Scottish people love to dance. Only certain types of dancing, though.  The kind that comes with a set of rules and instructions.  We are, after all, the great engineers.  Organized stamping and clapping or structured reels and skips are what the Scots want – God forbid anything involving sexiness or free expression, no fluid or sensual movements, please.  No squeezy buttocks pushing against groins to a salsa beat, that’s just the kind of thing that leads to people talking about their feelings.

As youthful debauchery transitions into growing celebrity, it is perhaps inevitable that the book loses some of its anarchic self-awareness and slips into something of a procedural for unlikely success.  But I found it impossible to stop reading this breezy and engaging story, spun with an outsider’s perspective that avoids many of the usual tropes of an American rags-to-riches tale.

Genuinely moving and insightful, the book serves as reminder to follow your interests, even (or especially) when they lead to unfamiliar territory.

The Honda was not unique in this regard, although it was generally the most successful at finding the right balance.  All the Japanese sportbikes of that era were racing platforms that compromised weight, performance, and style to provide some modicum of road usability.

In ‘98, Yamaha radically altered the equation with the R1, an edgy track-inspired design that cut weight and boosted power with brazen disregard to the girlfriends who subsequently got perched on its tiny secondary plank.  Testosterone and sales eventually validated this move, and now every 600 and 1,000 cc sportbike vies to be the sharpest track tool, no matter how peaky and uncomfortable it makes them for Monday commutes.

When the R1 came out, the only ways to test its limits were to risk shredding your body in sanctioned races or to risk shredding your license with public hooliganism.  Both are expensive and potentially hazardous propositions.  In an interesting chicken-and-egg turn, however, there are now a mind-boggling number of trackdays available to let your inner squid run rampant on a closed course.  No pedestrians, no cops, no dogs leaping unexpectedly at your heel.  Just open track, and ambulance support standing by.

There are no fewer than 50 publicly-available trackdays on 5 Texas circuits this year, listed after the jump.  Given the dramatic downturn in sportbike sales, which has led Suzuki to all but abandon importing 2010 models to the US, there may be fewer riders willing to spend the time and money to put themselves at risk. But there are still a decades worth of motorcycles that are better at fun than functionality on the road, and the police aren’t running out of ticket books anytime soon.

Providers:

• Elite Trackdays
• Lone Star Track Days
• RideSmart
• Texas Trackdays
• TWS Open Track Days

We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur.  But that’s the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968.  If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?  To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success – the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history – with a society that provides opportunities for all.

The book suggests an updated version of Horatio Alger’s stories, in which broader social awareness of trends and opportunities can help more Bill Gates (and Malcolm Gladwells) rise to the surface. In light of our flattening world and the decline of generational mobility in the United States, it would help to set aside the ideal of individual genius and recognize the support systems that allow genius to flourish.

In the process, my videography jones got kicked into high gear. Pinnacle 7 got dusted off (quirky, but workable in Vista), the camcorder got a workout, and the clutter of tedious videos got transformed into something moving and timeless, set to a couple songs I like.  Nice.

Delivery became a dilemma.  Gifting a link seemed a bit too virtual, so I planned to put them onto SanDisk MP3 players (the Fuze plays video) and send them out to my parents.  The retrospective montages were guaranteed tear-jerkers, plus everyone got a great little music player for the gym.  The wins were racking up.

This is supposed to be the era of user-generated content (formerly known as “crap you waste your time on”), so I felt compelled to share my creation with others.  My Facebook page had fallen into disrepair over the holidays, so I uploaded my shiny new vid … uh, wait … “violation” … “privacy” … what?

Facebook froze the upload and threatened to remove all my content should I try again.  My mash-up creation had morphed into copyright infringement, and threatened to transmogrify into social media banishment.

So, this is the world we live in.  The RIAA has convinced a lot of people that music is a finite resource that cannot be borrowed or bartered without harm.  In our system, my creative application of music can only be perceived as a threat to the artist’s well-being.

And yet the reality is nearly the opposite.  With few exceptions, music is a sprawling, fungible commodity that has multitudes of substitutes.  Yes, there is (was) only one Michael Jackson singing Billie Jean.  But hearing a “free” version of Billie Jean hardly ever replaces a “paid” version, rather it is more likely to replace a “free” version of something else.  And that replacement is likely to promote future purchase of Michael Jackson’s music, movies, shirts, breakfast cereals, and commemorative plates.

Creative uses of copyrighted media put the source material into circulation in ways that it would not have otherwise, helps it break through the sensory fugue.  If anything, the artists should thank me, and present me with royalties for future sales that would not have come without my help.

