In No Particular Order

Out with the old

2009-11-12T10:46:00.004-05:00

Just sold the Mazda RX-7 I raced for six seasons, and I did so with no regrets whatsoever. Indeed, when the guys at the Flatout Motorsports shop told me they were set to trailer the car to its new owner and asked if I wanted to drop by, snap a few pics, and maybe pat its haunch tearfully, I said hell no - haul that sucker away and bring me a check.

Let me add hastily that this was and is a damn good race car: fast and reliable, with all the important bits put together correctly and tuned to suit my driving style. I have no doubt its new owner will enjoy it as much as I did.

But that's all the affection I can muster for the 05. Yup, the 05 - my number. If your interest in racing stops at Days of Thunder, you may think drivers give their cars feminine nicknames and mutter to them affectionately. Not so. Race cars exist to be used up, thrashed within an inch of their life, and then disposed of. In one of my books, protagonist Conway Sax (a former NASCAR driver and mechanic) says, "A street car's a tool. A race car's a weapon. Not much more to it than that."

So I sold my old weapon, and you know what that means: time to build a new one. Which entails, of course, a future blog post.

Worth a thousand words

2009-10-31T18:06:00.004-04:00

Somebody asked recently how I named Conway Sax, the protagonist in my mystery series. By way of response, I simply emailed this photo.

One! Two! Got the swine flu

2009-10-23T08:23:00.005-04:00

I'll never know for sure whether I had a bona fide case of H1N1, as I didn't go to the doc for confirmation, but this much is certain: Been sick as a damn dog since Saturday.

So's half the country, of course; schools are ghost towns, the Cleveland Browns are so decimated they're seeking a roster-rules exemption just to field a team, and vaccine shots are running way behind demand.

I'm just about healthy again. The details I'll spare you, but trust me - you wouldn't wish this sickness, whatever it is, on your worst enemy.

And yet! As an optimist, I insist on silver linings, and the scores of hours I spent staring vacantly at the TV produced a few. For starters, the final scene of my Conway Sax work-in-progress came to me while I watched, of all things, "The Biggest Loser." Hey, you takes your inspiration where you finds it. The epiphany is a true comfort to me. In the past, I've always known my novels' final scenes before I started writing (which, by the way, is extremely common among writers I know). Such was not the case this time around. I waded into the book anyway, because that's what you do, but I admit I felt somewhat adrift without a final scene in my head.

The other tidbit I picked up comes from a multi-part documentary IFC is running on Monty Python. There's a gag in Monty Python and the Holy Grail that I'd forgotten. King Arthur canters past a couple of serfs. Serf One prostrates himself and says (quoting from memory), "Bless you, good King!" Serf Two says, "How do you know he's a king?" Serf One says, "He doesn't have shit all over him."

I love that bit - it reminds me of the "A young bull and an old bull" joke from Colors. In Conway Sax' world, anybody not covered with shit is indeed a king. I guarantee you I'll work it into a story sometime.

It looks like the Daytona 500 in the record books

2009-10-12T10:10:00.004-04:00

In Victory Lane I, my daughter, my son, and my fabulous wife Martha do our best to dent my expensive aluminum hood. Photo: Amy Mills.

A killjoy could peer at the results of yesterday's Sports Car Club of America race and conclude that I won almost by default, as most of the top drivers in my class chose to skip the event at Watkins Glen International (the best race track in North America, by the way, and absolutely stunning in mid-October).

But you're not a killjoy and you don't have access to the results (not if I can help it), so take my word: I was Jackie Stewart out there. I was Emerson Fittipaldi and Juan Manuel Fangio and Ayrton Senna all rolled into one, with just a soupcon of Dale Earnhardt Sr. for grit's sake.

At least that's what I told my family, who finally got to see me do something other than hit the wall.

In which I stock up on nonfiction

2009-10-09T07:06:00.007-04:00

I don't like to read fiction while I'm writing it - I find myself unconsciously aping my favorite writers. (I can flip through my first book and say That's a James Ellroy sentence, or That's a Travis McGee-style minor character.) I need to be reading at all times, so the solution is to load up on nonfiction for the six or eight months it takes to write a Conway Sax first draft.

Mission accomplished!

