Movies 2

We went to see "Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix," which is the fourth book in the series. We were shocked to see how much the kids have grown. Harry's all angular and stuff. He might even have facial hair somewhere, up close. Hermione is a young woman. And Ron is a big galoot. But Neville Longbottom, a short dumpy kid, now towers over everyone. It's very interesting.

We liked the movie. I probably should have re-read the book first, but I thought it was well-done.

We're working through the 7th book now. I'm on page 263, my wife is somewhere ahead of me. We leave it on the side table next to the couch, and whoever's not busy gets to read. I think I may catch up with her yet this weekend.

Movies

I saw John Cusack in "1408" with my daughter Alyssa a few weeks ago. Sigh. So campy it was stupid. John's acting range is limited at best... in this one, he's just playing a jaded jerk like usual. He won't believe Samuel L. Jackson's warning (as a hotel manager for all of 5 minutes onscreen) NOT to stay in a haunted hotel room where 53 people have died since the 1920s. "That's a f*cking evil room," says Samuel. Mmmhmm. The usual horror stuff happens, and every time the room tries to kill John (who's locked in and can't escape), the clock radio pops on and starts blasting Karen Carpenter singing "We've Only Just Begun." Now I can't hear that song without laughing. But the rest of the movie stunk.

A feline harbinger of death

Oscar the cat lives in a nursing home, and the staff has noticed that he likes to curl up and sleep with people who then die within a day. He's so accurate that now the staff uses him as an indicator to call the patient's family for one last visit. It's not improbable - animals always know when someone is sick or ill, because they smell different. Our cats know when one of their brethren is dying, and they generally give the ill cat a wide berth. But Oscar seems to like to hang out with dying folks. Maybe it's his way of getting a glimpse of what lies beyond life. I sat with one of my college professors when he was in a coma, dying. He knew when I visited because his breathing would change a bit. I would tell him what was going on in the school and in the world. I think he appreciated it. I wasn't there when he died, but it was a privilege to spend time with him when he was so close to leaving. Maybe Oscar thinks it's a privilege too.

Subliminal bull**** again in USA Today

You just can't trust the mainstream media (MSM) farther than you can throw it, you know. When they're not overtly lying to you about stuff, they're snidely, covertly sneaking in their little digs, opinions, or fetishes, as evidenced by the picture below...



The graphic is purportedly a bar chart that shows the percentage of a sample of people (2,395 adults) who used a particular method to contact a former flame. Tops is email at 32 percent, followed by a tie of face-to-face and telephone (23 percent each), then letter at 19 percent, and other (presumably by setting oneself on fire, or streaking at NFL football games) at 4 percent.



The "bars" in the bar graph are, at first glance, computer mice that are trailing their wavy cords behind them. However, I'm sure I'm not the only person who sees spermatozoa.



It's this kind of infantile crap that irritates the heck out of me in USA Today. I wish I had a bird, or some fish to be wrapped, to put this so-called "newspaper" to better use. I get it for "free" at the hotel, but some days it's just not even worth the effort to reach down and pick it up off the floor outside my door. Sigh.



Now, The Onion is a much more trustworthy bunch compared to USA Today. At least The Onion makes no bones about the fact that they're lying their heads off. I like this graphic in particular.




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In other MSM news, I see that CNN has booted Paula Zahn (who was a lightweight 20 years ago and is still a lightweight), only to replace her with... Campbell Brown from NBC? Pfui. Another lightweight. If Walter Cronkite were dead, he would be spinning in his grave. Maybe he's just twitching in his rocking chair. Still. I think it's funny, almost as funny as Katie Couric dumping NBC to host the CBS Evening News (a move that she recently admitted was a terrible mistake, because no one takes her seriously, and no one watches CBS anymore anyway). The MSM is irrelevant now, which is why Campbell Brown says she ditched broadcast NBC to go with cable CNN. Ahem...hello Campbell, cable is irrelevant now too. Blogs are where it's at. Well, okay, Fox News is still decent, which is why it routinely trounces CNN in the ratings. I just wish Bill O'Reilly would shut up and let his guests talk once in a while. Anyway, I think the recent swaps of personnel in the MSM and cable networks are just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It will make no difference in the long run.

A nice dinner out with co-workers

Tonight I had dinner with four of my comrades, one of whom I had never met before this week. Another I have not seen for about eight months. Another I have not seen for more than two years. It's nice to see my co-workers again.

Got Liquids?

You know how the Transportation Stupidity Administration (TSA, or Thousands Standing Around) likes to tell you that you have to pull out all your liquids, gels and aerosols out of your luggage and put them in a one-quart plastic bag and send it through the X-ray scanner separately?

I'm here to tell you that it's a complete load of dingo's kidneys.

Since the TSA instituted this ridiculous rule, I have traveled every week with liquids and gels in my carry-on luggage, including (a couple of weeks ago) a 20-ounce bottle of potentially-high-explosive shampoo in my backpack.

