Lightning striking all around me

• A few months ago, my neighbor across the street, Jack, was killed on his scooter, probably by a hit-and-run driver (they never really figured it out).
  
• My neighbors down the street, Pat and Mike, who were in a horrible boating accident where Pat lost her eye (Post 1, Post 2), are about to lose their house. Pat isn't really able to work, and is now a rip-roaring alcoholic, instead of a sort-of-functional one. (My wife saw her in the local strip mall, so stumbling drunk that she couldn't even get the door open...the door to a pub, to go inside and drink some more. It was very sad). And Mike, being an alcoholic too, and having been partly responsible for their horrible boating accident (they were all drunk that night on both boats, apparently), doesn't work. So neither of them work. And now their house is up for sale, because they're about to be evicted. They're selling off appliances, boats, all sorts of stuff, to forestall the inevitable. It's so very sad. But it's Exhibit A of how alcohol can ruin lives.
  
• My neighbor catty-cornered from me, Jack (we have something like 5 Jacks on our block), died the other day of a heart attack. He was only in his 60s, but he was so incredibly overweight that he couldn't even walk anymore. He just refused to take care of himself. And now he's dead. I feel terrible for his wife Jane, but at the same time, it has to be something of a relief for her. All of us neighbors are getting together to make and bring her dinner tomorrow night. Her family's here to take care of her. At least she has family around her.
  

So my question is, there seems to be a lot of bad things happening all around me. Am I going to be next? I certainly hope not. Lalalalalalalalala not happening to me, lalalalalalalala...

John Ringling's house

I went with my darling wife to visit the Ringling Museum of John and Mable Ringling. John was one of the Ringling Brothers, who started the famous circus. His winter home was in the jungle near us. The Ringling Circus used to come and spend winters there. So his is a big name in our area. He and Mabel built this house from 1924 to 1926. Unfortunately I think she died in 1928, so they hardly used it. He died in 1936 and left it to the state as a museum, since the taxes were onerous.


The foyer.


The big hall/den.


The dining room. The ceiling is plaster, carved and stained to look like wood. The table has one leaf in it at the moment - there are nineteen more leaves in storage. Stretched out, the full table is about 50 feet long, I think. They have to set it up in the big hall.


John and Mabel's bedroom. Although Mabel usually slept in her own room.


The dock outside, facing the bay. John would pull up his 125-foot motor yacht here. He would put an orchestra on the yacht, and they would play for his guests, who would dance on the terrace. Delightfully bourgeois.


The house is meant to be the Venetian style of Venice, Italy. I think it's a bit much.


It's called Ca' d' Zan, which means "House Of John" in an Italian dialect. That's funny, because the whole place was built to Mable's specifications. Too bad she died before she could really enjoy it much.

Determination

Francesco del Cairo, Judith with the Head of Holofernes, c1630/35, oil on canvas, The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art

I've always been intrigued by the biblical story of Judith, seducing the general of the army that is besieging her city, and decapitating him. I didn't know there was a painting of it. I love her expression. "See what happens to people who cross me and my loved ones?" Such innocence, yet determination.

Silly polls and vendettas

I saw this poll at Little Green Footballs and thought it was funny. The website operator despises U.S. House Representative Dr. Ron Paul (R - TX), a Libertarian Party candidate for president in 2008. Few people have heard of him, and fewer still would vote for him. But he has a small, very vocal group of supporters, who continually bombard the LGF site with pro-Paul comments and poll results. It's an amusing little vendetta.

Dinner in the cornfields

I had a lovely dinner with my friend tonight, whom I have not seen for more than a year. She has not changed a bit...still her wonderful, bubbly, spiritual self. It was a very enjoyable evening. She has such faith, and is so willing to shine her faith forth, and to be a light unto others... I admire her for that.

And I'm not just saying that because I know she will read this. ;-)

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Cornfields, encroaching upon the houses. Actually, it's the houses encroaching upon the cornfields. But when civilization collapses, the cornfields will swiftly swallow up the decaying houses in short order. Well, actually, weeds and grasses will swallow up both cornfields and houses.


Look! It's already starting! The houses are gone.


While stuck in traffic, I saw a beautiful sight - the shadow of a contrail, cast across the sky by the rising sun's rays, slanting upward away from me. Very cool.

Army of Darkness - The Boomstick Edition

I am old, apparently. This is proven by the fact that Bruce Campbell's "Army Of Darkness" (a.k.a. "Evil Dead 3") is on American Movie Classics channel (AMC), which is supposed to show "old" movies. AOD was made in 1992, I think. Just last week, by my recollection. I have never seen it, but always wanted to, because it's supposed to be very campy. I'm not a big fan of horror movies, though some of my readers are. They're just too darn scary for me. (The movies, that is.)

AOD is a campy film. The tagline: "Trapped in time. Surrounded by evil. Low on gas."

Fourteenth-century Europe looks a lot like the hot desert outside of Los Angeles.

Bridget Fonda is in it, for about 3 seconds, at the beginning. She's hot. That made it worth watching.

Now Ash (Bruce Campbell) is blasting zombies and witches, and intimidating superstitious 14th-century serfs and knights with his S-Mart 12-gauge Remington double-barrelled shotgun, which he calls his "boomstick." I like that.

I knew Bruce Campbell looked familiar. He played Autolycus (a-TALL-icus), the King of Thieves, a recurring character in "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys" and "Xena: Warrior Princess." He also directed quite a lot of their episodes. He does have a flair for comedy.