I bulled through the local Borders* yesterday and came out with the following trade paper:

A Terrible Glory, James Donovan. This one, which like most nonfiction has an overlong subtitle, is a bio of George Custer and a history of Little Bighorn.
What Hath God Wrought, Daniel Walker Howe. This U.S. history covers 1815-1848. Having read plenty of Revolutionary and Civil War histories and biographies, I now find myself filling in gaps with books on the Industrial Revolution and Reconstruction.
Memoirs of the Second World War, Winston Churchill. I'm a big Churchill fan - William Manchester's (sadly unfinished) bio of the titan is one of my favorite books - but I'll admit to being put off by his imperious prose. Time to get past that!

This lot, combined with the John Quincy Adams bio that gathered dust on the TBR stack all summer while I gorged on McGees, ought to carry me through. And then some.

* 'Twas a pleasure to buy physical books for a change. I love my Kindle, but I've decided it works best for novels. Hefty nonfiction, with its maps and footnotes, is best read in hardcopy.

You got how many MPG in that 20-year-old Honda?

2009-09-28T10:39:00.004-04:00

Chang Ho Kim is an old friend of mine, a top-notch mechanic specializing in Hondas, and a championship-level autocrosser, so I need to link to this post at a green-car blog.

When Chang heard about a fuel economy competition, he dusted off a 1989 Honda CRX HF that was sitting behind his shop, tuned it up, lowered it (to reduce wind resistance), installed snow tires (to reduce rolling resistance), put on the funny-looking cow-catcher you see here, and had a go.

And won, achieving a 118-mile-per-gallon average and beating some fancy hybrid machines in the process. So surprising was Chang's low-tech approach that contest organizers hyper-scrutinized his fuel consumption, but in the end he won fair and square.

Follow the link above to read how he did it, and keep in mind that there's more than one way to skin a cat: light weight and skilled driving are your best friends whether you're racing or saving fuel.

The first paragraph of Conway Sax 4

2009-09-25T08:43:00.003-04:00

Yeah, I'm going to need a better working title than that. One candidate is Mood Ring Eyes, but while I like the feel of the phrase - three four-letter words with distinctly different vowel sounds - it's better suited to a romance (or for that matter a cheesy pop song) than a noir mystery. Anyway, here's the opener as it now stands:

I was running and I was naked and my hands were cuffed behind my back. Ziptied, actually, the plastic strips cinched tight as hell, circulation long since gone. I pictured my hands oversized and puffy, like the Hamburger Helper mascot.

Forty words down, 76,960 to go! (Actually, I'm more than 5,000 words in, and I like where the story's heading.) Stay tuned.

They don't make 'em like they used to

2009-09-18T17:02:00.004-04:00

I'm not an unqualified fan of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, but the group does know how to throw a party. To celebrate its fiftieth birthday, the IIHS crashed a brand new 2009 Chevrolet Malibu into a '59 Chevy Bel Air.

If you think of cars from the 1950s as rolling fortresses, iron-framed behemoths that could run right over today's tin cans, watch this. (Stick around until the end to see how the drivers would have fared.)

Even a Blind Pig Dept.

2009-09-14T13:34:00.004-04:00

Well what do you know! I won a race for the first time in more than a year.

My company, Flatout Motorsports, made a pilgrimmage to New Hampshire Motor Speedway for a double race - one Saturday, one Sunday. I invited family Saturday, whereupon Murphy's Law kicked in: clammy drizzle prevailed. My family patiently waited for my race. I got a great start, passed the guy in front of me, got carried away entering the first turn (a high-speed NASCAR oval), and spun out in front of the entire field. They missed me, but I didn't miss the wall; I slapped it hard with the right front corner of my car. The photo you see here is small, but a careful look shows that the entire front end, which I'd bunged up in a previous race, is pretty ugly looking. It's held together, for now, with duct tape and Dzus fasteners.

By the time we came past the grandstands in which my family sat expectantly, I was DFL (dead bleeping last), and there I would stay.

Sorry, family.

The next day was a different matter entirely. I've never golfed, but those who do say it's that one sweet shot per eighteen holes that keeps you coming back to play the frustrating, expensive, time-consuming game.