Out of, I'm guessing, more than 50 trips through airport security with the aforementioned liquids, gels and aerosols, TSA has caught me exactly once, with a half-full bottle of Diet Coke in my backpack. Oooooohhhh!

They can't see this stuff on the scanner, I've read. It's purely the honor system. Well, screw it, terrorists have no honor, and they're not going to pull their explosives out and put them in a baggie, so why should I pull my shampoo out and put it in a baggie? That's nonsense. Therefore I don't. And 90 percent of the time, the TSA never catches it. So why bother? That's as dumb as DC and New Orleans making citizens surrender their weapons so "the community is safer." Yeah, right. I don't see criminals surrendering their weapons, and therefore it sure doesn't seem safer to me.

"Oops! Ya got me this time!" I say when the TSA catches me with my verboten liquids. They don't think it's funny.

But I do.

Lex Luthor had it right...

In the first "Superman" movie (1978), Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor launches a nuclear missile to blow up Hackensack, New Jersey. mostly (if I remember right) because he doesn't like the name "Hackensack." Since I'm working in New Jersey, it has special meaning to me. I think it's very funny.

No pictures this weekend

I was very tired and unmotivated this weekend, so I did not take any pictures. Mostly we ran errands, worked around the house (I installed a dimmer switch in the closet and a six-socket multi-plug in the bathroom), worked in the yard, and watched "The Vicar of Dibley" (a great BBC comedy show from the 1990s, featuring comedienne Dawn French as an Anglican vicar in a small rural English church. Very funny stuff. I sure miss that show. They didn't make very many episodes, maybe 20, in the bizarre schedule that the BBC likes to follow...six episodes one year, none for two or three years, two episodes the next year, and so on.

What color to paint the house?

My darling wife is very color-oriented. She lives in color, and I live in shades of gray. After we were married, it took me six months to realize that one of the rooms in her house was pink. I never would have figured it out if she hadn't told me.

Anyway, we have a red barrel-tile roof on our houses. This is an expensive roof, yet it is a liability because tiles peel off and become missiles during a hurricane. Nevertheless, it is a solid, heavy roof, and isn't due to be replaced for another 20 years or so. Eventually we'll pull it off, tie down the roof trusses to the walls to hold the roof on tighter against a hurricane, and then we'll put on a metal roof. Metal roofs are proof against all but the strongest hurricanes. And they make great radio antennas.

So, we need to paint our house something other than its icky light brown color. But it needs to match our red roof. So we drove around in some high-end neighborhoods to find other houses with tile roofs like ours. We talked our way into some gated communities, telling the guards that we are new to the area and we're shopping for houses. It turns out that Sunday is a great day to do that, because the guards actually have a list of the houses that are for sale in the complex. So it worked out quite well. We decided that we want to either paint the walls off-white, with bright white trim, or we want to paint the walls a peachy-pink, with darker orange trim. At least, that's what my wife says.

Anyway, while driving around in one of these gated communities, I saw a huge rat run across one of the driveways of these half-million-dollar homes. The creature was gigantic, almost as big as a Pomeranian dog... its body must have been at least ten inches long, and its tail was at least again that long. It dashed across the driveway from one set of bushes to another. I stopped and stared, because it's quite unseemly for such a posh community to have rats. We had to laugh. At our house, which is surrounded by jungle, I'm sure we have rats, but we also have raccoons, opossums, tortoises, armadillos, feral cats, bobcats, and even the occasional panther. So I expect that if we do have rats, they are kept in strict check by all the other predators.

But I was very surprised to see a big rat like that in a gated community. Just think, paying all that money for big houses and guards and groundskeepers and immaculate lawns and trees, and you still have rats. I think that's very funny.

Dessicated thoughts blowing away like dust

Yellow starfish towns
burning bright with the light of
dinosaurs long dead

the oily gleams peek
through the dark clouds beneath us
sliding past like ghosts

Silent above the
screaming jet engines, we flee
ahead of the moon

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I had dinner with my dad tonight. He drove over from New York City to see me at Newark airport. We had a nice meal of Chinese fast food and talked. He looks well and seems well. He won't move down to live near us. That's fine.... we made the offer. It's his choice, and he knows best what's for him.

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It's been a very long week, yet it was very short. I had a long talk with my friend/mentor/boss this week. She is very supportive. I feel much better now than I have in a while. I am still not 100 percent, but I am better than I was, and I am grateful.

A week of sunsets, and other stuff

This is a montage of sunsets from my week's vacation at home. We went nowhere and did nothing except work on the house, work in the yard, and watch the sunsets in the evenings.

This is our dead oak tree.

