WET WEDNESDAY (C)1999 Alan M. Schwartz My sweetie Linda allayed mid-life crisis by learning how to salt water sail. This is a little tricky in Nevada or New Mexico but entirely facile in coastal Southern California. I tolerate Wet Wednesday Regattas and thereafter minutely investigate the diverse bumps and bruises somatically sustained by my woman. I do not know whether it comforts her, but it emphatically does me a world of good and pleasure. (A gal of like accrued years, on the hot make for stud muffins to fill her specs when her biological clock needs winding, often tags along. One sailor survivor decorated with scratches and love bites relates crawling from her boudoir by his fingernails to the inescapable siren song of "we're not done yet." Teenage boys brimming with testosterone are invited to take a shower and then meet their most extreme fantasies head on, get them out of their systems, and proceed with life thereafter. Your integument will heal.) A highlight of doing 5 knots through 50 degree Fahrenheit ocean pollution with your peers is playing chicken. The sailboats each have about 1200 lbs of lead in their keels. (I would have gone for depleted uranium at 68% higher density in a hydrodynamic pod at the very bottom of the keel to afford maximum moment arm for minimal obstructive forward cross-section). Though the boats are not moving very fast, they are not about to stop, either. A bad chicken move is an expensive crunch as bows tend to be sharply curved and armored but sides are flat and vulnerable. I instructed my life mate to have her pirates purchase industrial grade laser diode light pens, the kind MBAs swagger with during PowerPoint presentations. My consultation was straightforward: "When the competition gets too close you all whip out your lightsabers, focus all the dots together on their sail, and make nasty science fiction noises while hoping for combustion" (no; but it makes a great rumor after the fact). It was thus one Wednesday evening at sunset that a group of obnoxious sailorettes presumed to honk into my luscious lawyer's territory and were met by eight (overachievers - some brought two) laser beams. Sails are Mylar film and Dacron fabric reinforced with Kevlar stitching. It was like the Deathstar going after Dantooine. About 35 mW of laser red converged on a small area and, given total internal reflection and the low ambient light, the opposing sail optically freaked - closely followed by its crew. As my lady relates, the screams are the stuff of legend. The Wednesday following, everyone was armed and dangerous as a middle manager at a quarterly performance review meeting. My major regret was not opening a laser pen purchasing kiosk at the yacht club, or at least bringing up a website. Things got interesting when an outsider did a stupid move and got his sails lasered by EVERYBODY. Each pen outputs an Officially a modest 3- 5 mW output (closer to 8 mW at the onset to allow for inevitable decay during operating lifetime), but 92 beams converged. 600 mW of laser output really is the Deathstar. The universe went ironic as every red thread came together on a big matte black ID numeral at the same tiny spot for an instant. The crassly expensive sail under high tension in the wind screamed as it ripped down its length starting at the thermally induced defect (melted hole). In my natal New York City the obvious next move would be to temporarily blind the targeted crew through their night-dilated pupils and run for home. Californians lack real world social skills and never bring emergency false ID number overlays for their sails. Nautical etiquette and the absurdity of walking on water prevented proximate fisticuffs. Cell phones appeared and everybody summoned legal counsel. The New York solution would have been kinder and much cheaper. Laser pens were quashed. These are people of high achievement, broad education, deep pockets, and tenacious snit. The best was yet to come. Acoustic science has awarded us an innovative non-lethal riot control modality, namely a resonant pulsed propane combustion subwoofer. Simple as a big freon honker crossbred with a piezoelectric lighter, it outputs 140 dB at 15 Hz to massage intestines into instant incontinence. A law enforcement manager quietly borrowed a Federal demo model from his employ for the next Wet Wednesday. (Adventure deleted.) Everybody returned to just sailing. (The executive got a promotion. Wear adult disposable nappies to your next Southern California civil insurrection lest it become a Wet Wednesday Regatta for you and yours.)