who always ride the bus together. I see them from time to time. They’re both in electric wheelchairs and make strange noises that cause great discomfort followed by sanctimony in those nearby. The point being that they both had to get off the bus, which means using the chair lift twice, which takes some time. No biggie to me, and in fact kind of amusing to watch fellow riders trying to figure out if they should allow themselves to feel put-upon by the disabled.

Arriving at Hardwick’s, I instantly remember that, yes, this was one of those places I’d driven by and wanted to go in sometime. Some of the aisles are only navigable sideways, it’s so crammed full of stuff. It’s almost not worth describing, because I can’t really tell a story about it, just describe, and that’s not nearly as fun as just letting you go there sometime and discover it for yourself.

But there it was, in the case with the used impact sockets: Twenty four inches of cheap Chinese steel with a half-inch socket flex driver at the top. I had to flag down an employee, who handed it to me, but expressed concern for my safety. “If that flex pin breaks…” I assured him I’d be the safest of safety-conscious safe people.

I needed some zip ties anyway, so I got some and used one to attach the bar to my backpack (one end inside, one end zip-tied to the outside strap), and it was plenty stable for walking around with. I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to brandish it like a sword, should the situation arise, which of course it never did.

I took the 65 back, down 35th, and went to the grocery store at the top of the hill above where I live. Hiked down, just in time to find Emma the dog loose in the neighborhood, and shepherded the retriever home, to a relieved landlord.

That was yesterday. Today was standing on the end of the breaker bar and getting that axle nut off. Then changing the brake shoes and assorted hardware. I kept the old retaining springs because the new ones were about twice too big. I also got really hot doing all this in the sun, and maybe breathed in a little more brake cleaner than I had hoped. So tomorrow will be round two.

The old brake shoes themselves were mightily fucked up, and it’s vaguely miraculous that they weren’t sounding worse than they did. There wasn’t anything inside the drum to make the unpleasant grinding sounds, though, and it’s still present. We’re hoping something really scary-looking pops out when I do the remaining pads tomorrow. If that doesn’t make the sound go away, we’re in trouble.

Yes, there were cobwebs. I forgot to take the ‘after’ picture.

If I had one of these, you wouldn’t hear from me for months.

103 errors on my ‘blog.

It’s brave of the Xanga Ghods to try a doctype of XHTML 1 strict, but please…. I just had someone tell me he can’t view my ‘blogs in Mozilla 1.2.

And since there seems to be an effort to Unicode-ify Xanga, the ISO-8859-1 declaration in the meta element might be a good place to start…

Do you guys need a tester? Cuz if you pay me $50 a week, I’ll enter my ‘blog URL into w3c.org and report the results. Or hell, just send me gift certificates from microbeerclub.com.

This goes out to Larry Craig:

Dude. Come out of the closet. It’s so much nicer, and you end up doing so much less harm.

(Man. It turns out Atrios blogged the same clip. Now I’m a copycat. Grr.)

More: Greenwald attacks this story with his usual thoroughness. Craig himself called Bill Clinton ‘very, very naughty,’ in the same breath where he’s talking about censuring or impeaching the then-President. As Greenwald points out, however, the right questioned the relevance of allegations against Craig during the election cycle. Now that the election is over, it’s the biggest scandal in the world, requiring Craig’s resignation.

This kind of hypocrisy, where everyone has to cover their political asses (so to speak) by betraying their own integrity is all a result of the closet. The closet does this not only to people like Craig (and Foley et al), but spreads out through the reflexive destruction of integrity across the whole right-wing political world. They all have to keep the closet door shut, or they lose the political power the shut closet gives them. Shame is the currency they trade in.

It’s really, really sad.

And, of course, it doesn’t apply only to politics, and it’s not really a right-wing/left-wing issue.

I thought the most surreal thing I’d see on Second Life would be strange architecture or incongruous objects or people dressed up in funny skins. But this is by far the most surreal thing I’ve seen on Second Life:

Each of those characters has a line above their name in their little name balloon thing that says ‘I’m On Welfare.’

It turns out that if you want ‘free’ money (the Linden Dollar), you take surveys. A number of shops are set up to do this, including the welfare line above, Money Island, and my favorite: HippiePay.

Yes, that’s me taking a hit off a huge bong. It even makes gurgling noises, and you stagger around for a while afterwards.

But basically, this is the perfect set-up. There’s no real money involved, so no one has to pay any taxes.

Scifiknitter offered a mini-review of ‘Pan’s Labyrinth,’ which I think is interesting.

Her review, and many of the comments, talk about being affected by the violence, and not seeing the film because it would stick with them, haunting them if you will. And I find that ironic because that’s the point of the movie: The horror of violence. Violence is a character in that movie, and there’s no escaping it. Everyone is hurt or killed. The good die, the bad die… And it stems from violence masquerading as civilization, in the form of Spanish-civil-war-era fascism.

The violence in the film is extreme, but it’s also true. It’s not presented for its own sake, and it’s not just part of the story. It *is* the story. Little Ofelia has to deal with it, and the way she deals with it is to live in Pan’s world, which isn’t a bowl of cherries, either. Or a bowl of grapes. The truth of the violence in the film is what causes it to stick with you, and that’s because it’s art, rather than simple genre film.

Violence is *supposed* to haunt you. If it doesn’t, then you’re the monster.

My previous review.

If you need to know anything at all about Second Life, then please read the following:

I floated around SL for about three hours yesterday, and a couple hours today, and this is an exhaustive list of everyone I encountered. Two were engaged in a slave/bondage type thing, and I interrupted. Two were skript kiddies who tried to shoot me with a gun because I was a newbie. One approached and tried to be helpful by telling me to search for places to go based on ‘my interests or hobbies,’ which is pretty funny since if I want to engage in my hobbies, I don’t need Second Life. A group of five people were at an ‘art gallery,’ speaking Spanish to each other. Another person didn’t speak very good English, so I had to wander off politely.

And that’s it for the social scene. Some of the architecture is lovely, but mostly it’s just crap and only speaks ill of the psychology involved in its creation (who builds castles in a place where you can fly?) The best thing I found was Greenie’s, which I can’t describe or it won’t be fun for you.

The land is for sale. That is, it’s real estate. That’s their model: Sell ‘land.’ Everywhere you go, there are signs that a given island is owned by a holding company (an in-game holding company) and is for sale. Some sellers subdivide, which is just freakin’ peachy: Build a virtual subdivision.

Oftentimes, soaring around through the sky, you bump into boundaries. I really don’t understand the exclusionary aspect of this place. A couple times I would land on a building and it would tell me that I was not authorized to land there, and I would be ejected. And ten seconds later I was teleported a block over or whatever. And so I’d fly back to the same building and it would happen over again. Which made no sense at all, really, because NO ONE WAS HOME. According to login statistics, there were 40,000 people logged in. I encoutered 11 of them over two days. But this building was completely empty. The map tells you these things. So what, exactly, was being guarded?

Nothing.

I updated my profile a little bit.

Note that I have my AIM/iChat address out there dangling in public, for all to click. Consider this an invitation. I’d put my Skype status, but Xanga won’t let me since I ‘updated’ to themes.