Sunday was the racing equivalent of that one sweet shot. From the drop of the green flag, I battled hard with two friends who drive cars much like mine. One friend would pass me, I would pass him back, and so on. We were each focused on the few hundred yards ahead, but were thinking strategically at the same time. How good are his tires? Should I press him or wait for a mistake? Will we come up on any lapped traffic soon?

In the end, I beat my pal by a whopping three-tenths of a second - half a car length. It was by far my best race of the year, and maybe my best ever. It made up for the season's mechanical glitches, bad breaks, and driver incompetence.

Now if only my family had been there to see it.

The season wears (and wears) on

2009-09-08T11:53:00.005-04:00

This picture feels right because of that blue tape patch on the fender of my race car, which reminds me of a cartoon bandage that Wile E. Coyote or Foghorn Leghorn might wind up with.

A few weeks ago during qualifying for a Pro-IT race at Connecticut's Lime Rock Park, I carried too much enthusiasm - that is, speed - into a corner, skidded onto wet grass, and watched helplessly as a tire wall (which is just what it sounds like: a wall composed of stacked tires, which help dissipate energy when shmucks like me crash into them) rushed toward my windshield.

I hit the tires hard but square, and was pleasantly surprised when I was able to back away and continue with qualifying. Finished third in the race, but it wasn't a third to be proud of - I was way slower than I should have been.

It's been that kind of season, right from lap one of race one, when a competitor punted me, breaking my transmission and causing my engine to fail. I've squeezed in a few decent results, but they've been overshadowed by mechanical failures, wrecks, running out of gas (which cost me a second place), and mediocre driving.

But I've got three more shots at my three favorite tracks: New Hampshire Motor Speedway this weekend, Lime Rock later this month, and glorious Watkins Glen in October. Here's hoping I and my poor old bandaged-up car can finish the season with a little pride.

McGee swings into the '70s

2009-07-21T07:29:00.005-04:00

As I may have posted before, I'm rereading my favorite detective series - John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee novels - in order. One of the series' many delights is anthropological. Bachelor (and how!) McGee spends the first four or five books in the 1960s of Brubeck and Hefner. The next half-dozen are set very much in the '60s of the Beatles, more-or-less harmless recreational drugs, and unselfconscious sex.

Well. I just finished A Tan and Sandy Silence. Published in 1972, it's the thirteenth McGee book and the first with a '70s vibe (The Long Lavendar Look, while published in 1970, is a '60s straggler in tone).

I'm astonished at how Tan and Sandy catches the post-Altamont shift in the nation's mood. Gone are the flocks of beach bunnies who populated the early books; they're replaced by a cult of nudist retro-fundamentalists who are miserable with crab lice (I kid you not). Carefree one-on-one flings, fueled by booze and enjoyed by both parties, are replaced by a sort of floating whorehouse. The antagonist is a blossoming sadist, and the sexual jollies he gets with his victims (male and female) are hinted at, if never spelled out. The feeling, overall, is of depravity, of a center not holding, of consequences not anticipated by Kesey & Hefner & Co.

Which is to say the book is a perfect anticipation of the 1970s.

MacDonald's gift in this regard is unparalleled. It's been awhile since I read all the McGees, so I look forward to seeing whether the books capture the feel of the 1980s with similar eerie accuracy.

Exhale!

2009-07-14T06:09:00.003-04:00

Hmm, you ask yourself. How long can Ulfelder keep up this torrid one-post-per-month blogging pace?

All right already. Here's the excuse: for the past month-plus I've been consumed with the rewrite of the third Conway Sax novel. Yesterday I sent the manuscript off to my incredible agent, Janet Reid. She got back to me with edits. I made the changes pronto, because Janet wants to start shopping the book pronto, and have thus earned a bit of by-God relaxation time.

(You read that right: Janet read my 80,000-word novel and turned it around with insightful suggestions in less than 24 hours. Keep that in mind next time you hear disgruntled writers griping about agents.)

The Conway Sax Full Employment Plan strikes again

2009-06-08T15:31:00.003-04:00

My protagonist, Conway Sax, lives in Framingham, Massachusetts, and helps people solve squalid problems, usually of their own making. This story demonstrates that Conway will never run out of things to do.