A fun movie, "Army of Darkness." Checking to see if a witch is dead: "It's a trick. Get an axe." Classic dialogue, similar to that of "Aliens" - "Nuke them from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

Words to live by.

Volvo commercial on TV

The Future Bible Heroes, courtesy of www.houseoftomorrow.com

"The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round," sings the laconic male voice on the new Volvo commercial. My ears pricked up when I heard this, not because we ever sang songs in Martian kindergarten, but because I know that voice - Stephin Merritt. He is the erstwhile leader/herder of various bands such as The Magnetic Fields, The Future Bible Heroes (my favorite, because band manager Claudia Gonson sings, NOT Stephin - his voice irritates me), The 6ths, and The Gothic Archies. Stephin's voice always sounds like he's drunk, half-asleep, or both. Very blase' -sounding. Claudia's voice is relatively untrained, but she sounds completely natural and approachable because of it.

Buy the "Eternal Youth" album by The Future Bible Heroes. It rocks.

Halo 3... pfui!

I have had quite enough of all the hoopla surrounding tomorrow's release of what is quite possibly the greatest video game franchise of all time; bigger than "Grand Theft Auto," bloodier than "Mortal Kombat"... we're talking about "Halo 3."

Sigh.

I LOOOOOVE "Halo - Combat Evolved" (Halo 1), released I think in 2002. Unfortunately, Microsoft screwed around so much, they only released Halo 2 for Windows Vista, and generally the business world has not moved to Vista because there is no need to do so. We all still run XP and we like it just fine, thankyouverymuch, because it works. As Vista has been proven often not to do.

So. I do not have Halo 2. I don't have an Xbox game system because I travel. My game machine is my laptop PC.

Now they are releasing Halo 3 for the Xbox 360 tomorrow. The cyborg Master Chief, the faceless human hero in his green body armor who singlehandedly destroyed the enemy fleet of the Covenant AND a horde of horrible aliens known as the Flood in Halo 1, who fought them again in Halo 2 (don't ask me what happened, I don't know), is now back in Halo 3, fighting the same baddies on Earth.

Alas, I would love to participate, but I can't. I don't have the requisite PC software or hardware to do it.

And I really don't have the time anymore. I would rather work, spend time with my darling wife, and blog, than to spend countless unproductive hours blasting make-believe enemies on a screen.

I LOOOOOOVE Halo. And I must reluctantly bid it adieu.

Sigh.

I love my new client but...

I am encountering odd resistance when I discuss training. "But how can you document a transaction and train users on it when it's not final?" they ask. "Um... you are running this software in a live Production environment at one plant already, correct?" I ask. "Does that not qualify as 'final'?" They hem and haw and decline to commit.

I sense that I will have to work forward and drag them along with me. I will nibble around the edges of the pie, working toward the soft and squidgy center. And if I reach a point of nibbling where the pie vaporizes into a soft cloud of "maybes" and "I don't knows", then I will stop. And I will go away, and I will come back when the rest of the pie has coagulated, congealed into something that is vaguely recognizable as a solid set of transactions.

And then I will resume nibbling.

Red and green - d'oh!

When I got home Friday morning after midnight, I could hear the ocean roaring. There was a large storm out in the gulf, and the clouds were speeding by, and the moon was peeking through them. It was beautiful.

Three days later, we went to the beach. The storm had thrown up huge quantities of seaweed onto the beach. The largest amount of it, deposited first, was red. The newer stuff was green. So my darling wife told me.



The skies were pretty.


The mysterious beach monster had already passed this way, that morning, for we found its tracks.


It was a quiet morning.


There were many sea squirts (Didemnum lahillei), an ancient (200 million years ago) invasive species of tunicate that is somewhat hard but slimy. It floats in the water and strains plankton out of the seawater by pumping it through its body (hence, sea squirt). Tunicates are the only animals that are able to create cellulose. They also concentrate the metal vanadium in their blood; it is not known why, or what purpose it serves. They are transported in the ballast water of ships, and once they are present in a body of water, they reproduce into large colonies, like the one shown here, forming mats up to a meter in diameter. Large numbers of these animals can crowd out other forms of life. They have few natural predators, because their slimy coating is acidic (with a pH of 2, equivalent to stomach acid), and so few animals will eat them.

They are dangerous merely because they exist. I can think of other forms of life, particularly human, which present a similar danger. So far, there is no known means of exterminating them (the tunicates, not the humans).


Another sea squirt.


A fluffy type of seaweed. It's very frilly and soft.


Kayakers. I hope someday to be able to afford a pair, so that my darling wife and I can cruise like these people are doing. With the skyrocketing cost of gasoline, kayaking is a form of boating that will only grow more popular. Plus, it's good upper-body exercise.


Beach erosion from the storm. There's not much beach left to erode, in some spots. Pretty soon the ocean will begin eating away at the dunes which form the barrier island itself. But then, that's okay. That's the function of a barrier island; to be eaten by the ocean, and then to re-form later somewhere else.


Huge mats of seaweed.

This must be what the Sargasso Sea looks like.


My wife and I picked up a ton of garbage in a half-mile stretch of beach. This was mine. She had her own bags of garbage.

Egrets on the rocks.


Our acquaintance Mary, a year-round resident. We see her on the beach now and then. She must be a million years old. She's very nice, even if she IS a Pittsburgh Steelers football fan. We like her anyway. ;-)


I'm not sure if someone collected these sea beans and placed them in the hollow of this rock, or if the ocean just naturally piled them there. You see strange things on the beach.

