To serve man

I had been marinated in oil and spices, the meat in my legs tenderized.

And now, 45 minutes into an alleged massage, two practitioners instruct me to sit on a small stool inside what looked like an armoire. Three black hoses connect the bottom of the armoire to a boiling pot of water on a stove.

The initial parts of this experience had merely been disconcerting. This latest development sent alarm bells ringing. The time had come to ask a hard question: Was I about to be eaten?

After days of hiking in the Periyar Wildlife Reserve in the southern tip of India, a relaxing massage near the sun-drenched beaches of Varkala, a hippie hideaway on the Arabian Sea, sounded like the perfect antidote for weary muscles.

Mrs. VFR booked appointments for ayurvedic massages, rubs that locals believe enhance overall health. In my eagerness to concur with these plans, I concentrated on the "massage" portion and ignored the unknown "ayurvedic" prefix.

This was a mistake.

When we arrived for our appointments, a woman dressed in a sari whisked Mrs. VFR away. I stood in the lobby by myself for a few minutes, before a boggle-eyed gentleman wearing a grubby v-neck t-shirt appeared in the doorway.

He escorted me to a dilapidated office around the corner from the lobby. There, I was introduced to "The Doctor," a shirtless man no older than 25.

It took a moment to sink in, but I realized that I would not have a masseuse, and that The Doctor was, in fact, the masseur.

In the States, I would have walked away. No brainer. But in India, it is taboo for men and women to touch each other. Mrs. VFR and I could not hold hands as we walked down the street. In contrast, it's commonplace to see men holding hands -- a normal sign of friendship.

Like the ayurvedic aspects of the massage, I failed to consider these cultural differences beforehand. So that left me with a decision: My wife was already mid-massage. Our driver had vanished.

I stepped forward and The Doctor closed the door.

The room seemed more like the office of a mad scientist than a serene massage studio. On one side, the pot of water sat atop the hot stove. The black hoses emerged from its base like tangled octopus tentacles. On the other, the armoire was positioned in the corner, a round hole cut from its top. An ornate, wooden table stood in the center of the room.

"Take off your clothes," The Doctor said.

I stripped to my boxers.

"All of them," he said.

I stood naked in the room. The Doctor and boggle-eyed assistant tie a sumo-wrestler's white cotton cloth around my loins. They instructed me to lie down on the table.

Molten-hot oil pours from a funky contraption hanging above my head onto my chest. Standing on either side of me, the masseur and assistant rubbed the oil into my skin with rapid motions and perfect symmetry.

They press hard, as if they were squeezing the last bit of toothpaste from the tube. It is painful. It feels like they are going to rip the hair out of my legs.

Friction developed in spots on my quads not saturated in oil. Days later, a nasty rash, essentially rug burn, appears. It takes weeks to recede.

Rubbing continues. Spices are sprinkled onto my chest and worked into the lather. The Doctor also massages the spices into my hair, in much the same manner a chef would apply a rub to a piece of meat before barbecuing.

Next, the pair dig their fingers into the inner and outer portions of my thighs and gouge downward with such vicious force I fear my kneecaps would pop off.

This, I could not ignore.

"That really hurts," I said, wincing.

"Relax," the doctor said.

I never relax, but eventually, I survive the mauling. I'm so covered in oil that I flail on the table like a slippery fish. The assistant helps me upright and directs me toward the odd-looking armoire. He opens the doors and I see the stool.

Steam from the boiling pot of water flows into the bottom of the armoire via the hoses. The doors are closed. My head pokes through the small hole at the top. It's hot.

As the assistant turns up the flame on the stove, I ponder cannibalization for the first time.

I note the ease in which my head could be severed in this position, the similarities between myself and steamed broccoli. I contemplate the earlier work with the tenderizing, marinating and spicing.

"I'm cooking," I said with a chuckle, hoping to receive friendly assurance from my captors this was not the case.

"Cooking," Boggle-eyes said. "Yes! Yes! Cooking! Ha ha ha."

They thought this was hilarious.

