The Whole Nine Yards.

On my recent trip up to Oregon to see my dad, I stopped in at the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum in McMinnville.

It’s home to the Spruce Goose, which used to be on display in my old stomping grounds of Long Beach until it was moved permanently to the Evergreen Museum.

The Spruce Goose is an enormous wooden airplane designed by Howard Hughes. Can you find it in the picture above? Hughes was a genius, but a gigantic airplane made out of plywood at a time in his life when he was eight ways from crazy probably isn’t the best example of his brilliance. Yet the spruce goose is a big part of the poor fellow's legacy. That and the fact that he boinked an awful lot of starlets. A good life lesson for all of us, don’t you think?

My favorite plane in the whole place is the B-17 bomber - the Flying Fortress.

Here's a shot of the ball turret. This gunner's post protrudes from the bottom of the plane like an outie belly button. This little turret has futuristic science fiction written all over it. In fact, Gene Roddenberry - yes, the Star Trek guy - flew B-17’s in the Pacific Theatre during WWII.

The photo above isn't mine. It comes from an internet post called "In the Belly of the Beast: A tour of the B-17 Bomber 'Aluminum Overcast,'" and if you want to see some really amazing B-17 photos, you really should check it out. Be sure to scroll all the way to the bottom for a gorgeous shot of a B-17 in flight during a full moon. I included this photo because I wanted to show the wonderful steampunk vibe these planes have. Because the plane was assembled in factories that made water heaters and ovens and radios, all of the dials and levers look like they belong on a toaster rather than an airplane. Which, of course, they do. Which, of course, is fantastic.

Here’s a propaganda video I found from WWII of a B-17 in combat. YouTube rocks! At the end of the video, an allied B-17 gets shot down, and as it plummets to the earth, the announcer says, “You can watch, but you can’t help.” Which makes the viewer want to charge through the screen and rescue those boys somehow. Which is the whole point. More on that later.

You can see in the video, too, the rate at which the gunners on those M2 Browning machine guns went through their .50 caliber ammunition belts. These ammunition belts were nine yards long, and supposedly this is where the phrase, “the whole nine yards” comes from. As in, “I gave him the whole nine yards,” meaning I shot as much ammo as I had. Or, “We’d better take the whole nine yards,” meaning that it will be a tough dogfight and we’d better take up as much ammo as we can carry.

Now, as some people point out, bolts of fabric have come in nine-yard lengths for centuries, and lots of people think the saying comes from seamstresses telling their clients that they’ll need “the whole nine yards” of a bolt of fabric to make a fancy dress. The fact that this saying could reference either a bolt of checkered gingham or a twenty-seven foot long string of .50 caliber bullets makes it all the more awesome if you ask me, though. In fact, I think I’d like a dress made out of nine yards worth of .50 caliber bullets. Anyone know a good seamstress / ball turret gunner?

As I mentioned, WWII propaganda films are constructed with the express purpose of persuading people to volunteer for service - lots of times by making the viewer want to exact revenge on the enemy themselves. That’s why the above film clip shows our boys plummeting to the earth in that B-17 - It makes the viewer want to DO something. And even those of us who weren’t alive during WWII have seen lots of these films and have been subjected to the emotions they evoke.

An example of this is probably best illustrated by this conversation I had with the docent who took me on the tour of the B-17’s interior. I don’t know the docent’s name, so I’ll just call him Vincent Price. The conversation went something like this:

VP: One of the main things the gunner had to remember was that from this position, he could spin this machine gun around and accidentally shoot off the tail or the wing of his own plane...

J: Is it possible for me to handle the Browning, please?

VP: Umm, what do you mean?

J: I want to handle the Browning. You know. Grab the grips and spin the gun around and go “Blam, blam, BLAM, blamitty BLAM BLAM!!

Take that, you Nazi bastards!!

Atat-atat-ATATatat-Atat-atatATATatatat!!

Goebbel’s mother wears army boots!!"

and so on. May I please?

VP: (glancing out the door of the plane nervously) Ummm...

Poor Vincent Price. Look how nervous I made him, touching the precious, precious M2 Browning. But first of all, I did say please. Second of all, come on. You know that the minute the museum is closed, all of the docents run to their favorite planes and pretend that they’re flying aces. I can see it now: “No, Dennis. NO. Time out! You can’t shoot me down because Vincent already shot YOU down. If you’re not going to play fair, then you should let someone else man the Warhawk...”