Hiyo Dinosaur

There's an ancient comic strip (which began in 1932 and ran for 40 years) called "Alley Oop," about a caveman. I can't recall if I've ever seen it.

I DO recall the song based on it, by the Hollywood Argyles (really, just one producer, Gary Paxton, using a multitrack recorder) in 1960, called "Alley Oop." "Hiyo dinosaur," he says. "Ride, daddy... ride."

I always think about that song when I pass through Chicago O'Hare Airport.

This is a brachiosaurus (brachiosaurus alithorax) who was found in Utah. He lived 150 million years ago.


He is positively titanic. He must stand at least 40 feet tall.


His head and neck are perfectly adapted for pulling the lush, succulent clumps of leaves off of tall trees. And he's so big, he's too big for many predators to take down. He's like a whale with legs.


Still, if something this big came stomping through the primeval forest at me, brandishing teeth like this, I doubt that my Acme disintegrator would do more than annoy him. I would have to run for my ship and zoom away. I didn't get into this field reconnaissance job to get squashed flat by some primitive plant-chewing, methane-farting Earth life form. I would rather hover at a safe altitude (say, at least a kilometer) and take pictures with my telephoto lens.

Randomness

Where are all these people going? Everyone is so intent on going somewhere else, other than where they are. And everyone who is THERE, is going back the other way. It seems very strange.



I think they are going nowhere fast.

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This fly hung onto my airplane window for a long time until takeoff. He blew away once we reached about 30 mph.

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This is the eco-house that is near us, after having been moved to its new site.


This is the road that they built for it to be moved.


This is the bare spot where it used to be. They're very efficient. I'm so glad that they moved it, instead of tearing it down. Now it can continue to serve as a model home for energy efficiency, "green" construction, and hurricane resistance. They're changing its mission from being a model home for new construction, to being a model home for existing homes to be retrofitted.

Riverboat gambling

Meandering through the Illinois cornfields west of Chicago, the Fox River brings life to the valley. And also it brings large floating buildings that masquerade as 1870s riverboats, but which are actually gambling casinos.

Several midwestern states began allowing gambling casinos to be built in the last few decades, but only if they were "riverboats," which have been associated with gambling for more than a century. So casino operators began building "riverboats," which at first were just barges converted for human occupation, and later began to be purpose-designed-and-built floating buildings. Some casino operators even began digging large holes in the middle of cornfields, filling them with water, and then putting a floating building in it. (It followed the letter of the law, but certainly not the spirit.)

I think gambling is a stain upon the soul, which is why I don't do it. It pains me to walk into a casino and smell the atmosphere of sadness and despair and trapped-ness that radiate from the psyches of the denizens there. They smile, they laugh, they cheer at the infrequent win, but I can see the sadness in their eyes. They are voluntary prisoners of "the house," and the house always wins in the end.

At least they don't allow smoking in casinos anymore. That makes it slightly more tolerable. But there's still that incessant dinging from the slot machines, and they all sound the same. "Oh, the bells, the bells!" (The Hunchback of Notre Dame.)

Illinois has just past a huge spending bill to repair its decaying roads, bridges and schools. The spending (on the order of $25 billion) will be funded by the construction of three new casinos (including two "riverboat" casinos).

I think that as long as gambling is allowed (which I don't think it should be, but I have not taken over the world yet to abolish it - just haven't had time, really), it's fine if people voluntarily throw their money away there, because it's their choice to do so. But as the people responsible for spending that money (on roads, bridges and schools), I would be concerned that at some point, the money is going to run out. It seems to be a foolhardy way to do it. But then, they're not raising taxes, and that's fine with me too. Let's "tax" the people who are giving their money away already.

But I feel sorry for those people. Perhaps with this spending bill, their foolhardiness is going to serve a good cause, by helping to pay for infrastructure for society. It doesn't make me feel any less sorry for them, though.

SOMETHING has to stick

I am so sick of hearing about O.J. Simpson. The man is grotesque. I can't believe they actually let him post bond and get out of jail on his latest charges of armed robbery, kidnapping, and all sorts of stuff in Las Vegas. He was caught with his "posse" of bodyguards and hangers-on, trying to steal back his own property that he'd sold years before, which was being auctioned off at a casino. That's ten felonies and a misdemeanor he's charged with.

• two counts of first-degree kidnapping
• two counts of robbery with use of a deadly weapon
• burglary while in possession of a deadly weapon
  
• two counts of assault with a deadly weapon
• conspiracy to commit kidnapping
• conspiracy to commit robbery
• coercion with use of a deadly weapon
  
• conspiracy to commit a crime (misdemeanor)

He could get life in prison.

I remember when police showed up to arrest him in 1994 for the gruesome knife murders of Nicole Brown Simpson (his ex-wife) and her boyfriend Ron Goldman. Instead, he grabbed a revolver, got in his friend Al Cowlings' white Ford Bronco, and led the police on a low-speed chase (well, Cowlings was driving - I don't know how Cowlings was never charged with attempting to elude police). I must have gotten home from work early that day - it was evening in Ohio, and late afternoon in California. On and on went his low-speed chase. It was the dumbest thing I'd ever seen, dozens of police cars serenely cruising down the highway in a line abreast, all following the white Bronco. Sigh. And then the long drawn-out trial, the stupid slogans by Johnny Cochran ("If it doesn't fit, you must acquit!"), the claims of racism on the part of the police... it just got stupider and stupider. And then he was acquitted. It was the dumbest travesty of justice in years, until they acquitted Michael Jackson of child molestation charges.

