About a week ago the Shoshone tribe bought the Hard Rock franchise, and I've been disappointed ever since. It used to be you couldn't turn your head without seeing someone wearing one of the T-shirts, but the hippies are letting me down. I expected them to be all over this and doing everything they could to make the purchase a successful venture.

I've ridden by the Hard Rock in Las Vegas, but that's as close as I've ever been. I did, once, eat at a Planet Hollywood in Orlando, but that's hardly the same thing.

While the Shoshone are channeling what I suspect to be gambling profits into a more mainstream venture, one of our local Indian tribes, the Pechanga, are dealing with their windfall a bit differently. In an effort that I'm sure has nothing to do with the twenty grand a month each of their tribe members are reaping from a successful southern California location, they've decided to trim their ranks. I have no idea what's considered acceptable, but they've been sending out notices to many people purging them from tribehood.

The recipients, naturally, say they're not upset about the money, only about losing their roots and heritage. I'm not sure who's doing the genealogy, but I don't think I'd be too upset about being told I wasn't one-sixteenth Pechanga or whatever the cutoff is, not as much as I would be about losing a damn good income for an accident of birth. Then, again, I've never been all that concerned about what my grandparents did for a living, or anything about them.

In Africa, however, the Bush people have received a very generous agreement with the people of Botswana, who've determined the Bushmen belong in the Kalahari. Now, I had to study the Bushmen in an undergraduate Sociology course, so anything I know about them is pretty much restricted to their name. Still, I think allowing them to return to their native lands is both good and bad.

Good because, well, it's what they're accustomed to. Bad because I don't think you can lift yourself out of a stone age existence if you're stuck in the Kalahari desert. Yes, you can survive the way your ancestors did, but look where that got 'em.

Whenever anyone who hasn't discovered metalworking runs up against Europeans, who have, they lose. This doesn't surprise me. There's something romantic about the pre-Industrial people, but I don't know anyone who'd like to live the way they did.

Still, it's been a great month for indigenous people.

That little car of mine should probably be named John instead of Timmy. He's getting a lot of action this week, but all of it is attention that's being paid for.

Earlier he had a date with a locksmith who was able to open his trunk for the first time in recorded history. The inside was clean, but contained nothing noteworthy or, to my regret, valuable. I promptly filled it with some assorted car goodies, which I'm putting off using, but there's still room for some small presents.

This morning, to my surprise, I felt strong and confident enough to admit I can't install the new convertible top that I bought from the previous owner, who was also smart enough not to try to put it on himself. I drove over to a tiny place that's been in my neighborhood all my life that advertises seat belt installation and auto upholstery. I've long felt it must be a mafia front, mostly because in all the years it's been around I've never seen anyone actually getting any work done there.

But, it was a mystery I could extend no longer.

My concerns going in were twofold: How much of an idiot would I look like asking them to install a convertible top that I had but couldn't put on myself? Second, and more important, the existing top doesn't latch tight, which means I can't put it up if it rains.

I parked my little car in the back and was astonished to see some guy actually working on a car, if by "working" you include "using a vacuum." I walked around to the front and was immediately met by an older man who spoke English with, to my delight, an Italian accent. I explained my plight, but left out that I can't secure the top in the shut position, and he quoted me a price to install my supplied top. As it turned out, much to my relief, he says a lot of people buy tops and can't install them.

He went out to look at, or mock, my car, and was concerned about the existing top failing to move that last inch it would need to if it were to be locked in place. I was too, and by then I was out of secrets and started feeling quite nervous. He thought, maybe, the top that was on there (in spite of the rips and complete lack of a rear window, which I'd cut out) may be too tight to allow the frame to move as far as it needs to. We ended up thinking it had possibly shrunk from years of neglect, but he wants me to bring Timmy back in tomorrow when his convertible top specialist can give it a look.

Then, if things are acceptable, sometime next week Timmy can have his new top installation appointment.

It's possible that if they take the old top off they can see if the frame will fasten, but I won't know that until tomorrow at the earliest. This little auto upholstery place doesn't work on convertible top frames, so I'm not sure yet how much trouble I'm in.

Today it would behoove me to wash and wax Timmy, who the owner called a "toy," but I'm too busy sulking to think of doing anything productive.

Over the weekend I began receiving gifts, the kind that come from those who care. Among others, my neighbors installed their Christmas lights and due to their generous use of extension cords I can now run portable heaters and other high energy devices. I can hardly wait to begin smelting iron and welding up some wrought iron goodies for all the people on my list!

I have some of those electric icicyles, too, and should probably put those up some time today, but it isn't as if this house is dreary as Scrooge's would have been. This year there's a couple of those inflatable things resting out front, one snow globe and one waving snow man. Very festive.

Except during the day, when it looks as if there's been some sort of industrial accident that resulted in puddles of plastic.

While the weekend started off poorly with Army losing to the Navy, a game I stumbled on and that I watched in respect of my late father, later on, of course, my Alma Mater triumphed over the hated men in skirts. I've yet to visit the campus, but I want to see all the cardinal taunts painted on the Bruin walk so I can be smug. In the meantime, I have to console myself with this article from the Daily Trojan, which I saw on Saturday.

It's always good when UCLA wins. I don't know why, since the athletic departments have little to do with the school, but it quiets some unwelcome noise and reminds me of the days when my car had a bumper sticker.

When the aliens come, it will be my responsibility to keep them from abducting or contacting my family.

I take this on, not as a way of protecting my family, but for the greater good. There's no way humanity, or the aliens, would benefit, and if I fail to keep the parties separate, much confusion could result.