Quick rundown to save you a click: A toll taker owes a Framingham construction worker - and, more to the point, cocaine dealer - $70,000. One night he decides to kill the dealer, thus pocketing the $70K. So he and a pal who owns (what else?) a concrete business visit the dealer (who's named Angel, BTW), shoot him in the back of the head, cart his remains to the concrete place, chop him up, and cook him.

Into the notebook it goes ...

The last Parker

2009-06-01T16:53:00.005-04:00

I just finished Dirty Money, which turns out to be the last Parker novel (author Donald Westlake, who wrote the Parker books under the name Richard Stark, died in December).

Dirty Money is a typical - meaning damn good - Parker novel. And like the others, it leaves you wanting more. Parker stories rarely end cleanly, with the maiden rescued and the treasure secured. I think that's why once you discover these books, you tend to read them three or four at a time.

In fact, Dirty Money is best understood as the last in a three-book run that centers on a single (botched) armored-car heist. Start with Nobody Runs Forever, stick with Ask the Parrot (which is, I must say, the weakest-ever Parker book), and then read Dirty Money.

That's racing

2009-05-04T06:55:00.004-04:00

Boy, did my 2009 racing season get off to a lousy start. Saturday, I had a great qualifying run at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. I would start the race third in class and fifth overall (out of about 30 cars) - at the sharp end of the field, ready to slug it out with fellow Mazda drivers and a bunch of fast BMWs.

The green flag fell. We screamed through Turns 1 and 2 - the NASCAR oval - at NHMS. As we approached Turn 3, I was right where I wanted to be: on the bumper of a BMW that was my bogie, on the outside of the right-hand turn, ready to trap some cars when we got to the next turn, a left-hander.

But at NHMS, Turn 3 is a notorious accordion on the first lap of any race. Cars slow from 100+mph down to 35 or so. Ugly things happen.

In my case, the ugly thing was a tap in the rear bumper that turned me good and sideways. My car was perpendicular to the race track, and I braced to get T-boned - but didn't, thanks to heads-up driving by the rest of the field.

I saved the car without losing too many spots. The red mist descended: I was pissed at losing all those positions, my race more or less ruined after 20 seconds. But at least things could get no worse. I gritted my teeth, flew up the hill from Turn 3, and grabbed third gear.

There was no third gear.

Whether as a result of the half-spin or purely by coincidence, my transmission was down one gear - a common problem in RX-7s. I babbled this info over my radio and watched the pack vanish over the horizon. From a starting position of fifth, I was now DFL - dead bleeping last.

My crew calmed me and told me to run the race in second and fourth gears. I began to do so. The problem is, NHMS requires a lot of third gear, so I was well and truly crippled. Oh well, I thought, limping around 4 seconds per lap slower than I should have been: at least things could get no worse. I would pick off a few slower cars, challenge myself to do the best I could, and earn points for the season-long series.

While thinking these thoughts and cruising, I should have been watching my gauges. My motor seemed to run flatter and flatter as the laps wore on, and by the time I checked my oil temperature it was off the charts.

I'd blown my engine.

That race reminded me of this little backstory passage in Dirty Pictures, the second Conway Sax book. Conway, protagonist and narrator, is recalling when he met his friend Floriano Mendes:

It turned out Floriano came north with a Brasilia-based pro racing team. Then the stud driver jumped ship for a more prestigious ride in Europe, and took his sponsorship money with him. The team folded twelve hours later, left a dozen Brazilian techs high and dry.

When Floriano told me all this we shrugged and both said, at the exact same time, “That’s racing.” Laughed.

Then I told Floriano I used to be a driver. NASCAR Busch Series, a step below what was then Winston Cup. He asked if I ever ran a Cup race. I said no, made the glug-glug gesture for drinking. Floriano said, “That’s racing too.” We laughed again. Been friends ever since.

A ittle ink for Flatout

2009-04-27T18:01:00.003-04:00

First things first: Photo credit for the shot you see goes to Bear Cieri of the Metrowest [MA] Daily News. Here's a link to a very generous profile of Flatout Motorsports written by the MDN's Paul Ring.

That's me inside the race car with my partners Nick Leverone (center) and Andy Bettencourt.

I was a journalist for 20 years, so it was kind of fun to be on the other end of a feature story for a change!