Then he had the gall to write a book, "If I Did It," taunting everyone about it. First he was prevented from publishing it. Then he was required to publish it, and Ron Goldman's family gets the money. It's just a big soap opera that never ends.

Why would O.J. think he could do something so brazen, in public, at a casino that is bristling with cameras and microphones? Because the jury in 1995 acquitted him of murder. Jury members who were interviewed said they would never convict him, simply because he was black, like them.

After that, O.J. knows he can get away with murder. Armed robbery is child's play, compared to that.

I'm hoping that at least one of the current charges against him sticks. Such a person doesn't deserve to keep breathing, much less be free to run around and commit other crimes.

I can't wait until Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan does something else stupid, just to get O.J. Simpson out of the news.

A morning greeting

I stepped out of my room this morning to the sound of running feet - a lot of them.

Two dogs came galumphing down the hall - a fifty-pound Boxer and a twenty-pound Sheltie-kind-of-dog... it was black-and-white. (Heck, who am I kidding? They're ALL black and white to me.)

They skidded to a stop and looked at me. "Hi, kids!" I said, proffering my hand, palm down, for them to sniff.

The Sheltie didn't know what to make of me. The Boxer sniffed cautiously, then lurched away down the hall with the Sheltie in tow.

Their owner, a woman in her 30s, came running down the hall, with a wry smile and a hurried "good morning." She followed her charges down the hall to her room. I shrugged and continued on my way.

I'm fairly certain that this Marriott doesn't allow pets. But then, it was a nice morning greeting from two cute dogs. There was no point in starting their owner's day badly by reporting them. As long as they don't poop in front of my door, I'm fine with it.

A nice chat with the Help Desk

I called the Help Desk yesterday to unlock my accounts at my client, which had mysteriously become locked in the time that it took to reboot my PC. I talked to Patrick in Ocala, Florida, who was very helpful. As we waited for my various network logons to synchronize and re-set, the conversation drifted into sporting goods stores in Ocala, and gun shops, and guns in general, and cartridges and gunpowders in particular, and National Rifle Association matches and favorite guns, and so on and so forth. He was a wealth of information. He used to shoot NRA silhouette matches in the 1980s with a Thompson-Contender single-shot pistol in .357 Magnum. He said that he reloaded more than 40,000 rounds of .357 in one year, he was shooting so much. That's something like ten hours a week at the reloading bench. I have several handguns in .357 myself... it's a very versatile and effective cartridge.

It was an interesting and amusing conversation. My knack for getting people to talk once again proved itself useful.

Pictures from this week

Storms gather to conspire to cancel my flight. Argh. Luckily they did not.


We were only delayed until darn near everyone else had flown out for the evening. I had the concourse nearly to myself.


This is my little hole at my current client, for this week and next. I mark my territory by spreading around papers and desk accessories over every available surface. It's more socially acceptable than peeing on the furniture.


There's a strange sign next to the stairwell door on the second floor of my hotel...


It seems to indicate that handicapped people should gather in this spot, in or near the stairwell, and wait for someone to come and get them, while the building is burning down around them. This reminds me of a chemical plant where I once worked. The plant made hydrogen cyanide, which is normally used in the "leach" method of gold mining. (Also, it's quite handy for poisoning people.) A memo came out one day at the plant that said that it was getting too expensive to keep and maintain respirators for everyone at the plant (for use in the event of a poisonous gas leak). Therefore they were adopting a "shelter-in-place" policy, which basically meant, "find a building to hide in during a leak. If you're in a building, keep the doors and windows shut, and hope that someone comes to rescue you before you are either poisoned or suffocated." We all had a good laugh at that one.

I think this sign must be some kind of reverse-intelligence test. If you heed the sign, you die. If you ignore it, and hurl yourself and your wheelchair down the stairs and then crawl the rest of the way out of the burning building, you live.

Hmmmmm.

Helicopters

Today's interesting sight on the way to work was a large helicopter that was trying to install an air-conditioning unit on top of a church. I wasn't able to take a photo of it because I was on a busy rural highway, and there was no real place to pull over and watch. But he was wobbling around and around, trying to get his cable down to where the equipment was sitting on the back of a flatbed truck, and he was having a terrible time of it.

What a task to undertake at 7 in the morning, trying to snag a heavy piece of metal and hoist it onto the roof of a building. Fun, but it would be difficult for me to be that focused at 7 in the morning.

A new baby

We "liberated" a cabbage palm tree (Sabal palmetto) from the yard of our old house. Since it is still our house, we felt like it was an appropriate thing to do, before we get the house on the market for sale. This poor little palm tree was languishing in the shade of some huge oak trees, and was overgrown by vines that were doing their best to strangle it.

This is our new baby in its new home. We gave it a "hurricane cut," which means removing all of its fronds except for its apical growth point, without which it cannot survive. We only cut off the other fronds because you are supposed to do that when you transplant them, because they'll turn brown and die back anyway as he goes into stasis for a year, recovering from being transplanted. You can transplant palms that have at least six feet of trunk, which this one does. He'll be dormant for a year, and then start growing again, as long as he gets plenty of sun and a weekly drink of water.

We deliberately planted him at an angle, so that he leans in an interesting way, away from the driveway. That way, no matter how big he gets, and whichever way he wants to lean as he grows, he's already leaning in a direction where he won't get in the way.