While it's only to be expected that one member of our family (me) would know just about everything about just about everything, judging from our Thanksgiving meal together, everyone in my family is pretty much an expert about anything you care to name. Not only are we all brilliant, we're all quite noisy about it.

There's no way the aliens should be led to think that all humans are like this. Meeting us would skew their research, and not in any good direction.

When we're not busy shouting over each other in an effort to make our voice heard, we're sulking because no one listens to us. Again, not typical. I've met quite a number of families over the years, and every one of them would be a better candidate for alien study.

I'm sure that we'd all rush out to see the glimmering, silvery spacecraft and its inhabitants, but I'm equally certain that I'll need to do everything in my power to prevent it. Not all members of my family would be easily distracted by shiny objects, but I'm hoping. Perhaps they'd be swayed by another of my famous recitations about growing up with black and white television.

What I'll have to do, when the aliens come hunting, is to point them to a reasonable family. The good news is, just about any I could name would be better representatives of the planet Earth than mine would be.

I just hope those aliens have room on their ship for me, too.

The robots will be thrilled to have another entry from me to parse.

Earlier this month I was suffering from a case of lactose intolerance, but I'm happy to say that it may have been the 48 hour variety. Or, it may have been an unyet unknown one, in which case, if it kills me, I can have a disease named after me. Since I have to die of something, anyway, I could do worse than be the first person with something. It worked for Lou Gherig.

My lactose intolerance may have mutated into cream soda intolerance, and I haven't heard of anyone having that before.

It's more likely, though less romantic, to think that I wasn't intolerant of anything, which would make me proud. I'm not fond of intolerance, not a big fan of it. I think what may have been happening is that I was going too long between meals and was wolfing my dinners down, or maybe just swallowing too quickly and taking in one part air to one part liquid.

I panicked, of course, when my evenings were filled with burps and other gaseous developments and tummy aches, but I took the extreme measure of diagnosing myself and bought some of those lactaid aid pills. Since I often drink half a gallon of milk a day (sometimes more) and have no desire to stop that, I was happy when I could drink that with impunity. I think that may be a lot of milk for a grown adult to stomach, but you have no idea how good it tastes when it's going down. I just can't stop swallowing, once I get started.

Yes, I have a drinking problem, and this may be an unexplored symptom. I just love swallowing. Repetitively. Over and over.

Now I'm feeling better.

At my last job when I wasn't busy grumbling about how we were counting kisses to measure love, a metaphor I was very proud of, I responded to a lot of suggestions by saying "Just because you can, doesn't make it a good idea."

I was thinking of that the other day when, for the first time in years, I was at a gas station filling up my car, which took 5.94 gallons. When I was first driving, not only did we have the old pumps with the analog display like the odometer, but the gallons advanced much quicker than the dollars did.

Those old pumps, which couldn't display prices over one dollar a gallon, were accurate enough to have kept the American motorist on the road for the first fifty years of driving, I'm guessing, but when we advanced to the computer-controlled, digital pumps, we suddenly realized that we could needlessly measure the gasoline dispensed. As if that helps anyone.

I've long been a fan of slide rules, which got me through high school. I have no idea whatever happend to the large ones in my math classrooms that were nearly as long as the blackboard, but I'd like to think they ended up somewhere. As calculators and computers have replaced them, I can't help thinking back to how much of the world was engineered and built to "slide rule accuracy," a term whose loss I regret nearly as much as "jungle."

Slide rule accuracy, as I understood it, meant three digits. That's not very many, but somehow it worked and, just as importantly, was always a number I could understand. We can now easily calculate things out to ten or one hundred digits and, having that ability, do so. The thing is, I'm not convinced that it honestly adds anything of value.

Do I really need to know, to five digits, the percent of my expenditures that go to food? I have to admit that 27.847% gets rounded off by me to 25%, or one quarter of my expenses. That's a figure I can understand, one that makes sense to me, and one that gives me a ballpark figure I can live with.

I noticed this obsession with needless accuracy when I got my first digital watch. Instead of telling me the time, I read 11:47, and then had to visualize that before I knew that it was quarter to twelve. Few things are more annoying than asking someone with a digital for the time: they'll read off the digits instead of saying "it's almost noon," or some such answer that actually gives you what you need to know.

I can no track my gasoline usage to one-thousandth of a gallon. Last time I checked, that was 3.78541ccs, or, as I like to call it, three and a quarter. I'm guessing that's about a thimble full, and is unneccassirly complex. It does permit me, however, to calculate my mileage to thousandths as well, or five and a half feet.

I think that's silly.

The elections are over, which means I can expect my telephone calls to once again be from, you know, people. Not that Clint Eastwood isn't a person, mind you, it's just that as soon as I hear a recorded voice I hang up, so I have no idea who I was hanging up on.

I did pretty good this year, getting many of the propositions right. I missed the one about the sex offenders, and I'm more than a bit sickened that so many of my fellow citizens want to tag anyone, no matter how loathsome, with a GPS monitoring anklet. Who knew?

I spread my votes around, like I think you're supposed to, between all the parties (except Republican and that one that sounds like Nazis), but I think only the Democrats won anything. I guess that now that the elections are over they'll forget all that partisan rancor and sit around the campfire singing cumbaya together. I did find it interesting that so many of the Democrats campaigned using the "my opponent voted along party lines 97% of the time" and never mentioned that they, too, voted along party lines 97% of the time. I guess if it's your party the argument doesn't hold, or maybe then it's a virtue, not a flaw.

I hardly got any mail today.

And I'm willing to predict that Rumsfeld's "resignation" will keep the Democratic "thumping" of the Republicans from dominating tomorrow's front pages.