What I didn't realize was how many parental-units are making up *last* names too. I guess now that it's normal for mommy and daddy to have different last names, making up an "original" last name for each of the brood makes sense, in some demented yuppie way.
And, of course, the trend of using male names for female children has expanded... and if this site is to be believed, it's now going the other way as well, with boys named "Marie" or "Brandy." Also lots of apostrophes, hyphens, and intercaps, which will drive the Social Security Administration mad, as well as the two-middle-name and hyphenated last name freakos.
I can see it now - in a few decades, some poor kid is going to be named JoeEaziel Q'werty L33t Hummer-CocaCola, and nobody will think it is unusual.
For your further entertainment: http://www.notwithoutmyhandbag.com/babynames/index.html
I *like* it! I'd bemoaned the disappearance of mini-trucks as they all went upsized, and now they're back! The thing looks like a unibody pickup version of one of the little A-name Chevy wagons.
This one had Mexican plates, and all the dealer stickers were still on it, all in Spanish. I googled around and it appears it's a Mexico-only vehicle, at least for now.
"Better watch it, primos! Crazy gringos are on their way to steal our trucks!"
I dunno, maybe something's going on there... I'd ask the Voices, but they've only been broadcasting at 300 baud lately, and they're still arguing about whether "Spanky" is of-the-body or not...
"Two zoologists at Harvard University trained a pair of kangaroos to hop along a treadmill wearing breathing masks to monitor their oxygen intake."
You know, I'd pay a modest amount to see video of that...
This was one of the startlingly few CIA scoops in the USSR. Khruschev's speech was to the closed Party Congress, and though not precisely secret, it was not to be reported by the Soviet news. Someone smuggled a transcript out and the CIA got it, then went public with it. The Politburo had to acknowledge it after news came filtering back from overseas.
Khruschev had likely intended the speech as an indication to the Congress of his intents, just sort of running it up the flagpole to see who saluted. If feedback had been bad, it would have unhappened. When it became public, it suddenly became policy; he couldn't retract or seriously modify it without losing credibility. His new hard line made him a lot of enemies, who eventually unseated him.
This is a good lesson to remember when doing corporate e-mail. Unlike bull sessions in the conference room, anything that becomes permanent can come back and haunt you.
The 366 is a small bore, tall-deck big block Chevy. Roller cam, too. There were a couple of interesting things. One was the water pump, which was beyond bizarre. It was *huge*, with a long inlet plenum running from near the oil pan, across the centerline of the block holes, and up near the driver's side valve cover, with the pump centerline near the corner of the intake and the left head.
I have no idea why, unless it was to locate the fan or something. That part wasn't installed yet. There was a large surge tank that mounted over the radiator, with a filler cap, probably to make sure the sucker had water above it.
The other thing was, this truck, which as far as I know *should* be exempt from emissions standards, had two, yes, *two* belt-driven smog pumps. And not just any smog pumps - these things were the size of small coffee cans. And they had maybe 1-1/4" inlet and outlet hose fittings; not the integral filter setup most car pumps use.
Looked like ordinary vane pumps, other than the size. They looked to be about the size of those old Shorrock vane superchargers that you used to see in the back of Popular Mechanics... no idea what their output volume is, of course.
"The reason most people never reach their goals is that they don't define them, learn about them, or even seriously consider them as believable or achievable. Winners can tell you where they are going, what they plan to do along the way, and who will be sharing the adventure with them."
-- Denis Waitley, Seeds of Greatness
According to the article, Felt, then 91, wrote an article for Vanity Fair Magazine, claiming he was Deep Throat. There was no indication of any "confirmation" of his claim.
The CNN writers blithered a bunch of Watergate factoids, mostly incorrect. Granted it was over 30 years ago, but I guess I was expecting a little too much from them.
Having read Felt's book covering that time period ("The FBI Pyramid"), as well as a considerable amount of other stuff from that period, Felt's claim brings up the "show me" flag. At the very most Felt might have been a relay for the real mole; he simply wasn't anywhere near the Oval Office, and couldn't have found out much on his own, nor did the FBI have any jurisdiction or connection with almost anything "Deep Throat" supposedly came up with.