After I took this picture, we strapped some burlap around him with some 2"x4" blocks, then nailed some supports into the blocks (not into the tree), to hold him steady in the event of high winds. You have to do that, in order to ensure that his roots take hold properly.

I'm looking forward to seeing him grow. In a year.

Scrabbling to retain my fading brainpower

One of the drawbacks of being an alien on Earth, occupying a frail human body, is that the body degrades over time. One of the systems that degrades is the brain; its speed, its processing power, and its memory retention.

One of the games that Earthlings have devised to counter this inevitable decay of the brain is Scrabble, a word game played with tiles that each bear a letter. During each turn, you must take your inventory of seven tiles and attempt to use as many of them as possible to form an English word. Proper nouns, abbreviations, and foreign-language words are generally forbidden.

It is a very taxing game, particularly for one who has a large lexicon of words to sort through when attempting to compile a word with one's available tiles. It is also taxing because I did not grow up playing this game (they don't have this game on Mars), whereas my darling Earthling wife did.

She beats me regularly, as evidenced by her use of the word "quiz" (an alarmingly valuable combination of letters, on a triple word score to boot).


This is my usual allotment of annoyingly useless letters. I wish I had had the letters to spell "kwyjibo." Kwyjibo was a word that Bart Simpson made up, during the first episode of "The Simpsons" series on Fox Network, lo these many years ago. Bart insisted that a kwyjibo was a "big, dumb, balding, North American ape," describing his father, Homer Simpson.

Last night, however, I won by twelve points, 269 to 257. Who's the kwyjibo now?

I will savor my fleeting victory, because the next round will no doubt return me to my familiar second-place status. ;-)

New electronic eyes

My darling wife acquiesced to my pleas to visit the camera shop, for me to show her the Panasonic camera that I hoped to acquire to replace my lost Nikon Coolpix S4. We looked at the Panasonic Lumix line, but my wife, ever the bargain hunter, asked the inevitable question: "What's your cheapest camera?"

The question took the salesman aback, and he blinked. "Well, there are several in this case for around a hundred dollars. We have one for $99 right here." And he hauled out a Kodak EasyShare Z-series, about two years old but new in the box, which had never sold. He said he had a couple of these older Kodaks which were the best of the Kodak product lineup; the rest, he said, he had sent down to another store to be dumped, but he had kept this one and another of his favorites, a V570.

I looked at the Z-series, and I liked its electronic viewfinder and its 12x optical zoom, but it was just too bulky to travel with, even though it was marked down to $99.


"What's the other one?" asked my wife. The salesman plopped down the V570 on the counter. Slim, black, all-metal case, sleek design, and a freaky twin-lens system (one for wide-angle, the other for telephoto). I had seen them in the airline magazines when they came out in 2005, and wanted one just because they were cool-looking, but they were more than $400 then, and I couldn't justify it.


But at $107, I could justify it. So I bought it. I'm quite happy with it, for the price I paid. It's the perfect knock-around snappy camera. It can go wherever I need it to go. The only drawbacks are that it has a rechargeable Li-On battery (which probably needs to be replaced by now, since it was the demo model in the display case for two years) and you can't easily download the pictures without the special funky Kodak EasyShare dock (a small frisbee-shaped device which is too bulky and fragile for me to lug around with me). But I do have a card-reader on my PC, so I can just pull out the SD card and copy the photos down. Simpler than using a USB cable, really.

So. My electronic eyes are back. I am happy. Next week when I go to the beach, we'll find out if they're waterproof! ;-)

Choices

I found out recently that a friend who is dying is still doing the very thing that gave her the disease in the first place.

I can understand the power of an addiction, even though I have never been addicted to anything besides video games. (And I have successfully weaned myself from them, mostly because I don't have time to play them anymore. Plus, deliberately keeping my PC hardware semi-obsolete also prevents me from rushing out and buying the latest games.)

But it makes me sad that my friend values her life so little that she accelerates her voyage toward death. I don't understand. I really don't.

All I can do is try to enjoy what little time I have remaining with her. And hope that someday, if I am placed in the same position, that I make "better" choices.

However, what is a "better" choice? Just because I don't understand what she's doing doesn't really mean there's a problem. She's doing what makes sense to her. It's merely my failure to understand why she's doing it, that's causing me the problem.

Sigh.

Evil in our midst

Here's a story that I haven't seen on the news (not that I watch much news, really) - Hussein Zorkot, a Lebanese "medical student" at Wayne State University, was arrested in a park in Dearborn Michigan, while wearing black clothing, camouflage paint, and carrying an AK-47 rifle. It was the start of his personal jihad in the United States, according to his website at www.zorkot.org/. I'm glad they caught him before he killed someone.

This is the face of evil in America.

I really can't understand why such people are even allowed to come to the United States. I also don't understand why American society thinks that everyone should wait, until such a person tries to kill someone, to do something about their presence.

Sigh.

You say potato, I say potahto...

It's always interesting to see how other people perceive things. My darling wife is extremely color-oriented, and she is fascinated with the color pink. I couldn't care less about pink, because it's just gray. Red is black. Dark green is also black, while light green is yellow. Medium green is brown. Only blue and orange and yellow is interesting to me, and those aren't colors that you often find in nature. I'm much more interested in patterns, which is why I like the artist M.C. Escher, and also various "op" (optical art) artists.