Ten years ago ...

2009-04-20T13:06:00.006-04:00

... I ran the Boston Marathon. Without training for it.

I was a dedicated runner at the time but had never gone farther than 10 miles. The Friday before the race (which is always held on Patriots' Day, a mid-April Monday), forecasters predicted perfect marathon weather: cool but not too, overcast, with a west wind to push runners along.

I announced to family and friends I would run the race. They laughed at me, which was an appropriate response. I didn't truly expect to finish. Rather, I thought it would be nice to run 15 miles, bail out in the town of Wellesley, and take a taxi home.

Monday, the weather was warmer and sunnier than expected - a setback - but I donned a lucky Minnesota Vikings T shirt, stuffed the pockets of my running shorts with nutrition gels and ibuprofen, and traveled the three miles from my home to the starting line. As a bandit (a runner who hadn't qualified for the race), I started as far back as possible, next to the octogenarians and the guys dressed as Groucho Marx. Most of those guys left me in their dust. That hurt.

Nevertheless, the first half of the race went better than expected. Having failed to do my homework, I didn't know that despite its famous Heartbreak Hill, the Boston course actually slopes downward for much of its length. Between this downhill run and the astonishing energy of the spectators (a thousand people must have called out "Go Minnesota!"), I surprised myself by clicking off thirteen or so 9-minute miles.

I blame the girls of Wellesley College for my downfall. These students famously scream themselves hoarse encouraging runners (what's not quite so well known is that, on warm days at least, a few off them whip off their tops and do their encouraging in brassieres), so just when I should have been choosing a spot to drop out, they convinced me I was quite a manly man. Thus puffed up, I trotted through the streets of Wellesley, knowing now that I could knock off the remaining 11 or so miles ...

... and that's how I was thinking when I hit the first of the hills in Newton, and just about dropped dead. These hills made clear what the brassieres of Wellesley College had masked: I was all done, with the bursar sacs in both hips and one knee (which had caused me trouble in the past) on fire.

But it was too late now; I'd blown through my 15-mile target, and a water- and commonsense-deprived part of my head declared that running 18 miles would be truly stupid unless I went ahead and ran the remaining eight.

Those last eight miles took me almost as long as the previous 18. I walked quite a bit, and when I ran I looked like a man with both legs in splints (locking my knees made the bursitis in my hips marginally less painful). People kept asking if I was okay. Around mile 21, Mother Nature decided it would be funny to kick up a stiff ocean breeze to further slow me. Somebody from an emergency aid station saw me shiver and handed me one of those little aluminum blankets. I wrapped it around my shoulders and finished the race with it. Between that and the knees-locked gait, I looked like the Tin Man.

I'm not exaggerating in the slightest when I tell you that when I rounded the final corner onto Boylston Street, all pain and discomfort simply vanished, and I ran the final half-mile as easily as I had the first. My time was four hours and fifty-four minutes. Running th Boston Marathon was and remains the best stupid thing I've ever done.

Notebook dump!

2009-04-14T09:05:00.005-04:00

As I take a few days off before wading into my Purgatory Chasm rewrite, it's time for administrative tasks. There's one job I never look forward to, but which always turns out to be kind of fun: transferring random notes and thoughts from a notebook to a Word doc.

The notebook is now actually a Blackberry. It took me time to give up my hardcopy notebook, and in many ways I think it's superior, but why carry two things when you can carry one?

Here's an unedited list of items, beginning a few months ago. (You'll quickly notice I love dreaming up titles - I'd have to live to 150 to write a crime novel for each great title I've got.) Here goes:

Title: Swank
Bell choir plays “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” (“A Scottish Melody”)
Name: Bert Saginaw
Titles: Cherry Bomb, Tahoe Baby, Wheelman, American Bullnose, Death or Glory, Flat Broke, Hot Pursuit, Police Interceptor
Real name: Billie Smaha
Have a retro-punk character who dresses like 1977 punk rocker
Character: Cruzatte, descendant of a member of the Lewis & Clark party
“He’s not immune from me.”
Title: Cripple Creek
Fact: many GIs in early Korean War had committed crimes while stationed in Japan – had a choice between the brig and fighting in Korea.
Have a character who hates the Amish
Purgatory Chasm
Breond Yarbrough – (real) name
Surname: Bowyer
Woman with eye patch
Name: Archie
Title: Baby Blue
Derwin Loundin – (real) name
Occoneechee Speedway, Hillsborough, NC
Famoso Drag Strip
80 West opener: Fat Jack Sebring was quicker than he looked, so nobody was surprised it was him shot the Somalian through the eye. Even the Somalian's remaining eye - his left - looked more or less resigned.
Eat an apple in the dark – that way, you don’t notice the soft spots.
Switchback
You could lose a one-man staring contest
Actual first name: Roebuck
Bellet – French surname
Steve Seabolt – actual name
It is difficulties that show what men are – Epictetus
Title: Slow Pay
Title: Damaged Goods
Slow as a middle-school second hand
Sarah Siddons: 18th century English actress
Name: Herschel
Surname: Cranch
Name: William Abdee, former slave
There is an urbanity without ostentation or extravagance which will succeed everywhere and at all times – John Adams
Title: Top Fuel
Name: Cotton Thaxter
If conscience disapproves, the loudest applauses of the world are of little value. – John Adams
Name: Tymon Dogg
Star of Wonder
Put Lacross and Ike Maple together in story (Pure?)
Coffee – good cop name
Open a book with a plane crash into water
Title: Lefty Loosey
Hot Rod Noir
Tumblehome
Have a character who wrote a musical based on COPS.
Have a character whose claim to fame was appearance in “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” ad.
Have a character who thinks wind direction should be determined by where it’s going, not where it’s been.
Have a hail-fellow-well-met character who says things twice, gaining momentum. “That’s the spirit, THAT’S the spirit.”
Memphis County Jail.
Have a character who works in a furniture store, likes to sit in chairs after closing.
Ram you damn you (adj. describing Jack Aubrey)

A thousand words a day

2009-04-13T09:58:00.005-04:00

I'm neither sentimental nor a pack rat; I don't save a lot of notes or other ephemera regarding my books (rather, each gets one chaotic Word doc that serves as an all-purpose dumping ground for character sketches, plot ideas and the like).

However, for each novel I do save a document like the one you see here: a simple running count showing how many words I wrote on a given day. This one is for Purgatory Chasm, but I didn't have that title when I started in August 2008 - hence the heading "CS3" for the third Conway Sax book.

My goal is always to write a thousand words a day, Monday through Thursday. Four thousand words a week equals 16,000 per month, which would give me an 80,000-word manuscript in five months. Of course, real life and work or a reasonable facsimile thereof intrude, but a man's reach must exceed his grasp.

If you can read the individual entries in the photo, note that the first draft of Purgatory Chasm saw a two-month-plus interruption while I reworked the voice of both Dirty Pictures, the previous novel, and PC. Start to finish, the first draft of PC took just under eight months. Subtract that two-month hiatus and you get a presentable draft in six months. I'll take it.

Worst celebration ever (but a celebration nevertheless)

2009-04-09T17:31:00.005-04:00

Today I finished the first draft of Purgatory Chasm, the third Conway Sax novel (I got that working title here). Various Twitter and Facebook pals have urged me to enjoy an adult beverage or three this evening in celebration. (Truth be told, nobody said anything about this evening - they want me to start drinking right now.)

Trouble is, I'm a teatotaler.

Usually my celebration would take the form of either a trip to my local obscenely overpriced ice cream parlor, if I wanted to get the kids in on the act, or a less sociable pint of Ben & Jerry's.

But - and this is where I shake my fist at the heavens and cry Why me, Lord? Why must you do this to me? - I gave up freakin' sweets for Lent this year. 'Twas the first time in 40 years I paid any attention to Lent. Haven't cheated once, either. Easter is Sunday, and I'll be damned (poor word choice, I know) if I'm going to screw up this close to the finish line.

So what am I supposed to do? Suggestions welcome, but do keep in mind this is a PG-rated blog.

Dept. of Too Much Time on Hands

2009-03-24T05:31:00.002-04:00

You want a model railroad? A massive, overengineered, perfect-to-the-last detail, obsessed-over model railroad? Call a German.