Woodward and Bernstein *did* have someone close to the Oval Office who was feeding them information, both true and false. (both, by the way, had been CIA informants or stringers before Watergate) Some of the things the Post printed under their byline were downright treasonous, such as minutes from Nixon's private meetings with Brezhnev.
Felt was one sad fuck in the FBI; his book was an attempt to whitewash his career after he was sacked. Unless he can come up with proof - and there's no statute of limitations on treason - I think he's just a sorry piece of shit trying to steal a little limelight for his last moments on this mortal coil.
I figure there were many "Deep Throats." The first "leaks" led to mass firings, which pissed off those of the White House staff who were left, wondering if the sword was going to fall on them next. By their own accounts, many of them were sabotaging their own work out of spite. Nixon, who was utterly clueless about any type of leadership or getting along with people, operated on the "beatings will continue until morale improves" principle. You can read it in his own words in his book, "The White House Years," particularly volume 2. Nixon compartmentalized everything he could near the end, and the leakage of information continued. Either his office was bugged, or more likely, more than one person was yanking his chain.
I was smurfing one of the binary newsgroups the other day and saw a listing for "Kyrie" by Mr. Mister. I snarfed it to the hard disk, and in due course I played it. Hmm. Still sounds like he's singing "keeree-ay" or something. Ah, a couple of clicks and lyricsdownload.com says:
Kyrie - Mr. Mister The wind blows hard against this mountainside Across the sea into my soul It reaches into where I cannot hide Setting my feet upon the road My heart is old it holds my memories My baby burns a gemlike flame Somewhere between the soul and soft machine Is where I find myself again Kyrie Eleison Down the road that I must travel Kyrie Eleison Through the darkness of the night Kyrie Eleison Where I'm going will you follow Kyrie Eleison On a highway in the light When I was young I thought of growing old Of what my life would mean to me Would I have followed down my chosen road Or only wished what I could beHmm. That even makes sense, mostly, unlike a lot of written lyrics. But what though "Kyrie" is a reasonable-enough girl's name, including a last name is odd. A few more clicks, and dictionary.com barfed on "eleison." I tossed it to google, which came up with an avalanche of hits.
It turned into one of those strange experiences you sometimes get on the web. This site is as good as any:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08714a.htm
"Kyrie Eleison" isn't a name, it's Greek for "Lord have mercy", and it goes back to the Old Testament. It's still in use by the Greek Orthodox liturgy, though apparently not used much in Roman Catholic liturgy. The phrase was used in Mass about the same way "amen" or "hallelujah" are used in various churches nowadays; the congregation would sing it instead of saying it.
Substituting the variable, we get:
The wind blows hard against this mountainside Across the sea into my soul It reaches into where I cannot hide Setting my feet upon the road My heart is old it holds my memories My baby burns a gemlike flame Somewhere between the soul and soft machine Is where I find myself again Lord have mercy Down the road that I must travel Lord have mercy Through the darkness of the night Lord have mercy Where I'm going will you follow Lord have mercy On a highway in the light When I was young I thought of growing old Of what my life would mean to me Would I have followed down my chosen road Or only wished what I could be...which evokes somewhat different results than a proper name.
Apparently the band took some heat for doing "religious music."
I dunno... the song is introspective, and it could be religious if they intended it that way, but a religious reference doesn't necessarily make something religious or spiritual.
From what I gathered when I was reading up on it, the "kyrie eleison" spread through Christendom mostly because it sounded nice when sung. And Mr. Mister's version sounds fine to me. However, other than very occasional use in Mass, it dropped out of Western culture a millennium ago; I consider myself moderately well educated, and I had to look it up. Which wasn't hard, but first I had to realize he wasn't just mangling a proper name, like the famous Beach Boys song "Bobber Ah." "Kyrie eleison" is a little too obscure for me to think they're deliberately trying for spiritual. If they'd sung "Lord have mercy" nobody would have thought a thing about it.