(Escher's "Relativity")


(Riley's "Intake")

Here's an interesting Wiki article about colorblindness, the different types of colorblindness, and how it's transmitted (usually on the X chromosome). Women seldom are colorblind, because women have two X chromosomes. Since the genetic defect of colorblindness is carried on the X chromosome, it's unlikely that a woman would have the same defect on both X chromosomes, and so the normal X chromosome overrides the defective X. Men have no such safety net. If the X is defective, the Y chromosome cannot compensate. This is why men are often colorblind while women are not.

I have anomalous trichromacy, in which all three Red-Green-Blue "cone" pigments are present in my eyes ("cones" are the structures in your eye which see color), but the spectral sensitivities to Red-Green-Blue are altered. Within anomalous trichromacy, there are three types:

• Protanomaly (red cones respond more to the color green than to the color red, meaning that reds are dulled toward the black, and green is brightened toward yellow)
• Deuteranomaly (green cones respond more to the color red than to the color green, meaning that reds are brightened toward green)
• Tritanomaly (blue cones respond more to the color yellow than to the color blue, meaning that yellows are dramatically shifted toward blue)

I have Protanomaly (problems with red, which is shifted toward black, and with green, which is shifted toward yellow).

But it's really annoying because I have different strengths of Protanomaly in each eye. I can sometimes see a test number with one eye that I cannot see with the other.




In this example, I vaguely see a number 21, but I have to stare at it to see it. If I just glance at it, there's no number there, just a random collection of spots.

Functionally, none of this means anything, except:

• My darling wife picks out my clothes, and I never wear patterns, only solids
• If I buy my wife clothing as a surprise, I always ask the salesperson what color it is, or if there's no one available to help me, I take it over to an outside window and look at it in bright sunlight, which helps somewhat
  
• When I'm driving in the daytime, I watch what other cars do. I stop when they stop. I go when they go. If they all run the red light, I will too, because the red light is dark - it looks like it's broken to me. If no one else is on the road, and the traffic light looks broken, I stop just in case. I cannot see car brake lights - I continually judge the relative size of each car around me, and whether its apparent size is increasing or decreasing. If the car's size is increasing rapidly, I hit the brakes.

Actually, I think I have life a bit easier than most people. I think it would be difficult to be constantly bombarded with such intense visual stimulus through color, as most of you are. It must be quite distracting. Nevertheless, you get along just fine, and so do I.

Until I get broadsided at an intersection. ;-)

A strange vehicle

Years ago, I was visiting North America's largest aluminum smelting plant in Baie Comeau, Quebec, Canada. We stopped at a roadside restaurant, where we ordered the saddest-looking meal we'd ever had. (Traditionally, British pub food has always been the worst in the world. Apparently there was some kind of competition going on that year between Quebec and Britain.)

But to distract us from our miserable meal, there was the strangest vehicle in the parking lot.



This is the British-built Grinnall Scorpion 3, borrowed from the company's website. I believe I saw an early model, circa 1999, in Quebec.

I promptly forgot about that vehicle until I was driving down a busy street south of San Francisco two weeks ago, and did a double-take, because there was a nearly-identical vehicle parked at the curb. It was very surprising to see it again. It was not the same one as in Quebec, but it was quite similar.

It's basically a custom-built open-wheeled two-seat roadster, powered by a BMW motorcycle engine/transmission/rear end, with a fat rear tire. Zero to 60 mph in 5 seconds, top speed of 130 mph (probably governed), and mileage less than 50 mpg. Cost is about $22,000 USD, and you have to assemble most of it yourself.

While it looks VERY cool, I question why anyone would bother to buy and build such a vehicle. I think mainly it's for the very reason I noticed it - it looks cool. It's certainly not because it will keep you dry in the rain.

Does anyone besides the media watch the MTV Video Music Awards?

For days now, all the "news" shows on TV have been blathering about Britney Spears' sleepwalking through her performance on the MTV Video Music Awards show.

I didn't know anyone actually watched the VMAs. And I can't help but wonder, in a better, quieter world, a world where "news" was better-censored than it is now (and it IS censored, usually self-censored by liberal media organizations who consistently promote their own agendas), would anyone have heard of Britney Spears' awful performance?

No. Because no one watches the VMAs except the media, and in a better, quieter world, the media would never bother to report something so uselessly trivial as that. It simply does not matter.

Sigh.

Retropsychokinesis

Psychokinesis is the ability to create movement or to affect objects at a distance, purely through the force of your will.

Retropsychokinesis is the ability to affect an event that has already happened.

Impossible, you say.

No, it works. Go to the link here (http://www.fourmilab.ch/rpkp/experiments/), read about it, then try the Pendulum experiment, in which the motion of a pendulum is directed by a random number generator. You will find that you can immobilize the pendulum, or make it swing wildly, simply by focusing your will upon it. When you do that, you are actually affecting the outcome of the numbers that the random number generator has already generated. You are affecting an event in the past. At least, I can. I would be surprised if you cannot.

This phenomenon gives credence to the idea that all times exist at once, and that events in the past and in the future all exist simultaneously. It is only our limited minds that see time as an endless series of moments, ever moving past our point of view, when in fact, all those moments have always been and always shall be. If you first accept that postulate, then it's a small step to consider the idea of changing a given, static event in the "past" through sheer willpower.

When I was younger, I was much better at feats of psychokinesis and mindreading. I think adults tend to discourage such abilities in children, which is a shame. However, it's nice to see that I still have a knack for it.

Fun with friends

My friend Pat and I get together perhaps once a year to do a sales call, or to start a project, or to go to a trade show. We always have a good time together... there's always something to talk about, and the conversation flows easily between us. We are two peas in a pod.

