My gasoline-powered chainsaw failed me yet again yesterday when I went to cut up that massive newly-fallen Red Oak tree, so I tore the damn thing apart trying to find an explanation. I know about as much about chainsaws as I did about boilers when I began the process of fixing ours a couple weeks ago. With the exception of a few fuckups (including the one where I tore apart my father's pocket watch at the age of four), I've found that it's an acceptable risk when one opens up equipment, and the chance of ultimately fixing it is much higher than of ruining it.
Eventually my focus turned to the chainsaw's carburetor. Several individuals belonging to a small species of bee had built mud nests inside the holes leading to a few of the chainsaw's adjustment screws, but this didn't seem to be the problem. Instead it was the carburetor's gas-pumping feature that appeared not to be working; no gasoline was making it to the solitary sparkplug. So I managed to get the carburetor off and disassembled into its thin layers and its cubic block of machined aluminum. Everything was shot through with perforations, some large and others small. Some of the layers had cutouts in them so they could act like diaphrams or one-way valves. Not really knowing what was what, I went into YouTube to find someone to explain it to me in video form. That's the great thing about the web at this stage of development: there are chainsaw experts in the middle of Texas selflessly shooting videos of them explaining how a chainsaw carburetor works. That's the closest thing to having a chainsaw expert pay a house call as technology is ever going to allow. Try absorbing the same information from a book or a web page!
Still, no matter what I did to my carburetor, I wasn't able to get it working again. So I bought a carburetor rebuild kit online; it provides replacements for all the non-metal pieces.
At some point today Mike, the guy who gives me remote web development jobs, sent me a link to some vintage photos from the Boston Marathon. Mike has recently gotten into distance running himself and his connection to me on the subject is my grandfather, Clarence DeMar, who won the Boston Marathon more times than anyone else. On this page were some pictures I'd never seen before, particularly a studio photo of the young Clarence DeMar, where I can really see the family resemblance. He even has a bit of my brother's Napoleon thing going on.
Whenever I do any Clarence DeMar research it always ends up being something of a binge. I hadn't been on such a binge since the rise of YouTube and it was a delight to see this video, produced by Reading [Massachussets] Community Television:
There's even a mention of my mother in this clip (she was the Betty half of the twins mentioned by Ginny Adαms, one of their childhood friends).
I also found the only video clip of Clarence DeMar running, which I uploaded to my YouTube account:
That cheesy naration is hard to take, but that was how they did things back in the day. What surprises me is how clear the audio is given that this was supposedly shot in 1930.
Listening to Malcolm Gladwell's audiobook Outliers left me with a hankering for more, so today I downloaded The Tipping Point using BitTorrent. But I never got a chance to listen to any of it because an ongoing ice storm caused a blackout in the early evening, sending Gretchen and me squarely back into the 19th Century. Gretchen, though, kept a toe in the 21st Century, carrying on at least one long conversation via cellphone.
