HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS

#54 :: Road hazard

The guys at the tire store were amazed. They pulled this out of my wife's radial one day when she came in with a flat. It is solid brass, about 5 inches long and 3/8ths of an inch thick, nicked and chiseled from being rolled, crushed and battered by countless passing cars until it found a way to bite into her tire and escape. It must have held fast, working its way through the steel belts to release the pungent cargo of rubber-tainted air in a fast rush punctuated by staccato clicking as its exposed end struck the pavement and pounded it home as surely as a carpenter's hammer. Its once precise, now ragged splines say it must once have been part of a finely turned piece of machinery.

#53 :: Tooth cap

I spent the morning in the dental chair, paying for a lifetime of chewing hard candy with my incisors instead of my molars. (Two or three packs of Pep-o-Mint Life Savers a day during about a year and a half's worth of court trials while at the Philadelphia Inquirer and Los Angeles Times accounted for the bulk of the abuse). The nervous nibbling had basically whittled my lower, misaligned middle incisor down to about 2/3 of its height, which left the ones on either side jutting up at horrible angles like ruined skyscrapers in a bad postapocalyptic sci-fi drama (click on picture to see the see grainy "before", inset). Thus snaggletoothed, I looked older than my years and considerably rougher than my breeding (I had the air of being ready for a fight that a shortage of street savvy would doom me to lose). It was time to get it all fixed. The able Dr. John Treinen (DDS, Sherman Oaks, CA) shot me full of novocain - scoring an excruciating direct hit on my mandibular nerve on the way in with the needle - and we were off. I'll spare you the rest of the gory, grinding, plaster-casting details, but I'm so pleased I shook the doctor's hand. This one's a temporary, made of some sort of sickly, yellowish wonder-plastic. The real ceramic one's being cast at the lab.

#52 :: Coil spring fasteners

When I was a kid, I'd build countless cars from plastic model kits, working from exploded-diagram instruction sheets printed in stark black ink. As I grew older and began to work on my own engines and brakes, I would buy parts from the Volvo and Toyota dealerships, confirming that I had the right item by squinting at the cars trapped mid-detonation, a cloud of parts hovering in the blue void of the microfiche. In time, I began to visualize cars as nothing more than diagrams in reverse - solid objects now imploded from their component parts to extreme density and mass, the air that once separated them squeezed to nothingness by the bolts, springs, gaskets and screws designed to hold everything together. These coiled o-rings are about two inches in diameter and quite flexible. They likely held the CV boots in place on the front end of my old Saab - I make it a habit to keep all old parts after car repairs, as I did with these bearings - which needed new front-wheel bearings after 140,000 miles.

#51 :: Flight helmet

Something about society needs to republish its artifacts of war in miniature, 3-D facsimile format. Not content with model planes, we make model pilots for our children to play with, and model pilots require tiny helmets with teensy glare shields and ittybitty microphones. The constant surf of children's toys into our house washes up objects like this - weapons, gear and accoutrements of characters whose "real-ness" and play value are validated by the amount of stuff strapped to their blowmolded bodies. We often visit the Pasadena Swap Meet and look quickly for the dollar-a-toy vendors to give the kids something "new" and durable to fidget with while in abject fascination while we look at pricier, more fragile merchandise that we can be trusted not to break. My 2½-year-old daughter is going through a very girly doll phase, and something possessed her to grab a six-inch-high pilot in a flight suit, complete with this helmet. We can't find the pilot at the moment, but this object verifies his service in the name of eternal toy vigilance.

#50 :: Pencil sharpener

Feisty. Steadfast. Small. Kitschy. Voracious. Cast in brown-toned potmetal, a dimestore pencil sharpener embedded in his belly, this triceratops is one of those elegantly simple tools that delights in efficiency and feel. Shove a pencil in his mouth, spin it, pull it out - it's sharper. He continues his silent roar whether I leave him on the desk or stick him back in his drawer. Craftsman wrenches have a cold efficiency - they don't try to be fun. They're just tools. This is a mass-produced wonder, which - had it been crafted 200 years ago as a one-of-a-kind demonstration of a toolmaker's creativity and craft - might have been presented to royalty.