"Who will win the U.S. election?" they ask in a clever attempt to distract me from my predicament.

I answered, and we struck up a conversation about the three candidates.

Throughout India, we encountered people intent on discussing the election, George W. Bush and American politics. Since Varkala is in a Communist state and 20 percent of its citizens are Muslims, we stayed as neutral as possible throughout these conversations.

Sweat and oil fell from my body in sheets. It sounded like giant raindrops plopping onto the floor. I feel like I'm melting. This continued for what seemed like forever. At the point I started to feel dizzy, I knew the time for my escape had come. It was now or never.

"How much longer?" I asked.

"As long as you'd like," The Doctor said.

"I'm done cooking."

The armoire doors opened, and as simple as that, I was free. No last-minute attempt to stuff an apple in my mouth or spear me with a kebab. My fears had been for naught.

The Doctor held spices under my nose and told me to snort them. I did. I stood as the pair dried me off with towels. They left the room as I changed back into my clothes, and I was free.

Mrs. VFR was waiting in the lobby. She greeted me with wide-eyed concern. She feared my response to the whole calamity of the male masseur.

But by that point in the ordeal, that seemed trivial. The true danger in the entire experience, she quickly learned, was that her husband was nearly served for dinner.

India pictures

Mrs. VFR and I recently spent a few weeks in India. There will be much written about the trip, but here are a few of the pictures for starters:

These cats were fired up when I started taking pictures of them playing cricket. They followed us around the ruins of Talaquabad in Delhi quite a bit after that.

Amjer Fort in Jaipur. It reminded me of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

The Taj Mahal.

Two women working exchange a basket while working in Talaquabad.



The Arabian Sea on the shores of Varkala, a hippie beach town in the southern tip of India.

Papanasam Beach from the North Cliff, Varkala.

Fishing boat.
More reminders of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Mom and Baby elephant.

We spent a day on a bamboo raft trip in the Periyar Wildlife Reserve near Kumily in the southern state of Kerala, and passed one of the locals returning home with his day's catch.

"Care to buy a car, comrade?"

Taxi.

Tampa tidbits

For those of you keeping track of my whereabouts, you know I had a tough decision to make last week while in Tampa, Fla.: Should I extend my trip to accommodate the one-night postponement of Springsteen's show or should I pack it in early and come home?

It was a tough decision. Staying the extra night would cost me a day at work and also cost some bills to rearrange flights and hotels.

Ultimately, I imagined myself reading the setlist in my office Wednesday morning. If I wasn't there, I knew I'd be pissed that I'd missed something cool.

So I stayed in Tampa the extra day. And it was absolutely the right call.

This was the first show since the death of E Street organist and accordion player extraordinare Danny Federici. As noted in my last post, I didn't know if Bruce could rally. But he did, and put on a hell of a show. He unearthed stuff from his early catalog and paid tribute to The Phantom.

Some highlights:

• Atlantic City and Tenth Avenue Freeze-out. The former is my favorite Springsteen song; the latter is one that topped my dying-to-hear-live list.

• The band took the stage with its back to the crowd and watched, along with everyone else, a video tribute to Danny as Blood Brothers played. They opened the show with Backstreets. A spotlight highlighted a vacant organ with an accordion placed at its base. Bruce screamed the line "We swore forever friends, on the backstreets, until the end."

• For the first time in a while, Bruce The Storyteller emerged. He opened a story by saying "Here's one more fairy tale" and then gave us a speech that went something like this: "There we were, on the highest hill in ... Flemington, New Jersey! (I pictured Tillman getting fired up). Bruce continued: "Just the two of us, and we could see all of Flemington. And the preacher said ... I stood stone-like at midnight..." and we got a wonderful throwback in Growin' Up.

• One song before Growin' Up, Springsteen invited Roy Bittan off the piano and handed him an accordion. He said, "You better make it good, Roy. Someone's watching." The band played Sandy, a song that always highlighted Federici's accordion acumen. At the end, Bruce and Roy had a tearful embrace.