(The not-quite-right English translation here is kind of endearing. Near the end, listen as "house of ill repute" becomes "house with a bad reputation.")

Family dogs then and now, Part 2

2009-03-21T15:19:00.004-04:00

Second in a 3-part series

Part 1 of this overlong post addressed the modern method of procuring a family dog - and found it wanting.

Once you get the dog home, things get worse. Again, my point of comparison is the 1960s and 1970s, before the ninnies and the nannies took over.

Back then, once you got the mutt (and indeed it was a mutt) home and purchased a 40-pound sack of Puppy Chow, your work was nearly done. Sure, when you first tried to shut your pup in the garage or basement overnight, you had to plug your ears with toilet paper in a futile effort to get some ever-loving sleep over the whining. But that problem was solved when the kids sneaked the grateful little guy out of the dark and into their room - where he promptly piddled.

Ah yes, the piddling and the pooping. Chasing the dog around with a rolled-up newspaper occupied a week or two, but once he was housebroken, an all-American mutt's training was over.

Train a dog? What for? In all but the worst weather, everybody simply let their mutts out the kitchen door each morning so they could commence their canine patrol. They did their business, prowled here and there, found romance, chased cats, maybe tipped over a garbage can or two. Essentially, dogs were allowed to vanish for hours - as were kids - and that worked out fine most of the time.

Which is not to say every time (thus creating an opening for the ninnies and the nannies, on whom more later). A roaming dog is a dog at risk (gasp!). We had a pup named Porky who was a relentless chewer. When he devoured a neighbor's $35 golf shoes - those were seriously expensive kicks in 1968 - my dad was forced to take him to that beautiful farm reserved for unruly mutts.

And then there was Violet, a sweet little mutt who could and did run all day. She was killed by a car when I was 12; my mother and I got a very concrete lesson on the meaning of "dead weight" when we put her on a bedspread and dragged her up the driveway, tears rolling.

By contrast, between the web research and the electric fences and the Science Diets and the eye-roll-inducing obedience schools that mark dog ownership today, it's a wonder all the pampered purebreds don't live to be 40. In human years, that is.

I wonder if the leading cause of death among today's suburban dogs is sheer boredom. Six AM walk, poop, watch the human pick up the poop, head home for 4.4 ounces of bio-engineered food, then it's into the cage for five or six hours until the kids get home from school. Yawn.

For God's sake, you want to tell these poor dogs, bust a move! Chase a squirrel! Sniff out a pile of another dog's feces and roll in it! Find something, anything, and hump it or chew it!

That's what I want: a humping, chewing, drooling, free-running, not-especially-bright, tongue-hanging mutt.

In the third and final part of this screed, I'll discuss the ninnies and the nannies as well as the stuff that got me thinking along these lines in the first place: dog poop. Which adds another dimension to the idea of waiting with bated breath, eh?

Sis! Boom! Bah!

2009-03-19T09:03:00.005-04:00

My company's pro race team headed to Homestead, Florida, last weekend for a Grand-Am race. That's our Mazda MX-5, surrounded by, um, enthusiastic fans [Whose fathers are probably younger than you - ed].

It's a thin line between clever and stupid*

2009-03-19T06:17:00.006-04:00

Is U2 good anymore? I don't know and I don't care. Reviews of the band's new album, "No Line on the Horizon," are mixed, and I know many folks are good and sick of frontman Bono's political posing.

Ah yes, posing - the subject at hand. Specifically, band pictures. Remember how cool you thought they were when you were in high school? Remember how you studied them (especially when your concentration was, er, enhanced by various substances)? Remember how you focused on each band member individually, seeking clues and hidden messages in his expression and body language?

What brought all this to mind was the photo of U2 above. It occurred to me that these guys are roughly my age - within hailing distance of 50 - and this must be the eight zillionth stupid-ass band photo they've posed for. If they are solid dudes, as I hope and suspect they are, they must dread these shoots, with the stern gazes and the one-guy-squatting routine. After the shutter clicks, does Bono gripe that his knees are killing him, ask for a hand up, and tell the Edge that next time it's his damn turn to squat? (Also, does the Edge stifle an impulse to say "Call me Dave, for crissake - I've started receiving mailings from the AARP!")