#49 :: Medal for the Elizabethan Club

Joe Reed crafted this, to commemorate the 75th Anniversary of Yale University's Elizabethan Club. It began life as a series of sketches, likely done in heavy graphite pencil, then inked for clarity of line. He then fashioned plaster-of-paris maquettes about 10 inches in diameter, carving them with Exacto blades and surplus dentist's tools. The maquettes were then translated into molds, and the medal was cast in solid bronze. It's different from the usual crisp, oversized-penny-styled medals usually bestowed at memorable occasions. Rough, almost brutish in its deeply gouged bas-relief features (QE I on the front, a phoenix rising on the reverse), it has a deeply rugged beauty. It is astonishingly heavy for its size (almost a pound at less than four inches in diameter), the sort of thing that, wrapped in a sock, could prove equally handy for dispatching a burglar or crushing ice. The artist takes commissions, and can be reached here.

#48 :: Pon-tiki

If I may be allowed a generalization, every serious collector is slightly mentally ill. People stuff their entire apartments with Beanie Babies, their warehouses with exotic $1-million sportscars, their desktops with frogs of every shape, size, material and expression. The collector is someone who is compelled to gather like objects together, to prove their collective worth is far and away greater than their individual value in - if nothing else - happiness. The serious collector seeks out pieces to fill in the gaps, variations on themes to make the whole collection richer, the happiness more complete - at least for the time it takes to carry out the transaction. The casual collector looks at objects almost at random and says, "Whoa, cool. How much is it?" at the moment some nerve is triggered deep in the lizard brain. Pon-tiki is one of those things. I found it at Giant Robot on Sawtelle, stared and sweated at the three varieties for something like 15 minutes, and then happily shelled out six bucks for what is basically the bastard son of the Memphis design school and Mr. Potatohead. It's a capsule 1½ inches long filled with about 10 or a dozen little shapes on white stalks. You plug the stalks into the holes and make ... whatever. It sits on your desk. I'm thinking of getting another so this one can have someone to talk to, so I can swap parts, or add more parts, making this one more meaningful. Whatever.

#47 :: Saab front wheel bearings

My very good friend, Steve Marquez, a sharp, funny, intensely humane reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News, died in 1987 of AIDS. (Read a bit more about him here.) He was an early casualty, before drug cocktails, before it was acceptable to even be HIV-positive. Very much closeted, he gutted it out for more than a year under the guise of a "rare blood disease" - a lie close enough to the truth for him to live with, but far enough to keep his friends close. Homeopathic treatment didn't do a damn thing, and he died a long, ugly, painful death. When I was called to his death bed, he had already left his body, which was still warm and breathing on machines that simply had not been turned off yet. A few days earlier, he had asked me to take his car, a 1975 Toyota Celica ST, metalflake brown in color, with 4 on the floor, a car in which we had rolled with a happy buzz on to many clubs and concerts in St. Petersburg Florida during the '80s - to get it washed so it would be ready for him when he got out of the hospital. (Read on ...)

That was as close as he got to a will. He died intestate, leaving some unpaid bills, a house full of books and music, a bereft and shattered girlfriend, a newsroom full of stunned colleagues and an answering machine message that said, "Steve is gone right now. The ghost is in the machine. Tell it who you are and it will call you back when he returns." So he left me this car - I had ditched my decrepit '70 Volvo (into which I had foolishly poured $6,000 worth of renovations and repairs - but that's another story) - and I made it my mission to keep it on the road for as long as I could, and drive it into the ground. The odometer - hovering somewhere around 90,000 when I got it, quit at 174,000 or so. A short while later, the engine quit, so I had another one put in (a rebuild of a Japanese-market Celica engine) and kept on going. I did most of my own repairs other than that - brakes, bearing seals, clutch hydraulics, and so on. I had it painted electric blue at one point. I bottomed out in Philadephia's rutted cobblestone side streets, almost tearing the front-end crossmember and oil pan off the bottom of the car. I paid a lot to get it fixed. It kept running. It rode out to California in 1990 with my furniture, in a moving van hired by the L.A. Times, which had just hired me. I kept driving. Brush fires, floods, countless city council meetings. It kept rolling to beaches, deserts, Las Vegas, San Francisco, San Diego. I had it painted "Plum crazy purple" - a wicked metalflake variation favored for the 1974 Dodge Challenger and Swinger - upholstered in cream leather, and replaced the wheel with one of solid mahogany and machined aluminum. The Northridge earthquake, more fires and countless trips up and down twisty roads in the Santa Monica Mountains, a particularly vicious bout of the Santa Ana winds that ripped the door from my hands and flung it open, crumpling the trailing edge of the front quarter panel. It ran and ran and ran. At some point, I replaced the front wheel bearings, which were howling kind of noisily. And not long thereafter - exactly seven years to the week after he died, the electrical system crapped out in the parking lot of an Oxnard mall while I was on assignment. That was the signal. I had it fixed, thanked Steve for giving me seven years of spiritually rewarding, safe and happy driving, and donated it to an auto mechanics program at Pierce College. My very educated guess is that it had somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 miles on it. I moved on to a brand-new Saab 900 (another wonderful car, for purely mechanical reasons) and I replaced the wheel bearings in that one, after a good 140,000 miles. These are the Saab's dead bearings. They put me in mind of Steve and the Celica, both of whom I miss terribly.