I always got a kick out of listening to them talk. Slow, very precise (mid-upper class) British-sounding English, like a Shakespearean stage actor without the orotund vowels. The vowels and consonants were all sharply defined, with none of the elisions of Southern American English.
They all sounded like you'd expect a British stage actor or university professor to sound like.
They were still teaching word recognition in the 1960s in California; I remember the teacher bitching at me for sounding words out instead of memorizing their shapes. On the other hand, I was digging Andre Norton and Robert Heinlein out of the library in the second grade and reading them all the way through. Yeah, I didn't know what a lot of the words meant, but I could follow the story well enough.
Once you're an *experienced* reader, yes, you go by pattern recognition... but that's not the way you *start*.
I guess the Elvi have been doing this for a long time, but it's still seems odd to me. (actually, I think there were some Buddy Holly impersonators for a while before the Elvi, but they seem to have vanished)
Back in the early '80s I saw Dan Blather trying to punk Gene Simmons during an interview on "violence on TV". Blather had been playing to the glass eye close to as long as Simmons had been alive, but though Simmons was fat and retired, he had been, at least for a while, one of the gods of rock and roll. Simmons became annoyed, and he simply assumed control of the interview and starting taking Blather and the network apart, pointing out they were the ones who shoved murder, war, and bad news down with every news broadcast. Blather waved frantically for a commercial, and when the show returned, someone else was in Simmons' seat.
It was one of the most amazing things I'd ever seen on the glass eye. Gene Simmons didn't become a star via MTV; KISS did it the hard way. Nowadays people forget how different things were, and how big KISS was, back in the day.
It was pretty, in a demented kind of way, but I wondered if they had to remove the lights every morning when the vehicles were needed. Sometimes the squirrels in my head are party poopers.
There not being much in the way of radio in rural Arkansas, I bought an MP3 player. This week I've been alternating between Terry Pratchett's "Making Money" and Barbara Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror." I'll probably have something to say about the latter when I've finished; the 14th century was a gruesome place.
Each route has a van and a company cellphone, "for company business only." The drivers call each other late at night to find someone to talk to when they start to fall asleep behind the wheel. So, nine or ten hours into a shift, driving along the asscrack of nowhere at two or three in the morning, the phone will ring and someone wants to chat for a while. Sometimes it's just "hey, where are you, anything interesting?".
Conversations with Christine often wander over the line into the esoteric or outright bizarre. She likes to listen to those radio shows where people talk about the chips the CIA implants into the heads of unsuspecting citizens, or about how they were abducted by UFO people, so one night we wound up with a discussion something like this:
What if you really could communicate with the dead? With a ouija board or something? No, let's say you just drop your quarter in the phone and call, and they could call you the same way. I'd like to be able to speak with my grandfather again. Yeah, but how would that affect society in general?I held to the opinion that it wouldn't make any real difference in the general scheme of things, but I've changed my mind. Where might we be if Newton, Ramanujan, or Steinmetz were still working? Or the military aspects - what if someone like Saddam Hussein could call up Alexander or Napoleon or Rommel for advice?
You know what? I think it might be something like the internet...
As an aside, (this is actually from Arthur C. Clarke) the post-WWII population explosion has created an interesting situation. Pegging the split between Cro-Magnon and Homo Sapiens at 50,000 years ago, something like half of all of the humans who ever lived are alive right this moment.
There were a few individualist types - John Campbell, H. Beam Piper, and Robert Heinlein among them. Heinlein was a positively rabid individualist in his later years, but I just re-read a story of his I hadn't seen since high school, a 1939 short story called "The Roads Must Roll." By various comments Heinlein made later, one of his favorite stories. I'd thought it sucked then, which was one reason I'd never re-read it. It was in a 1946 anthology I was reading last night, so I got to see it again.
