I’m here for you. I’m here writing and thinking for you, about you.

And I don’t mean to be mean, but what are you really doing?

I’m following an old path. It winds through a city park, across a stream that feeds into the lake, the lushness, the greeness. ‘Lush’ and ‘green’ are words anyone can use to describe this place, and that’s why it’s an old path. Lush and green, the stream babbles, the lake expands open before us like a jewel, the tiny bridge over the creek allows us to start thinking in terms of about a million metaphors.

But those metaphors are all well-traveled, and you’ve been there before. You know already. Sometimes it’s nice to have favorite spots, and sometimes it’s hard to visit new ones.

This park, next to the jewel of the lake, has a beach, and people from all over the area come and sit, watching their kids splash in the water, frolicking and scaring off the ducks and geese and gulls. This, too, is an old path, because children have been doing this since there were ducks and geese and gulls.

What changes is the drama. The thin layer of interpersonal drama existing upon and made possible by the seemingly unchanging world. Drama is the old path as well, but if it were recognized as such, it wouldn’t be drama anymore. Nevertheless, that’s the fabric from which it’s made, even though it’s available in the latest fashionable colors.

I won’t go into details. You can imagine the dramas in young families, three kids, all wanting to do something different, forced to do things that are similar. You get the picture, and that just proves my point.

I’m holding a broad leaf to my face. I’m breathing in across it and exhaling back into it. I wonder if a tree can know this pleasure as much as I do. Can a tree know that it is an extension of your lungs? Can it consider the difference between oxygen and carbon dioxide beyond its capacity to asphyxiate and die? Do trees ever feel *good*? Contented? Relaxed? Does the sun feel warm, do the rains bring cleansing?

There’s this guy called Merlin Mann, and he’s some kind of expert on productivity and stuff, but really he’s the guy who manages to tell you power-user stuff about Macs, and make you think you’re learning how to be more productive.

If it sounds like I’m saying that’s a bad thing, then I’m not getting my point across. But regardless: How to use a single Mail.app Archive (without losing your mind), which isn’t a very good title, since all the times I lose my mind have nothing to do with Mail.app or a single archive.

I discovered #2 on his list myself, and even ‘blogged about it.

An episode of This American Life on the subject of ‘special ed.’

I saw it in my podcast queue, but hadn’t listened yet. I was prompted to revisit it by this article on Worldchanging.com, which is titled ‘Empathy.’

A while back, I linked to Glenn Greenwald taking the Very Serious Foreign Policy Community to task.

He’s still at it, and apparently getting under their collective skin.

He even uses the ‘i’ word:

It may very well serve our “national interests” to start a war because we want to control someone else’s resources, or because we think it would be good if they had a different government, or because we want the world to fear us, or because we want to change the type of political system they have, or because they aren’t complying with our dictates, or because we want to use their land as military bases, or because they are going to acquire weapons we tell them they are not allowed to have. But those who believe that war is justifiable and desirable under those circumstances are, by definition, espousing an imperial ideology.

I’m enamored of all this because our little Glenn has finally discovered what America’s all about, and it took George Bush invading Iraq to teach him. And others, too. The ‘bloggers are figuring it out, and so is everybody else. Maybe one day soon, when the critical mass of voters has awoken from their collective slumber, we’ll smell the coffee and decide not to be an empire any more.

‘American Gigolo Soundtrack,’ by Giorgio Moroder

Blondie sings ‘Call Me,’ which was a great punk/disco crossover if ever there could be. I think that’s pretty definitively the beginning of New Wave, actually.

There’s Cheryl Barnes singing ‘Love And Passion,’ which is a terrible, terrible song, but which it’s far too easy to imagine being a big hit on the dance floor with coked-out dancers in synthetic materials enjoying a little too much.

Now, there rest of it’s pretty nice disco-mix sort of instrumentals. And there are some nice bits on here to sample if you’re into that sort of thing. But what I love most about it is that there are only two themes in this music: The ‘Call Me’ theme, and the 2nd Clarinet Concerto by Mozart theme. Yes, ‘Hello Mr. W.A.M.’ references Wolfgang Amadaeus Mozart. So basically Giorgio Moroder did the disco equivalent of ‘Switched On Bach.’

OK, not really.

But I have this LP because I found it at a thrift store, and decided to get it for one simple reason: It was one of the first tapes I ever had. I can’t recall why I had it; I think my brother got it and didn’t like it or something. But it was in the car (the old 1979 Toyota Tercel, bless that old heap), and it and a Willie Nelson tape were the only options. I’d listen to it because it was a ‘rock’ record, so imbued with some kind of forbidden-ness that only really existed in my imagination.

Now, I want to point out that there’s some stuff on here that’s actually good and worthwhile. There’s a track called ‘The Apartment’ that brings us something straight out of ‘Akira,’ except in 1979. And if you’re going to have your tastes shaped by something through repetitive listens, you could do worse. Much worse.