Here are my videos.  Anwen / Madoc

• 27% Looking for the tough cliches the MSM doesn’t want you to read
• 13% Cutting out photos to spruce up tattered Anita Bryant calendar
• 10% Researching next Russian history term paper
• 8% Nervously searching for veiled personal threats
• 6% Hoping to find definitive spelling of “youbetcha” to settle Scrabble argument
• 6% Able to exchange unread copy of “Faith of My Fathers” for Palin credit
• 5% Saving $99,971 in speaker fees for my trade group
• 5% Learning tips on how to score with professional snowmobile racers
• 5% Delighted to find folksy frontier wisdom printed on something besides beaver pelts
• 4% Mistaken for Tina Fey’s SNL tell-all
• 4% Throwing the bums in DC out, one revenge book at a time
• 3% Protecting our Constitutional rights to buy shit we don’t need
• 2% (Various chants / slogans ending in exclamation points)
• 2% Don’t Know

[among those not buying "Going Rogue" (Q11=2)]
Q12b. What was the primary reason you decided not to buy this book? (please select one reponse)

• 30% Not fully vetted by Oprah’s book club
• 14% Fully expect MoveOn.org to email line-by-line quotes from now until 2012
• 11% Following Sarah’s lead to be well read by avoiding reading
• 9% Waiting for the movie … not the porno, but the other “Going Rogue” movie
• 7% No index, no ego browsing, no dice
• 5% There can be only one “Maverick,” and Tom Cruise had me at Top Gun
• 5% Holding out for a REALLY batshit crazy governor’s memoir from Blago
• 4% Reading a political autobiography feels dangerously like becoming informed
• 4% Already sold out at my compound
• 3% Currently outsourcing all my reading to India
• 3% Jealous that another pretty conservative is more popular than Noam Chomsky
• 2% Book sales are for closers!
• 2% (Various expressions of solidarity with wolves)
• 1% Don’t Know

Honda is rumored to be producing the naked version of its concept bike, the CB1100F, as a 2010 model.   Thankfully they haven’t found a way to screw up a round headlight.  Yet.

This conflict might not be such a problem except that the people who tend to like science fiction also tend to demand consistency and transparency from things that don’t exist.  Bonanza was a much more popular show than Star Trek in the late 1960’s, and both have generated their fair share of fan fiction and conventions … the hallmarks of any good franchise obsession.  But it’s one thing to draft blueprints for the Ponderosa based on historical experience with similar structures, and quite another to dissect the validity of a future universe made up by a World War II pilot.

The latest spin on the sci-fi angst comes as the re-envisioned Battlestar Galactica winds down with the series finale.  BSG has used the common trappings of spaceships and “bad robots” to provide uncommon insight into terrorism, spiritual awakening, social order, and human compassion.  Yet while the show has gained enough credibility to win a Peabody Award and an audience with the United Nations, it still can’t avoid the inevitable scrutiny that has more to do with an OCD episode than critical thinking.

I’ve just finished watching the final two hours of BSG (not including the profit-reeking postscript coming in June) and there are plot elements that felt rushed, sloppy, or unsatisfying, at least partly due to the slow episodes that have been criticised for wasting time down the home stretch.  I can understand how a passionate follower of the show would find fault with certain resolutions, or the lack thereof.  Even now I’m slightly irritated that (spoiler #1) a driven sociopath like Cavil would spontaneously give up without a Khan-like gesture of destruction.  And I expect further viewing will reveal Kara Thrace to be (spoiler #2) an incoherent deus ex machina who inexplicably finds the wrong Earth before she finds the right one and disappears in a cloud of revisionist flashbacking.

But really, so what?  Fraying threads may ruin a potholder, but they go unnoticed at the edge of an exquisite tapestry.  After following BSG for 5 years, I care far less about the hanging chads than I do the conflict and compassion that was earned through ambitious story arcs and character evolution.  To some, the series is a fraud for not following a predestined path from start to finish, as if any story about Big Ideas should always know The Answer in advance.  To those who require cozy symmetry from storytelling, I recommend the collected works of Chris Columbus, or multitudinous other films and TV shows through which the journey is predetermined or irrelevant.  Ron Moore ultimately took us exactly where the BSG premise told us it would go, but by improvising so expertly along the way, the ending felt fresh and satisfying to a degree that I never could have expected.

After the original series ended in 1979 (we shall not speak of Galactica 1980), all I wanted was to fly a Viper like Starbuck and Apollo.  Granted, I was in 4th grade, but the series didn’t offer much beyond that level of attention.

After Ron Moore’s BSG, I want so much more – to feel Apollo’s ambition, to have Baltar’s redemption, to share Adama’s grief, or even to walk with Tyrol in isolation.  While the ending makes it an explicit part of the “canon,” this series has always revealed us in its characters.  Now that those characters are gone I am left with a greater sense of my own being, and it didn’t require an inverse tachyon beam to find it.  That’s great science fiction.

PS  … but the (spoiler #3) “angels” pontificating in New York City?  That was still pretty lame.