This week we're starting a new project in Chicago. I am very glad she's here helping me, because she's much better at the sales-y stuff than I am. I want to get right down into the ugly details, and she's very good at making sure that everyone understands the big picture before I drag them down into the details. Together we've worked out the project schedule and begun getting answers to a bunch of questions. I am very grateful for her help, especially since she gave up quality time with her daughter/grandbaby who suddenly popped in from Hong Kong without any warning. Pat could have canceled this trip with me to be with her family. I'm glad she didn't.

Today I found out that she's a serious photographer, a much better photographer than I am. She's armed herself with a Nikon D40x SLR and some cool Adobe photo-editing software like Lightroom. Oh, the stuff you can do with that program! WOW! I am seriously jealous.

But for now, I must be content with JPG images and snapshots and no photo-editing at all. I'm happy if my camera has a zoom.

I'd be happy if I had a stupid CAMERA right now. Oh well. I will get one this weekend. Then I will inflict more photographs on you.

Fun with noisy toys

Years ago, on Hermitage Road in Sharon, Pennsylvania, there was a nice little gun shop that dealt in Class 3 weapons (machine guns). They even had them for rent, on the indoor firing range that they had in the back of the building. So during the summer that I was working up at Werner Ladder Company in Greenville, Pennsylvania (a bizarre company - great ladders, silly corporate culture), I stopped in and tried out this little number.


It was a Heckler & Koch MP-5 clone, built in Turkey under license from H&K in the late 1980s. The retail price at the time was $8,000. I was content to rent it for $20 plus about six 32-round magazines of 9mm ammo.

(The actors on the television series "Stargate: SG-1" carried these for the first five seasons or so, before they switched to the newer, cooler-looking Fabrique Nationale Personal Defense Weapons, or PDWs. I'm a purist. I prefer the tried-and-true MP-5s. Although in the context of "Stargate: SG-1," anything smaller than a 20mm cannon was not going to put a dent in most of the bad guys on that show. Why the writers insisted on making the good guys continually carry ineffective peashooters, God only knows. But hey, it's television. It doesn't have to make sense.)

Anyway. On the first squeeze of the MP-5's trigger, I understood why this weapon is the favorite of tactical teams around the world: it has no recoil. I swear, a BB gun, or a Super Soaker water pistol, has more recoil than this weapon. You can even hold it at arm's length, one-handed, and put a 10-round burst into a spot the size of a softball at 10 meters. Unbelievable. It's very nearly the perfect weapon. It's a testament to good German engineering, ergonomics, and efficiency.

When I win the lottery, I am going to buy one of these. Until then, I will just look at the neatly-shredded target (which I still have on the wall over my reloading bench in the garage), and remember that idyllic summer day when I cradled the pinnacle of small-arms perfection in my hands, and brought it to hot, stuttering life with a gentle caress of the trigger.

Making my own reality

I am starting a new project tomorrow. I have been very worried that it will turn out to be a stress-filled nightmare like the last one. But I must remember that it will become what I WILL it to become. I have to visualize how I want things to be. If I visualize success, then I am much more likely to experience success, instead of fearing failure, and making it become a failure.

• I will control the project scope.
• I will speak with the project manager by phone and/or email every day.
• I will speak with my Subject Matter Experts by phone and/or email every day.
• I will get my work done speedily and on time. If I cannot get it done on time, I will document this fact in writing, early and often, to my boss and to the client.
• I will monitor my subordinates, and edit their work every day. I will pressure them to get their work done on time. If they do not, I will document this fact in writing, early and often, to my boss.
• I will not let this project stress me out. It is only work. I have done this before. I can do this again. And this time I will do it better.

This project will be a success, because I WILL it to be so. Not wish, WILL. I focus my energy with confidence. God will help me make this project an easy, trouble-free success.

The Bourne Ultimatum

We saw "The Bourne Ultimatum" yesterday. What a fantastic movie! It was better than any James Bond film, better than any spy movie I have seen. It was a non-stop frenetic blur of action, and it all made sense, in exactly the way that a Jackie Chan movie does not. One walks out of the movie much more paranoid than we went in. For example, early in the film when the U.K. Guardian reporter says a forbidden keyword on a cellphone, my wife and I looked at each other and said, "Uh-oh, he's dead now." Sure enough, the CIA is listening, and they send a hitman after him. That whole sequence is amazing and terrifying. The movie is worth watching, just for that.

(Rule number one - never use a cellphone or a cordless phone for anything important. And be careful what you say on a land line. That's a good rule to live by in any case.)

Anyway, it was a fantastic movie. It's nice to see Julia Stiles again, and she has a much bigger part in this movie, though we don't get to see her acting range in this film - mostly she runs from people who want to kill her. But I have to buy this film when it comes out on DVD. The second one was kinda "ehhh" but this third movie is the best.

Consuming mass quantities

"Must consume mass quantities!" says Beldar (Dan Aykroyd) in the movie, "The Coneheads" (1993).

Never has this been so apparent to me as during my recent visit to Sam's Club (a warehouse shopping club).

I was a member of Sam's Club for a long time. I consumed mass quantities, as my credit card statement could attest. I thought I needed everything I bought.

Then two things happened. One, we moved to a very tiny house, one-third the size of our original house. That made it difficult to consume mass quantities, because suddenly, we had no place to put it. Two, I got tired of spending $100+ with every visit to Sam's Club, and I got tired of the corresponding impact on my Discover card balance (the only credit card that Sam's would accept, at the time).