• A five-pack kicked off with Sandy, then followed with Growin' Up, Atlantic City, Because The Night and Darkness on the Edge of Town. Nils shredded his solo at the end of Because The Night.

• We also got back-to-back gems in Racin' In The Street and Brilliant Disguise. Roy worked some prolonged magic on the ivories on Racin'. That followed with Badlands and Out In The Street to close the first set. Usually Bruce does one or the other; it was a tremendous two-fer connected by a thundering Max Weinberg solo, in which the cat came unglued unlike anything I've seen from him before.

• Other highlights included my second appearance on the Magic tour in the pit. I was one of the lucky 300, and claimed a perch about four rows in front of The Big Man.
  

• Fellow pit denizens included former New York Knicks coach Pat Riley, who stood about 10 feet to my rear left for the entire show. He rocked out.

• A little Squawking VFR trivia for you: I have seen nine Springsteen shows in five states. They are: Colorado, New Jersey, Minnesota, Michigan and Florida.
  

***

Some other thoughts from the greater Tampa area:

I caught a game between the Chicago White Sox and the team formerly known as the Tampa Bay Devil Rays one night at Tropicana Field.

It is the most bizarre place I've ever seen a baseball game.

Outside, the greeters are a little too cheerful. I heard "Enjoy the game!" too many times. The barrage of faux happiness conveyed a minor-league vibe. But it was quaint, and didn't really bother me. The experience soon went sour.

We entered the stadium and got lost on the way to the field.

I wish I was kidding, but that's the truth.

We walked straight into the same entrance as others, but quickly found ourselves lingering outside the executive suites. We weren't the only people making this mistake. There weren't any signs pointing us in the proper direction, so we continued to meander for a while.

After some theorizing, we went back outside and entered through a different gate, then started walking around a giant, red subterranean concourse. There were a few stores hawking T-shirts, some crappy fry pits and that's about it. Sort of felt like a shopping mall. No sign of the field.

We rode an elevator upstairs - the operator was sure to tell us "Enjoy the game!" - and finally caught a glimpse of the field through a curtained door when we stepped off the carriage.

Rather than walk out and see a green-sodded cathedral built to honor Abner Doubleday, we entered what felt like a small gray warehouse. The turf on the field was in tatters. Patches were missing.

No more than 3,000 fans filled the stands on a Friday night, and the majority rooted for the Sox. Foul balls bounced off the bleak-gray roof.

In short, The Trop is a dingy warehouse inside of a shopping mall. I can't possibly see Major League Baseball surviving in Tampa.

***

Tampa itself is an underrated city.

Good eats abounded. Not only do you get excellent pizza-by-the-slice and classic New York delis thanks to all the snowbirds in the area, but you also can find pockets of Cuban food that provide balance to the off-the-track Old Florida fried seafood shacks that I loved.

Never pass up fried grouper bits.

Not far south from Tampa, across the historic Sunshine Skyway, lies Anna Maria Island. An old friend was kind enough to take me kayaking around the island's teal-blue waters. Kamikaze pelicans bombed into the water four feet from our boats.

The kayaking day was most relaxing I've had in a long time. Considering the whole Florida trip was something of an unexpected surprise, I couldn't have asked for anything better.

A dark night on E Street

On his current tour, Bruce Springsteen has closed almost every show with American Land. It's a joyful folk song about the beauty of the American Dream told through the context of the Irish immigrating to New York City.

On the previous tour, he closed with Land of Hope and Dreams, his grand vision of an inclusive America.

This train carries saints and sinners
This train carries whores and gamblers
This train carries lost souls

And:

Tomorrow they'll be sunshine
When this darkness will pass

For decades, the story arc of every Springsteen concert concludes with these celebrations of life and hope, friendship and love.

That script could change Tuesday night when he plays the St. Pete Forum.

As you may already know, Danny Federici, one of E Street's pillars, died Thursday of skin cancer. Federici recruited Bruce into Child, his first band. That began a collaboration of music and friendship that spanned 40 years.