Question: What's your favorite cliched band-photo pose? Is it the one where they all hold their instruments, and the poor drummer stands there with a ridiculous pair of sticks? The one where one member refuses to look at the camera? The one where the lead guitarist aims his ax at the camera like a machine gun (aka The Eddie Van Halen)?

* Trivia: What classic movie is this line from?

Family dogs then and now, Part 1

2009-03-17T10:31:00.016-04:00

First in a 3-part series

My family inches ever closer to buying a dog, and this is a fine thing. You know how there are cat people and dog people, and never the twain shall meet? I'm an exception: while deep down I'm a cat person (we've owned four, including Herschel the Best Pet Ever and the two malcontents staring at me right now), I truly love dogs as well.

But I'm not as thrilled by my canine prospects as I ought to be. I don't merely want a dog; I want to obtain and own a dog the right way. And today, that's virtually impossible.

What is this right way? Simple: the way my family did it in the 1960s and 1970s.

And just as Suburban Dad can no longer toss a half-dozen kids in the Ford Country Squire and let them slide around, seatbelt-free, for a run down to the ice-cream stand (a fast run at that - Suburban Dad is emboldened by three beers in his belly and one tucked between his pre-cupholder legs), a family can no longer get a good old-fashioned dog and treat it the way good old-fashioned dogs ought to be treated.

Let's start with obtaining a dog. There are two methods I approve of:

A neighbor's bitch has yet another litter of puppies. Your kids visit them in the neighbor's basement, then wear you down with can we can we can we pleas. You chat with the neighbor, and you both know what's going to happen to the pups he fails to get rid of, so ... aw, hell.
The kids wear you down, but there's no convenient litter of pups in the neighborhood. So one warm spring evening, with mom making the kids promise they'll walk and feed and whiz the dog (right), the family piles into that Country Squire for a trip to the local pound. There the kids sit on the floor, get swarmed by adorable puppies, and fight over which one to take home. An agreement is reached (usually when the eldest sibling shuts up the youngest through a liberal application of noogies and/or titty twisters).

Note that in both scenarios the breed, size, and disposition of the puppy are utterly irrelevant. That's because every single pup under consideration is a mutt. Who knows how it'll turn out? It may be a barker, a chewer, a runner, a drooler, a shedder. You picks your dog and you takes your chances.

Clearly, dogs are no longer selected this way - at least not in my reasonably upscale suburb. Today, the process begins with (what else?) web research. You want a dog that will weigh no more than X pounds full grown. And you want it docile. You don't want a barker, God knows, and a shedder is unthinkable. The kid next door is allergic to everything and her father's a personal injury lawyer, so you'd best get a dog that's hypoallergenic. You'd prefer a light brown dog, truth be told, but not a light brown that would fight with the sisal mat in the family room.

The result of millions of households performing this calculus is ... the Labradoodle. I could rest my case right there.

Which brings us to breeds and back to the 1970s, when the assumption was that every dog was a mutt. In fact, non-mutts (except German Shepherds and Golden Retrievers, which rightly got a pass due to their general doggy goodness) made us all suspicious - why, precisely, would anybody pay $250 for a freakish Giant Poodle when he could have had a floppy-eared mutt for a $10 ASPCA donation? Was a mutt not good enough for him? Did he think he was better than us? Well la-di-freakin'-da.

It's all been inverted, of course. In the past couple of years, at least a dozen families in my neighborhood got dogs. Only one that I can think of had the spirit and heart to adopt an old-fashioned mutt from the pound (it's liberating to call the Animal Shelter the pound, just as it is to call the Transfer Station the dump).

Once a breed is decided on, the Calling of the Breeders commences. From the stories I've heard, selecting a breeder is a lot like selecting a contractor: everybody tells you to get references and ask a hundred incisive questions, but the truth is you're going to go with the first one who calls you back. In the case of a good friend, that call came from ... Indiana. That's right, he paid $1800 to a woman in Indiana for a Standard Schnauzer. The woman, who happily made the 1880-mile round trip, was a delight, as is the dog. But still.

Not for me. I want a mutt, I want it from the pound, and I want it free or damn near. And once I get that damn-near-free mutt home ...

Well, that'll be tomorrow's post - what dog ownership is like now, what it was like then, and why the old way was better.