Yep, Heinlein was conforming to the accepted standards of the day. A rigid paramilitary society, driven by psychological testing, with different groups having absolute power over their domains and employees. When you go far enough to the left, you wind up on the right, and vice versa. Himmler and Beria both would have been ecstactic. Of course, Heinlein turned out to be a two-faced scumbag in the end, but this story pegs the Liberal meter.
However, the thing that led me off on this rant was the mention of some little vehicles some of the characters used:
"Gaines and Harvey mounted tumblebugs, and kept abreast of the cadet captain, some twenty-five yards behind the leading wave. It had been a long time since the chief engineer had been on one of these silly-looking vehicles, and he felt awkward. A tumblebug does not give a man dignity, since it is about the size and shape of a kitchen stool, gyro-stabilized on a single wheel. But it is perfectly adapted to patrolling the maze of machinery down inside, since it can go through an opening the width of a man's shoulders, is easily controlled, and will stand patiently upright, waiting, should the rider dismount."
It's a one-wheeled Segway from 1946! Take *that*, Segway lovers!
Britain's parliamentary government evolved, not from any particular English drive toward democracy, but because the Parliament somehow gained control of the treasury independent of the monarch. Even Churchill, in his "History of the English-Speaking Peoples" is maddeningly vague over how this occurred, though it was probably one of the major political coups of recorded history. Problem seems to be, nobody bothered to record it...
The monarch managed to retain his "personal income", mostly customs fees, road tolls, and the charter fees for cities and colonies. All ordinary taxes went to the Parliament, which moved from a group of lackeys taking care of things too small for the monarch to bother with, to a body that set policy in its own name. Eventually, more than one king was reduced to begging for money to go a-viking when he felt the need to thump some upstart relative on the Continent.
Yes, politics *is* all about the money...
The loss of control of the treasury was why the English throne was poorly regarded among the European nobility. Yes, those islanders were pretty good fighters, but to take the throne... more than one, probably closer to a dozen, of the extended nobility refused to take the throne at London, preferring to pass it over and wait for a better opportunity, where they wouldn't be looked down upon by their peers. Even during the heyday of the Empire, when the sun never set, et cetera, the throne of Britain was considered second rate for that very reason.
Of course, the parliamentarians won out in the end, and every surviving European monarchy runs along the English pattern now.
Nowadays, then the camera can be smaller than a matchbox and stick almost anywhere, they'd be a lot harder to find... except most systems still use the big shoebox cameras. Nobody pays any attention to those any more.
What I object to is, the owner of the property - the car - gets the ticket, not necessarily the person who was driving. That deeply offends my sense of justice.
Also, most photo-radar systems are leased to local PDs strictly for "revenue enhancement." The usual leasing terms are 50% of fines collected.
Anyway, the weird f*ck was there again. Guy in his 50s or 60s, white hair, and the throat-beard. His whole face is shaved, all the way down to his Adam's apple, and then there's a 4" long ruff running from ear to ear at the collar line. Looks sort of like a Pierrot collar.
For some reason, that guy has "pervert" oozing out all over him...
Near the end there was a long scene where Schwarzenegger's character drives a white Cadillac convertible into a gravel pit full of bad guys. We were never really told why they were there, or why he was killing them, but... he sticks a cassette into the tape deck, shoots the windshield out, and then drives through the quarry mowing down the bad guys to the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction."
...and not the usual cut! This one had a reedy-sounding Mick Jagger, no reverb, and acoustic music. It sounded like a really early nightclub recording, not an album recording.
I dunno, I'm not even a big 'Stones fan, and I noticed...
It's funny how many of Schwarzenegger's movies I really like. The Terminator, Terminator 2, Total Recall, Red Heat, The Running Man, The Sixth Day, True Lies... even some of his offbeat stuff like End of Days wasn't bad.
For some reason, though I'm a Terminator fan from the beginning, I *really* like True Lies. Yeah, it's overlong, and slow in spots, and predictable, but it was put together very well. Usually I complain about movies that could have been good, that died in the editing room. I think True Lies is one of the handful of movies (Mad Max is another) that started off as more of the same old crap, and some wizard sat there at the editing console and made a by-damn work of art out of miles of film.