A mountain of tree-stuff after we cut down the dead oak tree. It was a LOT of work. I missed my calling as a lumberjack - it turns out I am quite good with a chainsaw. It doesn't replace a disintegrator, or a vibro-blade, or a lightsaber. But a chainsaw is a nice primitive alternative. If a bit loud.

What's left of our dead oak tree- a single stump (which my darling wife will use for a bird feeder) surrounded by palmettos, which are a little worse for the wear for being repeatedly crushed by chunks of falling oak logs.


A southeastern 5-lined skink (Eumeces inexpectatus). I believe this was a pregnant female, because females play possum (males attack), and this one did not want to move, even when touched. Then again, it could have been dying. I'm not sure. Skinks are not very common anymore. I think they are slowly disappearing, like frogs.

Vrrooooommmm!

Jungle love on the beach. Ghost crabs mating. He pins her down and sits on her. They let me get within inches of them for this macro shot. He was NOT about to be interrupted.

More pix from last weekend

A "false crawl" from a loggerhead turtle. The female turtle crawls up the beach, searching for a place to lay her eggs. If she had laid eggs, the Turtle Patrol would have marked the nest with yellow tape strung between stakes, and covered the nest with a wire cage to prevent predators from digging up the eggs and eating them.


Ibis looking for lunch.

Oops, misjudged the wave!

A Bell UH-1 "Huey" helicopter, rigged for aerial spraying. Don't know what he was spraying, but he came and went a lot.

Coming around for another pass.

My girls swimming.

This guy didn't care if his fishing reel rusted, apparently. He let the waves dunk it repeatedly.

Sunset without the sun.

Sunset WITH sun.

Coming home at the end of a day of sailing.

Pix from last weekend

A big dredge.


My baby girl.


Another beautiful sunset.

The Joy of Tivo

We recently broke down and bought a Tivo, which, after rebates, will cost us $50 plus the monthly subscription (about $16 a month for a one-year contract, down to $8.31 a month for a three-year contract). It's a wonderful thing. There's no rewinding, there's no fumbling with timers. You search on a menu for the program or actor or director, it finds the programs and channels for you. All you do is choose the recording quality (Lousy, Barely Acceptable, Decent, or Good), and how long to keep the recording. It will also record over whatever you already have, if it needs the space and you designated the recording as being expendable.

What I really like is being able to download programs over my home network and watching them on my PC. That's VERY handy, especially since I travel. But, each hour of Decent-quality-level programming takes about 1.6 GB. So I can't hold a ton of stuff on my laptop. Enough to get me through a week on the road, though.

So, already we're enjoying our basic cable programming more, because we get to see shows we like, instead of shows that happen to be on when we're home. I can even set it to watch out for a particular movie or actor or director, and it will record what it finds.

You do have to specifically tell it NOT to record junk you don't want. Otherwise, it "suggests" things and records them. We told it not to do that, so it stopped.

Accidents will happen

We witnessed one scary accident, and saw the aftermath of another, over the weekend. (I am on vacation, so I am not posting much this week).

• We were coming back from a day at the beach on an island far south of us, and I was in the right lane on the highway, and in the left lane I saw an aluminum extension ladder lying there, dented up as if someone had already run over it. I didn't have to swerve, and there was no traffic near me, so I just glided past and said to myself, "hmmm, THAT's going to hurt when someone runs over it." Then I looked in my rear-view mirror at a pack of cars about a half-mile behind me, and realized there was going to be a mess. Sure enough, two cars were side-by-side, and another two were side-by-side behind them. A red pickup truck in the left lane dodged to the right to avoid the ladder in the road, and forced the purple minivan in the right lane into the grassy shoulder. A silver coupe behind the purple minivan was following too closely, and the coupe swerved to the left to avoid rear-ending the minivan in front of him, forcing the guy to HIS left into the grassy median. The silver coupe overcorrected and spun out into the grassy shoulder, plowing into the underbrush in a cloud of dust and dirt. All of this happened in about four seconds. My wife told my daughter not to look. But I watched in rapt fascination through the rear-view mirror. Then I forced myself to look away, because I didn't need to see a ten-car pileup, if that's what was going to happen. I reached for the phone but stopped myself, figuring that the whole pack of people behind me were already calling the highway patrol.
• We were coming south out of the big city, and were about to cross the big bridge when we saw that the four southbound lanes were entirely blocked by emergency vehicles. Everyone was creeping through one lane on the right side. After twenty minutes, we drew abreast of the mess, and could see a gaggle of motorcyclists in the median, picking up pieces of one of the bikes. A white car with its front bumper dangling off was parked behind them. One of the bikers was angrily describing to a policeman what had happened. Through his gestures, I deduced that the white car had come screaming up the entrance ramp onto the highway, and had rear-ended one or more of the motorcyclists. There were at least four ambulances there, five police cars and two fire trucks, but no one seemed to be injured. If that's the case, the motorcyclists are extremely lucky. I doubt they will get another chance to be so lucky as they were that day.