A real Mike Guy website

I've been told that I should launch a normal website to serve as a flagpole to fly past articles I've written. I relent.

Now, after having proudly come in well under the planned budget of $40, mostly by "designing" and "coding" it myself, I have created a specimen of utilitarian worldwidewebbery that I'm sure you'll agree is altogether hideous, recalling the heady days of Netscape.

Thank you and enjoy.

http://web.mac.com/mike.guy

Happy New Year, Homeland Security!

It's hard to say exactly who's to blame for the olympiad of idiocy that is airport security. I suppose if we wanted we could follow the daffy crumb trail right into the Oval Office. The Decider's decision to respond to 9/11 by forming the largest bureaucracy in the history of civilization pretty much sewed up our fate: Thrust upon us - and anyone wishing to visit us - is an impenetrable morass of bad security policy and ineffectual implementation.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Homeland's laughable security cordon at American airports. We remove our shoes because a half-wit named Richard Reid once tried to set his sneakers on fire flying from London to New York. What if Reid had been wearing an explosive bra? The most frustrating aspect of TSA's ineptitude is exactly what is so malignant about bureaucracy: it's rules are unthinking and arbitrary. There's an actual need for security that TSA simply doesn't fulfill. For example, nearly every terminal in the States has a $20 million "Explosives Trace Detection Machine", but the personnel actively screening passengers are paid $10 an hour. You get what you pay for.

I could rant about this at length, but instead I'll refer to something that Patrick Smith, a commercial airline pilot who writes a New York Times blog called "Jet Lagged", wrote last week.

"...The liquids and gels restrictions [were] introduced two summers ago following the breakup of a London-based cabal that was planning to blow up jetliners using liquid explosives. Allegations surrounding the conspiracy were revealed to be substantially embellished. In an August, 2006 article in the New York Times, British officials admitted that public statements made following the arrests were overcooked, inaccurate and “unfortunate.” The plot’s leaders were still in the process of recruiting and radicalizing would-be bombers. They lacked passports, airline tickets and, most critical of all, they had been unsuccessful in actually producing liquid explosives. Investigators later described the widely parroted report that up to ten U.S airliners had been targeted as “speculative” and “exaggerated.”

It's a sad blowback of the 2001 terror attacks. How many billions have been wasted chasing our tail in airports? Sadder still, if you look closely at the other high-profile terror arrests that Homeland trumpets so proudly, and which shape its response to threats, they fall apart under the most cursory inspections. Remember the half-baked plot to blow up the Sear's Tower? How about the Albanian pizza deliverymen conspiring to over Fort Dix? Homeland Security is a heady combination of dangerous and laughable. And that means that the joke is most certainly on us.

Drunken Holiday Brawl on South Pole Leads to Evacuation

It's mighty slow week here in Brooklyn. I'm sitting on the couch watching old Bruce Brown surfing movies in preparation for a reporting trip to Monterey next week. Otherwise, I'm doing shit. You might call it a lull. You might call it boredom. And boredom is bad news. Evidence:

McMurdo Station, Antarctica - Marathon holiday sessions of Asshole and Quarters at the US-operated Amundsen-Scott South Pole research station, at the heart of Antartica, led to what one scientist described as a "drunken Christmas punch-up," and forced researchers to airlift two injured men to a hospital in New Zealand.

It was a real whizzer. From the Guardian:

After reports of the fight reached staff at McMurdo station, the headquarters of the US Antarctic Program, an Air Force Hercules was sent to pick up the injured men.

They were flown back to McMurdo, but it was decided the man's injuries were too serious to be treated in Antarctica and he was taken on to Christchurch, New Zealand, accompanied by a nurse and a paramedic.

"There was an altercation between two people -- there's no indication of the cause or of the background between the two folks," said Peter West, spokesman for the National Science Foundation.

The injured man is an employee of Raytheon Polar Services, one of America's largest defence contractors. A company spokeswoman, Val Carroll, said an investigation into the incident would be held. She said it was company policy not to release names of the two men.

The Appetites of Artie Lange

If you have any interest at all in reading a dark, revealing tale of drugs, alcohol, cash, and Devil Dogs, buy this month's issue of Playboy and read my profile of Howard Stern's tormented right-hand man, 'Riding High With Artie Lange."

Over Ambergris Cay, 12/13/07

Landing in a storm, Ambergris Cay, 12/13/07

Landing in a storm, Ambergris Cay, 12/13/07

Downtown Miami, 39th floor, 12/10/07

The Swaying of the Meats

Dan Dunn is a Wine and Spirits Journalist. He writes a syndicated column called "The Imbiber", and recently authored the elaborately-titled "Nobody likes a Quitter (And Other Reasons to Avoid Rehab): The Loaded Life of An Outlaw Booze Writer". In that sense, Dan Dunn is very much my polar opposite. One night last week Dan and I sat at the Infinity Bar of the Grace Bay Club in the Turks & Caicos with the hotel's General Manager, a felicitous gentleman named Nikeel. Dan braced himself against the bar as Nikeel's barstaff presented him with a tangy parade of literally dozens of martinis, rum punches, mojitos, and various esoteric subspecies thereof. Dan Dunn is a Pro, and he absorbed the booze with well-rehearsed techniques involving sipping, puckering, gargling, breathing rhythmically, and hopping gingerly on his toes like a boxer before the bell.

Then the waiters brought us hors d'ouvres, like the skewered beef filets with cilantro pesto seen above. I ate most of the food as a fog of alcohol, lime, sugar and pulverized mint leaves enveloped Dan Dunn. Through it, I could foretell the rest his evening - Dan Dunn staggers through horrified newlyweds at O Soleil, crashes the VIP room at the Fire & Ice party, lurches onto laps of glowing Caribbean debutantes, somehow emerges from the fog just before dawn and wins $1000 at blackjack in a seedy Caicos casino.

Such is the life of a professional Wine & Spirits Journalist. Good luck in your continued quest to avoid rehab, Dan Dunn.

Marcus Gronholm turns a corner

Gronholm retires from WRC racing after the Wales Rally. This is my last view. At the beginning of the video, you can hear the brake compound squeaking as he left-foot brakes into the corner.

Ripping through the Welsh forest, 10:10 am, December 2007

Norwegian Petter Solberg, the 5th ranked rally driver in the world, slides past in his Subaru STI on the first stage of the WRC Rally of Wales. I was one of what seemed like 100,000 who scrambled through the muddy, mist-enshrouded forests to glimpse the best drivers in the world race in the last World Rally Championship of the year.

Xavier Pons passes the crowd, 10:20 a.m.

Stage Six, 5:15 pm, December 2007

Solberg later described the conditions to me as "mud and shit." The rain pissed, the North Sea winds raged, the filthy slurry of mud grew and grew. As I wandered among them, happily tanked Welshmen thumped me on the back and uttered incomprehensible Welsh aphorisms. The rains came in earnest after dark, turning the sixth stage into a chaotic and muck-slicked mess, like Woodstock, I suppose, but without hippies giving birth.

I found a spot in a growing pond of muck and discarded umbrellas, which were useless in the sideways rain and wind, and had a good view of the cars hitting a jump and skidding up a hill. I stood in a good foot of water, away from the crowds. The water was even deeper elsewhere. The fenceline I leaned against was collapsing, and crewmen approached to fix it. One took a wrong step and disappeared under the water. When he re-emerged a moment later he yelled in a thick Welsh brogue, "Was it determination or stupidity?"

Here I go after a week of Rally Racing school. Note my use of a technique caled the "Scandinavian Flick", which transfers the car's weight outside before a skid turn. It's a key to rally driving, kids.

In-car cam captures pass!