No one has been alongside Bruce for longer.

In a man whose ultimate mission is to celebrate a world "lined with the light of the living," how will Bruce play mourning this death?

If Bruce got on stage and couldn't sing a word, I'd understand. I don't know what to expect Tuesday night, but it will be the saddest Springsteen show I've ever seen. Maybe it won't be going to a concert as much as it is attending Danny's funeral.

RIP, Phantom

Music lives forever.

This shouldn't have been a close call

If you haven't seen this video of a Lufthansa Airbus 320 attempting to land in a treacherous crosswind yesterday in Hamburg, Germany, check it out. It's an incredible piece of aviation footage.

Watching these pilots work the stick and rudder on this harrowing approach reminds me of the aviation adage: "Any landing you can walk away from is a good one. ... Any landing you can walk away from AND they can use the plane again? A great one."

Crosswind landings are an art form.

They're the most difficult thing to teach, and certainly the most difficult to learn. Imagine attempting to conduct a symphony while pedaling and balancing on a unicycle at the same time, and doing it gracefully.

I won't go into a technical breakdown of the whole approach, starting with their crab into a fierce wind (about 100 m.p.h., according to news reports), the balance between the aileron and rudder use, and their go-around decision.

After my terrific lesson on spins, I've probably met my quota on aviation posts for non-av people. Just know this: This is a hell of a piece of flying. It took some serious steel nerves to avoid a catastrophe.

But these guys should have never attempted this landing in the first place.

That's where this investigation will eventually end. I hate to blame the pilots, because if they had elected to go to another airport, their pissant middle-manger bosses would have screamed bloody murder for altering a potential on-time arrival.

But ultimately the pilots are in charge of getting onto the ground safely.

They should have never attempted to land at this airport, given the weather conditions.

If they were hellbent on the airport, they should have used a runway that allowed them to fly the approach straight into the wind, not at a crosswind angle to it.

I don't profess to know much about the A320, but I'd be interested to know what its maximum demonstrated crosswind component is.

When engineers are building planes, they certify them as being able to handle a crosswind up to X number of knots. A Cessna 172S, for example, has a maximum demonstrated crosswind component of 17 knots.

That meant the plane could, in layman's terms, track the runway centerline with a direct 17-knot wind at its side.

(Interestingly, the FAA does not call the maximum crosswind component a limitation. They merely say that they've tested it at X knots, and it withstood. That doesn't mean the plane can't withstand higher. It just means that if you choose to land with a crosswind above that number, you're a flying experiment).

Now, I'm sure the A320 has a crosswind component a hell of a lot higher than 17 knots.

But watching the video, you can see that whatever their max is, they've exceeded it.

Notice when the plane is just above the ground, the pilots take the plane out of its crab, straighten the nose and try to point it straight down the runway.

It's precisely at this point the plane gets blown off the runway centerline and toward the left side of the tarmac. If the Lufthansa was within its crosswind component, it would have continued tracking the centerline.

Glad this one had a happy ending, and the pilots did a hell of a job given the circumstances. But they should never have let the approach carry on as long as it did.

When we return again, we'll finish off our two-part series that started in July on the nation's airports and preview the VFR family's upcoming trip to India.

Congressional fool's gold

On the first day of class my junior year of high school, my political science teacher scribbled this phrase on the blackboard:

TINSTAAFL

After a few puzzled minutes, someone smarter than me finally deciphered the message. There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

A rudimentary lesson on balancing the federal budget followed. If the government wanted to increase its spending, it needed to raise its revenues. If it wanted to cut taxes, cuts in service needed to follow. In the end, the numbers couldn't be askew. In the end, someone paid.

I find myself thinking about Mr. Hoelscher's class a lot today, wondering what he thinks of the profound bipartisan failure about to occur on Capital Hill.

Democrats and Republicans embraced a tax rebate plan today that would refund $600 to every American taxpayer or $1,200 to every American taxpaying couple in an effort to apply a tourniquet to the ailing economy.