And: I’ve never seen ‘American Gigolo.’ Maybe it’s time to rent it.

Becky Ann Lucas, I appreciate your sacrifice.

I’d like to point out that on a cool, rainy day, ramen with added frozen veggies and a sliced-up hot dog is pretty much heaven in a bowl.

OK, so SPF is kind of interesting, in that: a) You have to wait for DNS servers to propagate it before you can really test it, and b) not all servers will do what you’d think with it.

Here’s what I have for my SPF record: v=spf1 +mx +a:my.main.smtp.server -all

The v means SPF version 1. +mx means any mail server listed in the DNS record gets a pass. +a means that specific smtp server gets a pass, and -all means if it didn’t pass any of those tests, it’s a fail.

So I sent email to my gmail account through an smtp server that’s not allowed, and sure enough, gmail’s server failed it. But the thing is: It let the mail come through. So I can see it and read it like any other mail; it’s just marked as failed *in the headers.*

Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=hardfail (google.com: domain of spamtest@mile23.com does not designate 204.127.225.92 as permitted sender) smtp.mail=spamtest@mile23.com

Also, I’m sending these through comcast’s smtp server, which should also mark them as failed, but doesn’t.

I guess there’s still much to learn.

Also, on top of all this…. The reason I got started on the SPF jag is that my inbox got clogged with bounces yesterday, for emails sent spoofing my domain name. That is, [randomname]@mile23.com. So clogged, in fact, that Apple’s dainty Mail.app couldn’t keep up and died. (Well, actually all it did was hang on receiving mail from the clogged mailbox… the rest of it was working just fine.) The point being that I had to force-quit it, which meant that the mailbox indexes were all screwed up, and also meant that when I re-started it, it started downloading all of them *again.* I went through a number of these cycles, and now there are approximately 154 emails I can’t delete. None of the regular maintenance procedures work; I move them to the trash, empty the trash, and then they reappear.

ZOMBIE EMAILS.

I’m going to have to poke through about 300 individual email files (.emlx files in ~/Library/Mail/POP-myaccount/INBOX.mbox/Messages/) to determine which are worthwhile and which are not. If I were super shell scripter, this would be no problem.

Solution: OK, maybe I don’t need to sift through them, exactly. It turns out that if you open these orphaned mails in Mail.app, then Mail.app does the right thing. And then you can delete them. Of course, that means you’re staring at this for a while:

Mail.app doesn’t follow the decades-old Mac convention of command-option-W closing all windows, so I just hit the delete key 154 times.

I feel like not reading about SPF for a while, so I’ll ‘blog about axle nuts.

On the Vanagon, the axle nuts are big ol’ nuts, crenellated so that a kotter pin can hold them in place. They must be tightened to in excess of 300 ft/lbs, which is pretty fuckin’ tight. In order to remove one of these nuts, you must (of course) first remove the kotter pin, place a wrench over the nut, and attach a cheater bar to the wrench. Then you must stand on the wrench and jump up and down and bounce around like you’re humping the van. You’ll also be saying things like, “Come on you muther….” Except you’ll complete the sentence, and this will lead your neighbors to think that you actually are dry-humping the van.

In order for this to work (in terms of removing the nut, not in terms of the humping, though maybe that, too… I don’t know how you swing), you simply can’t have the van up on jacks. You have to have the wheel still attached to the hub, for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that you could make life excessively hard on the axle bearing races. So: Wheel on the hub, wrench on the axle.

Which is all fine and dandy if you have a van with steel rims, because the steel rims are not very bulky. But if you have alloy rims, then, man… You’re SOL.

See, the nut wrench looks like this:

The big hole goes over the nut, the little square hole is where the socket cheater bar attaches. But with the alloy rim, there’s just no hope, is there? The axle nut barely even touches the wrench if you use it while the alloy wheel is installed.

So, you might think: Hey, get a socket. It’s 46mm, which is freakin’ huge, but at least you’ll be able to get it off. And that seems reasonable, but you know what? There’s no clearance to put a socket into the hole in the alloy rim. I’ve read on a Vanagon mailing list that some guy got a socket and then machined it down to fit, and then it split open while he was trying to use it.

Since I have the alloy wheels, I’m left with one final DIY option: Get some steel rims.

Now, it’s interesting, because I’ve been trolling craigslist looking for rims. They show up every now and then: Someone getting rid of rims (with tires) for a van they don’t have any more, for free. There was one a while back that was just up the lake from here, but they were gone before I could respond. There was a set in West Seattle that I was all set to go get, but I just kinda lost interest. And there was a set being sold by a guy in Walla Walla, with nice tires on them. Which seemed like a bonus to me: A reason to drive to Walla Walla.

So I had plenty of opportunity to get wheels on rims for free, but I never did. And now I can’t, unless I get a housemate to take me.

Or, of course, I could call AAA, tell them to tow my van to a repair place, and then just pay to get it done. But where’s the fun in that?