I did a review of Predator when I saw it a year or so ago. Even AB was pointing out gross tactical combat errors after a while. It was enough to ruin the whole "suspension of disbelief" thing for me.
Oddly enough, we saw Commando just a few days ago. It was okay, but nothing special. Same for Collateral Damage, which is technically just fine, but for some reason it just doesn't move the wowmeter much.
I was impressed at how much stuff they had carried over from the movie to the TV series, considering the idea for the series came well after the movie was done. The guys who adapted it did an amazingly good job.
Watching the credits, I noted part of it was filmed on the Queen Mary. Ah, yes, parts of the "underground missile base", I bet.
Watching the series on DVD, there was an episode called "Wormhole X-Treme," about a TV series that was unnervingly similar to SG-1, right down to the characters. The "making of" track afterward had some interviews with the actors; some of it didn't make sense until I saw the movie again. James Spader played "Daniel Jackson" in the movie; and was the TV actor playing the "Jackson" character in the episode.
"It was very strange... I was playing Michael Shanks who was playing me playing Daniel Jackson."
[fwd] I have a facility engineering magazine that has a full page article on installing fake thermostats to eliminate annoying callbacks for building HVAC design. No other changes besides a fake 'stat will make people in the rooms happy.I've seen notices by thermostats turn into strong warning signs, then into locked cages over the thermostats, then the cages levered off with tire irons. A placebo thermostat seems like a decent-enough solution to that particular problem...
It seems I always wind up with some nutball coworker who wears his wooly undies and his ski jacket while dashing madly about, working up a sweat. While the rest of us are sitting quietly at our keyboards, working. So Bozo-Boy will turn the thermostat down to "frost" every time he walks by, so we wind up turning blue from the cold.
A fake thermostat would be simpler than explaining grievous bodily harm in the workplace...
The tao that can be tar(1)ed is not the entire Tao. The path that can be specified is not the Full Path. We declare the names of all variables and functions. Yet the Tao has no type specifier. Dynamically binding, you realize the magic. Statically binding, you see only the hierarchy. Yet magic and hierarchy arise from the same source, and this source has a null pointer. Reference the NULL within NULL, it is the gateway to all wizardry.
Various racers claim "synchro drag" is lost power. I really doubt there's much power lost there, but ham-handed bozos sure can gnarf the synchros easily enough. And once the synchro is gone, you're looking at a nasty time to replace it.
The Bandit doesn't have any synchros. It just has dogs on the sides of the freewheeling gears and holes in the sides of the fixed gears. The shifting mechanism pulls them together, they engage, and away you go. This is done with a simple ratchet-operated foot shifter.
I've ridden in vehicles with "slick-shifted" Muncie boxes, and in big trucks, with whatever mechanism they use, and I've driven cars with non-synchro boxes. I realize those all use different mechanisms than motorcycle dog boxes...
Weismann, Hewland, etc. make dog boxes, but they're not known for particularly smooth shifting. Since motorcycle boxes shift just fine, I don't understand why the racing boxes do. Racing motorcycle boxes have undercut dogs, and shift even better than street boxes do.
More thinking is required, here...
If you wanted a completely unsynchronized box, or even a sliding-gear box, that would be easy enough to do with modern electronics. Bevel the edge of one tooth on each gear, and use magnetic sensors to keep track of the gear position, just like the timing notches on DIS ignition systems. When the driver moves the stick, the transmission controller could either let the gears engage, or if they weren't in alignment, a simple eddy current brake could adjust the speed of the free gear so they'd engage without crashing.
I'm not sure it would be worth much unless you wanted the absolute smoothest shifting possible, though.