#46 :: Pachinko balls

There is something narcotic about playing pachinko. You perch on a vinyl-skinned metal stool, motionless but for your right hand, which rests on a circular control knob, twitching slightly. A stream of tiny steel balls shoots across the vertical table. Its angle changes as your hand moves. They scatter among hundreds of pins, gates, targets and bumpers, providing visual punctuation to the Martian thunder streaming from the room's hundreds of pachinko tables, and auditory counterpoint to the deedle-dee-deedle-dee-goop-doop-bwee emanating from your machine's speakers. You sigh, a bit, every now and then. Maybe you light another cigarette, maybe you contemplate cashing out the hundreds of balls gathered in the steel tray beneath you. Nah, a few more yen, you decide, and you keep playing. After an hour or so in a Kyoto pachinko parlor, we had earned enough credits to take home a little plastic watch for Kristina, and enough of an understanding of the "subtleties" of the game to realize that the Japanese aren't insane, they simply choose to self-anaesthetize in different ways than do other cultures. I keep these in a test tube. Some bear kanji markings, others - inexplicably - the letters USA.

#45 :: Kapok pods

Finding these rooted me fast, stabbing a map of the gargantuan Darwinian cosmos with a tiny pushpin labeled "you are here." The kapok tree spends its life growing these only to release them to the earth, where they dry, twist, crack and split, releasing flossy seeds to the winds. Ergo, more kapok trees, and more kapok - the principal flotation agent in lifejackets. I found this on the front lawn of the Los Angeles Natural History Museum just before seeing the intoxicating and brilliant multimedia exhibit L.A.: light / motion / dreams. Seed tufts littered the grass there, an L.A. species declaring its turf.

#44 :: Winding spring

I am an inveterate disassembler. After building a veritable fleet's worth of Revell car and plane model kits in my younger childhood, I learned in adolescence that taking things apart could be just as rewarding. Simple machines were the most fun - overwound alarm clocks, dead transistor radios, balky Hot Wheels cars - you could do most of 'em with a screwdriver and nail clipper. This steel spring came out of an I.D. card reel - a little retractable cord that lets you whip a magnetic card across the access plate at a secure building and then return it to ride close to your belt. There is doubtless an elegant fractal mathematic equation to explain the gentle tightening of its curve from edge to center.

#43 :: Semiautomatic Clasp Knife

Gerber makes wickedly sharp blades. The serrated one, mounted in a teflon-hinged block of sculpted steel, is among the keenest tools I have ever laid hands on (pocketknife #1 - current, collection since age 6). I became addicted to clasps just a week after lugging around a then-new Kershaw and pointedly *not* losing it out of my pocket on a massively busy trip in and around the Black Rock Desert in mid- -Burning Man. A good knife is for carving grilled meat, cleaning battery terminals and picking teeth.

#42 :: Iridescent fuzzball

I can't say for sure where this came from. A household with two young children in daycare sucks in playthings, gifts, books, hand-me-down clothing, Happy Meal toys, popsicle sticks and arts-and-crafts detritus with the gravitic pull of a dwarf star. This appeared somewhere among the flotsam and jetsam one day, glinting up from the back seat of the car amidst books, cast-off clothing, sippy cups, used wipes and apple cores. It is a non-biodegradable red plush ball less than half an inch thick, flocked with fine hairs of holographic diffraction film - the sort of thing one can probably buy by the scoopful from huge bins at Michael's. It is instantly disposable, yet will probably be around in one form or another long after this server is shut down and these words erased upon the demise of their author. It is a kitsch cockroach, with the manufactured power to outlast the collected cultural works of humankind.