Here’s the thing, though. Just like the tone set by those WWII propaganda films, the tone of this museum was definitely a nationalistic one. There were lots of planes dedicated to heroic flights and battles that really glorified our fly boys. There was even a kiddie section of the museum where children could sit in planes and have pretend dogfights with each other. None of which is necessarily bad by its own measure. After all, I wanted to pretend to shoot down pretend Nazis, in part, because the heroic atmosphere of the museum inspires those sorts of feelings. And no one wants Nazis, right?

The problem is, this sort of presentation has a tendency to make the real-life killing and deaths from real-life wars seem sanitary and abstract. It makes the visitor forget that shooting down planes in real life means that human beings will plummet to the earth from the sky and die. The machines may be modern, but the dying is the same as it ever was. And this fact deserves remembering, too.

From my mother's sleep

I fell into the State

And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,

I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

-- Randall Jarrell, "The Death Of The Ball Turret Gunner"

The Golden Best.

The Golden West Saloon.

You may be over a hundred years old, but I still think you're pretty.

Fort Bragg is one of those places that’s loaded with iconic western markers, which I think is pretty fantastic. These signs, for example, are posted all over downtown. What I want to know is, what if it’s the horses who are riding the bicycles or the skateboards? Didn’t consider that, did you, Fort Bragg?

A couple of blocks from the Golden West is this stagecoach step that people once used to climb up and down from horse-drawn wagons.

And right across the street from the Golden West are a couple of these hitching rings that were used for tying up horses.

But the best story concerning the Golden West is one that some might find distasteful - which explains why I find it so delightful. The Golden West Saloon, you see, was once a brothel. A den of sin. A house of ill repute. With whores and everything. According to town lore, downstairs in the Golden West was where the fishermen and lumbermen and ranchers gathered to gamble and drink. But as you can see from this picture, there are also rooms out back and up above the saloon, and this is where the * ahem * tender lovemaking took place. In this photo, you can also see some nice antique iron stars above the door, and the wooden louvers on the window are interesting too. But I have mixed feelings about the tag job. I mean, if you’re going to go to all the effort to tag a historic building, you should at least bring it. Not your best effort, Zerribbe. Just sayin.

Historians struggle when people perpetuate the mythology of a place because as time goes on, it grows increasingly challenging to tell what parts of the mythology are true and which are flights of fancy. Sometimes, though, the place is the product of its mythology, so I say let’s piss off some historians.

See the patch on the wall there? To the lower right? Here’s the story:

After an evening in the company of the ladies of the Golden West, the bartender would ask the Johns to toss coins over the top of the barback as a pension for the whores. It was meant to be a kind of hedge against their fading looks and * ahem * talents as they grew older. For reals. This went on for years, supposedly.

Fast forward.

Even though it was one of only two brick buildings in town to survive the 1906 earthquake, the Golden West still had to be retrofitted for earthquake safety. But before anyone could excavate all of those old coins, bandits broke through the brick wall from the outside and made off with the decades-worth of booty. If you ask me, stealing from retired whores makes those bandits worse than Zerribbe. Which is saying a lot.

This is the bar. What a beauty. That beamed ceiling ain’t bad, either. Kip, the owner, told me that the bar and barback are hand-carved French rosewood and had come “around the horn” of South America more than a century ago. Talk about mythology. Probably came from San Francisco via the Sears and Roebuck catalogue. But as I mentioned, none of that matters once the legend takes over.

Kip makes no apologies for his clientele of loggers, fishermen, slangers, ranchers, bikers, and general badasses. This poster kind of makes his point. Deplorable? Yes. Funny? Hell yes.

As I was admiring all of the original lights and woodworking and bar fixtures, I asked Kip who had painted the mural on the back wall. He said, “Some kid passing through in the 70’s who couldn’t pay his bar tab. Damn hippie.” When I told Kip that I thought he'd gotten his money’s worth, he said, “Well then you’re a damn hippie, too.” I said he was probably right. He laughed and gave me another bourbon.

I wandered around the place, looking at all of the old photos covering the walls. Below is a detail showing a felled redwood with a huge hollow inside. It’s a little tough to see, but inside of the hollow is a guy on a horse.

With all of the unapologetic machismo on display, I was a little surprised that Kip pleaded ignorance when I asked him about the whole brothel thing. One of the guys shooting pool in the back laughed and said, “Kip’s afraid it’ll damage the bar's reputation if he admits that it was a brothel once. But I tell you, when I was a kid my mom used to grab me and my brother by the hand and yank us across the street rather than have us walk in front of the Golden West. Didn’t matter that there hadn’t been any whores around the place for years, the fact that they had been around at all was enough for her.”

Kip said, “Your mother’s full of it.”