Preliminary specs for the new engine for his Malibu drag car:
* 4.060 Chevy block with Hard-Blok filler * Pro-Topline iron heads, 2.062/1.62 valves, 450# springs, titanium retainers, 54cc chambers * Scat 5.7" I-beam rods, capscrew, bushed * Speed-Pro domed pistons (I forget the dome volume offhand) * imported 3.75" 383 stroker crank * Offy 2x4 intake * two 650 CFM AFB carburetors * 13.5:1 compression * E85 fuelIt looks like he'll go with a custom solid roller cam, and he's deciding if he wants to go with conventional studs-guide plates-tiebars or just make the jump to shaft rockers. He's also keeping an eye out for a used Weiand or early Edelbrock tunnel ram intake with the large plenum. The small plenum intakes are most common now, but we're in the "big plenum" camp as far as manifold design.
> When the fighter-escort mission didn't pan out, U.S. > commanders had to come up with another rationale for > why 26,000 casualties had not been in vain.Iwo had 21,000 enemy troops in residence, was heavily fortified, had docking facilities and airstrips, and would have been behind Allied lines as the front moved forward from island to island. Iwo would have been a festering sore that had to be guarded at all times.
Nowadays it's fashionable to deride MacArthur's "island hopping" strategy, particularly since people now realize that MacArthur was a liar and not even close to the leader he was portrayed as, but in this case, he was right. It was all we could do at the beginning, and at the end, we had no reasonable expectation that the Japanese would suddenly roll over and surrender. They didn't do it before Iwo, and they didn't afterward, until the Emperor took to the radio to tell them to. So we took those islands, one by one, shutting down Japanese options and moving our forces closer to their homeland.
An amphibious assault against an entrenched enemy is the worst type of combat. The media swoons over D-Day, but there were dozens of D-Days in the Pacific, not to mention a few in Italy, and the giant Torch operation in North Africa. But when there's no other way, that's what you have to do. And that's what the US Army and US Marine Corps did, time after time, at little coral shitholes most people have never heard of.
Excuse me while I find some soap. Winding up defending MacArthur left a bad taste in my mouth...
> The majority of soldiers in WW2 shot above the head of the > enemy as they could not stomach killing another man.Possibly. Somehow, I doubt any sane person would deliberately miss someone who was shooting at them. Particularly not an adult American male of 1941-1945.
A couple of years ago I was in Avera, Georgia with my Dad. That's where the family is from. A plaque near City Hall (two rooms) said the town had been founded in 1870, I don't think the population ever exceeded a few hundred people since.
We went to one of the little cemetaries so he could visit some family graves. I never knew any of those people, so while he was busy I wandered around, and there were little rectangular concrete markers everywhere. I could read six from where I stood; they all said US ARMY. I read more as we moved about the graveyard. And there were many similar markers in each of the three graveyards we visited.
A sizeable percentage of all the adult males from Avera, Georgia (and probably surrounding areas) died on the same day in 1943.
In WW2, the Army tried to keep people together in the same town or county they came from. I didn't think to remember the date, or I'd have a good idea where they died. Probably either on a coral atoll in the Pacific, or in Operation Torch in North Africa, though.
Somehow, I can't imagine any of them not shooting back.
> The GMAC Insurance National Driver's Test found that nearly 20 million > Americans, or about 1 in 10 drivers, would fail a state driver's test if > they had to take one today. GMAC Insurance is part of General Motors' > finance subsidiary, GMAC.I fully believe it. *I* failed when I had to retake the written test 15 years after getting my license. I'd inadvertently let my motorcycle endorsement lapse, and they made me take the written again.
I got a fresh handbook from the police station, noted that passing on the right is now legal as long as at least two wheels are on the road (!?!!), everything else looked much the same... went in for the test, and made something like a 40 out of 100. The *entire* test consisted of the limits and penalties for driving under the influence of alcohol, marijuana, uppers, downers, and whatevers. There were *no* questions concerning right-of-way or other rules of the road. I barely squeaked by when I retook it a week later, mostly because I had a hard time paying attention to useless crap that had absolutely nothing to do with me.
> Don't forget that welding galvanized, zinc dipped and zinc coated steel > causes the smoke to also be mildly to moderately toxic so even more than > usual, you have to be supercareful about ventilation. (i.e. Have lots of > it)Oh, yes. The MSDS are worse than useless (check out the horror of "SAND, WASHED AND DRIED") and the vendors warn that everything is toxic and has no specific purpose ("DO NOT STICK WELDING ELECTRODES IN EARS"), it's hard to tell if something's really a problem or not. From the fearsome warnings, there's no appreciable difference between hydroflouric acid and grape soda.