Or maybe it's just a fuzzball.

#41 :: Maoist hologram

His visage bright, his jaw grimly set, the Chairman gazes toward the West with a stony wisdom and strength, against the sunburst iconography of a Communist flag. This was bought at Mao Zhedong's tomb in Tienanmen Square just three years after the murderous defeat of the student uprisings. With prim efficiency, uniformed guards ushered lines of tourists through the tomb, past the suspiciously lifelike corpse (or effigy) of the Great Leader and out into the gift shop, just as they had done for the years since his death. It is laser-etched glass rimmed with cheap goldtoned pot-metal on a flimsy chain, the sort of trinket a younger teenager might wear to look modern yet correct. Dozens more hung beside it, glittering.

#40 :: Oil drill tie bar

At some point, some oil company magnate (whose name has been lost to the fog of time) decided what the fellas really needed was a trinket, a memento of their work on the rigs. He had some machine shop run off a few hundred of these tiny oil drill bit models in brass, had 'em soldered via swivels to cheap chrome-plated tie bars, and given out. This is a tiny, mechanically meticulous object smaller than the tip of my pinky, made by a machinist with deep affection for detail. The three toothed, conical bit components spin independently, and in unison when the whole thing is rotated as it would be when screwed into the hollow end of a drill and shoved into the ground or sea bed. The tie bar itself is cheap, almost an insult to the craft and care that went into the bit, which glitters and whirs when you twirl it.

#39 :: Robot drawings

My 4½-year-old son is completely obsessed with robots. It may have started with the elaborate robot costume I made for his birthday two Halloweens ago, perhaps it's the huge volume of vintage science fiction illustrations I leafed through with him countless times when he was 2 and just getting into looking at pictures. But he wants to watch robots, control robots, build robots, be a robot. He just started putting shapes together as drawings about six months ago, and lately he's been drawing lots and lots of robots. Most are fairly elaborate, with multiple wheels, claw-like arms and oscilloscope faceplates, all jangly energy. These three are about an inch and a half high each, scrawled on scrap paper given to him at school. There's a wonderfully simple primitivism to them. Cave drawings of a digital boy.

#38 :: Nickel-plated pocket watch

I wish I knew more about this object, which came with the chain it was probably sold with close to 80 or 90 years ago. The font for the numbers, the filigreed bezel, the fluted face all speak of a time that won't be seen again, a time when going out to a nightclub meant dressing to the nines - from bleached spats to silk top hats. This was probably an aspiring, young, single man's dress watch - nickel, not silver, with a little rectangle on the back un-etched and free of pretensions of insignia or declarations of passion. It runs beautifully, if a little fast when not kept tuned.

#37 :: Trilobite

It's the size of my fingertip, the weight of a nickel and it was created millions of years ago when a tiny ocean-crawling invertebrate settled irretrievably into the mud. I seem to recall this was a gift - or it might have been something I plucked from those huge baskets of similar fossils on a road trip through Moab or Flagstaff or Albuquerque, a token of forays into the desert and a reminder of my own fragility. Unless I destroy it with a hammer, this fossil will be around for aons longer, suspended in the inexorable act of existence, a stinging rebuke to all our vanities of alleged immortality. We'll die in a few decades, you and I. These words, and all who can understand them, let alone those who can read them, will be gone again and the stone creature will remain.

#36 :: Pirate treasure

Miranda turned 2 last August, and we had a pirate birthday party - little eyepatches, telescopes and riches for all. The stuff is flashy, shiny gold pieces, cast-molded and plated with the same mirror-bright stuff they put on lowrider hardware. The inscription is beyond cryptic: AVAG CO BEPSIG CHINA a declaration of fealty to the hollow-eyed, corkscrew-maned ur-Grecian god thereon. These things are all over the house now.

As I say, I have no idea what it means. It's plastic - a toy.