As a side note, Nicky Hayden expresses  relief to have moved out of HRC (Honda) to weather the global economic downturn.  You certainly wouldn’t have heard anyone equate Ducati with recession-proof economics while ownership was being tossed around the globe between the troubled Cagiva and the dispassionateTexas Pacific Group, but record sales and a series of hit models seem to have Ducati Corse ready to contest the bottomless money pit known as MotoGP for 2009.  Recent moves to limit testing and tire expenses certainly favor a small player, but ultimately it comes down to sponsorship and whether a company is willing to put serious dollars on a square foot of advertising that flashes past distant cameras at 200 mph.

The sono-doc immediately, if subtly, started counseling us as though something were wrong. A c-section would be needed, and soon (foregoing the clichéd “stat,” thankfully). He would call our regular OB, who would certainly get back to us that day to move things forward. At 38 weeks, every all-star check-up and test suddenly got flushed by a late-term sonogram.

Apparently we are not alone in getting pushed down a surgical path. Almost a third of all births in the United States occurred through cesarean delivery in 2005, up 46 percent over the last decade. Clearly, breeched babies and birth complications are not skyrocketing in our advanced society, and yet American women are getting cut open faster than Whitechapel courtesans rather than squeeze a kid through the old-fashioned potato shoot.

When it comes to birthing babies, cesarean sections are the quintessential American procedure. From La-Z-Boys to Escalades, nobody expends more effort making things effortless. So it’s no surprise that our default approach to birth is usually, “why feel it if you don’t have to?” Pain avoidance is not the worst mantra in the world, but it’s disturbing to me how quickly it seems to shut out all other options.

The perversity is that, once pain is removed from the equation, invasive surgery becomes inherently preferred to a natural birth. C-sections are the Tivo of childbirth, allowing everyone to skip the boring parts and deliver the baby on our schedule rather than the baby’s. What on-the-go Mom wouldn’t love typing “11:30. Have baby” into her Treo? And what doctor wouldn’t prefer to avoid a late-night delivery? Fewer and fewer, apparently.

We absolutely adore our OB and count our blessings to have such a proficient and emotionally-connected doctor guiding us through pregnancy. Yet even he is subject to the demands of the Medical Industrial Complex. Our doctor isn’t pushing a c-section so that he can ensure a Saturday tee time or an uninterrupted dinner, but he is regulated by an insurance industry that prefers a complex, controlled birth to a natural and unregulated one. He conducts his services within a hospital industry that prefers short and expensive procedures and penalizes doctors who don’t do enough of them. And he is informed by an obstetrics industry that is largely ignorant of breech birthing techniques. All this, despite substantial health and financial concerns about elective c-sections.

So, the fact that our OB allowed us time to get Bean flipped came as something of a surprise. The fact that he told us we had a 1% chance of success was not. That may well be the rate among people who do not try, or the rate reported to obstetricians who warn parents against it. The medical industry is continuously poking and prodding its way to identifying every flaw and problem in our bodies, but is strangely ignorant of how bodies actually work.

In the 70’s, that meant a mother might just get knocked out and deliver while unconscious. Today’s epidural applications mean that moms can get slit open with the same detached numbness as a regular birth. Invasive surgery isn’t a cozy cuddle by the fire, but removing pain without losing consciousness makes it a pretty compelling option.

And doctors don’t just want to regulate their schedule, they’d prefer to avoid lawsuits too. For a country that pokes and prods its way to identify every flaw and problem, there aren’t a lot of doctors that know what to do about them. The human genome, we’ve got that mapped, but don’t even try to find a practitioner who can deliver a baby ass-first. The few who’ve attempted such barbarity have had a chunk of their gray matter removed by the insurance companies (solely for liability reasons, of course).

There are always other options. If we’d really wanted to push Bean out of the airlock, plenty of doulas could assist a natural childbirth regardless of which appendage made the first appearance. On the downside, that would mean birthing at home, being away from our trusted OB, and incurring a lot more risk (or “uncertainty,” in less loaded terms).

But would it have created more risk, or just different risks? As it was, we opted for the c-section. The birth, while glorious and miraculous in its own right, also yanked our baby from her mother’s gaping stomach well in arrears of her anticipated development. Medical science, which had made her delivery painless and possible, had also missed the boat on her prenatal advancement by about a pound and two weeks. Had we allowed nature to run its course, would our baby have struggled to breath at birth, or sleep through her first two weeks of development? Or could the complications from breech have created a more damaging environment for our daughter? Only Dr. Spock knows for sure, although it seems reasonable to say that the cesarean jump-started a process that the child was as yet unwilling to commit to.

Since we tallied another birth for the cesarean crowd, this also means that our next child will likely contribute towards this trend (Doctors are loathe to deliver a “v-back” once their procedures have weakened the uterus). One day, vaginal births may fall into the same atavistic category as ass-slapped newborns and cigar-chomping dads, and that’s not a wholly terrible thing if it means striking the word “episiotomy” from the Big Book of Post-Partum Recovery Fun. But there’s much to be said for the wisdom of the womb, and I would hope that it always takes precedence over the presumptuous convenience of the knife.