Anyway, the first time I got a big whiff of the fumes from welding galvanized metal, I had to stagger off and collapse on the front step for a while. Everything turned gray and two-dimensional and floaty. Yep, bad shit here... might be just a personal hyper-allergic reaction, but now I'm careful to avoid working with dipped stuff if I can. Even grinding doesn't seem to get it *all* off, though I can set up a fan to keep the worst of the fumes away without blowing away all the shielding gas.
I also put the new tires on the back of the wagon, so I don't have to pump the left rear up every time I want to go somewhere. It has been raining, cold, or muddy for the last three weeks, so the tires have ridden around in the back of the car since UPS dropped them off three weeks ago. [sigh], I didn't take the time to strip and paint them, so I'll have to break them back down to do that later. I managed to snag some 15x8 rally wheels a couple of months ago. Now if I get some 15" front tires, I can put the big brake kit on the front, too...
When I was a child everything was fixed sharply in time. As a young adult it was less so, but the progression of time was clear. In my later forties, it has mostly become "now" and "before." A lot of it is probably because most days are similar, and get overlaid with memories of many similar days; you'd think the differences would stand out, but they get lost in the sameness. Since memory is random-access, the "distance" between events is all the same.
The elderly often claim to remember their youth better than more recent times. I can now see how that would be true. Your early experiences are often unique; it's the first time for a lot of things. You might remember the first day of school vividly, but probably not the 120th day of the 9th grade, unless something special happened, anyway.
I'd read it two or three times. The first time I thought it was highly overrated. The second time I enjoyed it a lot more, having an idea where it was going. Gibson or his editor had trimmed away some of the connective tissue that connects pieces of the story, and some of the scene changes and background made no sense until quite a bit further into the story, which is something that invariably pisses me off. I later found out the novel was stitched together out of several short stories, which explains it, but doesn't excuse it.
Last time I took a reading speed test I was clocked at 980 words per minute. I can zip through most fiction in an hour or two. At that speed, you just take it as it's presented. If you miss something, you flip back and check. If you want to think about something, you just stop reading for a moment. But the audiobooks dribble their data with maddening slowness. One result of that is you have plenty of time to think about what you're listening to. Listening to some books I'd read on paper, I realized they were eaten up with stupid. Stupid plot complications, stupid science, stupid characters, stupid props.
Neuromancer held up on audiobook, which was surprising. The first time I read it I hated all the characters - they were all losers, and they were all crazy even by the standards of their society. But the fourth time around, there were two characters who stood out as *not* being crazy. They were peripheral characters, inserted as factotums for the main characters.
There was Hideo, who was basically property; a genetically engineered Ninja assassin, cryogenically stored between missions. Hideo, within the limits of his existence, was *not* crazy; he was doing what he was made for, and by the standards of many societies, would be an honorable gentleman.
The one who really stood out, though, was Maelcum. Maelcum was born on a Rastafarian orbital colony and raised on a mixture of religion and drugs. Wintermute has made a deal with the Rastafarian elders, and they assign Maelcum to ferry Case around in his tugboat. Later, the mission goes sour and Case has to enter the Spindle, and Maelcum is persauded to go with him. Things go even more sour, and Maelcum winds up faced off against Hideo in a scene that could have come out of any old Western. And Maelcum loses. He knew he was going to lose, But that wasn't the point; "I and I are the Rastafarian Navy," he said, when he took the shotgun out of its locker. He had his obligations. Probably most readers thought Maelcum was an idiot, but John Wayne and generations of samurai would have been nodding their heads.
Maelcum and Hideo together have only a few paragraphs in the book, and their confrontation is disposed of in a few lines. They were incidental characters in a scene that wasn'tparticularly important to the plot. But this time around, they really stood out.