#35 :: Telescope glasses

These have the feel of a Hammacher-Schlemmacher wannabe - a must-have gadget for the avid sports fan or optics freak. You can picture him sitting there with a pair of 'em on at Dodger Stadium, replaying the braying marketing boilerplate in his mind between innings - "Hundreds of uses! For birdwatching, auto racing - and at any sporting event, enjoy the sensation fo being right on the field!" He reaches up to fiddle with the diopters, swiveling the well-greased objectives to bring the pop fly into sharp focus in the precision-ground glass lenses. Congratulating himself on his savvy purchase, he turns to his buddy - Hey, did you see (extreme blurry closeup of nosehair) GAAAAHHH!" They came in a hand-stitched leather case lined with red felt.

#34 :: Handmade crucifix

My father made this for - I think - my first communion at age 7. He found slabs of ebony, hand-joined and -finished them, and sliced a little block of ivory from one of the elephant tusks that he had come by in the antiques market on London's Portobello Road. Upon this, he painted the Alpha and the Omega - symbols of the unending holiness of Christ, and to the top he affixed a little brass picture-ring so it could be hung. It stayed over my bed for many years, and remains among the most achingly beautiful pieces of art that I own.

#33 :: 3-inch carpenter's square

Mystery takes peculiar forms. Sometimes it's the center of war or religious zealotry. Sometimes it's an upperclass strange-o in a deerstalker hat and houndstooth cape poncing about with a magnifying glass. And sometimes mystery glints from your palm as an almost impracticably small, yet completely functional tool. This might have been a manufacturer's sample, or it might have been exceptionally useful in a shop specializing in building miniature balsa-wood architectural models. It is exquisitely machined, with a drop-forged, hand-finished body and a cast-nickel set screw that controls the sharp steel ruler's ability to slide. And it sings - of dado, miter, rabbet, dovetail and joints that might have been.

#32 :: Nuclear bomb test souvenir

The U.S. military detonated at least nine nuclear bombs on little Eniwetok Atoll in the 1950s. They ranged in size from the world's first hydrogen bombs - the 10.4-megaton twins, Mike 1 and Mike 2 on Halloween, 1952 - down to the smallish 8.5-kiloton Blackfoot bomb, set off on June 11, 1956. These were just a handful of the 1,125 test shots set off by the U.S. over the years. Somewhere along the line, someone must have figured the work at Eniwetok would be worth remembering with a solid little keepsake in the fine tradition of gold retirement watches and Chinese-laquered executive desk sets. Being mostly practical, calculating military men working in the ultra-remote, often storm-swept Marshall Islands, they opted for a windproof cigarette lighter. This particular one surfaced at a swap meet, its rich cloisonné badge all but glowing amid the crap-smeared Vietnam Zippos and Mack gimmes in the vendor's case. The badge commemorates the member departments in Joint Task Force Seven - Army, Navy, Air Force and Atomic Energy Commission. And the back shows a mushroom cloud rising over a little palm-tree-shaded map, naming the places that were wiped off of it. Bogallua. Engebi. Rujiyoru. Piiai. Japtan. West T-Spit. Libiron. Igurin. And Eniwetok. All are carved in the faux-steel finish, bitten through to the brass case beneath. The embossed base proclaims it to be "HIGH QUALITY LIGHTER" - a Penguin brand Zippo knockoff made in Japan, No. 19531. I can't say whether that's its model number, or the issue number out of untold thousands made. But it has served me faithfully, igniting camp fires in Joshua Tree and Sequoia National Parks, cigars and clove cigarettes, etc. at Burning Man and on board the Straylight, the doughty little Hobie Cat I sailed for many years. It is a good, reliable tool, its history throbbing from within as you hold it and flick the wheel. Please do click the pictures. I made them extra-large for this one.

#31 :: Rock'em Sock'em Robot

He is Russian, I think. Sure, he's a Mattellian icon made (at least until recently) right here in the USA. But he's got that Dostoyevskian brow, those sledgehammer fists, and he glows with a fiery red when the morning sun hits my office window. He's a 6-inch Burger King knockoff with a thumb-lever for a spine. The original Rock'em Sock'em Robots were about 10 inches high, and connected to sets of dual thumb-powered triggers via sleds slotted into a bright yellow thermoplastic boxing ring. When I was 8 or 9, I desperately needed a set in my life, so that I could yell like the boy in the TV commercials, "Hey, you knocked my block off!!!" and then push the spring-loaded, ratchet-mounted skull of cubist plastic back onto those burly shoulders and go at it again. No, my folks replied coldly - as they did with Creepy Crawlers, Lite-Brite, Monster Magnet and just about every other disposable must-have toy - "It's a piece of junk." And so it was, according to this review.