So we stopped, cold turkey, more than a year ago. It was hard, at first, but we quickly forgot about it, because we were so busy with other things.

Last weekend, we were driving past our old Sam's Club, in a town 20 miles away, the first time we'd been down that way since we stopped shopping there. We decided to go in and see what was new.

We saw hundreds of obese people, piling their carts and flatbeds high with cases of water, packs of diapers, giant-size boxes of cereal, LCD televisions, DVDs, books, camping equipment... mass quantities.

We realized that nothing had changed at Sam's Club, but suddenly we were seeing it with new eyes, eyes that could now see the pointlessness, the obscenity of such mindless consumption, consumption for consumption's sake.

We found it disturbing and even a bit disgusting, knowing that this scene was being played out in a thousand identical Sam's Club stores across the country, by millions of people spending billions of dollars every year on....stuff. Stuff to fill the needs that they didn't even know that they had until they walked into the store. Stuff to fill the holes in their hearts, which somehow the emptiness of shopping and spending can never fill.

We thought it was very sad to watch. Perhaps it's true, that the economy of America is being driven, in large part, by the consumption of mass quantities. If that's true, I'm happy not to be a part of it anymore. It's neither necessary nor right to consume things in such a way. Instead, we need to make do with what we have, not only because we don't need such quantities of stuff, but also because others need it... and if not in that form, they need the materials and the products that could have been created with those materials.

Perhaps if we each step back from such consumption, market forces will dictate to Sam's Club, other warehouse clubs, and the manufacturers of such stuff, that it is not necessary.

At least it's not necessary for me.

When fish attack

I went swimming in the Gulf today with my darling wife. It was a cloudy day, and the water was cloudy also. I was a bit concerned about sharks, since the water was cloudy and they tend to mistakenly attack humans when they can't see well. And, I had seen a two-foot shark swimming in the shallows in ankle-deep water two weeks ago.

Suddenly a fish hit me in the back, skittering across my shoulders! He must have been six inches long, perhaps, and left a trail of fish slime as he fled. I nearly jumped out of the water. My wife started laughing, thinking I was just imagining things.

Then we saw a ruffled patch of water coming toward us from the north. Ruffled water means there are fish teeming beneath it. Suddenly little fingerlings, like baby mullet an inch long, were racing past us. Then they began hitting us, all over our bodies, blundering into us in the murky water! It felt like many people were tapping us with their index fingers, all over our bodies. Some of the little fish got stuck in my chest hair, and I had to brush them away. Both my wife and I were jumping around and laughing.

Then the fish started nipping at us with their little mouths! It didn't hurt, but it worried us. And then we realized that if they were fleeing so quickly that they were running into us, it might mean that something bigger and meaner was chasing them. So we scurried for the shore, and spent the rest of our time at the beach safe in our beach chairs under our umbrella.

It was a strange experience. Almost as strange as the time that I stepped on a stingray. But that is a tale for another day.

Gated communities

I live amid a large number of gated communities. They have human or electronic gate guards, high walls or earthen berms, and inside, every house looks like every other house, jammed together, six feet apart.

It is a sad, stupid way to live, in my humble opinion. Especially since in so many of these communities, many of the houses are empty for most of the year, consuming electricity to run the air conditioning so that the walls and furniture don't begin to grow mold, and of course to power the alarm systems, to call the police for the occasional break-in. It's a wasteful way to live, especially when people aren't even living there.

Today, at 7:50 A.M. (on the way to an apppointment with the car dealer, to get some major/routine maintenance done on my vacation, which is why I'm posting while waiting on the car), I was driving past a particular gated community, where ABC news personality Barbara Walters has a winter home. Outside on the highway were dozens of work trucks, of all shapes and sizes. Plumbers, electricians, groundskeepers, and other unidentifiable trades were represented. All of them were sitting on the shoulder of the highway, idling, waiting.

Waiting for 8:00 A.M. when the gates would open to let them in.

I think that's ridiculous. Why make workmen wait to get into your complex to work on your home? These are honest tradesmen. Will criminals wait until 8:00 A.M. to get in? No, they will walk over the earthen berm around your complex, through the trees, across your impeccably-manicured lawn, and hurl a brick through your window to get in, at any hour that suits them.

The only reason I can see in limiting the access hours of workmen is to keep the noise down. I would resent it if my neighbor's workman set up sawhorses in the driveway and begin sawing wood at 7:00 A.M. But how much noise does a plumber make? It's ridiculous. The gate guard should advise each arriving workman that they cannot operate power equipment outside until 8:00 A.M. And of course the homeowner should not make appointments for groundskeepers to arrive until then.

But to have dozens of workmen idling their trucks on the highway, waiting to get in in the morning, is just stupid. Let them do their work. Punish the noisy miscreants and the homeowners who hire them, but let the remaining majority of them do their work.

Cat haiku

Furry cat lying
on the floor, waiting for us
to feed her belly

She lies on her back
in the cutest possible
pose, purring loudly

How well she trained us
to respond to her every
whim - I am ashamed.

A lazy day

We laid around all day and caught up on a week's worth of "Star Trek: Voyager" reruns. And we bought two seasons' worth of "Forever Knight," a Canadian vampire show circa 1994. Fantastic show. We'll find Season 3 somewhere else - the store was out of them.

Tomorrow - yard work. And beach. It's been too long since we did either.