The guy shrugged and took his shot. “If it was me, I’d spread the word from here to San Francisco that the Golden West was once the best whorehouse in all of Northern California. Because there’s nothing like a shady reputation to make people want to check a place out. Maybe have a drink while they’re here. Maybe two. Maybe they'd even buy one of those damn tee-shirts you've had hanging back there since Reagan was president...”

Kip looked thoughtful for a minute. Then he said, “You have a point.”

You think, Kip? As far as I’m concerned, the Golden West is the sort of place where legends are made. In fact, I think that Kip's bar is no less deserving of its own mythology than Schwab's Drugstore. Or Michael Jackson. Plus, since when are “the facts” important when it comes to the making of a legend?

So here it is, Kip - my gift to you and the Golden West - the internet launch of a scandalous rumor. Now the world will know:

The Golden West was a whorehouse.

Long live the Golden West.

The Big Move.

Even though I know that life is random, sometimes I get a kick out of trying to make patterns out of the chaos. So when I found this hummingbird tail feather on the same day I did my post on hummingbirds, I decided that it was a sign that I should do a follow-up. Whether it was, in point of fact, an actual sign is irrelevant. Because I decided that it was a sign, and because the sign has impacted my behavior through my writing of this post, both my decision and my actions makes the sign a sign even if it wasn’t really a sign at all. See how that works?

Why is this sign relevant? It all starts with information I left out of Friday’s post. See, I had no idea that so many people out there were colossal hummingbird geeks like me, so I only talked about the hummingbird’s astonishing speed during its courtship dive. You know, because speed is sexy. I left out the part about the sounds the hummingbird makes during the courtship dive. The sounds he makes with... (insert dramatic music here) ...his tail feathers.

It’s a real treat to see a hummingbird perform one of these courtship dives, or what I call “The Big Move.” Usually, a female sits nearby on a twig while the male hummingbird swoops back and forth in front of her in a pendulum motion. After ten or so passes in front of the female, the male hummingbird will rocket straight up in the sky until he’s well over a hundred feet up, then he’ll turn around and dive back down towards the female at over 50mph and pulling 10 g’s. The noise the male emits while he executes this dive sounds surprisingly like the Jetsons’ spaceship. For reals.

At the end of the dive, when he’s in the best view of the female, the male will pull up out of the dive and emit a loud “chirp,” which is explained in the informative video posted below. Glaven.

What Dr. Clark was able to prove through these amazing high-speed videos is that the noises the male hummingbird makes during The Big Move aren’t vocalizations. Rather, the hummingbird is able use his tail as a reeded instrument, and he can manipulate the air speeding over his tail feathers to create a song as he dives. His precious, precious tail feathers.

I've loved hearing from people who are as fond of hummingbirds as me. Lots of you liked the necklace, and I really love the idea that the designer, Michael Doyle, is sitting somewhere out there in the internet ether, wondering why he’s suddenly received so many orders for hummingbird skull jewelry. Some of you shared your own hummingbird stories. One of my friends had a very cool late-night hummingbird encounter on the day she read my blog post, and another of my friends told me about how he routinely kicks back on the lawn with his family in the evening just so they can all watch the hummingbirds together.

Sweet as these stories are, though, one of the things I find most interesting about hummingbirds is their aggression. One of my friends wondered about what would happen to humans if these little warriors were the size of eagles. He even went so far as to contemplate putting growth hormone in his hummingbird feeder in order to find out.

I think this would be a bad idea.

I have two hummingbird feeders which I keep full of clean, sweet, sugar water at all times. It's fair to say that the hummingbirds in my yard have a constant and unending food supply and are never left wanting for anything. Yet despite this artificial Nirvana I've created for them, they fight over those feeders like zombies over brains. I’m certain the loss of the tail feather is the result of just such a clash, and I’ll even lay down money saying that hummingbirds purposefully try to damage each other's tail feathers when they fight so that the loser is unable to chirp his way through a Big Move. Because I bet those hummingbirds already know what it has taken me two posts to learn: Chicks dig scars and think daredevils are sexy, but a romantic song will seal the deal every time.

Tempus Fugit.

This is a female Anna’s Hummingbird, and she’s clearly quick. So quick that parts of her are still a blur despite my best efforts.

She was busy lapping up nectar from these lilies out back. Many people know that hummingbirds need to consume several times their body weight in food in order to maintain their incredibly high metabolism. According to the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences, a hovering hummingbird consumes about 726 Btu of energy per pound per hour. This is very close to the 750 Btu consumed by a helicopter in flight. In human terms, to keep up with the energy a hummingbird burns each day, a human would have to eat 370 pounds of potatoes every 24 hours. That’s a lot of potatoes. It’s a wonder this little gal can afford to hold still for even a minute. Hey, hummingbird! That nectar won’t drink itself, you know!