#30 :: Machinists'/Jewelers' loupe

Certain props scream "mad scientist" or "post-apocalyptic economy of scavengers":

#29 :: Human silhouette

This is a new iteration of a very, very old design aid. Draftspeople always seemed (when I was a kid) to use the neatest tools - flexible curves, Staedtler pens, compasses, rulers - that spoke of a level of arcane understanding of the universe that mathematically ignorant people like me would never reach, the music of calculation, the figuring of art. The silhouette is about 3 inches long when crouched, 6 in full flight. Button-rivet joints let you imagine the pose of your subject as acrobat, bum, president, celebrant, victim, ballerina or slave - the last the most likely, you realize, as you bend its translucent green limbs into horrible positions to picture human suffering - before guilt or empathy makes you feel its discomfort and return it to a more peaceful state of repose.

#28 :: Pipe cutter

This is a magnificently simple machine. A hardened steel blade rides in a little carriage, opposite two rollers in the chassis. You put it onto a piece of pipe up to an inch thick, tighten the carriage by means of a big knurled thumbscrew until the blade bites into the pipe. then you spin the pipe inside its grip, tightening the carriage every few spins, until the blade cuts through the pipe. It is palm sized, no more than 2x1x.75", and heavy, heavy. The brand name, embossed on its flank in a thick, Aryan font, is "R I G I D."

#27 :: Ganesha finger puppet

Ganesha is not a little rubber guy you can put your finger in to perform counterpane dramas. He's the "lord of and destroyer of obstacles" according to the above link. But we found him in a carved wooden bowl along with about 38 more like him, in an import curio shop on the two blocks of San Francisco that we revisit just about every time we go to the city. A few doors down is the venerable City Lights Bookstore and the unstoppable Brandy Ho's Hunan Food. But there, one night, were 39 Ganeshas and about 23 Vishnus. We bought one of each. Buying gods seems now like a frivolous activity. I'm Catholic by upbringing, but I'll probably park Ganesha on my desk at work for the next few weeks while I try to claw raw design ideas out of blank white Photoshop windows. Inspiration often rests in the tiniest things.

#26 :: Hohner Little Lady

This may or may not be the world's smallest harmonica. At less than an inch long, it plays a full chromatic scale. The tongue and lip work is demanding, but you can actually play ittybitty tunes on it, then either clip it to a keyring or stick it back in its little fitted box. I fell in love with this at about age 10 (this is a replacement for one lost long ago) when I visited the United Nations and spotted one in the gift shop. Magpie eyes noticed the brand stamped in the tin cover, and I asked the man at the counter to "show me the Little Lady, please." Whereupon he pulled out a matruschka doll next to it, thus completely embarrassing me. It took all the guts I could muster to correct him, then plunk down four and a half bucks - all the money in the world to me then. I rode home in the car, turning it over and over in my hands, occasionally blowing into it carefully to make only soft, peeping notes so as not to disturb my dad while he was driving.

#25 :: Digital counter

This little clockwork device is very, very old, judging by the wear. There are no maker's marks anywhere on it. The back of its potmetal chassis is worn away where a metal thumb ring once rode, eroding the surface. Its stamped tin face bears the dents and scars of a thousand infinitesimal blows - a phenomenon about which William Gibson wrote beautifully in Neuromancer. Knobs on its back let you reset each of the dials inside, which spin smoothly and then click over - each moving the next one up by a power of 10 with every 10 pushes of the stamped-steel thumb button. Did it count baseball fans? Inmates at bed check? Pallets of cabbage thudding onto a flatbed, box after hard-picked box? It's not saying.

#24 :: Space pod

"Lost in Space" debuted in 1965, at the height of the Space Race. I was 5, and when my mom sat me down in front of the TV and I saw that flying saucer blast off into the blackness, I was locked in the hold with Will Robinson, doomed to wander the cosmos with the evil Dr. Smith and smart-mouthed robot B-19. The Space Pod was a little miracle - suspended against pinpricked black-velvet on monofilament, its tiny nuclear propeller whirring beneath - an uncanny reflection of the Lunar Excursion Module yet to come.