Now these are what I call hot rockets. Question is, which are the rocket geeks going to pay more attention to, the rockets, or Sheri?

It reminds me of the old engineer joke. An engineering student sees one of his buddies, a fellow engineering student, riding a bike toward him.

"Hey," he says. "When did you get the bike?"

"It's a weird story," he replies. "I was just walking on the quad, and this girl rides up to me, gets off, drops the bike, takes off all her clothes and lies there, saying 'take what you want.'"

"Good choice," says his friend. "The clothes probably wouldn't have fit."

I was noticing Sheri until I noticed the tatoos. Sorry in my opinion tatoos detract big time from a womans attractiveness. I have never seen a woman with a tatoo that would not have looked better without it. The rockets are WAY cool though.

When her first kits were posted on one of the rocketry hobby forums, there was drooling all around...about evenly split between the kits and the kit-maker. For awhile there it was turning into MySpace.

It was pretty easy to tell which forum members were a) functioning adults, b) adolescents, or c) adult-aged adolescents who desperately needed to move out of their parent's basements.

By the way, by all reports the kits are first-rate.

Yeah, those tatoos seem to be a generational thing. I have never seen one that I thought improved a woman's appearance. Guys just ten years younger than me find them sexy. Tatoos seem to be for young people today what long hair was for the Boomers - a way of having something they "get" that us old guys don't. Guys my age tend to associate tatoos with bikers, sailors, and guys you wouldn't want to share a cell with...

But Sheri is certainly pretty, and the rockets look awesome.

I've got a step-daughter her age (cripes I feel old now) - you can't find a girl in her teens or 20s without ink.

It's a way of expressing individuality by doing what everyone else is doing.

A lot of women my age (34) have ink as well. The lower back horizontal format (the "tramp stamp") is more than common - I see it at the gym all the time. Arschgeweih is the word they call it in German - "Ass Antlers"

The Chinese characters thing just baffles me though. I suspect that a lot of people are walking around with "Hey, how about me? I paid 80 bucks to have Kung Pao Chicken inked onto my arm!" Why would you get stuff tattooed onto you that you don't understand?

Why would you get stuff tattooed onto you that you don't understand?

Don't ask me. I can't understand why you'd get stuff tattooed on you that you do understand.

Jane B, at 34 you're "one of those young people" to me - I'm 47...
But yes, mid-thirties seems to be about the cutoff for wanting these things, or finding them attractive. The whole generational attraction thing is kind of interesting - for guys in my generation, Farrah Fawcett was the ultimate sex goddess - some guy I work with, early-thirties, saw the famous 1970's poster of her, and told me he thought that she looked "old" and "fat"...

Kids! What do they know?

"Marry a girl with piercings and tattoos, because she's already shown a willingness to live with her mistakes for the rest of her life."

Don't remember who said it.

Why would you get stuff tattooed onto you that you don't understand?

Which is my wee wifey, in her mid-50s, draws the flash for all the tatts she's getting.

Jane B, at 34 you're "one of those young people" to me - I'm 47...
But yes, mid-thirties seems to be about the cutoff for wanting these things, or finding them attractive

I guess I am right at the generational divide, being 40 -- and by the original arbitrary definition, at the leading edge of "Generation X". And FWIW, I find some (certainly not all) tattoos very attractive. Of course, 20 years ago they were already fairly common.

Ilya,
Yes, you're right on the line, I guess. Were tattoos on women really common twenty years ago? Probably a regional thing - I grew up in the Midwest, which wasn't exactly on the cutting edge of fashion. I did start to see the odd (to me) piercings about that time - were tattoos part of that? One of the interesting things about being middle-aged is that you start to notice things like this...

Jane - there is a website devoted to the misues of Chinese characters called Hanzismatter.

There are always gems on that site such as this quote:

"It looks like Chuck got suckered into believing English alphabet can be translated directly into Chinese characters. Or, perhaps his daughter's name is really 女康流, which means "woman healthy flow"."

I'm 31 and I think the tattoo's are a big turn-off. Just looks dirty to me, like she needs to take a bath or something. Whats funny is the occasional fat, hairy, middle-aged biker dude going down the highway that has the pull-out target tattoo splayed across his back for all to see while riding on his bike. The subsequent, impossible to suppress, mental imagery is enough to make you want to veer off the road into the next oncoming light pole. "Come here and rev mah engine big boyee, vroom vroom"