A zoologist at UC Berkeley named Chris Clark has discovered that the male Anna’s Hummingbird is able to reach the highest speed ever recorded for a vertebrate, relative to its size. Above is one of Dr. Clark’s time lapse images of the hummingbird performing a supersonic dive as part of its courtship ritual. This dive reaches speeds of over fifty miles per hour, or almost 400 times the hummingbird’s body length per second. Oh, and the little guy also pulls 10 g’s in the process. To put that in perspective, jet fighter pilots routinely black out at 7 g’s. We’re talking the Space Shuttle upon re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere here, and if you’ve ever seen one of these hummingbirds pull off this aerial stunt, you’ll know that the comparison is apt. No wonder the hummingbird’s heart beats 1,260 times per minute.

I found a hummingbird skull once, and I was surprised at how gigantic the eye sockets were. This necklace by Michael Doyle reflects what I mean. And yes, I think this necklace is wicked cool. I’m kooky like that. So sue me.

Finding that tiny skull with those huge eye sockets tangled in my garden flowers made me consider how hummingbirds must perceive the world. In order to process moving at those high rates of speed, their eyesight and brains would have to be more sophisticated than our most advanced navigational computers, and I imagine that everything around them must appear to be on delay or to be moving in slow motion. It makes me wonder how these little rockets must perceive the clumsy, lumbering, gigantic hairless ape who fills their feeder every now and again as they sit and wait. For her to fill the feeder. Which she does slowly. So slowly. So very, very slowly...

Your Name Here.

My friend Crystal is a stonemason. Which means she gets to sandblast epitaphs into tombstones like this one.

Here rests Ellen Shannon

Who was fatally burned

March 21, 1870

By the explosion of a lamp

Filled with “R.E. Danforth’s

Non-Explosive Burning Fluid.”

The amount of live effort it takes to memorialize a dead person is astonishing.

Crystal gets to use a gigantic sandblasting machine to engrave rocks by blasting them with sand made out of ground up garnets and sapphires. By the way, how adorable is it that she’s a stonemason and her name is Crystal? And her daughter’s name is Jade. What’s not to love?

Harry Edsel Morrison

Born 1903 - Died 1942

Looked up the elevator shaft

To see if the car

Was on the way down.

It was.

Crystal’s stonecutting process starts with a stencil...

This is a stencil for a man who wanted a tombstone that preserved his memory alongside that of his cat, LuLu. Besides loving his cat, this man was a well-respected human rights advocate.

Here beneath this pile of stones

Lies all that’s left of Sally Jones.

Her name was Black, not Jones,

But Jones was used to rhyme with stones.

And from the stencil - after all kinds of badass magic involving chemicals, gorilla tape, and the aforementioned sandblasting...

Crystal winds up with something like this. And without so much as a blemish to her bright pink manicure.

Here lies a man named Zeke.

Second-fasted draw in Cripple Creek.

Now, it’s only fair to point out that Crystal does other things besides tombstones.

Things like these neat garden rocks. Although I have to say, I have mixed feelings about the pairing of these two rocks. I embrace the “Whisp Of Smoke” philosophy of life - materialize out of nothing, do your beautiful thing, then vanish without a trace. So you can see how the combination of “peace” and “no smokin” is problematic for me.

Albert Franklin.

Never born

Never died:

Visited the planet Earth

Between December 11, 1931 and

January 19, 1990.

Crystal also gets to experiment with the sandblaster:

Jesus or ZigZag man? You decide.

Here rests Lester Moore

Four slugs from a .44

No Les No More.

And she gets to drive a forklift.

Yep, pretty awesome job, if you ask me.

Here Lies Jane Ryan

Wife of Thomas Ryan

Marble Cutter:

This Monument Erected

By Her Husband

As A Tribute

To Her Memory.

Monuments Of This Style

Are 250 Dollars.

But I’m most intrigued by the tombstones.

Look at this broken child’s tombstone. Crystal says it got tipped over so many times, the head of the teddy bear snapped right off.

Jedediah Goodwin

Auctioneer

Born 1828

Going! Going!! Gone!!!

1876

Crystal says that she has tried moving this tombstone to the rear by the fence, but that during the night, someone always brings this fellow back out front and center, severed head and all. Which I find delightfully unsettling. Especially since these tombstones are heavy - Crystal needs that forklift for a reason. I have no idea why someone would go to such great lengths to haul this Sleepy Hollowesque teddy bear out to the front of Crystal’s lot, every night, night after night. All I can say is, I’m glad they do.

(Along with being hilarious, all of the above-quoted epitaphs are real. Supposedly.)