"Tens of millions of Americans will have a check in the mail," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said. "I'm looking for quick action in the House. I hope that the Senate will follow quickly so that we can put this money in the hands of middle-income Americans as soon as possible," Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) said.

Votes in the House and Senate are expected soon.

Look, I like the idea of an extra $1,200 in my pocket as much as the next guy. But this is fiscal insanity. The national debt is more than $9 trillion dollars. In the end, each American will need to pay more than $90,000 to even the ledger.

Any Passaic Valley junior could tell you that the feds either need to chop spending or raise taxes. Instead, leaders on both sides of the aisle give us this fool's gold.

This is perhaps the worst piece of bipartisan legislation encountered since Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, 98-2, in 1964. Much like that legislation walked us into an awful jungle war, today, both parties are about to walk us into a financial quagmire.

The difference? You can make the argument that the decade-long Vietnam struggle was unforeseen. Today, we fully understand the consequences of further fiscal imbalance.

I've come to expect such illogic from President Bush, who has cut taxes while dramatically increasing spending since 2000. But I'm equally disappointed in the Democrats.

They're too weak to block this dead dog masquerading as "economic stimulus." They're too cowardly to risk the repercussions of exposing the hollowness of that catchphrase in an election year. Like me in high school, they're pathetically desperate to look popular.

Madam Speaker is no longer in high school, though, and as an adult, should know better than to mishandle the massive responsibility the citizens have entrusted with her.

If she wants to find a true leader to emulate, she should look no further than the floor she shares with Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich.

And hey, since he was busy dropping out of the presidential race Thursday at about the same time Pelosi was patting herself and Boehner on the back in front of the news cameras, he probably has plenty of time to impart this lesson:

When Kucinich was Mayor of Cleveland in the early 1980s, he faced a drastic fiscal crisis as the city's rust-belt economy collapsed. Much like how Americans overwhelmingly favor their quick-fix cash right now, Clevelanders of that day overwhelmingly demanded he sell the municipal electric system to a private enterprise. The sale would reap a tidy profit that surely would have plugged a hole in his budget.

But he refused.

And his critics howled. So much so, in fact, that Kucinich barely survived a recall vote. Voters bounced him from office in the next election, and he endured a 10-year political banishment for this sin until his election as a state senator in 1994.

According to The Associated Press:

In 1994, Kucinich was elected state senator and he then won a seat in Congress in 1996. His once unpopular stand against the sale of the municipal electric system was praised as courageous. In 1998, the Cleveland City Council issued him a commendation for having the foresight to refuse to sell it.

Let's be clear I'm not endorsing Kucinich's already-failed presidential run, nor his policies, nor even necessarily him for this role. But we need a real Democratic leader in Congress.

Someone with the backbone to stand against the rising tide of incompetence and weak will.

Someone who can replace a short-sighted quick fix with long-term vision.

We need our one lone voice in the wilderness.

Where is our Wayne Morse today?

*******************************

You would think the sports section would be the one segment of the media immune to the celebrity pseudo-nonsense passed around as journalism today.

But Tony Romo and Jessica Simpson have crept into coverage every Sunday for the last month or so -- ever since the Chicken of the Sea spokesperson showed up in the stands to show support for her new boyfriend.

It's embarrassing to watch my peers pander to this storyline. That's the bottom line.

Some would make the argument that there's a correlation with her arrival and Romo's dismal performance against the Eagles or a link between a quick trip to Mexico and Dallas' postseason loss against the Giants, and that therefore deems it a credible story.

If that's the case, then shouldn't we also know that left tackle Flozell Adams might have also had his ho/girlfriend/mistress/wife/significant other in the stands cheering him on against Philadelphia when he gave up two sacks?

Shouldn't we be concerned that center Marc Gurode, another one of the Romo guardians, might spent his days off gallivanting south of the border before botching a snap in the playoff game?

The Romo-Simpson stuff is a garbage storyline. I guess gutted newspapers have neither the staff nor inclination to do anything more than follow the herd down the path of least resistance.